Yet Ben had hit close to an uncomfortable truth without even trying, his peculiar talent. So far, Greer hadn’t been able to bridge the gap between wanting to write and writing. For one thing, there was never any time. But when she did find a free hour to sit in front of her computer, she froze. Staring at a blank screen almost made her feel sorry for Ben, something she never felt. Filling up that emptiness with her own ideas and stories – it seemed as unfathomable as contemplating one’s own death. Where did a story begin? What kind of story should she tell? In the early days, when Ben still sort of liked her – or, more correctly, didn’t actively dislike her – he would offer advice. “Take one idea – for example, the housebound private investigator, à la Nero Wolfe. Add something new – a female Archie Goodwin. That’s all we had when we started Ottoman’s Empire and everyone loved it.”
Everyone but the viewers, she had amended silently.
Idea number one: A girl wants to work in the movies. Idea number two: She gets a job, through hard work, and keeps her eyes open. But that was just her life, and she could not imagine her life becoming a movie or a television show. If her life had been rich enough to be the stuff of fiction, she wouldn’t be so desperate to flee it.
What she could imagine was success, the end result, at once vague and specific. She had – yes, why not, it wasn’t wrong to dream, quite the opposite – she had even imagined herself in a gown – floor length, gold, assuming gold was a favored trend, with a high waist to make the most of her top-heavy figure, although she would probably be thinner by the time she won a big award, having found the time and money for a personal trainer. In her fantasy, the statue was an Oscar, which made no sense relative to her own ambitions, but the Oscar looked to be a far more satisfactory object to clutch than the Emmy, with its sharp, pointy wings.
She had held an Emmy, secretly. Flip had won one, awarded for a spec script written for a long-running comedy. Just twenty-three at the time – younger than she was now – he had written it as a calling card, determined to break into the business without using the connections that his father could have provided. Flip had never expected to sell it, but the producers had loved it and used it, revising only a third of it. Greer knew this story because Flip had told it often, in almost every interview. “I was so depressed to find out that they had rewritten some of my pages. I didn’t know that first-timers often see their scripts rewritten from top to bottom, much less that spec scripts seldom become episodes, much less that they go on to be submitted for awards.” Greer was skeptical of that story. Could Phil Tumulty’s son really be that naïve about the television business?
She glanced again at the clock, realized she had forgotten to send the backup electronic copies of the call sheet and quickly fired it off to the mailing list. Lottie would chew her out for that, even though the paper copies had been distributed hours earlier. The call sheet shouldn’t fall to the show runner’s assistant, but Lottie had somehow finagled that. Greer assumed it was punishment for wanting to work for Flip instead of Lottie, but then Alicia had been forced to do it, too, when she was Flip’s assistant. She debated once more whether to call the detective again. Flip had to know it was wrong to call people past 10:59. Greer’s mother still jumped when the phone rang that late, her flutter of panic running through the house. God, it had been good to get out of that sad little house, even if it had meant moving in with JJ. What would Flip say tomorrow, when Greer admitted that she hadn’t been able to get the Monaghan woman on the phone? He would sigh, disappointed. Or he might have forgotten already why he had wanted Greer to call her. That happened sometimes. Monday’s whim was forgotten by Tuesday’s call time. But the problems with Selene weren’t going to go away. And the next time she caused a disruption, Flip would turn to Greer and say: “Whatever happened with that private detective, the one I wanted you to hire?”
Greer turned out the lights in the office, after making sure all the equipment was turned off. Ever since Flip had seen An Inconvenient Truth, he was insane on the topic of electricity. He had issued a memo, through Greer, that computers and other electronics were to be unplugged every night, and that the production offices were to use fluorescent bulbs everywhere – except in Flip’s private office, because he hated the quality of the light. The night was really too warm for her jacket, but she pulled it on anyway, eager for autumn. She had missed fall in L.A. It was about the only thing that she had missed about Baltimore.
Tomorrow’s start was civilized, 10 A.M., and they were on the soundstage, which meant that fewer variables would be thrown into the mix. No troublesome bystanders, no sirens going off during quiet moments, no worries about weather, no stupid rowers crashing their perfect sunrise. Today had been a mere nineteen hours, 4 A.M. to 11 P.M.
She rode the elevator down to the lobby of the deserted office building. The production had the top floor, and while the building claimed other tenants, Greer had seen scant evidence of them. Flip and Ben had wanted something flashier for their headquarters – sweeping water views, good restaurants – but Lottie had prevailed on this decision, insisting they take this cheaper suite of offices in a development on Locust Point, a boomtime project that had never actually boomed. Well, it had a water view, it was just from the other side of the harbor. There were perfectly good restaurants, too, although Ben bitched and moaned, even as he hit Popeyes three days out of four. Greer had seen the buckets in his trash. Even before she had known, for a fact, that Ben could not be trusted, she had plenty of reasons to believe that he was a phony and a liar.
As she reached for the outer door, she was aware of a movement in the parking lot, a skittering figure in the corner of her eye. A rat, she tried to tell herself, or a dog. But while both species could be exceptionally large in South Baltimore, neither one walked upright. She fell back behind the glass door, wondering what to do. She had her cell. She could call the police. And say what? “I want to report a shadow in the parking lot at Tide Point.” He’s more scared of you than you are of him, she told herself. He dislikes conflict just as much. More. Maybe it was a ghost, after all.
“I’m within my rights,” she announced to the empty parking lot. “Stop bothering me. I don’t have to give it back, under the circumstances.”
It was, she realized, an all-purpose pronouncement, one that could work for all the problematic people in her life. She waited, watching for that hint of movement again, then decided she had imagined it. Even so, she ran toward her car, unlocking it with the remote and leaving the parking lot gate open behind her, too scared to get out of her car and close it. She would have to make a point of being the first at work tomorrow, so it wouldn’t get back to Lottie that she had left the gate up.