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Chapter Twenty-Six

Hollywood Calling!

M iranda and the palm trees.

It’s been too long, she thought. She’d asked that they exit the freeway and take Sunset Boulevard across instead, below that honor guard of palms, with her window down, sun on her face.

She’d almost forgotten the feel of California on her skin, the pastel colors and surging crowds, the slow-crawling traffic, the buskers and the billboards.

Almost, but not quite. Like the hollywood sign itself, everything seemed both far away and near at hand at the same time, like looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.

They turned in at the same Burbank studios where they’d filmed the last four seasons of Pastor Fran Investigates .

“I’m here with Miranda Abbott,” said her driver. “ Eastern Township Mysteries. ”

Miranda called out, “I’m in the cast.”

“Just a sec.” The security guard in the booth retrieved a clipboard. “I don’t see that name.” He flipped to the next page, and the next. Ran a finger down it. “Oh, here it is. At the very end.” He passed her lanyard across to the driver, who passed it back to Miranda.

The guard then pressed the button to raise the gate. “Lot C, general parking, at the back.”

“Not staying,” said the driver, more gruffly than necessary. “Just dropping her off.”

No preferred parking spot near the studio gate with her name attached, and no dedicated driver, either.

“Ms. Fenland is expecting you,” said the receptionist.

A new chapter. A new direction. A decision made. Regrets hovering in the background.

“So good to see you!” said Penny, ushering Miranda into her office. “The table read is not till tomorrow, but do come in. Sit, sit. Do you need anything? Water? Wine?”

“Nothing, thank you. I only wanted to stop by before we started, see how my favorite former intern is doing.”

An awkward silence followed.

“Miranda, look, I’m so sorry about—”

“It’s perfectly fine, honestly it is. There’s no need for you to apologize. I know you tried your best.”

Penny looked relieved. “Thank you for being so understanding. In the end, the powers that be felt that making the character of Inspector Le Gnash a woman was a little too ‘adventurous’ for their tastes. But I’m so happy you agreed to take another part.

It’s smaller, of course, not the lead, the auntie of the detective.

But you get to do a Canadian accent, all ‘oot and aboot’ and ‘eh’? It’s going to be fun.”

Miranda said, without rancor, “It was Lachlan, wasn’t it?”

“Sorry?”

“He’s the power that be.”

Penny pursed her lips, pretending not to understand. “I don’t follow.”

“Lachlan Todd, your head writer—sorry, newly appointed showrunner . That’s who actually vetoed the idea of having me play the lead.”

Eyes down. “He did.”

“But you fought for me to be included in the pilot.”

Eyes up, smiling. “I did. And who knows? The aunt is potentially a recurring character. Pastor Fran began as a spin-off, so anything is possible.”

The word potentially had as much meaning in Hollywood as proposed . Miranda looked around Penny’s office, sparsely furnished as studio lot offices always were.

Penny was curious. “How’s everything in Happy Rock? Any news?”

It was meant to sound conversational, but she was obviously alluding to the murder investigation.

“Owen McCune is getting married. It was just announced. So that’s exciting.”

“The greasy mechanic in the coveralls and silk sash?”

“The very same.”

“Who’s the blushing bride?”

“Inez Fonio.”

“But—isn’t she still in jail?”

“A prison romance? Heavens, no. The wedding ceremony will be held at our local LOJIC Grand Lodge, featuring an array of cheese cubes provided by TB Foods, with a reception afterwards in the cemetery. A dignified Presbyterian-Wiccan affair. I know! It was quite the shock. Who knew Owen was a practicing Wiccan?”

“Oh. Well. That’s good news, then!” Penny shuffled through some folders on her desk. “I’ll see you at the table read. Thank you so much for stopping by.”

“Will Lachlan be there?” Miranda asked. “At the read-through?”

“I imagine so, but—please, no tension. What I told you was in confidence. He didn’t feel you were right for the lead, but he didn’t stop me from offering you a secondary role.”

“Oh, I’m not here asking for a bigger part.”

“No?”

