by Meg Cabot
“Obviously you care,” she said, with some asperity, “or you wouldn’t have dragged him to safety, now, would you?”
“Well,” Jack said, giving another shrug, this one uncomfortable. “Couldn’t very well leave him to die, now, could I? I mean, he’s got kids.”
“Kids?” Lou was having a hard time believing any of this. Was she really sitting in the snow, having this conversation with Jack Townsend? Had the two of them really survived a helicopter crash in the Alaskan outback? Or was this Bizarro World, an alternate reality, like in Superman? It certainly felt like Bizarro World. “What kids? How do you know he had kids?”
Oh, yes, definitely Bizarro World. In the real world, Jack Townsend would not sit down in the snow beside her and dig, as he was doing now, a cheap black leather wallet from his coat pocket, then flip it open. A half-dozen school portraits, in a long plastic holder, tumbled out.
“Four of ’em,” he informed her. “I know, I was as surprised as you are. Sam didn’t strike me as the fatherly type either.”
The children were all, Lou couldn’t help noticing, in need of a good deal of orthodontia. No wonder the guy needed money….
Then she tore her gaze from the wallet, and swung it accusingly towards Jack Townsend’s face.
“You picked an unconscious man’s pocket?” she asked.
Jack shrugged for a third time and began to fold the photos back into the wallet. “Hey,” he said. “Somebody paid him to kill me. I thought there might be something in here that would tell me who that person was.”
Lou’s gaze wavered uncertainly from his face to the wallet and back again. “Was there?” she couldn’t help asking, finally, when he did not elaborate.
“Nope.” Jack dropped the wallet back into his pocket.
Lou studied his profile for a moment. “You didn’t know he had kids,” she couldn’t help pointing out, drily, “until after you pulled him out.”
“Well,” Jack admitted, with obvious reluctance. “That’s true, I guess.”
Amazing. The guy had a heart after all. If she lived through this, she was going to have to apologize to Vicky for having doubted her on that score.
If she lived through this. The more Lou became aware of her surroundings, the more she began to doubt the likelihood of her lasting the afternoon. Everywhere she looked, she saw only smoke, and snow, and trees, and the rising slope of the mountain they’d crashed into.
My God, she thought. It’s And I Alone Survived, that 1978 film about the woman whose plane crashed somewhere…the Sierra Madres, maybe? And she had to climb down the mountain and wandered for days, looking for a telephone so she could call her loved ones and let them know she was all right….
Startled, Lou reached into the pocket of her parka, and drew out her cell phone.
“Don’t bother,” came Jack Townsend’s wry voice. “I already tried. There aren’t any relay towers out here.”
Lou shook her head, staring angrily down at the tiny screen. “I pay seventy bucks a month for this piece of junk,” she said. “Seventy bucks. And does it ever work? God, no. Drive through the canyon…nothing. Crash-land in Alaska. Nothing. I can’t even access my messages,” she added, after pushing send several times, and holding the phone to her slowly freezing ear.
“What do you want to bet,” Jack said in that same dry tone, “one of those messages is from someone who tried to reach you before we left, with some urgent reason why you weren’t supposed to fly out to Myra?”
She glanced at him. Snow was settling, in a gentle dusting, across his broad, leather-jacketed shoulders. She wondered if he was cold. She was cold, and she was in a down-filled ski parka. All he had on was a beaten brown leather jacket. Unlined, from what she could see.
Well, what had he needed a warm coat for? He just strolled from the plane to the limo to his heated trailer to the set. She was the one who’d been planning on standing around, freezing her toes off, trying to talk Tim Lord out of creating a real-life environmental disaster in order to realistically film the one she’d invented for the film.
Then the meaning of his words sunk in.
“You mean like Vicky,” she said, “with Elijah getting sick?”
“Exactly.” He regarded her steadily, still wearing that faint look of amusement on his achingly handsome face.
“So if I had just checked my messages before getting on that stupid helicopter….”Her voice trailed off.
“Then you’d be safely back in Anchorage,” Jack finished for her.
