The Starlet by Mary McNamara

Author:Mary McNamara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

I AM NOT GOING to live through this shoot,” Juliette said, following Gabe through one of the back pastures. Behind them, the tip of the tower was just visible over a line of trees that wound alongside one of the vegetable gardens. It was a blue-domed day, breezy and bright, and everywhere she looked, flowers seemed to have burst from limb and ground that very minute. Despite her frustrated tone, she felt her shoulders relax as the wind lifted her hair and stirred her long skirt around her. She and Gabe were in search of a pregnant sow that had escaped its pen, presumably to give birth somewhere in the forest. Though several of the prettiest interns had offered to accompany him, Gabe had specifically, and repeatedly, asked Juliette to join him.

“You?” said Gabe, peering into a likely-looking bit of gorse. “I thought this was the perfect solution to all our problems. I thought this was your milieu. I just wish the motherfuckers would recycle. How hard is it to separate paper from plastic from glass?”

“Well, I am ready to go on record as saying I have bitten off more than I can chew. That girl is impossible. She practically falls off the tower the other night and she’s up the next day in full makeup by seven. Me, I am still woozy two days later.”

“Addicts have a remarkable power of recovery,” Gabe said. “Until, of course, they don’t. Meanwhile, why not let the professionals deal with her?”

Juliette glanced at her cousin to see if he was being sarcastic or not, but his face looked placid enough, if a little flushed, in the sunshine.

“Well, I am. Angie can be in charge of her. Steve Usher can be in charge of her. Not that he seems very effective. I don’t even know what she’s on, I searched her room that night and I couldn’t find anything, except freaking gel caps of all sorts of herbal description. And as far as I know, no one puts their drugs in gel caps; I even squeezed a few to see if they’d been, I don’t know, injected with heroin or something. So where is she getting whatever is making her so . . . bizarre?”

“That is the million-dollar question,” Gabe murmured.

“Have you talked to her—I mean I know you’ve talked to her, but have you given her your little pitch?”

“My little pitch? I’ve told her life does not have to be the way it is, I’ve asked her if she thinks she could stop using, for a day, for a week.”

“And?”

“And she tells me she’s not using.”

“Do you think that’s true? Do you think maybe . . .”

Gabe stopped and stared at her. “I don’t think that is even remotely true,” he said. “I think she is addicted to drugs and alcohol and therefore is incapable of telling the truth. Don’t you even remember?” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Don’t you remember what that was like, to lie so well and

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