Bitter Finish by Linda Barnes

Probably."
    "Well, she's lying. I've never met her."
    Somehow Spraggue got the feeling that that wasn't what she wanted to say at all. But she slammed the door behind him, chained it. No footsteps. She stood by the peephole.
    He turned and walked way.
    Small, plump, and dark, he said to himself as he started the car. Mary Ellen Martinson.
 
    12
    Quiting, Spraggue thought, would get him a hell of a rep in the film industry .... Still, the temptation was growing.
    Pushing the speed limit and skipping lunch had gotten him back downtown dead on schedule. Made-up and costumed, he'd waited. At three o'clock, Everod decided there was still sufficient sunshine to wrap up the love-on-the-Boston Common montage.
    Spraggue grimaced, remembered with regret his promise not to quarrel until the dailies. He just played the scenes, thankful for their lack of dialogue, grateful that he couldn't hear the orchestral violins that would no doubt underscore his passion. Stock shots every one. Standard young couple clapping along with the one-man band. First brush of hesitant hands, first shared smile, first kiss.
    Spraggue felt twenty again . . . and that brought memories of Kate—and jail.
    "Cut!" Everod actually grinned at him, and Spraggue wondered how he'd make it through the film. Quitting might screw up his career, but surely it was worse to play this easy stereotyped "love." Leave out all the real stuff—the sizing—up, the talk, the doubts, the fears. Just gaze into her eyes and sigh and fall in love. The great Hollywood bullshit.
    Everod wanted more takes. Spraggue pressed his lips shut and complied. Couldn't the director see how wrong the damned scenes were? Lucy, the client, victim of a brutal husband, and Harry Bascomb, hard-boiled private eye, weren't exactly prime candidates for puppy love. And that's what old Everod had them playing: young love in the green grass. First love, the kind that never comes again.
    Kate.
    She could have drowned Lenny Brent so easily could have stood close beside him, up on the catwalk over the fermentation tanks ....
    The dailies were gruesome, Everod unreasonable.
    Karen Cameron found the scenes on the Common "cute."
    "You did read the script," Aunt Mary reminded him hours later, near the end of a perfect dinner. Her gray eyes twinkled.
    "I read tons of scripts. Still Waters seemed comparatively inspired."
    "Has it changed?" Innocently, Mary forked a last mouthful of strawberry tart.
    " How was I to know Everod was planning to treat the damn thing like Holy Writ? I've seen directors cut Shakespeare to ribbons. Why this kid-glove treatment for some hack writer?"
    " I would assume the writer's last film made a great deal of money."
    " Bingo," Spraggue said gloomily.
    Mary chuckled. "Then you are insulting a man who has his finger on the pulse of the movie-going public."
    "I'd like to get my fingers on the pulse in his throat."
    "There must be scenes you enjoy." She nodded to the immaculate butler. "Coffee, please, Pierce. Brandy in the library."
    " My favorite is the climax: Park Street Station. The murderer races across the tracks and gets mashed by a speeding trolley."
    "Nonsense," Mary said firmly.
    " Fact."
    " There's no such beast as a speeding trolley."
    " It's one of the more realistic scenes."
    They drank coffee in comfortable silence.
    Spraggue leaned back in his chair, felt the day's tensions slowly melt. His eyes did a quick survey of the rosewood-paneled dining room, stayed fixed on the familiar Degas.
    The Chestnut Hill place was his—dining room, library, and all the thirty-odd other rooms. It was part of the loot left by his robber-baron great-grandfather, chock-full of family ghosts and heirlooms. He couldn't live there; its hugeness mocked his solitude, inquired after a nonexistent wife and unborn children. Alone, he rattled around like a penny in a strongbox. So Mary lived there for him, Mary with her wondrous cook, her devoted butler, her quick game player's mind, and her ticker-tape