Lou looked at the smoking helicopter, at the scar it had made in the earth. She looked at Sam, the pilot, stretched out in the snow with a slightly bemused expression on his face, his mouth sagging open as he breathed, none too quietly. Not snoring, exactly, but not breathing easy, that was for sure. Then she looked at Jack Townsend, looking so cool and self-assured in his jeans and leather jacket. He didn’t look as if his butt, like Lou’s, was slowly freezing. He didn’t look as if his head, like Lou’s, was pounding. He didn’t look as if the thought of being trapped in the Alaskan woods without a working cell phone, food, or even a dry place to sit, was the slightest bit disconcerting.
If she had just checked her messages, right now she could be back at the hotel with Vicky, reading magazines, ordering hamburgers and hot fudge sundaes from room service, and watching the Lifetime movie channel. Maybe even watching And I Alone Survived and joking about it.
“Damn,” Lou burst out, angrily, her eyes stinging— maybe from the cold, but more likely from the injustice of it all.
“Of course,” Jack said, without even a hint of his usual dry, ironic tone,“if you had, I’d be dead.”
She blinked at him. “What?”
“I’d be dead,” Jack said, again, as simply as if he were telling his PA what he wanted for lunch. “You saved my life.”
Lou was so startled to hear this that she did the very first thing that came to mind. And that was to deny it. “I did not.”
“Sorry to have to be the one to break it to you,” Jack said, “but yeah, you did.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. She couldn’t tell whether he was joking or serious. That was, of course, the problem with Jack Townsend. Well, one of the many. His sense of humor was so dry that most people couldn’t tell he was joking at all.
Like now, for instance. Was he serious? Did he honestly think she’d saved his life? Had she saved his life? No. No, not hardly. Saved her own life, maybe. Sure. That’s what she’d been doing. Because why would she bother to save the life of a commitment-phobic egoist like Jack Townsend?
“What made you think of it, anyway?” Jack asked suddenly. Well, suddenly to Lou, anyway.
“Think of what?” she asked.
“The thing,” Jack explained patiently, as if to a mental patient, “with the flare gun.”
“Oh.” The flare gun. Of course. “Breakfast Club,” she said.
He looked startled. “I beg your pardon?”
“The Breakfast Club,” she said again, enunciating more carefully this time. “John Hughes, 1985. Anthony Michael Hall’s character gets detention for bringing a flare gun to school. He meant to kill himself with it, but it accidentally went off in his locker. Remember?” She studied his face for signs of recognition. “By the director of Sixteen Candles?”
“Sorry,” he said, as politely as if declining seconds at a dinner party. “I don’t really watch movies all that much.”
For a moment, Lou forgot she was the victim of an attempted murder and a helicopter crash, and gaped at him as if he had just done something completely out of keeping with his manly image, such as order a champagne cocktail or burst into a falsetto rendition of “I Feel Pretty.”
“You’re an actor,” she cried, “and you’re telling me you don’t really watch movies all that much?”
“Hazard of the trade,” Jack said with a shrug. “The magic of Hollywood doesn’t hold much allure when you know all the secrets behind the tricks.”
Lou shook her h
ead. Oh, yes. They were definitely in Bizarro World now. No doubt about it.
“But The Breakfast Club,” she said. “I mean, come on. That movie’s an American teen classic. It defined a generation.” What did he do on Sunday afternoons, if not lay around and watch movies on TV, the way Lou did?
“Maybe,” Jack ventured, as if he hoped to change the subject, “we should build a fire.”
“A fire?” She gaped at him. Maybe he had gotten a conk on the noggin, just like her and Sam, and was hallucinating, or something. The girl in And I Alone Survived had hallucinated quite a bit, from thirst and hunger, but all she had ever seen were trailer parks and the occasional Native American spirit guide. How much better the film would have been if she’d hallucinated about something entertaining, or at least lascivious, such as…well, Jack Townsend with his clothes off. Lou sincerely hoped that if worse came to worst and she started hallucinating, it was of something along those lines…but only if she could be assured Jack would never find out.
