I nodded. “Yeah. But Luther says that her diary hints at her knowing something. She tore out the pages about the actual heist and what happened to her brothers afterward.”
“Right,” Bess said. “So why does Luther think she knew what they were planning beforehand?”
“When he read over the diary again for this production, he found a passage that he hadn’t paid much attention to before,” I explained. “Two days before the heist, Esther wrote that she had a fight with her brothers. All she said was that she wanted them to ‘reconsider.’ They wouldn’t, and all three of them had a fight. Then the next day’s entry is torn out.”
Bess nudged my arm. “Sounds mysterious,” she said with a grin.
“I guess,” I said. “But I’m almost too busy trying to calm my nerves to get interested in a hundred-year-old mystery!”
Bess just laughed. “Yeah, right! Well, I bet your nerves will calm down as soon as you step in front of the camera again,” she told me. “You’re a natural!”
I sighed. My friends just didn’t seem to understand how much this stage fright was bothering me. But I really wanted to talk to them about it.
In the afternoon I returned to the makeup trailer, where Pam and Degas made me into a younger version of Esther. Then we all went over to the Rackhams’ cabin set. I could see that Mary had done some work there to make the place look slightly different than it had before. The fabric on the couch was newer and cleaner, and there weren’t as many props cluttering the set.
“I’m going to re-dress the set after every scene,” Mary explained to me. “We’re just going to craft little differences, so that audiences will think it’s a different day in each scene.”
“And you’ll be sitting in different places in the cabin for each scene,” Morris chimed in. “One time you’ll sit at the table to write in the diary. Another time you’ll be on the couch, or in the rocking chair.”
“It’s hard to believe that it will look as if each scene is a different time,” I said. “When I know all along that they were shot within an hour of one another.”
“Okay, we’re ready,” Mary said. “The cabin set should look newer, as if Esther and her brothers hadn’t been living there for long. There isn’t as much furniture and there aren’t as many decorations on the walls.”
I nodded. “It definitely looks newer.”
“And you look younger,” Pam said with a proud smile. She powdered my face one last time, and then I took my place at the wooden table.
My pulse pounded in my veins as I waited for the shoot to start. I felt out of place. What was I doing, acting in a movie? I wasn’t an actor—I was a detective! Solving mysteries, I could do. Helping people I could do too. But acting well? Or calming my own jitters? Not at all!
Mary’s assistant handed me a leatherbound book. Inside were blank pages made of old-fashioned pressed paper. It was one of the three duplicates of Esther’s diary that the props department had made.
“Here we go, Nancy,” Morris said. “You’re going to write in the front section of the book. Remember, you’re only fourteen years old now. You’re new in the area, and your brothers are still trying to make a go at being farmers.”
I nodded. It seemed strange that he wanted me to think of all that stuff when the only thing I had to do was write in the diary.
“Action,” Morris said.
I opened the little book, took up the heavy fountain pen, and paused. What was I supposed to write? Suddenly I panicked. Had Morris wanted me to memorize Esther’s actual diary entries? Was the camera going to show what I was writing? I had no idea what kinds of things Esther had written when she was younger. The only thing they’d taught us in school about her diary was that those incriminating pages were ripped out.
“Cut,” Morris said. “Nancy? Why aren’t you writing?”
“Um, I’m not sure what to write,” I admitted. “Did you want me to memorize the actual diary?”
He chuckled. “Good heavens, no. I wouldn’t expect anyone to do that! Just write whatever you want to.”
“The camera won’t see it?”
Morris shook his head. “We’re not going to do close-ups yet. Later we may shoot a few takes of the entries from the real diary. I haven’t decided yet.”
“Okay. Sorry.” I leaned back over the book as a production assistant read off the information about the scene and the take.
“Action,” Morris called.
I touched the fountain pen to the page, and the black ink sank right into the paper, making a big blot. I tried to pretend I hadn’t noticed. I began moving the pen, but I still didn’t know what to write. In desperation I wrote down my address. Then I wrote Bess’s, and then George’s. The whole time all I could think about was the camera. There were at least fifteen people on the soundstage, and they were all staring right at me. The camera was watching me and only me.
I wrote down Jeffrey Allman’s address. I hadn’t even realized I was thinking about him, but I guess the mysterious fire at his house was still in the back of my mind. Maybe I could make a list of possible motives for someone setting the fire. But I felt kind of silly writing something like that in Esther’s diary.
It was really quiet. The silence made me even more nervous for some reason. All I could hear was the sound of the pen scratching as I wrote. My breath began to come faster. I missed having the Alvarez brothers here to distract me. I noticed that my hand was shaking, and the fountain pen made another big blot.
“And … cut,” Morris said.
I put down the pen and turned nervously to the director. “That was good, Nancy,” he said unconvincingly. “But in this next take I want you to remember what we talked about. You’re only fourteen, and you have no worries yet about your brothers.”
“Okay,” I said. But I still didn’t understand why any of that mattered. We did another take. I could tell right away that this one was worse than the last one. With the camera rolling, I became completely selfconscious. I knew that my hands were moving in a weird, stilted way. I wondered if I was sitting up straight or if I would look slumped over on camera. I concentrated on straightening my spine.
