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Evening Bags and Executions(13)

By:Dorothy Howell


I read over the signed legal contract.

My heart started to beat faster.

I flipped through the notes.

My hands began to tremble.

Oh my God. This party was huge. Two hundred people were expected. There would be massive amounts of specialty foods, numerous musical performers, elaborate decorations, all with a Beatles theme.

The Beatles? Jeez, how old were the people giving this party?

I flipped through the file and saw that the entire event was being presented by Sheridan Adams. I’d read her name yesterday, but because I’d been mired in breakup zombieland I hadn’t made the connection.

Sheridan Adams was the wife of Hollywood’s highest profile, most prolific, Academy Award–winning director and producer, Talbot Adams. The man was a gazillionaire. Sheridan, a former actress, staged extravagant events at their estate in Holmby Hills to raise money for her charitable foundation. Anyone in their right mind would die—or kill—for an invitation to one of her parties.

I knew all of this because I was a vigilant reader of People magazine.

This was an event on a massive scale. An entire staff of planners could hardly handle all the work required to pull it off. Why would Vanessa have dumped it in my lap?

Then it hit me—Vanessa had given me this party because she knew how much work was involved. She thought I couldn’t handle it. She wanted me to fail—big-time.

Oh my God. Vanessa was trying to get me fired.

When L.A. Affairs saw how bad I screwed up on this party, they would have no choice but to fire me. Then Vanessa could force them to rehire her old assistant planner.

No way was I letting that happen.

No way.





CHAPTER 5


“My life is falling apart,” Mom announced when I walked into the house.

Note—she hadn’t said hello, asked how I was feeling, or checked on what my day had been like, which was just about all the info anyone needed to get to know my mom.

I’d texted her this morning and cancelled our lunch plans—which I still had no memory of making—but Mom had insisted I come to her place after work. So here I was, anxious to get in and out quickly because I had to work tonight at Holt’s—which I did, unfortunately, still remember.

Of course, Mom didn’t look like her life was falling apart. As a former beauty queen, she always dressed as if a red carpet might suddenly roll out in front of her and she would have to walk down it, smiling her pageant smile and waving her pageant wave, dressed for a black-tie awards presentation.

Today, for absolutely no reason, Mom had on a cocktail-length, strapless Pucci dress, four-inch Louboutin slingbacks, a diamond choker, and full-on makeup, with her hair styled in an intricate half updo.

Yep, that’s my mom.

Actually, Mom and I look somewhat alike. We’re the same height, with the same dark hair and blue eyes. While Mom was stunning, I was merely pretty, as she’d told me many times. She’d tried for years to mold me into a duplicate of herself, and I’d spent most of my childhood taking all sorts of lessons—ballet, tap, modeling, voice, piano—with Mom coaching me, trying desperately to unearth some miniscule nugget of natural talent in me. I dropped off her radar after my younger sister stepped up and the big proton cannon that was Mom’s desperate desire for a Mini-Me turned to her.

It didn’t hurt that I’d set fire to the den curtains while twirling fire batons.

“You won’t believe what I’ve been through,” Mom told me, as I followed her through the house to her office—a room she’d decorated mostly with pictures of herself.

Until I’d escaped to my own apartment, I’d lived here all my life along with my dad—he’s an aerospace engineer—and my older brother who’s an air force pilot, and my sister who attended UCLA and did some modeling.

The house—a Spanish-style mansion in the San Gabriel Mountains near Pasadena with an awesome view of the Los Angeles basin—had been left to Mom by her grandmother, along with a trust fund. No one in the family had ever divulged—or confessed—exactly what my great-grandmother did to end up with so much wealth.

The bigger mystery, to my way of thinking, was how my mom could have possibly ingratiated herself to anyone—let alone a family member—to warrant such an inheritance. And in yet another bizarre, unexpected, and totally unprecedented twist of fate, my mother had been so grateful that she’d honored her grandmother by giving me—her firstborn daughter—the middle name of Thelma, after her.

Mom had started several businesses, none of which had ended well—long story. That was probably because her idea of running something meant coming up with an idea, then turning the whole thing over to someone with minimal qualifications and questionable credentials and ignoring everything that happened after that.