Ellen Hartman - His Secret Past

“I want to make you an offer,” she said. She and Jake had done their research looking for his vulnerability. She hoped they’d chosen the right hook.

“No,” he said and then casually knocked another ball in the cup. He quirked his lips, though, in almost a smile, softening the rejection. Progress. She wished she had a camera to film his mouth. It was decadent, sculpted lips with little lines at the corners that weren’t quite dimples but then again, definitely were.

She leaned back, took her eyes off his mouth, thought about Terri. “You don’t even want to hear what I have to say?”

“You left fifteen messages. I heard. A movie. Five Star. My story. No.” He sighed. “Oh, all right. I’ll be polite. Make your offer.” He cocked an eyebrow and waited.

“I assume you’re not familiar with my work.” He shook his head. She felt a twinge of disappointment, which surprised her. Why did she care that he hadn’t even taken a second to Google her? “My brother and I make documentaries, but we have to pay the bills, so we do other things, too. Campaign spots, travel pieces, commercials, music videos.”

Mason leaned on the club, waiting her out. If she’d expected him to react, she was disappointed again.

“Can I try?” she asked, stalling, unable to take the plunge.

He handed her the putter, taking back the poster display. She tested the weight and balance of the club before kicking a ball into place. The last time she’d held a golf club she’d been seventeen, playing in a father-daughter tournament at the country club. After Terri died and her relationship with her parents fractured, they’d barely spoken, let alone played golf.

While she lined up her shot, she went ahead with her pitch. “Our music videos are top notch. We’ve won video-music awards. The one we did for Del Sweeney was on TRL for fourteen weeks straight.” Which wasn’t bragging but salesmanship. He needed to believe she knew what she was doing. “You agree to be in my movie and—” she swung the putter smooth and easy and waited until the ball sank “—I’ll shoot a video for your son’s band free of charge. I guarantee he’ll love it.”

She hadn’t expected laughter. His laugh was throaty and full of gravelly undertones like his voice and she wondered how many years he’d smoked. The lines at the corners of his eyes deepened and crinkled in a way that made her want to laugh with him. Except he wasn’t laughing with her, he was laughing at her.

“Nice swing, but, oh, man. You don’t know me very well if you think that’s the bribe that’ll get me into your movie.”

She was stung. She and Jake had misjudged, which didn’t happen often. “That’s the point of the movie. No one knows you. We should.”

He shook his head, suddenly serious. He leaned one forearm on the railing around the platform and his face was closer to hers than was comfortable, but she forced herself to hold still. “No. You don’t want to know me. The guy you want? Mason Star, lead singer of Five Star? That guy doesn’t exist anymore.”

He rubbed his hand back and forth in his short hair, leaving the front sticking up in messy points, and then looked at her, his head cocked to the right. “Matter of fact, why don’t you put that in your movie. Mason Star died. RIP.”

She held the club tighter, pressing her thumb into the grip. She needed Mason. What would motivate him? “People deserve to know what happened with the crash and afterward. They deserve the truth.”

“What?” He looked more engaged than he’d been.

“There’s more to the story of what happened. A story like that can’t be left untold.”

“I don’t know what you think you know. But here’s your truth. I’m not that guy anymore and digging all that up won’t do anything good for me or anyone else.”

“David Giles told me to ask you about the crash.”

Mason’s face settled, the light left his eyes. “You talked to him? No.” He shook his head. “Forget I asked that. I’m living here now.” He gestured around the pro shop, but she knew he meant Lakeland. “Five Star is history for me.” The corners of his mouth turned down, the not-quite dimples deepening, communicating disgust. About her? The crash? She couldn’t tell.

They’d misread him. He was slipping away. She had to think fast and find the right thing.

“Mason…” she started to say, but he shook his head.

“The last thing I need right now is for people to remember I was in a rock band.”

She noticed the protective hold he had on the Mulligans poster. “Your neighbors aren’t too thrilled, are they?” He’d called it his baby .

“You were at the zoning thing?”

“Stalking you. Sorry.”

“Witness to the execution,” he said wearily.

“I can help.” She put down the club and stepped off the platform. She tapped the poster, focusing his attention.

His eyebrows lifted. “You bribe zoning boards?”

“You and your charming smile were doing okay with the board. It’s the neighbors that killed you. Ms. Tidy Pants and the PTA brigade.”

His shoulders slumped. “Roxanne Curtis and her upwardly mobile assassins. If they’d come over and see Mulligans. Get to know us.”

“Watch the movie I make about it.”

“Watch the…?”

“You agree to speak on camera about the Five Star bus crash, I’ll make you a kick-butt film about Mulligans I guarantee will not only solve your zoning problems, it will have your neighbors eating out of your hand.”

“You guarantee? ”

“Here.” She reached into the inside pocket of her jacket and pulled out two DVDs in plastic sleeves. “Go home and watch these. Then call me and I’ll start making one for Mulligans right away.”

