There’s June’s back door. An old water fountain, velvet blooms of algae. Then the brick path splits off: the straight portion leading to Jack’s bungalow and Arlington Way, while the portion that veers right travels smack between the two bungalows and disappears near the hill at the edge of the lot. For one second she pauses, thinking she heard something. A spiderweb glistens a warning.

  Where the stone wall becomes a wooden fence is where a different neighbor’s property begins, and in seconds their dog is there. A rush of noise. Furious barking. Bared teeth through the slats. It’s only when she veers onto the smaller path that leads to Jack’s bungalow that the dog stops, and her heart begins to settle.

  Before she’s raised her hand to knock, the door swings open. Jack. He reeks of bourbon but he’s alive. Relief floods her—this means he can acknowledge that drinking shouldn’t happen again, and maybe they can keep going, even in private, even at night, because nothing is ever too late if someone is alive. She’s reaching out to him when she sees the blood on the white sleeve of his dress shirt. A lot of blood.

  When he told her he needed her, there was urgency in his voice and he said to come alone. But she shouldn’t have listened; he needs a doctor.

  Already he’s down the path, asking her to follow. She tells him to stop, demanding to know where he’s hurt and how badly, but he won’t listen.

  Again, the dog hurls itself against the fence. The noise, the blood. Frankie’s heart rate soars until they’ve passed the dog’s yard and the creature silences. She pauses to clear her head, to take a breath, when she sees that Jack has swerved onto the short path that leads to June’s back door.

  Now she looks to him.

  He faces her, and his voice is barely a whisper. “Please.”

  From deep within the carob tree, leaves rustle. The fact that Jack’s standing there calmly tells her all she needs to know, because whatever has happened is over. It’s too late.

  And now she knows he called her not as his girlfriend, but as his fixer.

  Inside, a clock ticks. The kitchen light is on, the curtains still closed, slices of light between fabric. There is a glass vase with old pink roses, necks wilted and heads hanging. It feels as though she’s walked onto a set, everything carefully arranged and loaded with purpose. When Jack disappears through the kitchen door, she waits for the noise and scramble of the crew at the end of a take.

  “Frankie,” he calls.

  This, she understands, is a set for a crime. Because the living room is struck with chaos. A chair is tipped over, and a lamp is knocked on its side, shade gaping. Sofa cushions are tousled, pillows missing. But the pillows are there, she sees, on the floor by the sofa, but then so is a stockinged foot and a leg, and now her heart pounds a remembrance of her mother, and Frankie’s breath comes up short and she sees a dark-green satin dress stained above the abdomen, darker still at the chest. Again, the safety of pretend: Makeup artists use chocolate syrup for blood. Film is black and white, a prop master once said, but I tell you, you clip an artery, and the blood’s dark, so we’re not far off. And this is dark but also red. Too red, really, all that wasted color for black-and-white film, and by the time Frankie looks up at June’s face, she’s feeling the pressing edge of reality, sharp like a blade.

  She’s seen June dead in films over and over, but it’s the color of June’s skin, ashy pale, that is beyond what they’ve achieved. “How did they do that?” she asks, taking a step forward.

  Jack stops her. “Don’t. You’ll get it everywhere like I did.”

  The stillness of June’s face is remarkable. I think there was a struggle, Jack is saying, and she was shot, but Frankie’s watching June’s lips, waiting for them to move.

  “The makeup.” But again, he’s stopping her because she’s stepped in blood, and the shoe print it leaves is red, bright red, and ultimately it’s that color that clues her in because it’s too red for syrup, just like June’s face is too pale for makeup. Her skin is the same shade that Fiona’s face was hours after she died, yet without a hint of powder. There is a scent that reminds Frankie of the carob tree outside, a strange, almost sweet decay.

  All at once it hits her. Backing away, she trips. Jack grabs her arm.

  “No.” She presses her hand on her mouth. Sick. There’s the sticky grab of red where she stepped.

  “I had a dream I was in the war,” Jack is saying. “Or I thought it was a dream. I must’ve heard the shot. I don’t know. I woke up with an empty bottle of Old Stagg.”

