Shards of Betrayal, page 2
He studied me a beat longer. Then gave a tight nod.
“All right. Follow me.”
CHAPTER 2
Seth moved between clusters of crew, me one step behind. His presence drew quiet nods. A grip called down from the rigging about light placement. A props man held up two nearly identical glasses. A cameraman gestured toward the rafters lost in shadow. Men worked the jazz club set—scarred tables, weathered bar, walls papered with peeling tobacco ads. The illusion of age held.
We threaded past cable snakes and light stands. Near the bar, two grips arranged tables to suggest a crowd while using half as many as Hollywood would need. The sound of clinking glasses carried from somewhere—props department testing options for the scene. Seth’s eyes never stopped moving, checking the space with the intensity of a man looking for something he hoped not to find.
Grace Carter stood by the bar, script in hand. I’d never met her but I knew her work—the haunting beauty in Harlem Babylon, the grieving war widow in Crossroads of Fate. She and Seth had met on Babylon and she’d starred in every one of his films since. Even in a simple day dress, she commanded attention. A young man—probably one of Seth’s local finds—stood beside her, stiff with nerves.
“Watch how I move here.” She demonstrated, her gesture fluid and precise. “Let the words follow the movement, not the other way around.”
The boy nodded, wide-eyed. Grace had a reputation for nurturing green talent. Stories floated about her staying hours after wrap, helping extras get their steps right.
I excused myself from Seth and crossed over. Up close, her skin glowed honey-warm in the overhead heat. The light caught the gleam in her neatly waved hair.
She smiled. “Why, you’re Lanie Price, aren’t you?” She extended her hand. “Seth said a reporter was coming. Didn’t say it’d be the Chronicle’s best.”
Behind her, Seth’s gaze swept the rigging again. His fingers worked the edge of his rolled sleeve.
“Your husband was kind enough to invite me.” I stepped carefully between cables. “Your scene in Crossroads of Fate, the letter-reading? I had to leave the theater. It cut straight to the heart.”
Grace’s smile dimmed, gentled. “Lots of women lost men in the war. I just thought about how they must’ve felt, getting that telegram.” Her gaze slid to Seth. “That’s what drives us. Telling the stories of the forgotten. Bringing their voices back.”
A clean line. Polished. Delivered with just enough sincerity to make you believe it wasn’t rehearsed.
Above us, metal groaned as someone adjusted a light. Seth’s head snapped up at the sound. Grace noticed it, too—there was a slight tightening around her eyes.
“Seth said this picture’s different.”
“Yes,” she said, refocusing on me. “No stereotypes. These characters—they’re as complex as we are.” She touched the young actor’s shoulder. “Show her what we were working on.”
He straightened, ready, but then—
“Places, everyone!” Seth’s voice cracked across the set.
Grace squeezed the boy’s arm. “Next time.” She rolled her shoulders, handed off her script. “Duty calls.”
Seth gestured for me to take the folding chair beside his. “Grace, you ready?”
“Ready, Mr. Director.”
Seth’s smile was brief but real.
The warehouse fell silent save for the whir of the camera. Someone called, “Scene twelve, take three.” The slate clacked.
Seth leaned forward, elbows to knees. “Action.”
The transformation happened in an instant. The warm, gracious woman who’d greeted me vanished. The person who stood in her place had been hollowed by loss. Each movement resisted gravity. The young actor watched her, transfixed, then joined her in the scene. Their grief tangled like smoke.
“Hold that light steady,” Seth said without turning.
“Got it, boss.”
Shadow and light played across Grace’s face, carving valleys beneath her cheekbones. Her hand trembled as she reached for a glass.
Metal scraped against metal somewhere in the rafters.
Seth’s fingers dug into his armrest. “Cut!” His voice carried. “Reset. We’ll take it from the door.”
The camera crew repositioned. Grace moved back to her mark. A grip climbed the ladder to adjust the spotlight. Seth scribbled a note in his script, but his attention kept darting upward.
