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  The Rita Farmer Mystery Series:

  Novels 1-3

  THE ACTRESS

  THE EXTRA

  ON LOCATION

  Elizabeth Sims

  Spruce Park Press

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  ELIZABETH SIMS STARTER PACK

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  THE ACTRESS

  Chapter 1 – Rita in Peril

  Chapter 2 – Adil’s Pawn America

  Chapter 3 – A Chance Meeting

  Chapter 4 – Breakfast With Daniel

  Chapter 5 – Gary Kwan’s Offer

  Chapter 6 – The Glamour of Surveillance

  Chapter 7 – Where Gramma Gladys Dwells

  Chapter 8 – Society Mom Behind Bars

  Chapter 9 – When One Case Closes …

  Chapter 10 – Improvisation for the Defense

  Chapter 11 – Seven Men to Five Women

  Chapter 12 – Rowe Rocks the Baby

  Chapter 13 – Wistful for Pastrami

  Chapter 14 – The Man in the Gallery

  Chapter 15 – “Try gasping.”

  Chapter 16 – The Iceberg Reveals Itself

  Chapter 17 – The Corpse in the Photo

  Chapter 18 – Saturday Strategies

  Chapter 19 – Wars and Warnings

  Chapter 20 – Rita Makes a Complete Fool of Herself

  Chapter 21 – What Maria Helena Knows

  Chapter 22 – Petey Stresses Out

  Chapter 23 – Blind Date

  Chapter 24 – Nuts With Tips

  Chapter 25 – Suite 7A

  Chapter 26 – The Show Must Go On

  Chapter 27 – No Toys Today

  Chapter 28 – When Chaos Comes

  Chapter 29 – Third Chance Mountain

  Chapter 30 – The Last Witness

  Chapter 31 – Down the Rabbit Hole

  Chapter 32 – The Key To It All

  Chapter 33 – Rita and Rowe Pick Up the Pace

  Chapter 34 – Nobody Has It All

  Chapter 35 – Daniel’s Mission

  Chapter 36 – The House in Topanga Canyon

  Chapter 37 – Daniel at the End of His Rope

  Chapter 38 – The Fingershredder

  Chapter 39 – Waiting for the Puppetmaster

  Chapter 40 – Prima Donna Stuff

  Chapter 41 – Rewards Wait in Strange Places

  THE EXTRA

  Chapter 1 – Rita Meets a Bullet

  Chapter 2 – Old Dogs Bark for New Tricks

  Chapter 3 – The ABCs of the Case

  Chapter 4 – Rowe Smells Blood

  Chapter 5 – Rita Delivers Kip’s Message

  Chapter 6 – Life With Gina

  Chapter 7 – Canine Desire

  Chapter 8 – Off to Adventure

  Chapter 9 – Rita and Gina Sniff Around

  Chapter 10 – Feral Interest

  Chapter 11 – Heroes in Tight Places

  Chapter 12 – Kip Tries to Help

  Chapter 13 – Amaryllis Educates Rita

  Chapter 14 – A Breakfast Warning; Sheila and Toots

  Chapter 15 – Guys Should be Ugly

  Chapter 16 – Latex, Transoms, and Ox

  Chapter 17 – George and Rita in Pursuit

  Chapter 18 – A Lucky Path; Dangerous Money

  Chapter 19 – The Strügen Cycle Beagle

  Chapter 20 – Inside the House in Bakersfield

  Chapter 21 – Behind Mysterious Walls

  Chapter 22 – Rowe is Nobody’s Fool

  Chapter 23 – Earth Puppets and Archives

  Chapter 24 – Fool’s Gold

  Chapter 25 – Mrs. Emberton Throws Rowe in the Deep End

  Chapter 26 – The Lady Shoots Up

  Chapter 27 – A Thug By Any Other Name

  Chapter 28 – Kitchen Work of Different Kinds

  Chapter 29 – Rowe Digs for Truth; Petey Takes Initiative

  Chapter 30 – Women Join Forces

  Chapter 31 – Rita Rises to the Depths

  Chapter 32 – Rats Hate Pandemonium

  Chapter 33 – The Whale Founders

  Chapter 34 – Rowe Unleashed

  Chapter 35 – Hair of the Dog

  Chapter 36 – Wrapping Up With Zing

  ON LOCATION

  Chapter 1 – Rita Off Balance

  Chapter 2 – Who Would You Save?

