Before she’d felt anything, the sudsy water in the sink turned dark red. Proof of how a deep slice in warm water might not hurt, not at first. She brought her hand to the surface, and the skin below her thumb, below the ham of her thumb, spouted like a red whale. The slice curved like the bite from a child’s mouth. It surged with blood Mitzi couldn’t bear to look at, so she plunged the hand back to the bottom of the sink.
Warm water and a cut so deep, her body was filling the sink as if she were plumbing.
She wondered how long the decision to survive was hers to make. If she ought to call someone to come rescue her. Or to simply wait for her body to make the other choice.
Foster let himself be dragged along. His free hand brushed smooth metal and the rough cages he took to be the burners of a gas stove. His leg slid along the metal door of a refrigerator, jarring his hip bone against the handle. Flailing in the dark, his free hand felt the knobs and edges of cabinet doors and drawer fronts. He didn’t lift his feet for fear of tripping over something, and the floor felt like smooth tile under his shuffling.
Now all he knew of Blush Gentry was her smell and the feel of her strong, smooth hand. He could guess at the size of rooms. To judge by the echoes the spaces must’ve been huge.
Blush stopped. “Take the handrail to your right,” she said. “We’re going up a flight of stairs.”
Foster waved blindly until he found the rail. A dimly lit archway rose above them. At the top of the steps, they entered a room large enough to host a basketball game. The first blue shade of morning filtered through the dirty windows. Dust cushioned their steps.
“Your house?” he asked. He was whispering. A house without food or water. A house without heat or power, it didn’t seem such a great hideout. He followed her to a built-in bookcase where she shoved aside some leather-bound volumes.
Her fingers worked at something in the shadows at the back of a shelf. A pneumatic hiss sounded, and the bookcase swung away from them, revealing a dark space behind it.
Blush touched the wall within and lights blazed. She touched again, a keypad mounted there, and cool air issued from vents near the ceiling. She waved him inside, saying, “Panic room. Earthquake preparation. Bottled water. Generator.” She plucked her phone from her bag. “No cell phone reception because the place is lead-lined or zinc-lined or something in the event of a nuclear bomb…” She pointed toward an old-school phone mounted on one wall and trailing a long, coiled cord. “But we do have a landline. Unlisted, of course.”
Right on cue, the phone rang.
Blush stared at it, her face dark with worry. It rang seven times and stopped. She sighed, “Wrong number.”
The ringing began again. Seven rings, then it stopped. As it began again, she reached to lift the receiver and bring it to her ear. “Schlo!” She cupped a hand to cover the mouthpiece and whispered to Foster, “He’s a friend. A producer, but a good guy.” Into the receiver she said, “Let me put you on speakerphone.”
The voice burst into the room like an extended belch. “I knew where to find you,” it said. “You there with your kidnapper?”
“Foster.” Blush nodded to indicate the phone, the little mesh-covered speaker on it. “This is Schlo. Schlo produced the babysitter bloodbath.”
The belch said, “Blush, little girl. You’re not planning to attend the Oscars, are you?”
Blush cast another worried look at Foster. “That was my plan,” she said.
The belch insisted, “Just don’t. Trust me.” The connection went dead.
Blush dropped her bag and shucked her jacket before ducking away. To retrieve the lug wrench. To camouflage the damage they’d done to the plywood covering the street door. As she left she swung the bookcase shut behind her.
With no idea how to open it, Foster became the captive.
He dug the phone from his pocket and snapped the battery into place. So what if he couldn’t get a signal? The police couldn’t find his location, either. He swiped through screens. He wanted to show this movie star something. A video. So what if it was grainy and without sound? It lasted no longer than a birthday candle, but it was the most important movie in his life.
Schlo proved himself to be no mere friend. Such a prince, he bribed the doorman of the Fontaine. That was Schlo. The doorman used a passkey and they found Mitzi insensate, the pile of her blacked out next to the kitchen sink, redecorating the cork tile to blood red. How he knew to do this, who knows. But Schlo sent the doorman out for superglue and hydrogen peroxide, and Schlo got Mitzi’s arm above her heart and applied pressure. He could’ve been a doctor.
Levelheaded like a person wouldn’t believe, he said, “Mitz, what I don’t know could fill Yankee Stadium, but I do know something’s wrong.”
The Imperial, the falling down of it. A palace of a landmark building that had withstood its share of earthquakes, the government was calling it an earthquake. Detroit they were calling snow load. The next theater, God forbid, they’d call it terrorism.
Mitzi should pack her bags is what the man meant. Take the money she’d socked away and pull a Roman Polanski. “Destroy the master tape,” he ordered her. “This isn’t only me talking. It’s our entire industry. We’ve been duped.”
Schlo was like a wizard. Maybe she wasn’t the first girl he’d glued the cuts in her wrist shut, but Schlo rinsed the area with ice and dusted it with cream of tartar. And when the bleeding stopped for just a moment, he pinched the cut closed and dripped on superglue.
Hollywood being Hollywood, who didn’t want to play
