Star Struck Read Free

Dibble.
    Gloria fiddled with her cigarette. “I told the management about it. And John Turpin, he’s the Administration and Production Coordinator, he persuaded me not to go to the cops.”
    “Why not? I’d have thought the management would have been desperate to make sure nothing happened to their stars.”
    Gloria’s lip curled in a cynical sneer. “It were nowt to do with my safety and everything to do with bad publicity. Plus, who’d want to come and work at NPTV if they found out the security was so crap that somebody could walk into the company compound and get away with that? Anyway, Turpin promised me an internal inquiry, so I decided to go along with him.”
    “But now you’re here.” It’s observational skills like this that got me where I am today.
    She flashed a quick up-and-under glance at me, an appraisal that contained more than a hint of fear held under tight control. “You’re going to think I’m daft.”
    I shook my head. “I don’t see you as the daft type, Gloria.” Well, it was only a white lie. Daft enough to spend the equivalent of a week’s payroll for Brannigan & Co on a matching outfit, but probably not daft when it came to a realistic assessment of personal danger. Mind you, neither was Ronald Reagan and look what happened to him.
    “You know Dorothea Dawson?” Gloria asked, eyeing me out of the corner of her eye.
    “‘The Seer to the Stars’?” I asked incredulously. “The one who does the horoscopes in
TV Viewer
? The one who’s always on the telly? ‘A horse born under the sign of Aries will win the Derby’?” I intoned in a cheap impersonation of Dorothea Dawson’s sepulchral groan.
    “Don’t mock,” she cautioned me, wagging a finger. “She’s a brilliant clairvoyant, you know. Dorothea comes into the studios
    I bet she had. Gifts from all the stars of
Northerners
. “And Dorothea said something about these letters?”
    “I took this letter in with me to my last consultation with her. I asked her what she could sense from it. She does that as well as the straight clairvoyance. She’s done it for me before now, and she’s never been wrong.” In spite of her acting skills, anxiety was surfacing in Gloria’s voice.
    “And what did she say?”
    Gloria drew so hard on her cigarette that I could hear the burning tobacco crackle. As she exhaled she said, “She held the envelope and shivered. She said the letter meant death. Dorothea said death was in the room with us.”
     
     
     

Chapter   2
     
     
SUN TRINE MOON

Creative thinking resolves difficult circumstances; she will tackle difficulties with bold resolution. The subject feels at home wherever she is, but can be blind to the real extent of problems. She will not always notice if her marriage is falling apart; she doesn’t always nip problems in the bud.

From
Written in the Stars
, by Dorothea Dawson
     
     
     
    Anybody gullible enough to fall for the doom and gloom dished out by professional con merchants like astrologers certainly wasn’t going to have a problem with my expense sheets. Money for old rope, I reckoned. By Gloria’s own admission, hate mail was as much part of the routine in her line of work as travelling everywhere with stacks of postcard-sized photographs to autograph for the punters. OK, the tire slashing was definitely more serious, but that might be unconnected to the letters, an isolated act of vindictiveness. It was only because the Seer to the Stars had thrown a wobbler that this poison pen outbreak had been blown up to life-threatening proportions. “Does she often sense impending death when she does predictions for people?” I asked, trying not to snigger.
    Gloria shook her head vigorously. “I’ve never heard of anybody else getting a prediction like that.”
    “And have you told other people in the cast about it?”
    “Nobody,” she said. “It’s not the sort of thing you go on about.”
    Not unless you liked being laughed at, I reckoned. On the other