by Meg Cabot
Jack sucked on his lower lip. He wore no hat—costume wouldn’t let him. Detective Pete Logan would never wear a hat. He could feel his ears beginning to feel numb already.
“And the arctic foxes?” Jack wanted to know.
“Fuck the foxes,” Tim said.
This, as Jack knew only too well, was how Tim Lord talked when there were no women present. Everything was frigging this and fuck that. Some actors found Tim’s earthiness refreshing after the pretentiousness of certain other directors. And Jack himself certainly did not mind foul language.
But he did mind that Lou had met with Tim—he knew she had, Lord himself had used their breakfast meeting as an excuse for why he’d arrived late to the set—and that Tim was obviously disregarding everything she had said. Lou was, as Jack knew only too well, a persuasive and passionate orator. How her plea for the arctic foxes could fail to change Tim’s mind, Jack couldn’t imagine.
But clearly it had failed, and Tim intended to go through with his plan of blowing up the old abandoned mine shaft in which these foxes supposedly lived—though Jack had been in there several times and seen no sign of any wildlife whatsoever; on the other hand, the hustle and bustle of the movie set might have sent them scurrying away.
Which wasn’t right. Blowing up their habitat. Not because Jack had any particular love for arctic foxes. He could, in fact, have cared less about them.
And he was certainly no tree-hugger. He loved red meat just as much as the next man.
But Lou cared. Lou had gone to the trouble of coming all the way out to Alaska to talk Tim Lord out of doing this. And the guy was blowing her off as if she were….
Well, nothing.
It was for this reason that Jack said, “No.”
Tim, who was peering through a lens, didn’t even glance in Jack’s direction. “No what?” he asked. “Don’t worry, the mattress is all set up. I know it was off a couple inches earlier in the week, but we’ve moved it. It should be all right now.”
“No,” Jack said, folding his arms across his chest—not so much as a gesture of defiance, but because he was starting to feel frozen. “No, I’m not going to do it.”
Now Tim did glance towards him. He glanced towards him with a laugh and said, “Funny, Townsend. Now come on. This is good light, I don’t want to lose it.”
“Maybe,” Jack said, “I didn’t make myself clear. I said no. I’m not going to do it.”
All movement, all noise on the set suddenly stopped. Fifty people, from guys perched in the crane overhead, to the sound guys in the snow below, swivelled around to stare at the pretty much unheard of spectacle of Tim Lord being challenged by an actor. Even Melanie Dupre, who was standing in her place—her character, Rebecca Wells, was supposed to scream as Detective Logan dove for cover—looked stunned…and she was trying to pretend she did not know Jack.
Tim was, of course, used to tantrums. He was used to actresses like Melanie, who’d once locked herself in her trailer and refused to do a scene until she was brought a particular brand of bottled water.
But this—this quiet opposition—was something new. Tim stared up at Jack as if he had done something rude, like questioned the genius of Spielberg.
“What did you say?” Tim asked, his voice carrying across the snow as loudly as if it had been a shout, though really he had not spoken more loudly than a whisper.
“I said—” Jack was bored with the whole thing already. Disgusted, really. How Vicky could have married this clown, Jack could not imagine. “—I’m not going to do it. I can’t have any part in destroying this beautiful—”
Even as he said it, he was wondering if he’d gone too far. The abandoned mine shaft was anything but beautiful. If anything, it was a blight on the landscape and quite probably a hazard to the locals, as certainly the children of Myra could not help but be tempted to explore this dangerous remnant of a time past.
Nevertheless, he went on.
“—piece of American history.”
There, it was out. After he’d said it, he felt better. The beautiful part had been a bit much, maybe, but the rest of it had been all right.
Not to Tim Lord, however. At least, not if his expression was any indication. He looked mad enough to spit nails. Or at the very least, ram his Porsche into the back of someone’s minivan.
