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her childhood playing another child-one who was so much cuter, smarter, sweeter than she was herself. When that went away, she'd struggled through what the agents and producers considered the awkward years, where the work was lean. She'd cut a disastrous mother-daughter album with Dilly, and done a handful of teen slasher films in which she considered herself lucky to have been grue-somely murdered.
She'd been washed up before her eighteenth birthday, Cilla thought as she flopped down on the bed in her motel room. A has-been, a what-ever-happened-to, who copped a scattering of guest roles on TV and voice-overs for commercials.
But the long-running TV series and a few forgettable B movies provided a nest egg. She'd been clever about feathering that nest, and using those eggs to allow her to poke her fingers into various pies to see if she liked the flavor.
Her mother called it wasting her God-given, and her therapist termed it avoidance.
Cilla called it a learning curve.
Whatever you called it, it brought her here to a fairly crappy hotel in Virginia, with the prospect of hard, sweaty and expensive work over the next several months. She couldn't wait to get started.
She flipped on the TV, intending to use it as background noise while she sat on the lumpy bed to make another pass through her notes. She heard a couple of cans thud out of the vending machine a few feet outside her door. Behind her head, the ghost sounds of the TV in the next room wafted through the wall.
While the local news droned on her set, she made her priority list for the next day. Working bathroom, number one. Camping out wasn't a problem for her, but moving out of the motel meant she required the basic facilities. Sweaty work necessitated a working shower. Plumbing, first priority.
Halfway through her list her eyes began to droop. Reminding herself she wanted to be checked out and on site by eight, she switched off the TV, then the light.
As she dropped into sleep, the ghosts from the next room drifted through the wall. She heard Janet Hardy's glorious voice lift into a song designed to break hearts.
"Perfect," Cilla murmured as the song followed her into sleep.
SHE SAT on the lovely patio with the view full of the pretty pond and the green hills that rolled back to the blue mountains. Roses and lilies stunned the air with perfume that had the bees buzzing drunkenly and a hummingbird, bold as an emerald, darting for nectar. The sun poured strong and bright out of cloudless skies to wash everything in the golden light of fairy tales. Birds sang their hearts out in Disneyesque harmony.
"I expect to see Bambi frolicking with Thumper any minute," Cilla commented.
"It's how I saw it. In the good times." Young, beautiful in a delicate white sundress, Janet sipped sparkling lemonade. "Perfect as a stage set, and ready for me to make my entrance."
"And in the bad times?"
"An escape, a prison, a mistake, a lie." Janet shrugged her lovely shoulders. "But always a world away."
"You brought that world with you. Why?"
"I needed it. I couldn't be alone. There's too much space when you're alone. How do you fill it? Friends, men, sex, drugs, parties, music. Still, I could be calm here for a while. I could pretend here, pretend I was Gertrude Hamilton again. Though she died when I was six and Janet Hardy was born."
"Did you want to be Gertrude again?"
"Of course not." A laugh, bright and bold as the day, danced through the air. "But I liked to pretend I did. Gertrude would have been a better mother, a better wife, probably a better woman. But Gertrude wouldn't have been nearly as interesting as Janet. Who'd remember her? And Janet? No one will ever forget her." With her head tilted, Janet gave her signature smile-humor and knowledge with sex shimmering at the edges. "Aren't you proof of that?"
"Maybe I am. But I see what happened to you, and what's happened to this place, as a terrible waste. I can't bring you back, or even know you. But I can do this."
"Are you doing this for you or for me?"
"Both, I think." She saw the grove, all pink and white blossoms, all fragrance and potential. And the horses grazing in green fields, gold and white etched against hills. "I don't see it as a perfect set. I don't need perfect. I see it as your legacy to me and, if I can bring it back, as