Safely in my room, I peered in both camera holes to make sure they weren’t in live test at the moment, then I looked for places to hide my stash. Places Wren wouldn’t find when she was in the quarters with me.
My smuggled toiletries fit perfectly into a tin that was for storing flour. I rolled up the sneakers in the T-shirt and capris, then tucked them under my quilt between the mattress and the footboard. Plumped up, the feathers settled in around the forbidden items, hiding them nicely.
The iPhone was another matter. It required a safe, snug, dry spot where no one, but no one, would discover it. Being caught with a few contraband toiletries and clothes was one thing—I wouldn’t be the first cast member to be forced to publicly surrender forbidden items to what security lovingly called the confession box—but being found with a cell phone was quite another matter. That was a security breach of epic proportions.
I finally settled for turning it off and tucking it underneath a small corner cabinet that held my very modest collection of dishes and foodstuffs. There was a shelf-like gap between the skirting and the slides of the bottom drawer. It seemed almost built for an iPhone, and even with the pink case, the thing was incredibly well hidden.
No one would ever find it there.
I tried to content myself with the idea that I wasn’t just doing this for me, I was also doing it for Stewart and for Bonnie Rose. Stewart was so determined to dig up these last bits of information; it seemed wrong to leave him with no place to send them. But more important than that was the conversation I’d had with Rav Singh. The suppositions he’d made about Bonnie Rose seemed so sensationalized, so unfair. I couldn’t shake them from the corners of my mind, and I wanted to disprove them, if I could.
The rationalization cycled in my head, struggling to become truth. It sounded so noble, so justified. Unfortunately, a guilty conscience rumbled louder than I’d ever anticipated it would. All evening it niggled me, and throughout the night I rolled around, listening to coyotes party on the bluff and worrying about what would happen if I got caught with the phone.
It was the first thing on my mind when I dragged myself out of bed in the morning, exhausted and sore. I was cheating. Cheating. That wasn’t me. I was the kind of person who did the right thing.
By the time I’d washed my face in the basin and struggled my way into my Bonnie Rose clothes, I was drenched in nervous sweat. Even the toothpaste I’d been so certain I had to have left a bad taste in my mouth today. If I couldn’t give up shampoo, Aquafresh, and communication with the outside world, how could I possibly survive this summer?
Kim doesn’t even want to be here anyway, now that she’s in love. Maybe we should just . . . leave. Go home.
And then what?
Move back to Phoenix? Become a clerk in Lloyd’s office? Go for the paralegal degree I didn’t want? Give up on everything I really cared about? Prove that I really was as much of a loser as Mom and Lloyd thought I was?
Letting out a cleansing breath, I flopped down on the bed, hoops and all, and lay there liked a giant, tipped-over bowling pin. I was supposed to do The Frontier Woman interview after breakfast and then gather for cast and crew photos. They’d probably all take one look at me and know I was a cheater-cheater-pumpkin-eater.
I let my eyes fall closed, tried to think. Calm down. Calm down. You’re making too big a deal of all this.
The air drifting through the cheesecloth screen felt like heaven, and I knew my mind was slowly succumbing, but I couldn’t help myself. An Irish proverb from the Wall of Wisdom in Moses Lake floated through the last of my consciousness.
A good laugh and a long sleep are the two best cures for anything.
Maybe . . . just a little catnap. I’d get up again in a few minutes. . . .
———
When I woke, I had no idea how long I’d been there. The nap did help a little. It calmed the panic, and I felt ready again. Confident. Determined. There was no way I was running back home with my tail between my legs. If the real Bonnie Rose could survive here, so could I.
This was the last day we’d be provided food via the grub trailer that had been set up at the end of the street. When go-live started tomorrow, we’d be on our own to manage supplies, cooking, and food preservation. If the trailer was still serving breakfast, I should hustle down there and grab something, then go find Mallory Everson and knock out my Frontier Woman interview. After the cast photos at noon, I’d figure out what to do about the phone and . . .
