“We need help,” I yelled. “We’re stuck in the snow at the top of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway.” I waited to hear him respond, but there was only silence. Somewhere as I was talking, the battery had gone out and the phone cut off. There was no way of knowing how much he’d heard.
I lost it and told Adele if she hadn’t been playing around online, the battery would have lasted longer. “He was our only hope,” I said.
Adele looked down as what I had said sank in. “We’re going to die. We’re going to die,” she shrieked.
I had to calm her down, which was hard because I was feeling a little panicky myself. I was hoping that even if Mason didn’t hear everything, he’d heard enough. But who knew? We leaned against a huge bolder and tried to share our body heat. Adele got the idea we should keep moving, so we started jiggling and shimmying.
“This could be the last night of our lives,” she said. As we kept gyrating around, she talked. “Pink, I have a confession to make. You probably never realized this, but I was pretty upset when you got hired as event coordinator. I thought I was going to get the job. I might have been a little mad at you and tried to make things difficult,” she said. If I hadn’t been shivering and so cold that it hurt, I might have rolled my eyes.
“But, the thing is,” Adele continued, “you turned out to be okay. And you might be my best friend,” When she said that, my eyes got watery and I had to pinch myself to keep from crying. I should have waited. “But the reason I only said might be, is because you’ve never invited me over to your house. A real best friend would have invited just me over to brunch or something.” She turned to look at me with a question in her eyes.
I jiggled my arms as I put them up in capitulation. “I promise, when we get back, we’re on for French toast.” I made a point of saying
when
rather than
if
.
“Pink, you shouldn’t have mentioned the French toast. It made me think of food and that I’m hungry.” She rummaged in her messenger bag and came up with an open bag of almonds that seemed to have a higher ratio of lint. I was touched when she offered it to me first. We huddled together and tried to share our body heat as we blew white bits off the stale nuts.
It seemed to get darker and colder, and every breeze that rustled the trees made us shiver more. I thought I heard something in the distance, but I was afraid it was just my imagination. Then Adele heard it, too. As it got louder, there was no mistaking the thwack of a helicopter. It was so cold now it burned, but with the hope of being rescued, my heart felt lighter.
It was too soon to celebrate. The helicopter began making a sweep and shone its powerful light down, but it was nowhere near us. I jumped up and down and waved my arms as if it would help, but the helicopter didn’t alter its course.
“We have to do something to get their attention. I don’t suppose you have any reflective tape in your bag or a flashlight.”
Adele rummaged around and came out with the tiny flashlight that projected a heart and the word
love
. “That’s not going to help,” I said.
“People always make fires to get attention,” Adele offered.
I was going to mention the fact that any wood on the ground was wet and wouldn’t the snow just put a fire out anyway, when I had an idea.
The saucer sled was sitting where we’d left it. “We could make a fire in this.” The helicopter seemed even farther away now.
“Give me your bag,” I demanded. Adele held back and said something about me being jealous because I didn’t have mine.
“Are you nuts? We could die here and you think I want your bag because I don’t have mine?”
“I’m sorry, Pink. Me saying that was just a symptom of hypothermia. It’s supposed to make you irrational.” I rolled my eyes to myself and thought maybe Adele was always suffering from hypothermia.
She handed over her bag and I started to take out all the receipts and scraps of paper. I piled them in the sled. I went through her crochet stuff and took out the wooden hooks.
“You can’t take those,” Adele protested. “They’re handmade and one of a kind.”
“You think your skeleton is going to be crocheting with them?” I said, taking them from the bag. I found a couple of skeins of cotton yarn and the pad of Post-it notes she used to keep track of her work.
Adele started to say she needed the yarn to show Barbara how to crochet, but even she realized she was being ridiculous and stopped herself midsentence.
“Now we just need to light it,” I said.
“Isn’t there something about rubbing two rocks together,” she offered.
“Give me that little flashlight you have. Maybe I can use it to find some rocks, though I’m not sure just any rocks will do.” She took out the love light. Seeing a heart with the word
love
projected on the snow was pretty, but not helpful.
“Give it to me,” I said. For the first time, I noticed the other end. “Adele this is a lighter.”