“Everyone ready?” His voice carried to the rafters. “Let’s make it count.”
The warehouse hushed. The slate clacked again.
Grace stood frozen for a heartbeat, then moved like a woman underwater. Each gesture conveyed grief and pain. She reached the bar, let her fingers trail across its scarred surface. The young actor matched her rhythm, drawn into her gravity.
“The telegram came on a Tuesday.” Her voice, though low, carried clearly. “I was hanging sheets in the yard.”
The boy poured her a drink. His hand shook.”Miss Elizabeth—“
“Don’t.” Her shoulders curved inward, protecting an invisible wound. “Just ... don’t.”
Seth frowned as he watched. Above, something creaked. His eyes flicked to the rigging, then back to the scene. A grip shifted his weight on the rigging and the metal groaned again.
“Cut.” Seth sounded strained. “Reset the glasses.” He stood, gaze fixed on the rafters. “And someone check that—”
A sharper scrape.
Seth moved to the edge of his chair, muscles coiled. His eyes tracked the grip adjusting the light above Grace. Sweat ran down the man’s temple.
“Take five, everyone.” Seth’s frown deepened. “Wilkes, how’s that connection looking?”
“Almost got it, Mr. Carter.” Metal rasped against metal. The spotlight swayed.
Grace stayed in character, quietly running lines with the boy. Murmurs mixed with the hum of lamps, the shuffle of feet, the creak of the beams. Seth watched her. Then the rigging. Then her again. His hand kept drifting to his collar.
“All right, places.” Seth massaged his chest. “From the telegram line.”
Grace took her mark. The young actor lifted the bottle. The camera whirred.
Then came the sound—sharp, wrong, like a gunshot in church. A sharp cry. Wordless. Pure alarm.
The spotlight twisted free. Three hundred pounds of metal and glass swung once.
“Grace!” Seth lunged forward as the fixture plummeted toward his wife.
I caught the flash of her face, the mask of grief gone, replaced by real terror. Time stretched. Bodies scattered.
The crash hit like a cannon blast. Glass burst in all directions. Sound slammed the walls, gave way to terrible quiet. What came after was worse—the delicate, terrible music of settling debris.
Silence.
Seth’s voice broke through, rough with fear: “Grace!”
She staggered, still on her feet, glass shards crunching under her shoes. “I’m all right.”
When Seth reached her, his hands hovered over her shoulders, not quite touching. She caught his fingers, squeezed once, let go.
The crew gathered in knots, standing around, gaping at the shattered spotlight. Once Seth was satisfied that Grace was okay, he checked the boy who’d been standing beside her. Then it was on to his crew.
No injuries.
Near the bar set, a heavyset cameraman with graying hair rolled a cigarette. “Third one this month.” A young grip started to speak. But the older man’s eyes found his. The kid stayed quiet.
A woman from wardrobe appeared with the first aid kit. An electrician swept the glass into piles. Someone appeared with a large dolly. Two grips hefted the crushed frame.
Like choreography. No panic. No confusion.
Too smooth.
That wardrobe woman—too practiced. The broom in the electrician’s hand—too ready. And that comment. “Third one this month.”
I remembered how Seth kept eyeing the rigging. The spotlights he’d bragged about. Warehouse finds from Jersey. That crew—Hollywood’s left-behinds—his words, not mine.
Had he pushed too far? Cut too many corners?
Seth Carter breaking barriers was one thing. Gambling with lives was another.
“Seth? We need to talk.”
He was with a grip. Looked up and read my face. Saw the questions forming, ones he most likely didn’t want to answer.
He hesitated. Then gave a nod—quiet, resigned.
“Okay. Let’s talk, but not here. Privately.”
CHAPTER 3
Seth led me back to the cluttered office and quickly shut the door. The heat seemed even worse inside the small space. Another man was seated at the second desk, his legs stretched out before him. He strongly resembled Seth—had the same dark circles under his eyes—but he was younger, leaner. He looked up when we entered, eyes narrowing.
