by Ava Barry
“Writer?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
He waved the comment away with his hand. “Do they know your face? You have a recognizable face?”
“Not really, I’m new.”
Errol wheeled around to face the rest of them. “It’s him,” he said. “He’ll go first.”
Everyone cheered. Nora came over and linked her arm through mine. “I’ll go with him,” she said. “He has no idea what he’s doing.”
“Look, I think it’s high time that someone told me what’s going on,” I said.
There was a sustained silence, and then everyone burst into laughter.
“He’s scared, look at him; he’s so scared.” Nora smiled.
“It’s not every day you come to Hollywood and find yourself abducted by the screen elite!” Errol joined in.
Nora smiled at me. “We like to play a little game,” she said. “There are no rules, except not getting caught. If you get caught, we’re all done for.”
“What sort of game?”
She shrugged. “We break into people’s houses while they’re sleeping. Sometimes we take things.”
“That’s absurd.”
“Isn’t it!” Errol waved his flask at me, grinning wildly. “I guarantee you’ve never had so much fun in your life.”
“Whoever finds the most interesting token wins the game.” Nora started up the drive, then turned to face me. “You coming?”
I couldn’t see her face, just a flush of moonlight that stretched down the driveway and made shadows of everything.
“Yes,” I said faintly. “I’m coming.”
It was unnaturally quiet, no traffic sounds or shouts of laughter from late-night revelry. Nora was always two steps ahead of me, and I had to marvel at her lack of fear.
“Wait up!”
“Shhh!” she said, turning to put her finger to her lips.
I followed her as she tiptoed through the garden. My attention was fully riveted on the window with the light on; I could hardly focus on anything else.
“What happens if they catch us?”
She shrugged and smiled. “Hasn’t happened yet.”
I waited by a patch of hydrangeas as Nora strolled up to the front door and gingerly tested the handle. She tried it again, then turned around and shook her head. Before I could follow her intentions, she walked around the side of the house and disappeared.
There was only a moment for me to decide what to do. If I was caught in the garden alone, I would seem like a common thief. I could hardly expect a wealthy homeowner to believe that I had been talked into the act by Errol Flynn and the three others, because I could hardly believe it myself. I lingered a moment longer, then ran after her.
She was nowhere to be seen. I looked around frantically for a moment, then heard a small noise above me. Nora had scaled a latticed portico on the side of the house and was straddling an upper balcony.
“Nora!”
“Come up here!” she whispered. “This one looks promising!”
Before I could say anything else, she climbed over and disappeared once more.
It took me a good ten minutes to climb up the lattice, and by the time I had finally reached the balcony and peered through the windows, there was no sight of her. Trying to be as quiet as possible, I slipped through the balcony doors and nearly had a heart attack when I realized what was in front of me.
I was standing in a bedroom, and by the size of it, it looked to be the master bedroom. Right next to the balcony doors were two sleeping forms, and as I watched, one of them rolled over to face me.
Five minutes passed before I could fully convince myself that the man was asleep. I finally summoned the courage to tiptoe across the bedroom and into the hallway, which lay beyond an open door.
Nora stood at the end of the corridor. She looked up and smiled when she saw me. With an excited motion, she called me over, and I went to join her.
Even in the darkness, I could see that the room at the end of the hall was a nursery. It had a slanted ceiling, and a mobile hung with moons and stars. Against one wall lay a crib, and next to it, a fancy perambulator.
“He’s asleep,” Nora said. “Let’s take him with us.”
It took me a moment to realize that she was talking about the baby. “No!” I hissed, under my breath. “Are you crazy?”
“C’mon, Theo, he’s so cute.” Nora walked over to the crib and leaned on her forearms. “I’m good with babies.”
“Nora, this is too much,” I said. “I’m leaving.”
“Relax, Theo,” she whispered. “I’m joking. We’ll find a different token.”
We tiptoed out of the nursery and made our way toward the stairs. Following Nora’s lead, I placed each foot on the stairs with absolute care, not wanting to make a sound. It took forever to descend to the bottom floor, but when we finally did, I allowed myself my first real breath.
“Find something, then let’s go,” I said.
Nora gave me a sly grin. “You’re nervous, aren’t you?”
“It’s no big deal if you get caught,” I said. “You’re a beautiful young woman. You can say that you were lost. If I get caught, I’ll go straight to jail.”
“Is that a compliment?” She touched my chin, then walked past me. She peered into the dimness of the living room, then turned around and walked into the foyer. After a few steps, she turned to look at me.
“What are you waiting for?”
“I think we should leave.”
“So, go.” She shrugged, then disappeared.
I watched her vanish into the dimness of the house. A moment later, there was the sound of creaking wood, and a soft phwoosh, and then silence once more. As I listened, a gentle, mocking melody came floating out of the silence, followed by a dizzy sequence of notes that dissolved into a lilting crescendo.
I lingered there for a moment, frozen to the spot, and then ran down the hall to find Nora. To my immediate horror, she was seated at a grand piano, playing a whimsical ballad with the effortlessness of a sleepwalker.
“What are you doing? They’ll wake up!”