He shifted the poster and took the DVDs but didn’t look at them. “I appreciate the offer, Anna, I do. And I can honestly say I admire your confidence. But I’m not going to talk about Five Star. Not to you. Not to anyone.” He backed up, cradling his poster carefully under his arm. He put the DVDs in his pocket, though, she noticed.

“Can you at least think about it?” she asked as she followed him to the front of the store.

“I think about that crash every day.”

She’d meant the movie, but he’d misinterpreted her. Deliberately or not, she couldn’t tell.

When he turned left outside the shop, she let him go. She hoped that last offer had been the right one. The way he’d looked when she mentioned the zoning board made her think she had a shot at least. She never would have expected him to be as involved as he seemed to be in Mulligans.

She knew quite a bit about getting people to discuss things they wanted to keep to themselves. There was a time to push and a time to back off. Mason needed to stew over her offer before she gave him another nudge. And she needed to deal with the feelings he’d stirred up in her.

CHAPTER FIVE

MASON STARED at the screen. He couldn’t believe he’d ever been the kid who was standing center stage singing the hell out of “Stage Fright.” He’d been twenty when this movie, Five Star Rising , was shot. It was mostly a concert video, intended to support the Five Star Rising album during what ended up being his last tour. Tonight he was fast-forwarding through all the backstage coverage. Couldn’t stand to see the bottles and women and himself wasting his life as fast as he could.

He never watched this movie. Damn Anna for making him seek it out. He’d come home expecting to clear up some paperwork and get to bed, but he’d been too restless. Angry about the zoning board, pissed off at David and his e-mail and really mad about Anna’s offer. What the hell was David thinking talking to anyone about the crash? Telling her to come here?

Without the zoning fiasco, he’d never have given her offer to make him a movie another thought. But the hearing had been bad. He knew Stephanie would do her best, but people, not just Roxanne, a lot of people, were really upset. He used to be able to get people on board with his plans without even trying. But he’d lost something after Five Star. Now he couldn’t even get a suburban zoning board to leave him alone. The last time people turned on him and he couldn’t fix it, he’d lost everything. What if he couldn’t fix this and this time Mulligans was the price?

Anna had said her movie would save Mulligans.

But he’d have to talk about the crash. She’d said people wanted the truth about it. He’d never told the truth. He’d had his reasons then and he still thought he’d made the right decision. What did Anna know or think she knew? He was pretty sure he and David Giles were the only ones who knew what really happened that night. David had his own reasons for keeping quiet. If he agreed to talk to her, how much would he have to say? What would she be able to figure out?

Those questions had led him out to the video store and then here, to this place in his past where he didn’t like to go, thinking about the tour that led to the crash…and everything else that happened.

He had all the lights off and was sunk deep in the leather couch in the small room he and Christian used as a private family room above the common rooms where the residents ate communal meals several nights a week, did their laundry, conducted meetings and held functions.

This room had always felt safe to him. Seeing his old life in the midst of this real one was jarring.

Before he moved into Mulligans, Mason had never lived anywhere permanent. With his mom there’d been a string of trashy apartments and sketchy trailers. With Five Star he’d been a hotel nomad. He hadn’t had much furniture here at first, but after Christian moved in, he’d needed to fill the empty spaces. He’d hired a decorator because he hadn’t had the first clue about how to change a room into a home. He’d wanted Christian to feel normal and fit in, but Mason hadn’t known what “normal” looked like.

The couches and chairs were deep and comfortable, large enough to handle his tall frame and durable enough to resist the energetic boy Christian had been. The natural-cherry bookcases lining two walls were crammed with his books and CDs, Christian’s outgrown picture books and paperbacks, board games and puzzles.

Photos of him and Christian, their friends, Mulligans, everything he held close were framed in black metal and hung up on the third wall. He looked back to the screen when he heard the boy he’d been launch into the second verse.

“Stage Fright” was a cover but it suited his voice and had always set up the audience perfectly for Five Star’s own soaring ballad, “Live.” The screen flashed as the spotlight swung off him and out over the audience. In the brighter light, he caught a shadow and realized his son was standing behind him. He hadn’t heard Christian come in. He turned the volume down and the room fell abruptly quiet.

“You don’t think I’ve seen that before?” Chris stayed behind him.

Of course, Mason should have known Chris had seen the movie. But until that very second, yeah, he did think the kid wouldn’t have seen it. Sometimes parents were the dumbest people on earth, brains dulled by loving their stupid children too much.

“I never showed it to you.”

“It’s on Netflix.”

Was it too late to tighten the parental controls on Chris’s Internet connection?

He tried to think of something to say, but everything he came up with seemed awkward. He was half-afraid he’d blurt out something about ice cream again. Most of what passed for conversation between him and Chris these days was uncomfortable small talk strung together with uncomfortable silence, spiced up with occasional bouts of yelling.