CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 26
How Can You Sleep When the World Is Burning?
I put Harper to bed, muttering and drunk in a way I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her. 94 I leave water, a garbage can, and some Tylenol by her bedside. She’ll be embarrassed and in pain in the morning, and if I could use some device to erase her memories, I would.
And yeah, I know there are consequences to doing that.
That’s what the movies tell us, anyway. But I’m not so sure. If we could find a way to eliminate memories of our worst mistakes, wouldn’t we all be better off?
But for now, Harper is forgetting. Because that’s what sleep is. A way to shut out the day and live in another world. I’ll let her do that for as long as she likes.
I close her door as quietly as I can and let out a long sigh.
“Is she okay?” Oliver asks.
He moves behind me and starts massaging my shoulders. I lean against his chest, and a large part of me wants to turn around and put my mouth on his and end up in the bedroom, where we can’t talk and can’t remember either.
“She’ll live,” I say. “But she won’t ever be the same.”
“It’s hard to believe...Shawna, of all people.” I can feel Oliver’s breath against my neck.
I turn around. Oliver’s taken apart his bow tie, the ties loose around his neck, and undone the top buttons on his shirt. He looks tired and comfortable at the same time, like a rumpled bed you want to crawl into.
But I shake that impulse away because I can’t let my guard down.
Not with Shawna on the loose.
“Did you lock the front door?”
“Yes. And I put the chain on and a chair under it for good measure. I’ll keep watch.”
“I’ll do it with you.”
I move away from him, walking to the window. It’s rain-streaked. The ocean looks black. Or maybe all I’m looking at is the night, dark and menacing.
It occurs to me how very isolated we are here.
Because of course we are.
But even if we weren’t, that doesn’t matter.
One person with a determined plan can cause so much chaos whether it’s dark out or not.
I know that better than most.
I pull the curtains closed.
“What did Officer Anderson tell you?” Oliver asks.
I catch him up on the details. What she found in Shawna’s room. How Shawna’s still missing. What it must mean for what’s been happening. How there are still so many things that don’t make sense.
“What’s this about the script colors?” Oliver asks.
“The final script before you start shooting has a white cover. And then, every shooting day, we get sides—that’s the pages that are being shot that day—with the call sheet. If there are any revisions, they give you those pages in the revision color so you can swap them out in your script. And then a new cover for the script with the new version number on it.”
“Why do they do this?”
“No idea. But here, you can see my script.”
I locate it in my bag and pull it out. It’s got a green cover and the words “REVISION #5” written on it with a date from near the end of filming. I’m a bit anal about certain things, so I’d collated the new pages along with the old, which means my script is multicolored.
The cover page says that the script is co-written by David Liu and Simone Banerjee. I hadn’t noticed it at the time, and Simone’s name isn’t on the script that was found in Shawna’s room. This means Simone had to have changed at least 50 percent of the script since filming began. Which, now that I think about it, David mentioned before.
Is that relevant to this, though? It’s not a crime to make changes to a script.
Only a book.
Ha.
“Remember what Harper said earlier about David?” Oliver asks. “About how he had hardly any credits?”
“You think it’s relevant?”
“I’m not sure.” Oliver rubs at his stubble. “This is all too familiar.”
“I was thinking the same thing. You think he’s involved in what’s been happening?”
“Maybe, maybe not. But I don’t think Shawna was working alone. She also doesn’t have a motive. And she’s too junior to have enough sway over what happened...”
“You think she was working for David?”
“She could be.”
“Why?”
“Call it a hunch.”
“Do you know something you’re not telling me?”
“No,” Oliver says. “But it feels like we’re missing something. Someone. You know how when you’re working out the plot and you can’t quite close the loop on the mystery?”
“Of course.” 95
“That’s what this is like.”
“You think there needs to be a third-act twist.”
“Doesn’t there?”
“I wish there wasn’t. Maybe we should talk to David and find out.”
“I’m sure Officer Anderson wants us to keep out of it.”
“She does for sure.” In fact, she’d said that very thing to me when I was getting Harper out of the bar. Don’t go investigating this yourself... 96 “But I feel like we can get things out of people that she can’t.”
“Magical thinking.”
“Is it? She doesn’t know us. She doesn’t know the personalities at work.”
“Lucky her.”
“And we did figure it out in Italy.”
“Not before you almost died.”
