Fade to Black

Elizabeth bends to smooth the mauve duvet cover and tuck it beneath the pillows, then winces. She twists to rub the burning spot between her shoulder blades, a telltale remnant of her sleepless night. The few times she had managed to doze off, nightmares had tormented her.

She had been hurtled back to another August night, to the sprawling rented mansion high on the cliffs above the beach at Malibu, to the vast king-sized bed in the master bedroom there. The hot, dry Santa Anas stirred the filmy white draperies on the floor-to-ceiling windows and set the wind chimes on the stone terrace to an eerie, mournful tolling.

And there, beyond the landscaped pool area, a dark silhouette crept toward her, moving stealthily through the shadows.

In that impossibly convenient manner of dreams, she could see the figure clearly though she was inside the house, in bed, tossing in a restless sleep. She sensed that danger was closing in; she knew that in a matter of moments, she would be dead....

Elizabeth lets out a shuddering sigh and abruptly shoves the quilt beneath the edges of the pillow shams. She turns and surveys the room, not reassured by its sun-splashed order or by the faint strains of an old Billy Joel song playing on the easy-listening radio station in the next room.

The day Janet Kravinski had first shown Elizabeth this house, she had pointed out how spacious the master bedroom was, how bright with “all those windows”—three-paned, high rectangles overlooking the asphalt driveway and chain-link-fenced backyard.

Elizabeth had nodded mutely as the Realtor rattled on. She had been remembering the skylit vaulted ceiling and three full walls of glass in that other, long-ago master bedroom that overlooked a lush, landscaped terrace and kidney-shaped swimming pool, and, off in the distance, the blue Pacific Ocean.

How she had loved that expansive view. She distinctly remembered instructing the interior decorator not to cover those windows. When the woman—one of those ubiquitous designer-clad, Mercedes-driving Beverly Hills blondes—had pointed out that the room might feel too stark without some kind of draperies to soften the boxy lines, Elizabeth had insisted on simple white sheers so that she would never feel closed in.

In the beginning she had rarely bothered to draw the drapes at night, wanting to feel as though she were sleeping outdoors, just as she had so long ago as a midwestern Girl Scout. It was comforting to open her eyes and see the moonlight filtering through the lush, blooming shrubs, reflected in the crystalline aqua waters of the pool.

That someone was looking in on her as she lay alone in the wee hours of the morning?

Now she glances at the heavy, lined curtains and sturdy Venetian blinds she has installed at every window in this small bedroom, where only flimsy vinyl shades existed before. She had forced herself to open the blinds and curtains this morning, refusing to allow herself to give in to the terror that has threatened to send her over the edge ever since she opened that card yesterday afternoon....

Even the teddy bear illustration haunts her, the creature’s black button eyes seeming to follow her with menacing intent.

Well, maybe it hadn’t been meant in a threatening way. Maybe someone sent it as a joke.

There is no one in Elizabeth Baxter’s past who would play a joke on her, because she has no past.

This is it, this solitary life in this quiet New England town. There are no old boyfriends, no long-lost friends, no far-flung family members.

Whoever sent it is right here in town, or they were as recently as a few days ago.

Do they know where she lives? Or did they trace her to Wind-mere Cove through the post office box address she uses for everything, another attempt at keeping her exact location a secret, should anyone figure out the alias she’s been using.

All at once her body gives in to the panic, involuntarily releasing it to surge from her gut and course through her veins. Urgent warnings screech in her brain, and her heart launches into a violent pounding.

Trembling, she strides to the nearest window and jerks her jittery hand toward the white plastic rod that controls the blinds.

Only when all three windows are darkened and the curtains drawn again does she shakily release the breath she has been holding.

By early afternoon the frantic feeling has subsided enough so that Elizabeth is able to leave the easy chair in the living room, where she has been warily huddled for hours, her arms wrapped so tightly around her bent knees that her whole body now aches with tension.

She fixes herself a tuna sandwich, which she barely touches, and then decides to throw in a load of laundry. Anything to keep busy.

In the cellar she quells the thought that someone might be hiding in the dark corners that aren’t quite reached by the light from the bare overhead bulbs.

Inside, plastered against the side, she sees a damp scrap of pink and white ruffled fabric, and she remembers....

Elizabeth sniffs it, but there’s no hint of mildew, though it’s been sitting there, damp, for nearly twenty-four hours. She puts it into the dryer and turns it on low.

Then she fills the washer with bath towels and washcloths, measures the liquid detergent, dumps it in, turns the dial, and pulls the knob so that water starts gushing into the machine.

Yet, the thought of having her privacy needlessly invaded by her neighbor’s prying eyes and nosy questions is unbearable.