Morris called cut again. He got out of his chair and came over to sit with me at the table. I winced, expecting him to yell at me for being such a bad actress.
“You need to relax, Nancy,” he said gently. “You’re very stiff. What’s the matter?”
“I feel silly just sitting here and writing,” I admitted.
Morris smiled. “Maybe that’s the problem. You should be doing more than just sitting and writing.”
Shoot. I was supposed to be doing something else? Had I forgotten some of his directions? My cheeks grew hot with embarrassment. “What else should I be doing?” I asked.
“Thinking,” he said. “You don’t suppose that Esther Rackham felt silly sitting at her table and putting her thoughts down in her diary, do you?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“So why should you feel silly?”
I thought about that. “Well, nobody was watching Esther,” I pointed out. “She didn’t have a camera pointed at her.”
“But if you want to act like Esther, you have to think like Esther,” Morris told me. “You might know you’re being filmed, but Esther doesn’t. She’s just writing in her diary.”
“I guess,” I said. “But I’m not Esther. How am I supposed to forget the camera?”
“By thinking,” he said again. “Right now, you’re thinking your own thoughts—about how you feel silly, about what you should write, about what position you’re sitting in. Am I right?”
I nodded. “I’m self-conscious.”
“Exactly,” Morris said. “So instead of thinking your own thoughts, try to think Esther’s thoughts. She’s not aware of what position she’s sitting in. She’s not wondering what words to write. She’s just thinking her thoughts and putting them down on paper.”
“That’s why you’re telling me to remember how old she is and wh
at her current family situation is?” I asked. “So that I’ll be able to figure out what she’d be thinking?”
“It will give you a starting point,” he said.
I was beginning to understand what he meant. That morning I had concentrated on the other actors. By paying attention to them, I forgot to pay attention to myself and my own thoughts. Now Morris was saying that I should pay attention to Esther’s thoughts the same way I’d done with the Alvarez brothers.
“I’ll do my best,” I promised Morris.
When we did the next take, I tried to ignore the camera. Instead I thought about fourteen-year-old Esther. She was a pioneer girl whose parents had both died when she was a toddler. As far as I could remember, she had been raised by her two older brothers. It’s odd that she didn’t learn bad behavior from them, I thought suddenly. The Rackham boys were notorious criminals, but Esther had been a good girl who saved the life of the man her brothers had tried to kill. Where had she learned her morals? Clearly not from her wild brothers.
“Cut!” Morris’s voice broke into my thoughts. I jumped, startled. A glance at the diary showed me that I’d been writing down what I was thinking about Esther. Somehow I had managed to forget my nervousness for a moment. I’d even forgotten the camera.
“Much better,” Morris said happily. “Let’s do it again.”
My heart sank. Forgetting the camera for one take had been hard enough. How could I do it for another take? Not to mention for all the other scenes I still had to film this afternoon. I had a feeling I was in for a very long day.
Almost nine hours later, I stumbled out of my trailer, exhausted. All afternoon we had filmed Esther writing in her diary. Between every scene, I’d had to wait while Pam and Degas changed my hair and makeup to make me look a little bit older each time. Mary had to change the set, too, to make it look a little more shabby and lived-in as I grew “older.” Plus, the lighting crew had to change the position of their lamps, and Morris had to decide where he wanted me sitting in each scene. But those things were all easy compared to the acting I had to do.
Sitting still and writing didn’t get any more comfortable, no matter how many times I had to do it. There was something so intimate about writing in a diary—it was almost impossible to do it naturally with a camera watching. I used Morris’s trick as much as I could. I thought about how Esther would feel at the age of fourteen, at the age of sixteen, after she’d gotten a job as a bank teller, while she was sick with influenza, and finally when she realized that her brothers were planning a crime. In each different scene, I thought about what was going on in Esther’s life at the time. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. All I knew for sure was that it had taken a long, long time to film.
By the time I had changed back into my own clothes and gotten my stuff from the trailer, it was almost eleven o’clock at night. There was a note on the mirror in my trailer that said there were changes to the script for tomorrow. That meant I had to go and pick up the revised script pages tonight so that I could learn the new lines in time for the next day’s shoot. Yawning, I headed over to the main office. The office was in a temporary building near the parking area.
I was surprised to find George still there. She was sitting at one of the desks in the back with an intricate array of computer cables in front of her.
“Hi,” I greeted her. “I’m glad you’re still here. I’m supposed to pick up pages for tomorrow’s scenes, but the script coordinator is gone.”
“Hang on a sec,” George said, not looking at me. Her fingers were flying over the keyboard on the desk. I glanced around at the mess of wires and motherboards.
I yawned. I felt exhausted and worn out by the long, difficult day. It was hard to believe that I had to come back tomorrow to shoot even more scenes. After the mess I had made of the diary scenes, I was surprised Morris hadn’t fired me on the spot.
“George, can you just print out the new pages for me?” I asked. “I had a really hard—”
“This is Jeffrey Allman’s computer,” George interrupted me. “I’ve managed to recover a few files.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Where’s his computer?”