  June’s handbag is on the desk, open. Shoes toppled by the door. The details. Frankie knows she needs the details, but the second she notices something, it slips away. Over and over she scans the room. A champagne bottle on an end table, open. Empty. The cork on the ground. A juice glass beside the bottle with a small amount of liquid still inside. Another glass, clean, on the other end table. She feels as though she’s struggling to get back inside herself. She needs to be present. “Start with what you remember.”

  “Jolting awake. Not long after I fell asleep, I think. I thought they were firing on us.”

  “Because you heard the shot.”

  His words are slow, as if he’s wading through memory to find them. “I guess. I thought it was a dream. Then this morning, I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to get her on board with calling things off. And I found her, and everything got tangled. For an hour or so, I didn’t know what was what.” A pause. “It used to happen like that, time tangling up.”

  The long shadow of war. Its effect never truly over. “After you saw her, but before you called me—did you go back to your bungalow?”

  He shakes his head. “I was still in her kitchen when everything started making sense.”

  Something scratches on the glass. A branch that’s against the window.

  “Go to the bedroom. Make sure the curtains are closed.” She’s getting back to herself, snapping to. When he shuts the door, she calls Nico. It’s not yet eight a.m., the day after a premiere, which means he could be sleeping. Waiting, she faces the wall, feeling June like a presence at her back.

  When Nico says hello, his voice is groggy.

  “Hi,” she says cheerfully, which she knows will alarm him. “Can you come to bungalow one? Now?”

  To this, there is silence. And then he tells her he’s on his way.

  Time is stuck. It feels as though hours have passed, but it’s still only morning. Frankie is alone in the kitchen, staring at pink roses that make no sense.

  Ida. Though Frankie’s never liked her, the woman will be destroyed. Nico will handle it. Like he has car accidents and fights and even an incident when a star was caught shoplifting. Everything will be fine. He just needs to get here.

  The clock ticks. Light stretches on the table. A dust mote glitters in the air. Still, it is morning. Still, the unbelievable has only just happened.

  Shock transitions to logic; there are things she needs to do. All the windows in the living room are covered, and the bedroom was dark. But it’s hitting her that she should’ve made Jack leave and not just hide. If anyone sees him here, with blood on his shirt, they will think he did this.

  Then, the sound of a car. When she hears it, she hurries through the living room. A speck of orange through the curtain: Nico’s Bugatti. He’s left his car in the middle of the road, facing the Dead End sign at the end of the street as if the road is merely a driveway. Without looking back, he’s storming up the pathway.

  He pushes open the door and, in a second, sees June. As if punched in the stomach, he doubles over, whispering Italian—prayers or curses, Frankie’s not sure. When he looks up again, there are tears in his eyes, and she can see the effort it takes to not look back at June. Because he loved her, Frankie knows. He protected her. He took care of her, above all else, and now he’s failed.

  As fast as she can, she starts to explain that Jack had a lot to drink and ended up in bungalow two, that he called her when he found June this morning, but she stops talking when Nico turns toward her. Slow and focused. Calm. “Jack was here?”

  She motions to the bedroom.

  “He’s still here?”

  When they push open the bedroom door, Jack is on his back, feet hanging over the end of the bed. His eyes are open, staring at the ceiling.

  Then they are in the kitchen, and Jack is talking. In each pause, Frankie gathers the courage to come clean, to hand Nico every card—including the truth of her and Jack—and let him figure out a play. But she’s too slow. Muddled. Jack fills the silences, telling the story of what happened as if she were never a part of it, then saying it must have been close to three a.m. when he jolted awake. Frankie knows he’s right to omit her role; it would make everything ten times worse if Nico knew she was part of why Jack was here to begin with.

  “And you got a ride from who at the pool hall?” Nico asks.

  “Some guy. Barely talked to him, but he heard I needed a ride and volunteered, till I said Pasadena. Then he was set to leave me—so I told him to take me here. It was closer.”

  The lie is smooth. Though it shouldn’t surprise her, since he’s essentially trained in lying, it still throws her how convincing he is.

