Chapter 26
Lana
“If I’ve been asleep for a month, why am I so freaking tired?”
Lana topped up Vivien’s water cup. “The doctors say it’ll take a while.” It had been hours before Vivien could even speak, and after a full day, she’d only just been moved into a sitting position, propped up with pillows.
Lana had filled her in on nearly everything that had happened since she’d been sedated.
Everything except Griffin and Lana’s … relationship.
If you could call it that. Because now that the crisis was over, Lana didn’t know where they stood.
Not to mention: how did she explain that while her sister was missing, she was sleeping with a movie star?
She hadn’t heard from him since yesterday, though her phone was still at the Beverly Grove hospital.
After police arrived at the soundstage, they were interviewed separately by the LAPD Threat Management Unit—the stalker branch.
Afterward, the Fitch cop, who’d come down “to join in the fun,” in his words, had driven Lana to Vivien’s new hospital and taken her bloody clothing as evidence, leaving a kind nurse scrambling to find her some clean clothes in lost and found.
For all she knew, Griffin was now back on set, back in his version of normalcy.
“I always felt like there was something unexplained about me,” Vivien said, touching her necklace, which Lana had returned to her.
“Something in my brain, in my memory, that I could never quite access. I did hypnosis once, a couple of years ago, and I got a really strong memory of my mom hugging me—but it wasn’t our mom.
The therapist said I might have ‘unresolved childhood trauma,’ but I didn’t want to think that something was wrong with me, so I pushed it to the back of my mind.
But then, a couple of months ago, I needed my birth certificate to renew my passport, but couldn’t find it, so I went in to apply for one, but the woman got confused and thought I wanted access to the original, which she said was sealed.
” Vivien closed her eyes. “Which, as I found out, could only mean one thing. Long story, but I did the DNA test, and one thing led to another. I was about to talk to you and Mom and Dad, but then this other shit happened, and here I am.”
Lana had managed to piece together the rest. Vivien had been approached by a woman who claimed to work for a nonprofit that helped reunite adopted kids with their birth parents.
“I wasn’t sure about it, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt—ha!
” Vivien had explained. “From then on, all the communications were by mail—actual snail mail. Weird, right? She said it was a legal thing. But then it got real strange—they told me they’d found my father and offered me a ton of money to go and confront him. ”
Vivien had declined, and told a friend in the industry about it, who had joined the dots on the family tree in the same way Evangeline had, and led her to Walter.
“I went to see him, but I wasn’t in a great frame of mind—I mean, I’d just found out I wasn’t who I thought I was, right?
And he offered me money, and I stupidly took it, thinking he was just helping me out, but next thing, he hits me with a restraining order.
And then my friend said she figured these people were some blackmail gang and she offered to set me up with someone she knew who was looking into it, but I thought that sounded shifty, so I went to the cops instead.
And then they sent down that detective to talk to me. ”
“To gaslight you, basically,” Lana said.
“She really pissed me off—you know how it bugs me when people write me off as a flake. So, I’m sitting in my car, straight afterward, stewing about it, and I see her go to her car, and she’s carrying the binder I gave her, with all the letters from the blackmailers—the originals.
And she was looking kind of shifty. I didn’t mean to follow her at first—we were just driving the same way, but then she parked up and jumped in a car with this other woman, and gave her my binder!
And I recognized her as this Griffin Hart stalker who’d been ejected from the set—he’s the big star of the show. Hot like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Uh-huh?” Lana said, noncommittal.
“So that was odd, right? I followed them to this old soundstage and watched them punch in a code at the door to get in, so I waited until they left, and I broke in to get my binder back. But I found an office with all sorts of shit—photos of celebrities doing stuff they shouldn’t be, sneaky photos of Walter and me at the hospital…
I used their photocopier to take copies of everything I could find. ”
Lana nodded. The LAPD had searched the office yesterday and taken everything as evidence.
“But then I didn’t know what to do with it.
I couldn’t go to the cops, obviously. I sat on it for a while, freaking out.
And then Walter calls me while I’m on set and accuses me of recording our conversation!
And I realize he’s already getting blackmailed.