“Really?” she said, completely surprised. I flicked it, and we both jumped up and down before I touched the flame to the pile of stuff. The paper flared and then the cotton yarn and finally the wooden crochet hooks caught. Then we hugged each other and crossed our fingers the helicopter would see the fire.
I was afraid to look. This was our only chance. If the fire went out, we’d have nothing else to burn. Was it my imagination or was the thwack getting louder? Then I was sure. Adele and I looked up and were bathed in the spotlight. We started jumping up and down again to make sure they saw us. It circled and lowered and set up a huge wind. Finally it hovered just above the ground. I saw someone in a bright-colored helmet leaning out. I didn’t stop to think about being scared, but just grabbed Adele’s hand and we ran toward it.
I felt a pair of arms pull me inside. Adele came in after, and we both fell into seats. A voice barked for us to buckle in and the helicopter took off.
You could say we’d been saved by a hook.
They dropped us off on the desert floor. Several police cars and an ambulance were waiting. They wanted to take us to the hospital, but I insisted we were fine and had to get to the benefit. I told the cops about D. J. abandoning us and the doll with the media card in her underpants that I was sure had some crucial evidence in a murder. I was pretty sure I convinced them we weren’t delirious from the cold. Reluctantly, two of the officers agreed to give us a lift.
The real A-list benefit was taking place right next to the tent where we’d been in the first place. There was no problem getting past security since Adele and I had two cops with us.
We might have looked a little worse for wear, and the shiny Mylar blankets we were wrapped in might have given a slight impression that we were aliens. I could only imagine what my hair looked like from seeing Adele’s before she put her big hat back on.
There was some kind of toast going on, but it stopped when we came in. Along with our escorts, we walked up to the table where D. J. was sitting. For a split second, he looked shocked to see us, then he recovered. He got up and ran toward us.
“There you are,” he said in an angry tone. He told everyone, but mostly the cops, that we’d wanted to see the aerial tramway and he’d gone with us, but we’d rushed off and left him. He’d finally found his way back to the tram and thought we’d gone down before him. Luckily for him, he had a compass on his watch and a windbreaker in his fanny pack. He walked back to his seat. “Here’s you stuff,” he said, pushing my tote bag on me. I immediately took the doll out and checked its underpants. No surprise, the media card was gone.
CHAPTER 36
“PINK, IF ONLY I’D HAD THOSE HOOKS,” ADELE SAID. We had finally made it to our room. Both of us had had a hot shower and we were dressed in hotel robes. We’d splurged and ordered room service.
“You didn’t really think Barbara was going to invite us to stay at the banquet and let you give her a crochet lesson?” I said. Once the doll had come out, everything got crazy. Becca saw it first and left her chair to rush up to us. What were we doing with Robyn’s doll? she had demanded. Derek joined his wife and I didn’t have a chance to answer before D. J. did it for me. I, he explained, was friends with the woman who everybody thought was responsible for Robyn’s death and I was trying to help her beat the wrap.
“She came here because she thinks you people killed your own daughter and son,” he said to the celebrity pair. Becca started to cry, Derek looked angry, and everyone else seemed confused.
Barbara Olive Overton stepped in and strongly suggested we leave.
Needless to say, nobody wanted to hear our side of the aerial tramway story. Who would believe that the nicely dressed author would try to kill two women wearing shiny blankets. Even the cops who’d come in with us gave us dirty looks. We’d made the top celebrity couple cry.
What could we do but take our silver blanket capes and go. Talk about personas non grata.
At least, now we were warm, dry and working on dessert. “Pink, you might as well just give up,” Adele said as she picked off one of the strawberries on her cheesecake. “You might be sure that D. J. killed Robyn and her brother, but where’s the proof? Where’s even the motive?”
“On that media card,” I said with a sigh. “And he probably has cut it up in little pieces and scattered them in the desert by now.”
“Now that we’ve been saved,” Adele said, “are you still going to invite me over?” She reminded me that just as she’d offered, she had added the crochet trim to my Chanel-style jacket. She had me there. To my surprise, the embellishment she’d added was actually tasteful, and instead of stuffing it in the back of the closet with clothes I never wore, I’d put it in the front.
