Over Her Dead Body(80)
The detective seemed confused as to why Charlie’s wife would want to kill him, and Nathan dropped the bomb that he’d been sleeping with her. He would never explain how he came to be involved with his cousin’s wife, and I would never ask, but suffice to say it made me less enthusiastic about the prospect of a second date.
The coroner later confirmed that Louisa had died from “asphyxia due to exhaustion of oxygen,” or “air hunger,” and her grisly final expression indicated it was not very pleasant for her. As Jordan put it, her lungs were literally screaming for oxygen. I felt terrible that she had suffered—I didn’t know it was painful for some people! But one might argue what she endured was in line with the abominations she had inflicted on others.
Winnie started to cry when she realized that if Jordan and I hadn’t come along when we did, she and Charlie would have suffered a similar fate. As for why Charlie passed out and Winnie didn’t, Jordan explained that different people have different reactions to low-oxygen environments, and while Winnie’s tolerance was higher, they both would have succumbed eventually. I never would have done it if I’d known Winnie and Charlie would go down there, but in the end, my insider intel is what saved them, so I took some consolation in that. I gave them the house and the lion’s share of the money (no court order required!) to make it up to them. They insisted I take a cut for my troubles, and we ultimately agreed on a cool million, which was a helluva payday for an acting job that, in the end, required very little acting.
When the policeman found the baseball in the air vent, the possibility that Louisa’s suffocation was not an accident chilled the room like a blast of cold air. I got a bit of a lucky break that Zander played the sport because if this turned into a homicide investigation, Marcela would be the obvious suspect. Even though of course I put it there.
The movie script Louisa and I had both read—her at the end of her career, and me at the beginning of mine—was called Over Her Dead Body. It was about—you guessed it!—a woman who fakes her own death, then hides in her basement while her family tears itself apart. It was in “preproduction” when my friend at CAA sent it to me, back when I was reading everything I could get my hands on in the hopes of ferreting out a casting. I had hoped to read for the “Winnie” role. In the original she was of course not called Winnie (“Scarlett,” I think?) and was quite vile, nothing like the warm, quick-witted redhead in Louisa’s adaptation. The studio wound up going belly-up, as studios do, and the town quickly forgot all about that script. I did, too. Until I heard my voice on Nathan’s phone. And the particulars of that “tense psychological thriller about a woman betrayed by her greedy children” came flooding back. There was no question Louisa had read it, too; a quick peek on IMDb confirmed that she had been the casting director on it.
The event that puts a story in motion is called the inciting incident. The shark devours a swimmer, Romeo and Juliet meet and fall in love. Once Nathan played that recording for me, I knew I’d been cast as the bumbling innocent who “incites” the plot, doomed to be irrelevant after act one. But I didn’t want to be a bit player; I wanted to be the lead. Plus I didn’t like how the original ended—with the scorned old woman getting revenge on her undeserving children. So I did something I’d learned in acting class: I improvised. And I daresay the new direction was a vast improvement on the original.
Louisa was a terrible protagonist—dishonest, abusive, and not remotely sympathetic. It was without a doubt the worst casting she had ever made. No one was going to root for her. And she certainly didn’t deserve a triumphant ending.
I, on the other hand, was a wonderfully sympathetic character—a bit of a vigilante, perhaps, but justified in my actions. Besides having a clear “motivation” (as we actors call it), I got justice for two tortured souls and, in the end, helped to heal a fractured family. That’s a pretty good arc!
So how, you may ask, did I know about the bomb shelter? We call the details that make a character specific and relatable her “backstory.” I could never have made a surprise turn from victim to victor if my backstory hadn’t included a seven-year stint as a tour guide. While I aspired to be an actress, poking around LA’s most unique homes and landmarks had been my true full-time job all those years. And you don’t spend the better part of a decade touring LA’s landmarks and not know where the super weird ones are . . . especially the one that’s in your own backyard.
The Scooby-Doo-scary house up the street had intrigued me from the moment I moved into that otherwise unremarkable neighborhood. It took a little digging, but eventually I unearthed the history of that kooky old storybook . . . and found the seventy-year-old photos of what lay underneath. The plans were not public record, but we tour guides had friends in the permit office who were all too happy to help when we called. There was a reason I had avoided that bizarro property on my walks, and it wasn’t because of the gnarled old trees.
Once I knew what movie we were in, I knew where Louisa was hiding and what I could do to make sure she never came out. I recognized that “bird feeder” as an air vent in disguise the minute I laid eyes on it. As for how I knew a baseball was the perfect size to seal it off, on that front I kind of got lucky. I figured my angels wouldn’t have put a whole box of them in the middle of my living room floor for me to trip over if I wasn’t meant to take one. And wouldn’t you know, it fit like a key in a lock.