Chapter One #3
Only a few islands dotted the lake, the largest one an amoeba-shaped thing sitting smack-dab in its center.
Although it wasn’t labeled on the map, I knew from where I was being dropped off that it was my destination.
What I didn’t quite understand was how much water stretched between the two.
It all makes me more than a little nervous.
“That’s…far.”
“Too far to be making a movie there,” Pete says with a judgmental sniff.
“We’re not filming yet. This is just—”
I struggle to find a way to describe something I don’t fully understand myself. The movie itself will start shooting next week on a set still being built in North Carolina. This week in Vermont is part of preproduction. A boot camp, of sorts, for the five actresses starring in the movie.
“This is going to be a fast shoot,” Ronan said while explaining the schedule to me over lunch with him and Loretta the day after I was cast. “Down and dirty, so to speak. Small crew. Shooting in natural light. Since there won’t be a lot of room for error, I need all of you to have a good grasp on your characters before the cameras roll. I know it may seem a bit extreme.”
“He means obsessive,” Loretta added with an eye roll.
“Hey, this was your idea.”
Loretta patted his hand. “And you ran with it.”
“You created this project specifically with me in mind,” Ronan said. “You told me I was the only person capable of making this movie the right way. And this is the right way. So if that makes me obsessive, then guilty as charged.”
I looked between them, unsure if I was witnessing good-natured banter or real creative tension. “So we’re going to be spending an entire week on an island?”
“Five days, but close enough.” Ronan looked at me across the table, his glasses framing the excitement in his blue eyes.
“The only way this story will work is if audiences feel like they’ve been transported back in time.
Every detail, from the way your costumes are sewn to the glass in the windows, must be authentic. ”
That quest for authenticity, I learned, also extends to the cast. Ronan wants us to spend time on an island in Vermont, just like the women we’ll be playing did.
We’ll live the way they lived, including cooking the way they cooked, eating what they ate, dressing how they dressed.
That means no phones, no devices, nothing that didn’t exist in 1926.
While it all does seem obsessive, to use Loretta’s word, I also know it’s just the way Ronan works.
“It’s a retreat,” I finally say to Pete. “We’ll be living the way our characters did.”
“Will you be talking to ghosts, then?”
I give him a look, surprised he knows what the movie’s about. “You’ve heard of New Avalon?”
Pete nods, his eyes still focused on the island in the distance. “Everyone around these parts has.”
Odd.
I had never heard the story until Ronan and Loretta told me about it during that fateful lunch.
“I’m going to be completely honest,” Loretta said.
“I had reservations about giving this part to someone with no experience. But I saw your tape and was very impressed. Also, it’s only fair that Ronan gets his choice of actress, too.
We both agreed on Violet, because she’s a legendary talent, but the other three I foisted on him.
So when Ronan picked you, I immediately gave him the green light. ”
“What, exactly, does the part require?”
“No nudity,” Ronan said. “If that’s your concern.”
Yes, that certainly had been one of them. Over the years, actresses have been expected to say they don’t mind doing nude scenes if it’s important to the plot or the character’s journey. I am not one of those actresses. I don’t even like seeing myself naked in the bathroom mirror.
“There’s no sex whatsoever in this film,” Ronan added. “As for violence, it’s less physical and more…psychological.”
I nervously straightened in my chair. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Have you ever heard of New Avalon?”
“Is that the summer camp where those three girls disappeared?”
“No, but they share a common thread,” Ronan said. “New Avalon is an island in Vermont.”
“Not far from where I grew up,” Loretta chimed in.
“It used to be the summer retreat of the industrialist Roderick Semple, who got filthy rich making cannons and cannonballs during the Civil War. When he died, his spinster daughter, Ruth Hume Semple, turned it into some kind of commune. Every spring, she would arrive with a small group of women and head off to the island. She’d stay there all summer, with various women coming and going.
What they did on the island prompted quite a bit of speculation.
Some locals claimed it was a coven of witches.
There were rumors of chanting and bonfires and the women dancing naked in the woods.
Others swore they were harmless. Just a bunch of rich girls living off the land.
No one really knew what went on there—or even how many people were on the island at any given time—until 1926. ”
“That’s when they vanished,” Ronan said, denying Loretta the kicker to her own story.
The two of them continued to take turns as they told me how, at first, no one even knew the women were missing.
A local grocer hired to bring necessities to the island every week showed up one day and realized no one was there.
The women’s own boat was gone, leading him to think they’d left for some reason.
And when that boat was found empty on the lakeshore miles away, everyone assumed there’d been an accident and that the women drowned.
But no bodies were ever found in the water or on the island itself.
Nothing on New Avalon pointed to violence or an accident.
Nothing was damaged or disturbed. It was like the women vanished without a trace.
“The only strange thing the local grocer noticed about the empty island were several dresses hanging from the branches of an old oak tree,” Ronan said.
A chill passed through me then, even though we were outside, dining on a rooftop terrace in the August heat. “Why?”