Ellen Hartman - His Secret Past

If the album had come together, Five Star might be almost finished in the studio and the movie would be well on its way to complete. As it was, the music was so bad, Anna was sure the footage they had was as useless as the session tapes.

Although the band and their managers had agreed to let her include some archival footage and do new interviews—she’d explained it as framing for the story—she’d gotten nothing about the crash or Terri. Chet, Nick, even the normally silent Harris, had all given her the same noncommittal answers. Hard show, late night, everyone bunked down, no idea how the driver lost control. No one knew Terri or why she’d been on the bus. The only interesting thing she’d heard was when every one of them asked some form of the same question. Did you talk to David?

David. He told several stories about heroic crew members pulling Mason Star out of the bus after the crash, several more about his own injuries, which as far as she could tell consisted mainly of a fat lip and interrupted sleep. Then he said if she wanted to know about the crash she should talk to Mason. So everyone pointed to David and then he turned right around to point at Mason. In Anna’s experience, when fingers got pointed it was because there was something to point at. Somewhere in the intersection of David and Mason there was something to know. Her instincts told her that something was Terri’s story.

“You know what David told me? Mason’s mom was a dancer—in nightclubs. She changed her name legally to Sierra Star. Isn’t that wild? Imagine being a boy, growing up with a stripper name?”

Suddenly the door opened behind them and David Giles walked in. He hadn’t knocked, of course. David played bass and had taken over as lead singer when Mason left. He was larger than life with an outsize ego and the mistaken belief that he was irresistible.

It looked as if David had drawn a line in the sand, daring age forty to touch him. His shoulder-length blond hair was highlighted, teased and sprayed to cover the fact that he had passed “thinning” and was well on the way to “bald up top.” His fake tan was more Sunkist than sun kissed and, while his skinny jeans were probably the same size he’d worn in his twenties, considerably more of David Giles’s middle spilled over the waistband than seemed comfortable.

“Anna!” He came up behind her and rubbed her shoulders, more irritation than massage. “How’s my beautiful director today?”

Jake answered, “I’m great. Thanks for asking.”

“Oh. Ha. Ha. You wish you were as good-looking as your sister here. Look at this hair—it’s just begging to be touched.”

Anna’s curly brown hair had been exasperating her for the past thirty years. The way David obsessed over it and felt free to touch it was making her crazy. He was pushing her closer than she’d ever been to breaking Blue Maverick rule number 18, Don’t Punch the Client. She shifted and rolled the chair to the left, temporarily out of punching distance.

“Going over the film?” David’s high, excited voice grated even when he wasn’t singing. “Does it look as good as it sounds?”

Jake crossed his arms and said, “Yep.”

Anna lifted her shoulder and turned her head, hiding her mouth in her sleeve so David wouldn’t see her smile. “We’re jazzed about the stuff we have down,” David went on. “It’s gelling. Organic, you know?”

Anna kept her eyes on David—if she looked at Jake she’d laugh. The music was organic in the same way half-cured compost was organic. “We’re glad you’re feeling good.”

David shifted, touching his hair with his fingertips, a habit she’d noticed shortly after meeting him. It was as if he was reassuring himself the hair was still there, while making sure not to move it even slightly. It was a tic so delicate and unconscious and heartbreakingly desperate she might have found it sympathetic in a person she liked even the littlest bit. In David it made her clamp her jaws shut so she wouldn’t tell him to get over himself.

“You want to run through some of the stuff you shot of that last session? We were really working that one.”

Jake bent deliberately to tie his shoe.

“We don’t show raw tape to anyone, David. We’ve discussed this before.”

“But this is me. Let’s see a bit, sweetheart, huh?”

She was saved from having to answer when the closet/office door banged open and Nick Kane, the Five Star drummer, pushed his way in followed shortly by a furious Chet Giles, the guitarist.

“You’re not seriously thinking about changing the name of the band, David. Even you can’t be that stupid,” Nick yelled.

Anna instinctively reached for her camera and swung it to her shoulder, adjusting the wide-angle lens so she could see all three bandmates. Jake stepped back out of David’s light. He quietly adjusted the shade on the desk lamp to erase the shadows on Nick’s face.

Chet stepped up to Nick. “That was a private conversation. You weren’t supposed to hear it,” he said.

David held up his hand. “Okay, Nick. I didn’t mean for you to find out this way, but yeah. I brought up a name change to management and they agree. There’s four of us, not five. Mason’s not around but we’re still using his name. Five? Star? None of it fits anymore.”

“The G-Men?” Nick sputtered.

David looked irritated. “It was just an idea.”

“What about this idea? We’re Five Star. Besides, Mason’s coming back. You got in touch with him. You said he’s got new songs. Right?”

Only years of practice at keeping still and silent during shoots kept Anna from reacting. Mason Star was coming out of hibernation? She wanted to look at Jake, be sure he was hearing the same things she was, but she didn’t dare look away.

“We need a plan B,” David said. “He might not say yes.”

Nick looked startled. “Mason was crushed when we kicked him out. He had no idea what happened. Of course he’ll say yes. You said he was working on stuff already.”