“Townsend,” he said. “Just because you’ve had a little taste of how it feels to direct doesn’t mean you are in any sort of position to take over my job. Sure, the Times might’ve loved your Danish prince, but I know what your gross was, and it was nothing to write home about. And what we’re doing out here today? Yeah, it ain’t Shakespeare. So don’t even think you’re gonna go crunchy granola on me today. You get your ass into that mine shaft, and you stay there until I yell action. Got it?”
Jack said, “You want to shoot me anywhere near that mine shaft, you agree not to blow it up. You got that?”
Tim set his jaw. He wore a beard, a short gray number that was really more of a goatee, because he had something of a receding chin. Still, when he set his jaw, he looked formidable…sort of like an aging Robin Hood.
“Always have to do things your way, right, Townsend?” Tim shook his head. “Never think about anybody else’s feelings, do you?”
“Excuse me,” Jack said. “I’m considering the foxes’ feelings right now.”
“Right,” Tim said, with a humorless laugh.
Then he said the one word Jack had never expected to hear from Tim Lord in his life.
“Fine.”
Jack raised his eyebrows. He could not quite believe what he’d heard.
“Pardon me?” Jack said.
“You heard me.” Tim might have said it once, but wild horses wouldn’t drag it out of him again, that much was clear. “Now get into that mine.”
Jack, a little astonished that his scheme had worked, said, “I really mean it, Tim. You blow up that mine, and I’ll take it personally. Real personally.”
Tim looked tired. “Jack. Just get in there, all right?”
And with that, it was over. This, Jack realized, was really it. This was the last scene of this film—possibly any film—he was going to have to shoot. After this, he’d be done with it. For good.
Turning around, he faced the dark mouth to the mine shaft. He saluted Officer Mitchell, who grinned back at him encouragingly. Then Jack began the long trek through the combed, spray-painted snow, to the top of the slope where the opening to the shaft sat, deeply embedded into the side of Mount McKinley.
Then, with one long look back at Tim Lord and all the other people gathered below, he stepped into the mine.
Below him, he heard Tim Lord say through his megaphone, “Okay, everyone, this is the real deal. Places. Places, everyone. Jack? You all right in there?”
Jack stepped towards the mouth of the shaft and waved, then disappeared back into its gloomy depths.
“Excellent,” he heard Tim Lord say through his megaphone. “And…Action!”
31
“Can’t this thing go any faster?” Lou, bouncing along in the front seat of the sheriff’s four-by-four, crammed in between the sheriff and Deputy Lippincott, wanted to know.
“It can,” Walt O’Malley said as he carefully navigated a hairpin turn in the road. “But I’m not going to risk plunging over the side into that ravine. That won’t help your friend, and it certainly won’t help us any, either.”
“It’s just,” Lou said, feeling as if, not for the first time in the past hour, she were addressing a roomful of toddlers, “that a man might die if we don’t hurry.”
“I got all that,” Sheriff O’Malley said. “I actually got that the first time you told me.”
“Well, then could you please hurry it up—”
On the word up the four-by-four went over a deep rut in the road that caused the passengers in the backseat—Vicky Lord and, though Lou had not been happy about their tagging along, Jack’s mother and her father—to become airborne for a second or two. When
they landed again, Mrs. Townsend’s dog, whom she’d apparently squeezed too hard, let out a squeak.
“Oh, my poor baby,” Eleanor Townsend said, lowering her face into the dog’s neck. “It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”
Lou wasn’t certain if the woman was trying to reassure herself or the dog. Whereas Lou’s father’s intentions were clear: he was busy trying to reassure everyone.
“Now, don’t get yourself in a tizzy, Lou,” he said—had been saying that since they’d boarded the private plane Eleanor had chartered for the express purpose of getting out to Myra as fast as possible. “Jack’s a grown man. He can take care of himself.”
“With bombs going off right and left, and people with guns lurking around?” Lou threw her father an aggravated look over her shoulder. “I don’t think so, Dad.”
“I just don’t understand,” Eleanor said, for what had to have been the hundredth time, “what this Tim Lord has against Jack.”