  A sound. A bird. It’s loud, a crow that must be on the branch outside the window, but Jack’s reaction is disproportionate. He flinches as if someone slammed a door beside him.

  Nico eyes him. “We just lost one star. If we’re not careful, we’ll lose another. Jack, tell me about the pool hall and the guy.”

  Jack looks around the room as if hunting for any further potential noise. “It was a dive. No one in there knew who I was. Or cared. I wouldn’t know how to find that guy if I tried.”

  Nico nods. “We need to stick with Malibu, that you went straight there. We’ve got everything in place; pretty much already got alibis. Thank God. O’Shea, the champagne delivery, everything works in our favor right now, and if someone from the pool hall comes out of the woodwork, I’ll deal with it.”

  Frankie glances at Jack, who blinks heavily, as if he has to clear his vision of something he doesn’t want to see. “They were going to elope,” she says. “That’s why June wasn’t with him. Last minute, she came here so they didn’t see each other. Whatever that tradition is.”

  “That’s good. Jack, you hear me? You were sick of the hysteria around the wedding, and you decided to elope.”

  Barely, Jack nods. Then he leans forward. “Who was the father?”

  “What?”

  “Motive.”

  Nico shakes his head. “She didn’t tell me. She said she wanted part of her life to be just hers. I didn’t press.”

  “The man finds out she’s marrying me, he’s furious, he kills her.”

  “She never said anything that made me think he was jealous or angry, or anything. But I guess nothing’s off the table.”

  Frankie touches a pink rose petal. “Why would you kill someone if you want to be with them? Unless that love is unreciprocated. Unless you live in a fantasy world.”

  “Tank Adams,” Nico says. Frankie nods.

  Could Tank have done it? Years back, there was a scandal at the warehouse where he worked, and rumors made it to the papers that he stole money. There was more, Nico said. Plenty of reasons to keep him away, and plenty of damage he could do to her reputation. Frankie sees Tank following June, watching her from across streets. Once, he left a letter for her on a chair in the makeup department, and no one knew how he got in. When June read it, her face seemed to collapse with sadness like someone finally glimpsing an unfortunate truth.

  Nico stands, heading to the phone. “Tank being jealous and shooting her because he couldn’t have her—that I see. I need to call my guys and then Mickey.” Mickey Mulroney. The chief of police, who also works for the studio.

  In another world, the police would’ve already been here. But in this world, there is what they can do to save June—which is nothing—and what they can do to save Jack—which is everything.

  Then Jack says something quietly, and Nico looks as though he’s going to be sick. In a rush, he’s hung up the phone before anyone answered, and stormed into the living room.

  “What’d you say to him?” Frankie asks.

  “I said the back door wasn’t completely closed. It’s hard to lock. It happened after the last rain.”

  In the other room, Nico’s swearing.

  “It sticks,” Jack continues. “Maybe he didn’t know. You think that’s how the person who shot her got in? It’s how I got in.”

  From the other room, Nico’s voice goes loud. “The necklace. Where’s the necklace?”

  Just like that, what happened crystallizes. And though they know they won’t find it, Frankie searches the house while Nico makes calls—the first to a few associates he ropes in only for the big jobs, and second to Mickey.

  What they learn is that June must have been staying here for a while. In the closet, there are shirts and skirts and a few dresses, as well as high heels lined up along the floorboards. In the bathroom, there’s Noxzema, pill bottles, even perfume. Jean Patou’s Joy Parfum Luxe. Ten thousand jasmine flowers and twenty-eight dozen roses, just to make one ounce. Claimed to be the costliest perfume in the world. They just gave it to me, Frankie, June had said of the bottle, whose label even had June’s name on it. It makes me delirious, it’s so beautiful. Frankie picks up the flacon and twists the crystal stopper, bringing it to her nose: flowery green, a heart of rose, and a hint of the musk to come. Closing her eyes, she feels as if June stands beside her.

  Off the phone, Nico leans forward in the wooden chair at the desk, elbows on his knees. June’s eyes are still open. Once, not long enough ago, Frankie watched a stranger close her mother’s eyes for the last time. Now, she goes to June and calls to Nico. When he understands what she’s doing, he nods.

