After She's Gone (9 page)

“I thought she may have talked to you.”

Fingers curled over the steering wheel in a death grip, he turned off the highway and angled his old pickup into the outskirts of Falls Crossing. “Not for a while.”

“You didn’t see her at the hospital?” Jenna asked, but he suspected she knew the truth.

“Cass wouldn’t see me. Refused to let me near her. I was, and am, persona non grata.”

“But you’re her husband.”

“Doesn’t mean much to Cass.” He slowed for a stop sign. A Cadillac old enough to sport fins rolled through the intersection.

“I’m worried about her,” Jenna admitted.

“Yeah.”

“Aren’t you?” The question had a bite to it.

“She’s always a worry,” he bit back, then mentally kicked himself. Jenna had always been fair with him, no matter how many times he’d screwed up. He pulled into a parking slot near the post office. “I haven’t talked to Cassie since she and everyone else came back to reshoot the end of her last movie and Allie went missing. She called me and ranted and railed at me, thought I had something to do with Allie’s disappearance and then I hauled her ass—I picked her up from the police station after a particularly rough interview. But you know all that.”

Silence.

“Haven’t heard from her since.”

Jenna said through a tight throat, “She . . . she won’t talk to me.

Barely takes my calls. I just thought . . . or hoped that she might have been in touch with you.”

“Sorry.”

Another long pause and he could almost see his famous mother-in-law pull herself together. “Me too.”

Trent felt obliged to ask, “Any news on Allie?” though he knew there wasn’t. If Allie Kramer or her body had been found it would be splashed all over the news, tabloids, and Internet. She’d been missing for over three weeks and
Dead Heat
was soon to premiere. Allie Kramer, its star, had disappeared before the last day of shooting, or more precisely, reshooting, of the ending for the film. No one had seen or heard from her since.

A catch in her voice, Jenna said, “Nothing yet.”

“Damn.”

She sighed. “Precisely.”

He felt like a heel. “I’m sorry,” he said again. It was a platitude. Heartfelt, but a platitude. As the days and weeks had passed, hope for finding Allie Kramer alive had diminished, though, now that the movie was to be released, interest in her fate and whereabouts was ramping to new levels. He knew from personal experience. As Cassie’s husband of record and Allie’s brother-in-law, he’d been dealing with the press himself. “Look, I’ll give Cassie a call, see if she’ll take it and let me know what’s up.”

“I appreciate it, Trent.” She sounded weary. “Good-bye.”

He stared at the screen a second or two after the call ended, then speed-dialed Cassie. Might as well get it over with.

The call connected, and he heard it ringing. “Come on,” he said under his breath, his gut clenching at the thought of talking to her again. He dropped his visor down where a picture of her was clipped. In the shot her smile curved up on one side, a naughty little grin, her eyes sparkling green, her brows arched, her pointed chin at an angle, her tousled hair tossed behind one shoulder. Sexy. Seductive. Smart.

The line rang again.

His jaw clenched.

He waited through three more rings, but of course, she didn’t pick up.

 

C
assie grabbed an iced coffee from a Starbucks near La Cienega

Boulevard and as she sipped it at an umbrella table on the sidewalk, she went through her phone messages again. Since leaving Portland, she’d collected four voice messages: one from her mother; another from Whitney Stone, a reporter who had dogged her before she’d entered the hospital; a third from Holly Dennison, who was a set designer and, if not a friend, an acquaintance; and the last, she noted, biting her lower lip, was from Trent.

Her mother had asked her to call, Whitney wanted to meet, and Holly had said, “Hey, I’m in LA. I think I saw you at the airport. Give me a call.”

Finally, it had been Trent’s turn. “It’s me,” and the timbre of his voice touched a forbidden part of her heart. “Jenna called. She’s worried. Wants to know what’s going on with you. She said you were in the airport or taking a trip.” A pause. Cassie held her breath. “Give me a call when you can. Or her.” Another pause and then her undoing, “Take care, Cass.”

“As if you give a crap,” she whispered, her throat instantly thick. That was the problem. If Trent showed her any hint of kindness whether heartfelt or fake, it got to her.