Some details Lou had thought pragmatic to leave out of the story she’d hastily told her father and Jack’s mother when she and Vicky had run into them as they were exiting the hotel restaurant. It had been enough that they knew the gist—that Tim Lord wanted Jack dead, and that Jack had gone to the set—a set out of reach of their cell phones—where Tim Lord was expected to cause a very large explosion later in the day. They would know the truth soon enough, Lou supposed. The whole world would know.
“Don’t you see?” Lou had asked her father when he’d expressed doubt about the efficiency of blowing up a mine shaft while Jack Townsend was in it. “Everyone will think it was an accident. People die during film stunts all the time, Dad. No one would ever suspect there was anything behind it.”
Frank Calabrese had been dubious, but he’d been alarmed enough by his daughter’s vehemence that he’d insisted upon coming along to Myra in a frantic effort to keep Tim Lord from making yet another attempt on Jack’s life. It had to be admitted that, upon arriving at the Myra sheriff’s department, Lou’s father had grown a good deal less skeptical. That’s because as Lou had hastily laid out the evidence in her case, the sheriff had not looked at all surprised. Instead, he’d flicked an inquiring glance at his deputy and asked, “You like him for our money man?”
Apparently, the guns Lou had handed over had been successfully traced to two Myra locals—“Deadbeats,” the sheriff had described them—who happened to be missing. Their buddies, when brought in for questioning, had said, after pressure had been exerted on them, that they had been paid five thousand dollars each by an individual they would not identify to kill action-adventure star Jack Townsend, who, they’d been informed, had wandered away from a plane crash somewhere in McKinley Park.
“Five thousand dollars?” Lou had been disgusted. That’s all Jack’s life had been worth?
“Well,” the sheriff had said. “Five thousand each. And we suspect there were seven or eight of them involved, not counting old Sam Kowalski. We haven’t finished rounding them all up, but we expect to have ’em by the end of the week. Except for that one you killed, that is.”
All of this talk, however, had only prevented them from getting out to the set as soon as Lou would have liked. While the sheriff didn’t dispute the fact that someone had paid the men he was currently holding for questioning to kill Jack Townsend, no one seemed to believe that someone was Tim Lord, the Academy Award–winning director. How could the director of such a heartwarming film as Hindenburg be a killer—or at least have paid others to kill for him?
Lou had had to make Vicky explain it to them, something that Vicky, looking whipped and defeated, had done in a toneless and not entirely convincing manner. Certainly Eleanor Townsend, who had heard the whole thing, wasn’t convinced.
“But that’s ridiculous,” she’d cried. “Why should Mr. Lord want to kill Jack, just because his wife says she’s still in love with him? Lots of wives are married to one man while in love with another, and their husbands don’t go around trying to kill anyone!”
Yes, but this was Hollywood, where Tim Lord was pretty much king, it would never have done for the queen’s heart to belong to someone else. That was the thing about directors. They wanted control. And if they didn’t have it, well, that was when things got messy.
Sheriff O’Malley had not been at all excited about transporting the four of them to the movie set. He’d have preferred, he’d explained to Frank Calabrese, as if speaking one cop to another might help, to bring the suspect in for questioning himself.
But Lou wasn’t about to be left behind in the sheriff’s stuffy office while Jack was in imminent danger of being blown to bits….
And neither, she’d soon discovered, were any of her other companions, who piled into the back of O’Malley’s four-by-four right along with her, and like her, refused to budge from it.
But she supposed the sheriff was happy she’d come along when, arriving at the set, they were met by a PA in a shearling coat and a headset. She tapped on the driver’s side window of the four-by-four and said, “Sorry. Closed set. You’ll have to turn back.”
Sheriff O’Malley was just lifting out his badge and preparing to present it to the PA when Lou leaned over him and shrieked at the young woman, “Get out of the way before we run you down!”
The PA hastily backed out of the way, and Lou laid her foot down over the sheriff’s….
A gesture he did not appreciate, though it did propel the four-by-four several hundred feet at a considerably faster rate than they had traveled thus far.
