Famous Last Words

I had to find someplace to hide — someplace where he wouldn’t look right away. The guest cottage sat silently, facing the pool, an impartial observer.

I looked down, and in front of me, a single rose petal fluttered to the tile. A few feet away, another one appeared. I followed the sparse path around the side of the guest cottage, where there were two windows hidden from view of the main house. If I broke one, would Jonathan hear the impact of a rock on the glass?

As I looked at the window, it swung open.

I overturned an old bucket that someone had stashed back there and used it to reach the window and crawl inside. I pulled the bucket in after me, then closed the window and locked it.

I looked around. The main room was small, with a kitchenette off to one side. The walls were cheap wood paneling, and the carpet beneath my feet was chocolate brown and mashed flat, sprinkled with dust and small white flecks fallen from the decaying popcorn ceiling. It felt strangely oily against my bare skin.

At some point in its history, this had been a cute, functional little guesthouse, but now it was a creepy, smelly hole of a place, packed with old furniture — a ragged, damp-looking sofa, a huge wood cabinet with a little rounded glass TV screen in it, a coffee table with crooked spindly wooden legs … Every imaginable surface was covered in junk, mostly cardboard boxes and bulging plastic trash bags.

The windows were all covered in brown paper, each one rimmed by a brilliant square of sunlight seeping in from behind the paper’s curled-up edges.

To my left was a door that led into a bathroom. Next to it was a set of shutter-like accordion doors — a closet?

As I stared at them, they opened with a creak.

Honestly, I don’t even know why I was surprised. Did I say a creepy, smelly hole of a place? Obviously, I meant a creepy, smelly, haunted hole of a place.

I walked over to the closet. Bonus — there were shoes in there, a lot of them. Fancy, high-heeled, vintage-y looking shoes, old enough to have belonged to Diana Del Mar — not the kind of thing you’d normally wear to hike through a ravine, but certainly better than nothing.

But when I tried to slide my foot inside one, I realized that Jonathan was right — movie stars did have tiny feet. I held one up and looked at the number on the sole. Size five and a half. I couldn’t even force the toes of my size-eight foot inside. It was a mathematical and physical impossibility.

Outside, a shadow passed in front of the papered-over door.

I knew he couldn’t see me, but the sight still turned my blood to ice.

I was standing motionless when a sound in the closet caught my attention. I looked over just as all of the clothes slipped off their hangers to the floor. Then the two dozen or so hangers began to swing, all at different speeds, making a horrible scraping sound on the ancient wood bar.

“Quiet!” I hissed, darting over to the closet. I was about to pull them all down — I might be trapped in here, but at least I could keep Paige from telegraphing my exact location to a murderer.

My plan was interrupted when I saw the hinge.

There was a hidden door disguised in the wood paneling of the closet wall.

When I gave it a push, it opened easily, revealing a small, dark space. I reached my hand inside and found a light switch, flipping it on.

A flight of stairs led down into absolute darkness.

A biting scent floated up and invaded my nose. I turned away, my nostrils stinging, and remembered what Leyta Fitzgeorge had asked me — what seemed like a weird question at the time — whether I ever smelled the strong smell of vinegar.

I did now.

Gently closing the door behind me, I crept down the steps, which opened into a room roughly the same size as the room upstairs.

On the far wall was a small pull-down movie screen, like the kind you use in classrooms with an overhead projector. A small olive-green leather sofa faced the screen, and a rolling cart directly behind the sofa held an old-fashioned film projector.

This must have been Diana Del Mar’s workroom. I remembered Paige’s blog entry about her — how she had wanted to make movies. In this room, Diana didn’t have to be a smiling starlet or box office poison. She got to be who she really wanted to be — a filmmaker.

Close to me there was a large table that looked like some ancient version of a computer, with a screen in the back, raised up like a monitor. On the flat part of the table was an array of buttons and control dials. There were also six big, flat turntable pieces. Two of the turntables held a film reel each, and the film wound through the spools on the machine from one to the other, co

It must have been an editing machine — the kind they used before everything was edited on computers.

Next to the table was a small rolling cart, with a metal rack that stood about five feet high. Curling pieces of film hung from the rack’s thin metal hooks like snakeskins.

I walked toward the desk on the side wall. It was sturdy, constructed of heavy steel. On it were a typewriter, a telephone, and a few piles of paper. There was a tray marked IN and one marked FILE and another one marked READ. I reached toward the typewriter and tapped out a series of letters on the dusty keys: q w e r t y

The e on the page was slightly lower than the rest of the letters, the t slightly raised.

This exact typewriter had been used by Diana Del Mar, more than seventy years ago — to write the script Paige had presented to me in the bathtub.

I picked up the phone to check for a signal, but the line was dead — it probably had been for decades.

In the corner of the room, there was a simple door, painted the same drab color as the walls. I tried the handle, but it was locked.

As I turned back to the stairs, the lights cut out.

I stood in perfect, horrific darkness for about three seconds, and then with a groan, the editing machine came to life behind me. The film reels began to spin, and a movie scene appeared on the screen.

It was a man and woman sitting at a di

There was no sound, but you could feel the tension between them. The camera slowly moved in on Diana as she took a sip of her wine. Then it cut to the man, watching her carefully. Diana was speaking. They conversed for a minute, and then the man spoke a single angry line.

The shot cut to Diana. She stared into her wine glass and said something quietly. And then her mouth moved in the shape of the words I’d know anywhere —

This is the kind of dream you don’t wake up from, Henry.

I’d known it was coming, but it still stopped me cold.

This was a scene from Diana’s movie. The one Paige had written about in her blog. I searched my memory for the film’s title. The Final Honeymoon.

On a shelf next to the table was a stack of empty film cans — the ones that had held the reels that were loaded on the editing table. I picked one up and looked at the label on its top.

It read: THE DINNER PARTY (WORKING TITLE ONLY)

I’d heard that name before … but where?

Then it hit me. From Reed. It was one of the movies he’d listed as his favorites. But it wasn’t even the real name of the movie. It was only a working title, one that even Paige hadn’t known.

Which meant … Reed had been down here. He’d seen this movie. He’d heard that line.

Suddenly, there was a jump in the action on the film. Diana’s character was standing up from the table, holding her wine glass. The camera was close on her dazed eyes. The glass slipped from her hand. She stumbled, trying to walk away from her chair, and made it almost all the way out of the dining room before collapsing to the ground. The man watched her with a small smile.