Read The Body in the Cast Online

Authors: Katherine Hall Page

The Body in the Cast (7 page)

Back at the tent, Faith quickly put together a tray for Ms. O'Clair: a large, steaming bowl of black bean soup topped by
a dollop of sour cream and fresh chives (see recipe on page 271); some of the buckwheat walnut rolls with ham that she'd missed; a salad; and a ramekin of crème caramel, along with Evelyn's drink of choice—Perrier mixed with diet Coke. As Faith worked, she thought about the fragment of the conversation she'd overheard. Caresse obviously was “her.” But why did Evelyn want her off the picture, especially at this stage of the game? Wouldn't any objections she'd had have been made when Max was casting in the first place? Maybe she hadn't heard “Never act with children or dogs”—or hadn't believed it. Whatever her opinion had been earlier, she was certainly definite now. Faith added a small bud vase with a single pale pink rose, a damask napkin, and appropriate cutlery. She knew from past experiences that catering to the stars meant exactly that.
The tray dispatched, Faith, Niki, Pix, and the rest of the staff turned their attention to preparing for the stampede that would arrive shortly—not before Pix had voiced her irritation with little Miss Carroll, however.
“You know what I think about spanking,” she said. Faith nodded and quoted, “‘A parent out of control means a child out of control.'” Pix had taken some sort of parent-awareness classes at Adult Ed in between pierced lamp shades and folded star patchwork tree ornaments.
“But,” continued Pix, and it was a momentous
but,
“this child needs someone to turn her over his or her knee—and if I see her push her mother again, it's going to be mine, no matter how much money America's Sweetheart makes.” Having disposed of the problem of Caresse, Pix turned her attention to counting napkins, knives, forks, and spoons.
Besides the soup, there were individual tomato and onion quiches, couscous with grilled vegetables, a salad bar, assorted breads, and a savory whole pastrami keeping warm under the lights, which made it look all the more appetizing—not too fat, not too lean. Mr. and Mrs. Sprat would have had a tough time deciding.
“Stations, everyone,” Faith called, and she tied back the tent
flaps. The heaters made the inside a cozy contrast to what was yet another typically “brisk” New England March day. People were beginning to straggle across the Pingrees' lawn in search of sustenance when a call for help stopped them dead in their tracks.
“Fire!” somebody screamed. “Come on!”
Everyone, including the caterers, rushed off in the direction of the house. The clapboard would go up like the kindling it was. Faith grabbed one of the fire extinguishers she had on hand and shouted over her shoulder for someone to get the other one.
Once outside, they realized everyone was running toward the barn—the site of the fire made obvious by the thick cloud of black smoke billowing from the open door. It was mass confusion with a touch of mass hysteria. Two crew members—stunt—men, Faith discovered later—grabbed her extinguishers and disappeared into the smoke. The breeze spread the harsh odor of the fumes over the watching crowd. In what seemed like several hours but was in reality no more than twenty minutes, the stuntmen and the others who had gone in immediately with extinguishers from the set emerged. They looked none the worse for wear, except for smudged faces, shiny with sweat and tears from the smoke.
“It's all over, folks. Oily rags. No damage, Max,” one of them reassured the director, who was hastening toward them.
“How did it start?” he asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe somebody sneaking a smoke.”
Maxwell Reed had a hard-and-fast rule about smoking on the set—anywhere. He was fanatic on the subject. Not everybody was able to live with it, and the stalls in the honey wagon smelled a lot more like Luckies than Lysol.
“I hope not,” Max said grimly, his eyes raking the group still assembled outside the barn. When he reached where she was standing, Faith felt instinctively guilty—for what, she knew not.
“It's out now, and that's the important thing.” Alan Morris moved quickly to douse these new flames. “Let's eat, everybody.”
It was out. And out before both bright red Aleford fire engines tore into the yard, sirens blaring, carrying a full complement of the Aleford Ancient Order of Hook and Ladder Volunteers. Screeching to a halt behind these came the ambulance. Bringing up the rear, the chief's venerable police car sputtered to its own inimitable stop.
