Fallen Star

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents, tirades, opinions, exaggerations, prevarications, and dubious facts either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons—living, dead, or otherwise—is entirely coincidental.

  Fallen Star. Copyright © 2019 by Susannah Nix

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without written permission from the author.

  FIRST EDITION: March 2019

  ISBN: 978-0-9990948-9-1

  Haver Street Press | 448 W. 19th St., Suite 407 | Houston, TX 77008

  Edited by Julia Ganis, www.juliaedits.com

  Ebook & Print Cover Design by Okay Creations

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  On Sale Now: RISING STAR

  Books by Susannah Nix

  Preface

  Dear reader,

  * * *

  This book contains recurring, frank discussions of drug and alcohol addiction and recovery.

  I offer this warning so that those for whom this is a sensitive subject may make an informed decision about whether or not to proceed with the story.

  Be good to yourself,

  Susannah Nix

  1

  “So it’s really Scotty Deacon?” Carmen asked.

  Grace Speer looked up from her desk in the empty bullpen of the Sunset Limited production offices. It was late, and nearly everyone else had called it quits for the day, except Carmen Vargas, who’d just wandered over from the costume department office down the hall.

  “It’s really Scotty Deacon.” Grace’s lips curled a little as they formed the words. “He’s coming in tonight to meet with Joe.” She glanced at the clock on the wall. “In about ten minutes.”

  After months of searching, a string of disappointing auditions, and two failed negotiations, the producers had finally cast the lead of Sunset Limited, the indie neo-noir thriller that was due to start principal photography next month in New Orleans.

  Grace could only assume the decision to give the part to Scotty Deacon had been made out of desperation. It was the only reason she could think why they’d agreed to cast a washed-up former teen heartthrob who hadn’t worked in years.

  “Huh.” Carmen held a pad of costume sketches in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other as she leaned against the edge of Grace’s desk. “I thought he was dead.”

  Grace had thought the same thing until she’d seen his name on the short list for Sunset Limited.

  Scotty Deacon had been one of the rare Disney Channel stars to make the transition from tween heartthrob to big-time box office hunk—until a messy drug habit, a string of DUIs, and enough bad behavior to earn him his own episode of E! True Hollywood Story had derailed his career. After getting himself fired from the set of a Michael Bay film four years ago, Deacon had been blacklisted in Hollywood and dropped off the radar completely. Grace could have sworn she’d heard something about an overdose a couple years back, but she must have been mixing up her former child stars.

  “Only figuratively,” she told Carmen. “He’s looking to make a comeback, apparently.”

  Carmen’s eye roll conveyed her skepticism. “And we’re the chumps who get to take a chance on the drug addict? Lucky us.” As costume supervisor, Carmen had to get up close and personal with all the actors, but especially with the lead, who would be in nearly every scene of the film and would therefore require the most costumes and costume changes.

  “Recovering addict,” Grace corrected. “Joe says he’s been working the program for two years now. Turned over a new leaf or something.”

  Not that she believed a word of it. She trusted Joe Lincoln—he was one of her preferred directors to work with—but he had an optimist’s tendency to think the best of everyone that Grace didn’t share. Because she liked Joe so much, she hated to think of him being taken in by a self-destructive burnout whose dumpster fire of a personal life could bring the entire production to a screeching halt.

  What surprised Grace was that Joe’s producing partner and wife, Nichole, had ever agreed to cast Deacon—an actor with a well-documented history of showing up to set so high he couldn’t say his lines without an earpiece when he even bothered to show up at all. Nichole was the pragmatic business-minded half of the partnership who kept the ship afloat and cleaned up messes before they could turn into full-fledged disasters. The fact that she’d agreed to take on Scotty Deacon meant he’d either made one hell of a convincing case for himself, or they were so desperate Nichole hadn’t had any other choice.

  “I thought he was uninsurable,” Carmen said, dragging a chair over from a nearby desk.

  That was the main reason Deacon hadn’t worked in four years. Once the insurance companies determined you were high-risk, the insane premiums tended to dissuade producers from taking a chance on you.

  “Everyone’s insurable if you’ve got enough money to pay for it.” Grace cut a glance at the closed door to Joe’s office and lowered her voice. “A friend of his put up the bond out of his own pocket.”

  Carmen’s eyes widened as she fiddled with the height adjustment on the chair to accommodate her short frame. “Who?”

  “Robbie Scarborough.”

  “Wow. Okay, then.”

  Robbie Scarborough had hit it big around the same time as Scotty, and for a while the two of them had run in the same pack of young Hollywood actors charmingly nicknamed the “Coochie Squad”—until they’d had a big falling out a few years ago. But if Robbie was personally bankrolling Scotty’s comeback, they must have patched things up.

  “Must be nice to have a friend willing to risk a few mil to get you a job, huh?” Carmen said sourly.

