What Remains of Me Read online

  DEDICATION

  FOR JAMES CONRAD, FOREVER MY “MAIN”

  EPIGRAPH

  I would like more sisters, that the taking out of one, might not leave such stillness.

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Alison Gaylin

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  At Carpentia Women’s State Correctional Facility in Central California, the thermostat is always kept at a chilly 55 degrees. There’s a practical psychology in this, one of the guards tells me. In cooler temperatures, prisoners are more alert and productive, more courteous too.

  “The heat,” the guard says, black velvet eyes belying his tall, muscular frame. “It does things to people.”

  In a way, Kelly Lund’s story proves out the guard’s point, for it was on June 28, 1980—the hottest night of the year—that Lund, then 17 and hopped up on a combination of marijuana and cocaine, walked into the Hollywood Hills mansion of Oscar-nominated director John McFadden and, in the midst of his own wrap party, shot him to death. Was it the heat, not the drugs, that drove this ordinary girl to enter a home filled with Tinseltown elite—with uber-cool rock stars and impossibly sleek models and the silver screen gods and goddesses whose glorious faces graced the pages of the movie magazines that lonely Kelly was known to have stashed under her bed?

  Was it the 93-degree temperature—and perhaps the blinding rage it sparked—that propelled this Hollywood have-not past a glittering constellation of haves and into McFadden’s opulent, Moroccan-themed living room where, finding him alone, she pumped three bullets into his chest and skull?

  I consider that possibility now, as the guard leads me into Lund’s cell—the tidy, dull square that has been her home for the past seven years. And as I reach the cell to find her sitting on her cot in her institutional orange, I decide, in my own way, to raise the issue.

  “Kelly, do you ever miss the sun?”

  She turns her gaze up to me, her gray eyes hard, dry as prison bars. In seven years, Kelly Lund hasn’t aged a day. It’s hard to imagine she ever will. Her skin is unlined, the whole of her as impervious to time as she is to all transformative emotions—shame, regret, caring. Guilt.

  “The sun is still there,” she says. “No reason to miss it.”

  “John McFadden isn’t here anymore.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you miss him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you feel bad about killing him?”

  “It was meant to be.”

  “His death?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “If it wasn’t, someone would have noticed me before I made it into the den.” She pauses for a moment, deciding whether or not to go on. Weighing her options. “I see myself,” she says, finally, “as an agent of fate.”

  “Fate didn’t murder John McFadden, Kelly. You did.”

  Lund’s gaze drifts, and for a moment, she appears immersed in the dull gray wall of her cell, as though she sees something in it that exists in herself. “You have your belief system,” she tells me. “I have mine.”

  On one level, it is probably a defense mechanism, Kelly Lund’s complete lack of spark, of color. When she was just 15, her fraternal twin sister, Catherine, stole their mother’s car, drove to Chantry Flats—a remote overlook in the San Gabriel Valley favored by lovers—and took her own life by flinging herself into the canyon. An aspiring actress, Catherine had been everything Kelly Lund was not—beautiful, vibrant, and with a natural charisma potent enough to gain her entry into Hollywood’s young party circuit at the tender age of 14. But she was also troubled, vulnerable—the type of girl who felt everything a little too deeply—and who ultimately, tragically, let those feelings get the best of her.

  Conversely, it may have been Kelly Lund’s very blandness that kept her alive and afloat in the same tank of sharks that devoured her sister. The block of ice to Catherine’s fast-burning flame, Kelly had few friends, and—outside of a brief and puzzling relationship with McFadden’s son Vincent—lived a largely uneventful life before committing the brutal act that would gain her the fame her lovely twin died for lack of.

  “I almost didn’t go to the party, you know,” she says to me now. “It was hot out and I wasn’t feeling so great. But then, I changed my mind.” Never before have I seen a face so utterly placid, a pair of eyes so still.