“What do you think that is?” Lou pointed at the burning hulk of metal a dozen yards away. “What, you’re worried when they start looking for us, they won’t be able to spot us? Townsend, I don’t think they’re going to have any problem.”
“Actually,” he said, in the same polite tone he’d used before, “I was thinking a fire we might actually be able to get close to, for warmth. You’re shivering, you know.”
She was, of course. Shivering. But she’d hoped he wouldn’t notice. It was bad enough she’d been unconscious in front of him. The last thing she wanted was to show weakness in front of Jack Townsend.
So he wasn’t hallucinating after all. She heaved a sigh. No, that would have been too much to hope. That Jack Townsend might have suffered a concussion and would hopefully remember none of this, most specifically the part where he had saved her life by pulling her unconscious body from the burning wreckage of the helicopter.
Because now, of course, she owed him one. And how was she supposed to maintain a healthy and ongoing contempt for him—which she had to, out of loyalty to Vicky—if she owed him one?
On the other hand, if he really did believe this thing about her saving his life, maybe they were even. If so, and they lived through this, she could still hate him without impunity….
It was as she was thinking this that Jack, who’d climbed to his feet and begun picking up branches that the helicopter had knocked to the ground, leaned down and heft a particularly large stick. The back of his leather jacket hiked up as he bent over, and she was awarded a denimclad view of the famous Jack Townsend ass, the one women all over America gladly shelled out ten bucks a pop to see on the big screen.
And here she was, in the middle of Alaska, with that butt all to herself.
Not that she wanted it. No, thank you. She was certainly not going to make that mistake again. No more actors for her. So what if this one seemed to be concerned about her physical comfort, and had saved her life, and oh, yes, looked better in a pair of jeans than any man Lou had ever seen in her life? I need a bigger gun. Right there was reason enough not to give him the time of day, let alone her sorely abused heart.
Besides, hadn’t he had the very bad taste to dump her best friend and take up with Greta Woolston instead?
Jack turned around and approached the place where she sat, dropping the pieces of wood he’d collected into a pile at her feet. If he noticed that her cheeks, which had gone up in flames the minute he’d turned around, were burning, he didn’t say anything about it. Maybe he thought it was due to the wind, and not the fact that she had, just seconds before, been ogling his hindquarters.
“A lot of it’s wet,” he said.
Hardly noticing the cold now, she was blushing so hard, Lou said, “Wet? What’s wet?”
He looked down at her curiously. “The wood,” he said. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Fine,” Lou said quickly. Too quickly. “Why?”
“Because you look….”He paused, as if searching forthe right word. “Funny.”
Funny. Great. Because her face was as red as a strawberry, maybe? Yeah, real funny.
Then, to her relief, he looked away.
“We might as well give it a try,” he said, glancing at the burning heap of metal before them. “I’d rather not get too close to that if I don’t have to. Who knows if it’s still gonna blow. You got any matches?”
She assumed a look of complete disdain, hoping he would not guess that she’d been admiring his butt.
“No, I don’t have any matches,” she said, huffily. “I live in LA, where smoking is outlawed. Why would I have matches?”
He seemed very surprised to hear this.
“I thought all screenwriters smoked,” he said.
“I thought all actors smoked,” she countered.
They fell silent. All Lou could hear was the hiss of the snow as it fell on the burning helicopter. Not even a bird. And definitely not any search planes, out looking for them yet. Lou didn’t say anything, because she didn’t want to alarm her fellow crash survivor. But the snow suddenly seemed to be falling a lot more thickly. And quite a bit faster.
“I’ll bet our friend Sam’s a smoker,” Jack said suddenly, starting to his feet. “I’ll go check.”
This time it was she who stopped him by grabbing onto the back of his coat—being careful not to look at what lay beneath it, however.
“Aw, come on,” she said. “Leave the guy alone.”
Jack looked impatient. “Lou,” he said. “He’s not going to mind my rifling through his pockets. He’s out cold.”
