“That’s not surprising; you’re not exactly a rocket scientist.”
Hey!
I ripped my gaze from her eyes-which were wide and slightly unbalanced, I now noticed-and let it travel down to her hands. One was twisting a brown leather belt. The other held a gun.
I gulped.
“You killed Veronika?” I squeaked out.
“Don’t pass judgment on me, you little twit, ” she said, pointing the gun at my nose. “If you saw what Veronika was doing, you wouldn’t think she was such an innocent victim. She was blackmailing someone, all right. Me!”
My head was spinning, partly from the lack of oxygen, but mostly with bits and pieces of information that had been swirling in my brain for days. And suddenly, as if by magic, they were falling into place.
“It was about the letters all along, ” I said.
Mia grinned, showing off two rows of perfectly bleached teeth. They seemed to glow in the moonlight, giving her face an eerie otherworldly look. If it was possible, she creeped me out even more.
“Yes, it was about the letters.”
“Only…” I paused, letting things fall into place. “Veronika didn’t write them. You did.”
For a moment her creepy smile faltered. Apparently I wasn’t playing the role of “dumb blonde” to her satisfaction. “It was all Blake’s fault. I was trailing in the ratings because of his stupid nerves. The man couldn’t even give a goddamned red-carpet interview without breaking into a sweat and stuttering like Porky Pig. And then that bitch Margo goes and tries to write me out of the film script. Me! Can you believe it? I’m the star of the show. So, I decided I needed more screen time. If the writers weren’t going to give it to me, I’d just have to write myself a new part.”
“Like the victim of a stalker fan?” I glanced behind Mia. Where was this extra security everyone kept talking about? If I could keep her talking long enough, surely someone would see us, right?
“Why not? Do you know how much fan mail I get every single day?” She snorted. “Five times as much as that Margo, I’ll tell you. So, I started sending some to myself. Increasingly obsessive. Then they started arriving daily, threatening my life.” She smiled again, and I was reminded of a wolf grinning down at its prey.
I shuddered. I hated being prey.
“You wouldn’t believe how the media ate that story up, ” she continued, eyes shining like a fever victim’s. “You know I hit the cover of Star, People, and US Weekly all in the same week?”
“So what went wrong?” I glanced over Mia’s shoulder. Come on, come on, what’s the holdup?
“Veronika, that’s what.” Her smile disappeared, her jaw setting into a hard angle as she stared at a point just beyond my head. “That nosy bitch. One day I come into my trailer and who do I find there but nosy Veronika? Lost her copy of the shooting schedule and wanted to borrow mine. Or so she said. She found one of my letters, half-finished. She may have been a nosy little bitch, but she wasn’t stupid. She put two and two together and realized I’d made up the entire story for the press.”
“And she threatened to go public if you didn’t pay her off?”
Mia nodded, her cap bobbing up and down. “Greedy bitch. She wanted half a mil.”
Which would have seemed like a fortune to Veronika. Only, according to Entertainment Tonight, Mia made at least that per episode.
“Why didn’t you just pay her off?”
Mia’s face distorted, her lips curling back to bare her wolfish teeth at me. “Because that wasn’t the way I planned it. Being a blackmail victim was not in my script. Blackmail is dirty and deceitful. I’m the damn star of this show! No one drags me to that level.”
O-kay.
Eccentric artist didn’t even begin to describe the kind of crazy that was going on here.
Mia took a step toward me, her eyes flashing, the gun catching the light as it glinted in my direction.
I winced, feeling my throat tighten up.
“So you killed her?” I squeaked out, stalling for time.
“Minor rewrite. But a good one, don’t you think? The perfect opportunity to escalate my stalker into a full-blown, above-the-fold murder story. I told her to meet me in my trailer after the wrap and I’d give her what she wanted. Greedy little thing actually thought I was going to pay her off. Ha!” Mia laughed out loud, a short bark that held little humor. “So, I handed her the money, and while she was busy counting it I came up behind her and strangled her with a pair of panty hose I’d taken from wardrobe earlier that day.”
The final piece of the puzzle clicked in my brain. “Dusty saw you take the panty hose.”
Mia frowned, obviously peeved that I’d skipped ahead in the script. “Yes. At the time I told her I’d run my first pair. But after she found Veronika, it became clear that Dusty wasn’t as stupid as she looked. She confronted me. Told me she was going to the cops with what she’d seen. Maybe the cops would have believed her, maybe not. But I couldn’t take that chance. Not when the press is eating this story up. I have a Barbara Walters interview scheduled! So, I had to write Dusty out of the picture.”
The way Mia referred to killing Dusty, as if she’d simply dropped a character from her little show, made me sick to my stomach.
“So, you killed her, too?”
Mia smirked. “I used Margo’s scarf to try to throw suspicion on her. Nice plot twist, huh?”
I glanced behind Mia’s shoulder again. Nothing. No sign of security. No sign of anyone.
I felt my heart clench in my chest as Mia took another step toward me and I realized I was truly on my own here. Maybe if I could just slowly inch backward toward that metal detector…
“What are you doing?” Mia took a step forward, shoving the gun in my face.
I froze. “Nothing.”
She snarled at me. “Then stop moving! I don’t want to have to shoot you. It’s supposed to be strangulation. Don’t make me ruin your scene.”
I gulped-and just barely avoided having those five cups of coffee sitting in my bladder stain Marco’s leather pants.
“So, what happens next?” I asked. Not that I really wanted to know. I was pretty sure that this was the point in the script where Mia went for an R rating by adding some gratuitous violence via one badly dressed blonde. But I figured the longer I kept her talking, the longer I had to come up with some brilliant plan to get away. (Yes, I was aware that as plans went, so far mine had backfired miserably.)
“Next, ” Mia said, taking a menacing step forward, “the nosy new wardrobe assistant is found dead by the back gate. The Magnolia Lane strangler strikes again.”
Mia’s wide eyes suddenly went calm as she took a step toward me, and I realized it was now or never. Unless I wanted to be found with black-and-blue marks on my neck that would really clash with my red leather and porn shoes, I had to move.
I watched Mia take one more step, closing the gap between us. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and said a silent prayer. Then in one swift movement that would make my mother’s tabby cat jealous, I pushed off the ground and lunged at her throat.
She screeched, thrown off balance, and staggered back a step as my weight slammed into her anorexic build. Had she been the one wearing three-inch heels, she might have fallen backward, giving me the upper hand. Unfortunately, she was wearing sturdy work boots and I was the one in the three-inch heels. She quickly regained her footing, dropping the belt to grab a handful of my hair instead.
I screamed. Loudly. It was one thing to catch a hair or two in a zipper, quite another to have an entire handful yanked from the roots. With visions of bald spots dancing in my head, I retaliated, my fingernails clawing at her face.
Her turn to scream. “Not my face, you bitch!”
She stomped on my foot with one of her boots, crushing my toes. I yelped, then knocked her cap off her head and grabbed a handful of blonde locks.