Forever and Always Read online

  By the time the writer had been told this part, his mouth was hanging open in shock. Laughing, the man told how Adam had been attracted to the young virgin the psychic had helped him find, but he knew he couldn’t touch her or she wouldn’t be able to read the mirror.

  In his book, the writer told the story of how Adam Montgomery had staved off the many sexual advances of the young woman as he heroically tried to find his sister. The book described Darci’s obsession with money. There were silly scenes like the time that Darci, malnourished all her life, made a racket with a candy machine as Adam was trying to search the underground tunnels where the witch was said to be hiding.

  By the end of the book, the reader felt that Adam Montgomery was a saint who had single-handedly, in spite of all Darci Monroe could do to thwart him, rescued his sister and saved several children who had been missing for months. The kicker was that on the last page, the reader learned that Adam had married Darci.

  Of course the Montgomerys sued and the book was taken off the stands. But that just made people more anxious to read it and almost immediately it was available in its entirety, for free, on the Internet. The Montgomerys’ attorneys made sure that what money the writer received from the book went to pay lawyers’ fees, but that didn’t matter. He wrote three other books in quick succession and they sold millions based on his name.

  I read the book about a year after it came out. Alanna’s copy was old and dog-eared, passed from one hand to another. Like everyone else who’d read it, I had a hard time understanding it. Why in the world had a man like Montgomery married a dingbat like Darci Monroe? In the midst of their adventures did he take her virginity and, like some hero of old, feel he had to marry her? They’d had a daughter soon after they were married. Was the pregnancy why he married her?

  Not long after the book came out, Adam and his sister, Boadicea, got on a small airplane, with Adam piloting, and were never heard from again. They had left a flight plan but it was soon discovered that Adam had not followed his charted course. His plane had been seen by the control tower at an airport two hundred miles in the opposite direction, but when the spotter tried to contact them, there was no answer.

  About three days after the disappearance, a tabloid printed a full front sheet photo of Darci laughing, a drink in her hand. The headlines said that Adam’s widow would inherit nearly a billion dollars. The implication was that party-girl Darci had had a hand in her husband’s disappearance.

  Once again the Montgomerys sued, but the tabloid had been smart. They hadn’t accused Darci of anything. That the photo had been taken before Adam disappeared was not their fault, they said; it was the only one they had. In the end, the paper agreed to publish a retraction, not in the back but on the front page.

  The next issue of the paper wrote, “We apologize. She inherits only two hundred million, and this photo was taken before he flew away forever.” The photo had been reprinted, uncropped, this time showing that Darci had been dancing with a man who was not her husband.

  Sometime during all of this, Darci was dubbed the Hillbilly Honey, and it was the general consensus of the world that she’d killed her husband for the money.

  None of this had touched my life. During the day I was fighting with my producers to change my role, and during the night I was fighting with Alanna. I wanted a couple of kids; she wanted to do four films a year.

  Two weeks ago Jerlene Monroe was a guest on Missing. Of course I’d seen her work. She’d seduced Russell Crowe in one of those extravagant epics he got to star in because he was white and had that voice. Sorry. My role envy is showing. He got those parts because he deserved them. Great actor.

  Anyway, Jerlene Monroe was to do a guest shot with us and we were all foaming at the mouth to get to meet her. Every critic alive had agreed (now there’s a cover story!) that Jerlene had stolen the movie she’d been in with Crowe. When Crowe had to kill her in order to save the world from her treachery, the audience cried right along with him.

  None of us could figure out why she agreed to do a TV show, so as we gathered around her, it was one of the questions we asked. “I promised someone,” she murmured in that silken voice of hers.

  It was hard to believe, but she was more beautiful in person than on screen. One thing you soon find out in this business is that an actress without makeup is pretty ordinary-looking. She’ll show up for work with frizzy hair jammed under a baseball cap, skin like a teenager’s after a grease-eating spree, and wearing ratty old jeans and a T-shirt. You look at her and think, She made how much on her last film?