Faith hurried back to the tent to put out additional food.
“More mouths to feed,” she instructed the staff, adding to Niki and Pix, “You know they're all kicking themselves for missing the action, and you can be sure they're not going to pass up the chance to hobnob on the set now that they're here.” She looked into the soup tureens. There was plenty and it was steaming hot. “And, to be fair, they can't leave without checking things out, which just might have to take all afternoon. We can grab Charley later for coffee and doughnuts. I'd like to know myself how the rags caught fire.”
“Is this the Faith Fairchild version of ‘inquiring minds want to know' again?” Niki asked. “I've heard stories about you. I'm sure it was a cigarette. You know they all go into the woods to smoke. It's a wonder we haven't had a forest fire.”
“You're probably right,” Faith agreed. “But why is it always a pile of oily rags? Do
you
keep oily rags around? I don't. What do you do to get them oily, anyway? If you were being terribly crafty and refinishing furniture or working on your car, why not throw the rags away? It's not as though you'd wash them and use them for oily things again. No, it all seems so—well, so convenient.”
“You've obviously put a great deal of thought into the problem of oily rags and I'm sure you'd prefer a straightforward fire of suspicious origin in this case, but if you'd ever looked in the hayloft of that barn, you'd have seen there are piles of all sorts of junk, including oily rags created by God knows who for what purpose.”
Tucking the thoughts of what Niki was doing in the hayloft and why she, Faith, hadn't checked it out herself into a corner of her mind for later consideration, Faith got ready to serve the returning crew. “It looks like our purpose is coming in the door.”
They were followed by the Aleford brigade about thirty minutes later. Which is why Police Chief MacIsaac, Fire Chief O‘Halloran, and their cohorts eagerly slurping down Faith's soup and clamoring for seconds in amiable company with the director, cast, and crew of A were all there to witness Evelyn O'Clair's possibly last dramatic entrance.
Clutching her stomach and moaning, she staggered into the tent. “I've been poisoned!” she cried. Then she vomited violently and collapsed.
But who can see an inch into futurity beyond his nose?
If one has indeed been poisoned, having a large number of trained rescue workers and an ambulance close at hand may be regarded as something more than a happy coincidence. Evelyn O'Clair had been damned lucky indeed.
But not poisoned.
Or rather, not poisoned in the classical, even conventional sense. It wasn't strychnine or arsenic. Not even digitalis—ad—mittedly difficult to cull from the abundant foxglove still slumbering under the earth surrounding the old house.
It was Chocolax, a digestive aid, and it was in the black bean soup—a medium that unfortunately intensified the drug's effects. In addition, a substantial amount of a liquid laxative sold over the counter for use before certain X rays had been added.
“Why didn't anyone say anything!” wailed Faith when Charley MacIsaac stopped by early the next day to bring her the ill tidings in person. He had had a bad night himself after yesterday's lunch and was not in a good mood.
“We all thought it was some sort of new fool concoction of
yours, that's why. And it wasn't bad. Just kind of unusual. Besides, there was so much smoke in the air, nobody could taste much of anything.”
Tom and Ben had departed for their respective morning activities—sermon writing and Play-Doh—and at least one of them wanted to switch. Amy was asleep.
Faith had offered the chief some breakfast, but he had declined with unaccustomed haste. He opted for the sofa instead of the large Windsor chair, his usual choice. His face was a study in contrasts: affection for the woman sitting next to him struggled with animosity. Faith watched in alarm.
“Charley! You know I wouldn't have put a laxative in any soup I'd made, especially Chocolax, which must bear no more resemblance to real chocolate than Styrofoam to meringue. That means somebody else put it in. The question is, who and when?”
“All right, let's start from the beginning.” Affection triumphed and Charley managed a weak smile. He took a small, creased spiral notepad from his, jacket pocket, along with a sharp number-two yellow Dixon pencil. Faith expected him to lick the tip before commencing to write, and he did.
“When did you make the soup?”
“Wednesday afternoon.”
“And it sat in your refrigerator until you brought it to the set yesterday?”