“Miss Calabrese,” Walt O’Malley turned to say to her when he had recovered control of the vehicle. “I am quite capable of doing my job. I really don’t need—”
But Lou had already bailed from the car, having climbed over a deeply embarrassed Deputy Lippincott in her effort to get out.
And then she was running.
Lou was not dressed for the arctic, as she had hardly expected, when she’d met with Tim Lord for breakfast that morning, to be back on Mount McKinley an hour later.
But that’s exactly where she was, in a skirt and Jimmy Choo heels, no less, running through the dirty gray snow that carpeted the ground between the trailers, icy wind stabbing at her lungs, and all the exposed parts of her skin feeling as if they were on fire. But she hardly noticed her own discomfort. All of her attention was on the crowd of people in front of her, looking expectantly up towards an old, abandoned mine shaft. One set of tracks led to the dark mouth of the mine. Lou could see no one standing in it, but she heard Tim Lord’s voice clearly enough, yelling one word through a megaphone. One word that seemed to freeze the blood running through Lou’s veins.
“Action!”
Lou let out a shriek that, had there been any loose snow on the mountainside above them, would have brought it all raining down upon their heads. As it was, every person on the set, from the key grip to the caterer, turned to stare at her….
…including Tim Lord, whose pointed, foxy face was livid with rage.
“Cut,” he called in disgust when he saw who it was who’d dared disrupt his shot. Then he lowered the megaphone and said, “Lou. I should have known. Don’t you think you’re going a little far with this save-the-animals crap? I don’t think the studio’s going to appreciate it when they hear—hey, where do you think you’re going? You can’t—Stop her! Somebody stop her!”
But it was too late. Lou had already staggered past the director’s chair, and was laboring up the mountainside in her heels, screaming at the top of her lungs, “Jack, get out! It’s a trap! Tim Lord is trying to kill you!”
Behind her, she could hear her father shouting. Not just her father, either, but Tim Lord and, for some reason, Melanie Dupre. Chaos had broken out on the set. The sheriff could be heard, calling for order. Alessandro barked shrilly.
But all of Lou’s concentration was centered on getting up the hill to the mine, and getting Jack safely out of it before Tim Lord flicked the switch that would, Lou had no doubt, send the whole thing
exploding—just like Barry’s vision of Pompeii.
Except that when she finally reached the mouth of the mine and stumbled inside of it, thinking, only briefly, “It’s too cold for spiders…way too cold for spiders,” there was no Jack to be found. The opening was empty. Just a few old crates. But no Jack. Jack was nowhere to be seen.
“Jack?” she called hoarsely into the mine. “Jack, are you in there? It’s me, Lou.”
But when she heard him respond, it wasn’t from inside the mine. It wasn’t from inside the mine at all. His voice, calling her name, seemed to come from somewhere outside, and from far away.
And he was saying the strangest thing, too. Lou couldn’t be certain, because it was hard to hear anything above the screams from the people down below, but she thought Jack was shouting, “Stay where you are!”
“Jack?” A beatific smile broke over her face. He was alive. He was still alive. She hadn’t been too late. “Jack? Where are you?”
Lou turned around and headed out of the mouth of the mine, to see if she could find where Jack’s voice was coming from.
And as she was stepping from the mine and back out into the snow, her foot caught on something—a wire. It tangled around her ankle and put a run in her hose.
“God dammit,” she said, attempting to kick her foot free from the wire….
And that’s when she heard Jack call, “No!” and she knew, instantly, what she’d just done.
She threw her arms up over head and waited for Mount McKinley to come down on top of her.
32
Except it didn’t. Not then.
Instead, Jack Townsend came down on top of her, all two hundred pounds of him, hitting her with enough force to knock the wind straight out of her. Then they were falling onto the hard snow…
…just as a red-and-yellow fireball exploded behind them, sending down a hailstorm of rock and wood, and pouring a wave of thick black smoke over them.
The explosion was deafening, the heat intense. For several minutes Lou could see nothing but darkness. She wasn’t even sure whether or not she was dead or alive. She could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing…nothing but cold, a cold that was seeping through the front of her blouse and skirt, causing her skin to feel numb.
