Mirror Image

himself in the span of his career. It was known throughout the state that if stock footage of an event was needed and it couldn’t be found elsewhere, Van Lovejoy of KTEX in San Antonio would have it.
    He spent all his free time watching tapes. Tonight, his fascination was centered on the raw footage he had shot at the Rocking R Ranch a few days earlier. He’d delivered the tapes to MB Productions, but not before making copies of them for himself. He never knew when something he’d shot years earlier might prove useful or valuable, so he kept copies of everything.
    In post-production, MBP would write scripts, edit, record voice-overs, mix music, and end up with slick, fully produced commercials of varying lengths. Van’s camera work would look sterilized and staged by the time the commercials went out over the air. He didn’t care. He’d been paid. What interested him were the candid shots.
    Tate Rutledge was charismatic on or off camera. Handsome and affluent, he was a walking success story—the kind of man Van usually despised on principle. But if Van had been a voter, the guy would get his vote just because he seemed to shoot straight from the hip. He didn’t bullshit, even when what he was saying wasn’t particularly what people wanted to hear. He might lose the election, but it wouldn’t be because he lacked integrity.
    He kept thinking that there was something wrong with the kid. She was cute enough, although, in Van’s opinion, one kid looked like another. He usually wasn’t called upon to videotape children, but when he was, his experience had been that they had to be threatened or cajoled into settling down, behaving, and cooperating, especially when shooting retakes or reverse questions.
    That hadn’t been the case with the Rutledge kid. She was quiet and didn’t do anything ornery. She didn’t do anything, period, unless she was told to, and then she moved like a little wind-up doll. The one who got the most response out of her was Carole Rutledge.
    It was she who really held Van enthralled.
    Time and again he had played the tapes—those he’d shot of her at the ranch, and those he’d shot on the day she left the clinic. The lady knew what to do in front of a camera.
    He’d had to direct Rutledge and the kid, but not her. She was a natural, always turning toward the light, knowing instinctively where to look. She seemed to know what he was about to do before he did it. Her face begged for close-ups. Her body language wasn’t stilted or robotized, like most amateurs.
    She was a pro.
    Her resemblance to another pro he had known and worked with was damned spooky.
    For hours he had sat in front of his console, replaying the tapes and studying Carole Rutledge. When she did make an awkward move, he believed it was deliberate, as if she realized just how good she was and wanted to cover it up.
    He ejected one tape and inserted another, one he had shot so it could be played back in slow motion. He was familiar with the scene. It showed the threesome walking through a pasture of verdant grass, Rutledge carrying his daughter, his wife at his side. Van had planned his shot so that the sun was sinking behind the nearest hill, casting them in silhouette. It was a great effect, he thought now as he watched it for the umpteenth time.
    And then he saw it! Mrs. Rutledge turned her head and smiled up at her husband. She touched his arm. His smile turned stiff. He moved his arm—slightly, but enough to shrug off her wifely caress. If the tape hadn’t been in slow motion, Van might not have even noticed the candidate’s subtle rejection of his wife’s touch.
    He didn’t doubt when the post-production was done, the shot would be edited out. The Rutledges would come out looking like Ozzie and Harriet. But there was something wrong with the marriage, just like there was something wrong with the kid. Something stunk in Camelot.
    Van was a cynic by nature. It came as no surprise to him that the marriage was shaky. He figured they all were, and he didn’t give a flying fig.
    Yet the woman still fascinated him. He could swear that she had recognized him the other day before he had introduced himself. He was constantly aware of expressions and reactions, and he couldn’t have mistaken that momentary widening of her eyes or the quick rush of her breath. Even though the features weren’t identical, and the hairstyle was wrong, the resemblance between Carole Rutledge and Avery Daniels was uncanny. Carole’s