Chapter 7 A Circumspect Woman #2
Sam was reminded of the Oakland Victorian she’d grown up in.
When she’d bought her own house, a sleek California contemporary, she’d been focused primarily on its convenient access to Bex’s place, just a ten-minute walk on a canyon path separating them.
But Ramona’s home looked like somewhere a creative person could retreat to find inspiration.
“Does she have housekeeping?” Sam asked.
“Or any other kind of service?” They sat down in the comfortable furniture.
At Bex’s elbow was another small table, this one topped in what looked like lapis lazuli.
The finished end of a stick of incense stuck out of a ceramic holder. A bit of ash had fallen on the table.
“Oh, no. Nothing like that. Ramona takes care of everything herself. The house is small, and the garden plantings are well-established. She put them in when she was young. Not to say she isn’t very fit now at …
forty-eight? Fifty? But even a busy actress can look after this place. That’s why she’s kept it.”
Colin leaned forward to greet a petite calico who had trotted into the room, tail high with the excitement of guests. “Hello, my dear Miette. Look at all the laps you have to choose from!”
As if she understood perfectly, the cat surveyed the guests and then meowed elegantly and leapt into Vic’s lap. She made biscuits with her front paws as she settled in, purring astonishingly loud.
“Animals adore me,” Vic said, petting the cat. “I’m going to be a veterinarian.”
“Outstanding.” Colin smiled. “Very smart to avoid this town’s business. Now. What questions can I answer?”
Bex opened the flap of her purse and extracted her notebook.
She flipped it open to a fresh page. “It would be helpful if we could start to get an idea of Ramona’s movements.
We know she didn’t show up on set Monday morning, and we know she filmed on Friday.
Macie’s understanding is that she hadn’t been seen since.
We’d like to narrow in, if we could. When did you last see her? ”
“When our schedules align, we eat breakfast together. We did on Friday. She was heading out for work.”
“When should you have seen her next?” Bex asked. “That is, when would you normally expect to?”
“Weeknights, we often watch something together on her big television, but on a Friday, I have no expectations. I may not see her on a weekend, or I may spot her in the garden and spend time talking. I didn’t begin to worry until the young man from the studio stopped by looking for her. This was late yesterday morning.”
“Do you happen to recall his name?”
Colin looked out the window for a moment, then shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t.”
“Where does she go when she’s not here for the weekend?” Vic asked.
“She sometimes travels for press events, or she’ll have a premiere and get a hotel so she can use the spa the next day. Of course, she’ll plan getaways with friends and the like.”
“Does she tell you where she’s going?” Bex asked.
“Only if she wants me to feed Miette or she’s canceling plans we made.”
“So she was on set on Friday, and you never make plans with her on a Friday evening, but as far as you know, she didn’t come home?” Bex was clearly checking this information against what she’d written in her notebook.
“After the man came by, I looked at the feed from the security camera over her garage. I checked Friday afternoon and evening, you understand. There was nothing on it, so I took a look at Saturday and Sunday. No Ramona. And then I got confused.”
“Because she should’ve come home?”
“Because I backed the footage up to Friday morning, and her car never left. The security system covers the whole property. I never saw her or her little car come and go, so I opened the garage. It’s still in there, as well as the truck she drives when she goes to one of the garden centers.
I don’t know how she got to work on Friday. ”
“I sometimes use a car service,” Sam said, “if I know the day on set is going to be exhausting and I don’t trust myself to drive home late.”
“It could be. I discovered the cameras don’t cover the area out front where one would naturally pull in to pick someone up who was waiting.”
“They had a location shoot that day,” Sam said. “Her agent told me. She might not have driven herself if she wasn’t going to the studio.”
“And there had been recent diva moments,” Vic added. “Maybe she wanted to swan onto the studio lot with a driver to make her look fancy.”
Colin gave Vic a quizzical look.
“The Howling brought on Chad Bevington and Sloan Lennox as guest stars for the episode they shot last week,” Vic explained. “According to my friend who’s on the show, Ramona went into full diva mode with them, and it was an entire cold war that made everything nearly impossible.”
Colin huffed out a breath. “Good lord. Ramona didn’t breathe a word of that.
