“That is appalling!” Darcy said, outraged. “They would risk their baby’s health just to prevent a few stretch marks?”
Lynda simply shrugged. “It’s Hollywood,” she said.
“And Dr. Steinberg goes along with this?” She had always liked and respected Dr. Steinberg before. But now...
Another shrug. “It’s not really all that dangerous,” Lynda explained. “There’s a slightly increased risk of lung issues, but it’s only a small risk. If Steinberg didn’t do it, she’d find someone else who would.”
“Hmph,” Darcy grunted, shaking her head. “I think it’s disgusting.”
“Yeah? Well, what can you do?”
Darcy returned to her desk and continued to fume about this. What could she do? Well, maybe there was something that she could do. She could expose Mindy Snow for the heartless bitch that she was. Anonymously, of course.
She got off work at four-thirty that afternoon and drove home to her modest apartment in North Hollywood. After feeding her two cats and playing with them for a few minutes, she went to the kitchen and looked at the stack of this week’s LA Times copies that were sitting next to the garbage can waiting their turn to be taken to the recycle bin. Her absolute favorite entertainment reporter was Bernadette Tapp, who had been the one to first break the story that Greg and Celia were divorcing and who had covered their breakup extensively since. There had been an article penned by her a few days ago on that very subject. It had to do with the final paperwork filing of the uncontested divorce.
It took her a few minutes of digging around before she found the story again. She did not re-read the article. Instead, she went to the bottom where Tapp’s office number and email address were printed. She debated giving a call but decided that she would probably only get voicemail and God only knew how long it would be before someone listened to it. So, instead, she turned on her computer and opened up her email account. She put Tapp’s email into the sender box and then typed out a brief message.
I have some very interesting information to share regarding Mindy Snow’s upcoming delivery of her child. If interested, I will be home all evening and will answer the phone if you would like to discuss this.
She signed her email “an anonymous source” and then put in her phone number. She then sent the email from her account (her email address was an AOL account, with username Darcy_Grover). She then sat back on the couch to watch television, eat leftover pizza from last night, and drink chardonnay from a box in the refrigerator.
Less than an hour later, when she was three glasses in, the phone began to ring.
It was Bernadette Tapp on the other end.
They had quite the conversation.
Jake and Laura spent the night in Oceano after flying from Lindbergh Field to San Luis Obispo Regional Airport in the city of San Luis Obispo. The airport was fifteen minutes further from their home than Oceano Airport, but the runway in Oceano was not long enough to accommodate the Avanti so they were now renting a hangar at SLO, hoping that the faster aircraft would cancel out the longer driving distance. In the next week Jake would put the Chancellor on the market for the asking price of two hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
On the morning of July 12—a Friday morning—he got his first opportunity to check the timeline of his commute in the new plane. His band—the members of Lighthouse—had been hard at work rehearsing up the basic melodies of the set he planned to play at the TSF and he was going to check on their progress before they knocked off for the weekend (he had given them all weekends off until the festival itself). On Monday, he would jump right back in with them and they would hopefully start to polish things up into something that did not suck. Of course, he still did not have a piano player or a synthesizer player or a violinist, so those were things he was going to have to start working on as well.
He roared into the sky just after eight o’clock, climbing out toward Morro Bay before turning south toward the San Fernando Valley. As he left the airport, his engines turning at ninety percent thrust, hundreds, if not thousands of people who lived or worked in the vicinity of the egress path of SLO Regional looked up as they heard the grating, irritating, loud whine of those rear-facing turboprop engines. Though the Avanti was extremely quiet inside the fuselage, outside was another story completely. Many of them pondered the strange aircraft that was generating the noise. It looked quite peculiar, like something out of a science fiction show. They then mostly forgot about it. For the time being anyway.
Jake leveled the Avanti at 11500 feet, flying under VFR conditions and reaching his target altitude in less than five minutes. After entering cruise flight, the aircraft easily achieved a ground speed of 330 miles per hour, bumping lightly over the spine of the coastal mountains. He began his descent only sixteen minutes later and then circled into the landing pattern of Whiteman Airport, touching down at 8:37 AM. It took him another ten minutes to secure the aircraft and make the walk to his hangar, where his F-150 was hooked to a trickle charger, patiently awaiting him.
As he drove from the airport to the studio, he passed quite near the Covington Medical Center campus. His aviator’s eyes noticed that there were several helicopters circling around the fifteen-story building, which was kind of strange, but he dismissed the thought as soon as it was no longer in his sight. He arrived at KVA Records at 9:07 AM, only seven minutes after the band had started their day.
The Nerdlys were not there—they were up in Oregon with Brainwash, starting the process of laying down the rhythm tracks for the ten tunes that had been selected for the next CD—so the soundcheck was nearly complete (although, in truth, they did not sound as good as when the Nerdlys were supervising it).
Everyone was happy to see Jake.
“How’s the new plane?” asked Ted.
“Everything I hoped it would be,” Jake told him.
“Did I ever tell you about the plane crash I was on back when I worked in Riverside County?” he asked next.
“No,” Jake said. “And I do not want to hear about it, if you please.”
“It’s a good story,” Ted said, just itching to spin a tale of death and destruction.
“I’m sure it is,” Jake said, “but I’m going to take a pass on this one.”
“All right,” Ted sighed, clearly disappointed.
They finished their sound check and showed him what they had accomplished. It was a lot. When he had left for Dallas nearly two weeks ago, they had been in the very beginning stages of learning his melodies. Now, they were able to perform respectable instrumental versions of every one of the sixteen songs on the setlist. Of course, they still needed to work on the bridges, intros, outros, and the mixing with Jake’s vocals, but they had made good progress while he was gone and his confidence that he could pull this off began to rise.
Nobody had listened to the news today or had read the LA Times. For that reason, nobody knew that a media circus was currently in progress just a few miles away. The first that Jake heard about it was when the band broke for lunch and Jake used his cell phone to call Greg Oldfellow. Greg was staying in LA these days because Palm Springs was too hot for his taste this time of year. The two of them had made plans to have dinner today as they had not seen each other in more than a month now.