Double Image

Because the attack had happened only a few hours earlier, there was still a chance to get Amy back if a rescue party set out immediately, but that would leave the wagon train underma

Coltrane felt light-headed as the scene shifted and he saw Rebecca secured by a rope, stumbling next to the raiding party, who jeered at her from their horses. She, too, had disheveled hair and grimy features, but nothing could obscure her riveting beauty. Her blouse had been torn, revealing more of her right shoulder, almost to her upper breast, than he had realized was permitted by censors back then. Similarly, her skirt was torn up to her knees, exposing her stockings, the tantalizing sight of which seemed more sensual than bare flesh would have been. The animal quality suggested by her lush, tangled hair, the insolence in her dark eyes, the defiance in her full lips made for as erotic a combination as he had ever seen.

“My God,” he whispered.

“Yes,” Toler said, “she could have been a star. But I never saw her in another movie.”

“This was her last. She disappeared.”

Coltrane watched, awestruck as a member of the raiding party tugged the rope and made her stumble, a movement that she accomplished with the grace of a dancer while still making it look like a stumble. In fact, all of her actions had similar grace. Her body had a sensual fluidness that caused every gesture, no matter how trivial, to be impossible to look away from. When she spoke, Coltrane wasn’t prepared for how wonderfully full-throated and sonorous her voice was. Whatever Hispanic accent she had brought to Hollywood, she had worked hard to eliminate. She had re-created herself, and yet there remained the slightest hint of the origins she was trying to disguise.

Coltrane was so enthralled that he had trouble concentrating when other actors were featured in the story. Bruce Cabot pursued the raiding party, overcoming brush fires, thunderstorms, swollen rivers, buffalo stampedes, avalanches, and ambushes in his determined effort to save the sister of the woman he loved (the structure of the film was obviously indebted to the cliffhanger serials that Seitz had directed in his youth). Meanwhile, the wagon train overcame similar obstacles. A young man had taken over Bruce Cabot’s role as expedition leader and was proving himself to be such a hero that Mary, praying for Cabot to come back with her sister, had fallen in love with Cabot’s substitute. Seitz crosscut between the two sets of adventures. To build suspense as to whether Rebecca’s character was still alive, her screen time was reduced after an Indian, angered by her insolence, grabbed her long black hair and wielded a knife to cut it off.

Watching Cabot scale a cliff and race through a forest, Coltrane waited with mounting frustration for Rebecca to reappear, and when she finally did, the Indian was hurling her off a cliff into a river. The fight between Cabot and the Indian was suspenseful, but all Coltrane cared about was another glimpse of Rebecca, who made him inhale sharply when he saw her wading from the river, her wet clothes sticking to her, her soaked dark hair slicked back against her head and hanging down her back. Every curve of her body was emphasized. It was as if she were one with the water, her body gathering substance as she emerged from it, retaining the fluid grace of the waves. She was Venus rising from the water. With her head tilted back, every magnificent detail of her face was pronounced, and if it had earlier seemed questionable that Bruce Cabot would instantly fall in love with Mary Beecham, there was no strain of credulity at all when he triumphed over the Indian and hurried to help Rebecca, only to see her wading from the sensuous waters and to be overcome with attraction.

In the end, he brought Rebecca back to the wagon train, where he a

In the darkness, Coltrane heard the camera whirring. He heard a chair creak as Vincent stood in the darkness, presumably to go into the projection room and shut off the machine.

“You said Rebecca Chance disappeared after making this movie?” Vincent’s disembodied voice asked.

Coltrane was so enraptured by what he had seen that he had to force himself to speak. “That’s right.”

“When I told you I didn’t know much about Winston Case, I neglected to tell you all of what I did know,” Vincent said.

“Oh?”

“This was his last picture, too. He disappeared after producing it.”

16

COLTRANE RETURNED TO PACKARD’S HOUSE AT TWO IN THE morning. His circles of confusion not only had come back but were more severe than ever. His mind was filled with a welter of overlapping blurs. Surely the police would have known that Rebecca Chance wasn’t the only person associated with The Trailblazer to disappear. Why hadn’t Winston Case’s disappearance also been noted in the newspaper? The two incidents would have reinforced each other and made a good story. Had the studio covered it up? Or had Winston Case’s “disappearance” been merely a retreat from the movie business, which would have been the same as vanishing from the face of the earth, as far as Hollywood was concerned.

In his kitchen, the red light on his answering machine was blinking.

Uneasy, he pressed the play button.

“Mitch, are you… I’m begi