He shook his head. “I can dig some more while you make your calls. Then we can confer?”
“Deal.” She quirked her mouth at him. “Then we can ‘get it on.’”
Alden snorted. “I haven’t hazed that boy properly. Give me time.”
Roz smiled. “Whipper-snappers.”
“Says the old lady of thirty-two,” he threw over his shoulder as he returned to his desk. He was only a couple of years older than she was, but after all he’d seen, sometimes it felt like decades.
He opened his computer to dig. On Sunday, they’d found a few facts about Wayne’s undistinguished youth in California and a couple of references to him attending UCLA film school. There was almost nothing online about what he’d been doing since then. And there was only so much information web surfing could unearth, especially when it came to the entertainment business. Celebrity-chasers reported rumors as fact. Even if a movie deal was real, so many films never came to fruition. It was hard to know what stories to trust. Oh, the irony. He’d fed that rumor mill himself.
He went back and checked the film database site they’d looked at yesterday and Wayne Vandershell’s credits. He had a short film picked for a few festivals, though it apparently hadn’t made it online yet. A student film, maybe? It was more than ten years old. Shouldn’t it be on YouTube by now? And there were other producer credits, but as creative as Alden got in his searches, he couldn’t find more information on the movies. A couple of them had release dates in the past. Had they gone straight to video? Maybe with a new name? It happened.
Vandershell had a few older credits as crew, too. One was on a heist movie he’d actually heard of, Fastest Spin Wins. Alden recognized another name in the credits, an assistant director he’d written nice things about—a guy Alden had had a few beers with in LA who was now frying much larger fish.
As Alden opened his contacts on his phone, he startled as a hand lightly touched his shoulder.
It was Roz. “Am I interrupting something?”
He spun to face her. “I was focused, is all. Tracking something down.”
“Good. I’ve got a lead. But I want to talk to my mom about it.”
He looked up at her in surprise. “OK. Want to ping me afterward? I might have more on Vandershell by then.”
“Sounds good. We can grab a quick lunch and see where to go from there, OK?”
He grinned. “Get it on, Ms. Melander. Get it on.”
Chapter Six
Roz drove her silver hybrid across Comet Cove to the northwest quarter of town, well north of Star Inlet. Her mother’s building overlooked a small bay in the Indian River Lagoon. Or the river, as locals called it.
Clouds scudded across the sky, spattering raindrops on the windshield, but after Roz parked she skipped digging out an umbrella. She clutched her big leather bag tightly to her chest and trotted across the nicely landscaped parking lot to the multi-winged, eight-story pile of concrete known as Daydream Village.
More of a compound than a village, it was considered a skyscraper around these parts, but the city council reluctantly approved it knowing there was a need for retiree communities, especially one like this. If Megan Melander’s multiple sclerosis became too advanced for her to live independently in her apartment, she’d have options for higher levels of care.
Roz walked through the spacious lobby with its coffee shop, lovely decor and bright open spaces where people sat reading newspapers (yes!), playing mah jongg, assembling puzzles and having small, cheerful meetings. This place offered all kinds of hobby spaces and activities, a cafeteria if folks didn’t want to cook, and visiting helpers for hire. Her mom had a woman come in a couple of days a week.
Roz moved past a bank of mailboxes to the head of one wing and hit the button for the elevator.
This was nice, wasn’t it? Roz had mixed feelings about her mom’s move here after Megan sold the Courier to the Beacon’s publisher. As a dutiful daughter, Roz couldn’t shake a primal guilt about not stepping up to be a caretaker. But this was absolutely what Megan wanted. She wanted Roz to carry on the legacy of the Courier, the newspaper Roz’s grandparents founded that Megan and David, Roz’s dad, made a pillar of the community.
David died close to two years ago of a heart attack. With her mother ailing and the paper struggling, Roz gave up her rising Baltimore journalism career to come back and run it. Then Alden and the big story and the merger happened, and her mom could afford to move.
The elevator opened onto a clean, quiet, carpeted corridor of apartments on the fifth floor. Doors were set back in small alcoves that residents decorated as if they were front porches in a suburban neighborhood: bouquets of fake flowers, seasonal tchotchkes, ceramic dogs and cats, even small bits of framed art. Precious bits people couldn’t get rid of even if they knew they no longer had room for them. Life overflow, Roz thought. You built up your life and then you shrunk it down again.
She found Megan’s door, which had a faux topiary bush next to it, a matching square wreath around the peephole, and a framed picture on the short adjoining wall that had been different every time she visited. This time it was a black-and-white photo of what this very site looked like before Daydream Village—a ramshackle fish camp with weathered wooden boats. Roz felt a twinge. Old Florida was endangered if not completely gone. But her mom had a nice place to live.
The door opened a few moments after her knock, and Megan waved her in and enveloped her in a hug. “Roz! I didn’t expect you today.”
“Spontaneous visit. Am I interrupting anything?”
“Not at all. I have a book club meeting later.” Her mom looked well in jeans and a casual light blue top, her gray-streaked reddish hair recently cropped, her green eyes bright. At sixty-eight, she was practically a kid in this community, though her progressive illness slowed her down. “Want a snack?”
“No, I’m having lunch with Alden later.”
“Oh, Alden.” Megan smiled. “Lucky you. Have a seat then. I’m having a ginger ale with Major Tom.”
