Chapters (84)
“Sounds good,” Regan said. As she walked out of the room, she looked at her watch. It was eleven-thirty. I’ve been here nearly fourteen hours, and I only have two days left to solve this crime.
Crimes, she thought. With each passing minute, she was becoming more and more certain that Nat had been murdered. That’s why she had to talk to Clara. She felt sure that Clara, unknowingly, had information that would be helpful.
When she got off the elevator and walked down to Nat’s door, she could still hear a small group of people inside Lydia’s apartment. The diehards, she thought.
Within fifteen minutes she was in bed in the guest room, the alarm set for seven o’clock. I want to get up early and take a good look through this apartment, she thought. There’s got to be something around here that gives me a clue. Regan turned out the light and put her head down on the pillow. Five minutes later, she was asleep.
47
Action!” Jacques Harlow cried to Daphne.
They were in his sparsely furnished, high-ceilinged, drafty loft on a deserted street in lower Manhattan. Jacques had signaled one of his assistants to turn on a fog machine as Daphne sat on the floor, surrounded by darkness, and began to rhapsodize on the benefits and sorrows of selling her farm. Nat and Wendy’s sheep stood at attention on either side of her.
“I look out over the moors,” Daphne almost whispered, “and my heart starts to sing …”
“Wait!” the cameraman shouted.
“Wait! What do you mean wait?” Jacques demanded. “The director is the boss! The director calls ‘action’ and the director calls ‘cut.’ How could you forget such a thing?”
“You’re going to waste a lot of film. I’m getting a bad reflection off the sheep’s eyes.”
“So turn the sheep sideways and pull their bangs down,” Jacques screamed impatiently.
Two weary production assistants hurried over. When they turned Dolly to face Daphne, one of her eyes fell out and rolled away into the darkness. As they frantically scrambled to feel around for it on the floor, Jacques screamed again. “Don’t worry about it! I don’t care about the sheep’s eyes. I only care what’s going on in my actor’s eyes. Now turn the other sheep and let’s go!”
Bah-Bah in place on one side, Dolly on the other, Daphne was ready to start over. The two sheep now looked as though they were dying to hear what she had to say.
“Action!” Jacques cried again.
For the next six minutes, Daphne emoted over her character’s sheep farm like nobody’s business. At the end, sobbing, she lowered her head to the ground as Scarlett O’Hara had done so famously in Gone with the Wind.