George indicated a pile of boards and chips that looked like an electronic skeleton. “That’s his hard drive,” she said. “I took it out of the laptop casing, because the casing was so damaged by the fire.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, yawning again. I really needed to get home and go to sleep. I’d have to wake up very early to learn the new lines for tomorrow. Just thinking about it made me feel nervous all over again.
“I hooked up his hard drive to the computer here, and I think I’m making real progress,” George began. The sparkle in her eyes told me that she was about to launch into a long and detailed account of how she had managed to recover the damaged files. And suddenly I knew that I couldn’t take it. I was so overwhelmed by my feelings of stage fright and failure and exhaustion that I couldn’t stand still and listen to George talking about computers.
“I need the revised pages,” I said.
“Nance, you don’t understand—”
“No, you don’t understand,” I snapped. “I’m tired and I’m having a really hard time on this movie, but you and Bess don’t seem to get it. Every time I say I’m nervous, you act like it’s a joke. But it’s not. I don’t care about your computers any more than you care about my stage fright. Now can you just print out the pages so I can go home?”
George stared at me, her brown eyes wide and astonished. I felt a stab of guilt. I’d never spoken to her like that before. But I was too tired to do anything about it now.
Silently George turned to the computer and pulled up the script. She hit Print, and the pages shot quickly from the printer near the door. George didn’t even turn back to look at me again. I took the pages from the printer and left without saying good-bye.
The Mountain Lion Attack
I woke up late the next morning, as usual. The first thing I thought about was how I had snapped at George. I glanced at the clock. It was almost eight thirty. George is an early bird. She was probably at the set already. I didn’t want to bother her at work, so I would have to call her later.
Thinking about George reminded me of the fire at Jeffrey Allman’s house. George had mentioned that she was making progress in salvaging his hard drive. I wished again that I hadn’t cut her off—she’d probably been trying to tell me something important about the mystery of who set the fire. Would Mr. Allman’s laptop help us find the answer? It was possible that his old computer files from Rackham Industries would contain information leading to a suspect.
I wished I could have focused on a nice, juicy mystery like that one. It would have been much easier than trying to figure out why I was so nervous all the time on the set!
I sighed and picked up the revised script pages I’d gotten last night. I only had one scene today, in the late afternoon. But the whole thing had changed a lot since the last time I saw it. Luther and Althea seemed to keep making my part bigger every time they did a rewrite. The original scene had contained only two lines of dialogue for Esther. The revised scene had two whole pages of new dialogue for me to memorize!
There was a knock on my door, and Hannah stuck her head in.
“Morning, Hannah,” I said.
She stepped inside and frowned at me, her hands on her hips.
“Uh-oh,” I said. “What did I do wrong?”
“You ate the dinner I left you last night,” Hannah said.
I nodded. She had left a whole plate of her meat-loaf and vegetables wrapped up in the fridge. I’d been so hungry by the time I got home that I stuck it in the microwave and gobbled the entire thing. “It was delicious,” I told her. “Thanks.”
“You left your dirty plate sitting out on the table,” Hannah said. “With the dirty tin foil lying next to it, and the dirty utensils on the table too.”
I grimaced. How could I have forgotten to clean up after myself? Hannah hates anythi
ng dirty on the clean table. “Yikes!” I cried. “I’m sorry, Hannah. I got home so late, and it was such a bad day …”
Immediately Hannah’s frown disappeared. She studied my face for a moment, then took a seat on the foot of the bed.
“Why was it a bad day?” she asked.
“I kind of messed up a lot during filming,” I admitted.
“Did you forget your lines?”
“No.” I shrugged helplessly. “I didn’t even have any lines. I was just sitting there writing in a diary.”
“So how did you mess up?” Hannah asked. “You never ‘mess up’ anything!”
“Oh, come on, Hannah. I got nervous, so I didn’t look natural,” I told her. “The director helped me out a lot. In fact, if he hadn’t taught me a trick about how to do it, I wouldn’t have gotten through a single take.”
“But you still think you did a bad job?” Hannah asked. “Even after he taught you his trick?”
I nodded. “I could tell he was frustrated with me by the end of the day. They were just short scenes with no dialogue. It shouldn’t have taken so long to shoot them all. But I had to keep doing a lot of takes.”
“Why?”
“I got self-conscious in front of the camera,” I said quietly. “In fact, I always get self-conscious these days.”
Hannah’s brow wrinkled in concern. “That doesn’t sound like you,” she said. “You’re the most confident girl I know.”
“Not when it comes to acting,” I murmured.
“What do your friends say?” Hannah asked.
“Every time I try to tell anyone that I’m nervous, they say it’s normal,” I told her. “But I don’t think it is normal. This is more than just jitters. I’m really afraid I’m going to make a fool of myself.”
“But Bess and George said that everyone on set considers you a natural,” Hannah protested.
I shrugged. “I doubt Morris thinks I’m a natural after yesterday. Mostly I’ve just managed to muddle through.”
Hannah looked skeptical. “I have a feeling that you’re doing a much better job than you think you are,” she said.
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