“Lanie, this is my brother, Clay. He’s my script writer. I visualize, but he makes it real, puts it down on paper. Clay, this is the lady reporter I told you about.”
Clay pushed himself up from the chair and crossed the room with a smooth, easy gait. He welcomed me with a warm smile and shook my hand. “Nice to meet you. Seth’s been looking forward to talking to you.”
“Has he? I—”
“Clay, could you give us a few minutes?” Seth’s voice cut across the pleasantries. “I need to speak with Mrs. Price privately.”
Clay’s eyebrows went up. He looked from Seth to me, then back to his brother. “What’s wrong? You look shaken up. And you’ve got dust all over your shirt. Did something happen out there? I thought I heard a crash.”
Seth brushed at his sleeve, avoiding Clay’s eyes. “It’s nothing.”
“Nothing?” Clay’s voice carried a note I couldn’t quite place. “That didn’t sound like nothing from in here.”
Seth’s shoulders tensed. “Just some noise from the set.” He shrugged, raised his hands. “That was … simply equipment being moved around. Things fall sometimes.”
That was a blatant lie. I frowned, surprised at Seth.
Clay settled back against the edge of his desk, arms crossed. “Things fall.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Heavy things?”
This wasn’t going the way Seth wanted. The two brothers were squaring off like prizefighters in a phone booth.
“Clay.” Seth’s voice carried a warning.
“What fell this time, Seth?”
“This time?” I said.
“Another spotlight?”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Another one?”
Seth shot Clay a hard look, then turned back to me. “Yeah. We’ve uh … had a run of bad luck.”
Clay let out a short, derisive breath. “Luck’s got nothing to do with it.”
Seth gave him another warning look, but it was too late.
I took a step closer. “What’s going on?”
Seth pressed his lips tightly together.
“Seth?” I said.
Seth ran a hand over his hair. “Look, these things happen. Old equipment, you know how it is.”
“Old equipment.” I repeated the words back to him. “And this has happened before?”
Clay straightened up from the desk. “Should I tell her, or will you?”
“Clay, don’t.”
“Tell me what?” I moved closer to Seth’s desk.
Clay looked at his brother for a long moment, then back at me. “We’ve had a run of bad luck lately.”
“Bad luck?” I repeated. “What kind of bad luck?”
Seth held back, still trying to find an angle out. “Equipment failing,” he said finally. “Props breaking at the wrong time. Nothing major. Just setbacks.”
“Setbacks?” Clay cut in. “People getting hurt, equipment failing at the worst possible moments. You call that setbacks?”
I watched Seth’s face as his brother spoke. The exhaustion there ran deeper than I’d first noticed, carved into the lines around his eyes.
“People could have been killed,” Clay said, his gaze never leaving mine. “People still could be.”
Those four words. They did the job. I watched Seth give up the fight. When he met my eyes, I knew he was ready to talk.
“All right.” His voice was quiet, resigned. “All right.”
“Start at the beginning,” I said. “Tell me everything.”
Seth dragged a hand over his face. “It started a few weeks back. One day, a sandbag dropped from the rigging. Not long after that, someone tried to set the grip truck on fire. Then there was the day one of the dollies—the wheels were greased, brakes suddenly failed. Jimmy, one of our camera assistants, dove out of the way just in time. It was a miracle.”
“Miracle, my eye,” Clay snorted. “Somebody tampered with it. Cut the brake line clean through.”
“Sounds deliberate,” I said.
“There’s more.” Clay turned to his brother. “Tell her.”
Seth didn’t want to. He clearly didn’t want to. But it was too late to stop. “Gerry, one of our actors, got shocked by a prop lamp that’d been rigged with exposed wires. Nasty burn on his hand, could’ve been much worse.”
“Don’t forget the scaffold,” Clay said. “How it collapsed last week. If it’d been a few minutes later, half the lighting crew would’ve been crushed.”
I listened in growing concern as they recounted incident after incident. Someone had a vendetta against this film—and whoever it was didn’t care who got hurt. Or perhaps that was the entire point.