Something caught my eye, bisecting the thought as I passed the window on my way to the water pitcher. I stopped to look out the glass above the cloth screen. There was . . . a guy coming up the path from the creek . . . wearing modern clothes and carrying . . . a black duffel bag? A member of the security team, maybe? They’d been chasing paparazzi and curious locals away for almost three weeks now. It’s not every day an antique town and its citizenry rise out of the backwoods. Word gets around about a thing like that, despite all efforts to keep it quiet. The security guys had their hands full.
I imagined the man outside pointing at my window with a stern look, saying, “Allie Kirkland, come with me. You’ve been found guilty of breeching the laws of Wildwood.”
And then . . . I recognized him. That wasn’t a security guy. Holy cow! That was the mystery cowboy—Blake Fulton. So it was him I’d seen when I passed by the Waterbird yesterday.
Now here he was, skulking around behind the schoolhouse and carrying a black nylon duffel bag that definitely wasn’t standard mid-nineteenth-century issue. He looked like he did not want to be seen. He wasn’t in costume either—no surprise there. Once again, he was wearing camo pants, hiking boots, and a khaki-colored T-shirt that, I had to admit, fit rather nicely across his chest and strained just a bit, circling his upper arms. The black baseball cap was pulled low, and he looked . . . like he was definitely up to something. He stuffed his duffel bag under the edge of the porch, then stood up and glanced directly toward my window.
I ducked away from the glass.
Who was this guy, really? Did he know there was someone in here, or did he think he could come and go undetected?
Fat chance, mister. I peeked out just in time to see him forgo the steps and ascend the porch with one quick, athletic jump, then walk through the door into the room . . . right next to mine?
In two shakes of a lamb’s tail (as Grandma Rita would’ve said), I was on my bed and crawling across the mattress, skirts bunched everywhere as I leaned close to the wall. He was in there, all right. The divider between the apartments was nothing more than studs and whitewashed tongue-and-groove boards. No insulation to muffle the sound. He was moving around the room and . . . whistling to himself?
Then shuffling again . . .
A grunt or two . . .
The stomp, stomp of boots on the floor . . .
More shuffling, a little walking around . . .
Something metal fell on the floor and clattered. Maybe one of the tinware cups like the set on the shelf above my cabinet? He stopped whistling.
There was an electronic beep. Then another. What was he doing in there? Bugging the place? Maybe he really was up to no good . . . perhaps a reporter of some sort. Or a disgruntled cowboy who’d tried to get a cast position and hadn’t made the cut. Maybe he was here to . . . commit some sort of sabotage. It was a wild idea, but as usual my mind grabbed it and ran, inventing a scenario in which I, Allie Kirkland, saved the day and earned major brownie points by exposing a nefarious invader to the village.
Tucking my hair out of the way, I pressed my ear closer to the wood. The room had gone silent. No sign of movement, no electronic noises, no dishes being knocked off shelves.
Was he still in there, or had he left?
Or was he . . .
Crossing the porch and passing my window!
I scrambled away from the wall, tangled my knee in the quilt, and landed on the floor in an ungraceful heap of fabric. The boning in my corset temporarily incapacitated me, and by the
time I made it to my feet, Blake Fulton was already headed down the path to the creek again.
The change in him caused me to blink and look again, and the scenarios in my mind morphed in a different direction. Suddenly, he was in full costume. He looked like any other cast member on this last day of dress rehearsal and pre-production photo shoots. He was wearing an unbleached muslin shirt—I recognized the seven-button, shield-front style as a pattern that Phyllis had ordered in a variety of fabrics from a reenactment store. He’d paired the shirt with civilian-style trousers with mule-ear pockets, and tall brown stovepipe boots worn outside his pants. He was carrying something in front of himself—the duffel bag maybe—but I couldn’t tell for sure.
I had to follow him and find out, that was all there was to it. Whatever this guy’s game was, I wanted to know it now, but if I took the time to go out the front way and circle around the building, I’d lose him. . . .
With a complete lack of forethought (the usual mode of operation when my mind was on a wild tear), I popped the cheesecloth screen from the window and prepared to exit. The opening was large enough and low to the ground, in keeping with authentic mid-century construction. Slipping through wouldn’t be that hard. . . .