“True, but that was the drinking. I’m sharper than that now.”
Oliver gives me a look because I’ve been drinking tonight, too.
“I’m not proposing going up on any tall buildings, just talking to David and Allison.”
He puts a hand on my waist. “I worry about you.”
“I’m glad.” I pull in a deep breath.
“So we talk to David and Allison.”
“Agreed. Should we go over there? Invite them here?”
“They’re one room over,” Oliver says. He points to a door in the wall. “Through there.”
“We have an adjoining room with a potential murderer?”
“I’d expect nothing less.”
After a private moment where we pluck up our courage, 97 we knock on the door and Allison answers it after I tell her it’s me.
She’s dressed down in comfortable-looking sweats and a hoodie. David’s in a pair of flannel pajamas. They look domestic and innocent and like we might’ve interrupted them in an intimate moment. I brush away my embarrassment as it occurs to me that we haven’t examined Allison as a suspect.
If it’s Connor who was the intended victim, that puts her in the hot seat. Maybe she got a taste of Connor almost dying in Italy and liked it. And the fact that he’s still here, still in her life, was suddenly too much?
Of course that logic could apply to me, too.
Nothing’s really changed since Italy, has it?
No, something has changed.
Things are better between us. We’re bantering. We’re working together without friction.
And it’s ruining my life.
Okay, “ruining” is a big word. But it’s definitely affecting me and Oliver. So it needs to stop. I need to put Connor in my rearview.
But not by killing him.
Besides, as you may have noticed, I’m not a long-term planner.
But Allison?
Allison is . She could’ve set all this up—I’m not sure how, exactly, but she has the means to do it. Means, motive, opportunity. She has the motive, too. Oh! Even more of one now that Connor just signed a huge book deal (!) because if he dies, the balance of her divorce settlement is due. 98 Before, it wasn’t clear if he had enough money left to cover it, but now...high six figures just for the film rights. That’s a lot of money. More than I can believe he got for his book. But never mind about that.
She has a motive.
And as for opportunity—she’s been here the whole time. She was on set, too. She could’ve left the notes. She’d know about all of the ins and outs of production from David.
Wait, wait, wait...I’ve been thinking David was the one who seduced Allison, but what if it was the other way around? What if she saw that he was weak, and he was her way into the When in Rome production?
I mean, who auditions to play themselves in a movie? 99
“What do you want, Eleanor?” Allison asks. “It’s been a long day.”
“Don’t you want to know who did it?”
“It’s Shawna, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” David says. “I don’t like your tone.”
“We don’t think Shawna was behind it. Not exclusively.”
Allison frowns. “Why do you think that?”
“Have you met Shawna?”
“She was acting, obviously.”
“No one’s that good of an actress.”
Allison lifts her chin. “You don’t know anything about it.”
“Oh? Please tell me.”
“What are you implying?”
“That maybe there’s more than one good actress on this trip.”
Allison stares at me for a moment, and then she throws her head back and laughs. “Oh my God, Eleanor. You know you’re bad at this, don’t you?”
“No, I’m not.”
“You are, though. You think I’m behind all of this? How could that possibly be true?”
“I haven’t worked it out yet, but you have a motive, you have the means, and you had the opportunity.”
“A motive to kill Emma and Fred?”
“No, Connor.”
“I see. And I was in cahoots with Tyler to do this? I only met him a few weeks ago. And why would Tyler want to kill Connor?”
“Tyler was a red herring. Shawna had a cloned phone for him. He wasn’t the one texting with José. She was.”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“Easy to say.”
“Please. Is that all you have?”
I’m starting to get that desperate feeling when I know I’m right, but I can’t explain why. “You’re the one who did it in the script.”
“Excuse me?”
“Like I said yesterday at the ropes course...The big twist. It was all a long con between Connor and Allison. They identified Cecilia as an heiress and targeted her to get her money. And they get away with it. Cecilia doesn’t even find a way to get back at them.”
I know, right? It’s stupid . And it’s not what happened in When in Rome , the book. But that’s the movie we’ve been filming. At least I think it is. There have been so many changes along the way it’s hard to keep track.
I may have...lost the plot.
And yes, I have been saving that one in my drafts folder for a while.
You know me that well by now, right?
“That’s not how the movie ends.”
“What?”
“You were there, Eleanor. Remember Shutters? Connor and Cecilia and their happy ending?”