  But not Jerlene. She arrived looking like little girls thought movie stars should look. She never lorded it over anyone, never demanded anything, but we all ran to do whatever she even hinted that she wanted. She smiled dazzlingly at the cameraman, said nothing, just smiled. The SOB made her look better than he’d ever made any of us look.

  On the show, Jerlene played the wife of a rich man who’d been murdered, and at the end, we found out she did it. The script, like all the others, had us handcuffing her and leading her away. You know, we were smart and she was dumb.

  On the second day of shooting, Jerlene said, “What a shame to incarcerate her. Her husband so very much deserved to die.” She didn’t complain, just voiced that one opinion and the next second the director was head-to-head with the writer.

  The script was completely rewritten; Jerlene’s role got bigger. The new story was that she got together with three of her husband’s discarded mistresses and together they killed him. They alibied each other. We cops knew Jerlene had done it, but as we uncovered disgusting facts about the man, we were ready to kill him ourselves.

  Toward the end of shooting, Jerlene said, “Perhaps it would help the story if I were to enjoy one of the men.”

  We were all dumbstruck. What did that mean? “Enjoy”? Have sex? With one of us? The entire male cast (and two women) stood up straighter, eyes wide. Silently, we were shouting Me! Me! Me!

  “Perhaps him,” Jerlene said and pointed to Ralph Boone. Short, old, beer-bellied, chain-smoking Ralph? He’d had one triple bypass and when Jerlene pointed at him he started coughing so hard we thought he’d be back in the hospital by evening.

  Politely, the director said,“How about Linc?”

  She didn’t look at me, just turned away and said, “Perhaps.”

  She was acting, but then I soon learned that Jerlene Monroe was always acting. In her mind, she was always on camera.

  We didn’t have an affair for real. Not because I wasn’t willing to but because she said no. Sexily, prettily, she said no. I was fighting a lot with Alanna then and she punished me by withholding sex. The result of having two women tell me no was that Jerlene and I played some pretty hot sex scenes. So hot, so realistic, that that show and Jerlene’s performance were considered Emmy material. I’m ashamed to say that I told people I thought I should be nominated, too. Ralph, my costar, said, “Everyone could see you weren’t acting. Not for a minute.”

  One thing good about my skin color is that it’s hard to see when I blush.

  Anyway, because of our on-screen affair I ended up spending some time with Jerlene. Okay, so I admit it. I told her we needed to rehearse in her dressing room—which was bigger than mine and had been freshly painted just for her.

  It was during the first day I was alone with Jerlene that the Best Boy knocked on the door and handed me a letter. He said it was from my agent, which surprised me. When had Barney learned to write?

  I opened it. “Your kid’s missing,” it read.

  For a moment I just sat there looking at the note and couldn’t think what it meant. My kid? I don’t have a kid. Slowly, I remembered. Oh yeah. Connor. Or was his name Conan? She’d named him something to do with Schwarzenegger. That woman loved movies—which had caused the whole thing in the first place.

  When Jerlene took the letter out of my hand, I didn’t protest. She read it and for the first time I saw a genuine expression cross her beautiful face. “You
r child,” she whispered, horror in her voice. She loves her daughter! I thought in surprise.

  Of course I, like the rest of America, knew that Jerlene Monroe was the mother of the Hillbilly Honey, but the knowledge only fed the mystery of the woman. How could someone as elegant as Jerlene have given birth to such a greedy little golddigger as Darci Montgomery? And risk her life to save her?!

  At the end of the book all of America had read, Adam Montgomery had worked with some of his Montgomery cousins, Jerlene, and a man from her hometown to rescue Darci and the children. They’d arrived just in time, killed the bad guys, and taken an unconscious Darci to the hospital.

  In other words, Darci’s qualification of virginity to read some mirror that didn’t exist hadn’t been needed. Adam Montgomery’s sleuthing and bravery had found and saved his sister, then he’d had to risk his life again to save dingbat Darci.