“Yes, but …”
“Hold your horses, Faith. Now who besides you and probably the Reverend has keys to the place?”
“Pix and Niki, but …”
“No spares hidden under the mat or in a flowerpot?” he asked doggedly.
“Charley, I'm trying to tell you something! Nobody could have put anything into the soup at the kitchen. It was fine when we arrived at the set, because I tasted it to check the seasonings when we first heated it.”
“All right, now we're getting somewhere.” The chief gave
her a baleful look, suggesting that she had hitherto been throwing sand in the gas tank of justice. “When, as near as you can remember, did you do the tasting?”
“It was before we heard the fire alarm, and that was about quarter after twelve. We normally serve lunch at twelve-thirty, and I was watching the time pretty closely.”
“So let me get this straight. The soup was fine before the fire broke out.”
“Yes, which could mean the fire was set to get us out of the way while the soup was doctored. Sorry, poor choice of words.”
“All the soup was in one big pot?”
“No, there were two tureens. We serve from two stations so the lines go faster.”
“I'm sure they kept the samples separate, but, in any case, everyone who had the soup got the runs, so they both must have been tampered with.”
Faith had not been ill, nor had the rest of the Have Faith staff, since they normally ate after everyone else. After Evelyn's pronouncement, nothing passed anybody's lips. No, it was only the cast and crew of A, the entire fire department, and both police and fire chiefs who had been felled.
Something was nagging at Faith. Something was wrong, besides what was so obviously wrong—that person or persons unknown had deliberately set out to destroy her reputation and business.
“Charley, wait. Whoever dumped the Chocolax in the soup had to have done it earlier, because it was in the portion on Evelyn's tray and we sent that to her trailer before the fire.”
“But after you tasted it?”
“Yes. Just after. I remember thinking how good it was,” Faith declared staunchly. It
had
been good—she'd used hickory-smoked ham hocks for flavor, plus two kinds of onions and a touch of dry sherry before pureeing it all into a smooth liquid.
Charley looked tired. Up and down all night perhaps? “Then
what we have here is a situation where someone comes into the tent in broad daylight and empties God only knows how many packages of the stuff into two soup pots in front of you, Niki, Pix, and the rest of the bunch.”
“Plus a dozen or so crew members who needed to eat early or were waiting for trays. I admit it is impossible.”
“Yet it must have happened that way.”
“We would have noticed, believe me. Even if someone palmed the stuff and dropped it in the soup while we weren't looking, he or she would have to have stirred it to mix it in and then have repeated the whole thing at the other table.”
Charley looked glum. When more than a minute had passed, Faith tentatively asked the question that had been on her mind since he'd told her what had happened.
“Are you going to have to close me down?”
“I'm supposed to. You know the law as well as I do, probably better.”
“Yes, except this was not a result of the caterer in question's actions. I mean, we're not talking salmonella chicken or spoiled mayonnaise here.”
“Sort of what I said to the Department of Health.”
“And they said?”
“They agreed—after a while. But whether the movie people still want you …”
“It would be perfectly understandable if they didn't. I just don't want to be shut down. You can't imagine how grateful I am to you, Charley.” Faith would have thrown her arms around the chief, but he wasn't the hugging kind.
Charley still had the notebook out. He was thinking out loud. “A fire and food poisoning—all within the same hour. Could be one of those movie people is some sort of lunatic. You ever notice any of them behaving more strangely than the rest?” Charley took it for granted all of them were demented in some respect—otherwise, they wouldn't live in California. Faith had observed this regional chauvinism in Charley, and other Alefordians, on numerous occasions. New York City
was the worst. Make no mistake about that, but L.A. was definitely in the running.
“No, I can't say I've seen anyone wandering around talking to lampposts. The only slightly maniacal outburst was an eight-year-old girl's, and she's merely spoiled.” Faith then gave Charley an account of Caresse's temper tantrum, which was accompanied by noises from Amy's room, indicating she was up and ready for company. The first soft babbles became increasingly puzzled syllables, then finally insistent crying as Faith ignored her—hoping to finish the story before tending to her child.