Outside, she can hear the birds singing, and the faint sound of a neighbor’s lawn mower.

Nothing’s going to happen to you in broad daylight, with people all around, she tells herself firmly.

No. He would wait until after dark—after midnight, when she was alone in her bed and there was no one to hear her scream....

Frank Minelli’s brown eyes widen in surprise and he opens the screen door wider.

“Pamela’s not home,” he tells her. “She went to some play group with the kids.”

“That’s okay. I just wanted to return this.” She hands him the neatly folded pink and white sunsuit, still warm from the dryer.

Frank holds it up by the ruffled shoulder straps, then shakes his head and looks at her. “Must have been pretty skimpy on you, but Hannah’s always glad to share her clothes.”

She forces her mouth to smile, knowing he can’t see that her eyes aren’t smiling. They’re hidden behind the sunglasses she wears whenever she leaves the house, even just to cross the yard.

“Actually, Hannah has about a hundred of these little pink outfits,” Frank tells her. “I don’t think anyone would have realized this one was missing.”

Elizabeth nods stiffly, wanting only to go, feeling trapped in this neighborly suburban encounter.

“Then again,” Frank says with a chuckle, “knowing my wife, Hannah’s closet is probably alphabetized and labeled. She loves playing dress-up with Hannah, poor kid, like she’s one of those Barbie dolls. But my daughter doesn’t seem to mind, you know? Still, I’m telling you, the day I find Jason in a pink bonnet, I put my foot down.”

He’s nice, Frank. He must be a good cop. With his easygoing manner and sense of humor, he’s the kind of person you’d want around if you were in trouble.

Not that Elizabeth has any intention of confiding her troubles to him. That’s not even an option.

She takes a step backward, bumps into the black wrought iron railing at the edge of the small cement stoop.

“Want to come in?” Frank asks, still holding the door open with one hand, clutching the sunsuit in the other. “I can offer you that diet iced tea that Pam drinks, or a cold beer. I was just about to have one myself. Cutting the lawn always makes me thirsty as hell.”

She can’t think of a single excuse that wouldn’t sound like a feeble lie. So she simply trails off with a shrug, and puts a foot down on the top step.

“I noticed your grass is getting a little overgrown,” Frank says, leaning his shoulder against the door to prop it open, and casting a glance over at her yard next door. “You want me to take care of it for you?”

“Oh, no, that’s okay,” she tells him quickly. “It’s fine. I mean, I’ll get to it as soon as I have a chance. It hasn’t needed mowing that much this month since it’s been so dry. I, uh, had planned to do it today, but …”

But I’m too terrified to leave my house for the amount of time it would take me to mow the grass.

“Are you sure you don’t want a hand? I’d be glad to help you out,” Frank says. “Pam told me she owes you a favor, anyway, for you taking Hannah off her hands yesterday afternoon. That really was nice of you to go out of your way like that.”

“It was no problem, really,” Elizabeth assures him, and moves down another step.

Frank shrugs. “Well, we owe you one, then. Just let us know what you need. And if you get too lonely later, feel free to drop by. We’re always around on weekend nights when I’m not working, ‘specially now that the baby’s here too. It isn’t easy to find a sitter for two kids.”

Suddenly, it occurs to her that maybe he expects her to volunteer to stay with the kids so that he and Pamela can have a night out.

Then she realizes he doesn’t seem the type to drop a broad hint like that. His wife would do it, but—

Correction. Pamela would come right out and ask if she needed a favor like that.

Well, Elizabeth isn’t about to offer her baby-sitting services to Frank, whether he’s hinting or not. She has enough to worry about.

Still, as she looks into his friendly face, she feels a pang of regret. He’s been so nice, offering to help her with her lawn and inviting her inside for a beer....

You’re just feeling guilty because you can’t be neighborly in return, she tells herself.

She had learned, once she had made it big back in Hollywood, never to trust anyone outside of a very select circle of friends. Everybody else, it turned out, wanted something from her—wanted her money or her connections or her body, or simply a share of the limelight.

“You all right, Elizabeth?” Frank Minelli asks, seeming to lean forward a little, his brown eyes concerned.

“I’m fine,” she says hastily, and nearly stumbles moving down the last step to the sidewalk. “I have to get going. Tell Pamela I said hello....”

She turns and just stops her foot from landing smack in the border of red and white impatiens along the sidewalk. She takes a giant step over the flower bed and crosses the lawn, tripping over a garden hose along the way.

She feels Frank Minelli’s eyes on her and knows he must be thinking she’s a clumsy, jittery fool.

But when she turns back, the screen door is closed and he’s not watching her after all.

You’re totally paranoid. Everyone in the world isn’t caught up in watching every move you make.

