Book of Shadows Read Online Free PDF

of the game was pretty faces and Marisa failed to qualify.
    In person she made an entirely different impression. Her looks were striking, and she was an intelligent, sensitive, witty woman. And always a superb actress. California’s mania for youth, its concern with capped teeth and firm flesh drove Marisa back to New York, where she found a different Broadway, one she didn’t like. The emphasis was on old stars in old musicals. Box office was all that mattered and box office was a star from the 1940’s in a song and dance from the 1930’s. The irony of now being too young for a role wasn’t lost on Marisa, who neither sang nor danced nor cared to.
    There were other scripts, other producers—and both too often emerged as shits. She read pallid mysteries by insurance salesmen and high-school principals. She read plodding musicals by university drama professors, anxious to prove that those who could teach could also do. She refused to read 1200-page “madcap comedies in the tradition of Carole Lombard and Kay Kendall,” written by housewives in longhand and accompanied by thirty-page letters explaining how the play came to be written.
    And there were producers who wanted her to sleep with backers to raise money for these plays.
    Television soap operas were a surprise, a pleasant one. Many were well written, reflecting changing times and dealing with life as it was, not as it was imagined. The old standbys of adultery, abortion, and lingering death from unnamed and unknown diseases were joined by environmental concerns, terrorism, statutory rape, political scandals, miscegenation, incest, affairs between older women and younger men, exposés of medical and scientific abuses. Soap operas had grown up.
    And they paid better than any other work in New York. Marisa’s popularity on World and Forever was immediate and just as quickly rewarded. By the end of her second week she’d become the ratings draw the show’s producer had been searching for. By the end of the month she was the top fan-mail draw. Her thirteen week contract was torn up and she was given one for six months, then a year, and finally two years, with huge jumps in salary each time.
    Since she had to play the role of a bitch, it didn’t matter whether the television camera was kind or not. Yet somehow she emerged as more attractive on the small screen than the large one. The lighting director managed to light her face in a way that removed the hollows from her eyes, and the camera somehow softened her sneer in close-ups. She enjoyed the show and, with one or two exceptions, liked the people she worked with. Her personal life was another matter. It was a problem and the problem was Robert Seldes, her lover.
    But for the moment, the thought of Robert was pushed into a neutral corner of her mind as she struggled to deal with Nathan Shields’ death. The night after the funeral, Marisa sat talking with Nat’s wife, Ellie, in their beautiful Park Avenue apartment, an apartment Marisa had always described as an experience second only to sex. It was a triplex decorated by Nat, who’d filled it with antiques from around the world and had even gotten down on his knees to place red and gold Florentine tiles on the floors of the five bathrooms.
    It had been a standing joke between Marisa and Nat that the apartment was the ideal place to be buried. Cremate us, they’d said, and scatter our ashes outside on the patio where there would be plenty of sun and an excellent view.
    And now Nat Shields had died horribly and alone.
    Dear, darling Nat. A wonderful man, a loyal friend. Death was something that happened to other people, not to Marisa or her friends.
    “They don’t waste any time,” said Ellie. “The broker tells me he’s received eight offers for the farm since yesterday. He says we’ll get a good price.”
    She sat rigid on the long, low couch, her back half turned to Marisa, her small hands shredding a damp tissue. She was short and chubby. At