As soon as I said yes, she tried to pin me down to a date. I said I’d have to check my calendar. “Pink, if you knew anything about your BlackBerry, you’d realize you could keep your calendar on there.”
I had already vowed that if we got off the mountain, I was going to learn how to do everything possible on the BlackBerry. I turned on the TV instead.
It must have been a slow night in Palm Springs; our rescue made the news, though they used only stock footage and never showed us. They interviewed a ranger who repeated what Adele had said about people getting lost up there about once a month and getting in trouble because they didn’t understand how much colder it was up there. I shuddered when he talked about the bones picked clean they’d found in the past.
I had just started on my cherry cobbler a la mode when there was a knock at the door.
“Mason,” I said in surprise when I opened it. His face went from tense and worried to a grin in a split second, and he hugged me tight. Adele called out a greeting from inside.
“I started driving as soon as I got in touch with search and rescue,” he said. He’d kept calling me and had gotten voice mail. “I remembered the tickets included a room. I was hoping you were here.” He hugged me again, saying how relieved he was to find us.
“What happened with your BlackBerry now?” he said.
“Dead and nothing to charge it with.” I invited him in.
“I’m getting you a bunch of cords. You can keep them everywhere,” he said as I shut the door.
I shared my dessert with him as I told him the whole story down to how D. J. had turned the tables on us and made it look like we’d lost him, along with how he’d made the media card disappear. “I’m sure whatever is on it implicates D. J., not that it matters anymore.”
“Maybe not, Pink,” Adele said from across the room. She stood up and did a little cocky strut. “Who’s the detective now? Maybe I’ll change my name to Adele Poirot.”
CHAPTER 37
ADELE AND I SAT DOWN IN THE FIRST ROW WITH Dinah. It felt like déjà vu, at least sort of. It had been barely a month ago when we’d sat in almost the same seats when all of this began. This time CeeCee was in the audience, along with Nell. Rhoda, Elise, Eduardo and Sheila were in the row behind. The booing started and Barbara Olive Overton came out and greeted the audience.
In the week since the golf tournament, I’d had to pull every string and get help from Mason, Detective Heather and even my talent-agent son, Peter, to make this happen. Adele had talked me into wearing the black Chanel-style suit jacket she’d embellished. I had to admit it: The red trim she’d crocheted on the sleeves and down the front had added some pizzazz, and it looked much better paired with the black jeans I was wearing than the skirt it came with. Over the top as usual, Adele was taking way too much pride in my wearing it, and along with pointing out her work to everyone, was acting like a wardrobe mistress. More than once, she’d adjusted the jacket so it hung just right, even pushing the tissue I’d stuck in the pocket out of sight.
“Our guest today is D. J. Florian, author of
Back from Hell
,” Barbara began. She sounded fine, but I wondered if she was nervous, knowing what was going to happen. “For those of you who don’t know his story, D. J. started to write a blog as his life was falling apart. He chronicled what it was like to hit the bottom and the hard road back up. Now it’s been turned into a book he calls a blogoir.” She smiled at the audience and explained the word was coined by combining
blog
with
memoir
. “A reviewer for the
Los Angeles Post
called it ‘a book filled with grit, dark humor and hope.’ There’s talk of a movie deal and more books. He’s currently working on a self-help program that will help everyone, whether their problem is drugs, potato chips, smoking or nail biting,” she said, holding up her own hands, “which I personally would like to hear about.”
Adele nudged me and made a harrumph sound. I knew she was itching to pull out a hook, but for once, Adele behaved.
A video piece began to play on a large screen behind Barbara and D. J. The first scene showed D. J. walking down Cahuenga Boulevard and talking to the camera. He pointed out the Hollywood Hills dotted with houses and the TV- and movie-production-related businesses he was passing and explained his frustration at working as a clerk in an electronic store instead of being part of the entertainment business. He’d always expected better things for himself. So to escape his disappointment, he’d gotten into drugs. Just recreational, at first, with the guys he worked with. Then he had moved over to heroin and everything changed.