Seidel, Kathleen Gilles Read Online Free PDF Page A

told herself for the second time this day, that was the end of that.

CHAPTER 2
    Of course, it wasn't. AH night Jill repeatedly woke up to the most pointless thoughts. The director, the continuity girl, and the cameraman would have to know, but if the sets, costumes, and characters' names were the same, would the designer or the sound men need to know? She kept trying to figure out how someone who wasn't Woody Allen could have done it.
    Or why they would have done it. Miles Smithson, the producer of the movie, hadn't had his own production company with a contract to provide the studio with so many movies in so much time. He was an employee of the studio. His office was on the lot; he reported to the executives who could have fired him in an instant.
    Everyone involved in a deception such as this would have been risking their careers hourly. No other studio would have hired anyone who had been fired for this kind of duplicity. What could have been in that secret script to make it worth taking such risks? Doug said it was magnificent, but would that have been enough to bind the "little group" into a conspiracy that could have ruined their professional futures?
    Assuming, of course, that there had been a conspiracy in the first place. Jill didn't believe so... although, for a person who didn't believe, she certainly couldn't keep it out of her mind. At four a.m. she sat up, switched on the bedside lamp, and admitted that she was obsessing.
    She was not the sort who usually gave into obsessions. If she lost a filling or had a tooth that ached, she was perfectly able to keep her tongue from probing the pain until she saw the dentist. She really was capable of being very sensible.
    It was just, she told herself, that Doug Ringling had caught her at a bad time.
    Four weeks ago she had lost her house. It had been a little two-bedroom cottage off Topanga Canyon Road near the Pacific Coast Highway. A towering pile of mud had rumbled down the hillside, uprooting trees, dragging down electric poles, sweeping away two houses, one of which had been Jill's.
    She had been out of the country at the time, but her neighbors had alerted her father's office, and his former secretary had sent out a moving crew. With the mud approaching fast, there had been no time to give them instructions. They had saved what they would have saved from their own houses: the stereo, the televisions, the VCRs, all of which were insured and easily replaced. They did get Jill's clothes, her modest accumulation of jewelry, and her father's two Oscars. They left behind her Rolodex, her calendar, and her kitchen drinking glasses, having no way of knowing that these ordinary-looking glasses were startlingly valuable, as they had been used on the set of Casablanca. She had inherited them from her father who, decades ago, had roomed with someone who was a prop boy on the Casablanca set. Cass's roommate had lifted a box of glasses simply because he had needed glasses, and despite their value to collectors now, that's how Jill had used them, to drink from.
    Jill was determined to be all right about having lost her house. She always refused to attach any sentimental importance to objects. Her mother was a compulsive shopper, and, as a result, Jill loathed accumulating things. If there was any woman able to cope with losing most of her belongings, she told her concerned friends, she was.
    Nonetheless, it had been an unsettling month. She had had to reconstruct her Rolodex, and almost all her friends— children of the Hollywood famous or celebrities in their own right—had unlisted phone numbers. Losing her calendar had been an even greater problem. Her mother had suggested that she be hypnotized in an effort to remember her appointments. Jill had chosen not to, concluding that if her presence at some event was truly essential, someone would remind her of it.
    Life was finally starting to seem normal again, but odd moments would catch her off guard. She would reach for a