by Fred DeVecca
Mooney paid us a visit. He was traveling around in a stealth vehicle—a beater of an old Subaru with a driver in jeans and gray work shirt—and came around the back entrance to the house. Mooney could easily walk here from the big rented estate on Maple Street where he was staying, but he was avoiding being seen on the streets too.
Julie was looking pretty good. Mooney gave her a kiss on the cheek.
“How you doing, babe?”
“I’m good. Ready to go.”
“Okay. That’s great. We really only lost a few days and we can make those up quickly if all goes well, which it will, right?”
There was slight admonition in his voice, but only slight.
“You know me. All will be well. That’s what I’m all about.”
Mooney gave her a call sheet, and he passed one along to me too.
“And now that you’re up and about, we can move you into that big house we got for you next to mine,” he told her.
“No, I like it here. I’m staying.”
“Come on. We got you the most spectacular house in town. With a private caterer. And a full staff. It’s gorgeous and it’s private and I’m right next door. You’ll love it there.”
“I love it here.”
He could see she wasn’t going to budge.
“Okay. Fine. Suit yourself. We can make this work too.”
He turned to me. “The first shot of this whole damn picture will be you Morris guys doing your dance in front of McCusker’s. We’ll get to Julie’s stuff in the afternoon. Let’s start her off slow.”
“Nicky, I’m up for anything,” she said. “I can go anytime.”
“Let’s get these Morris guys first, and then be done with them and they can go drink beer and sing songs or whatever the hell they want to do. Then we’ll do that scene in the West End since we’ll be right there. Won’t have to move far at all.”
“Cool. Totally cool.”
Mooney asked me, “You guys all set?”
“We’re psyched.”
“Okay. See you bright and early.”
With that, and another hug and kiss for Julie, Mooney and his driver left.
Julie said, “I’m going to be there to watch you guys shoot your scene.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” I told her. “That’s the only time in this whole film I won’t be able to watch you. Stay here. Only come out when you need to work.”
“I want to see the Morris dancing. I’ll be fine. I’ll have bodyguards up the ying-yang.”
“And I’ll be there too,” said Sarah.
I didn’t feel good about this, but I didn’t want to stifle her either, especially after all she’d been through.
“Well, okay,” I said. “Sarah, I’m counting on you.”
“I’m all over this, Frankie.”
The girls smiled.
It was late. I needed my rest. We had a 7 a.m. call. I wasn’t going to leave Julie’s side until this film was over, so there would be no trekking up the Hill of Tears for me for a while. I had put Marlowe in the kennel for the duration, and I would sleep at Clara’s.
I was heading upstairs and about to say my goodnights when Julie stopped me.
“Francis …” she began. “You said I could call you Francis, right?”
I nodded, and she went on, “When all this is over, I need to talk to you some more.”
“We can talk now.”
“No. I’ve been through enough of these to know—you have to concentrate on the film to make a good one. This is all I’m going to be thinking about for the next month or so. But still, we need to talk, okay?”
“Well, yeah. Sure. But can you give me a clue?”
“No clues. That wouldn’t be concentrating on this movie.”
“Okay. But I’m all ears when you’re ready.”
I took the first step up the stairs.
“Francis?”
I paused.
“I saw a lot of things when I was sick.”
I wanted her to talk. “Tell me about them.”
She shook her head.
“Not now. Another day, in another town. Get some sleep and dance well tomorrow. All will be well. Will you remember that?”
She walked away into Matthew’s room.
I would remember what she told me, but I would not sleep that night. Not a damn wink.
Chapter Fifteen
Break a Leg
Monday dawned bright and crisp, a perfect New England spring morning. I was not the only one who had not slept, or at least not slept well. The excitement of the first day of shooting had cranked up the whole household. Clara made waffles for us. I sipped coffee. Julie studied her script at the breakfast table and ran lines with Sarah.
Julie and I were not the only people with dual roles in the making of Untitled Nicholas Mooney Project. Sarah was now detective and stand-in. Mooney had agreed to my hiring her as my assistant in guarding Julie, and he had also latched onto her as the perfect stand-in for his star.
Movies employ people the approximate size and coloring as their major performers to stand on the set, in the identical costume as the real actor, while the camera and lighting departments spend interminable hours setting up shots and tweaking the lighting, thus saving the real actors for the real work.
While Julie had a much more perfect, in fact an almost impossibly perfect, look, she and Sarah both had red hair, pale skin, and were pretty much the same size.
So, on this fresh morning, the girls were dressed identically in the costume that Julie would wear for her first scene—a rather outrageously short, tight purple skirt with a mismatched orange silk blouse, leggings with horizontal black stripes, red high-top Converse All Stars, and an orange bandana matching the blouse. It was not clear what look Mooney and the costumer who had arrived at dawn to dress the girls were going for, but they did look striking. They were not yet “made up.” The make-up person would arrive closer to the actual shooting of Julie’s scene.
How could two young ladies, the same size, the same coloring, dressed identically, look so similar from a distance, but so different up close? At this morning’s breakfast table, Sarah looked like a teenage student from Shelburne Falls, while Julie looked like a drop-dead gorgeous movie star.