My brain starts to whir. Allison’s right. That’s the scene we shot. Cecilia and Connor clinking Champagne glasses, being all loved up at Shutters.
Am I losing my mind?
No.
I mean, yes, obviously, but not about this.
“Okay,” I say, “but if that’s true, how come you were there on Thursday? You were on the call sheet.”
“That’s for the alternative ending,” David says.
“The what ?”
“You know, sometimes they shoot two endings to a movie and see which one tests better.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Allison asks.
“Something, I think,” Oliver says in a measured tone, but his voice is harder than it usually is, and this gets Allison’s attention in a way my spinning theories hasn’t.
“You think this is about the movie?”
“Not the way you mean, but...David, you wrote the script a long time ago, yes?”
David nods slowly. “Tyler hired me to write it when it was first optioned.”
“And you’d worked with him before?”
“That’s right. One credited script and a bunch of backroom rewrites.”
“And then what happened?”
David gnaws at his bottom lip. “Hollywood.”
“Fred?”
“That’s right.”
“Tell us.”
“It’s an old story, isn’t it? Write a script, everyone gets excited, an actor comes in and tells you how much he loves it and how much he’s going to make it happen, and then...poof, the project is dead.”
“Was that Fred’s fault?” I say.
David takes a beat. “He took another film. In fact, I believe he used the interest in him for this movie to parlay a better deal for himself on that film.”
“Doesn’t that sort of thing happen all the time?” Oliver says.
“Not to friends .”
I try to keep my face impassive. I doubt very highly that Fred was a friend. He’s not the type to have friends in the lower classes of Hollywood.
“You got paid, though, didn’t you?” I ask.
“Um, no.” David laughs bitterly. “Have you never heard of development?”
“I know it can take a long time.”
“Right, and if it’s the beginning of your career or even the middle, it’s often free.”
“You wrote a whole script for free?”
“I did.”
“Why?”
He makes a dismissive gesture. I should know this, he’s saying. “Because Tyler was where my work was coming from. And Fred was involved. It was green-lit. It was happening. I’d get paid on the first day of principal photography.”
“Which only happened a couple of months ago.”
“Yes.”
“You resent Tyler,” I say.
“Wouldn’t you?”
“And Fred?”
“Fred is a lightweight.”
“And you don’t like Emma,” I say. “Because she got you turfed from the only other movie you’ve ever done.”
“And you came back to this project,” Oliver says. “Why?”
“I wanted to get paid.”
“Where are you going with all of this?” Allison asks. “Why are you excavating David’s career?”
“Because David has a motive,” I say.
“For what?”
“To kill Fred and Emma and pin it on Tyler,” Oliver says with a solid certainty.
Oh, how I love this man. I really don’t want to lose him.
“I thought Connor was the intended victim?” Allison says.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“David didn’t do it, Eleanor,” Allison says.
“Why are you so sure?”
“Why would he? At this juncture? Right when he’s finally getting the success he deserves? And sorry, darling, but planning isn’t his strong suit.”
“I don’t think that’s fair,” David says.
“Are you trying to convince us that you could have planned this murder?”
“Well, no, of course not—”
“The point is,” Allison says, “it would be counter to his interests to kill anyone right now, especially on the production. Assuming that killing someone is a reasonable or even possible response to Hollywood being Hollywood.”
“She has a point,” Oliver says.
I sigh. “I know.”
“So what now?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” David says.
“What’s obvious?”
“Who’s behind it all.”
“Oh, really? Tell us then.”
“It’s Fred.”
94 Okay, maybe once when she was a teenager, but a drunk driver killed our parents. That puts a cap on alcohol consumption. Not that I don’t indulge—you know this about me—but I never drive if I’ve had a glass of wine. And I’m always checking to make sure my consumption is reasonable overall. Please note all you’ve ever seen is me on vacation .
95 I feel like that all the time. One of the downsides of being a pantser. But it always comes together in the end.
96 That Officer Anderson would assume I’d follow her directions to stay out of it is either very naive or very trusting, neither of which are great qualities for a cop. Or a mystery writer.
97 No, we didn’t have sex. That would have taken too long .
98 I found this out in Italy.
99 Okay, John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich , but that movie was cool . And yeah, fine, Keanu Reeves did it, too. Whatever, you get my point.