KW 09:Shot on Location (13 page)

33.

For the cast and crew of
Adrift,
there was a five a.m. call for a scene scheduled to be shot at sunrise.

When the vans and limos, headlights sweeping, gathered on Big Sandy Key, the western sky was still a mystic purple pocked with stars, while in the east the seam between sea and heaven was just becoming visible, a tissue of dim haze shimmering between them like the dancing steam above a pot of heating water. Crickets rasped, frogs croaked, abrupt and fleeting splashes were faintly heard as the rays and crabs and fishes went about their secret pre-dawn business. The air was at its coolest and most damp; it seemed made of tiny droplets that burst and yielded up their moisture like bubbles in a drink to tickle skin and noses.

On the far side of the barge crossing, muttering and yawning, the crew began setting up the shot. It was to be filmed on a pretty arc of beach where wavelets sizzled softly through the knobs of coral and a single, perfect palm, iconic in its wind-bent posture and the serene but melancholy droop of its fronds, provided a perfect spot for rest and contemplation. Beneath this palm, Candace McBride would be sitting as the sun lifted from the sea. A male character named Beau — another hopeful suitor for the difficult and irresistible Lulu — would approach, and they would share a few lines of dialogue. It was a very simple scene, mainly a pretext to show Candace in a string bikini top, sitting barelegged and languorous as the slow, red, and fleshy light of dawn licked across her skin.

The eastern sky showed bruised green, then pale yellow, and the actors took their places, some dozen feet apart. The director waited for the sun to lift its shoulders from the ocean, then called for action.

BEAU

(raptly watching the sunrise, then noticing Lulu)

My very favorite place. Yours too?

She just nods dreamily. He looks at her with longing.

BEAU

What are you thinking?

LULU

Oh, nothing.

(a pause)

No, actually, what I was thinking … What I was thinking on such a gorgeous morning, is that if we never got rescued, if we were out here forever …

A longer pause, as she looks flirtatiously at Beau and leans back against the palm.

LULU

… maybe it wouldn’t really be so …

“BAD!”
screamed Candace as she broke the scene and rocketed to her feet, jumping and stamping and reaching futilely around to slap at her bare back, from which a large brown scorpion, roughly the length and girth of a human index finger, was dangling and bobbing, still rooted in her flesh by the barbed and pulsing stinger squeezing out its venom. She howled, she cursed, she spun, and after a long, frozen moment Beau ran over and awkwardly swatted at the wriggling beast. The stinger pulled out with an almost audible pop from the hole it had made in the diva’s perfect skin, and the scorpion fell to the ground, dying but not dead, curling spasmodically, flailing its nightmarish pincers. Candace looked down at the horrible creature, felt its venom spreading fire between her shoulder blades and behind her heart, and passed out on the coral.

---

Jake and Bryce had spent the balance of the night babysitting Ace, still not quite comfortable at the thought of leaving him in Donna’s place without a chaperon. They took turns napping; now and then they chatted, small talk mostly. At daybreak Bryce had made coffee and scavenged some bread from the freezer. The cottage filled with the companionable smell of toast and the three men sat there almost like old friends preparing to head out for an early shift of work.

They’d been waiting many hours for Donna to appear, but when she finally arrived at the compound — unannounced, delivered from the hospital by taxi--they were oddly unprepared. The dishes were undone, toast crumbs dotting the plates. The straggles of rope with which Ace had been tied sat guiltily on a coffee table; the shattered and skeletal Dustbuster leaned against a wall. The men had made no plan for how to welcome Donna home, and her entrance was entirely undramatic.

The doorknob turned and she stood there in the doorway. She was wearing a loose-fitting dress but even so it could be seen that her somewhat swaggering athletic posture was compromised and tilted by the tugging stitches in her healing wound. She was pale from three days in a hospital bed and her right arm was in a sling. She seemed to notice the vast bouquet of pilfered, fading flowers before she noticed the three men. Then her eyes flicked past Jake and Bryce and settled on her former lover, and the two of them just stared.

After a moment Ace said very gently, “Hello, baby.”

Donna said nothing. Her mouth twitched in what might have been a false start toward a tentative smile.

Looking at her arm, the cautious way she stood, Ace said, “You been hurt.” As he said it his hard black eyes welled up; the flinty pupils smeared and the rims instantly grew red and puffy.

By way of answer, Donna said only, “It wasn’t you?”

“Tell me you never thought that, baby.”

“I did think it, Ace. Why wouldn’t I? You used to scare me.”

