Chapter 10 The Truth According to Star Spy
The Truth According to Star Spy
Vic twisted around in her seat and held her phone up so Sam and Bex could see the screen.
“According to Star Spy, the ‘evergreen trendsetting and retro-cool star of a popular horror series’ was spotted enjoying the weather and signing autographs at the Exposition Park Rose Garden this morning, her signature perfectly messy brunette locks showcasing the crystal hairpin collection from Chloé accessories line.”
Bex had been tapping on her own phone, but now she dropped it in her lap and pushed her hands over her eyes. “I can’t get Macie to pick up. They should know about this, but they’re not answering.”
“We’ll tell them,” Sam said. “If we have to, we’ll go to them.
” She felt as though a heavy blanket had been laid down on top of her own feelings.
Sam hated Vic’s news. That was the truth.
She didn’t hate that Ramona was alive, but she did hate that they’d just found out Ramona was perfectly fine, enjoying the spring weather, chatting up her fans at the rose garden.
Why would she do that?
Bex gave her a pained smile. “So much for her private and enigmatic reputation, huh?”
Sam nodded. But then she really heard what Bex had said. “She is private and enigmatic. But now she’s signing autographs right out in the middle of the busiest part of L.A. on a pretty spring day?”
Something felt off. The Star Spy item was too much of a let-down, too much confirmation that it was ridiculous for two former TV detectives to drive all over Los Angeles gathering “evidence” to find a missing actress.
She and Bex were not ridiculous people. Neither were Macie or April Feinstein or Colin Worth.
Call it what you wanted, headline it however it got the clicks, but Sam and Bex: TV Detectives Who Can’t Resist a Real Case were also real people who had made other people feel like they could get to the bottom of a real problem.
“You know what we need right now?” Vic turned fully around in her seat. “Perspective.”
“Yeah?” Fergus started his truck and began rolling down the endless driveway. “I know just the place.”
After a quiet drive and small hike over the sand toward the roar of the ocean, they were gathered in a small circle on a cluster of rocks. Sam watched Vic fight the wind as she set up her phone so everyone could hear Frankie.
“Our perspective is at a Missouri truck stop,” Vic said. “She doesn’t have enough signal to video chat. You should know I told her about the blind item, and she’s pissed at us if we say we believe it.”
Here on the beach, they were a stone’s throw from Marina Del Rey, where Ramona had gone to a party on a yacht the night of Juliette Draper’s death.
But Sam knew that wasn’t the reason Fergus had chosen to bring them to Santa Monica.
The beach was where Fergus could always think best, where he went to heal.
He’d structured his entire life around the Pacific Ocean.
“Who am I talking to?” Frankie’s voice was clear in the lee of the big rocks. She did sound pissed, but Sam wasn’t bothered. Frankie had been in middle school when Sam met her, with a caustic wit and a tendency to lock down her feelings until they exploded in bursts of furious recrimination.
“Me and Bex and Sam and Fergus,” Vic said.
“All right. Vic has indeed filled me in.” Frankie sounded ready to give them one of her ranting lectures.
“Have you guys actually forgotten there is nothing the world loves more than putting a woman in the public eye on a pedestal and then ripping her apart when they’re bored?
Women and marginalized famous people are always fighting the minimal tolerance the public has for them in the first place.
Bex—for example. Star Spy once placed you at Nobu throwing up in a Birkin bag when you were actually with me at the orthodontist getting my braces tightened.
They ran that right after your Emmy win and Vogue cover. ”
“Well, that’s true.” Bex pulled her wild hair on top of her head and wound an elastic around it.
“And it’s probably the least of what they’ve gotten wrong.
Until this Star Spy thing, there hasn’t been anything from any source about Ramona.
By some miracle, unless I’ve missed something from all the alerts I’ve set up on my phone, it still hasn’t even leaked that Chad and Sloan are going to be on her show.
Most of what’s out there right now is gossip speculating with varying degrees of accuracy about the relationship between me and Sam and listing the places we’ve been spotted. ”
Sam nodded, thinking aloud. “No one who was with Ramona on Friday has leaked that Ramona didn’t show up Monday. The Howling is good at confidentiality. I can’t decide if that’s good or bad under the circumstances.”
