Beginnings and Ends (Short Story) Read online

  It had been difficult growing up with their parents. Most weekends it was just Jane and Robin and their father’s housekeeper, who was replaced with an even higher frequency than the stepmom of the moment, and rarely spoke English.

  It was during one of those weekends that Jane first discovered that Robin’s entire life reeked of neglect. His mother was referred to by her own mother as “that drunken bitch,” so she probably shouldn’t have been too surprised.

  Somewhere down the line, just a few years before Robin’s mother died and he moved in full-time with their father, she stopped being his chief tormentor and became his champion. His protector. His ally.

  “What’s not to understand?” he asked her now. “HeartBeat wants to hire a couple of bodyguards for you. Use it. Spin it into something that’ll get us two, maybe three stories in the trades. If you do it right, maybe AP’ll pick it up.”

  “I don’t want a bodyguard following me around day and night.” Jane’s public persona, “Party Girl Producer Mercedes Chadwick,” was as much a fictional character as any she’d ever created for one of her screenplays.

  For the first time in her career—a crazy, seven-year ride that had started with a freak hit when she was still in film school—Jane was making a movie based on fact.

  And was getting death threats because of it.

  “I don’t want to have to be the ‘Party Girl Producer’ here in my own home,” she told her brother. Her feet hurt just from the idea of wearing J. Mercedes Chadwick’s dangerously high heels 24/7. Which she would have to do. Because her bodyguards would be watching her—that was the whole point of them being there, right?

  And no way would she risk one of them giving an interview after the threat was over and done, saying, “Jane Chadwick? Yeah, the Mercedes thing is just BS. No really calls her that. She’s actually very normal. Plain Jane, you know? Nothing special to look at without the trashy clothes and makeup. She works eighteen-hour days—which is deadly dull and boring, if you want to know the truth. All those guys she allegedly dates? It’s all for show. The Party Girl Producer hasn’t had a private party in her bedroom for close to two years.”

  Patty knocked on the door, opening it a crack to peek in. “I’m sorry,” she reported. “They’ve set up a meeting here for four o’clock with the security firm they’ve hired—Troubleshooters Incorporated.”

  Jane closed her eyes at Patty’s verb tense. Hired. “No,” she said. “Tell them no. Leave off the thank you this time and—”

  “I’m sorry,”—Patty looked as if she were going to cry,—“but the studio apparently called the FBI—”

  “What?”

  “And the authorities are taking the threats seriously. They’re involved now—”

  “The FBI?” Jane was on her feet.

  Patty nodded. “Some important agent from DC is going to be here at four, too. He’s already on his way.”

  It was very clear to Cosmo that J. Mercedes Chadwick couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  “You’re telling me,” she repeated, making sure that she got it right, “that there are thousands of people—tens of thousands—who consider Chester Lord, a little-known Alabama District Court judge who’s been dead since 1959, to be their personal hero?”

  FBI Agent Jules Cassidy nodded. “Yes, ma’am. They call themselves the Freedom Network. Chester Lord wrote a number of books and—”

  “This is a man who was über-conservative even for his time,” she pointed out. “There are rumors that Judge Lord looked the other way and allowed lynchings—”

  “I believe they refer to him as honest and old-fashioned,” Jules told her. “And his son, Hal, was a highly decorated war hero—you surely know more about that part of it than I do. But I can tell you one thing. Apparently these people are very protective of the memories of both father and son, and they’re not at all happy at the idea of you outing Hal in your movie.”

  Mercedes’s assistant had put a copy of the American Hero script onto the table in front of them, along with the warning that they could not take it out of this building.

  Like … what? They were going to sell it on e-bay? Or give a copy of the most provocative scenes to a tabloid like the National Voice?

  Cosmo flipped through it. It was the story of Jack Shelton and Harold “Hal” Lord—two young American soldiers who met in Paris in early 1945, toward the end of World War Two.

  Hal was a highly decorated war hero, and because he spoke fluent German, he volunteered to be part of an Allied team determined to find out whether Hitler’s scientists had succeeded in creating an atomic bomb. The movie alleged that Hal Lord was gay, but in total denial. He was not just in the closet, he was sitting so far in the back with his eyes shut, he couldn’t even see the door.

  Until Jack Shelton made the scene.

  “Hal’s own granddaughter has given our movie her blessing,” Mercedes pointed out. “If you’re looking for the sex, the first gay love scene isn’t until page seventy-two.”

  Cos looked up, directly into her eyes, which were a remarkably pretty color. She was talking to him. She thought he was looking for …

  “The hetero couple doesn’t get it on until close to the end of the movie either—page seventy-nine,” she continued. “I think you’ll find it’s all tastefully done. We fade to black in both of the romantic subplots. We’ve been very up-front about that, so I’m not sure why all those Internet crazies have their panties in a twist.”

  “I wasn’t …” he started to say, but her attention was already back on Cassidy. Fine. Let her think whatever she wanted to think.

  “Can we back up a bit?” Mercedes asked. “You said earlier that these Freedom people—all megathousands of them—have these weekend get-togethers up in, in … Monkey-Fuck, Idaho, where they sit around a campfire, doing what? Reciting eighty-seven-verse epic poems lauding the glory that was Chester ‘Baby-Lyncher’ Lord?”

  “Well, we’re not exactly sure what they do during their retreats,” Jules told her. He was trying to keep this serious, but Cosmo could tell that “Monkey-Fuck” had him biting the insides of his cheeks. “They’re pretty adamant about not letting outsiders into their inner circle. Still, whatever they do up there, we think it’s probably more likely that it has to do with firearms rather than poetry.”

  “But whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it in Idaho, right?” she asked. “So I should be okay as long as I stay in California.” She looked over at her assistant. “Patty, call Steve Spielberg with my regrets. I won’t be able to attend his potato-picking party in Boise next week, gosh darn it.”

  Jules was hanging in. “Ms. Chadwick. With all due respect, yesterday this was a joke. But today the Freedom Network’s involved. There have been several e-mails that have raised a red flag. I don’t have the details yet, but my boss, Max Bhagat, is concerned. And believe me, when he becomes concerned, you should take it seriously.”

  Mercedes looked again at the computer documents Jules had given her—pages upon pages, printed directly from the Freedom Network’s website. They included a sheet which had a picture of her face in the center of a bull’s-eye target.

  She laughed, but to Cosmo’s ears it sounded a little forced. “This is priceless, you know. I couldn’t buy this kind of publicity.”

  Her brother spoke, his voice sharp. “I think we’ve all agreed this has gone too far, Jane.”

  Mercedes—or Jane, as her brother called her—looked up at Cosmo, as if she’d somehow decided that she trusted him above everyone else in the room. “Am I really in danger?” she asked.

  He put down the script. Not from him. Nothing moved him less than a woman like J. Mercedes Chadwick. Yes, she was beautiful, with a perfect oval of a face that hinted at a Middle Eastern ancestry. And that body …

  He cleared his throat. “Lotta crazy people out there,” he told her. She seemed to want more, so he kept going. “Seems like a no-brainer to me—letting us come in and provide security, letting HeartSong pay for it.”<
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  She looked down at that picture again, frowning slightly. And Cosmo suspected that it scared her more than she was willing to admit.

  But she kept up her act. “They spelled my name wrong,” she said.

  “Yeah, but they got our address right,” her brother pointed out.

  There was silence then, as that bit of info sank in.

  J. Mercedes finally sighed, swearing under her breath. Then she looked up again, directly at Cosmo. “How do we do this?” she asked him. “How exactly is this going to work?”

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Other Books by This Author

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Excerpt from Hot Target