He looked down at the floor. “I’m so, so sorry for that. I never will again. These last few days, worrying about you, I’ve learned some things. I’m a different guy. I swear.”

She considered that a moment, waited to see if the heartfelt sound of it would last or leak away into the intervening silence.

Ace went on, “Can I stay with you a while? Few days, at least?”

Donna said nothing.

“You’re gonna need some help,” he said. “Groceries and stuff. Cooking. Driving you around.”

Donna took as deep a breath as her bandages allowed, pushed her lips out as she weighed the offer, then finally gave in to a slightly twisted smile into which she poured her gradually returning high spirits and ribaldry. “No sex, Ace. No way. I still got stitches. You know that, right?”

He nodded, almost shyly, and she moved slowly toward him, her good arm outstretched to circle him as she laid her cheek against his chest.

Jake and Bryce took the opportunity to slip out of the cottage. Near the pool, in the quickly mounting sunshine, they shared a sleepy and understated high-five then parted company and went off to get some sleep.

34.

Jake didn’t get to rest for long. Around ten o’clock his cell phone rang and woke him. It was Claire, telling him there’d been another mishap on the set. They needed to talk. Could he meet her up at Smathers Beach, somewhere between the shave ice stand and the pizza wagon?

He dragged himself out of bed and into a cool shower. He pulled on a bathing suit, rolled the purple bicycle out of the rack by the compound gate, and headed for the ocean. He rode shakily along the busy promenade, dodging skaters, joggers, people walking dogs that were frantically intoxicated with the wealth of salty smells.

He found Claire perched on a blanket that she’d laid out over the trucked-in sand. She was lying on her stomach, lifted up on her elbows so she could spot him and wave. The arc of her back was graceful and lithe. There was both strength and something poignant, breakable, in the way her shoulders pinched together beneath her glistening skin. She wore a one-piece bathing suit, chaste but elegant, black and snug. She shielded her eyes with her hand and said hello.

“I get to see you in your play clothes again,” he said.

“Shooting’s cancelled for the day. Thank God. I really need some time to myself.”

“But I’m here,” Jake observed.

“Yeah, but that’s different. That’s a good thing.”

Still standing above her, he said, “So what happened on the set?”

She patted the empty space next to her. “Come share the blanket.”

He lay down, not too close but close enough that he could feel the borrowed sunshine radiating from her side and legs and warming him. He smelled her sunscreen, that endlessly nostalgic sweet and coconutty smell that was a summary of so many perfect days and brought back muddled memories of every momentary crush he’d ever had on a woman at the beach. Settled beside her, he said, “We aren’t on a date, right?”

She said, “We aren’t on a date.”

“Just making sure. So tell me what happened this morning.”

She lowered her head, rested her cheek on the back of her hand, and sighed. “Well, it was Candace.”

“Of course.”

“Of course,” Claire echoed. “But, you know, just because she’s a narcissist and a paranoid, that doesn’t mean she’s wrong. She was badly stung by a scorpion.”

Jake couldn’t help wincing at the thought. “Nasty piece of luck,” he said.

“Except it wasn’t. Someone set it up.”

“Set up a scorpion sting?”

She didn’t answer, just reached into her beach bag and came out with a sheet of paper — half a sheet of paper, actually, hand-torn on a jagged diagonal. Handing it to Jake, she said, “I found this in the mangroves just a few feet from where it happened.”

It was a page from the script. Not just any page. The page that had Candace on that beach and leaning back against the tree.

“So you think —”

“I googled scorpions,” she said. “Amazing what you can learn in thirty seconds. They’re nocturnal and photophobic. Hiding under foliage or loose tree bark where it’s nice and dark and cool is one of their favorite things. Contrary to their reputation, they’re not aggressive. They only sting if something threatens them. Like by leaning back and caving in the bark.”

Jake considered and gradually, dimly noticed that his usual sense of what was possible was being altered, stretched, perhaps suspended altogether. This was Key West. If a speedboat could be used as a weapon, why not a scorpion? After a moment he said, “Careless, though, leaving the page behind.”

Claire disagreed. “I don’t think it was careless at all. I think it was left there on purpose. To freak out Candace even more. And I have a pretty good guess for who might have done it.”

Jake made no effort to mask his surprise. “You do?”

“The sister of Candace’s old boyfriend.”

“Wait a second. The sister--?”

So Claire filled him on the story of the betrayal and the suicide and the stalking. “But still,” she went on, “there’s two things I can’t figure. How she got a copy of the script. And how she planted the scorpion in the middle of the night.”