Frankie sighed loudly. “It’s good. You don’t want to follow leads generated from gossip and the Internet.
That’s my fucking point. You should know that Haris checked his location tracker, and it still shows Ramona as unfindable.
And look, if she was signing autographs in L.A. , would her phone be turned off?”
“This whole town gossips,” Bex said, taking in Frankie’s argument. “Information leaks and gets distorted.”
Sam rubbed her temples. She could still hear the shouts of the paps as she and Bex walked out of Urth Melrose holding hands.
Her publicist had already left her a voicemail saying to give her a call when Sam had a “quick second” for a “rundown” of the agency’s “strategies” for dealing with the surge of press.
Sam guessed if she looked on the Internet right now, every headline about them would be at least partly wrong.
Ramona knew herself. That was what they’d learned about her so far from visiting her home and talking to the people who were close to her.
In her career and in her life, all of Ramona’s decisions grew from her understanding of herself.
It was why the news from Star Spy had churned up Sam’s feelings so quickly—because the behavior it described didn’t make sense for the person they were getting to know, even though they hadn’t met her yet.
Sam wanted to listen to Ramona, not the noise. Not only because it was the right thing to do, but because the woman they were looking for had come to mean something to Sam.
It was true that she didn’t know what was coming next in her life. She could feel the hours ticking closer to the moment she was either on that plane to Telluride or not. But that clock wasn’t ticking as loud as the one counting off the hours Ramona had been gone.
Sam had to believe there was a reason Macie had brought this problem to her door.
And as far as spending time with Bex? Making up for lost time? Bex was right here. Sitting next to her, a hand on her knee. Right now, they were together.
Sam stood up. “We don’t know yet if Ramona’s still in trouble,” she said. “Not until what Star Spy says is definitively confirmed. Does everybody agree with that?”
“Yes,” Bex said. Frankie, Vic, and Fergus chimed in with their own affirmatives.
“That means we need to check in with Macie and Colin, and if Ramona’s still not calling them back, it’s time we start looking at what was happening on the set of The Howling.
Maybe Ramona shared her plans with someone.
The only thing we know so far is Ramona had to shoot with Chad and Sloan last week, hated it, and then didn’t return to set.
It’s fair to wonder if something went down. ”
Vic nodded vigorously. “Yes. And we haven’t found out anything about that guy who came looking for Ramona at her house on Monday morning. Colin said he came from the studio. If that’s true, we should be able to verify it.”
“I can get us on the studio lot with my credentials from the Theomina reshoot,” Sam said, “but I doubt we can use them to access the Howling set.”
“I’m going to call Piper,” Vic said. “She’s where this started, in a way. Maybe she can get us in after they wrap today. It’s what, four o’clock?”
“Four thirty. What a day.” Sam held out her hands and pulled Bex to her feet. The freckles across Bex’s nose and cheeks washed a wave of tenderness through her that made her knees weak.
Bex laid her head on Sam’s shoulder. The ocean breeze had pulled half of her hair down from its impromptu bun, and as Sam gathered her close, the loose locks blew against the exposed skin of Sam’s throat. She inhaled the familiar smell of Bex’s shampoo and kissed the top of her head.
Bex’s phone started ringing from somewhere in the depths of her bag.
“I want updates.” Frankie’s voice interrupted the muffled ringtone. “I’ll try to think of anything else we can do to help.”
After they packed up and began moving back toward the parking lot, Bex hustled ahead and dug her phone out. She was poking at the screen when Vic caught up to her and asked her something, but Sam couldn’t hear what it was. The ocean drowned them out.
She walked next to her brother, whose Oxford shirt had come untucked. The tails were blowing in the wind. “You look like a men’s fragrance ad,” she told him. “Half squinty, half empty-eyed bonehead.”
“It’s called cool. You wouldn’t know.” He smiled, not quite in her direction. “Are they all like that?”
“Who’s they?”
Solemn lines bracketed her brother’s mouth. “Christian Stanstedt. I must’ve seen that skater movie a thousand times. Thought he was so fucking aspirational.” He shook his head. “What a wank-hammer.”
“I’m sorry I dragged you over there.”
