A Knife to Remember by Jill Churchill Read Free Book Online

ground.
     
    7
    Jane listened carefully as they all chatted while luncheon trays were being delivered to them. She thought sure she'd recognize the voices of the blackmailer and the victim, but she could not. They were all speaking in their normal voices and the ominous discussion she'd heard earlier had been in abrasive whispers.
    Going over it in her mind, Jane decided the victim must have been an actor or actress. Obviously somebody who made their living in front of a camera, not behind it. Lynette Harwell? Possibly. Or maybe George Abington. But if George or Lynette were holding any grudges against anyone at this table, they weren't evident at luncheon. The chat was general, professional: discussion of the weather as it related to filming, talk of the schedule. Very mundane stuff.
    Jane studied George, suddenly recognizing him as the hero in a movie the children had loved when they were little. George was in his fifties, trying desperately to look thirty-five. He held himself rigidly upright, even seated, making Jane suspect he was wearing some kind of corset-type underpinnings. His hair was longish and unrealistically black andwhen a breeze lifted a lock of it off his ear, Jane could see the faint whitish line of a face-lift. His eyes, likewise, were too blue to be natural and the lashes looked tinted.
    But for all the fraudulence of his appearance, he was still handsome. His manner, perhaps natural, or perhaps taken on for the duration of the filming, was Old-World, flowery and courteous, at least to Jane. He was the only one at the table who acknowledged her existence. "What a nuisance it must be for you, having your neighborhood invaded this way," he said.
    “On the contrary. It's fascinating," Jane said. "I had no idea how hard — and early — all of you have to work. I couldn't even be myself, much less another character, so early in the morning."
    “Ah, but you're seeing only a part of it," George answered, looking critically at a tray of food that a gofer had put in front of him. He turned over a lettuce leaf as if expecting something slimy to be on the other side of it. "Between jobs we lie about eating bonbons — or having wild affairs, if you were to believe the media."
    “That may be how you spend your time, George," Lynette drawled. "I for one live a very spartan, healthy life. Rising early, exercising—"
    “As well I know," George said with an excessively capped smile. "I remember all the exercise you used to get lifting glasses of wine to your lips. So good for the muscles of the arm, I always thought.”
    Lynette glared at him for a second, then laughed with hollow merriment. "Darling, you know I don't drink. You must have been reading the sleazier tabloids. I don't know why that doesn't surprise me."
    “At least I
can
read, my dear," he said, and winked at Jane, drawing her into the joke on his side. Jane tried to look pleasantly noncommittal.
    Roberto Cavagnari joined them at this point with a tray piled high with food. "Jake, the campfires, they are not right. These people, they would be burning bits of buildings, not twigs and branches and natural rubbish.”
    Jake set down his fork and said, "I don't agree. Remember, they have fled the fire into the country. There would be no buildings and they certainly wouldn't have carried pieces of buildings with them as they fled.”
    Cavagnari apparently recognized the sense of this, but didn't want to back down, so he pretended he hadn't heard Jake and launched into a story of a film he had directed in Europe where a special effect fire had gone wrong and endangered the surroundings. The story was not only boring and pointless, but delivered with such drama and so extreme an accent that Jane couldn't follow it at all. Instead, she just studied the others, wondering which of them she had overheard earlier.
    Lynette was picking daintily at her food, but managing to subtly put quite a bit of it away without looking piggy. She was gazing at (or through)