According to Mr. Kennedy, Ms. Birch’s casting as Cora Mulroney was a bit of a happy accident—an accident that had yet another tie to the little town. As it would turn out, it was actually the younger Birch sister who originally caught the attention of the director during the auditions. Upon learning that Miss Dorothy Birch was no longer available, the elder Lenora was cast, as she’d been a close second choice for the role of Cora…
Jill frowned.
Dorothy Birch was an actress?
And a good one, apparently, if she’d been the first choice for the now iconic role of Cora.
What in the world would have come up to make a seventeen-year-old girl pass up the opportunity of a lifetime?
And how must it have felt that that very film had made her older sister a household name?
Jill didn’t have siblings, but she couldn’t help but think that must have left a scar.
A very deep, very long-lasting scar.
Her mind whirring into overdrive, Jill quickly rifled through the pages toward the other end of the stack until she found the article she’d been reading just hours earlier.
It was from the Entertainment section of the LA Times—celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of A Love Song for Cora.
The anniversary had been just three days before Lenora’s death—timely coincidence Jill and Vin had disregarded as unimportant before. The film, while famous, was old, most of its principal actors and behind-the-scenes legends long dead.
A Love Song for Cora was free of the controversy and scandal that followed Lenora in her later films. The fact that its anniversary had overlapped so closely with Lenora’s death had seemed a bittersweet send-off for one of Hollywood’s sweethearts.
Jill picked up the other article—the older one, from Ohio—and chewed her lip. Reread the part about the role of Lenora being the director’s second choice.
It was probably nothing.
It certainly didn’t feel like a breakthrough. Whenever Vin had one of his premonitions, or a surge of Spidey sense, it seemed to rip through him with vicious certainty. When Vin knew something, he knew it. One hundred percent.
Jill didn’t know anything.
Didn’t feel anything except a faint tingling.
Was a quote from an ancient news article really worth pursuing? Hell, it wasn’t even an actual quote. For all she knew Bill Shapiro had gotten Miles Kennedy’s answering machine and decided to make something up to add a little flair to his otherwise dull recitation of the facts.
Jill stood and stretched, her eyes flicking back and forth between the two articles.
It was probably nothing. She was pretty sure it was nothing.
But then again, this sort of assessment was usually Vincent’s part of the job. Her role came after.
Jill picked up the phone to call Vincent, although with a very different agenda than she’d had just a few minutes before. This time she needed her partner.
“Dang it,” she muttered when he didn’t pick up. He was still at work. She could call into dispatch, get him on the radio…
But that seemed excessive. It wasn’t even an open case, and she didn’t have proof beyond the blurry scan of a small-town newspaper publication that was a half-century old.
It could wait.
She texted him to call her, then put the phone back down.
Her stomach rumbled, telling her the only thing she’d eaten was a handful of chips.
Jill went back to the kitchen and started to go through the motions of making a sandwich. Bread. Mayo. Mustard. Ham.
She cut the sandwich into neat triangles and then stared down at it without taking a bite.
The tingle she’d felt earlier was more of a buzz now. Distracting enough that she couldn’t seem to think about anything except Lenora Birch being pushed over the railing of her home. Probably by someone she knew. Trusted.
Someone who had a grudge…
“Oh, for Pete’s sake.”
She poured a glass of the wine Elena had brought over, wanting to calm her nerves. But that too sat untouched next to the sandwich.
The buzzing was getting louder.
“Okay, fine,” Jill muttered to herself. “It can’t hurt to have the conversation.”
She headed to the bedroom, pulling out a pair of slacks and a blue button-down. She pulled her hair into a ponytail before grabbing her badge.
And her gun. She wasn’t an idiot, after all.
She checked her phone as she headed toward the front door. Nothing from Vincent. Jill hesitated for a moment, wondering if she should have him meet her.
Then she remembered that she was supposed to be sick, but Vincent was still working. For all she knew, he was knee-deep in the middle of an active homicide case, and if she pulled him out of that for a not-quite-hunch on a cold case that they weren’t supposed to be working on…
She patted her gun reassuringly as she opened the door. She was a damn good cop with a firearm. She could certainly handle talking to a frail sixty-six-year-old lady on her own.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Vincent was about four minutes away from catching Jill’s “flu” in order to avoid a huge backlog of paperwork, when his father called.
“Pops,” Vin said, answering his cell.
“You busy?”
Vincent glanced down at his computer, then at the Post-it note that served as his to-do list.
Flipped over the Post-it note, looked at the list that extended to the other side.
Looked back at the computer and that patient, blinking cursor.
“Nope,” he replied.