  “Yeah,” Grace agreed, unable to imagine a friendship worth handing over that kind of money. “Must be.” She clicked her retractable pen as she glanced at the clock again. “The schedule’s already tight, and I know the budget’s stretched to the max, so if Deacon starts pulling his usual crap again…”

  Carmen shook her head as she sipped her coffee. “Didn’t he throw a chair at a director once?”

  “Yeah, he did.” Grace had done some reading up on Deacon after Joe told her he’d been cast in the lead, and what she’d learned had only intensified her misgivings. The guy hadn’t just thrown a chair at Jerry Duncan, the two of them had gotten into an on-set shoving match that had devolved into a full-on brawl before the crew managed to pull them off each other.

  Grace’s job as script supervisor required her to be the director’s near-constant companion, sitting next to him and taking meticulous notes on every take—time codes, lenses, camera movements, props, costumes—to ensure continuity when the footage was cut together in editing. That meant watching the actors closely and noting every detail of their performance: every action they made, when it happened and where, how they were sitting or standing, when and how they handled the props.

  When an actor forgot a line or stage direction, Grace was the one who fed it to them, and if they deviated from the script or a previous take, it was her job to point it out. That could involve a lot of interaction with the ta
lent, particularly if they were prone to flubbing lines or missing marks.

  A bad apple could make her life a living hell for the duration of the shoot, and Scotty Deacon was one giant honking Red Delicious. If he decided to start throwing furniture or punches on this set, Grace would be right smack in the line of fire.

  Carmen shook her head. “Gonna be an interesting shoot.”

  “I honestly don’t know what Joe and Nichole were thinking,” Grace said as she clicked her pen. “The guy’s never been more than a pretty face, so why take such a big risk on him? There are dozens of actors more talented and more professional than Scotty Deacon. Why not pick one of them instead?”

  “They must have their reasons,” Carmen said with a shrug. “We’ll just have to trust them.”

  “Yeah,” Grace replied without zeal.

  Trust wasn’t something that came naturally to her. She’d always been too much of a worrier and control freak to embrace the concept of blind faith. As much as she respected Joe and Nichole, she’d sooner trust a clown hiding in a sewer grate than put her fate in the hands of someone like Scotty Deacon.

  Scott Deacon stood in the hall outside the production office, frozen in place. He was early for his meeting with Joe Lincoln, which he’d been feeling pretty proud of until the sound of his name had stopped him in his tracks.

  Two women inside the office ahead were talking about him, and in less than flattering terms.

  He ought to be used to it by now. He had a string of critical and box office successes under his belt, he’d been inducted into the Academy when he was only twenty-six years old, and he had a star on the goddamn Walk of Fame, but all anyone seemed to care about was his mistakes. He had been branded a fuckup by the world at large, and a fuckup he would remain until he’d proven himself otherwise.

  That was the whole point of doing this two-bit indie film for union scale. To show the world that Scott Deacon was clean and sober and willing to show up on time every day to do the work. To prove he still had talent and a career left in him.

  Scott knew he had a lot to make up for, and he couldn’t blame anyone for being reluctant to put their trust in him after all the shit he’d pulled over the years. All most people knew about him was what they’d read: the coke binges and drug psychosis, the run-ins with the law, the multiple stints in rehab. They didn’t have any reason to believe that was all in his past, didn’t know how hard he’d worked these last two years to finally get himself clean and stay that way. No one was writing articles about healthy, sober Scott Deacon, because the everyday struggle of recovery wasn’t as entertaining as his drug-addled antics had been.

  He’d known going into this job that everyone would be scrutinizing him with mistrust, waiting for him to revert to his old habits. He’d been prepared for that, but that wasn’t what had stopped him cold in the hall outside Joe Lincoln’s office.

  The guy’s never been more than a pretty face. There are dozens of actors more talented and more professional than Scotty Deacon. Why not pick one of them instead?

  Hearing his own worst fears about himself voiced aloud by a stranger was a real punch to the diaphragm. Whoever the woman was, she’d landed a solid hit on Scott’s deepest, darkest insecurities—the ones that woke him up at night in a cold sweat.

  In his lowest moments, he was convinced he’d never had any real talent in the first place. That the successes he’d achieved in the past had been the net effect of luck, connections, and unearned confidence, and now that all three of those magic elements had abandoned him, he’d be revealed for what he really was: a no-talent waste of space.

  Fame had been part of Scott’s life for almost as long as he could remember. It had been a protective sheath woven into the fabric of his reality that had shielded him from certain kinds of scrutiny and a lot of the harsher realities of the world. When you were famous, it stopped mattering who you were underneath the fame, because the fame was all anyone cared about or reacted to.

  But when that fame slipped away, it left you stripped bare and defenseless in the stark glare of an unforgiving world. Learning to cope with the back end of fame these last few years had been almost as difficult as learning to cope without drugs.

