The Disappearing Act(80)

“The tracking app shows that after she left the diner without her car someone drove her all around LA. If she was dead already, or alive, I don’t know. She still had her phone on her, registering a signal, but she didn’t try to call for help, she didn’t dial anyone. Then around four a.m., they took her to the reservoir, and that’s where the signal stopped.”

I try to keep my tone neutral as I speak though every fiber in my body is screaming to know. “And Nick was involved? Nick helped Moon Finch? He was the one looking for you the day we met. He thought you were Emily and you were still alive?”

She turns to me sadly then looks away. Eyes cast out to the lake, she nods.

A wave of dizziness hits me. Nick isn’t the man I thought he was. All this time he’s been watching me, waiting to see what exactly I knew about Emily’s disappearance. I think of our conversation about Ben Cohan earlier this evening, Nick’s arm wrapped firmly about my shoulders, and I shudder. “Why didn’t you go to the police, Marla? Why didn’t you tell them all of this?”

To my surprise Marla lets out a laugh. “Because things are a little different in this country than they are in yours, I think.” She turns to me now. “I’m not like you. I might look like you, I might be able to fit in around people like you, but we may as well be a different species. We aren’t the same. Everything I have in my life I fought for, tooth and nail, do you understand? Being in care, foster homes, juvenile. I was in and out of one thing or another until I was seventeen. My last foster mom. She’d been an actress, a failed one, but she pushed me. And it started to work. I suppose looking like this helped.” She swirls a finger in the air around her bruised but beautiful face. “But the police don’t tend to listen to people with my kind of record. At least not in this country. I didn’t fancy my chances as a reliable witness in a court case against one of the richest production companies in America. Trust me, they would’ve destroyed me on the stand. They would have gotten away with it and I didn’t want to trash a career in the only good thing in my life. That’s why I didn’t call the police. The police aren’t for people like me. They’re for people like you. But don’t think for a second—” She breaks off emphatically. “—that I let them get away with what they did to Emily. I picked up her car, I moved into her apartment, I changed agents using her name, and I started to go to auditions as her. I changed all her headshots to mine and then I waited. When they thought they were safe I emailed Moon Finch. As Emily.” She lets out a giggle of pure joy. “I hope it scared the absolute shit out of them. God, to have been a fly on the wall when Ben and Mike read that email. As Emily I told them I’d been away but now I was back and looking forward to working together just like they’d promised. I don’t know if at first they thought maybe Emily had survived somehow or if they knew who I was from the start, but boy did they invite me into their office fast. And I went in, with a copy of her tape recording from New Year’s, and a copy of her tape recording from their meeting. And on top of that I knew what they’d done to her. Where they’d put her. I had all the cards. They were so fucked. Because as far as the rest of the world was concerned, I was Emily Bryant. And if they said I wasn’t Emily, if they said I couldn’t possibly be Emily, then they would damn well need to explain why I wasn’t and how they knew it. I had them over a barrel.”

Marla fingers the bruise beneath her eye delicately before taking another deep drag of her cigarette.

“And that’s where you come in.” She tips her hand in my direction. “No, actually, that’s where Kathryn Mayer comes in.”

The mention of Kathryn Mayer’s name throws me for a second. What could Kathryn have to do with Ben Cohan and Moon Finch?

And then a cascade of thoughts fall into place. How could I have been so stupid?

Galatea.

Ben Cohan told me himself, Galatea was originally a Moon Finch production, they developed it, they did the pre-production on it, and then Kathryn Mayer joined the studio, swept in and laid claim. Moon Finch had Galatea.

I speak as the thoughts form. “They promised Emily Galatea?”

Marla smiles at my leap of logic. “They promised Emily Galatea. And then they promised it to me,” she says, wry disappointment in her voice. “I could not believe my fucking luck when they gave me that script.” She beams, basking in the memory. “No feeling like it. Nothing. I can’t imagine how Emily must have felt when they first offered it to her.”

We’re all connected by one part. The role of a lifetime. A role worth dying for.

Maybe even a role worth killing for?

The reality of my situation finally dawns on me. Marla might not be responsible for Emily’s death, but that doesn’t mean she won’t be for mine.

I force my right hand into my pocket and let it find a position on the gun’s grip, my thumb finding the safety and testing its give. I remind myself there is a bullet in it and inch my thumb away again. It’s odd how calm I suddenly feel, forty-five feet up in the air with a woman who wants what’s mine and clearly has a very different moral landscape from me.

I watch her stub her cigarette out against the corrugated sign, my mind finally piecing it all together.

It’s as simple as this: Marla found out Kathryn was eyeing me for the lead in Galatea, she looked me up, she knew what I looked like, and when she saw me at an audition she made friends. She read me like a fucking book, tried to get me to go ahead of her so she could steal my apartment key, read my emails, break into my apartment, but I wouldn’t go first. I went out to the meter. Since we met she’d tried everything she could short of incapacitating me to stop me from testing for her role. She deleted my emails, distracted, scared, threatened, and impeded me, anything to keep me from that part. So in a way, I suppose it had to come to this. I can’t say she didn’t try to warn me.