  The book had shown Jerlene to be a true-life heroine, risking her own life to save a daughter who had done nothing but cause a lot of people a lot of trouble.

  “Tell me everything,” Jerlene said in that voice that came from deep within her throat.

  Who could resist an entreaty like that? Certainly not me, so I told her my big secret about a job I’d once had when I was desperate for money and the result of it. Yes, I had a son but I’d never met him or his mother. All I knew of the kid was his age, seven, his name, Connor, I think, and I had a photo of him with his mother. My son had sandy hair and hazel eyes. His coloring was more like his mother’s—blond, blue-eyed—but slap a little pancake on the kid and he’d look just like me at that age.

  After I told Jerlene about how I came to have a kid, I used my cell to call my agent Barney. Since I’d just signed a new contract, he didn’t have much time for me. When I was up for renewal, I was his best friend.

  Anyway, Barney told me that my son and his mother were missing, and the private investigator he’d hired to keep track of them had told him a couple of weeks ago. He’d been waiting for a ransom note to appear, but since one hadn’t, he hadn’t thought to pass the info on to me before now.

  “So why write me a letter? Why not just call and tell me?” I asked.

  “Letter? I don’t even send my mother letters. Why would I send you a letter? Look, kid, I told you, so I gotta go.”

  I hung up, stared at Jerlene for a moment, then looked at the letter again. There was nothing on it to indicate it was from my agent and now that I looked at the paper, I saw that it was top quality, not something Barney would shell out for.

  Jerlene didn’t have to ask me to tell her anything, I just did. When I’d finished, she said, “Stay here,” then went outside. She returned minutes later and said that a short, fat man smoking a cigar had given the letter to the Best Boy and said it was from my agent. Jerlene said no one else on the set had seen the man.

  I didn’t know what to think about the odd letter, much less what to do about it—if anything. Jerlene advised me to wait a few days to see if anything else happened. I think she meant that I was to wait to see if a ransom note arrived.

  Of course I’d pay it. I had to. The kid was my own flesh and blood.

  I waited, but I was jittery and jumped at everything. I lucked out because in the season’s final episode of Missing, Travis was being stalked by some woman who had the hots for him. When someone dropped a stack of papers I jumped half a foot. When the woman sneaked up behind me and held a gun to my throat, I sweated for real. When I asked her not to kill me—which wasn’t in the script—I wasn’t acting. I was thinking about my kid out there somewhere, being held by some madman all because he had a famous father. Me. I was causing some cute little kid to be tortured.

  I was aware that everyone on the set was looking at me weirdly, but my head was too full of my own thoughts to try to understand what was going on. Jerlene’s episode had finished so she’d gone back to her house in Malibu to look at the many scripts she’d been offered. She’d told me to call her if I heard anything.

  Two seconds after the last show wrapped I called her. I had heard nothing. She told me to come to her house and I went. I missed the season’s big wrap party but I was too nervous to care.

  Jerlene plied me with booze and a lot of food, none of which she touched. She told me that she’d been thinking and wondered if maybe my child had been taken randomly rather than because he was my son.

  That made me feel worse. A kid who wasn’t taken for ransom would have been taken for…for other reasons. I drained my bourbon and poured myself another.

  “I want to know everything you know about the child and the mother,” Jerlene said.

  I was a little worse for wear by then, what with the tension of the last week and four double bourbons. “Her name is Lisa Henderson and the boy’s name is Conan or Connor—he would be seven now. She’s a movie buff. Loves them. She—”

  “How does she support herself?” Jerlene asked impatiently.

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember. My agent had a PI check her out and they sent me reports. She never seems to have a job for long. She’s worked in department stores, as a receptionist, as a bus driver, as a—” I smiled in memory. “She broke her arm one time so she got a job on the telephone. You ready for this? As a psychic. You know, over the Internet. She was called Crystal Spirit or something like that and she told people what they wanted to hear.”