Jake let his head rest on the blanket. The warm sand seemed to loosen up his brain and something clicked. He said, “Hold on. I bet I know how she got the script. Donna’s boyfriend stole it for her. Except he didn’t know it was for her. He was hired by a middle man. It was just a job.”

It was Claire’s turn to be bewildered. “How you know all that?”

“He told me.”

“Who told you?”

“Ace. The boyfriend.”

“But I thought —”

So he related his adventures of the night before. At the close of the recitation, she said, “With a Dustbuster?”

“What can I say? It’s what we had handy.”

There was a pause. The sun shone down. The waves hissed softly as they vanished. Here and there along the beach, people hit balls with paddles or chucked around a soggy football. Claire started doodling in the sand with a fingertip. She seemed to be working out some sort of diagram but it was unclear what it illustrated. “Okay,” she said at last, “let’s think this through. As of yesterday, you thought the boyfriend took the script so he could hit Donna with the speedboat. As revenge for dumping him.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought. I don’t think it anymore.”

“But now it looks like whoever has the script was really going after Candace.”

“Yes,” Jake agreed, “that’s how it looks. Assuming you’re right about the scorpion.”

“But the fact remains that Donna has also been hurt.”

“True.”

“So what’s the connection between Donna getting run over and Candace getting stung?”

“I haven’t got a fucking clue.”

As if exhausted by the puzzle, or maybe just cozened by the lapping water and the sand that molded itself beneath his body, Jake let his eyes fall closed. Claire did the same. The moment seemed so easy that the intimacy of it almost went unnoticed: two people, side by side, trusting to closed eyes and quiet in each other’s company.

It was a wonderful respite but it couldn’t last. There were too many questions tugging at the edges of it as at the corners of a quilt. Lifting his head, plunging, in spite of himself, back into the fray, Jake began, “So if the sister planted the scorpion, presumably she has a boat.”

“Presumably,” said Claire.

“And if she has a boat, she might also have been the one to run over Donna.”

“But why would she? Her grudge is with Candace.”

“Exactly. And Donna was doubling for Candace when she got hit.”

“True. But this person has a script and schedule. The schedule lists the personnel for every shot. I mean, it’s certainly possible that it was just a dumb mistake —”

“Or maybe not a mistake,” Jake put in. “Maybe something else. A warning. A threat.”

“Or a tease,” Claire said. “This woman seems to like to tease.”

Jake’s scalp felt tight from thinking. He rubbed his head. As a bit of an afterthought, he said, “So how’s she doing? Candace, I mean.”

“Oh, she’s fine. Those stings apparently hurt like hell but aren’t really dangerous. She fainted, but only from the shock. I cleaned it out with ammonia, gave her some antihistamines. She’ll be fine.”

Jake said, “First aid is your job too?”

“Everything’s my job. I’m getting really sick of it.”

“Does she know about the paper you found? The page from the script.”

Claire shook her head. “I didn’t tell her. I didn’t tell anyone. What would be the point? She’d be even more scared and the publicity people would have more grist for their bullshit story about the diva being targeted.”

“Except,” said Jake, “now it sounds like she really is.”

In a tone more bemused than bitter, Claire said, “Whaddya know. Life imitates spin. Welcome to the entertainment business. On another subject, your shoulders are getting really red. Did you put sunblock on?”

“I forgot,” he admitted. As an experiment, he poked a finger into the flesh at the top of his arm. The skin went dead white for a moment then flushed a hot angry orange-pink.

Claire reached into her bag and came out with a plastic bottle that she dangled in front of him. There followed one of those unemphatic but decisive moments that generally go unrecorded in a life, moments when some tiny gesture or lack thereof divides time into before and after and changes the trajectory of much that follows. Jake didn’t take the bottle. He bided his time. He waited. And after a breath or two Claire squirted sunblock into her own hand and prepared to rub it onto his skin.

He pancaked flat against the sand, closed his eyes, exhaled, and opened himself to the pleasure of her touch. She anointed his neck and shoulders. Her fingers lightly kneaded the tops of his arms and then the palm of her hand bumped notch by notch over the vertebrae of his lean back. At times her touch was so light that he imagined he could feel the tiny whorls and ridges of her fingerprints; now and then he felt the hard tips of her nails just barely scratching at his flesh, holding the faraway promise of a tighter clasp sometime. He lay as still and quiet as he could, not wanting the luxury to end. When it finally did, he craned his neck around to smile at the woman kneeling over him. “This is starting to feel a little like a date,” he said.

“Maybe just a little,” she admitted. But then, jarringly, she added, “I think we need to find that crazy sister.”