  Chapter 3 – Gina Meets the Matriarch

  Chapter 4 – Rita Packs Her Knife

  Chapter 5 – Rowe Meets an Equal

  Chapter 6 – Jurassic Nature

  Chapter 7 – Rowe Digs; Rita Plunges In

  Chapter 8 – Rowe Tries a New Tack

  Chapter 9 – Gina and Lance go Wild

  Chapter 10 – Rowe Displays That Flair

  Chapter 11 – Camp It

  Chapter 12 – What Bonechopper Wants

  Chapter 13 – Rowe Analyzes; Gina Makes a Dash

  Chapter 14 – War Paint

  Chapter 15 – ‘Your Son Will Die!’

  Chapter 16 – Rivers and Tides

  Chapter 17 – A Body in the River

  Chapter 18 – A Signal on the Log Bridge

  Chapter 19 – A Mystery in the Shed; Alger Returns

  Chapter 20 – The Teeth of the Gorge

  Chapter 21 – Our Strong Place

  Chapter 22 – Gina, Buddha, George, Whiskey

  Chapter 23 – Fear Like a Brick

  Chapter 24 – Rita in Disguise

  Chapter 25 – Bonechopper in Control

  Chapter 26 – A Savage Place for Boys

  Chapter 27 – Like Ten Thunderclaps

  Chapter 28 – Think Revenge

  Chapter 29 – Petey Cracks It

  Chapter 30 – A Dead Man’s Last Defense

  Chapter 31 – Joey Mans Up

  Chapter 32 – Bertrice’s Epiphany; Sheriff Craig Works the Angles

  Chapter 33 – Rita’s Touchstone

  GET THE STARTER PACK

  SPECIAL NOTE

  ABOUT ELIZABETH

  BOOKS BY ELIZABETH SIMS

  THANKS

  COPYRIGHT

  THE ACTRESS

  Rita Farmer Mystery #1

  “Intricate and surprising, this is a gripping read and a promising start to a new mystery series.”

  -- Booklist

  “Sims’s wry commentary on life in Hollywood is dead-on.”

  -- Publishers Weekly

  “Witty and compelling, this is a complex mystery you’ll love reading, and hate to see end.”

  -- What We’re Reading, Bloomingdale Public Library

  “At last, a fresh idea in mysteries.”

  -- I Love a Mystery

  Chapter 1 – Rita in Peril

  I screamed.

  I filled my lungs with the stale, coffee-smelling air of the dungeon and let out a ragged howl that ricocheted off the cold walls. I closed my eyes and screamed again as every cell in my body writhed in a futile attempt to deny the horror that was being inflicted on me by the guy in glasses holding a small cardboard box that said Death.

  The guy, who had introduced himself as Ned, stood to the side and brandished the box in his freckled hands. I decided to scream once more, this one a sharp, convulsive type of cry.

  “OK,” said the casting director, a thin black woman named M’kenge, with
expressive hands. “OK, Rita, please do it again, only”—she cupped her hands as if to suppress a flower growing—“this time don’t shrink down. Get all taut and tall, like you’re going to break out of your skin.” Upward release of hands.

  I did so. I stood at attention, remembering I was supposed to be tied to a pole, put my hands behind my back—behind my butt, actually, which looks more like natural bondage because your shoulders aren’t all hiked up—and arched my neck like Joan of Arc at the stake. Ned shook the box at me and I screamed.

  When you take a breath to do a scream, you don’t just grab a gulp of air and let go. You need to take the time to load your lungs all the way to the bottom. You need to pull all the slack from your diaphragm like you’d pull a bowstring in archery, and then and only then do you unleash that scream to its target, which is the red beating heart of every human within four miles.

  I screamed, and it felt good. I was screaming well today. I ululated in the middle of this one—nothing fancy, just another jolt of emotion, just another ripple in the violent fabric of my horror. I’d warmed up carefully.