Safely sheltered inside Clara’s home, eating our waffle breakfast, we were oblivious to what was going on just outside our doors. Clara’s house was on the side street heading up the Hill of Tears from McCusker’s, and the streets directly in front of McCusker’s were where we would be dancing for the first shots. We could have spit out the window and hit the hundreds of people who had gathered there—the film crew, the paparazzi, and locals just hanging out to observe the filming.
That is exactly what I saw when I peeled back the curtain and took a glance. The police had blocked off the streets. Yellow tape and orange cones corralled the roads, and high-tech equipment and its operators were everywhere. There was even a sixty-foot crane on a large flatbed truck parked in front of the church. And hundreds of hungry people. Hungry for what, I did not know.
Frick and Frack arrived. They were two behemoth linebackers from UMass, one black, one white, weighing in at six hundred pounds between them, dressed casually in polo shirts and shorts. These guys were Julie’s bodyguards—pure muscle, little brain—and they did call themselves Frick and Frack. It wasn’t until much later that I could determine which was which.
Jenna was with them—VelCro’s “assistant,” whose job was to be her filter, to deflect attention from her, to relay questions and instructions to her. She was one of the few deemed important enough to talk directly to VelCro, other than a few very important luminaries. The rule was you had to go through Jenna. Mooney, Sarah, and I had been granted special dispensation.
When Clara and I exited to the streets, I was “kitted up” in my Morris whites, bells strapped to my legs, bedecked with red and silver ribbons and sporting the team’s trademark bow tie. The throngs gave us a cursory glance, saw we were nobodies, and went looki
ng for bigger game.
The girls and Jenna and Frick and Frack snuck out the back door. They cut through neighbors’ yards, entered a waiting Cadillac limo, and drove around aimlessly before emerging in front of McCusker’s. All to keep their starting point a secret. They could have walked to McCusker’s in ten seconds, but the trip took ten minutes.
Sarah exited the limo first amid much gasping, photo clicking, and buzzing. The crowd surged toward her but was halted by the police. It took a few minutes before the peons realized she was not the impossible-to-find VelCro.
Then the real VelCro emerged from the car, preceded by Frick and followed by Frack, or vice versa, and the buzzing and surging began again, this time doubled in volume and intensity. Jenna emerged too with no discernible effect on the onlookers.
“We love you, VelCro!” shouted a female voice. Some poor male admirer tossed a bouquet of roses. Julie waved politely and ignored the flowers.
The Morris guys were in front of McCusker’s, Danny playfully cranking out tunes on his accordion. I joined them. Soon VelCro and Sarah and Frick and Frack and Jenna were at our sides. Mooney seemed lost in the multitudes. He was wearing one of those cool black Greek fisherman’s hats. With his youthful face and newly shorn locks, he did not have the look of a powerful Hollywood director, and few in the crowd had any idea who he was. One of his producers, a man slightly older with a far more distinguished appearance, worked the periphery—a more likely director than Mooney. I could see people pointing and staring at him, apparently under the mistaken impression that he was Nick Mooney—the real Mooney’s intention, no doubt.
It takes forever for these Hollywood types to get their act together. Though we were about ten minutes early for the 7 a.m. call, it would be a few hours before the shooting would begin. While the rest of us stood around, tech guys were hauling cable, monitors were being set up, and some poor sonofabitch was perched up in the apex of the crane. People were grabbing breakfast burritos from the craft service table set up in front of the West End, and Mooney and Dexter were consulting with the lighting and sound people.
Our twelve-man “Nutting Girl” takes about three minutes to dance, but they had allowed four hours to shoot it. I was guessing only a few seconds would make it up there on the silver screen, if that. We would have to do the entire dance at least five times to allow for the five different angles requested by Dexter, who would need multiple takes for each shot. It was also possible that we’d have to do at least parts of it over for some cut-ins.
The twelve of us stood on the streets in front of McCusker’s in what would be our dance configuration while Dexter set things up with Mooney. Dexter would have his camera set up halfway across the street, on the mid-street stripe and on a dolly for the first take. The crane shot would come later.
As we were preparing, Sarah and Julie, with their constant companions Frick and Frack and Jenna, established an encampment on the other side of the street near the fence along the river. As much as possible, I kept my eye on Julie while at the same time assessing the crowd for things and people out of the ordinary.
It was a hard job. Frankly, I had never worked under conditions like these before—this many people, this much confusion. And Mooney and Dexter were demanding a lot from me; my attention was often pulled away from Julie. My assignment was not starting off well.
I was reassured by the two brutes on either side of her, and by Sarah, but Sarah seemed to be more involved in whispering secretly in Julie’s ear than in observing the crowd. While the linebackers did appear to rotate their heads and search, it remained to be seen how much these two guys were capable of noticing.
One thing anyone with eyes and ears would notice, however, was the power of the swollen river. It rushed and roared, as high as it could get without overflowing its banks. Whitecaps reached up to the windows of the building across the street. The sound guy gazed forlornly at his console. Shaking his head, he said we’d probably have to go into a studio and record new sound for this scene later, but he’d do his best to capture it live.