Halfway out, I suddenly understood why female operatives of the Civil War era weren’t all that common. Yards and yards of fabric can be more than problematic, and a hoop has a mind of its own. I was quickly marooned over the sill . . . which, it turned out, wasn’t very well sanded. I’d be picking splinters out of my skin all night, and given the lack of tweezers in the ladies’ dressing kit I’d been given, that could be an interesting challenge. My hair blew over my face, and I couldn’t see anything but a wall of red frizz, nicely highlighted by the morning light.
And then there was a sound . . . whistling . . . and it was coming . . . closer.
Panic set in, and I reversed course, struggling like a fish in a net and calling the window ugly names. I heard a small tearing sound and thought, Randy is going to kill me, and when he’s done, Phyllis and Michelle will kill me. They were already so busy making adjustments to garments that didn’t fit, didn’t work, or had been damaged, that the entire costuming department was on the verge of a combined mental breakdown.
As far as I knew, though, no one had yet been stupid enough to end up stuck in a window. I pushed, pulled, and wiggled harder. Above my head, the window rattled in its sashes and slid downward as if someone had given it a good swift push. Fortunately, my neck and shoulders were there to stop it from crashing and breaking the glass. Unfortunately, it hurt, and I let out a yelp without meaning to. I’d just identified mistake number two in my plan. The trainer had told us to always put the brace bar in the window upon opening it. Frontier housing was most often not equipped with fancy window weights. Fingers and other body parts were not uncommonly lost in the windows of 1861.
Hair, too, apparently, because mine had been sucked into the frame as it came down. The window inched lower, and the hair pulled tighter. “Oww, oww, oww!”
Pressing upward with my shoulders didn’t help. The window went cockeyed, pulled the captured hair tighter, and my head wedged against one side of the frame.
Good job, Allie. This’ll make your record book of stupid human tricks.
Okay. Think, think, think.
There had to be a way to extricate myself from this situation before it got any worse.
Inside the room, I heard a telltale beep, beep, beep.
Too late. Things were already worse.
That was the sound of a camera about to do a go-live test, exactly ten minutes from now. Throughout the day today, production would be randomly taping for a behind-the-scenes reel to accompany Wildwood Creek. They were also testing the remote camera system and helping the cast members get accustomed to the cameras going on and off.
I was about to end up on film, inexplicably trapped in my own window.
Over my dead body. If I had to yank the hair out by the roots, I was . . .
“I must’ve missed this part of the pioneer manual.” Blake Fulton’s voice was easily recognizable, even from knee level. And yes, those were his boots, standing just a few feet away. “What page was it on?”
“The one . . . about . . . fire escapes,” I ground out. “Didn’t . . . you read it? I want to . . . ouch . . . be sure I’m . . . prepared, just in case.” When all else fails, make fun of yourself. Stupidity does have a certain pathetic charm to it.
He squatted down, and I could see his face through the curtain of hair. “How’s it working for you?”
“Well . . . other than the fact that my . . . scalp is slowly being sucked off my head . . . Not so bad. I made it halfway out.”
He chuckled then. I caught a wide white smile through the wall of red frizz. “You realize there’s a door on the other end of the room, right?”
“What if . . . the fire was in the . . . school? Ever . . . think of . . . that?” I wound my fingers into the trapped strands, tried to wrestle them free. Some hair, I could stand to lose—I had more than enough. But the skin covering my skull, I felt fondly attached to, and so did about a bazillion nerve endings, apparently. “I like to be . . . thorough.”
“Next time you’d better get the kids out first. Save some innocent lives,” he advised matter-of-factly. Funny guy.
“I’ll remember that. I’m new to this . . . teaching thing.”
The window slid a little lower and pretty little white fireflies danced around my eyes. “Owww. Help me out of here, okay? They just sent a ten minute go-live on my cameras.”
There comes a time when picking the lesser of two evils is necessary. Right now, Blake Fulton, whatever his big secret deal was, seemed by far the lesser of two evils. I could already picture everyone up in the control center laughing their heads off, and me going viral on YouTube.
