Starstruck

Chapter One

ONE

“Hey, sweetheart, you gonna pay for that?”

The rough voice startled Margaret out of her skin. She tipped forward off the vinyl- covered stool, just managing to grab her glass of chocolate ice cream soda before it deposited its halfmelted contents all over the freshly mopped floor of Schwab’s Pharmacy.

“I—I’m sorry?” she stammered. “Pay for . . . what?”

The soda jerk tipped his peaked paper cap a few inches back from the expanse of his sweaty forehead. “That rag you got there,” he said, angling his bristled chin toward the open copy of Picture Palace in front of Margaret on the white Formicalunch counter, where the Technicolor visage of Diana Chesterfield gazed serenely from its glossy pages. “I ain’t running no lending library around here, see? You read, you buy. Store policy.”

He leaned over the counter for a better look at the magazine, so close that Margaret could smell the sour milk and stale whiskey on his breath. Her hand flew to the gold circle pin fastened to the collar of her sweater. A family heirloom, her parents had presented it to her for her sixteenth birthday the year before, and Margaret soon found herself worrying its little cluster of pearls whenever she got nervous. Somehow the feeling of their smooth, cool surface under the tips of her fingers always seemed to calm her down. “Who you got there? Diana Chesterfield?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Always liked her.” The man gave an approving nod. “Nice girl.”

Margaret gasped. Getting into a conversation with the soda jerk was the last thing she wanted to do; still, she couldn’t keep herself from asking. “You don’t . . . you don’t actually know her, do you?”

“Sure do. She’d come in for an egg salad sandwich with french fries every other Tuesday, strict as clockwork. Used to make up her order myself, right here at the counter.” His sharp face took on a dreamy look. “She liked my egg salad, Miss Chesterfield. Perfect ratio of mustard to mayonnaise. That’s the key, see. You gotta get the proportions right.”

“She told you that herself?”

“Well, not exactly. She’s one of the quiet ones, you know. Keeps to herself, like. Most of the time she’d send her driver in while she sat pretty in one of them fancy cars of hers. But every so often she’d come in herself with her sunglasses on and sit right on that stool where you’re sitting now.”

Margaret couldn’t suppress the excited shiver that ran down her spine, despite the soda jerk’s too- appreciative gaze. When she’d decided that morning to play hooky from her afternoon classes to have a sandwich at Schwab’s, she’d hardly supposed she’d be receiving intimate information about the sandwich preferences of her favorite movie star.

Although Margaret had to admit that after the events— or lack thereof— of the premiere at Grauman’s, it was decidedly unnerving to hear Diana referred to in the past tense. 

“I take it you’re a fan of hers?” the man prompted.

A fan? Margaret knew practically everything about Diana Chesterfield. She knew her middle name (Constance), her birthday (December 10) and her birthplace (Hampshire, England). She knew her favorite color (lilac); her favorite meal (steak Diane— bien sûr— with potatoes dauphinoise); and obviously, her romantic status. Before Margaret had started high school and thus become far too mature for such things, she’d even been the president of the Official Bellefontaine Street Diana Chesterfield Fan Club. True, the only other member was Doris, who had served as a kind of vice president/secretary hybrid, but she had sent away to Olympus Studios for a special Diana Chesterfield Fan Club President badge, which she kept tucked away in her top dresser drawer, along with her film star scrapbook, the dried corsage from the Christmas dance last year when she’d kissed Phipps McKendrick, and Florence the rag doll, whom she hadn’t slept with since grade school but couldn’t bear to give away. But none of this was anything the soda jerk needed to know about. After all, this was Schwab’s, the unofficial canteen of the Hollywood colony. He might be a working stiff who dished out french fries and strawberry phosphates for a living, but he was serving them to some of the biggest legends in the movie business.