  When I saw Jerlene’s face turn white, I remembered what I’d read about her part in the witch-thing in Connecticut. Her daughter had been kidnapped by a so-called witch. Not one of the modern-day “good” witches, but like the scary ones in fairy tales. No one knew the full story of what happened that night, but when it was over, four people were dead. Had Jerlene had to kill someone to save her daughter?

  “Look,” I said, “the woman wasn’t psychic any more than I am. She just needed a job that she could do while her arm healed.”

  That’s when she told me I had to go to her daughter and that her daughter would help me find my son.

  After that I was dismissed. As regally as though she were a queen and I her subject, I was dismissed. She pushed a button by the phone on a side table and instantly a tough-looking man appeared. “Virgil,” she said, “would you please drive Mr. Aimes home?”

  I was in no condition to protest, so I let the man pull me up and lead me out to my car. He drove. The next morning I awoke in my own bed, fully dressed, with a hangover.

  By afternoon, I was feeling better and I began to think the whole thing was a dream—or at least I told myself it was. There was no way on earth I was going to contact the Hillbilly Honey and ask for help. The woman probably killed her husband and sister-in-law for the money she’d get. No, thank you. I didn’t want to be involved with her.

  I probably would have dropped everything, and even forgotten all about my son if two things hadn’t happened. I’d done a good job of rationalizing everything, telling myself that the boy’s mother had probably taken the kid away from wherever they were to go to another job. I promised myself I’d look into it when I returned from Scotland with Alanna, and if the mystery hadn’t been cleared up by then, I’d—I wasn’t sure what I’d do, but I swore I’d figure it out.

  Meanwhile, I was working with a travel agent—a guy so exclusive he had an unlisted number—to plan six weeks alone in the Scottish Highlands with the woman I loved.

  Alanna had made five films back to back, each one in a different tropical climate. We’d hardly seen each other in the last year. Between my schedule and hers, it was nearly impossible to get together. Every time I talked to her, she’d cry and say she missed me and that she was very tired. And hot. She said she was sick of hot climates and all she wanted to do was rest somewhere cool and private. “I want to go somewhere where no one knows me, where the two of us can be alone together,” she said over and over.

  Fool that I am, I believed her. I secretly rented a castle in the cool, remote, private Highlands. It would be just us, a housekeeper-cook, an old man who kept the fire
s lit, another man who looked after the 200 acres of woodland, and a whole bunch of funny-looking cows.

  I presented the package to Alanna over candlelight and champagne. She looked at me like I was crazy and said she was leaving the next day for Key West to do a movie with Denzel Washington.

  I’m not prone to violence but I nearly lost it that night. Loudly, I told her I’d turned down two movie offers so I could spend those six weeks with her. That both scripts portrayed me as handsome but dumb was something she didn’t need to know. I told her she meant more to me than any movie in the world and she ought to feel the same about me.

  Coolly, Alanna said, “How long do you think I’ll look like this? When you’re sixty you’ll be offered roles as a leading man, with some twenty-year-old falling in love with you. When I’m thirty-five they’ll be asking me to play Denzel’s mother.”

  She had a point.

  But I didn’t like it. I had completely cleared my schedule for six weeks so I could go to Scotland with the woman I loved. So now what was I to do? Call my agent and grovel? He’d yelled at me that I was a fool to turn down big screen work during the series hiatus, but I’d said—I’d rather not think of what I said. Not since the king of England abdicated for a woman had anyone gushed so much.

  That was the first thing that happened. The second thing was that Jerlene sent the man named Virgil to my house with a thick packet. I thanked him—while praying I’d never meet him on a dark street—and took the package. Instinct told me I’d better pour myself a drink before looking inside, so I did.

  Jerlene had hired a private investigator to find out about the woman who’d had my child. I skipped through most of the first pages because I’d seen them before. Lisa Henderson, mother of my son, had had two to three different jobs each year since my son had been born. She’d lived in four states.

  “Tough life,” I muttered. My son had been dragged around all his little life. I’d been right in ignoring that note about my son being missing. Lisa had obviously moved yet again.