Not like the old days, when she couldn’t step out her door to get the morning paper without paparazzi jumping from the bushes, when she couldn’t go to the ladies’ room in a restaurant without being trailed by a barrage of fans and press and curiosity seekers.

Nobody except the shadowy stranger she had thought she’d escaped for good five years ago …

Five years ago today, she realizes with a start as she jabs the key into the lock and opens the back door to her house.

She hadn’t realized it was the anniversary until now, when the date had suddenly popped into her head.

There goes the last glimmer of hope, hope that the card she had received yesterday had been some kind of fluke, that it hadn’t been meant for her or that it hadn’t been from the person who had made her life a living hell five years ago.

Whoever had sent that card knows exactly what day it is, and he knows that Mallory Eden isn’t dead.

The child sits cross-legged on the scarred rust-colored linoleum floor in front of a small color television set. His neck is craned uncomfortably as he looks up at the screen, because the set isn’t at eye level. It sits high atop the rickety white-painted table his grandfather picked out of someone’s trash last year.

So is the way Grammy’s always going around in that same green cotton dress and shoes so worn, the soles slap against her heels like beach flipflops—and the fact that she often hunts for greens in the vacant lot behind the house.

She flours them, salts them, and fries them in oil, and they taste pretty good, but they’re still weeds. They don’t serve weeds in the school cafeteria or at the free day camp run by the town. None of his friends eat weeds at home.

And Elizabeth, he’s positive, doesn’t eat weeds, though he never asked her about it.

The screen door in the kitchen bangs, and he hears footsteps in the hall, then voices speaking in Portuguese.

He moves closer to the television set, stretching his arm to turn up the volume. It’s just some stupid cartoon, but he focuses on the screen intently, as though mere are no distractions.

No stupid golden oldies music blasting from his grandfather’s small radio in the next room.

No simmering teapot building to a whistle, forgotten, on the gas range down the hall in the kitchen.

No voices bickering, then hollering from the bedroom in a language he understands but has never chosen to speak.

Her father hollers that he has no money to give her, especially not for what she’ll spend it on. Crack.

Then, open windows clearly forgotten, they rant at their daughter; she rants back at them.

“What about your son?” her mother shouts. “We can barely afford to feed him now that your father’s out of work on disability. Do you want to take food out of your son’s mouth? Do you want him to starve? Do you care?”

“He won’t starve,” comes the reckless reply. “He’s got that lady. She must give him money.”

The child squeezes his eyes closed and bends his head, shaking it. Elizabeth. But how does she know?

“That lady who takes him out for ice cream all the time. I have friends. They see her with him. She’s trying to take my place. She’s trying to take over as his mother.”

“she’s hallucinating again,” his grandmother says, as if that’s the only possible explanation. “Calm down, Rafael. You don’t want to get worked up. Your heart—”

“I’m not hallucinating,” says their daughter. “You two don’t even know what he’s up to half the time, do you? What the hell kind of guardians are you?”

“Don’t you curse at us!” Manny’s grandfather bellows. “What kind of mother are you? What kind of daughter? What kind of person leaves her own flesh and blood without looking back? Except when you need money for—”

Footsteps again, retreating quickly down the hall toward the back of the house. The door creaks open, slams closed.

His grandmother makes her way down the hall into the kitchen and the teapot makes a deflating, moaning sound as it slowly ceases to whistle.

His grandfather mutters something to himself, then curses and throws something against the wall in the next room.

And the child opens his eyes just in time to see a large brown roach the size of a small mouse scurrying across the linoleum inches from his bare leg.

Had she actually thought she could escape the fear, escape the memories, even for a short time?

Elizabeth draws a deep breath and forces herself to look back at the headline that has caught her eye in this evening’s edition of the Harbor Times.

It’s a major story, located on the second page, opposite a piece about the ongoing reservoir water shortage in the East Bay, compounded by the hot, dry August they’ve had.

Even the dinky local paper has marked the anniversary with a full-length feature story off the wire, accompanied by several photographs.

One is a flattering shot of Mallory Eden taken, according to the caption beneath, in the March before her suicide.

In it, she is standing on the red carpet at the Shrine Auditorium just before the Oscar ceremony. Her golden hair is upswept in a mass of curls to reveal dazzling jewels at her throat and ears. Her blue eyes are bright with anticipation, and her lithe figure is clad in a slinky black Dolce & Gabbana midriff-baring gown.

She is on the arm of one of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors, one of the five nominees for best supporting actor that particular year. Though the tabloids practically had them married off the following morning, the date was in truth a publicity stunt, arranged by their mutual manager.

Two years later, the actor would finally win the golden statuette that had eluded him the night Mallory had been his date; in the year following that he would be forced out of the closet by a militant gay tabloid, only to fade to near obscurity soon afterward.