  This was a job I wanted. A job I needed. This was Evan Granger Jackson’s new teensploitation movie, Fingershredder II, sequel to Fingershredder, the low-budget instant-cult terror film you’ve doubtless heard about or seen. If you’re a male age thirteen through seventeen, you’ve seen it three times.

  The role I was trying for was Student Teacher Who Gets Her Fingers Shredded Halfway Through the Script by the Evil But Understandably So Because of Childhood Abuse Sadistic Killer. The fingershredder.

  So I screamed. I screamed my ass off, discharging the screams through relaxed vocal cords but tight external throat muscles as Sam Wojczyk had taught me in his acting class at UCLA.

  I was lucky to have Ned standing there holding the cardboard box, because at least he was human. In case you’ve never auditioned for pictures like this in Hollywood, you often don’t have anybody playing opposite you. You’re just there all alone in front of the casting director, maybe possibly a producer, an assistant with a clipboard who might also be running the video camera, and the empty coffee cups and scone wrappers of the day.

  The cardboard box was a stand-in for the fingershredder device audiences came to know and love so well in the original. See, the fingershredding guy figures out pretty early in his career that paper shredders don’t work well on fingers: they jam quickly, even the heavy-duty, government models. Plus he likes to shred other body parts too, then eventually the victim bleeds to death in terrible pain. So he invents this gadget using parts from a vacuum cleaner, a Cuisinart, and a walkie-talkie. Works great on the screen. A fiendish device, of course you’ve seen stills of it in People and Teen and such. I’m surprised they didn’t license miniatures of it for inclusion in Happy Meals.

  “OK, stop,” said M’kenge. I had not met M’kenge before today’s audition, but I’d carefully learned her name because that’s what a professional actress does. I feel unusual names are more critical to remember than ordinary names, because people with unusual names have a bigger burden in life than the rest of us, in a small but important to them way.

  An unusual name practically invites you to forget it. M’kenge pronounced her name Em-ken-gay. On the page M’kenge looks as if it might be pronounced Ma-keng-ee, which would make it sound Scots, which her parents surely could not have intended.

  So M’kenge said stop. I looked at her attentively. She blew a breath down at the tabletop, then ran two fingers along the side of her skull as if trying to unzip a headache and let it out. Her head was one of those beautiful short-cropped African heritage ones, large smooth cranium, narrow jaw. She did not bother to smile. She was looking at me with intensity and thrilling dissatisfaction. Thrilling because she clearly wanted to help me get it right.

  I so wanted to get it right.

  “Rita, can you do it again, this time full-face to me. I know in this scene you’re supposed to be watching your student Melissa’s fingers getting shredded, and then her tongue and all that, but now I’d like you to scream as if your fingers were getting shredded. You were given pages for that scene, so let’s try it, just the screaming part.” She clenched one hand on her stomach and reached skyward with the other. “Bring it up from your gut, but not totally from there. Give me some highness, I guess what I’m trying to say is can you make it more piercing?”

  Piercing.

  “Yes,” I said, my heart singing because she didn’t say, Thank you, next! If they ask you to do it different ways, they think you might be able to deliver exactly what they want.

  “Make the hair on the back of my neck stand up.”

  “Yes.”

  I thought of the most horrifying thing in the world to me right then, which was getting my credit card declined again at the grocery store, which would mean I would have to sell Gramma Gladys’s diamond brooch to buy cereal and juice boxes for Petey and to prevent the landlord from evicting us.

  So I imagined walking into Adil’s Pawn America with that diamond-and-sapphire brooch, and all that it meant, and I felt not only frightened but angry, and I set my heels into the carpet of the soundproof audition room which was doubling today as a bloody dungeon, and I screamed and screamed again.

  Plus usually for a film role you’re doing it in somebody’s office, not a casting studio, the studios being the cattle chutes between the herd of actors out there and the yearned-for slaughterhouse of TV commercials. The company that made the Fingershredder movies, Half Fast Pictures, however, rented studio space for these auditions because everybody in the offices would have gone insane listening to people screaming for days on end. Evan Granger Jackson liked to have lots of first audition tapes to look at.

