Reel Murder by Mary Kennedy

along beside her with his camera mounted on a little miniature railway track.
    A myriad of emotions crossed her face—anger, uncertainty, and a touch of malevolence. “In fact, I was convinced that you’d had second thoughts and that—”
    “Cut, cut!” Hank shouted, leaping out of his chair. “Adriana, you’re moving way too slowly. Jeff hit the mark and you didn’t. You’re gonna have to speed it up, so you both hit the mark at the exact same time.” His expression was tight and his tone brittle.
    For the first time, I noticed someone had scratched a giant X on the sand. Apparently that was the mark Hank was talking about, and Adriana was at least six feet away from it.
    “Why shouldn’t Jeff be the one to speed it up?” Adriana retorted, her expression stony. She put her hands on her hips, her body language challenging. “Do you know how tough it is to walk with my damn high heels sinking into the sand at every step? I almost fell on my ass.”
    Maisie snickered next to me, and quickly covered it with a fake cough.
    “Look, Adriana, if Jeff walks too fast, it ruins the scene,” Hank said with heavy patience. “You just have to walk faster, just pick up the pace a little. Let’s try it again, okay? From the top.”
    Hank sat back down and whispered to Maisie, “If she moved any slower, you could harvest her organs. I think she’s doing it deliberately.”
    “This is par for the course,” Maisie said quietly. “Typical Adriana behavior.”
    “I know. I must have been out of my mind to hire her,” Hank muttered, running his hand through his silvering hair. He saw me watching him and managed a grin. “Oops; you didn’t hear that, Maggie. Dealing with actresses is giving me gray hairs. You’d think after all these years, I’d be used to it.” I knew he was putting a good spin on things because I was there; he didn’t want me to go back to WYME and talk about trouble on the set.
    “Don’t worry; I didn’t hear it.” I smiled to reassure him.
    During the next take, both Adriana and Jeff hit the mark at the same time.
    “Thank God,” Maisie whispered under her breath. I noticed she was following the dialogue, running her index finger under each line. I glanced down and saw some stage directions coming up at the bottom of the page: Jeff pulls out a gun . Maisie had hilighted that line in blue and underlined it several times.
    Adriana was mouthing some lines about money, and I gathered that her character had been blackmailing Jeff. She jabbed him in the chest to emphasize a point and then her eyes widened with fear when he pulled out a gun he’d tucked into the waistband of his pants.
    “No!” she screamed. “Jeff, don’t do it!! We can work this out.” She took a step backward, lifting her hands in front of her, palms up, her expression pleading.
    It looked like Jeff was wielding a Beretta from where I sat, but of course, I knew it was only a harmless prop gun, designed to look lethal. He wouldn’t be shooting real bullets. In fact, a prop gun wouldn’t even take a real bullet. Instead, a harmless wad would be expelled from the gun followed by a sharp retort, just like the sound of a real gunshot.
    Mom has acted in a lot of thrillers and she told me that if the prop gun didn’t sound right, they would simply add a gunshot to the audio track after the filming was completed. The magic of Hollywood.
    Jeff was mouthing some cliché dialogue like, “Can it, Adriana. I’ve had enough of your silly games and I’m never going to pay you another penny.” He gave a maniacal laugh, pointed the gun at Adriana, and fired at point-blank range. The noise was surprisingly realistic and I flinched. I thought I smelled a faint scent of powder in the air, but maybe that was just my overactive imagination at work.
    Adriana reacted perfectly; she clutched her chest, her eyes rolled back convincingly in her head, and she collapsed on the sand. Interesting. She was a much better actress than I’d