“Still,” Lou said. “It’s not right. It’s…it’s creepy. ”She couldn’t explain her repugnance over the idea of Jack touching Sam. She tried to change the subject, to distract him. Such tactics had usually worked with Barry, whose attention span had been extremely limited. “And besides, isn’t there some beacon or something that goes off whenever a plane crashes that alerts everyone back in the tower that it’s down? I mean, someone knows we’re out here, right? Someone will be here any minute to rescue us. Any minute now. And even if there isn’t a black box or whatever, they’re bound to notice over in Myra if we don’t show up, right? I mean, Tim’s probably on the phone with the Mounties or whoever right now.”
“Sure,” Jack Townsend said. Was it her imagination, or did it sound as if he was just trying to appease her? “Sure he is.”
“Right,” she said, with false cheer. “They’ll be here any minute. So have a seat.”
Jack gently peeled her fingers from his coat. “I will,” he said. “But first, I’m going to get some matches, and then I’m going to build a fire to keep us warm.”
Dismayed that she hadn’t, in fact, managed to get him to forget about searching Sam for matches, she cried, “But—”
“Look, I’m not suggesting we eat him,” Jack said before adding darkly, “yet. I’m just saying, I am not going to freeze to death if I can help it. It’s called survival, honey. You better get used to it.”
She narrowed her eyes after him as he strode through the swirling snow. It’s called survival, honey. You better get used to it.
Not a bad line, really. She kind of liked it. She had to hand it to Jack. He was a fair wordsmith, for an actor. Maybe she could use that line sometime. Not in this film. It was too late. But maybe in her novel. Yes, her novel, the one that was going to catapult her out of the film business forever, and maybe land her on a nice farm somewhere far, far away from the Santa Monica Freeway….
Suddenly, she sprang to her feet, then staggered as her head swam from the sudden movement.
“My laptop!” she cried. “Oh, my God! Where’s my laptop?”
Jack glanced up at her from where he was bent over the pilot, going through his pockets once more.
“It’s all right,” he said, seeming puzzled by her outburst. Well, and why shouldn’t he be? Clearly, he thought her a headcase. He couldn’t understand, he didn’t know what it was like. “It’s right over t
here.”
She looked in the direction he pointed to now. Her laptop, in its computer case, sat a few feet away, unscathed except for the snow that had already begun to carpet it.
She pounced upon it, cradling it to her chest as her heart began to slow its frantic pace, and her head stopped spinning.
She was being ridiculous, she knew. It was only a computer, after all. But it had that chapter on it. The first thing she’d been able to write since that rat fink Barry had left, taking with him, she’d been sure for a while, not only her heart but her creativity, as well.
But no. No, he hadn’t gotten it all. That chapter was proof. And the proof was safe. Because, she thought with a sickening feeling, Jack Townsend had saved it. Saved her first chapter, and her, too.
She glanced over at him. It appeared his search for matches was not going well. He looked annoyed, and slightly disgusted, as he picked through Sam’s pockets.
Good God. The reality of her situation was finally starting to sink in. This wasn’t Bizarro World. This was the real world. And she was stranded. Stranded in a clearing amidst a thick cluster of pine trees, on a sloping hillside. In Alaska. In the middle of nowhere. Next to the smoking heap that had once been a helicopter.
And it was snowing. And it was cold. And her head hurt.
And over there was Jack Townsend, the last man in the world—with the possible exception of Barry Kimmel—that she’d ever want to be stranded with in the Alaskan wilderness. Or anywhere, for that matter. And someone wanted him dead—wanted it enough not to mind if a few other people, namely Lou Calabrese, went right along with him.
Great. Just great. Just what, precisely, had she ever done to deserve this?
7
“I don’t care about your piddling problems, Marvin,” Beverly Tennant snarled into the phone. “Do you hear me? Let me repeat it, in case you didn’t understand. I…don’t…care.”
The door to Beverly’s office, which someone had been tapping on for some time throughout Beverly’s conversation, opened a tentative few inches, and Chloe peered in, looking pale and a little sick to her stomach.