My Life in Black and White (26 page)

She nodded, but I couldn’t read her expression. “Wherever she is, I’m sure she’s happy her story has been finished,” she said at last. “Maybe she can finally rest in peace.”

We sat quietly, both of us having our own private thoughts about Alice. “Can I show you something?” I said. “That is, if you’re not too tired.”

“Of course,” she said.

I opened the closet where I had returned the suitcase, its contents still locked up, and pulled it out.

“You know about the suitcase, don’t you?” I asked, no longer feeling the need to hide what had happened.

“What about it?” she said coyly.

I sighed. Maybe I’d been wrong, maybe it was just me. “You’re tired, you should go to bed. Sorry I mentioned it.”

I had picked up the suitcase when her hand closed down on mine. Marjorie met my gaze, her expression soft and revealing.

“When I was much younger than you are now, when you were a child, after your father left me for that tramp, I was very angry. Just like you were when Dean left you for Amber. And I’m positive Alice was equally angry when my father left her. I wanted to get even. It
started with the green dress, you know, the first one you tried on.”

I nodded, transfixed.

“At first I followed your father around for days, begging him to come home. I even got into a real knock ’em down fight with the tramp.”

“You did?”

She nodded. “You aren’t the only tomboy in the family.”

“Now you are shocking me,” I said with a smirk. She smirked back.

“Your father loved that, I might add. But at some point I stopped caring. The clothes changed my grief into anger, and then the anger made me tough. Somehow I became tough enough to raise you on my own.”

“But you gave up your career,” I pointed out. “Because of me.”

She watched me carefully, and I shifted from foot to foot, worried I’d upset her.

“It wasn’t because of you,” she said slowly. “Is that what you thought all this time?”

“You’ve said as much,” I said and felt the old hurts and childhood emotions getting the better of me.

“I was wrong to have done that,” she said quietly. “I didn’t have a career to give up. I was a lousy actress. There, I’ve said it. It took me thirty-odd years to admit, but there you go.”

“I’m sure you weren’t that bad,” I said, trying to catch up with the revelation.

“I stank. I suppose it was easier to tell people I gave up acting to be a good mother rather than admit that I was terrible, and that I got nothing but rejections. I was pretty. That’s why I got the extra work, a nice platinum blonde to linger in the background.”

“Let’s stop talking,” I said, seeing how emotional she had become. “You’re tired. You’ve been sick.”

“No. It’s good to talk. I think what happened to me and to you, well, I like to think it’s Alice helping us, watching over us.”

I pondered this a moment. It was a nice thought, Alice watching over us. I gestured to the locked suitcase. “I can’t open it. It’s broken or something. Look.”

I grabbed the key from the dressing table and shoved it in the tiny lock.

“I turn it and nothing …” Only this time the lock opened. “It didn’t work. I’m telling you the truth.”

“I believe you,” Marjorie said and together we opened the lid. Her eyes lit up at the sight of the clothes. “These gave me the confidence I needed at the time.” She gave me a knowing smile and began to hang them up in the closet where they’d been before I left for England. Once again, the clothes were only clothes, no magic, no enchantment, just lots of silk and satin.

“Now Alice is home again.”

I helped with the unpacking. The clothes brought back so many memories, a blend of two centuries and two different women with an identical problem.

“I want you to get an agent again and sell
A Woman Scorned
,” she said suddenly. “You’re a great writer. And you and Alice should share the credit. It would be a wonderful way to honour her memory.”

“I have news about that,” I said. “I was waiting for the contract, but since you brought it up. That British film producer I met, Frederick Marshall? He’s optioned it and wants to make the film.”

“That’s wonderful!” She hugged me tight, then smiled proudly. There was one dress left to hang up. It was the bottle-green bouclé, the dress that started the whole thing. I knew it was the right time to tell her.

“Mom, there’s more,” I said.

“What is it?”

“Let me get the article,” I said and went to retrieve it. I returned with the printout that Niall had given me, and I let her read it. She grew upset, and I was concerned that the news would bring on another heart attack.

“I know you always said she died of a broken heart …”

“I always believed that she killed herself,” she said softly, admitting it at last.

“You need to know the truth,” I said and sat beside her and told her everything that Betty had told me. “Alice swerved to miss another car that was speeding, and she drove off the edge. She never wanted to die.”

Marjorie was crying now. “This means more to me than you can know.”

I rubbed her shoulder. “I can only imagine. It must have been hard to think your mother killed herself when she had you to take care of.”

