“Tell!”
What’s the big secret?
Her neck and shoulders were red. Her blonde hair was matted to her head.
“You’ve been here for hours, not doing the loops. You could be here for days, weeks. This is a big gift I’m offering you, for a very small and easy bit of information. Guthrie, what did he do here?”
She scanned the ground. “He’s the chimney builder.”
“Chimney builder?”
She pointed to the three cylinders I’d thought of as giant bud vases, a yard wide and each one larger than the next. The smallest was maybe ten feet high, the largest between two and three stories. “He built chimneys.”
“Are those picnic areas? Ovens leading to those chimneys?”
“No. Just the chimneys. That’s all I know.”
Chimneys not attached to anything. Chimneys in the desert. “Why?” Boy, did this make no sense at all. “You must have asked why.”
“No, I mustn’t. I’m here because I panicked on a set, doing something just like this. I hung over a ravine for an hour while the crew battled a wire pulling off its mooring and I tried not to move a muscle. After that I could barely make myself look down to tie my shoes. I lie awake every night, dreading morning when I have to come back here. It took me over a week to step off this platform and even hang from the wire holding onto the edge. I don’t have time to worry about what other people are doing.”
I wanted to wrap an arm around her and press the panic out. I’d had a friend, a newbie, stranded like that. I’d heard her screams. She was okay,
no thanks to me. I still couldn’t bring myself to talk about that incident. “Listen, I know what panic is. I had a tree phobia for years. I couldn’t be in the woods, even in a city park. And I sure couldn’t tell anyone. I was a stunt double living in an apartment on a street in Manhattan where I never had to see a tree. If you’re going to make it in the business, you’re not turning down location shots for fear you’ll see an oak. Trust me, I know.”
She just stared. And I felt as stupid as the first day I’d admitted my fear. “It’s like having a wart on the end of your nose. With hairs growing out of it. Give me the harness.”
She unclasped.
I would have guessed the vest in a place like this would be a clunky one-size-fits-all affair, but this number was made of a sturdy open mesh, weighing in at under a pound and looking like it was tailored for her slight figure. I got it fastened, but it wasn’t an item I’d want to wear all afternoon. When I turned back to her, her hands hung by her sides. She was standing on the platform like it was a sidewalk. Like she’d never felt fear.
“So . . . ?”
But she didn’t offer a name.
“Okay, so we’ve got three loops to get around. Momentum’ll carry you through the first one, right? That’s why you ended up hanging on the far side of it. But momentum gives out halfway up that side loop. What you need to do is thrust your head down the instant you hit the top of the curve.”
“Yeah. And the last one?”
I laughed. “We’ll see.” I exhaled and pushed off hard. I shot around the first loop, weightless compared to my last ride hanging on to her. The second loop veered to the left. I bent into the curve, feet together, arms tight to my sides. I was losing momentum fast, barely moving at the top of that curve. I threw my head down, shimmied like a swimmer, and coasted
over the top back around the horizontal curve, picking up speed and onto the final loop. I flung my hands over my head, shimmied, caught the wire between my heels, and pushed off.
It was a cheat, but close enough. I didn’t exactly sail to the end, but I had enough energy to swing myself onto the platform.
“Ta da!” I called across to the start platform.
The girl was gone.
You spent hours pushing off, failing, and dragging yourself back. Now someone shows you how it’s done and suddenly there’s something more important?
Apparently there was. I scanned the grounds and caught sight of her blonde ponytail disappearing into the barn. The door slammed afterwards.
Not an answer, but the next best thing! I tore off the vest and flung it to the ground. I eyed the pole—too slow—and jumped into the net. No spreading arms and legs this time. I hit feet first, taking the bounce and leaning toward the edge of the net. When I hit net again, I bent, grabbed the edge, flipped over, dropped to the ground, and ran full out for the barn.