  Against the wall, Jack watches, his face pale. “No one but us knew she was staying here.”

  Nico corrects him. “No one at the outset. Then we had a premiere with hundreds of people who saw her in that thing, and how hard would it be to follow the limo and catch her ducking into a different car? This day and age, that necklace would’ve tempted anyone.”

  June’s gun. Her beaded handbag is on the table, but when Frankie goes to it, she sees the gun’s not there. “I didn’t see her gun anywhere when I looked for the necklace.”

  Nico eyes June’s small handbag. “Doubt she’d take it to a premiere.”

  “No, she did.”

  Jack. They turn to him.

  He continues. “She had it in there. On the way to the premiere, she got a mint from her bag and I saw it. Said she felt better with it.”

  “Those people,” Nico says. “Goddamn those people who scared her.”

  “You think it was them?” Frankie asks.

  But Nico’s shaking his head. “No. No, they didn’t know who she was. But they were the reason she started carrying that thing. And my guess is that the bullet that killed her is a .41, like her gun. My guess is her gun was turned against her.”

  “Maybe he had a knife,” Frankie says. “Maybe she thought she could defend herself.”

  “And if he used her gun, he wouldn’t leave it behind, because his prints were on it. So I see two possibilities. One, she went for it to defend herself, and he got it. Or two, he came in, knew where it was, and he went for it.”

  He knew where it was.

  Jack narrows his eyes, staring at the floor. Because he just admitted he knew the gun was in her purse.

  Light from the kitchen slips into the room, time a slow unravel. Now and then, understanding hits her. June is dead. This fact is there and then gone, a claw of grief that retracts as fast as it emerges. Because June is still there, in the stack of magazines in the corner, her name on a script on the desk, her voice in rooms across the country. She’s larger than life, and so that she’s dead makes no sense.

  Suddenly Frankie’s own words return to her, words she spoke at the premiere when she and Nico were talking about Harry Winston.

  “Without a security guard. I said that. At the premiere. About June wearing the necklace. Remember? Nico, what—”

  But he cuts her off. “No one heard that.”

  “There were people right next to us—”

  “And you just happened to say it within earshot of the one person who would do something like this?”

  “This day and age, the necklace would’ve tempted anyone. You just said that.”

  “Frankie.” He’s pleading. “Don’t go down that road. Either it was Tank or a robbery because someone saw her there, with their own eyes, and followed her. Either way, it has nothing to do with you.”

  A knock on the door. Nico answers, assuming it’s his men. In a beat, the neighbor woman from up the hill has her hands on her mouth, her eyes wide.

  “Oh my God. Oh my God. I knew I heard—”

  Nico’s got her arm, saying, “Shh, shh, shh,” as he ushers her inside, passing Jack—whom the woman cranes her neck to look at—and straight into the kitchen.

  It’s the neighbor with the dog. Mid-fifties, a face that’s on a slow slide away from beautiful, a blue paisley scarf wrapped on her hair and rollers bulging underneath. Uneven red lipstick as if she heard Nico’s car and raced down here but first needed to look presentable. Darlene Cleary, she says to Frankie. I live up the hill. Her voice is crumbly, breaking apart. The complainer, Nico’s called her. A staunch prohibitionist.

  Unprompted, Darlene unleashes everything she knows. A bang around three a.m. She got up and out of bed and saw the dark shape of a man walking the path from the back of June’s bungalow toward Arlington. Though she waited to hear the sound of a car starting or sirens, there was nothing. “A bang, and then silence. I figured someone got drunk and shot off a gun. That happens here, believe you me.”

  The words slide into one. Believeyoume. With barely a pause, she continues.

  “And they want to bring it back, don’t they? So the fools don’t even need to sneak in booze, they just traipse it right in?” She turns to Frankie. “One man, a couple years back, he aimed at my weather vane. Missed and got the corner of my house—even worse! No point in calling the cops, Mr. Marconi told me. I have his personal number.”