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  Ted and Carl misinterpreted the reason for her tears and started talking at the same time, their voices filled with anxiety. “We, all of us, just wanted to make it official, Julie, that’s all, so your name could be Mathison like ours,” Carl said, and Ted added, “I mean, like, if you aren’t sure it’s a good idea, you don’t have to go along with it—” He stopped as Julie hurtled herself into his arms, nearly knocking him over.

  “I’m sure,” she squealed in delight. “I’m sure, I’m sure, I’m sure!”

  Nothing could dim her pleasure. That night, when her brothers invited her to go to the movies with a group of their friends to see their hero, Zack Benedict, she agreed instantly, even though she couldn’t see why her brothers thought he was so neat. Wrapped in joy, she sat in the third row at the Bijou Theater with her brothers on either side of her, their shoulders dwarfing hers, absently watching a movie featuring a tall, dark-haired guy who didn’t do much of anything except race motorcycles, get into fistfights, and look bored and kind of . . . cold.

  “What did you think of the movie? Isn’t Zack Benedict cool?” Ted asked her as they left the theater with a crowd of teenagers who were generally saying the same thing Ted had just said.

  Julie’s dedication to total honesty won by a very narrow margin over her desire to agree with her wonderful brothers about everything. “He’s . . . well . . . he seems sort of old,” she said, looking for support to the three teenage girls who’d gone to the movies with them.

  Ted looked thunderstruck. “Old! He’s only twenty-one, but he’s really lived! I mean, I read in a movie magazine that he’s been on his own since he was six years old, living out West, working on ranches to earn his keep. You know— breaking horses. Later he rode in rodeos. For a while, he belonged to a motorcycle gang . . . riding around the country. Zack Benedict,” Ted finished on a wistful note, “is a man’s man.”

  “Yes, but he looks . . . cold,” Julie argued. “Cold and sort of mean, too.”

  The girls laughed out loud at what had seemed a reasonable criticism to Julie. “Julie,” Laurie Paulson said, giggling, “Zachary Benedict is absolutely gorgeous and totally sexy. Everyone thinks so.”

  Julie, who knew that Carl had a secret crush on Laurie, instantly and loyally said, “Well, I don’t think so. I don’t like his eyes. They’re brown and mean-looking.”

  “His eyes aren’t brown, they’re golden. He has incredible sexy eyes, ask anybody!”

  “Julie isn’t a good judge of stuff like that,” Carl intervened, turning away from his secret love and walking beside Ted as they headed home. “She’s too young.”

  “I’m not too young to know,” Julie argued smugly as she tucked her small hands in the crooks of both their elbows, “that Zack Benedict isn’t nearly as handsome as you two!”

  At that piece of flattery, Carl flashed a superior grin over his shoulder at Laurie and amended, “Julie is very mature for her age, though.”

  Ted was still absorbed in the wonderous life of his movie hero. “Imagine being on your own as a kid, working on a ranch, riding horses, roping steers . . .”

  4

  1988

  “MOVE THOSE DAMNED STEERS OUT of here, the stench is enough to gag a corpse!” Seated on a black canvas chair with the word DIRECTOR stenciled in white above his name, Zachary Benedict snapped the order and glowered at the cattle moving around in a temporary pen near a sprawling, modernistic ranch house, then he continued making notes on his script. Located forty miles from Dallas, the luxurious residence with its tree-lined drive, lavish riding stable, and fields dotted with oil wells had been leased from a Texas billionaire for use in a movie called Destiny, a movie that, according to Variety, was likely to win Zack another Academy Award for Best Actor as well as one for Best Director—assuming he ever managed to complete the picture that everyone was calling jinxed.

  Until last night, Zack had thought things couldn’t possibly get worse: Originally budgeted at $45 million with four months allotted for filming it, Destiny was now one month behind schedule and $7 million over budget, owing to an extraordinary number of bizarre production problems and accidents that had plagued it almost from the day shooting began.

  Now, after months of delays and disasters, there were only two scenes remaining to be filmed, but the elated satisfaction Zack should have felt was completely obliterated by a raging fury that he could hardly contain as he tried ineffectually to concentrate on the changes he wanted to make in the next scene.

  Off to his right, near the main road, a camera was being moved into position to capture what promised to be a fiery sunset with the Dallas skyline outlined on the distant horizon. Through the open doors of the stable, Zack could see grips positioning bales of hay and best boys scrambling up in the beams and adjusting lights, while the cameraman called directions to them. Beyond the stable, well out of the camera’s range, two stuntmen were moving automobiles bearing Texas State Highway Patrol insignias into place for a chase scene that would be shot tomorrow. At the perimeter of the lawn beneath a stand of oak trees, trailers reserved for the main cast members were drawn into a large semicircle, their blinds closed, their air conditioners laboring in the battle against the relentless July heat. Beside them the caterer’s trucks were doing a land-office business dispensing cold drinks to sweating crew members and overheated actors.

  The cast and crew were all seasoned pros, accustomed to standing around and waiting for hours in order to be on hand for a few minutes of shooting. Ordinarily, the atmosphere was convivial, and on the day before a final wrap, it was usually downright buoyant. Normally, the same people who were standing in uneasy groups near the catering trucks would have been hanging around Zack, joking about the trials they’d endured together or talking enthusiastically about a wrap party tomorrow night to celebrate the end of shooting. After what had happened last night, however, no one was talking to him if they could avoid it, and no one was expecting a party.

  Today, all thirty-eight members of the Dallas cast and crew were giving him a conspicuously wide, watchful berth, and all of them were dreading the next few hours. As a result, instructions that were normally given in reasonable tones were being rapped out with taut impatience by anyone in a position to give them; directions that were normally carried out with alacrity were being followed with the clumsy inaccuracy that comes when people are nervously eager to finish something.

  Zack could almost feel the emotions emanating from everyone around him; the sympathy from those who liked him, the satisfied derision from those who either didn’t like him or were friends of his wife, the avid curiosity from those who had no feelings for either of them.

  Belatedly realizing that no one had heard his order to move the cattle, he looked around for the assistant director and saw him standing on the lawn, his hands on his hips and his head tipped back, watching one of the helicopters lift off for a routine run to the Dallas lab where each day’s film was taken for processing. Beneath the helicopter, a typhoon of dirt and dust swirled and spread out, sending a fresh blast of hot gritty wind laced with the odor of fresh cow manure straight at Zack. “Tommy!” he called in an irritated shout.

  Tommy Newton turned and trotted forward, brushing dust off his khaki shorts. Short of stature with thinning brown hair, hazel eyes, and wire-rimmed glasses, the thirty-five-year-old assistant director had a studious appearance that belied an irrepressible sense of humor and indefatigable energy. Today, however, not even Tommy could manage a lighthearted tone. Pulling his clip board from beneath his arm in case he needed to make notes, he said, “Did you call me?”

  Without bothering to look up, Zack said curtly, “Have someone move those steers downwind.”

  “Sure, Zack.” Touching the volume control on the transmitter at his waist, Tommy moved the mouthpiece of his headset into place and spoke to Doug Furlough, the key grip, who was supervising his crew while they set up a breakaway corral fence around the stable for tomorrow’s final shot. “Doug,” Tommy said into the mouthpi