She ignored me. A moment later, a light snapped on upstairs, and then I heard a voice.
“Marvin!” came a voice. “Marvin, there’s someone downstairs!”
Nora only played faster. The ceiling shook as someone heavy hopped out of bed, and the baby began to wail.
“Nora, please! I don’t want to leave without you!”
Her hands danced along the keys, scaling the high registers with precision. I could see a slow smile curling up at the edges of her mouth, and she swayed gently as her hands climbed over each other to head toward the lower keys.
“Who is that?” a man’s voice called. “You’ve been warned—I have a gun!”
I crossed the room and grabbed Nora’s shoulders. She looked up at me with a smile.
“I’m leaving,” I said. “Let’s go out through the back.”
Thunderous footsteps came down the stairs as Nora stood up from the piano. I crossed the sitting room and threw open a door. It opened into a little servant’s corridor. I could hear the man turning on lights, and I could tell that there was very little time to get out of the house before he caught up with us.
Without further ado, I grabbed Nora’s hand and pulled her down the corridor.
“I know you’re in here,” the man said. He flicked on the sitting room lamp, and light flooded in beneath the doorframe.
I could hear him stomping around the room, throwing furniture aside and bending to look behind the piano. Nora pressed up against me, and I tried not to breathe, convinced that the man would hear me if I did so.
“Marvin?” came a woman’s voice. “I’ve called the police. They should be here any minute.”
“Good, Nancy!” he called. “Stay upstairs with David.”
Nora detached herself from me and slipped backward down the hall. She motioned for me to follow, and after a moment, I did.
“You h
ear that, you bastard?” came the man’s voice. “The police are on their way. We’ll have you out in no time!”
I had almost reached the end of the corridor before the man threw open the sitting room door. His eyes widened when he saw me.
“Stop!” he said, and raised the gun. “Stop right there!”
I hesitated for a moment. His gun was pointed directly at my chest.
“What’s in your hand?” he demanded.
“Nothing.”
“You’re holding something; let’s see what it is.”
I slowly raised my hands, but before I could open them, the door burst open behind me.
“Say, mate, put that thing down,” came Errol’s voice. “Someone’s liable to get hurt.”
I turned around, and Errol grinned at me.
“Aren’t you… Robin Hood?” the man asked, confused.
“Defender of the poor, adversary of the rich,” Errol said, then took a small bow. “We’ve gotten lost on the way to a party.”
Before the man could respond, Errol grabbed my arm and yanked me out of the corridor. We crossed through a laundry room and had almost reached the door when a shot went off behind us.
The sound was so immediate and confusing that I thought the gun had been next to my ear. Errol crouched for a moment, throwing his hands up over his head, then leaped up. He grabbed me by the shoulders and made for the door. Bits of plaster rained down around us, and everything was reduced to a static hiss as my ears tried to recalibrate.
“Come on!” Errol yelled.
I felt the door burst open behind me, and the man nearly collided with me as he aimed at Errol.
“You’re not going anywhere!” he yelled.
I turned around to charge at him, but the man fired another shot, narrowly missing my hand.
As the man tried to regain his footing, Errol grabbed a box of detergent and threw it at his head. The box burst open and powder detergent filled the air. Another shot went off somewhere in the room, and I heard glass shatter as the bullet hit a window. I couldn’t see anything; the detergent filled my nose and eyes, and I couldn’t stop coughing.
I felt someone grab me and push me out of the room. Somewhere, someone was screaming, and the sound was more terrible than anything. I held my hands over my eyes, which burned so much I thought I might go blind.
A shock of cold air hit me as we found ourselves outside.
“We have to go back!” I yelled. “Nora’s still in there!”
“I’m right here, Theo,” she said, and I felt hands pushing me into the car.
“Everyone in? Good!”
I slammed into the side of the car as we went screeching down the driveway. In the distance, sirens split the silence.
“Go, you bastard, drive!” Errol yelled.
My hands were still clapped over my eyes, and I could feel tears streaming down my face from the detergent.
“Theo, I’m sorry!” Nora said. “They don’t usually have guns.”
I could hear Jules and Errol arguing in the front. I was squashed between the wall of the car and a soft, relenting mass, which I took to be Bill.
“You can’t go down Benedict Canyon,” Errol argued. “We’ll get stopped!”
“We have to get out of here!” Jules said. “Let go of the wheel!”
“This is my car, you heathen!”
“Hey!” Nora yelled. “Turn left up ahead! I know a place where we can hide out.”
I was slammed against the side of the car once again as Jules screeched off the road. We hit a rough patch of road, and I felt the car bumping over gravel and dirt.
“Where the fuck are we?” Errol hissed, and Nora shushed him.
“Jules, turn off the car.”
Jules pulled over and turned off the engine. We idled in silence, and not a minute went past before the sirens grew in volume. I held my breath, and gradually they faded away.
I rubbed my eyes, then blinked and took in my surroundings. The night sky was obscured by lofty trees, and as my vision returned, I saw that they were narrow eucalypts. The air was cooler here, and everything smelled like blue wood and something medicinal. My heart rate slowed.