The metal door was locked. I banged. “Open up! What the hell is going on here? What are you all afraid of? Let me in or I’m coming back with the cops.” I stood panting, straining to hear footsteps, peering through the small dark window at what looked like green paint. Could that be the Mustang just beyond? “This is your last chance! Open up or I make that call.”
The room inside burst into noise—feet slapping the wooden floor, doors slamming at the far end. Then metal clicked on my door. The door swung back. I stepped inside and stared.
Not a garage. No car in sight. But still, I stood and stared. The place was better than the best professional workout space, the kind I’d been to only once when I had to learn a lift, heave, and toss for a high-budget
movie with a tight schedule. That space had been outside Burbank and frequented by lead actors with specific needs and excess cash. But this was its equal.
The far end held a diving pool with three platforms and two boards. Along one side they’d built a ski jump that tossed the skier into a catcher net that looked like something on an aircraft carrier. But the side of the jump didn’t have regular scaffolding. It was deliberately irregular, the type of thing that would challenge a climber and be great practice for an escape bit. The wall beyond it
was
a climbing wall, one that went to the roof, forty feet above. In the middle of the floor, like something abandoned by a giant toddler, was a rubber ball half as tall as I was. And from that ceiling hung an array of ropes, swings, and rings, a mouse run suspended in air. The place was part uber-gym and part pure fantasy—what any stunt double dreams of should a million-dollar inheritance be in the offing.
The only thing missing was people. It was the Flying Dutchman of gyms—free weights abandoned on the floor, massage table with towel in a heap, while above, ropes still swayed uselessly. Doors had slammed, but the people who’d been working out here weren’t standing outside in the heat. They were in here somewhere. The blonde I’d followed hadn’t raced in here only to race out.
I was just about to yell out another threat, when what I had taken for a wall quivered and revealed itself as curtain. Behind it I could see Zahra Raintree’s outline. I reached for the cloth.
She grabbed my hand, pressing the rough fabric into my skin.
I let my hand go slack. “This is insane. What’s—Why did people scatter like ants?” As frustrated as I was, I wanted to accuse her, but no accusation made sense. You don’t keep drugs or contraband in a place you can barely get to. You may hide illegals, but you don’t build them a fantasy gym. “Why are you keeping all this secret?”
“If my reason meets your approval, will you promise to hold silence?”
“If
I
think it’s good enough?”
“Yes.”
Why not?
“Okay.”
Zahra Raintree pushed aside the curtain and stepped into the light.
Half her face had been destroyed.
21
HALF HER FACE was the normally weathered visage of someone who lived in the desert. But the other half looked like it had been strafed. Deep, ugly, irregular red crevasses had been seared between patches of skin. The gouges cut at an angle from above her ear to the edge of her nose. It looked like something had clawed her, dragging the skin with it, leaving raw edges to heal or not. Between the scars even the skin that had survived was gray, blotchy, and dry, and the hard scars had pulled it unevenly so it had developed its own lines, shadowy reflections going in opposite directions. It looked stiff, painful, and horrifying, and I couldn’t stop staring. When I realized my appalling insensitivity I froze, unable to find an escape.
“That’s why this place exists,” she said, with only a fraction of the disgust she might have.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered, looking at the floor.
“Sorry! Now there’s a useless word. What you mean is, get me out of here!”
She’d read me. I didn’t know what to say.
“And now you’re waiting to be forgiven for your rudeness because like all good children, you were taught never to stare at freaks in the street.”
The air conditioning that had been so welcome a minute ago was freezing.
“You stare like you’re at the zoo, then you steal my time with your stupid apologies. You demand
I
feel sorry for
you.
Out there—up the road—in L.A., San Diego, there are hundreds of you every day. A trip to the grocery is running the gauntlet. It never changes. New people, new freak-outs.”
I felt like the kids who point, the drivers who slow down next to an accident to see the bodies, the boys who pull the legs off centipedes. “So you built this place?”
“Oh, so now you think I built this escape to protect my vanity! A play-ground without mirrors all for me.”