“Penny, I need your help. I’m closing in on a killer.”

“A killer?”

“The fiendish person who murdered Ray Hamady, Fairfax DePoy, and Wanda Stobol.”

“But they arrested Inez.”

“Not arrested, detained. She was never formally charged.”

“But what about the DNA on the speargun? If it wasn’t hers, whose was it?”

“No one’s.”

Penny was perplexed. “There was no DNA?”

“What looked like blood was in fact red food coloring. It came from the glass vial that Inez wore around her neck. Everyone assumed it was real blood in the vial, that it was her blood, but it wasn’t.

She just said it was. But the killer didn’t know that and assumed it would have her DNA.

It didn’t. Which begs the question: Why would droplets of food coloring be sprinkled on a murder weapon?

If the vial had broken in the furnace room, some of the food coloring would have splattered.

It didn’t. The fake blood was added to the weapon later, and it would hardly have been Inez Fonio who did that.

No. It would have been added by someone intent on framing her, someone who thought it was Inez’s blood in the vial. Let me ask you a question.”

“Please.”

“How well do you know Lachlan Todd?”

“I don’t. We met when I worked on Pastor Fran Investigates , but I left the show soon after he arrived on the scene. When I saw him again at the bookstore, he introduced himself to me, unaware that we’d crossed paths before, albeit in a tangential manner. Why?”

“Barely knew him, yet you used your clout as an executive producer to bring him on as head writer and then to have him promoted to showrunner?”

“I don’t know him well , but I’m a fan of his work. The episodes he wrote for Pastor Fran Investigates were among my favorites.”

“Really? Name one.”

“Sorry?”

“Name one of the episodes he wrote. Any episode.”

“I—I, well... there are too many to mention.”

“An actor lives on false praise, Penny, but every now and then, the flattery falters. Geri and Gerry thought my character was a priest. I was a pastor, of course, but I didn’t have the heart to tell them.

You were dropped from our TV show because your scripts were too good for Pastor Fran Investigates .

They were nuanced and layered, had lengthy scenes of introspection and not enough spectacle.

Lachlan and Edgar could crank out high-concept confectionary.

You couldn’t. You had depth , and you left before the show ever went into production.

I have a hard time believing you became a fan of the show after we parted company.

If you honestly were a fan of Lachlan’s work, if that’s truly why you hired him, name something he wrote—anything, made-for-TV movies, pilots, anything. ”

“Miranda, I don’t really have time for this. I was just being polite when I said I was a fan of his work.”

“You write mysteries for a living, Penny. Here’s one for you: an over-the-top hack is unexpectedly handed the reins to a dramatic television series based on novels that are rich in detail, rather than the usual inane gimmicks he traffics in.

Does that strike you as... suspicious?

It certainly makes one wonder. It makes me wonder what Lachlan saw that night when he stomped off from Hiram Henry House and then came hurrying back, scared of bears.

It makes me wonder who he might have seen slipping out the back, or coming in. ”

Her cheeks flushed. “You need to leave.”

“He’s playing with fire, our Lachlan, dancing with the devil like that.

But when one has hit the bottom so hard, is so abjectly desperate to get back in the game, well, the rules of the game no longer matter.

Knowing Lachlan, he has some unnecessarily elaborate time-release mechanism to reveal the truth, should anything happen to him.

But you are so much smarter than he is, smarter than all of us, that I don’t imagine it would take you much time to find and dismantle such a safeguard.

And when you do? Goodbye, Lachlan. You kept insisting that we test the speargun, not for fingerprints—there were none, as you well knew; they’d been wiped clean by you —but for DNA.

Why? Because you were sure that Inez’s DNA was on it.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t her blood around her neck.

When it comes to Inez, everything is always more performative than real. ”

“This is conjecture, nothing more.”

“It might have been Fairfax. That’s true. He could have killed Kane and then later been murdered in turn by a second assailant who was in cahoots with him. There’s no reason there couldn’t have been two killers roaming the streets of Happy Rock that night. Except for the dust.”

“The dust?”