“I thought she abandoned me. That she didn’t love me enough. This means the world to me.”

We held on to each other tightly. I couldn’t think of the last time Marjorie and I were so close. She gently pulled away.

“And Betty, she was going to kill herself?”

“Yes. Betty was planning to jump off the Hollywood sign, but when she saw the car roll down the hillside and knew that Alice was dead, she decided she wanted to live.”

“Alice saved her life, then?”

“You could say that. But the point is that Alice was happy. She should have lived a long life but fate got in the way,” I said.

Marjorie held on to my hand. “Doesn’t it always?”

We sat there remembering Alicia Steele as best we could from one movie and a screenplay.

“What should we do with this?” I asked her and gestured to the suitcase.

“Save it for your own daughter,” she said.

I felt the blood drain from my face. “I don’t think I can get pregnant,” I said.

“Nonsense,” she said with a shake of her head. “You and Dean just weren’t meant to be. It’s good you didn’t have a child with him. Then you’d be stuck with him your whole life.”

“Maybe I’ve broken the family curse by finishing the screenplay like I did,” I said, still reeling from the pang of emptiness I got every time I allowed myself to want a baby. “Look at you and Dad.”

She smiled and touched her engagement ring. “Exactly. The curse is broken,” she said. Her words astounded me; after years of battling her conviction that we were jinxed, she was letting go. “Believe me, one day your daughter will carry the suitcase and wear these clothes to be pretty, not to be a tough dame who can take a slap as easy as a kiss,” she grinned.

S
he went to bed and I took Niall for a walk up to High Tower Elevator. It was a cool evening, but the lights from the houses and their gardens gave the pathway a warm and sensual glow.

“I’m glad you finally brought me here,” he said. “Though after reading
A Woman Scorned I’m
a tad frightened that you mean to shove me down the elevator shaft like the fictional Clara planned to do.”

“Don’t worry. I wouldn’t dream of killing you, unless we’re married.”

“How reassuring!” he said and grabbed hold of me.

“But only if you leave me for a blonde,” I said and poked his chest hard with my index finger. “Or a brunette or another redhead, for that matter.”

“I promise you won’t need to worry about that with me,” he said. “Though despite what happened, your father made his way back in the end. You better not take Dean back when you’re old and have had a heart attack.”

“Never!” I answered with a laugh. “Though I must say I’m happy for my parents.”

“You should be,” he said.

I walked towards the staircase. “I want you to come somewhere with me,” I said.

“Anywhere you say,” he answered.

I smiled at him. “We’re going for a drive.”

We hopped into my father’s two-seater coupe and headed for the hills. Not just any hills either; I drove expertly along Mulholland Drive where it gets wild and unyielding east of the 101. When I’d driven as far as I could, I stopped the car. We were just short of security camera range.

“That was quite the drive,” he said, looking a little green. “Lots of twists and turns.”

“This is where the Hollywood sign sits,” I told him and got out of the car. “We can’t get closer than this, but you get the drift. You’ve read the script.”

He stepped towards the edge of the road and peered over cautiously. It was so black outside you couldn’t see the bottom of the canyon. He shivered. I took the script out of the car and turned to the last page.

“You’re not tossing it over the side are you?” he asked, alarmed.

“Don’t be silly,” I said. What I was going to do could be considered as silly, though not to me. “I’m going to read the last scene out loud. My grandmother died on this road. She never got to finish the screenplay, and I want her to hear how I ended it.”

His head moved up and down ever so slowly. “Would you like me to sit in the car?”

“Please stay and listen. I want to share it with you.”

“I’d be honoured.”

I stepped off the road onto the dirt. The ground felt loose and unstable beneath my feet; then again, the side of a mountain wasn’t optimum footing for high heels. I turned on the flashlight and started to read. The breeze picked up my words and carried them across the cool air and down the canyon.

Dear Rod
,

By the time you get this, I will be long gone. I took your advice and left this God-forsaken place. This hell they call the Golden State. I know you’ll worry. I heard about a woman leaping to her death from the Hollywood sign, and knew you’d think the worst. It could have been me, once. But you saved me. You showed me that I didn’t need my husband or his money, or revenge. I didn’t kill him, and I didn’t harm her, because you asked me not to. Now I’m free. And I want you with me. Take a plane to Mexico. The exact address is on the other side of this note. We can start over. I love you. Your redhead, Clara
.

