After She's Gone (West Coast 3)

Who was it?

Allie? Or Cherise? The sister she didn’t know? Ineesha? Laura? Little Bea . . . or someone she didn’t even know?

Rotating, she fumbled with the gun in her hands. Freaked out of her mind, she raised the pistol, ready to take aim on her attacker. Her headache thudded, her body ached.

Could she use it against another human?

A person who’s firing at you? Who wants to kill you? Who probably already killed Trent?

No problem!

ACT VII

Through the umbra, she walked slowly, patiently, knowing her prey had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, nowhere to escape. Finally, after all the years of pretending, of sucking up, of acting as if she weren’t as important as the Sisters Kramer and their has-been of a mother, it was time to set things right.

The wind whistled around the old barn, a tree branch banged against the wall, and the tingle of excitement was in the air. Like one of the suspense movies in which Jenna Hughes had played the heroine, a woman in jeopardy, or, more recently, Allie Kramer’s role in Dead Heat.

At the thought of the star, her lips curled. Allie should have been dead by now, lying in a coffin, her legion of fans distraught, her mother destroyed and feeling alone. That part of the plan had backfired, but she’d set it right. Allie had been in on the original plot, the one in which Cassie was to die on the set of Dead Heat, but then Cassie had come up with a new twist to the end of the movie and changed things up, so Allie, as Shondie Kent, would have been the one to take the real bullet from Sig Masters’s gun. She’d freaked and pulled an effective disappearing act, and poor Lucinda Rinaldi was nearly killed.

Boy, that pissed her off. She’d made so many plans, and then with a stroke of Cassie’s pen, everything went sideways and Allie, the sister who had figured out their connection, had realized she might be shot and quickly double-crossed her, never reappeared. Pfft! Just vanished.

She wasn’t about to be played for a fool. It had been easy enough to come up with a way to terrorize Allie. The DIY masks had been the perfect touch. Since she had connections to Dead Heat, knew the cast and crew, she could pluck her victims at random. Truth to tell, she loved the thrill of the killings, the supreme sense of power she felt when she’d pulled the trigger on that twit of a set designer, Holly Dennison. Even now she experienced a little thrum in her blood when she thought of it, an adrenaline rush. With Brandi, not as big of a thrill, of course, as she’d only met the extra once. But she’d been easy to track, her stupid midnight runs had made her an easy target, one more dead body to decorate with a mask she’d created especially for the event.

And how convenient that Cassie had all those mental problems, the hallucinations and blackouts. They’d come in handy, hadn’t they? So nice of Allie to spill her guts. And so interesting how deep Allie’s hatred of Cassie had been. All things considered, Allie was the successful one, the rising star who appeared on top of the world, but inside she was little more than a gelatinous glob of insecurities.

All because of men.

Go figure.

She heard Cassie breathing hard, from somewhere near the end of the building. Trapped and fearful.

Good.

Dealing with that nut-job had been a pain; pretending to befriend her made her gag and now it was over. “Little Sister,” she called out, thinking she was funny, her voice high-pitched and sing-song. But it was true. She herself was the “Big Sister,” Cassie the “Little Sister,” and that stupid, missing, double-crossing celluloid princess, Allie, the youngest, thereby “Baby Sister.”

“Baby” had yet to be found. She’d gone dark.

What the fuck was that all about?

The bitch had double-crossed her.

Oh, Baby Sister, that’s dangerous.

Ah, well, that’s what happens when you mix business and pleasure and family. Someone always gets burned.

“Little Sister,” she called again, more loudly to be heard over the wind and the animals. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

It was a game. Like one she’d never gotten to play with her half-sisters, never had been given the chance. Instead she’d been tossed away, handed over to the stuffy Beauchamp family where she’d never fit in. Oh, she’d had another sister, one that had been hand-picked for her, barely six months younger, but now, of course, she was dead, like these others would soon be.

She felt her eyes shimmer at the thought of the sister she’d grown up with. So beautiful and self-assured, so happy and bright, as if Gene and Beverly had picked the perfect child.

Her stomach turned.

They’d never really done anything wrong to her; the Beauchamps were decent enough people, but they’d been boring and common and she . . . she was born to Jenna Hughes. Her child. She should have been rich and famous and grown up in Southern California and been offered movie roles instead of being forced to go to a trade school and encouraged to marry young.

She’d been born to be a star.

And she’d been robbed.