She erased all the messages, then checked her texts. Again, one from that reporter, Whitney Stone, asking to meet. No way. Not when Whitney Stone produced and reported for her own tell-all television show, a blend of Hollywood gossip and unsolved mysteries. Rumor had it
Justice: Stone Cold
was already in production with the Allie Kramer disappearance story. Cassie wanted no part of it.
Delete!
Another from her mother asking her to call.
Delete.
A third was from Holly, suggesting they get together since they were both in town. That message she didn’t immediately delete. Since Holly had worked on
Dead Heat
and was an acquaintance of Allie’s, it made sense to meet her.

Still, Cassie hesitated. She sipped the coffee, watched people hurrying in and out of the coffee shop, or sitting like she was, laptop on the table or phone in hand or both as they drank from paper cups.

It was late afternoon now, a few clouds creating a haze over the lowering sun. She needed a plan. She’d left the hospital with no clear idea of what to do, how to locate Allie, how to go forward with her life. Her first impulse had been to check out Allie’s apartment in Portland, fly south, grab her own things and her car, and snoop around a little down here, see what she could dig up.

And now as the sun sank lower in the sky and she watched the little birds pluck at bits of scones and whatever dropped near the tables, she wondered what her next move was. She knew she’d probably return to Portland, if only temporarily, as that was where, presumably, Allie had last been seen.

“Tell me about that night,” Detective Rhonda Nash had asked in the stuffy, cinder-block interrogation room. In her forties, Cassie had guessed, she wore short, frosted hair that spiked above an oval face with no apparent laugh lines. Her gray suit was crisp, her open-throated blouse pressed. From the way she’d held herself, Cassie guessed Detective Nash was no stranger to the gym. “The last night you were with your sister.”

“Nothing much to tell.”

“What did you discuss?”

“The movie,” Cassie had said. “We were both involved in
Dead Heat
.”

“She was the star.”

Behind rimless glasses, dark eyes had stared pointedly at Cassie, who guessed the detective had been searching for a reaction. “Yes.” This was a fact the whole world knew, an unnecessary question.

“And you had, what? Four lines?” Had there been an underlying sneer in her question?

“Yes.” Cassie had nodded as she’d somehow managed to keep her irritation from showing.

“She’s become a pretty big name.”

Cassie had waited.

“So, you talked about the movie.” She’d glanced down at her notes. “What was the nature of the discussion?”

“We were both a little upset that we had to return to shoot the final scene.”

“And why was that?”

“Because there was a test audience who didn’t like the ending as it had been written and shot, so everyone involved in that last scene had to reschedule everything to come back here, to Portland.”

“I meant why were you upset?”

“Allie wasn’t thrilled that I made a minor adjustment to a scene.”

“You made an adjustment?”

“I’m a writer, so I had an idea that the director liked.”

“But this adjustment bothered her.”

Big time.
“She said so, yeah. And she was irritated because she was going to take a break from acting for a few months. Go over screenplays that were offered to her, make sure she found the right... ‘vehicle. ’ That’s what she said.”

“And you?”

“I’m a screenwriter now and I was anxious”—
Wrong word! Wrong word!—
“eager to jump into a plot I’d been playing around with.”

“So you’d rather write than act?”

Cassie had fielded this one before. “A lot of actors think they’d rather direct or produce or write. I chose writing.”

“Because your acting career wasn’t taking off.”

“That’s one reason,” she’d admitted. “Yes.”

“Unlike your sister’s.”

“I guess.”

“Ever since her breakout role in that film . . . oh, what was it?” She’d actually snapped her fingers as if she’d forgotten the name of
Street Life
, a blockbuster hit in which Allie played a teenage prostitute who, a drug user, had found herself pregnant by a sixty-year-old john and, despite all the cards stacked against her, prevailed. The role had been gritty and dark, one Cassie had auditioned for but had been cast aside as “too old,” in her early twenties. Allie had been eighteen but had been able to pull off the scared, desperate actions of a girl three years her junior.

“
Street Life.
”

“That’s right.” Nash had nodded. “You tried out for that role, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“But Allie landed it.”

“Yes.”

“And there was talk of her being up for an Oscar, I think.”