At long last, it seemed we were ready to go. All was in place. The police held back the great unwashed. An assistant director herded twelve dancers into position with Danny and his accordion at the head, facing the storefronts. We dancers faced the streets. A young woman clapped a clapper, announcing the scene number and the fact that this was take one. The assistant director called for silence, the production assistants passed this request politely on to the crowds, and they hushed completely and suddenly, as if shot dead en masse.
From my spot in the dance set, I could see Julie and Sarah repositioning themselves at the riverbank edge. On that side of the bank were a few benches and a concrete wall about three feet high. It was topped by a black iron railing another foot higher than the wall, right at the very edge of the river. With Frick on one side and Frack on the other, Julie hoisted herself up onto the railing and Sarah, next to her, did the same, so that Julie was on my left as I watched, with Sarah on her right and Frack next to her on her left. Frick was to Sarah’s right.
It was a bizarre sight: the two tiny girls perched like matching red birds on the fence flanked by the behemoths who towered over them. It was made even stranger by the raging of the river behind them, dangerously close. The waves literally washed over their matching red heads, close enough that droplets splashed their freckled faces. Jenna stood directly in front of them, a human shield trying to make it as difficult as possible for the throngs to stare at and photograph VelCro. The problem was that she was also making it difficult for me to watch over VelCro, but I had to dance anyway, so it didn’t make much difference.
As crazy as everything had been, it was now suddenly settled, silent, and safe. We were getting the late morning slanted sunlight. Mooney whispered a few words to Dexter and backed off to sit under an awning where he would watch the scene unfold on a monitor, just as the camera was seeing it.
The assistant director reiterated her call for quiet, made sure the sound and cameras was ready, and said, “And—”
Julie interrupted her, shouting out, “Break a leg, Francis!”
Had it been anyone other than the film’s biggest celebrity, she would have been unceremoniously tossed out, but Mooney ignored it, even sheepishly grinned. A few crew members laughed aloud, having been given permission to do so by Mooney’s smile.
I chuckled, and the assistant director finished her call, “Action!” Danny started playing, the Shelburne Falls Morris Men started dancing, the dolly grips started pushing Dexter and his camera and his focus puller infinitesimally closer to us at a deliberate pace, and the music swelled. We were dancing beautifully, and I did not break my leg.
Then the really, really bad thing happened.
Chapter Sixteen
A Dirge for our Julie of the Deerfield
At some point during the dance, I gave up. I stopped trying to do two things at once. I decided that I was now a dancer and not a detective and that’s where I would focus my attention and energy. I jumped as high, and as beautifully, as I was capable of doing, sweeping my arms up over my head to get full hankie extension toward the almost cloudless heavens.
I occasionally glanced over to the riverbank and saw the two identical redheaded figures sitting on the iron fence.
We were near the end, where we finished up in a long line of twelve guys, each facing in an alternate direction, arms up in the air and hands clasping those of the guys next to us.
Danny, on the accordion, stomped his foot to the rhythm of the tune and put some extra oomph into it. We were looking good for the camera.
I glanced at the girls on the fence.
“And what few nuts that poor girl had …” we sang. I momentarily turned away from Julie and Sarah but I saw the two heads there as I made the turn.
“She threw them all away,” we finished. And we concluded with a loud, “Hey!”
I was now facing the two girls again, holding Michael’s hand on my left, young Sam’s on my right
. We all smiled, then began our patented, circular walk-off.
As I began walking off, I saw there was only one redhead on the fence.
I stopped walking and blinked, as if that would change things. Then there are no redheads on the fence.
I started running—toward the fence, toward the redheads who were no longer there.
They were gone, both of them. In an instant. Poof. Just like that.
It seemed like no one else on the fence, or nearby, or anywhere, noticed their absence except me. Everyone else was still watching the filming play out. Some were even clapping.
Then Frick, or Frack—the black one—climbed up on the fence and dove into the water. This was heroic but not smart.
I was now at the fence myself, staring down into the river. Nothing was visible down there but swirling white waters from hell.
Then the hordes started to notice that something had happened. Slowly, a few at a time. There were raised voices, screams.
And then, instantly, they all knew. The police momentarily lost control of the crowd that had gathered for the filming and the crowd rushed to the riverbank, hundreds of them. No one called “cut.” For all I knew, Dexter was still shooting all of this.
Sirens started to wail and red flashers flickered more brightly than the sun. I held on to the top rung of the fence and looked down at the roiling stew down there—and looked and looked. I wanted to jump in. But it would not help.
Then I saw Frick—for I was later to ascertain that it was he and not the other one—bravely paddling but barely keeping his head above water, pretty much helpless, being pulled along toward the falls on a wave.
At this point in the river, it flowed directly toward a dam owned by the electric company, a dam leading to the falls over which the river drops to create the Glacial Potholes. There was one redhead bouncing, ghostly white and vacant-looking, in the waters approaching the dam.