You and me both, Elizabeth tells him ruefully, laying a fingertip on his newsprint image.

The next photo is a grainy candid that had been published in the tabloids early that terrible summer, showing her drawn and pale, leaving the hospital in a wheelchair. She remembers how she had tried to hide her bony frame beneath a baggy sweatshirt and jeans, but now she realizes that the sagging clothes only emphasized that her once-celebrated curves had given way to skeletal proportions. One of her hands is thrown up in front of her face, as though to shield herself … from the photographer? Or from the bullets she had suddenly found herself expecting at every turn?

The final picture shows the desolate Rock River Falls Bridge—a rickety structure looming high above the raging white water that had, presumably, swallowed Mallory Eden’s battered body.

Elizabeth looks away again, clears her throat. The sound seems deafening in the quiet room.

She wraps a strand of long, dark hair around her index finger and glances at the loudly ticking mantel clock above the yellow brick fireplace—how she loathes yellow brick. In her Malibu mansion there were three huge, rustic stone fireplaces.

Almost time to turn on the television and watch a rerun of Family of Foes, the sitcom starring Kenny Abner, one of her old Hollywood pals. Every time she sees his familiar freckled face beaming at her from her television screen, she finds herself battling the impulse to pick up the phone and call him.

She continues to twist her hair and look around at the room that suddenly, somehow, seems foreign to her—to Mallory Eden. None of this belongs to her—the blue-and-green-striped couch, the boxy coffee table with its scarred wood veneer, the peach-colored silk flowers in a basket on the television console. The room could desperately use a paint job, and the area rug beneath the coffee table, a cheap polyester Oriental, is worn. Shabby—it’s all so shabby.

Stolen, rather, from the real Elizabeth Baxter, who won’t be needing it anymore.

Finally, she reaches up, beneath the shade on the floor lamp beside her chair, and clicks the switch so that the bulb is a touch brighter.

It was actually bright enough before, but she needs another moment of reprieve before reading the article about her life—and death.

Then she realizes that she has no choice. She has to read it; has to know what the press is saying now, five years later. Has to know what kind of stuff he’s been reading; whether there are any clues in the article that could tip someone off—not just that Mallory Eden didn’t die, but where she is, and who she has become.

And so she takes a deep breath and begins to relive the nightmare one more time.

In countless films earlier this decade, Mallory Eden portrayed the perky, pretty girl-next-door who captured the leading man’s heart—and the hearts of her audience. But five years ago today, August twenty-second, the twenty-four-year-old actress took her own life when she jumped from the Rock River Falls Bridge in a rural, mountainous region of northwestern Montana. Her body has never been found.

What led a woman who had everything to such a tragic end?

There is no question among those who knew her.

“It was the stalker, pure and simple,” maintains Flynn Soderland, the late star’s flamboyant agent, who has since retired.

“The stalker” refers to the anonymous fan who became obsessed with Mallory Eden at least six months before her suicide. Star stalking is certainly nothing new, but the death nearly a decade ago of My Sister Sam actress Rebecca Schaeffer, murdered at the hands of an obsessed fan, thrust the syndrome into the public eye.

According to Roger Boyd of Boyd Security, a Los Angeles firm with many of tinseltown’s top names on its client roster, “Highly visible show business professionals are certainly accustomed to overzealous fans, and everyone, even the most universally popular stars, receives threatening mail occasionally. But once in a while you have a situation where the fan is a true psychopath, where the threats start to cross the line, and where the victim is in real danger.”

That is precisely what happened to Mallory Eden.

At first she was reportedly not even aware of the menacing letters that had been addressed to her and received at her publicity office over a period of several weeks during the spring before her death. When the messages became increasingly ominous and threatened violence, however, the actress was alerted. She hired a security consultant and was rarely seen thereafter in public without a bodyguard at her side. Yet despite the unsettling problems in her personal life, Eden continued to display the sunny, breezy California-girl demeanor that made her famous.

It is rumored that the letters gradually gave way to threatening telephone calls, and that Mallory Eden arrived at her rented Malibu mansion one evening to find that her beloved pet dog had had its throat slashed. According to Soderland, there was a note accompanying the corpse, written in the animal’s blood that read, “You’re next.” Los Angeles police have consistently refused to comment on that report.

The cunning stalker somehow managed to continue to elude both the star’s security advisers and the police. Finally, in July, after several months of harassment, the gun-toting intruder broke into the house and attacked Mallory Eden herself. The actress was shot as she slept in her bedroom, hit by a single bullet in her stomach.

The plucky actress survived the wound and the subsequent surgery, which left her unable to bear children. Despite that traumatizing condition, she released a statement thanking the medical professionals, Los Angeles police, and friends who had stood by her, and requesting that her fans allow her a private recovery.