“She wasn’t nominated.”

“But the buzz was that she should have been.”

“Her breakout role,” Cassie had agreed as the detective had scribbled a note to herself even though the session was being taped.

“It had to be difficult for you that your kid sister got it and you didn’t.”

“She was better suited. Younger.” Cassie’s palms had begun to sweat and she’d stuffed them under her legs, kept her face relaxed, though Detective Nash had hit a sensitive nerve. That role of Penelope Burke was an actor’s dream. In fact it had been Cassie’s dream. Allie had only learned of it from her older sister and then decided to audition.

“I understand she beat you out of roles more than once,” the detective had said as she scanned some pages from the file she’d brought into the small, airless room. “Three times?” She looked up expectantly.

“Uh . . . yes. Yes, I think that’s right.”

“You can’t remember?” Skepticism. “Boy, I would have known, if it had been me.”

“Three parts,” Cassie had clarified, keeping the edge out of her voice. Obviously the cop had been badgering her, looking for a way to get her to explode and say something she’d regret.

“There were signs of a struggle at her apartment. A broken wineglass on the floor. Furniture slightly moved. Since you were the last one there, I thought you might tell me about it.”

“We argued over the change to the script, and she got upset and dropped the glass.”

“It wasn’t more personal?”

“No.” Another lie. She’d wanted to expand, to blame it all on sister stuff, sibling rivalry, but she’d thought it best to keep her answers short and to the point. Her lies and equivocations simple. So she could recall them when necessary.

Detective Nash’s eyebrows had pinched together as if she were deep in thought. “Your sister and your husband had gotten together, hadn’t they?”

Cassie had seen red and her fingers had curled over the edge of her chair, her fingertips glancing off wads of gum. “While we were separated, Allie and Trent had gone out,” she acknowledged though Trent had insisted it had all been platonic, both parties concerned about Cassie. All bull, but she hadn’t admitted it in the interview. In fact, she hadn’t admitted to much, not when the questions had gotten more personal about her marriage nor when the detective had probed about her relationship with each of her parents. Detective Nash had even brought up the horrid ordeal she and Allie had gone through at the hands of their mother’s stalker, but Cassie had held on to her cool.

It had been obvious they considered her a suspect in her sister’s disappearance. She’d been one of the last, if not
the
last, person to see Allie before she vanished. The fact that she had no alibi, that she’d been alone on the night Allie had seemingly evaporated into thin air, had made her a “person of interest” in Allie Kramer’s missing person’s case. As such, she’d been under surveillance, had felt people following her, watching her, and knew the police were discussing her motives and opportunity to do away with her sister. Paranoia had become full-blown.

Was it any wonder she’d checked herself into Mercy Hospital where she was under constant observation and psychiatric care? The staff at Mercy had been employed to help her, not be suspicious of her.

As she took her final sip of her coffee, her phone vibrated across the table and she snagged it. Another text from Holly.

She could have a drink. She would talk to Holly, then head back to her condo. Her plan, loose as it was, included cleaning out the apartment, giving her notice, poking around LA for a few days, and finally heading north. Maybe at night. Traffic would be easier then, and she could start her drive up the coast, take the PCH toward San Francisco and chill out, enjoy the view of the Pacific lapping along the California shore, then cut over to the Five, sometime along the way. Or she could freeway it from here and the drive would take sixteen hours or so.

She tossed her empty cup into the trash and climbed into the heat of her car where she second-guessed herself. What good would meeting Holly do?

Before she could talk herself out of the meeting, she texted:

Before she could jab her keys in the ignition, her phone chirped and she read:
I’m there!

Cassie glanced at the rearview mirror. Worried eyes stared back at her.

“Yeah. Well, no one can,” she said aloud.

Jamming her car into reverse, she backed out. A silver Mercedes that had been hovering grabbed her spot, nearly hitting her in an effort to park near the café. Cassie restrained herself from flipping off the driver as she pulled out of the parking lot. Instead, she scrounged around and found a pair of dusty sunglasses in a side pocket of the car and slid them onto the bridge of her nose.

She prayed the gods of traffic would rain grace on the 405 heading north.

Otherwise, the drive would be a bitch.