Page 12

CHAPTER 12

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!

Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!

Thy mists, that roll and rise!

Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag

And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag

To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!

World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,

But never knew I this;

Here such a passion is

As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear

Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;

My soul is all but out of me,—let fall

No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay, “God’s World”

WHITNEY

Though I’d had no luck tracking down Terry Thorne via the internet, I was determined to find her some other way. Without access to Collin’s law enforcement databases, locating the woman would put my people-finding skills to the test. Who might know where she is today?

I pulled up the Sock Hop promotional image again and stared at Terry, willing her to advise me where she was. Sawdust was lying on my lap, and I ran my hand over his back as I pondered the situation. Then I had a lightbulb moment. Many old sitcoms were still in syndication or available on streaming services. If Sock Hop was still generating income, Terry might be getting a piece of the action, however small. The money trail could lead me to her!

To Sawdust’s dismay, I stopped stroking his fur and put my hands back on my keyboard. Hollywood actors usually had agents, right? Any residuals Terry earned would likely be paid through the agent so that they could deduct their share of the earnings.

I performed a new search to determine who represented Terry Thorne. Nothing came up in her name, though my search produced a list of the major agencies. Contacting them was worth a shot, right?

I dialed the first agency on the list, Action Acting Agency, Inc. When the receptionist answered, I said, “I’m trying to find out which agency represents Terry Thorne. Can you tell me if it’s your agency?”

“Spell the last name please.”

I spelled it out for her.

“We represent a Rick Thorne, but no Terry. Sorry.”

I thanked her and moved on to the next one on the list. By the seventh agency, I wondered if I was hippity-hopping down a pointless rabbit hole. Whoever represented Terry Thorne might no longer be in the business. Besides, like businesses in many industries, agencies probably merged and re-formed over the years. This could be a total waste of time.

It wasn’t, fortunately. My fifteenth call produced paydirt.

“Terry Thorne isn’t on our current client roster,” the receptionist informed me, “but one of our agents represented her in the past. Larry Silver. Would you like me to see if he’s available?”

Would I ever! “Yes, please.”

I held for nine full minutes before a man answered the line. “Larry Silver. What can I do for you?”

I identified myself and told him I was trying to locate Terry Thorne.

He said nothing for several beats. “I haven’t spoken to Terry in thirty years or more. She was one of my first clients. What do you want with her?”

I was as honest as I could be. “I’m a carpenter and I’m working on a remodeling job at the boarding school she attended in Tennessee. We’re cleaning things out and came across some costumes she wore in her performances here. We thought she might like to have them. If you have her current phone number, I’d like to get in touch with her.”

“You sure you want to do that? You could just throw them away or take them to Goodwill.”

It seemed he was trying to discourage me from contacting Terry. But why? “If she’s not interested, I’ll do that. But I feel like it’s only right to ask her first. She got her start in acting while she was at Ridgetop Prep.”

He let loose a long, loud exhale. “All right. Let me see what I’ve got.” I heard the clicking sounds of him typing on his computer keyboard. A few seconds later, he rattled off a phone number. To my surprise, it began with a 615 area code. “That’s the Nashville area code. Terry Thorne isn’t in Los Angeles anymore?”

“Not according to my records. She’s not Terry Thorne anymore, either. She’s Terry Pfeiffer now, or at least she was the last time she updated her contact information with us.” He spelled her last name for me.

“Could you give me her address, too?”

“Not without her permission, and I’m not about to call that girl to get it.”

Terry would hardly be a girl anymore, but I supposed she’d been one when she’d worked with this man. “I take it she wasn’t easy to get along with?”

He snorted. “Look, actors have egos. I get it. It takes a lot of self-esteem to put yourself out there in the first place, and fame can go to a person’s head. But I get her that small part in Sock Hop and she thinks she’s God’s gift to Hollywood. She drove the director and other actors nuts, telling them how to do their jobs as if she knew better than everyone else.”

Sounded like Terry and Adam Joule had something in common. A superiority complex.

Mr. Silver wasn’t done. “Terry was always demanding that craft services have some kind of impossible-to-find drinks and snacks on hand. She had the production assistants running all over the city trying to find them. She’d change her lines to ones she thought were better than what was written in the script. It’s okay for an actor to improvise a little, but she tried to change entire scenes. Pissed the writers off to no end. She also insisted she could do her makeup and hair better than the professional makeup artist. The director tried to get Terry in line. Hell, I did, too. She wasn’t a team player. The final straw was when her costumer accidentally poked her with a safety pin and Terry backhanded the woman across the face.”

