The girl giggled. “Not always,” she said. She pulled against the cords binding her, not so much fighting them as pulling against them to stretch her muscles. The meters jumped as she said, “Wylie Gustafson.”
In a slurred whisper she described a struggling country singer who’d come to Los Angeles in the 1990s to find success. In a world of hip-hop and rap, his yodeling style of roots music didn’t catch on. Among a few odd advertising jobs, he recorded a yodel for a tech start-up, a three-note yodel. They paid him some six hundred bucks for one-time use of it. Two years later, he heard himself yodeling during the Super Bowl, hired a copyright lawyer, and filed a lawsuit for five million dollars. Today he runs a vast horse ranch, paid for by the settlement.
The girl smiled dreamily. “He named his horse Yahoo.”
Mitzi couldn’t help but smile. For once, it was nice to hear a Hollywood story with a happy ending. An instance when the little man had won.
She stretched a latex glove over one hand. Watching the meters pulse softly, she stretched on the second glove and began to bundle her hair under a cloth surgical cap. She poured another glass of wine and took a few sips with a pill.
The drug’s typical side effect had started, the mania. Mitzi reached up and pulled the shotgun mic a skosh closer to the girl’s mouth. She asked, “Now tell me what else you ate for breakfast, please.”
Her voice reduced to a breath, the girl said, “Black coffee…”
Mitzi tore open a small plastic package containing two foam rubber plugs. With latex fingers she twisted one until it would fit inside of her ear. The small stranger inside her belly shifted and kicked.
Mitzi was unrolling the express envelope, about to remove and unwrap the knife. She had to do this. She had to know if she could commit this horrid act.
The monitors, their needles bounced softly with every sound.
Mitzi patted the girl’s shoulder to roust her. She held the girl’s gaze and told her, “The name of your character is Lucinda…”
The girl’s eyes went wide. Pale and suddenly awake, she struggled for real, twisting against her restraints.
Shushing her, telling her to relax, Mitzi said, “Your line…the line I want you to say is ‘Help me! Daddy, please, no! Help me!’”
Her breathing shallow and fast, the girl asked, “What’s my cue?”
At this Mitzi held the huge knife where the girl’s eyes could find it.
So this Foley person had put Foster to work. He’d wanted to buy a scream from the back inventory, so she sat him down at a console and fitted him with a pair of earphones. She lugged an armload of tapes and set them within reach and showed him how to thread each reel. He was to listen his way through a hundred-plus years of screams.
He didn’t ask about the actress Lucinda. He couldn’t risk spooking this Mitzi person and losing her trust. Fastened around her neck was a double strand of natural pearls that filled him with rage.
She placed a reel on the spindle and threaded the tape. “There’s only one scream I want for you to keep,” she told him. She drew his attention away from the volume controls and told him, “It’s a man screaming from profound agony, I kid you not.” She stressed, “At the peak of the scream you’ll hear glass breaking. A bottle and a wineglass, breaking.”
The rest of the inventory she dismissed with a flick of her wrist, a wave of her hand. The other shrieks were leftovers. Dross.
Then she carted over another stack of reels, and a third. But even with the console piled with reels, each trailing a loose header of tape, this wasn’t a divot out of the boxes and file drawers filled with similar recordings.
So Foster had put on his headphones and thrown the switch. The hiss in his ears changed pitch, and a bellowing shriek made him jump to his feet so fast his chair toppled over behind him.
Sitting next to him, her elbow next to his as she listened to her own stack of reels, the Mitzi person shook her head and grinned as if embarrassed on his behalf.
Each scream was over quickly and followed by a margin of tape hiss. On occasion a man’s voice gave instructions. Not always the same man, but clear coaching directed at the person who was about to scream. The scream came, shrill and sharp and long. Or ragged and sobbing.
The tape crackle changed pitch, the signal for a new scream. Listening for his daughter. Eavesdropping on these cutting room scraps. The snatches of talk that framed moments of torture. Torture or terrible acting.
After the tape hiss changed tone yet again, Foster braced himself for the next assault. Instead, a woman’s voice spoke.
“Of course I’m fucking Schlo,” the woman said. Her voice, the clarity of it, replaced the present moment. Only this woman from the past existed, shouting, “Untie me this instant, you’d better!” She shouted, “Do you think that little baby is your child? Don’t make me laugh! That beautiful little girl is Schlo’s!”
He shot a look in Mitzi’s direction. To where she was reviewing and erasing, oblivious to the drama inside his headset. She might get a kick out of this corny vignette. More likely she’d heard worse.
The scream dragged on, cursing, ranting, “Walter, you bastard!” The preserved echo of plain old melodrama. Leaden dialogue from a trashy movie lost to time. Foster had to laugh even as the woman’s scream faded to silence. He rewound the section. He hit the Erase button.
To Mitzi’s great relief the wires reached. They unspooled all the way from the console in the sound pit, through storerooms, to the locker. There she’d found the dress.
Not even Ambien could blot out the old memory. Nothing triggered memory better than the smell of that fabric. Nylon tulle and acetate satin stiff with age. The scent of