“I told you not to worry about this, Nick. You need to back off and let David do what needs to be done,” Chet said. He reached out and poked Nick’s chest. “Got it?”

Nick was the oldest member of the band; he’d turned forty-seven earlier that year. Right now with his dark eyes narrowed and his heavy jaw set, he looked dangerous. And pissed. “You did not just poke me,” Nick growled.

“I certainly just did,” Chet growled back.

Anna focused in on Nick’s face as it tightened and colored. He stared in furious disbelief from Chet to David. Anna mentally scoped out the desk behind her, ready to do what she could to protect the equipment if the brawl brewing in front of her bubbled over in the small space.

“You know what? Go to hell. I should have walked out the day you cut Mason loose. That was wrong then and this is wrong now. If he comes back tell him to call me.” Nick spun on his heel and left the room.

Chet turned on her. “Turn off the camera.” Then he walked out.

David put his hand up as if he was going to run it through his hair, but he stopped himself, fluttering his fingers off the crown instead. “Drama, huh?” he said. “He’ll be back. Nick’ll be back, you’ll see.” He moved toward the door. “We’re not definitely changing the name. G-Men was just an idea. When Nick comes back we’ll straighten this out.”

Anna and Jake nodded.

BUT DAVID WAS WRONG. A week later he came into the office where Anna was at the desk wolfing down a container of leftover risotto she’d brought from home. David said he was shutting down the studio and the movie. Nick was holed up on the farm he owned outside Princeton and he showed no signs of returning to the studio. The album was on hold until the rest of the band figured out what they wanted to do, either find a new drummer or wait for Nick to come back.

Anna’s mouth dried up and she put her fork down. She struggled to keep her voice even as she spoke. “David, we have a schedule. You committed to the movie. How can we—”

“Music doesn’t have a schedule, Anna,” David interrupted her. “You gotta let it flow. Organic, you know?”

Anna thought fast. She couldn’t let him go. She hadn’t gotten what she needed yet. “If you’re taking time out of the studio that’s perfect for the movie. We can do more interviews. Get the historical and background pieces down.”

“Listen, sweetheart, as much as we love spending time together, we’re closing down. If you want to meet up, there’s a club on Sixty-fourth—”

“No,” she snapped, the thought so repulsive she couldn’t even keep her client manners in place.

Obviously irritated by her quick refusal, he said, “We’re out of here at the end of the day. Take anything you need.”

She reached desperately for something to keep him talking. “Have you heard from Mason? Is he coming back?”

“He has our offer. That’s all I can say.”

“What did Nick mean when he said it was wrong to let him go—”

“I told you, we’re shutting the movie down,” David said, cutting her off. “No point in answering questions right now.” Abruptly he turned and left.

It took her seven seconds to go from stunned to furious.

She dumped everything out of the desk into her work duffel. Let them shut down the studio. This wasn’t their movie anyway. Never had been. So what if she hadn’t had the guts to pursue it on her own at first? She did now.

She was through wasting time. Finished waiting for someone to hand her Terri’s story. Blue Maverick was better than that. Anna was better than that.

She was already working on her to-do list as she locked the door behind her. Number-one priority? Track down Mason Star and make him talk.

CHAPTER THREE

LESS THAN A WEEK after Mason was blindsided by David Giles’s e-mail, he got knocked on his ass again by his friends and neighbors from the Lakeland Neighborhood Association.

There was a reason Mason would never be a politician. Actually, there was more than one reason, and the fact that he definitely had inhaled wasn’t even in the top twenty. The primary problem was he just couldn’t understand why so-called normal people had this need to ban anything and anyone the slightest bit different than themselves. It was yet another rule he hadn’t learned growing up the way he did, where the only thing that mattered was if you had the rent or most of it come the first of the month. Maybe if he’d grown up middle class he’d get these people better. Because the fact was, Mason just didn’t get them.

Take this zoning hearing.

Take Roxanne Curtis.

Take her to the top of the Empire State Building and drop kick her off.

Roxanne had been rubbing him the wrong way ever since Christian was the only kid left off her daughter’s birthday-party guest list in second grade. The reason his kid wasn’t on her kid’s list? At the Mulligans Opening Day ceremony right before school started, Roxanne confessed her teenage crush on Mason’s teenage self and suggested they re-create the sex-on-the-hood-of-the-Firebird scene from Five Star’s Dirty Sweet video. Mason turned her down flat—wrong time, wrong place, wrong memory. And definitely wrong person.

A month later, Christian had come home from school crying, crushed by social disgrace. Using a seven-year-old kid as a pawn in revenge for a sexual rebuff was every kind of wrong.

Now Roxanne was after his other baby. Maybe it was the hearing so close on the heels of David Giles’s e-mail, but he was having serious déjà vu. When he’d bought his property, refurbished the buildings and built the community center, it had been next to impossible to give away real estate in Lakeland. But the real estate boom had pushed even the upper middle class out into formerly scorned suburbs. Home prices in Lakeland, a twenty-minute train ride to New York, had skyrocketed and suddenly Mulligans was an unsavory, unwelcome neighbor in a town on the way up.