The Homewreckers(9)

“So what’s gonna happen?” Mo asked. “Reruns?”

“Not if I can help it,” Rebecca said. “We need fresh content, and we need it now. I’ve been going over some stuff we’ve had kicking around in development…”

“What about my new idea?” Mo broke in. “Becc, I swear, you’re gonna love it. Just let me show you.”

“I got your email. Saving Savannah?” She wrinkled her nose. “Doesn’t sound very sexy. In fact, it sounds totally granny.”

Mo took out his phone and thumbed through the photos until he came to the shots he’d surreptitiously taken of Hattie Kavanaugh at the coffee shop, along with the ones he’d taken of Hattie and Cass outside the Tattnall Street house. He passed the phone over to Rebecca. “Does she look granny to you?”

He’d captured Hattie mid-sentence. Her hair was held back with a bandana, her cheeks sprinkled with freckles. She wore not a speck of makeup as far as Mo could tell, but some kind of light seemed to emanate from those hazel eyes of hers. She didn’t have the glamour of a Krystee Brandstetter, who managed to look sexy even in a hard hat and welder’s goggles, or the exotic appeal of Hayden Horowitz, the glamorous real estate host of Building Bridgehampton, but to Mo, that was a selling point.

“Cute,” Rebecca said, handing the phone back.

“Look again, Becc,” Mo said, thumbing over to the next photo of Hattie, taken as she climbed into her pickup truck. “This girl really has something. She’s fresh as buttermilk, absolutely no phoniness about her. And she’s fierce. Won’t back away from a challenge. Viewers will eat her up. The women will want to be like her, the men will want to sleep with her. And she’s got that southern accent—not that grits-and-gravy, syrupy one—more like the tour-guide-at-the-museum southern. Kinda refined. Educated.”

Rebecca thumbed through the rest of the photos, stopping at a shot of the Tattnall Street house. “This is the house she’s rehabbing? It’s gawd-awful.”

“That’s the project she’s about to finish,” Mo said, taking the phone back. “Of course, we’d start the show with a new house. Something smaller, more relatable.”

“What’s her story?” Rebecca asked. “I mean, who is she? How did you find her?”

“I was having breakfast at a place down the street from my hotel and I overheard her and her father-in-law talking about this house they were working on. I was intrigued, so I rode around until I found the house. And her.”

He deliberately omitted the whole falling-through-the-kitchen-floor anecdote.

Rebecca wrinkled her nose again. “So this girl is married? I don’t want another Krystee and Will situation.”

“Not married. Widowed,” Mo said. “According to her best friend, she married her high school sweetheart, but he was killed in a motorcycle accident a few years ago.”

“A widow. Hmm. I kind of like the possibility. Plucky young widow … rehabbing old houses. That’s a story line our viewers could sympathize with.”

“Right?”

Rebecca tapped the phone. “Who’s this woman she’s talking to in front of the house?”

“Her best friend, who’s also the construction foreman.”

“I like that,” Rebecca mused. “She’s Black, so we get built-in diversity right there. Tony would love that, all right.”

Mo pulled his iPad from his messenger bag, opened the pitch document for Saving Savannah, and gave it to Rebecca.

“The real star of the show would be Savannah,” he told her. “The place oozes atmosphere. And it’s got great creative energy because of SCAD. Tons of talent living there, and every place you look, a camera crew is shooting a film or television project.”

“Georgia’s a right-to-work state too,” Rebecca said, tapping her pencil on her desktop. “So super cheap labor costs, plus the tax incentives the state offers filmmakers.”

“That was my next point,” Mo said. He could feel Rebecca’s mood lightening. She was in to this idea, totally in to it.

She’d tabbed back to the photo of Hattie now, the pencil tapping a mile a minute.

“Well?”

“I need a sizzle reel, obviously, so we can see if this girl can walk and chew gum. And the house, the one you’d rehab for the first season.”

“That’s no problem at all,” Mo lied. “How soon?”

“Now.” She handed him the iPad. “Going Coastal is going on hiatus. So your little Savannah show, if you can pull it together, can be our fall replacement.”

Mo felt his mouth go dry. “But … this is May.”

“I’m aware,” Rebecca said. She picked up a folder and leafed through it. “Byron sent this over last night. Somehow, he’d already heard about Krystee and Will. It’s freakish how he always seems to know what’s going on in this town. And of course he just happens to have a new show already in development.”

“Of course he does,” Mo said. “Just out of idle curiosity, what kind of low-budget crap is he trying to sell you now?”

Rebecca arched an eyebrow. “Jealousy doesn’t suit you at all, Mo. It’s actually very intriguing. Each week he’s pairing an up-and-coming designer with a client just emerging from a bad divorce, to totally redesign their master bedroom. Suite Revenge. Don’t you just love it?”