Just days after Eden’s release from the hospital, as her personal assistant, Gretchen Dodd, sorted mail and gifts sent by well-wishers, a floral arrangement exploded. Dodd was disfigured in the blast. She has since dropped from public view and could not be reached by this reporter for comment.

Meanwhile, the injury to Eden’s assistant seemed to drive the actress over the edge. Reclusive in the weeks that followed the explosion, she ultimately eluded the press and her bodyguards, apparently fleeing alone in mid-Auqust to a secluded wilderness area of northern Montana. Little is known of how she spent the days before her black Lexus was found abandoned at the Rock River Falls Bridge, a suicide note on the dashboard.

The text of the note has never been released, but the motive behind her death is no mystery to loved ones left behind.

“Mallory loved life. She was always upbeat, always laughing and joking around,” says Rae Hamilton, Eden’s closest friend and former roommate who was until recently seen as a semiregular on the daytime soap opera Morning, Noon, and Night. “She had hoped to marry one day and have children. That possibility was cruelly stolen from her.”

Another Eden confidante, former stand-up comic Kenny Abner, who now stars in the popular NBC sitcom Family of Foes, declined to be interviewed for this article. He did release a statement through his publicist, calling his late friend “a superior human being. She is still missed every day, not just by those who knew her, but by the fans who worshipped her.”

Rae Hamilton concurs. “She was a rare commodity in Hollywood. I don’t know a soul who didn’t think she was a great person, and that doesn’t happen very often in this town.”

The golden-haired, azure-eyed Hamilton, chairwoman of the Mallory Eden Foundation—which according to the actress’s will provides scholarship money to single mothers—bears an almost eerie resemblance to her late friend. In fact, the two met at an audition when both were struggling actresses, up for the same role—a sexy, slightly ditzy blue-eyed blond con woman in director Cal Lansing’s comedy smash, “Wrong Side of the Tracks.”

In an interview, Eden once cited the audition as “the turning point in my life. Not just because it helped to launch my career, but because it was how I met Rae. My first thought when I saw her was that it was like looking into a mirror—only a trick mirror, the opposite of one of those funhouse kinds. In this mirror, everything looks slightly better than in real life. I mean, Rae is gorgeous. My second thought, when I learned I was to audition directly after her, was ‘uh-oh.’ I never thought I’d measure up.”

Eden, of course, won the role, a small part that nonetheless captured the attention of critics and audiences alike.

Meanwhile, Hamilton and Eden went on to share more than a striking resemblance. For two years they shared a house in LA. ‘s San Fernando Valley. And they shared a genuine friendship, rare by Hollywood standards.

Meanwhile, Hamilton admits that they look so much alike that fans have always mistaken her for Eden, and it continued even after her suicide.

“People would stop on the street and do a double take,” she said recently. “It’s like they thought I was a ghost, or that Mallory was still alive after all. But that doesn’t happen so much anymore. I guess after so many years, people start to forget.”

Not everyone. The Mallory Eden Fan Club has an active Web site and continues to publish a semiannual newsletter filled with facts, photos, and tributes to their fallen idol.

“Just because she’s gone doesn’t mean she’s not still on our minds and in our hearts,” says Elise Sweet, a San Diego housewife and president of the fan club. “She was truly special—so different from other successful actresses. She never minded signing autographs or stopping to chat and kid around with fans.”

Sweet refuses to acknowledge that it might have been that very accessibility that triggered Eden’s stalker’s obsession. She comments, “Mallory was a kind and loving person, and there’s no way that what happened to her was her fault.”

Hamilton sheds additional light on the true character of the late actress. “When this nutcase began stalking Mallory, threatening her, and finally physically attacking not just her, but someone close to her, she fell apart. She simply couldn’t go on that way. She felt that it was only a matter of time before the stalker again hurt somebody she cared about, and this time fatally. And then there was the knowledge that she could never bear a child because of what that bullet wound had done to her. Mallory adored children.”

Growing up in the tiny town of Custer Creek in rural Nebraska, the future actress—born Cindy O’Neal—had often displayed that caring nature, not to mention her trademark sense of humor. She was loved by everyone she met, though according to those who knew her, she displayed a wild, restless streak not surprising for an overprotected small-town girl with lofty aspirations.

After being abandoned as a toddler by her unwed teenage mother, she was raised by her maternal grandmother. Vera O’Neal kept a strict rein on young Cindy, who began entering—and winning—local beauty pageants as an adolescent.

According to hometown legend, on the night she graduated from Custer Creek High School, Cindy O’Neal ran away from home with her then boyfriend, Brawley Johnson, seven years her senior. Hours later, her grief-stricken grandmother died of a heart attack.