“Nora, what is this place?”
“It’s an old clinic,” she said. Her voice was slightly muffled. She was chewing on her thumb. “It’s been abandoned since the twenties.”
“How long do we have to wait?”
“Until they leave,” she replied. “Stay in the car, if you want. I’m going in.”
“Nora!” Jules hissed, but she climbed over him and left the car. I rubbed my eyes once more, then climbed out after her.
“Great, now we’ve lost both of them,” Errol muttered.
“Hey, wait up!” I called. Nora turned and looked back at me. I caught up with her, and we walked toward the dark building together.
“What type of clinic was it?”
“Tuberculosis,” she replied. “A bunch of girls wearing masks and white dresses.”
The garden had gone completely wild in the years of abandonment. Chamise and coyote brush grew along the gentle slope that led up toward the hulking structure, which I could see more clearly now. It looked like it might have been a large house at one point, a gingerbread Victorian mansion complete with gables, turrets, and rounded windows.
“Why do you sneak into people’s houses?” I asked. “Not enough excitement in your life?”
“I spend all my time on a stage,” she said. “I never get the chance to watch other people. It’s the chance to be anonymous.”
“So buy a mask. It’d be a lot safer.”
“Don’t you get it? Most of these people don’t know how they ended up in Los Angeles. They’re all buying into someone else’s dream. It’s so sad.”
We reached the front door. Nora walked up and tested the doorknob.
“It’s locked,” she said. “Should we climb through a window?”
“Not tonight,” I said. “Not for me.”
“We didn’t get a token,” she said. “I didn’t have a chance to find something.”
I smiled at her, then held up my hand. She frowned and tilted her head, confused.
“Take it,” I said. “It’s yours.”
I opened my hand and revealed a brooch. It was shaped like a scarab, with a fat green jewel for the body, and gold-tipped antennae and legs. Nora was speechless for a moment, then took it from me.
“You stole this?” she said, wide-eyed.
I was confused for a moment. “I thought that was the point of the game,” I said.
“You’re not supposed to take something valuable!” she said, hitting my shoulder. “What if they called the cops or something? You want me to get arrested?”
“But—they did call the cops.”
A slow grin spread across her face. “Theo, I’m joking,” she said. “I love it. I think it’s the best thing that anyone’s ever found. Pin it on me.”
I stepped toward her and undid the clasp on the brooch. For the first time that night, I was close enough to catch a whiff of her perfume. She smelled like orange blossoms, the sharp, dazzling smell of a lost California, something that existed only between the faded pages of the old city. The smell made me think of a dusty wilderness that had vanished years ago, long before the pepper trees and oleander came to represent the city.
After I pinned the brooch to her dress, she looked down at it. I hadn’t stepped away yet, and she looked up and smiled.
“Let’s go, hey?” she said. “The cops are probably gone by now.”
I followed her back to the car, wondering what the rest of them would say when they saw the brooch. It turned out that I didn’t need to worry, because everyone was silent when we climbed into the car. There were no detours on the way back to the Garden of Allah, and when I finally stepped into my bedroom, the strange couple who had unwittingly set me off on the night’s journey had disappeared.
TEN
It was three in the morning by the time I finished read
ing. Theo’s handwriting was cramped and elegant, the letters hooked together. The words were difficult to read, and it took me at least ten minutes to read each page, especially since I took copious notes as I went along.
Errol Flynn, Jules, and someone named Bill. Nora was Eleanor Hayes, of course; it only took me a few pages to figure that out. When I finished reading the first part of the journal I went to the wall of my office, where I had pinned dozens of photographs of Eleanor. After scanning through the photos, I found the one I wanted: Eleanor, at the premiere for My Friend, Roy. She wore a long black gown, and pinned near her breast was a brooch, shaped like a scarab.
* * *
I could hardly wait to get to work the next morning. When I arrived at the office at six o’clock, I was convinced that I would be the first one in. As soon as I walked into the office, however, I smelled coffee. Someone was already there.
I walked into the kitchen and found Brian humming to himself. His back was to me, and he was stirring sugar into his coffee.
“Brian.”
“Jesus fuck!” He whirled around.
I leaned against the doorframe. “What are you doing here?”
Brian scowled. “I’m meeting someone.”
“Oh? Who?”
He pointed his spoon at me. “That,” he said, “is none of your business.”
I followed him out into the hallway. He sauntered toward his office, still humming. When he reached the office door, he gave me a smug little smile.
“So, how’s that job search coming?”
“I’m not leaving, Brian. Alexa’s keeping me on.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“Who are you meeting?”
“Never you mind.” He pulled the door of his office shut behind him. I struggled not to kick the door in, and instead contented myself with going into the kitchen and fixing myself up a cup of coffee.
Over the next few hours, the rest of the Lens staff trickled in. I lingered by my desk, pretending to do work, until I saw Petra walk into the lobby. I jumped up and walked over to her.
“Who’s Brian meeting up with today?”
“Good morning to you, too,” she murmured. “Is that coffee for me?”
“Sure, why not.”