  I can’t help wondering what those eyes must have looked like through John McFadden’s lens a week before his death, when on his son’s insistence, he’d filmed Kelly Lund. “Would you still have killed John,” I ask, “if he had been nice to you at the screen test?”

  Lund smiles—the same smile she offered the world outside the L.A. courthouse the day of her sentencing. Not a smile at all, really. More a baring of the teeth. “How should I know?” she says.

  The room grows even colder.

  EXCERPTED FROM

  Mona Lisa: The True Story of

  Hollywood Killer Kelly Lund

  by Sebastian Todd, 1989

  CHAPTER 1

  FEBRUARY 11, 1980

  It was when Kelly Lund’s science teacher, Mr. Hansen, asked her the third question in a row that she wasn’t able to answer—the one about mitochondria—that Bellamy Marshall passed her a note. Kelly said “um” and swallowed hard to get her dry mouth working when she felt the balled-up paper hit her in the leg. She didn’t think note at first, though. She thought spitball.

  Kelly got spitballed a lot. So often, in fact, that she’d once told her mom about it. “They throw spitballs at me,” she’d said. “They laugh at my clothes because they’re so cheap.”

  “Cheap?” Mom had said. “Your clothes cover you up where you should be covered, which is more than I can say about those other girls you go to school with. If you want to talk about cheap, Kelly. Those girls are what I call cheap.”

  Kelly had made a secret vow never to talk to her mom about school again.

  So she didn’t look at the note when it hit her leg. She ignored it, the way she ignored all the spitballs, the way she ignored so much of what happened to her, in school and elsewhere. Ignore it and it will go away. It worked for most things that hurt, if not all.

  Mr. Hansen said the thing about mitochondria again, Kelly trying to hang on to the words, to mold them into something that made a little bit of sense. But she couldn’t. She felt the sun pressing through the classroom windows and the itchiness of her cardigan sweater and the elastic of her peasant skirt cutting into skin—all of those things so much more real than the question.

  Everyone wa
s watching her. She felt that too.

  “Miss Lund?” Mr. Hansen said.

  Kelly gazed at the floor. Her eyelids fluttered. She felt herself starting to escape . . . “Miss Lund.”

  For a few seconds, or maybe it was more, Kelly slipped into a dream—an actual dream of being seven years old and with her sister again, of sitting cross-legged on their bedroom floor, of sitting knee to knee with Catherine, staring as hard as she could into Catherine’s bottle green eyes.

  “Whoever moves first, dies.”

  “But . . . but . . . I don’t want to die, Catherine.”

  Catherine places a hand on hers. It is warm and dry and calming. “Don’t be scared, Kelly. You know me. I always move first.”

  “Miss Lund! Am I keeping you awake?”

  Kelly’s eyes flipped open. She heard herself say, “No. I’m falling asleep just fine.”

  Oh no . . .

  A strange silence fell over the room—an airless feeling. Mr. Hansen blinked, his jaw tightening. Kelly knew she was supposed to say “I’m sorry,” and she started to, but before she could get the words out everyone started to laugh. It took Kelly a few moments to register that the kids were laughing with her, not at her. That never happened. Her heart beat faster. Her face warmed.

  “Good one,” said Pete Nichol behind her, Pete a champion spitball thrower who had never said anything directly to Kelly ever. Pete—tall and shining blond and rich too. The son of the producer of one of Kelly’s favorite TV shows, swimmers’ hair like white silk. Pete Nichol clapped Kelly on the back and Mr. Hansen said, “Miss Lund. You are on detention,” and that made everyone laugh louder. Some even cheered.

  Kelly turned and ventured a look back at the class and that’s when she saw the balled-up piece of paper on the floor next to her leg—not a spitball—and when she glanced up and toward the next row over, Bellamy Marshall was gesturing at the paper, her silver bracelets jangling.

  Read it, Bellamy mouthed.