“She always blamed herself [for her grandmother’s death],” says Johnson, 36, now a Los Angeles limousine driver, and still single. “If that hadn’t happened, she probably would have gone back home after we had our taste of freedom. I know I would have. I always figured we’d go back to Custer Creek, get married, and have a bunch of kids. But when Vera died, Cindy had nothing to go back to. So she turned to acting. She was determined not to let anything get in the way of her dream.”

According to Johnson, he and Eden stayed together for several years, and he supported her financially while she, like countless other midwestern runaways, struggled to make it in Hollywood. Unlike the vast majority of nubile young hopefuls, Mallory Eden made it.

And like other suddenly successful stars, she didn’t waste time in severing her relationship with the hometown lover who knew her when.

By some accounts, the split between Eden and Johnson was a bitter one. But the man who is, by all accounts, the only serious lover the famed actress ever had, refuses to comment on the end of their relationship.

He will say only, “She was a great lady, and I will always be grateful for the time we had together. She taught me a lot, and no one knows how much I miss her to this day.”

After performing bit parts in high-profile, big-budget movies, the actress, just after her twentieth birthday, landed a lead in Oscar-winning director Langdon McKay’s romantic comedy Stars in Her Eyes, opposite veteran actor Tom Hawes. She became an overnight sensation and leading lady, appearing in a number of well-received films in the years that followed. Among them are the blockbusters Mommy’s Boyfriend, and Monday in the Park, the latter her final film, which was released shortly after her death.

“She had an incredible amount of potential, and she had only begun to tap into her thespian skills. Had she lived,” says Soderland, her agent, from his retirement home in Pacific Palisades, “I have no doubt that Mallory would have become one of the greatest dramatic actresses of our time. I continue to mourn her loss.”

As do legions of fans—some of whom, it is said, believe that the actress’s untimely death wasn’t a suicide.

Some of those who have speculated that Mallory Eden didn’t take her own life theorize that she was abducted to Montana by her stalker, then forced to write the suicide note before being thrown or pushed from the bridge into the deadly rocky gorge.

Still others believe that the actress never jumped or was forced, off that bridge at all. Their assumption is that she faked her death to escape her stalker, and is presumably alive and well somewhere in the world, perhaps still living in fear of the crazed fan who shattered her fairytale life.

Subscribers to this speculation point as evidence to the fact that Mallory Eden’s body has never been found.

However, Allen Macy, the sheriff of Dry Fork, Montana, a remote town not far from the fateful bridge, contends that the failure to recover a body from the raging Rock River is hardly unusual.

“This is one of the fastest-moving, most treacherous bodies of water in the country,” Macy said. “First, you have the waterfall just downstream from the bridge. There is a deep vault underwater in the rock beneath the falls that has been known to temporarily—and maybe permanently—trap debris and bodies that go over.”

Beyond that point, according to Macy, the river travels primarily through rugged wilderness, where very few humans have ventured. Therefore, it would be not only conceivable, but highly likely, for a body to travel downstream and become snagged in the rough terrain along the way.

As an example, the sheriff cited the case of three Canadian fly-fishermen who drowned a decade ago in the river, not far from the bridge in question, after being swept over the falls. Two of the bodies were recovered thirteen miles downstream several weeks later, and the third has never been found

It is understandable that some of her fans prefer to believe that the effervescent Mallory Eden escaped such a grisly fate.

Meanwhile, the stalker who tormented the actress and ultimately destroyed her remains at large. There have been no leads and no suspects in the case, which remains open to this day.

Elizabeth crumples the newspaper and tosses it to the hardwood floor beside her chair. She rises abruptly, crossing restlessly to the window to part the dark green brocade draperies. She lifts one of the slats in the Venetian blinds to peer out into the night.

The light from the room behind her obscures the view until she presses her face right up to the glass. Only then does she see that the quiet, curving dead-end street is seemingly deserted.

She clasps a trembling hand against her mouth and turns toward the telephone, which sits on an end table across the room.

One is Manny Souza, the eight-year-old boy she befriended in the local park a year ago. He alone possesses her unlisted telephone number; on the rare occasions when her phone rings, it’s been him.

There’s only one other person who might be calling—who might somehow have gotten hold of her number.

She lets the phone ring, clamping her hands over her ears to shut out the persistent noise, until it finally ceases a full minute later, leaving her alone in the room with the crumpled newspaper and the ticking clock.

“We’ll be ready for you in about five minutes, Mr. Johnson,” calls a bespectacled production assistant, sticking her close-cropped dark head into the small glassed-in cubicle.

