“Oh. I must have read it wrong. Nice name, though.”

Donna Spendler looked very different with a crew cut.

“Going out?” she asked.

“Just to get a coffee,” Scarlett said. There was the throat thing again. The clamp was on her—but this time, it was all panic.

“I’d like a coffee myself. Do you mind if I come down with you?”

It wasn’t like she could refuse, so the two walked together. Donna seemed strangely at ease as they went together. She even paid for Scarlett’s coffee before Scarlett could stop her.

“I left a message for you yesterday,” she began, when they sat with their drinks. “You may not have gotten it.”

“Sorry,” Scarlett said.

“I’ll bet you’re wondering how I got here.”

This was precisely what Scarlett was wondering. Her brain was working feverishly on this problem and getting nowhere.

“It took a while before I knew something was wrong,” she said. “I was so pleased to get a television show that I let some oddities slip by. But when I didn’t hear anything about the script, when my agent couldn’t confirm what was going on with any of the trades…sometimes those things are normal. But then she really started looking, and no one had heard anything about The Heart of the Empire. The Heart of the Empire really did not seem to exist. And I started to think. Paul. I kept thinking he looked very familiar. I started to think very hard about where I had seen him before. Then I remembered. It was a commercial.”

The famous commercial. Scarlett felt her eyes roll back into her head in realization. Mrs. Amberson probably didn’t know that his face was already familiar—she had been in Thailand when it was shown.

“It wasn’t hard to trace his name online. He posts his resume. From there, I was able to find his agent, find out what he was working on. Do you know that someone in that cast keeps a blog about what’s going on with the show, complete with pictures? Imagine my surprise when I saw his assistant in there as well. I looked up your brother, and lo and behold, both of you are pictured on the Web site for this hotel. The Internet is an amazing thing.”

The picture with the braces glistening in the sunlight. Apparently, she still looked like that.

“Now,” Donna went on, ripping open a packet of sweetener, “I had to ask myself, why did the cast of Hamlet at a little theater downtown want to set me up like that? You see, that stunt ended up costing me a big part in a show. And I can’t help but feel that maybe that was the goal.”

Scarlett looked past the tips of Donna’s clipped locks, out of the window to the street.

“I figured the explanation behind this had to be pretty interesting,” Donna said. “So, Scarlett, would you care to enlighten me?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“You don’t know what? Why it was set up? Who did it? Because it wasn’t you or your brother or his friends who planned this.”