Free City of Mirrors by Melodie Johnson-Howe

successful ghost. Picking up Mother, I placed her between his two awards.
    â€œWe’re back together again after all these years.” I leaned my forehead against the hard stucco mantel. I wanted to cry but I was too tired.
    Tensing, I became aware of someone outside on my deck. I whirled around. Pressing his face against the sliding glass door, Ryan Johns peered in, looking like an aging lost boy. I let out my breath and opened the door. He rolled in with the salty cold air.
    â€œI feel sobriety coming on. How about a nightcap?” He wriggled his eyebrows at me.
    â€œI’m going to bed.”
    He lingered, hands in his jacket pockets, beer belly hanging over the waist of his Bermuda shorts. “Diana, I vaguely remember hearing, in my sexually unfulfilled drunken haze thanks to you, somebody at the party say that Jenny Parson was murdered. Did you hear about it?”
    â€œIt’s all over the TV. I discovered her body. You can go into the kitchen and learn all about it. I’m still going to bed.”
    â€œYou found her body?” Confused, he ran his large hands through his red unruly hair. “How well did you know her?”
    â€œYou don’t need to know someone well to find their corpse. We were working together on a movie, that’s all. We talked alone in her trailer yesterday evening.”
    â€œWhat about?”
    â€œShe couldn’t remember her lines. Why? Did you know her?”
    â€œThis’ll bring her father down here.” He edged crablike back out onto the deck and toward the stairs.
    â€œYou know Jenny’s father?” I followed after him.
    â€œIn a way.” He loped down the steps to the common pathway.
    â€œIn what way?” I yelled after him.
    â€œI owe him money.” He ran up his steps and disappeared inside his house.
    My landline rang. Closing and locking the sliding doors, I answered it.
    â€œDon’t you ever answer your cell?” Zaitlin bellowed.
    â€œI turned it off.”
    â€œYou’re all over the television holding your mother’s ashes, for God’s sake.”
    â€œI know. I think it was the doorman who took …”
    â€œOur insecure star, Jake Jackson, is chewing my ass out about it. He asked me if you’d gone fucking nuts.” Before I could respond, Zaitlin continued, “I’m sending a car for you tomorrow at eleven in the morning. Jackson wants a meeting to discuss if we go forward with the movie or not. And he wants to make sure you’re okay.”
    â€œIn what way?”
    â€œâ€˜Okay’ as in not fucking nutso .”
    â€œYou know I’m not. And why a car? You think I’m so crazy I can’t drive?”
    â€œIn case there are reporters outside your house. I don’t want any more mistakes, Diana.”
    â€œMistakes? You mean like finding Jenny Parson in a garbage truck?” I was yelling now.
    â€œNo, I mean your reaction to it.”
    â€œIf you had done your job as producer I wouldn’t have been put in this position.”
    â€œAll right. Let’s calm down. We’re all on edge. Just don’t bring your mother to the meeting.” He hung up.
    I slammed the phone down and stared at the urn dominating the mantel. The cherry wood looked substantial. Her nameplate shone. Maybe I should unpack her Oscar for Best Actress in a Starring Role and put it up there. Except I wasn’t sure where it was stored. I wasn’t sure where anything or anyone was.
    In bed, I took a sleeping pill and turned out the light. The TV flickered a bad black-and-white film. They weren’t all great.
    I thought about Ryan owing Jenny’s father money. He didn’t ask how Jenny was murdered. Nor did Celia. Nobody seemed interested in how she died or why. Except Ben. And why would the head of a security firm, a fixer, use an alias to look at Bella Casa? And then there was Beth Woods, our director, who thought Jenny was evil. Why did she think