  Navigating his recovery and his new reality as a celebrity washout was like kayaking over unfamiliar rapids. He didn’t have any control over where the river went or how rough the ride was, so he had to exert his control in whatever small ways he could, by learning safety maneuvers and equipping himself with gear to cushion the blow. He’d had to learn coping mechanisms to manage himself and fill the empty spaces the fame and the drugs used to occupy in his life.

  Scott had felt like he’d been doing a pretty decent job steering through the rapids lately, but hearing that woman’s words just now, when he was about to meet with the man who’d be directing him in his first film in four years, was like having his kayak overturned by a rock hidden beneath the water’s surface.

  His hand moved reflexively to the pocket where he used to keep his pills. There was nothing there but gum now. He popped a piece with a shaking hand, trying to pacify the lingering itch for pharmaceutical intervention. Spearmint was a miserable substitute for the soothing, glorious numbness of an opioid high. Without that tranquilizing buffer to protect him from the real world, his brain felt like it was being dragged over a cheese grater.

  He closed his eyes and put a hand against the wall as reality came crashing down around him, crumbling his thin veneer of confidence to dust.

  Before anyone inside the office could see him, Scott turned and retreated back the way he’d come, back to the safety of his car where he could pull himself together in private.

  Grace was still chatting with Carmen in the outer office when Scotty Deacon finally showed up for his meeting with Joe—fifteen minutes late, of course.

  After working ten years in the entertainment industry, Grace liked to think she was immune to celebrity. She’d dealt with enough of them, both major and minor, that fame and beauty no longer made much of an impact on her.

  But even she had to admit that in person, Scotty Deacon was something extraordinary. It wasn’t just his good looks, which were the kind of off-the-Richter-scale gorgeous she’d encountered plenty of times before. It was his presence. She couldn’t put it into words, but there was something about him, some sort of hypnotic intensity that worked like a supermagnet to pull all the focus in the room.

  When Deacon’s six-foot frame filled the doorway, he commanded attention without saying a word. Grace found herself sitting up a little straighter as his dark eyes skated over her and Carmen—then quickly dismissed them as insignificant.

  “Joe Lincoln?” he demanded in a brusque, I don’t have time for niceties tone that dared anyone to waste his time with intrusive chitchat.

  Grace lifted her eyebrows along with her pen, and pointed toward the space’s only office, which had a piece of white printer paper taped beside the doorframe with the words JOE LINCOLN written in large black capital letters.

  “Get me a water,” Deacon threw over his shoulder as he started for Joe’s office. “Sparkling if you have it.”

  Charming. Grace could already tell working with him was going to be as much fun as a pap smear with a cold speculum.

  “Which one of us were you talking to?” Carmen replied coolly as she leaned back in her chair. If her eyes could shoot knives, the back of Scotty Deacon’s head would look like a cutlery starter set right about now.

  He stopped and turned, fixing them both with a look that reeked of disdain. “I don’t care. Whichever one of you is Joe’s assistant.”

  Grace crossed her arms and met his gaze evenly. “That would be neither of us.”

  One of the first things she’d learned as a script supervisor was not to let herself be intimidated by anyone’s entitled, imperious bullshit. Her job and the success of the entire film depended on her not being afraid to speak up when she had something to say, so she couldn’t afford to be meek or passive.

&
nbsp; What Grace’s job didn’t entail was taking water orders from washed-up cokeheads. If she gave ground now, it would set the tone for the rest of their working relationship, and he would go right on snapping orders at her and expecting to be obeyed.

  Before Deacon could reply, the office door opened and Joe Lincoln peeked out. “Scott! I thought I heard your voice out here!” Despite being recently lauded by TheWrap as “the next great black director,” Joe had a down-to-earth attitude and a friendly demeanor that tended to put everyone at their ease. But even his natural warmth couldn’t quite take the chill out of the room.

  Grace watched as Deacon turned to greet Joe and his scornful expression shifted into an ingratiating smile, smooth as the slide on a dimmer switch. She and Carmen exchanged a look as the two men shook hands.

  “You guys all introduce yourselves already?” Joe asked, turning to Grace and Carmen.

  “Not yet,” Grace said, affixing a saccharine smile to her face as she got to her feet. She could pretend to be nice when the boss was around too.

  Joe addressed Deacon as he gestured to Carmen. “This is Carmen Vargas, our costume supervisor.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Carmen said flatly as she stood and shook hands with Deacon.

  “And Grace Speer, our script supervisor.”

  “Hi.” Deacon’s voice was warm as popcorn butter, though his eyes grew distinctly cold as they focused on Grace.

  She kept her expression neutral as she accepted the hand he offered. “So you’re the famous Scotty Deacon.”

  “I prefer Scott.”