  We had already done an earlier scene with dialogue in it, not that there was lots in those movies. Which is what makes horror movies so much like pornos. There’s not that much difference between “Please don’t! Stop!” and “Please don’t stop!” The scripts are interchangeable, it’s only the action that’s different. Really, just listen sometime.

  “Thank you,” said M’kenge with finality in her voice, and I could tell she was disappointed. She crunched up one cheek wistfully. To me, an acting professional, it was the worst kind of disappointment, that tone that says, Man, this one just missed. Missed by that much. Next!

  Of course they rarely say anything at the moment, they leave that for your agent. But I was experienced enough to know that tone; I’d heard it so often.

  Was my life’s ambition to play supporting roles in teen horror flicks? No. But give me credit for not having stooped to doing porn, not that I have the body porn requires anyway—the Macy’s-parade tits, the lion’s-mane hair. I’d had breast augmentation, but only one cup size, up to C from my God-given B, which I felt was necessary for the movies, but no way could I ever compete in porn.

  I was a serious actress, and I’d long known acting was the best path in life for me. But time had become my enemy: at this point I was twenty-nine and grimly fighting the concept of thirty. Thirty is what you never want to turn in Hollywood, let alone forty or worse. Time, frankly, was running out. My agent was getting me lots of auditions, because she still believed in me. But if you could convert auditions into car payments what a butt-sassy world Los Angeles would be.

  I thanked Ned, I thanked M’kenge, I thanked Ellen the coffee-stained assistant. Thank you, thank you, they thanked me back and Ellen flipped my head shot to the bottom of the stack. I caught a glimpse of my face, spritely and wholesome above the collar of my crisp white blouse, then—flip—there was the next actress’s face, spritely and wholesome, possibly just what they were looking for.

  I passed her on the way out. Her head was high, shoulders back, confident smile ready. We exchanged friendly glances, because you never know who you might be asking for a job someday.

  That night Petey and I ate the last can of Campbell’s tomato soup and the last of the rice, which came to three-fourths of a cup before cooking. I mixed it
all together, put salt and pepper on it, and called it Spider-Man’s Mom’s Special. God bless my boy, he was so hungry he ate it.

  Petey was a Spider-Man maniac. He was four now. When he was three he was a Curious George maniac. When he was two he was a hit-the-rainbow-xylophone-until-Mommy’s-ears-pour-blood maniac. I watched him eat and wondered what five would bring.

  Precious boy. I saw his father’s face in his miniature one: there were Jeff’s gorgeous marine-blue eyes, Jeff’s touchingly dimpled cheeks, Jeff’s contemptuous upper lip. Would he take after his dad? Marry the cute girl next door, move to California for a dull job and start drinking a fifth a day and slapping her around?

  I asked Petey that question with my eyes. He looked at me, swallowed a mouthful of the disgusting dinner I had prepared, and answered, “Noah at school? He pooped on the piano.”

  I hugged him. It was a quiet night.

  Chapter 2 – Adil’s Pawn America

  The bright sepulchre of Adil’s Pawn America was crammed with dead items moldering under a hundred cold fluorescent suns.

  Petey found the place stimulating.

  “Let’s buy that guitar.”

  “No.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s an amplifier.”

  “What does it do?”

  “It makes the guitar sound louder.”

  “Let’s buy it!”

  “No!”

  “Mommy, I’m still hungry.”

  “I know, honey.”

  “I want chips.” The boy was only slightly uncomfortable from hunger, but in children a little hunger goes a long way. They teach you that fifteen minutes after they’re born.

  “No chips.”

  “Can I have an apple?”

  “May I have. As soon as we get back to the Safeway.”

  “Can I eat it while we’re walking around?”

  “Honey, be quiet now.”

  “It smells bad in here.”

  I held his wrist in my practiced antilock grip against his aimless tugging. The key is to give the wrist some space to twirl, but not enough so it can yank its way out altogether. I achieved this by using my thumb and middle finger for the basic hold, with my index finger poised like a trigger to crank down at any indication of increased pulling force. This took commitment because such a grip hurts your hand after a while. I sacrificed my hand comfort for Petey’s almost every day.