“Nah. I’ve always gotten a kick out of the behind-the-scenes drama of your career. I’d prefer a total lack of danger, but I appreciate the chance to pick up the pretty, shiny rocks and see what’s squiggling in the dirt underneath them.”
Sam tried to get a bead on her brother, whose interest in her work had always seemed to be limited to watching her shows and movies when they released.
In her TV days, her older brothers had sometimes visited her on set or tagged along for a premiere, but not Fergus, even though he’d been her closest brother growing up.
When Sam said my brother, she still always meant Fergus.
“I’m glad you were there, but you can bail now if you want.
We can go by the Beverly-Canon and Bex can get her car.
You don’t have to pick up any more rocks.
I promise that Bex and Vic and I will stay safe. ”
Fergus stopped walking. “You’re kidding, right?” There was a palpable thread of tension behind the question that matched his hands, fisted now in his deep pockets.
“No.” Sam was surprised to have prompted such a strong reaction. She wasn’t sure what he was reacting to, but his tone made her stomach tighten. “I know you have meetings and wanted to scout some properties in Malibu. This is a working trip for you, right?”
Fergus laughed. “If you don’t hang out with me, it is.
Look. I’m here. I’m doing this. I get why you might think I’d rather be doing something else, but that’s old pain that you and I should talk about sometime.
Hopefully in more relaxed circumstances when we both know we can escape the conversation the minute it gets too much into the feelings. ”
Sam’s stomach relaxed. It was a relief for the tension between them to be acknowledged. Maybe they finally would talk.
That was when she noticed the sedan.
She touched her brother’s arm. “I didn’t tell you this yet, but I’m pretty sure I saw that car when we left the garage in Beverly. And the woman in it was the same person I saw watching me and Bex and Vic at Urth Caffé.”
Fergus pulled his phone out of his pocket, swiped the screen, and started filming.
“I’m probably wrong,” Sam said. “Why would someone follow us? I mean, people follow me, especially me and Bex together, but women don’t, usually.
And this woman was inside the café, which is also not normal for the people who tend to follow celebrities around.
And they don’t drive from West Hollywood to Beverly Hills to Santa Monica. ”
As Bex and Vic got closer to the Rivian, Sam watched the woman’s head swivel to watch them.
“Can you zoom, Ferg?” She picked up her pace, and his strides lengthened.
“On it.”
Then the woman was looking right at Sam. Her heart skipped, but she kept her gaze steady. She heard the woman’s car start up. “Can you get her face?”
“The sun’s so bright, it’s washing out the details, but she’s around my age, maybe a bit older. Dark hair cut into a bob. I got her plates.”
“For sure the same person.” Sam watched the car slowly pull away as Bex and Vic made it to the tailgate of Fergus’s truck. “A stalker is not something I need right now.”
Fergus lowered his phone. “That was unsettling. Not to get all protective big brother, but it will make me feel better to live closer by you. At least then you can call me if you need me.”
Sam was trying to think of how to respond when her brain snapped with a new Ramona thought.
“If that woman caught up with us at Urth, then she knows we went to the Swan mansion. But she could have been following us before that, when we were at Ramona’s house.
Everyone I’ve talked to so far has assumed Bex and I were looking into Ramona’s disappearance in an official way.
That means there’s an impression out there in the world that we weren’t done once we figured out who killed Jen on the Craven’s Daughter set. ”
“You’re saying you think that woman knows you’re looking into Ramona?”
Sam tapped her mouth, thinking. “If she does, it would mean she knows Ramona. Well enough to know she’s missing, I mean. So why hasn’t she talked to us? Unless—”
“—she’s a bad guy,” Fergus finished. “And I hate that. I can’t even tell you how much I hate it. What should I do with this video? With the plates?”
“I could send them to the person who does my security when I need a detail. He has the connections to figure out who she is. But if I call him right now, it will initiate an entire series of events that are about me, not Ramona, and God knows what would leak. I think we should hold onto what you have until after we talk to Piper on the Howling set.”
“You’re the boss.” They caught up to Vic and Bex, who were waiting for them. He unlocked the truck for everyone. “Let’s head to the studio. See where the magic happens.”