“Hang on a minute.” Blake stood up and grasped the window frame. It lifted a fraction, taking my hair along with it, and I screamed like a banshee. The corners of my vision narrowed, twinkling with tiny stars. A whole galaxy of them.
“Hold on and let me get some tools. That window facing is just tacked on. I think I can pop it loose and . . .” All of a sudden, Blake was walking away.
“No! Oh no . . . wait . . .” But he was already crossing the porch. He came back with the duffel bag he’d stashed not long before. By then, I was making a last desperate attempt to free myself before the camera came on.
“This’ll go better if you’ll stop wedging yourself in there, tiger.” At first, I thought he called me tiger. A weird little tingle went through me, and then I realized the word was tighter. Stop wedging yourself in there tighter.
“Just . . . trying to . . . make it as much of a . . . challenge as possible.”
“You’re doing a fine job of it.”
“This is not funny.”
“Darlin’ . . .” He leaned close to my ear now, his long legs folding so that he was squatted beside the window, working his way up the facing. “Sometimes you can either laugh or cry, and you might as well laugh.”
My mind did a quick hitch step. That was one of Grandma Rita’s favorite sayings. I remembered it as the antithesis to life at Lloyd’s house, where every misstep or social faux pas was a major tragedy and the impetus for a lengthy parental lecture about the importance of keeping up appearances and making a good impression.
Somehow, the mysterious Blake Fulton was channeling Grandma Rita. That was exactly what she would have said in a moment like this.
And exactly what I needed to hear.
How could he possibly have known?
He stood up again. “Close your eyes down there.” The nails squealed as he manhandled the facing board loose.
Bits of wood drifted downward over my skin. I pictured what I must’ve looked like, high centered in the window, my skirts caught over the sill and my cheek crammed against the frame.
“You laughing down there, or turning hysterical?” Blake was laughing too.
I compl
etely lost it.
Somewhere far, far beyond the laughter, I heard the beep of the camera going live.
It didn’t even matter. When you’re laughing hard enough, nothing does.
Chapter 17
ALLIE KIRKLAND
JUNE, PRESENT DAY
No sooner had I gotten dislodged from the window than Blake Fulton disappeared into the woods and never came back. I probably should’ve reported the whole thing, but I figured enough of it had been caught on camera. Production could report it if they wanted to. From my standpoint, the less said the better. I was hoping the incident would go unnoticed—just another random camera test that no one was really watching.
I should have known I wouldn’t be so lucky, of course. Even though no names were given, I was the talk of a last-minute morning safety lecture. Someone tried to climb through a window without putting in the brace and got stuck this morning. Always use braces in open windows. Keep hair, fabric, ribbons, bonnet strings, and other dangling items well away from possible sources of entrapment. . . .
I’d only begun to gather my tattered dignity when the set photographer showed up to snap pre-production photos of Wren and me in the schoolhouse. After that, Mallory Everson came to do the interview for The Frontier Woman blog. The whole time all I could think of was the iPhone hiding under my cabinet and the need to be rid of it. I was relieved when the interview was over, and since I couldn’t just leave Stewart hanging, it seemed that the best course of action would be to sneak off with the phone now, see if he’d sent me anything, and then let him know this was the last he’d be hearing from me until summer was over. I could hand the phone off to Stacy tonight, thereby removing further temptation and the danger of getting caught with it in the future.
Since engaging in illegal communication with the outside world definitely involved a hike, I shed my hoop, corset, and petticoat, then pulled my tennis shoes on under the skirt before leaving the schoolhouse with the iPhone hastily tucked into my skirt pocket. What I needed now was a secluded place—very secluded—and since photo ops were going on at the miners’ camps scattered between Wildwood and the river, it only made sense to head beyond the brush arbor and find my way to the shores of Moses Lake, where no part of the production was set to take place. That was actually closer to civilization, so a cell signal was a good bet. If anyone found me, I could say I’d used the time after my photo ops to go exploring.
Wildwood Creek Page 19
