Chapter 1 #2
“Mr. Hart is not to be approached,” the guard had warned.
“I need to ask him a quick question.”
“You’re new here, right?”
“My first day.”
“First and last, if you don’t obey the number-one rule.
Don’t talk to Mr. Hart, don’t go within twenty feet of Mr. Hart without express permission, do not get in Mr. Hart’s way.
No autographs, no gossiping, no photos.” He’d pointed at the phone in Lana’s hand.
“You shouldn’t even have that out—leave it in Holding. ”
“But I wasn’t—”
“Don’t even look him in the eye.” Perhaps reading the mortification on Lana’s face, he’d relented, checking over his shoulder. “Be cool, okay? You’ll be dead soon, and he’ll have forgotten you by lunch.”
Forgettable, that’s what she was.
Another thing Lana had learned? In the hierarchy of Hollywood stardom, there were regular movie stars, there were stratospherically famous A-listers, and then there was Griffin Hart.
And yes, she was late to the party, being one of the last people in America to hear of him, but as more of a bookworm than a film buff, she was accustomed to her heroes staying confined to her imagination, not popping out in front of her in inarguably impressive 3D.
The extras who’d worked on the first season gleefully whispered that Mr. Hart had gotten various cast and crew fired for crimes as egregious as crossing his path, staring, having body odor, eating food from his table at craft services, and breaking into his trailer and stealing his toothbrush, though that last one was understandable.
But asshole or not, admiring Griffin Hart—from a legally acceptable distance where his personality didn’t matter—had become Lana’s guilty pleasure. With emphasis on the guilt, because his abs were not the reason she was here. Vivien was.
Not that Lana was getting far on that mission.
After a week of snooping, she knew little more than she had on the first day—that Vivien’s phone had last pinged a month ago in the foothills behind the set and that was the last anyone had seen or heard of her.
Despite several escape attempts, Lana hadn’t managed to explore the hills.
The security guards were having none of her claims that she needed to stretch her legs.
She was expected to be on the set or in Holding, and the background-actor wranglers corralled their human cattle between the two.
She’d innocently asked the other extras about accidents on set, and all they’d come up with was the time Estelle Duman fell through a trapdoor into a dungeon and twisted her ankle, and Griffin Hart leaped down and carried her out through the tunnels to the set medic.
Lana had struck up conversation with the woman she’d deduced to be Vivien’s replacement and learned that Vivien had been considered a “flake” and her absence was notable only for its inconvenience.
“I assume she couldn’t handle the pressure,” the woman had said, shrugging.
It was one of those rare times Lana felt a pang of longing for her hometown in Washington State.
There, someone would have noticed. Someone would have cared.
She’d wondered if someone would make the link between her and Vivien, but no one had. Fleming was a common enough surname, and though they had the same long, dark hair, brown eyes, and slight build, so did a lot of people.
“The thing is, your sister doesn’t fall into the right category to prompt an intensive search,” the cop at the Fitch Police Station had explained, a week ago.
Lana had driven the four hours from L.A.
in frustration after her calls had gone unanswered.
Once inside the tiny station, she realized why—the phone out front just kept on ringing.
“The right category?” Lana said.
Officer Milo Sheng sniffed as he tapped his computer screen, open at Vivien’s Missing Person Report. “A history of antisocial behavior, substance abuse, misdemeanors. And she’s a prior missing,” he added darkly.
“What does that mean?”
“She’s been reported missing in the past, and she turned up.”
“That was when she joined a guerrilla gardening squad. My mistake.”
“A guerrilla—?”
“They go around cities, sneakily planting gardens in urban areas. She eventually called me from Salt Lake. Point is, this is different.”
“In what way?”
“She … missed my birthday.”
The cop’s eyebrows lurched upward, which was the most animation he’d displayed. To her relief, the phone stopped ringing. She took a breath. She hadn’t realized how much the haranguing ringtone was stressing her out. It immediately started again.
“She would never miss anyone’s birthday,” Lana continued. “Even when she was on an extreme meditation retreat one year, she snuck away to call me.”
“An extreme—?”
“Not important. Point is, she makes a big deal of birthdays. Hers is on February 29—leap day—so sometimes people leave it off their calendars. And it was my thirtieth.”
Lana swallowed. She’d promised herself, on her birthday, that Vivien would call.