Rod folds the note and goes to his closet. He takes down a suitcase. He starts to pack.

THE END

I looked at Niall. “She doesn’t die. I gave her a happy ending,” I said triumphantly.

“Everyone deserves a happy ending. Even the femme fatale,” he agreed.

C
lara had finished pitching her story and drinking her second sidecar. She loved happy hour at the Formosa. The producer looked like he enjoyed the pitch.

“That’s a remarkable story,” he said and sucked an olive off its toothpick.

“I like to think so,” Clara answered. She wanted desperately to check her watch but knew it would look bad.

“Frederick said I should meet you and he was right,” the man told her with a formal-looking nod, like a butler who was taking an order from his master. It made her think of that night at the castle and the gold gown that Frederick’s butler had laid out on the bed. She shivered. “I enjoyed your script for
A Woman Scorned
. Wish I’d had a chance to bid on it but I was out of town.”

Clara smiled. She had sold her first screenplay only eighteen months ago, but it seemed like a lifetime. “I wrote that with my grandmother.”

“With her? I thought she was dead,” he said, then abruptly apologized. “Sorry, that was insensitive. I meant, I thought you finished it after. At least that’s the story I heard.”

“That is correct,” Clara said. “This one I just pitched you is all mine.”

He nodded and drank more of his martini. Clara had lost count but she thought it was his fourth.

“I like it. The whole magical suitcase full of clothes that sends the lead back in time so she can solve her grandmother’s mysterious death is brilliant. When can I read it?”

“I’m nearly finished the first draft. My agent will have it in another week or two,” Clara said, not sure if she should admit why it was so late.

“I want the exclusive on it. Will you give it to me? No one else in town reads it before me?”

Clara grinned. “I don’t see why not.”

Clara got home just in time. She opened the door to her and Niall’s house to be greeted by the sound of her infant daughter wailing like the house was on fire. Niall was trying in vain to feed her from the bottle. Marjorie was shaking her head at him.

“Sorry I’m late,” Clara rushed in and kissed Niall and the baby on the forehead. “I’ll take her.”

“We have to get changed,” Niall said in a panic. “We have to be at the theatre in half an hour.”

“Don’t worry, it’s on Hollywood Boulevard. We could walk there if we had to,” Clara explained and cooed at her baby.

“Not in your shoes,” Niall said playfully and dashed off to the bedroom to change.

“Let me take her,” Marjorie offered, and Clara gently placed the baby into her arms.

“I’d better get ready,” she said and disappeared down the hall.

The couple emerged not long after; Clara in a deep purple satin gown, Niall in a bespoke tux, no tie, and a pair of purple velvet loafers.

“You two look positively radiant!” Marjorie exclaimed.

Clara tiptoed over to the bassinette, where her daughter was now fast asleep.

“Have a lovely evening, Alicia,” she whispered to the infant.

“Have a good time,” Marjorie said. “Your father will be here with takeout any moment.”

Clara and Niall left the house and got into the waiting limo, and it took them down through the narrow twisty streets to Franklin, then down Sycamore to the security check on Hollywood Boulevard. They walked from there and onto the red carpet.

“How’s this for two former entertainment journalists being on the other side of the paparazzi?” Clara whispered to him.

Before he could answer, they heard a wolf whistle and saw Sylvia, also on their side of the red carpet, waltzing towards them in a long black gown.

“Have you seen the cast yet?” she asked.

“Some of us are right behind you,” joked Trinity.

The four walked down the carpet until Trinity had to go off and pose for photos alongside Saffron, who looked just like the movie star she was about to become. Frederick Marshall was off to the side in the background, overseeing the premiere. He saw Clara and smiled briefly before going back to the behind-the-scenes chatter.

“I hope the film is good,” Sylvia whispered.

“I liked it at the screening,” Niall said.

“Ooh, so says the newly minted film critic,” she teased. “Big shot now, are you?”

“Stop taunting him,” Clara joked. She headed along the crowd barrier towards the theatre. Clara was a few steps from the theatre door when she caught sight of a familiar face. It was a pretty face. She knew it instantly. Amber was watching her enter the theatre. It was supposed to be her premiere, not Saffron’s, and no doubt she would blame Clara for it. And Clara knew that on some level she did have
something to do with how it all unfolded. Then again, she wasn’t really herself at the time. And there was just the right amount of the hell cat left inside Clara to make her not regret a moment of it. Past or present, no matter whose past it was.

Fade Out