blocks from Hollywood Boulevard. “Then I got my first movie,” she said.
“And after that you were rich and famous,” Ashley stated, believing it.
“Ha! I wish! I had about a dozen lines to say in that movie. Mostly I had to jump rope to ‘Down by the river, down by the sea, Johnny broke a milk bottle, blamed it on me….’ We must have shot that scene 20 times, and when I got so tired I started to cry, my mother took me on her lap and told me this was my big chance, and I had to be brave. So I kept doing it, over and over.”
“How old were you?” Ashley asked.
“Seven. I didn’t get the part in Melissa’s Dream till I was nine. By then, my mother already had cancer.”
Each day, Bindy said, her mother managed to take her to the studio where the movie was being filmed; each night they returned to the cramped apartment over the garage and rehearsed the script again and again until Bindy learned her lines. She had to be perfect; she couldn’t lose that job, because they had no other income and no hospital insurance.
“That must have been awful for you,” Ashley sympathized.
“No it wasn’t, because we were a team. My mother loved me!” Bindy said fiercely. “We were always together—she stayed with me on the set every minute. It was months before Melissa’s Dream was released in the theaters, and my mother kept getting sicker, but finally we went together to see the movie. Two days later, she died.”
Jack felt his throat tighten as he thought of what Bindy had been through. If Bindy Callister—or Belinda Taylor—wasn’t telling the truth, she was one fabulous actress. But she stayed dry eyed as she sat there telling them the rest of her story, which only got worse.
“So Aunt Marian came to Hollywood to take me home with her—she was my mother’s sister. She’d seen Melissa’s Dream, too, and she thought if she adopted me, she’d get a pretty, talented little girl to be part of her family, along with her handsome, smart, athletic son, Cole. A perfect Barbie to go with her perfect Ken doll. Hey, throw me that other Butterfinger, would you, Ashley?”
“So…so what happened?” Ashley whispered.
“Well, I didn’t want to be part of Aunt Marian’s perfect family. I hated Cole on sight, and he hated me, too. So…I ate. And the more I ate, the more upset Aunt Marian got. Twice she dragged me back to Hollywood to get me into another movie, but the casting director took one look at me and said no film needed a prepubescent girl with weight issues. That’s how they talk in Hollywood.” Bindy threw back her head and laughed a laugh so full of anger it made Jack feel creepy.
He wanted out of there. Reading his mother’s thick books on whales would be better than hearing Bindy talk about her awful life, even if it was all made up.
Someone was moving around in the room. Jack opened one eye to stare at the digital clock on the lamp table. 12:35. Barely past midnight. He’d been asleep for only one uncomfortable hour, because the cot he was on felt lumpy.
Hair stood up on his arms as he watched the deep shadow glide silently across the floor. He could make out the outline of his parents in their bed, so it wasn’t one of them who’d gotten up to go to the bathroom or anything. The shadowy shape, moving so soundlessly through the room, had to be an intruder. A thief! His fingers trembled as he watched the shape move closer. Should he call out and wake his parents or just keep quiet and let the thief take whatever he wanted?
His heart thumping so loudly the thief might hear it, Jack opened his other eye. Whoever the intruder was, he seemed awfully small. Then the shadowy figure bumped into Jack’s cot and muttered, “Ouch!”
That was Jack’s chance. He leaped up and grabbed the person, who wiggled and yelled, “Let go, you dork!”
“Ashley?”
“Who’d you think it was? Freddy Krueger?”
By then Jack was feeling pretty stupid—for the second time in the past six hours—so he grumbled, “What the heck are you doing sneaking around in the dark?”
“What’s going on?” Olivia asked, turning on the bedside lamp. Her dark hair sprang from her head in wild curls. Blinking hard, she asked, “Where’s Bindy?”
“That’s what I came to tell you,” Ashley answered calmly. “She’s gone.”
Steven sat upright. “Gone? Gone where?”
Plunking herself down on the end of Jack’s cot, Ashley replied, “I have no idea. I heard a door close, and at first I thought it was the bathroom door and Bindy had just gone in to…you know. I was kinda sleepy, so I don’t know how much time went by, but then I looked over at her bed and it was empty. I got up and looked into the bathroom, and that was empty, too.”
Both Steven and Olivia were on their feet so fast it was as though they’d been shot out of a cannon.
They practically dove into their jeans and then pulled sweatshirts over their heads, yanking them into place as they ran through the door that connected Ashley’s room to theirs. In less than a minute they were back, looking grim.
“I’ll check at the front desk,” Steven said.
“It’s after hours. I doubt anyone will still be there,” Olivia said.
Jack suggested, “Maybe she just couldn’t sleep. She could have gone out on the beach to look at the waves.” Before he even spoke the last word, Steven rushed out the door. Jack listened for the clatter of his father’s footsteps going from the front deck down the wooden stairs to the parking lot, then remembered that his dad hadn’t bothered to put on shoes. Steven’s feet were going to get awfully sore clambering barefoot over the rocky beach.
Olivia had begun to page through a phone book, muttering, “I’m calling the police.”
“Don’t you think you ought to wait a little while?” Jack asked her. “At least until we look around the motel. Maybe she just went for a Coke in the drink machine.” Or a couple more candy bars, he thought.
Olivia slammed down the receiver, saying, “You’re right. Kids, get dressed. We’ll do a thorough search. Then I’ll call the police. And grab your dad’s shoes on your way out. He’s going to need them.”
After catching up to Steven and handing him the shoes, Olivia and Ashley left to scour the grounds of the motel while Steven and Jack walked along the shore, peering inside weathered boats and searching protruding rock formations that seemed to bubble up from the water’s edge. Lights from a few distant buildings twinkled in the darkness. Jack would have felt cheered if it hadn’t been such a serious situation. Olivia’s faint voice wafted to them. “Anything?”
Steven called back, “No!” Then, to Jack, he grumbled, “This is ridiculous. Where could she be?”
Suddenly, Jack snapped his fingers. “Hey, wait a minute—did you check the pier?”
“Of course I checked the pier.”
“But did you go past the No Trespassing sign? There are steps way at the end of the pier—I could see them from our balcony. Bindy might be sitting at the bottom of the steps just looking at the waves. She said she likes the Atlantic,” he finished lamely.
Steven