Maybe she was a bit more tired than usual last week, but if she was difficult on set, she didn’t bring it to me.
I have to believe that your friend who called her a diva was most likely witnessing a woman of an age to be in her full powers refusing to suffer assholes one moment longer than she had to. ”
“Probably,” Vic said. “Piper is weirdly suspicious of people over thirty, so that tracks.”
“Could someone have used the dead spot in the camera to drop Ramona off Friday night?” Bex asked, steering the conversation back to the timeline she was making.
Colin put an index finger to his temple.
Only his hands belied his age. He had gotten paler as they talked, and Sam noticed a mild tremor in his hand.
“Perhaps, but the security system doesn’t log anyone coming into the house Friday evening or at any point since.
No one disarmed it until I did. Again, I checked after the man came for Ramona. ”
“Can we see camera footage of the man?” Bex asked.
Colin reached into a snapped-closed pocket on his tennis shorts and pulled out his phone. He swiped it awake, tapped the screen, and handed it to Bex. “You can download any of that footage you want. Email it to yourself.”
Vic snatched the phone from Bex’s hand, and then they were bickering quietly, huddled over the phone as they tried to figure out how to pull photos and stills to Bex’s account.
Sam noticed that one of the framed pieces on the wall behind Colin was a movie poster featuring a group shot of the Ice Crew.
“That’s interesting,” she said, pointing.
“I thought I’d seen all the Ice Crew movies.
At one point in film school my friends and I made a project of tracking down the entire catalog for a weekend film festival. I guess we missed that one.”
Colin turned to look at the poster Sam indicated. “It’s a little bit of a joke, that one. It’s the poster for a documentary that was never distributed. Ice.”
“By Archie Blasingame,” Sam read from the bottom.
“I sat at the next table over when he won an Oscar a few years ago.” She rose and stepped closer to read the fine print of the copyright statement, then let out a low whistle.
“It was going to release the same year Juliette died. I’m guessing the timing had something to do with why it never made it to theaters. ”
“Perhaps. It’s funny you noticed that poster, because it was on Ramona’s mind recently. She’s been looking at some of the old footage from the documentary and taking notes.”
“Why? Is the project being revived?” If someone had taken an old documentary out of mothballs, that could explain why it seemed as though all of the old Ice Crew were emerging just as Sam and Bex tried to find Ramona—because they had already positioned themselves to be noticed ahead of the release.
“Couldn’t tell you.” Colin gave a dry laugh.
“Oh, Ramona. A circumspect woman. Keeps her friends close, never speaks of her enemies, and holds everyone in her life as far away from each other as possible. If she was part of a project with”—he gestured at the poster—“no one would know until it officially hit industry announcements. Her inclination is to trust people and to love them, but I imagine she was betrayed so many times early on that she had to develop some kind of workaround to keep the friends she had left.”
Sam thought of the stories she’d seen over the years about Ramona. Dozens of blind items and breathless tabloid accounts of her instability. Someone, or some ones, had given those stories to the news media. Former friends or significant others?
Celebrity could be vicious.
“My friendship with her is a bit of an example,” Colin said.
“What do you mean?” The tone of Colin’s voice had arrested everyone’s attention. Even Vic had stopped tapping on the screen of Colin’s phone to listen. Sam didn’t like the ominous hush in the room.
“I mean that by taking my side in a matter of the heart, Ramona necessarily made a bitter enemy.”
“Who?”
“Christian Stanstedt,” Colin said. “My ex. He and I adored each other when it was good, but the end was very bad indeed. Ramona confronted Christian over his treatment of me, and after an ugly bit of business, she cut him off and opened the carriage house to me. She’s meant a great deal to me in what’s been a dark time. Christian has not forgiven her.”
Sam thought of what Haris had told them. Ramona had fired an assistant not too long ago, simply because she was afraid the assistant might leak about a messy issue going on between Ramona and a friend.
Christian could be the friend. If so, it meant Ramona had a lot of feelings about stepping in on Colin’s behalf and her estrangement from Christian as a result.
Colin looked down, then at the three of them. There were tears in his eyes. “Christian can be a toxic person. And I’m afraid he hates Ramona more than anyone else in this town.”