Silver Scream: A Bed-And-Breakfast Mystery by Mary Daheim

Author:Mary Daheim [Daheim, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery & Detective, Women Sleuths, Fiction
ISBN: 9780380815630
Publisher: Avon

TWELVE

JOE HADN’T YET detached the garden hoses or covered the faucets for the winter. Judith turned on the hose by the back porch and gently aimed it at the barbecue. The stack of paper hissed and sizzled, but didn’t go out. When she increased the pressure, the smoke finally died down and the heat faded away. Standing over the barbecue, Judith stirred the ashes with a meat fork.

“I don’t think I’ll ask what you’re doing,” Renie called from the back porch, “but I thought you’d ordered food from a caterer.”

Startled, Judith turned toward her cousin. “Some-body burned something in here. I’m trying to figure out what it was.”

“Wienie Wizards?” Renie inquired, coming down the walk to the patio.

“Nothing so edible,” Judith said. “It looks like a script.”

“It does for a fact,” Renie agreed, picking up a pair of steel tongs. “It’s pretty well fried.” She flipped through the ashes until she got to the last few pages, which were only charred. “If I touch them, they may burst into flame again, but it looks like a script all right. See—it’s mostly dialogue on this top page with some directions in between.”

“Can you see what any of it says?” Judith asked, shivering slightly as the fog began to drift among the trees and shrubs.

“Not really,” Renie admitted, after putting on her much marred and thoroughly smudged reading glasses. Judith could never figure out how her cousin could see anything through the abused lenses. “Wait—here are a couple of lines I can make out: Benjamin: You have never had cause to be…I think the last word is afraid. The next line is dialogue by someone named Tz’u-hsi, who replies, It is not strange to be a concubine, though I am called wife. Yet I am more than a stranger, I am a…The rest of the page is too burned to read.”

“A Chinese name,” Judith murmured. “Ellie’s role in the script written by her mother, All the Way to Utah?”

“Maybe,” Renie allowed. “So who’d burn the script? And why?”

Judith started to stir the ashes again, thought better of it, and replaced the lid to the barbecue. Heading back into the house, she paused with her hand on the doorknob. “It was in Dirk and Ben’s room,” she said. “Room Four. The script was all marked up. There were even some obscenities, as if whoever was reading it didn’t like it much.”

“But which of the two actors?” Renie asked. “Ben or Dirk?”

“Ben, of course,” Judith said. “He’s supposed to costar, remember? Besides,” she added, “I read a clipping, also in Room Four, about how Dirk had lost the lead in another Zepf movie because he and Bruno got into a fistfight at Marina Del Rey in L.A. I assume Dirk was permanently scratched from Bruno’s A-list.”

“Very interesting,” Renie remarked. “So Ben gets to be a leading man instead of a villain because Dirk played smash-mouth with Bruno.”

“I suppose so,” Judith responded as the cousins went inside. “I guess nice guys do finish first.”

“That’s not the saying,” Renie corrected.

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