She’s what he privately refers to as fashionably ugly. He knows it’s a stylish look; still, he wonders why women want to do that to themselves—wear boy-shorn hair and horn-rimmed glasses and boxy, baggy clothes that reveal not a hint of flesh or a womanly curve.

Not kind of woman, as if there is an entire class of available, perfect specimens all ripe for the choosing.

He absently thrums his fingertips on the Formica tabletop, then realizes he probably appears nervous to anyone watching from the other side of the glass.

The last thing he needs is for anyone to think he’s uncomfortable about the prospect of appearing on camera. He has to show them that he’s utterly relaxed, a real pro at this television stuff.

He straightens his posture and tries to appear at ease, wishing he had a magazine to leaf through casually.

He resists the urge to jiggle his leg impatiently, licks his lips, and finds that they taste strangely waxy, thanks to the lipstick the makeup woman insisted on applying.

“You don’t want to look washed out on camera,” she had said, peering into his face as she applied the lipstick. She was decent-looking and he had almost opened his mouth to flirt with her the way he flirts with anyone attractive, before he realized that she smelled faintly of garlic. There was a telltale white paper bag from an Italian restaurant on the counter behind her.

It was all he could do not to wrinkle his nose in distaste as she breathed into his face while she worked on him. He was so eager for it to be over that he hadn’t even protested the makeup she’d applied.

Now, here he is, about to go on national television, wearing rosy pink lipstick. He won’t look washed out—he’ll just look like a freakin’ fag.

He fumbles in his pocket for something to wipe it on, but comes up with nothing.

With this tan, he’s going to look washed out. He’s spent every day this week roasting at the beach, just so he’ll look his best today.

Not that, at the beginning of the past week, he’d even had any interviews set up. But with August twenty-second looming on the horizon, he figured the press would come sniffing him out. They do it every year.

Back when it first happened, five years ago, he was on every talk show and newsmagazine program that existed, not to mention the actual network news.

But ever since, he’s done only some local television news spots whenever they commemorate Mallory Eden’s death with scholarship presentation.

Mostly, it’s print reporters who ask him for comment. A couple of times he’s been interviewed by legitimate newspapers, and the tabloids always want to talk to him.

But today it’s Scoop Hollywood, a live half-hour entertainment news program with millions of regular viewers.

That was a subconscious slip. He rarely thinks of her as Cindy anymore. She had, of course, officially stopped being Cindy when she started calling herself Mallory Eden, but it took him a while after that to stop thinking of her as Cindy O’Neal. Because at home, with him, away from the glare of the cameras, she still acted like her.

Still asked for his opinion, still laughed at his jokes, still gave him blowjobs whenever he asked. Maybe not as eagerly as she once had, but at least she made an effort. At least she was there for him.

But gradually she had changed so much, he barely recognized her. Her emotional distance from him had grown in direct proportion with her success. The more she got caught up in all that Hollywood crap, the less attention she gave to him.

And if she was worried that he would reveal her big secret, she didn’t let on.

Finally, one day, just after they had returned from a week-long vacation he had paid for—even though he was making far less money than she was by that time—she fucking moved out of their one-bedroom Long Beach apartment. She relocated to a rented house in the Valley with her friend Rae, a real phony whom Brawley had never liked.

And from there Mallory went straight to Malibu, to the Mediterranean-style beachfront mansion with the fancy gates and the picture-perfect landscaping and the professional decorating inside.

How many times, in the years that followed, had he threatened to reveal her deep, dark secret to the press?

“Go ahead,” she would say, looking at him with those fake blue eyes, making him wonder whether she was as undaunted as she appeared.

But he had never been able to bring himself to do it. He was saving that secret as a last resort. He couldn’t use it to win her back—only to destroy her. He hadn’t had the chance.

It’s the production assistant again, smiling and gesturing. She has a speck of something dark caught between her front teeth.

He nods and gets up, following her into the adjacent dimly lit studio, where he will once again tell the world, in a halting, grieving voice, how much he still misses his dead lover, Mallory Eden.

They embrace, the golden-haired starlet and the flamboyant retired agent, beside the table at Mitsuhisa, the trendy nouveau Japanese restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

Flynn Soderland casts a shrewd eye over her well-sculpted features and thinks that she has aged; well, who hasn’t? His own hair is fully white-gray now, he reminds himself, and his hairline seems to be shrinking back from his face at an alarming rate.

But Rae Hamilton is still a working actress—for the most part. Until recently she had played the role of dim-but-adorable Rainbow Weber on the soap opera Morning, Noon, and Night. But poor Rainbow had been hacked to death by a machete-wielding serial killer during May Sweeps.

“How have you been, really?” Flynn asks Rae after they’ve ordered—sashimi and salad for her; a shrimp dish in wasabi butter sauce for him. He leans forward and lays a gentle hand over hers, finding it icy.