I told him I’d found all this stuff, but he didn’t want to hear it—he thought I’d betrayed him.
After he hung up, I checked my phone and found this recording app on it. ”
“So you ditched the phone.”
“Yeah. I mean, if they were listening in, they would’ve heard me tell Walter about the photocopies, so I knew they’d be coming for me.
I left it on, hoping it would lead them on a wild goose chase, to buy me time.
I decided to hand everything to Walter—the guy must have contacts, right?
But then, well, you know the rest.” She sighed, exhausted by the effort of speaking.
“Save your voice, Vivi. You should rest.”
Lana hadn’t left Vivien’s side in almost twenty-four hours, since relieving Evangeline on watch duty. In her haze, Vivien had thought she was dreaming that a Hollywood icon was at her bedside, even when Lana turned up and Evangeline hugged her and said, “You can borrow my Chanel anytime.”
“I’m sorry, Lana,” Vivien said. She reached for her cup, and Lana handed it to her. “I should have told you about Walter, and everything else. I wanted to have it all figured out, so I could break it to you gently, be the big sister I should be. Grow up, like you said.”
“No, it’s me who’s sorry.” Lana pulled her plastic chair closer.
“The one thing I’ve always had in my life is you—and I wasn’t there when you needed me.
And besides, look what you achieved. You solved a mystery that’s eluded police for years—though turns out they had someone on the inside killing every investigation. ”
The Fitch cop had told Lana that Keisha Graham was the young police officer Maggie reported her sexual assault to, years ago.
Graham had been furious when ordered to drop the case, so she’d joined Maggie.
Sweetie later recruited the doctor and nurse who’d examined her after her attack.
“They truly thought they were heroes on a mission,” Officer Sheng explained.
“And maybe it started out like that, but boy…”
Lana took Vivien’s hand and cradled it. It was warmer now but, like the rest of her, it was thin and pale, the veins protruding.
“Oh, I know how we got our names!” Vivien said.
“Aren’t they old family names?”
“In a sense. I figured it out from Walter’s memoir. He had two unofficial godmothers—close friends of his parents: Vivien Leigh and Lana Turner. He adored them.”
“Seriously?”
“Knowing all this now,” Vivien continued, “it explains so much—about me, but also about you. I read about it. A baby bonds with the person who parents it in those first months. They can adjust, but the trauma has a permanent effect. It’s probably why you were so shy, as a kid.
I think part of you has always known, deep down. ”
“How do you figure that?”
“Think about it, what books were your favorites as a kid?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Humor me. Favorite books, go.”
“Well, Anne of Green Gables, obviously, and all the sequels.”
“Obsessed.”
“Jane Eyre, The Secret Garden, Matilda, Heidi… Omigod!”
“All orphans, right? And the full cast of Dickens orphans—Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations… You went through all of those in like a month. Plus, The Outsiders, Peter Pan.”
“Tom Sawyer. Pippi Longstocking. Holy shit, Vivi!”
“And don’t get me started on Harry Potter… Not an expert, but I think that’s called processing.”
Processing. Lana had a lot of that to do.
Vivien tried to sit up straighter, forgetting she didn’t have the strength.
“I did a lot of reading—you’d be proud of me.
There’s a bunch of effects it could have—and they do say the jury’s out on some of them.
But they say a sudden, permanent separation changes the structure of the brain, right when it’s going through the biggest development phase of your life.
Messes with your perception of safety and trust. Our bodies would have been flooded with stress hormones, and they’d have remained high for ages—the car crash, losing our birth mom, being cared for by strangers until our parents arrived, leaving our home… ”
“The car crash. You think we were in it?”
“I found a news article. It was a pile-up on the freeway. We were strapped into our car seats, unharmed. I can’t remember the exact science—my brain’s been switched off for a month, right, so that’s my excuse.
But these stress hormones can cause permanent chemical alterations in the brain.
‘Toxic stress,’ they call it. We learned an early lesson that life can’t be trusted, even though we ended up in a good home.
This constant threat that everything can be taken away from us at any second. So we struggle to bond with people.”
“We push people away—well, I do, anyway. Shit. I’ve been thinking about that lately, how I get all insecure in relationships.”