“Get the baby, Faith, before she blows a gasket. I have to check in at the station and see what's going on there before I head over to the Marriott.”
Amy's cries had become one long antiphony.
“But I still have so many questions. At least tell me if the fire was set or an accident.”
“You have questions! Some things never change.” Charley looked more cheerful than he had all morning. “All right. We don't know if the fire was set or not yet. We don't know why someone wanted to close down the set of
A, B,
or whatever the hell the name of this thing is. And we don't know why Evelyn O'Clair was so much sicker than anybody else. Okay?”
She who must be obeyed would soon rocket right out of the crib. Faith called, “Coming, sweetie. Mommy's coming,” and turned to start up the stairs. “Thanks, Charley. For everything. And let me know what's happening.”
“Sure, Faith.” Police Chief MacIsaac let himself out the front door and got into the cruiser—if you could call it that, he reflected dismally. He'd bring Patrolman Dale Warren along while he questioned everyone at the Marriott. The kid saw a lot of movies. And he hadn't eaten any soup.
Amy stopped crying the moment her mother entered the room, and as Faith changed her diaper and put on a fresh set of clothes, she positively beamed. Faith's mood, however, did not match her easily placated daughter's. The business of who
had put the Chocolax in the soup had to be cleared up, and cleared up quickly. Rumors in the catering business traveled faster than the latest chili pepper craze, and if word got out that there had been a food poisoning episode at Have Faith, she'd be lucky to be catering snacktime at Ben's nursery school. Certain food purveyors who would leap at the chance to stick a knife or even a fork in her back came to mind with frightening speed.
She took the baby into the kitchen and packed some zwieback and other baby goodies into her gargantuan diaper bag. Faith was upset and had to talk to Tom—in person. After bundling Amy into her L. L. Bean Baby Bag, she grabbed her own jacket and headed across the yard and through the ancient cemetery that separated the church from the parsonage.
At least no one had died in the incident, she reflected, looking at the slightly askew slate tombstones with their lugubrious messages from the glorious beyond—such as Daniel Noyes's pithy 1716 epitaph: “As you were, so was I/God did call and I did dy.” The sun had not managed to pierce the gray cloud cover overhead and the ground was frozen. There hadn't been any snow, but the remnants of last summer's green carpet of grass, so very green in the burial ground, crunched underfoot.
Tom was slightly surprised to see Faith, flushed and obviously agitated, at his office door. She rarely ventured into this part of the church, whether from lack of interest or fear of being added to a committee, he was still not quite sure.
“Is everything all right, honey?” he asked anxiously.
“No,” she replied, peeling off Amy's layers and looking around for a place to deposit her. Tom was not the tidiest person in the world. His office consisted of a large rolltop desk, several bookcases crammed with books, two wing chairs, one Hitchcock, and piles and piles of papers and more books on the floor, said chairs, and any available surface. A four-drawer file stood to the right of his desk and held church stationery, extra hymnals, and prayer books. “I know exactly where everything is,” he'd protested to both his wife and the church secretary,
earnestly imploring them not to touch a thing. “I have my own system.”
Faith refrained from her usual comment. Before slumping into one of the wing chairs, she removed a stack of the yellow legal pads he favored when composing his sermons, written in longhand. “These are my computer,” he often said, wiggling his fingers. Too precious for words, his wife had told him on more than one occasion, and an unlikely affectation for a man whose state-of-the-art high fidelity system required a degree from MIT to operate.
“What's happened?” he said, reaching for the baby, who proceeded to treat his lap as a trampoline, delightedly bobbing up and down in his grip.
“The reason everyone got sick yesterday was a superabundance of Chocolax and some other laxative in the black bean soup.”
“Faith, this is terrible! Are they going to suspend your license?” Tom knew the repercussions almost as well as Faith.
“For the moment, no, and the rumors will die down, I hope,” Faith said in a voice that belied her words. “But what's got me is, who would do such a thing and why? Was it directed at the film people or me?”
“My guess would be the cast and crew, and perhaps Evelyn O'Clair in particular. You just provided a happy medium.”

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