“Whoa.”

“The director had security toss Terry off the lot and told the writers to revise the script and write her character out of the show. Terry had bragged incessantly about attending that artsy boarding school in Tennessee, the one you’re remodeling, I suppose. The writers thought it would be amusing to have the character sent off to a boarding school.” He chuckled, then said, “You’re not going to tell her I said any of this, are you?”

“No way,” I said. “In fact, you’ve talked me out of contacting her.”

It was a white lie, of course. I planned to contact her as soon as I could find her. I just didn’t want him to worry that he’d be implicated in any way. “Thanks for your time.”

The instant we ended the call, I googled Terry Pfeiffer and Nashville . Holy moly! I found several articles detailing her arrest for an assault on her own husband twenty-two years ago. I knew I’d found the right Terry because the article included her photo. Though she’d aged some since her teen years at Ridgetop, the woman in the photo resembled the girl in the 1982 yearbook, as well as the program for The Music Man . I’d kept a copy.

According to the articles, she’d attacked her husband with a long-handled barbecue fork at a neighborhood cookout after she’d caught him engaged in conversation with another woman. She’d stabbed him three times, lacerating his internal organs, before several men grabbed the grilling tool from her and flung her into the nearby swimming pool to cool her down. When she emerged from the pool, they’d wrestled her to the ground until law enforcement arrived. Her husband, meanwhile, was taken away in an ambulance to undergo emergency surgery. A jury later found her guilty of felony assault and sentenced her to three years in prison.

Every cell in my body tingled. Terry had evolved from the creepy student sneaking down the hallway at Ridgetop Prep with a geometry compass in her robe pocket and unprovable intentions to a fork-wielding felon who’d attempted to eviscerate her husband in front of two dozen witnesses.

A later collection of articles documented the arrest seventeen years ago of Terry Bickford, formerly known as Terry Pfeiffer. This time around, she was arrested for felony destruction of property after setting fire to the house in which her estranged husband, a man named Van Bickford, lived. Bickford must have been Terry’s second husband, and their marriage must have been a short one given that she’d been released from prison not long before. Surely, he, too, must have divorced her after she’d tried to burn his house down with him inside. This time, with a prior on her record, she served eight years in prison.

Searches for the name Terry Bickford in any current capacity led me nowhere. She appeared to have changed her name again. But what is it now?

With no current name to go on, I tried searching the phone number Larry Silver had given me. To my surprise, it popped up in conjunction with a business called Main Stage Salon. The information on the website promised that the salon’s chief stylist, Marie St. Germaine, would get her clients red-carpet ready not only with hairdressing services, but a variety of aesthetician services as well. Many involved some method of hair removal, including waxing, threading, and electrolysis. She also offered skincare services, such as facials, chemical peels, and microdermabrasion. She touted herself as being well versed in makeup artistry, too. She made a firm promise to her clients: You’ll leave looking like a star!

Had Terry canceled her account and the phone number been subsequently reassigned to the salon? To determine if this was the case, I clicked on the About Marie tab. The woman identified as Marie now had wheat-blond hair, but there was no doubt in my mind that she was Terry Thorne. In fact, the school roster, which included students’ middle names, identified Terry as Terry Marie Thorne. She was evidently going by her middle name now, along with a new last name. Had she married a third time? She must have figured it was wise to ditch her previous names. Who’d want to sit in a chair while a violent criminal tended to them with scissors and razors and high-voltage devices?

With nary a wrinkle in sight, sassy layered locks, and full pouty lips, Terry/Marie looked nowhere near her actual age, which had to be sixty or sixty-one, right around my mother’s age. Looked like she’d put her interest in makeup and hair to work for her. Maybe I can put her to work, too…

I clicked on the Book a Service tab to check her availability. Her calendar was fully booked for the next three weeks. Ugh! I grabbed her next open appointment time, scheduling a seaweed facial. I also added myself to her cancellation list, and crossed my fingers she’d have a no-show in the meantime so I could get in sooner.

I closed my laptop and sat back. Scheduling an appointment with the violent felon was either a genius way to get close to her or the stupidest thing I’d ever done. Maybe I should write my will.

