Famous Last Words

“Are you kidding?” I asked.

“My mother is a creature of habit,” he said. “Every time I change it, she finds a way to get logged out and then can’t remember the new password to log back in. I finally gave up around eighth grade. Anyway, can I see the search results?”

“Sure thing, cutiepants.” I typed in the whole sentence and hit SEARCH. The results were assorted references to people named Henry — Henry Rollins, Henry James — and a movie called 50 First Dates. No exact matches.

“What if you leave off the name?” he asked.

“Then we get …” I backspaced through Henry and hit SEARCH. “… a Beyoncé song.”

“Well, that explains it,” he said. “You’re being haunted by Beyoncé.”

“Oh, this is ideal,” I said.

He smiled a little and then put his concentrating face back on. “What if you search for Charice and Henry — and movie?”

I typed it in and came up with a bunch of random unhelpful results.

“Nothing,” I said. “We need to face it. This movie doesn’t exist.”

“What if you’re right?” Wyatt said. “Maybe the killer wrote the screenplay himself.”

“That wouldn’t explain how it got in my house,” I said.

“There are a lot of things in your house that don’t seem to belong there,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

“You don’t look convinced.”

I pulled out my phone. “I left the page at home because it’s so delicate, but I took a picture. Notice anything?”

Wyatt took the phone and zoomed in on the photo. “What am I looking for?”

“The letters,” I said. “The lowercase t is always a hair above the line of the other letters.”

“And the e is lower,” he said. “So this was typed on an actual typewriter?”

I nodded. “Nobody actually uses typewriters anymore. So it’s probably pretty old, right?”

“Yeah,” he said, “but look — it’s a photocopy. See how the corner is just a copy of a dog-eared page? Maybe the original is old, but the page you found isn’t the original. Someone could have made that copy yesterday, for all we know.”

“What’s Namur?” I asked, typing the word into the computer. “In the vision I had, the girl thought about Namur.”

Our heads nearly touched as we looked at the screen. Namur turned out to be a city in southern Belgium. I skimmed the Wikipedia entry, with Wyatt reading over my shoulder.

“Not very exciting,” Wyatt said. “University … museum, belfry, cathedral, Del Mar Park …”

“Wait,” I said. “Del Mar? As in …”

I typed Diana Del Mar Namur Belgium.

It was a hit.

“Diana Del Mar lived in Namur for three years,” I read. “When she was a teenager.”

“So?” Wyatt asked.

“So … Diana Del Mar lived in my house.”

He blinked.

“Is this movie about her somehow?” I asked. I typed Diana Del Mar Charice and nothing came up.

“Wait, look,” Wyatt said, holding up my phone. “In two different spots, someone made a mistake typing Charice. See how there’s a letter X-ed out? They typed an s first. Try that.”

It seemed like a stretch, but I typed it in: Diana Del Mar Charise.

“There!” Wyatt said.

The very first result was an article titled “Diana Del Mar — Screen Star to Screenwriter,” from a blog called Learning the Craft. The author of the blog was named Paige Pollan. Her bio said she was “an aspiring ‘Hollywood type’ determined to do my homework before plunging into the swamp of Tinseltown.”

I read the blog post:

Diana Del Mar, a beloved actress in the 1930s, turned her attention to behind-the-scenes pursuits when she found herself being rejected for roles because of her “advancing” age (35! GASP!). One of her interests was writing. Rumors swirled around town that she and none other than “Hitch” himself (the great Alfred Hitchcock, newly arrived in America following the release of Rebecca) were collaborating on a project. Diana was working on a screenplay and hoped to star as the character Charise. Hitchcock would direct. Soon, however, the arrangement fell through. Some speculated that Miss Del Mar would try to produce the movie on her own, but before that could happen she was found dead in an upstairs bathtub at her home in the Hollywood Hills. [Source: Hollywood Glamour Magazine, April 1943.]

Dead. In an upstairs bathtub.

Yeah, that just about fit. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

“So they changed the spelling of the character’s name,” Wyatt said.

“But she doesn’t say what the movie was called.” My voice sounded slightly frantic. “How could she not say what it was called?”

Wyatt reached over and scrolled farther down the page to the comments. The first one, from someone called “G.A. Green,” read: Fascinating. What was the movie called?

And Paige P. had replied: The Final Honeymoon. It had a different working title, but I don’t know what that was, sorry!

We Googled The Final Honeymoon, but nothing came up. Interest in the project vanished when Diana Del Mar died. It was strange to think that even the stuff that was really important to a huge, famous movie star could disappear forever, except in dusty old copies of Hollywood tabloids.

“We need to get in touch with this Paige Pollan person and see what else she knows,” Wyatt said. “This is a solid lead.”

“I’m not denying that it seems significant,” I said. “But how does it co

“That would break the pattern,” Wyatt said. “This screenplay never became an actual movie.”

I breathed into my balled-up hand. “Are we ignoring the obvious answer?”

“That Diana Del Mar is the ghost?” he asked.

I nodded. “And she knows something about the killer.”

“No. Let’s not ignore it. Let’s look into it. Maybe when you get home you could …”

“I could what?” I asked, even though I knew what he was going to say.

“Ask her?”

I bit down on my knuckle and stared out at the dark blue of the morning sky. “Oh, goodie.”

“In the meantime, let’s try to find out more about the movie itself. That’s obviously an important part of her message to you. Even if we know who she is, we’d better find out what she wants.”

“All right,” I said, going back to the blog. “Fine. I’ll ask the ghost what she wants. And I’ll email Paige.”

“Do you want anything to eat or drink?” Wyatt asked. “My mom is addicted to paying for designer water. For every four million bottles they sell they adopt an elephant or something. I’d be happy to bring you a bottle.”

“No, thanks,” I said. As he left, I opened a new-message window in my email.

I kept it simple: I read your blog about Diana Del Mar and her project The Final Honeymoon. I have some specific questions and wondered if you’d be willing to talk to me over the phone. If so, my number is 323-555-8333. Thank you for your time.

I hit SEND and sat back, looking around Wyatt’s room and trying to picture him there. It was simple and spare, but if you looked closer, you saw some personal touches — a stack of books in the corner, a small movie poster, artfully framed.

There was more to it than there seemed to be at first glance.

Kind of like Wyatt himself.

He came back, carrying a glass of water.

I read him the email I had sent Paige Pollan, and he nodded in approval, but he was distracted.

“All right,” I said. “Let me have it.”

He looked perplexed. “What?”

“Whatever it is you want to tell me, but were holding back on before,” I said.

He frowned, then kind of smiled. Then frowned again. “Well, last night, I … How do I say this? … I figured something out. Something that I think you’ll be interested to know.”

“Great.” I sat back in my chair, expecting to hear him gleefully recount that Leyta Fitzgeorge actually had a long criminal history or something. “Hit me.”