“I didn’t say—”
“Because I’m afraid to look?”
What do you want me to say? I can’t be any sorrier than I already am.
“Look around you. Do you think this is what I would choose?”
“Hell, yes!” I said. “You were legendary in the stunt world. Yeah, I think this is exactly what you’d choose, and by now you can swing from one side of the ceiling to the other and walk across the floor on top of that giant ball. And each time you get bored, I think you build something impossible and conquer it.” I looked around the gym anew, suddenly aching to try the rope swings, to practice the trickiest high fall from the diving platform, to see what I could do with that giant orb.
But she was glaring at me. “To what end?”
“Oh.”
“Right. What’s the point of being the best if you can never do it when it counts? If the cameras never roll for you?”
I nodded. There’s more to being a stunt double than doing the stunts. The camaraderie with the crew, the excitement, the focus of performing when the director says, “We need this in one take.”
“Like being the backup quarterback.”
“But he, at least, has the hope of playing.”
I nodded again. It was too awful to consider, to never again—I looked at her more closely, not at her face, but her body. “You’re in great shape. You must work out as much as you ever did. And you’ve got whatever equipment you want. You can still do gags with the best of them, right? So why not? I mean, the last thing directors want in a shot is our faces. They need the star’s face. So what difference—”
“You even have to ask what difference a face like this makes? What director wants to see this on his set? What stunt double wants a reminder that she could screw up, or worse yet, not screw up and still come out of it looking like Halloween?”
I nodded yet again, hoping that would pass for words I couldn’t force out. She was right. No one’s going to add that extra pressure on a set. Stunt doubles double- and triple-check every piece of equipment. Our carefulness is our Saint Christopher’s medal and we count on it to protect us. We don’t even want to think that it could fail us, much less that it could fail someone as legendary as Zahra Raintree. My voice was almost inaudible even to me as I admitted, “None of us wants to see our worst nightmare suiting up next to us.”
“Exactly.”
I was desperate to look away, to gain time to regroup. But I didn’t dare. I said, “But if you can afford all this, you could have your own production company. You could—”
“I could have made bleu cheese. I didn’t choose to. What I did was create this place, which you have barged into. I have security men; I chose not to call them.”
“Why not?”
She lifted one eyebrow. I wondered if that ironic expression was her intent or merely the best she could do with half a mobile face. It made
it impossible to read what she might have assumed was her response. Leaning in toward me, she said, “Ask your question and don’t ever attempt to come back.”
“If this place is not a one-woman amusement park, then what is it?”
“Don’t condescend to me!”
I laughed. I don’t know whether she was stunned or merely appreciative of the acting skill that laugh had required, but she took a step back and when she spoke a bit of the edge was gone from her voice. “You could have come here two years ago. You could have stayed and no one would have bothered you. When you were ready, I’d have planted you a forest.”
I almost gasped. The blonde could have blurted out what I’d told her about my phobia as she raced in here. But I hadn’t let on it was as recent as two years ago. Still, Zahra knew. If freaked me out. It was all I could do to control my voice as I asked, “You do therapy?”
“You had therapy, right? It didn’t work, right?”
“Because I couldn’t take the chance of anyone knowing—”
“Exactly.”
“So I could have come here, sat in my little forest day after day, and no one in the business would have known?”
“If that’s what you wanted.”
“Do you have only one person at a time?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes not.”
“Then how can you be sure secrets stay secret?”
Again she raised that eyebrow. “Because there’s only one reason to be here, so no one’s going to admit they were here. Even you. If you do, people in the business will ask why and that phobia of yours will come to light and they’ll question whether you’re really over it. They’ll come to the logical conclusion that you don’t go to the hassle of finding a place most people think is a fairy tale and checking it out if you don’t have a
very serious problem. And the next time a gig comes up, they’re going to decide to take the safe route and hire someone else.”
“But I’m only here . . .”