Free Dead to Me by Mary McCoy

her.
    Once it was done, I settled in the chair next to her bed for the night. She looked so helpless and fragile lying there, so different from all the ways I remembered her. She didn’t look
like the girl who worked ciphers on Sunday nights or the girl who sang at cocktail parties or even the girl in the school picture that I’d shown to Wanda.
    Picture.
    The word knocked something loose in my memory, and I reached for my purse, pulling out the envelope of photographs I’d taken from my father’s safe. I hadn’t recognized the
woman in the first shot, but it wasn’t the only glossy print in the envelope. From a different angle, in different clothes, maybe she’d look familiar to me, or maybe there’d be a
name written on the back. Or if she’d really been in an Insignia Pictures movie, maybe one of the nurses would recognize her.
    I slid the first photograph out of the envelope and studied it more carefully, looking for any clues that might reveal who the woman was. She wore a black bathing suit and satin gloves that
reached her elbows. One hand rested on her hip, the other held an apple. Her lips were pursed into a neat little bow of a smile, and she had dark, wavy hair and porcelain skin like Snow White. But
when I looked closely at her face, I could tell she wasn’t the type to attract singing woodland creatures or charming princes. There was a hard set to her jaw and a defiant yet weary look in
her eyes that seemed to say, “Let’s just get this over with.”
    I put the photograph down at the foot of Annie’s bed. When I pulled out the next one, though, it wasn’t the woman who looked like Snow White. It was a different actress, one I
recognized even though I’d never seen a single movie she was in. She was famous for different reasons.
    A few years before, Camille Grabo was front-page news after the police caught her snorting cocaine with a married actor in her Hollywood Hills bungalow. Both she and the actor went to jail, but
he’d been famous and she hadn’t been. He’d made a lot of money for the studio and she hadn’t. That didn’t stop anyone from splashing her pretty face all over the
newspapers, pictures of her cleaning her cell, standing behind bars looking remorseful, or curled up on her prison cot after a bout of food poisoning. After they served their sentences, the actor
went right back to work and made more money than ever, but no studio would touch Camille Grabo with a ten-foot pole. Rumors about her filled the pages of the sleazier movie magazines that Cassie
read—that Camille Grabo was addicted to heroin and running around with mobsters, or smashing up cars and trying for a comeback as a nightclub singer. That was two years ago, and since then,
not a peep, not a headline. It was as if Camille Grabo had disappeared completely. Not Hollywood’s most original cautionary tale, but there was certainly nothing halfway about it. I’d
give her that.
    I wasn’t sure what these women had to do with each other, what their pictures were doing in an envelope in my father’s office. When I saw the next one, I wasn’t sure I wanted
to know.
    As I pulled it out of the envelope, a wave of nausea passed through my body. How old was the girl in this picture? I wondered. Thirteen? Fourteen? She had been made up to look like Jean Harlow,
reclining on a chaise longue in a platinum-blond wig and frilly underwear, but all the makeup in the world couldn’t hide the features she hadn’t grown into yet, the smile that was a
little too eager to please. Worst of all, her eyes looked glassy and unfocused, and I wondered if she’d been drunk or drugged when the photograph was taken.
    What if the pictures aren’t his? I thought. What if he’s holding on to them for someone at the studio?
    It didn’t help. This girl was younger than me, and her picture was in my father’s safe. He hadn’t turned it over to the police or ripped it into a hundred pieces. He’d
kept it.
    I couldn’t