  Bellamy was new, the daughter of a famous actor named Sterling Marshall who’d been a big deal in the ’50s and ’60s and still kind of was. She’d started at Hollywood High after Christmas break, having been expelled from a fancy private school in Santa Monica for mysterious reasons. There was drama in that, high drama in the way Bellamy had shown up a week after school restarted, slipping into the back row of Mr. Hansen’s class, the very back row, though Mr. Hansen had pointed at an empty seat in the front. Kelly had turned to look at this daring new girl in her bangle bracelets and designer jeans, her luxe leather jacket, Bellamy Marshall ignoring Mr. Hansen and breathing through frosty parted lips, like a movie heroine on the run.

  Bellamy had smiled at Kelly and Kelly had smiled back, wanting to be her friend but a little sad for knowing that it wasn’t possible. Not with this girl—this shining rich, leather jacketed girl who’d only smiled at Kelly because she didn’t know any better . . .

  That had been more than a month ago.

  Once Mr. Hansen got everybody quiet, once he called on Phoebe Calloway in the front row and asked her the mitochondria question and Kelly felt reasonably invisible again, she kicked the piece of paper closer to her desk. She slipped it off the floor, unfolded it quietly.

  PARTY AFTER SCHOOL. MY PLACE.

  Kelly turned to Bellamy to make sure it wasn’t a joke. She wore a different leather jacket today—a brown bomber. She probably had a closet full of them, all real leather.

  Bellamy mouthed, Well? And then she winked at Kelly. She didn’t look like someone who was joking.

  Yes, Kelly nodded, amazed at this moment. Amazed at this day.

  IT WASN’T REALLY A PARTY. JUST BELLAMY, KELLY, TWO BOYS FROM the soccer team, and a tall, skinny twenty-three-year-old guy named Len with a pencilly mustache and a sandwich bag full to bursting with what he called “Humbolt’s finest.” They met up in the school parking lot, Len shaking the Baggie at Bellamy and grinning.

  The two boys piled into Len’s black Trans Am, while Kelly rode with Bellamy in her red VW Rabbit. They drove in the opposite direction from where Kelly lived, sped across Sunset Boulevard and past Barney’s Beanery, Bellamy swerving around slow drivers, sunglasses focused on the road, silver bangle bracelets slipping up and down her wrists as she steered. They drove up, up, up, into the hills, neither one of them talking, just listening to the radio, to The Knack’s “Good Girls Don’t”—a song Kelly had never liked, not until now.

  Kelly had expected to be nervous when she got in the car, but Bellamy not talking to her felt like not getting called on in class. It put her at ease.

  “Hand me my cigs, would you?” Bellamy said. “They’re in my purse.”

  Kelly picked Bellamy’s bag off the car floor—a Louis Vuitton. A lot of the girls at school had these. They called them “Louie Vouies” and treated them in such an offhand way, tossing them around like they were worth nothing, but Kelly knew better. Her mother had shown her one at I. Magnin once, tapping her nails on the price tag. “Who would spend this kind of money?” she had said. Kelly’s mother worked at I. Magnin behind the makeup counter. But even with her discount, she never bought anything there for Kelly or for herself. “It’s obscene,” she would say, about the prices, about the entire store. Kelly never replied. She found it beautiful.

  “Someday,” Mom would say, “I’ll get us out of this town.”

  Carefully, Kelly unzipped the bag. She plucked out a box of Marlboro Reds—Mom’s brand—and handed it to her.

  “You can have one too,” Bellamy said.

  “Thanks.”

  Bellamy lit one off the car lighter, then slipped it to Kelly without looking at her. The gesture made her feel as though they’d known each other for years. Bellamy rolled the windows down and Kelly blew a cloud of smoke into the warming air.

  “Len likes you,” Bellamy said, “I can tell.”

  Kelly felt her cheeks redden. “How do you know him?”

  She shrugged. “Just . . . around,” she said. “He can be a jerk but he’s always got good weed. And I love the smell of his car.”

