The Disappearing Act(78)
I zip up my jacket pockets containing the phone and Nick’s gun then warily duck through the wire and out onto the steep dusty slope beyond.
Marla has descended the slope as far as the base of the letters and is making her way briskly along to the end of the sign. I carefully scramble down, struggling to keep up as I watch her disappear out of sight behind the final letter. It’s funny how the mind adjusts in order to normalize situations: back in the 101 Coffee Shop I hadn’t thought for a second I would be doing this now. But I am and my mind is slowly and inexorably coming around to the idea that at the end of our hike I might see Emily, but Emily won’t see me.
I stumble on the loose dirt, snatch in a breath, and catch myself on an outcrop of grass, a tumble of loose earth scattering off down the dark slope beneath me. I look up to see Marla’s head reappear around the final letter. She’s waiting. I get my bearings, recheck my pockets, and get moving.
I come to a halt beside her at the giant D at the end of HOLLYWOOD.
“How are you with heights?” she asks, looking up at the letter.
She can’t be serious. I follow her gaze up and about a yard above our heads a ladder begins. I see now as I look along the staggered line: each letter has its own white ladder beginning about ten feet from the ground and leading all the way up.
“You’re joking,” I erupt.
She looks at me calmly. “It’s fine, kids go up it all the time, it’s just a service ladder. It’s perfectly safe.” She cranes her neck up into the night again. “We need to get up there. You see the platform at the top. I’ll go first if you like?”
She goes to move farther up the slope but I stop her. “You told me we were meeting Emily. Emily’s not here, is she?” I demand, urgency clear in my tone.
She looks down at my hand on her arm, and when she looks up her eyes sparkle with tears in the moonlight. “No. No, she’s not here,” she says, a deep weariness seeming to crack open inside her as she stares out at the twinkle of LA beyond the sign. “I needed to get you to come here with me. I needed to tell you what happened, Mia. I need to tell someone what they did. What they did to her. I’m sorry I dragged you into this, but I promise you, you were already involved. I knew you’d never come if I told you.” I feel my stomach lurch. Emily is dead. They killed her. Marla tricked me into coming here and Emily is dead. Her heartbroken eyes find mine. “I miss her so much, she was my friend, Mia. A real friend, we went through a lot. And she never let anything get her down. I’ve never known anyone like that before.” She swipes at her wet cheeks with the sleeve of her sweater and looks up at me. “Will you come up with me? I need to show someone, someone else needs to know what happened, you can see her from up there.”
Oh God. I shudder at her words. An image of the broken body of the actress who jumped from the sign flashes through my mind. I’m not really sure I want to see Emily anymore.
“How am I involved, Marla? You need to tell me.”
“You know who killed her. Emily,” she says, simply. “It’s someone you’ve met, someone you know.”
The hairs along the back of my neck rise. Does she mean herself; did she kill her only friend? She can’t mean that, she means someone else. My thoughts race through the new faces I’ve met this past week. Ben Cohan leaps instantly to mind. Ben Cohan and Mike. But I haven’t even met Mike. I scramble for other options, and then my blood runs cold. Does she mean Nick? Is Nick connected to all of this?
Nick who I met years ago and forgot. Nick the producer. Nick who was so pleased to see me that first day when I thought I’d lost Emily. Nick who knows everyone in this town and has worked with everyone. Nick who lives in Bel Air. Nick whose house I just came from and whose gun lies snug in my pocket.
Oh shit.
Now that I think about it, he’s been there from day one. When Marla disappeared at the audition he was lurking outside. No wonder she ran. I remember how interested he was in the missing girl; how eager he was to hear any news on the subject. His late-night emergency visits to the studio to deal with troublesome actors. I realize I have no idea what he’s been up to since the beginning. I think of the way his arm pulled me close on the terrace and I cringe deep inside at the thought. How could I have read him so wrong? I so wanted Nick to be the man I saw that I must have ignored anything that conflicted. Why didn’t I just ask him tonight if he’d ever worked with Ben Cohan? But perhaps I’m lucky I didn’t.
“Nick Eldridge and Ben Cohan?”
Marla holds my gaze unflinching, and I feel my heart sink. “Yes,” she confirms. “Will you come up and see?”
I gaze up at the platform nearly fifty feet in the air. God knows what I’ll see up there. If there’s a body up there or in the ravine, surely someone must have found it by now.
“Tell me what Nick had to do with this, Marla. I need to know.”
“I want to show you first.”
She scrambles past me, climbing slightly higher up the rocky slope, then positions herself carefully on a knotty outcrop of vegetation and teeters there for a moment before reaching across to brush the lowest rung of the letter’s ladder. The fingertips of one hand just able to touch. She leans back away from the ledge, takes a breath, and then throws herself forward, off the outcrop. My heart skips a beat as she flies forward, in momentary free fall, before a palm slams down on the ladder’s rung. For a second she hangs precariously by just one hand before the other finds the metal and she heaves herself up fully onto the ladder.