En Emma Wild Mystery: Killer Christmas
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Harper Lin
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19
Chapter 1
I’ve had people faint in my presence before, but never had one to drop dead at my feet—literally. The girl I was chatting with at the cafe suddenly began to choke and shake. Her drink slipped from her hand and she collapsed onto the floor. Her body convulsed and her eyes rolled to the back of her head. The spilt hot chocolate made it look as if she were lying in a pool of brown blood.
I knew the drink had been poisoned. I knew it in my gut when I bent down to inspect her body and the drink on the floor. And I also knew that I was somehow responsible for what happened. She died because of me. But I didn’t admit any of this to myself until later.
At the time, however, I only thought that perhaps it was a good idea to stay away from hot chocolate.
* * *
Maybe I should start at the beginning. Or should I say the end? A story can begin with heartbreak or end with one, but I was sure not willing to let both happen.
In my instance, the story began with heartbreak and I was not willing to let it end until a happy ending was reached.
My name is Emma Wild. Yup, that Emma Wild. The crooner with the two Grammy award-winning albums. Jazz, blue-eyed soul, alternative and mainstream pop are some of the ways they would try to categorize my music.
How would I categorize myself? An incurable romantic. And a singer.
I wasn’t always that girl on MTV singing about heartbreak in a husky alto voice choked full of tears. I didn’t always wear body-hugging dresses and my red hair in glamorous waves styled over one eye. I grew up in Hartfield, Ontario, a town about an hour and a half from Toronto. It was a charming town and my family still lived there, but at eighteen years old, I tailed on out of there, forgoing college to pursue my singing career. For two years, I busted my ass singing at every open mic in New York City. I knocked on every door and pushed demo tapes into the hands of anyone who was connected to anyone until finally somebody gave me a chance. Then it became a blur from there.
My record company was behind me every step of the way—at least in the looks department. I was a control freak in the studio, so I let them play with my hair and makeup and put me in designer clothes and on the cover of magazines while I picked which producers, musicians and video directors I wanted to work with.
Along with all that came the world tours—Paris, Tokyo, Melbourne, you name it. TV appearances, award shows, press conferences, and movie premieres consumed my years. A “thank you” and a smile here, a funny quip there, a twirl to show off who I was wearing—I could do all that stuff in my sleep. Literally. Sometimes I was so tired from all the work and travel that I would give an interview while I was half asleep. Still, I had fun with it; playing the fame game came pretty easily to me because I didn’t take it seriously.
The only thing I took seriously was my work, the music. I’d been writing my own songs since I learned how to write my name. In high school, I played clarinet in the school band…nerd alert. I sang at every event where somebody allowed me to take hold of a mic. I’d even go to poetry slams and sing with a guitar instead.
During my childhood and teen years in Hartfield, every winter I’d sing at the Christmas concert at the town square, and every summer I’d sing at the food festival. Then there was everything in between: talent shows, private parties, baseball games. Whoever needed a singer would only need to speed dial my mom.
So it didn’t surprise my friends and family that I would make it big with all the ambition and the steely determination that I possessed. Due to my busy schedule, their relationship with me was pretty one-sided most of the time. Sure, I called them whenever I could, and I would fly them into New York, where I lived, but on a day-to-day basis they learned about what was happening in my life through the tabloids. Especially in recent years when I started dating someone more famous than I was.
In general, my private life was pretty tame up until I met him. All I did was work. I’d ignore all the stories in the papers, magazines and blogs written about me to keep my sanity and self-esteem intact.
After dating a few industry types, I’d sworn celebrities off, bored with their massive egos and self-entitlement. Then along came Nicolas Doyle. Yes, that Nick Doyle. The movie star who had a bad habit of dating supermodels until he met me. Me, a five foot two redhead with pale skin and freckles—a little ball of fire, as the journalists would sometimes call me. I didn’t think I was his type; I wasn’t under contract with Victoria’s Secret as one of their Angels. But once Nick has his eyes set on something, or someone, he usually got what he wanted.
Soon I started showing up at his movie premieres, separately. We tried our best to keep our private lives private, but it didn’t take long for the tabloids to put two and two together, and soon I was being photographed in my sweatpants during my daily morning runs in Central Park.
When I first ran into him at the Vanity Fair party, I was joking around with a bunch of joke writers. They were a pretty funny pack. They kept teasing me for how bad my jokes were and kept trying to make even worse jokes to one-up me. Nick joined in, seemingly out of nowhere, with an extra glass of champagne and a witty remark of his own (something about horse butts—don’t ask), and I downed the glass to keep myself from shaking.
Back then, he wasn’t Nick. He was the Nicolas Doyle that the public knew. The piercing blue eyes that burned through movie screens, the mischievous grin, the raw talent that allowed him to disappear into any role—I’d grown up with him from baby-faced TV star to strong-jawed leading man.
I was totally starstruck at first, but I fell in love with him after I knew him. I loved that he got involved with all sorts of causes. All the charity work that he did during his time off was not a publicity act, I came to find out. It was what made him irresistible. Underneath all the Hollywood hoopla, he was a caring guy. When he had passion for something, he threw everything into it, whether it was acting, saving extinct pandas, or brightening up the lives of children born with cleft palates. So when he didn’t want to get married after four years of being together, I knew that something was wrong.
When a guy could take or leave you, it wasn’t a good sign. I’d been down that road before, got the T-shirt and didn’t want to go back there again. It was in my best interest to move on, even if it was the hardest thing I had to do—maybe the second hardest.
I packed all my stuff from his New York penthouse and stayed holed up for a week in a hotel, churning out song after song on this little hotel notepad. I couldn’t think about finding another apartment yet, but I knew I had to eventually. I didn’t know if I even wanted to stay in the city, where I’d be constantly paranoid about running into him or his millionaire friends.
Luckily, Christmas was coming up and I had the excuse to go back to Canada to spend the holidays with my family for a while, so I booked the next flight to Toronto, then hired a driver to take me to my hometown.
It was in the car that I began to panic about something else. I hadn’t been back in Hartfield for at least two years.
It wasn’t until I was getting close to the town when I remembered that I stayed away from Hartfield as much as I could for good reasons. One, to be exact. The cause of the first story of my life. The one that ended in heartbreak.
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