  “Is he really twenty-three?”

  “Yep.”

  “Wow.”

  Through the windshield, the Hollywood sign loomed before them, making Kelly think of Catherine. It always did—how she used to brag about their view of it to anyone who’d listen. “You can see the sign from our apartment,” she’d say, leaning on the word sign as though she were talking about the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower, when the truth was, the Hollywood sign had been an eyesore back then—full of holes, crumbling into the hills, the first and third o’s missing almost entirely.

  “Who wants to see it?” Kelly would say to her. “It’s ugly.”

  “No it isn’t. It just needs fixing.”

  Two years ago, a whole bunch of rich movie stars and politicians had taken interest in the rotting sign and rebuilt it. Alice Cooper had even donated his first o to replace the more destroyed of the two and declared himself Alice Coper for the rest of the year—something Catherine would have found funny if she’d still been alive . . .

  On the radio, The Knack was fading into Tom Petty—that song Kelly liked about a girl raised on promises. She took another drag off her Red and gazed out at Catherine’s sign—sparkling white in the sun, the letters whole and welcoming. Some things do wind up getting fixed.

  “You were killer today,” Bellamy said.

  “Huh?”

  “In science! How did you get the balls to say that to Hansen?”

  “Oh,” Kelly said, remembering. “It uh . . . it just sort of came out, I guess.”

  “‘I’m falling asleep just fine . . .’” Bellamy said. “Man. That made my whole year. My whole life.”

  Kelly took another drag off her cigarette, smiled a little. “I just had to say it,” she said. “He was being so annoying.”

  Bellamy laughed—warm and contagious—and Kelly joined in. She tried to remember the last time she’d laughed at something that wasn’t on TV. It ha
d to be back when Catherine was still alive, when they were still little kids. “Hansen’s face,” Bellamy gasped. “He was clenching his teeth so tight, I thought his eyes were going to pop out!” And Kelly laughed some more, Tom Petty singing about his American Girl, the whole car full of music.

  Finally, they caught their breath. Bellamy slowed down at a stoplight, braking smoothly. She was a good driver. Kelly couldn’t drive at all. She’d signed up for Driver’s Ed, but hadn’t made it to most of the classes. What was the point? Mom would never let her use the car anyway.

  “So,” Bellamy said. “I guess they let you out early for a first offense?”

  “Huh?”x

  “You know. I expected you to be stuck in detention ’til sunset.”

  Kelly’s mouth went dry. Miss Lund. You are on detention. Mr. Hansen had used those words. She’d never been on detention before, woodwork kid that she was—one out of a mismatched set, the quiet twin, the dull one. Beyond bad grades, she’d never gotten into any type of trouble before today, never acted up, barely spoke. But here, this, her very first time and she’d . . . Mom will kill me. She turned to Bellamy, cheeks burning. “I didn’t go to detention,” she said. “I never checked in.”

  Bellamy blinked her mascaraed eyes. “You’re serious?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I forgot.”

  She turned back to the road as the light changed to green, her face cracking into a bright grin. “I think I’m falling in love with you, Kelly Lund,” she said.

  Kelly grinned too. She couldn’t help herself.

  WHEN THEY GOT TO BELLAMY’S HOUSE, THE BOYS WERE ALREADY waiting out in front. “What’s your name, sweetheart?” Len said. He kept smiling at Kelly, a slippery smile.

  “Her name’s Kelly, not Sweetheart,” Bellamy said. “Try and keep from drooling.”

  One of the soccer boys said, “Who cares about names? Let’s smoke.”

  Kelly was only half-listening. She couldn’t stop gawking at Bellamy’s house. It was huge—an adobe palace with a gleaming red tile roof, balconies all around. They’d driven through a gate to get here, up a long, palm-lined driveway that slithered up the side of Mount Lee, Kelly’s ears clicking with each rising turn. It had made her heart pound, this drive, like traveling to another world.