No matter how troubled her sister could be, she was sweet and loyal and would never miss calling Lana on any birthday, let alone a significant one.
She would even have forgiven Lana for their last conversation, in which Vivien had (again) asked for money, and Lana had snapped back, “I’m a public librarian.
I don’t have any money. You’re thirty-two.
Isn’t it time you started taking care of yourself?
” Lana should have been the bigger person.
Sure, Vivien had a steady job and a boyfriend—or so Lana had thought—but she was always going through something.
Instead, Lana had doubled down: “I give up! Solve your own problems, for a change!”
On her birthday, Lana had hovered over her phone, telling herself Vivien would definitely call by eight a.m. Vivien always insisted on being the first to sing you Happy Birthday.
It was like a superstition. Lana told herself she’d be so grateful to hear Vivien’s smoky voice that she’d resist demanding to know where she’d been.
When eight a.m. slipped by, and then nine, Lana extended the deadline to eleven, then two p.m., then five p.m. Even at midnight, she told herself Vivien had gone on an interstate road trip and miscalculated the time difference.
At three a.m. she ran out of fabricated excuses—and hope.
“I take it you’ve checked her home address?
” Officer Sheng said. Lana rubbed her breastbone, trying to dislodge the anxious knot in her lungs.
Again, the phone stopped ringing, and she exhaled.
Again, it started. “It’s not listed on the report.
Says here the DMV address is out of date. She’s homeless?”
“I don’t know. She moves around a lot, chasing films. Last I knew, she was living with her boyfriend in North Hollywood.”
“Julian Vega?” the cop said, scrolling down.
“That’s him. But when I showed up at their apartment a few weeks ago, he was moving out. Turned out they’d broken up a month or so earlier and she’d left.”
“And you believed him?”
“You think I shouldn’t have?”
“I have no idea. She hadn’t told you about the breakup?”
“No.”
“Was that unusual?”
“Yes, but we had argued.”
“About what?”
“Money, mostly. She asked for a loan.”
“Ah,” he said, as if that cleared up the matter.
“But there was more to it. Julian said she’d gotten obsessed with something.
Some secret she said could ‘blow lives apart.’ She’d be on her laptop at all hours, and she’d switch screens when he came near.
Once, she went to the bathroom and he looked up her search history but found nothing.
And not ‘nothing’ as in ‘nothing much.’ Nothing as in, she’d wiped it before going to the bathroom.
In her own house. Who does that? This is a woman who’s a chronic over-sharer. She’s not good with secrets.”
“It does seem like she was troubled,” the cop said, choosing his words carefully. “Any history of mental illness?”
“Nothing diagnosed. Can we subpoena her search history? Check her bank records?”
“That would be some process. I understand your concern, but an adult acting strange and disappearing isn’t a strong probable cause. I see she previously claimed to have been abducted by aliens?”
“That was less about little green men and more about little white pills.”
“Miss Fleming, I’d love to say I’ll put a team of detectives on this, but I don’t have that power, or resource.
She’s a grown woman with a history of unpredictable behavior and there’s no evidence of foul play.
Look, I used to work in Missing Persons.
The number of active cases in California averages—”
“Twenty thousand.” Lana’s mind kindly supplied the Dewey decimal number, as it so often did at times it wasn’t at all useful: 363.2336: Missing Persons. She sat straighter. “How about an AMBER alert?”
“That’s for a child abduction. See, those twenty thousand missing people? Most are missing because they want to be, for one reason or another.”
“A BOLO?” she said, spelling out each letter. “‘Be On The Lookout?’”
“We call that a ‘bolo,’ and you’ve watched too much TV.”
“Read too many books. Otherwise, I’d know how to pronounce it. I assumed it was an acronym.”
“A bolo is for immediate risks.”
“But she could be at risk.”
“You don’t have evidence of that, beyond her ghosting you. She could well be sitting at home—wherever that might be—binge-watching Friends.”
“I’m not sure she has many friends. How about an APB? Or do you pronounce that ay-pib?”
“Not applicable and, no, that’s an APB.”
“You see how that’s confusing? Are you going to answer that?” She pointed at the phone, inadvertently raising her voice. She collected herself and added through clenched teeth, “It could be important.”
“If it’s urgent they’ll call 9-1-1. If I sat there answering the phone all day, I wouldn’t get a single thing done.”