ONE
JEN
“Do I really have to be tied up with duct tape?” Bird Long asked wistfully.
Laughter bubbled inside Jen’s chest, an unfamiliar sensation. She could count how many times she’d laughed these past few years.
“Of course you have to be tied up with duct tape,” Godiva exclaimed, a tiny figure with a long white braid, toothpick arms akimbo. “I gotta see what it looks like as you struggle to get yourself free.”
“Bird, I’ll be the victim if you would rather,” Mikhail Long offered—clearly wanting to spare his wife the slightest discomfort.
Godiva’s “But I need you for the martial arts,” clashed with Bird’s “It’s all right, Mikhail, I don’t mind! It’s just that the adhesive takes forever to scrub off my skin.”
Godiva said, “Oh, we can fix that. Put your sweater back on, and we’ll tape over the sleeves. As a United States Senator, you were wearing your power suit when you were kidnapped. We’ll tape over your jeans,” she added, pointing to Bird’s ankles. “As for the gag, a cloth will do just as well as duct tape. Maybe better.”
As Bird sunnily put on her sweater and sat down to be taped up to play a kidnap victim, another bubble of laughter ascended behind Jen’s ribs at the ridiculousness of the scene.
Laughter. So rare.
So dangerous.
Her breathing shuddered, her emotions teetering as if she balanced on a high wire in a wind. The problem with laughter was how fast it could turn into tears. And she was totally, completely, and absolutely done with guilt and tears.
So she squashed it down hard, until she recovered the steadying numbness she had worked so hard to achieve.
She turned a determined smile toward Bird, whose sweet face under her soft gray cap of tousled curls looked as unsenatorial as you could get. But Bird was Godiva’s favorite victim in these scenarios—she was an expert at dying in very dramatic ways.
Godiva’s vast readership expected her mystery novels to start with vivid action scenes setting up the new whodunnit. And to get that vividness, Godiva turned to Jen, Bird, and Doris, the other three of what she called their Gang of Four—friends who’d met in the Baker Street Writers’ Workshop. Bird was the dead victim expert, and Doris, the only one among them truly good at acting, played a wide variety of roles—if she wasn’t behind the camera.
Jen, six feet tall and built like her Viking ancestors, was invariably the villain.
For this scenario, they had the benefit of two extras, Bird’s husband Mikhail, and Doris’s new boyfriend Joey, who had offered to serve as cameraman.
“Okay.” Godiva smacked her hands and rubbed them. “This mystery is gonna be more of a techno-thriller. Doris! You’re the cop chasing Jen, who is a cyber-enhanced Big Evil. Bullets are no good. I want you to shoot at Jen two or three times. Then Jen, you give the cop a super-villain martial arts bop. She goes down, and Mikhail, you come to the rescue, and we see some hand to hand. What I really want here is karate razzle-dazzle. Since I don’t know spit about martial arts, I’ll be rewatching this vid to get it all down on paper. Got it?”
Mikhail was taller than Jen—not many people were, male or female—and rather austere. But his expression lightened with the quiet smile that made him such a great match for Bird. “Thank you for permitting me to be in one of your scenes. I look forward to the result.”
Godiva cackled. “Well, by the time I’m done with you, you won’t recognize yourself in the book. But thank you for playing along. Ready, everybody?”
Jen cast a quick glance around, assessing the space she had to move in. They stood on a side-street in Playa del Encanto, the small town on the coast of Southern California where Jen and her friends had lived for many years. It was early in the morning, before there was any traffic in the sleepy little town. Behind them lay the Baker Street Pastry Shop, owned and run by the current moderator of the writers’ workshop. Godiva had promised to treat them all to fresh pastries once they had the video in the bag.
Jen pushed away from the wall she’d been standing against. Since she was going to do martial arts, she’d worn her black practice T-shirt and loose white yoga pants instead of her usual jeans and top. Mikhail, she noticed, wore dark slacks and a loose shirt that she suspected was his workout outfit—for a guy in his seventies or so, he was as fit as anyone at her studio.