“Do you mean since my character was killed off?” she asks, her blue eyes narrowing at him as she sips her club soda.

“I mean since your best friend was killed off. Five years ago today, to be exact. Isn’t that why we’re here?”

They get together for lunch every year on this date—at first to console themselves over her lost friend; his lost client. Now that the grief has waned and they have little in common, they continue the tradition out of habit. He suspects Rae is as reluctant as he is to let go entirely.

“Oh. I didn’t realize you were referring to Mallory.” She shakes her head and echoes, “God. ‘Killed off.’ You always were blunt, Flynn.”

“I was talking about Rainbow Weber, who, in case you aren’t a soap fan, met her maker a few months ago.”

And anyway, it wasn’t that she was so awful. It was the writing, the melodrama … just not the kind of scene that’s conducive to an actress’s reputation.

He can tell, by the world-weary expression in her blue eyes, that she’s perfectly aware of that truth.

He continues. “But I was more concerned that you might be upset over Mallory, even after so many years. I’m just … worried about you.”

“You look sad,” he says. “Or tired. In your eyes. They’re not sparkling.”

“Well, hell. I was up before dawn this morning to tape a live interview with one of those New York morning shows.”

“Good for you,” he tells her, thinking maybe, contrary to local gossip, she isn’t out of work after all. Has she landed a role without his hearing about it?

Maybe he’s more out of the loop than he realizes. He still lives right there in the Hollywood Hills; he continues to subscribe to the trades and to dine with his friends in the industry. But it’s not the same as being in the business.

“Are you kidding? You just said it yourself. Today’s the fifth anniversary.”

“Ah, yes.” He nods, surprised at his own momentary lapse. Of course she had been interviewed about Mallory.

Even after all these years the media wants to rehash her life, her death, as though some new detail is going to pop up and stun the world.

“I’m surprised they don’t come after you,” Rae remarks. “After all, you were her agent.”

“But you were her best friend.” He pauses, then admits, “And anyway, they do come after me. I’ve talked to several print journalists recently about Mallory, but I’ve decided not to do television interviews any longer.”

He nods, though of course that isn’t the case at all. He’s perfectly capable of controlling his emotions, particularly on camera. It’s just …

Who wants to have their balding head and wrinkled, liver-spotted face broadcast to millions of people?

“Touché.” She smiles and shakes her head so that her long blond hair flips back, behind her shoulders.

She tells him, “I’m glad you’ve noticed. It’s taken me a long time to shake that pesky dumb-blonde image.”

He doesn’t tell her that sometimes it’s better not to try too hard. Not everyone likes a smart cookie—not here anyway.

Mallory knew that instinctively, without his having to tell her. She knew just how to play it, the role of the sweetly sexy, slightly zany girl-next-door. She never worried, the way Rae always has, about being seen as a bimbo.

Not that anyone—within the industry or beyond it—perceived Mallory Eden as a bimbo. Far from it Her superb comic timing was pure genius, and she had always been quick-witted with the press, tossing off quips with the aplomb of a shrewd professional. She was able to laugh at anything—including herself—a rare trait in Hollywood.

Rae, on the other hand, for all her beauty and intellect, isn’t nearly as sure of herself.

She hasn’t had anywhere near Mallory’s success. There have been a few minor movie roles in recent years, and a lead in a quickly-canceled television sitcom last season before Morning, Noon, and Night came along.

Flynn wonders, as he has many times over the years, whether he could have made a difference in Rae Hamilton’s career had he signed her on as a client. She had approached him almost a decade ago, and he had met with her on Mallory’s recommendation.

Years in the business had taught him to recognize instantly whether an actress had potential. He had seen that star quality in Mallory the moment she had walked into his office.

He had turned her down for representation, softening the blow by telling her his client list was simply too crowded at the time.

But they remained casual acquaintances, both before and after Mallory’s death.

And she is still with Buddy Charles, the agent to whom he had referred her. Charles is a decent agent who has made a name for himself over the past few years managing the careers of middle-of-the-road performers.

“she’s going to be my breakout star,” Charles had crowed to Flynn years back when he’d called to thank him for sending her his way.

“I hope so,” Flynn had said sincerely, though he was fairly certain that Rae Hamilton wasn’t destined for cinematic greatness.

But her pale beauty is considerably less accessible than Mallory’s fresh-faced loveliness had been; it’s almost too deliberate, as though she has spent the last hour and a half applying makeup and styling her hair.

And her Ivy League background is a little too apparent; get her talking about a classic novel and she’ll go off on a tangent about themes and metaphors and leave everyone in the dust.

Meanwhile, her quick wit is a little too direct; some comments too barbed for comfort.

Chapter

2