“After I called her to give her the bad news — I felt I owed her that — Shelly made an appointment to see him. We'd already cast somebody else by then but I guess it half-crossed my mind that she was going to try to charm, if you want to be euphemistic, Michael into giving her the part after all.”

“Shelly wouldn't do that.”

Becker looked at her with his eyebrow raised.

“Not to get a part,” Rune said. “She wasn't like that. It doesn't make sense but I know that about her now. There were some lines she wouldn't cross.”

“In any case that's what occurred to me. But that wasn't what happened...” His voice faded. “I probably shouldn't be telling you this.”

Rune squinted. “Just pretend it's gossip. I love gossip.”

“A terrible fight. Really vicious.”

“What could you hear?”

“Not much. You read poetry, Robert Frost?”

Rune thought. “Something about horses standing around in the snow when they should be going somewhere?”

Becker said, “Ah, does anybody read anymore?... Well, Frost coined this term called the sound of sense. It refers to the way we can understand words even though we can't hear them distinctly. Like through closed doors. I got a real sense of their conversation. I've never heard Michael so mad. I've never heard him so scared, either.”

“Scared?”

“Scared. He comes out of the meeting, then paces around. A few minutes later he calms down. Then he asks me about the new lead for the play and whether the Equity contract has been signed and I tell him it was. And I can tell he's thinking about casting Shelly again even though he doesn't want to.”

“What happened, do you think?”

“I noticed something interesting about Shelly,” Becker said. “She really did her homework — getting the script in the first place, for instance. See, we get a lot of young, intense hopefuls in here. They know Chekhov and Ibsen and Mamet cold. But they don't have a clue about the business of the theater. They think producers are gods. But as creative as Shelly was she also had a foot in the real world. She was a strategist. For the first EPI, she'd found out everything there was to know about Michael. Personal things as well as professional.” Becker gave Rune a meaningful smile and when she didn't respond he frowned. “Don't you get it?”

“Uh, not exactly.”

“Blackmail.”

“Blackmail? Shelly was blackmailing him?”

“Nobody here knows for certain but there're rumors about Michael. A few years ago he was traveling through some small town in, I don't know, Colorado, Nevada, and we think he got arrested. For picking up a high school boy — the story was that he was just seventeen.”

“Ouch.”