“That’s sabotage,” I said. “Someone’s deliberately trying to harm your production—or end it.”
The room went still.
“Show her the notes,” Clay finally said.
But Seth was obviously reluctant to do so. He clenched his jaw, a muscle twitching beneath his smooth skin.
“Notes?” I prompted. “What notes?”
“Go on,” Clay said. “You might as well.”
“Yes,” I echoed. “You might as well.”
Seth’s gaze went from Clay to me. No way out. He reached around behind his desk, yanked open a drawer and pulled out a stack of folded pages. Their edges were crumpled and worn, as though they’d been opened and closed many times.
“I’ve been receiving these. Threats, warnings ... demands to stop filming. They coincided with the accidents on set.”
He handed them to me and I unfolded the first one.
Shut it down, or suffer the consequences.
The second was no better.
We know every move you make. Every scene you shoot. Stop now, or pay the price.
Short but vicious. The language cold, calculated and precise. All variations of the same message. All typewritten.
I looked up at Seth. “Who else knows about these?”
“Just us. I didn’t want to panic the crew.”
“Panic them?” Clay repeated. “They’re putting their lives on the line every time they step onto that set. They deserve to know—if they don’t suspect already.”
“You need to find out who’s behind this,” I said. “Before someone gets seriously hurt—or worse.” I glanced at the notes again. “Whoever wrote these, he knows this set backwards and forwards.”
“See?” Clay said, as if resuming an argument they’d had before. “She thinks someone on set is behind this, too.”
Seth didn’t answer right away. He stared at the floor, his hands braced on the edge of the desk. “I don’t know. I don’t want to believe it.”
“You don’t—you don’t want to?” Clay was incredulous. “Open your eyes, brother! This isn’t just bad luck. Someone’s messing with us—and it’s an inside job.”
“I can’t accept that.” Seth turned to me. “Look, I know these people. They’re like family. None of them would do this.”
Clay shook his head. “Just because you feel that way doesn’t mean they do. Family or not, someone’s trying to sabotage this film.”
I drew a deep breath. “Seth, I know this is difficult, but you have to consider all possibilities. Who has access to the set? Who knows the production well enough to be behind this?”
He shrugged, raising open palms. “Everyone. The actors. The whole crew. We’ve been working together for years, some of us since my very first film.”
Clearly, he did not want to face the harsh but very likely possibility that someone he trusted had betrayed him. I glanced at the crumpled notes. Threats, sabotage, the accidents that weren’t accidents at all but proof of a malevolent mind at work—it was all there. I studied Seth’s face. Exhaustion and strain were aging him beyond his years.
“Have you told the police?” I glanced between the two of them. Their expressions gave me the answer. “You have to report this.”
Clay let out another bitter snort, folding his arms across his chest. “The police won’t care. You think they’re gonna come running ’cause a colored man’s film set is falling apart? They’d laugh us out of the station.”
“Maybe” I said. “But you should at least try. Someone’s out to get you. And they’re taking no prisoners. The risk to you—and to everyone who works around you—it’s just too high to ignore.”
I paused, hoping that would sink in. Then I looked directly at Seth. “And I have to write about it. The public has a right to know what’s happening here.”
Both of them stiffened at that. Clay gave a grunt, looked away and shook his head. Like he was done. Just done with the whole argument.
Seth’s face went tight. ‘Wait. You can’t—‘ He stopped, started over. ‘If this gets out, the film dies. Three years of work, gone.’ His voice dropped. ‘Please. Just give us a little time.’”
His eyes searched mine for something—empathy, maybe. Or mercy. “If word gets out about these accidents, about the sabotage … it could ruin everything. The people who’ve invested money, those who’ve promised to? They’ll pull out. And if they do, that’s it. No more film. No more jobs. Maybe even no more career.”
I understood what he was saying and I certainly sympathized, but I couldn’t just look away. “People’s lives are at risk. You can’t just ignore that.”
