“Do you think Mrs. Chaplin did something to the door?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Tell me the part about cats again?”

Later, Chaplin was dressing for work. He stood on the sleeping porch to see what the weather was like, and saw below him, in the garden, his mother. She was on the nearest bench, the morning paper beside her. She had her head back and her eyes closed, and he thought she had never felt sun like this.

She had a ribbon in her hand. She opened her eyes, and she was dragging it across the grass, shaking it. She made it dance like a snake, and he could hear her making cooing sounds, trying to coax something from the bushes. Chaplin had only one cuff buttoned, collar standing off his shirt like the wing of a gull testing the wind. His eyes swept across the close hedge. He thought he saw something in the shadows.

“Charlie?”

He jumped. It was Mildred. “Just a moment,” he whispered. He leaned against the wall and watched his mother playing with the long silk ribbon.

“Can I ask you—”

He put his finger to his lips and escorted Mildred inside, then returned outside and closed the door. He was only gone for five seconds, perhaps, but when he returned, Hannah was gone. Had he missed the cat? He stood perfectly still, long after Kono had started the car, and several times he thought he saw something playing in the shadows of the hedge, a stealthy form prowling as quiet as a memory.

Kono took Chaplin to a dusty ranch of 160 acres off Sunset. It didn’t quite have a name yet. Occupying a gentle canyon, it had long ago been purchased by a man named Phelps whose widow hoped that having Chaplin film there would lead to a fantastic sale to a real-estate company. Her ranch was close enough to the Laurel Canyon trolley tracks that you could hear the bells clamoring in the distance. The grounds were planted with an acre of badly tended grapefruits, and there was a weathered barn, a riding ring, and a foreman’s house.

Here they would shoot the finale of Sunnyside out of sequence. Rollie ran a test strip of the scene, focusing on the mountain ridge. Chaplin corrected the angle. “We won’t fade out on landscape—you must never fade out on landscape.”

The hand-focusing board read “Chaplin—Sunnyside—RT—Scene 145,” a boy held up a train schedule for Rollie to focus on, the clapper went down, and Chaplin immediately called, “Cut.”

Rollie was relieved, for he did not like the shadows being thrown. He ordered his umbrella pushed back. The blond nature of the dirt was uplighting Chaplin as in a courtship scene.

Chaplin sat in the backseat of his car with Maverick and Vincent so he could explain where the story was going. The Little Fellow, jilted in love, walks down this path alone.