Between my visit to Detective Macedo at the Robertson County Sheriff’s department and my upcoming appointment at Terry Thorne’s salon, I read Irving Finster’s second novel, The Solution. His first book had been so engaging, the world could have turned upside down around me and I wouldn’t have even noticed. His second book, though, was an absolute slog. I’d had to force myself to pick it up and turn the pages. The story was replete with purple prose. The stereotypical characters lacked depth, and the pacing was so slow the story crawled along at half the pace of a garden slug. The novel was nothing short of literary torture.

The main character in The Solution was the mayor of a small town in an unidentified state. The mayor inherited a long list of problems his predecessor had failed to properly address. The city budget was in shambles. The steel mill that had been the town’s primary employer closed, putting over two hundred people out of work. Without a major industry in town, and with homeowners having no money to keep up their houses, property values plummeted, negatively impacting property tax revenue. What’s more, Main Street was in decline, too, with shoppers neglecting the tired old mom-and-pop shops and instead venturing eight miles down the road to the brand-new air-conditioned mall in the neighboring town. As a result, the city’s sales tax revenue had declined by half.

The water tower was old and rusty, but there were no funds to replace or repair it. Nobody was surprised when one of its supports gave way and the tower collapsed, crushing the roof of the town’s small library—thankfully empty at the time—and flooding the building. An outbreak of swine flu at a local hog farm spread to the population, killing several of the town’s elderly residents and making many others sick, overwhelming the small hospital.

The schools struggled, too. Experienced teachers were retiring or taking jobs at private schools in the city an hour away where they could earn more money. Young teachers didn’t want to move to a small town where their romantic prospects were slim and there was nothing fun to do on the weekends.

The poor mayor was put upon by everyone—the city council, the school board, the chamber of commerce, even the Little League parents, who insisted on new sod and bleachers for the dusty baseball field despite the fact that the city didn’t even have enough funds to fix the garbage truck after its engine blew. His job was utterly thankless. None of the townspeople seemed to realize just how hard the mayor was working to try to solve their small-town problems. While his wife and three children loved and appreciated him, they encouraged him to resign, to give up on a job he seemed ill-suited for. His modest home went from being a place of respite to just another place where he failed to live up to expectations and demands. No matter what the man did, it was never right, never enough.

Just when you hoped he’d finally lure to town one of the large manufacturing companies he’d been desperately courting or that he’d find a creative solution such as launching a seasonal festival to bring in tourist dollars, a black hole opens in space directly over the town and expels a giant meteor aimed directly at the city hall in the center of town. The meteor strikes—KABOOM!—putting an end to all of the town’s problems and the people as well. Only the mayor survives, having taken his patched-up old rowboat onto the river to try to land a catfish or two for his family’s dinner. After watching the town that sucked him dry go up in flames, succumbing to the flaming spitball from space, he sets his fishing rod down in the bottom of the boat, lies down beside it, and closes his eyes, letting the current carry him where it may. The end.

What?!

Finster’s use of deus ex machina to resolve the town’s problems was a cheap, lazy ploy. I’d been rooting for the mayor to find a real solution and finally receive the respect and appreciation he deserved, but it never happened. I felt entirely let down, betrayed, in fact. All of that buildup only to have a meteor strike the town? Sheesh. So cliché. No wonder the book had received lackluster reviews from critics.

Speaking of those reviews, Irving seemed to have put a lot of stock in them. I’d poked around a little in his study in the Victorian to see what I might find. I’d come across a manila folder in one of the desk drawers. Inside were newspaper clippings of reviews for his work. His first novel, A Dark Day for Justice, had received stellar reviews. A critic for the New York Times predicted “a meteoric rise for this uncommonly talented debut author.” Instead, the meteor that resolved the problems in Finster’s second book led to him being lambasted by this same critic as “a talentless regurgitator of tripe.” There’s irony for you.

Still, while the book had been a joyless read, it provided many insights into Irving Finster’s world. The small town had been an obvious metaphor for Ridgetop Preparatory Academy, the town’s problems analogous to the many issues the school suffered. The mayor was a stand-in for the headmaster, who must have felt as overwhelmed, ill-equipped, and helpless as the protagonist in his novel. Had Irving Finster hoped for a proverbial giant meteor to strike Ridgetop and put an end to his misery?