Cuff Me(83)

“We’re good, right?” Elena asked, shrugging on her jacket.

Jill smiled. “We’re great. Way too good of friends to let something as silly as your dumb brother come between us.”

Elena smiled. “So you’ll implement the naked plan we talked about?”

Jill rested her cheek against the open door. “I’ve got to figure out what to say first.”

“Don’t overthink it. And definitely consider the naked plan I laid out for you.”

Jill rolled her eyes and hugged her friend good-bye.

She stood still for several moments after shutting the door.

“I’m such an idiot,” she muttered.

Jill headed toward her cell phone, but the paper all over her floor caught her eye.

The mess seemed to have grown since last time she looked, and since Jill knew herself well enough to know that the longer she waited the more burdensome the task would become, she forced herself to clean it up now.

She wasn’t particularly organized by nature, but when it came to work, she had to be, so she carefully sorted the mess of papers by order of date, in case she’d need to quickly find something later.

Not that it would likely make much of a difference for Lenora Birch. This case seemed determined to stay cold—ice cold.

Finally Jill got to the last scanned article. It was over fifty years old, and the original must have been so faded that the scanned image was barely legible.

In fact, it was so hard to read, and so old, that Jill had barely glanced at it the first time. It was a local story from Lenora’s hometown of Lorrence, a tiny town in Ohio barely big enough to be on most maps. Understandably, a local girl getting cast as the lead in a major Hollywood film was a big deal.

A Love Song for Cora went on to garner an Academy Award nomination and was the movie that launched Lenora’s career.

Jill placed the article on top of the pile and sat back on her heels. She couldn’t help the wistful smile as she glanced down at the article. She wondered if its columnist—a Bill Shapiro—had had any idea that his little article would be the first of hundreds on a Hollywood legend.

Her eyes skimmed the hard-to-read print. Bill Shapiro’s writing was amateurish, at best, and his irritation at being unable to get a statement from the producer, the director, or Lenora herself was thinly veiled.

Ultimately the only “insider” willing to speak with Bill had been an assistant casting director, Miles Kennedy, and Bill had obviously done his best to add a bit of drama, despite the lack of big-name references.

According to Mr. Kennedy, Ms. Birch’s casting as Cora Mulroney was a bit of a happy accident—an accident that had yet another tie to the little town. As it would turn out, it was actually the younger Birch sister who originally caught the attention of the director during the auditions. Upon learning that Miss Dorothy Birch was no longer available, the elder Lenora was cast, as she’d been a close second choice for the role of Cora…

Jill frowned.

Dorothy Birch was an actress?

And a good one, apparently, if she’d been the first choice for the now iconic role of Cora.

What in the world would have come up to make a seventeen-year-old girl pass up the opportunity of a lifetime?

And how must it have felt that that very film had made her older sister a household name?

Jill didn’t have siblings, but she couldn’t help but think that must have left a scar.

A very deep, very long-lasting scar.

Her mind whirring into overdrive, Jill quickly rifled through the pages toward the other end of the stack until she found the article she’d been reading just hours earlier.

It was from the Entertainment section of the LA Times—celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of A Love Song for Cora.

The anniversary had been just three days before Lenora’s death—timely coincidence Jill and Vin had disregarded as unimportant before. The film, while famous, was old, most of its principal actors and behind-the-scenes legends long dead.

A Love Song for Cora was free of the controversy and scandal that followed Lenora in her later films. The fact that its anniversary had overlapped so closely with Lenora’s death had seemed a bittersweet send-off for one of Hollywood’s sweethearts.

Jill picked up the other article—the older one, from Ohio—and chewed her lip. Reread the part about the role of Lenora being the director’s second choice.

It was probably nothing.

It certainly didn’t feel like a breakthrough. Whenever Vin had one of his premonitions, or a surge of Spidey sense, it seemed to rip through him with vicious certainty. When Vin knew something, he knew it. One hundred percent.

Jill didn’t know anything.

Didn’t feel anything except a faint tingling.

Was a quote from an ancient news article really worth pursuing? Hell, it wasn’t even an actual quote. For all she knew Bill Shapiro had gotten Miles Kennedy’s answering machine and decided to make something up to add a little flair to his otherwise dull recitation of the facts.

Jill stood and stretched, her eyes flicking back and forth between the two articles.

It was probably nothing. She was pretty sure it was nothing.

But then again, this sort of assessment was usually Vincent’s part of the job. Her role came after.

Jill picked up the phone to call Vincent, although with a very different agenda than she’d had just a few minutes before. This time she needed her partner.