Oh God. I shudder at her words. An image of the broken body of the actress who jumped from the sign flashes through my mind. I’m not really sure I want to see Emily anymore.
“How am I involved, Marla? You need to tell me.”
“You know who killed her. Emily,” she says, simply. “It’s someone you’ve met, someone you know.”
The hairs along the back of my neck rise. Does she mean herself; did she kill her only friend? She can’t mean that, she means someone else. My thoughts race through the new faces I’ve met this past week. Ben Cohan leaps instantly to mind. Ben Cohan and Mike. But I haven’t even met Mike. I scramble for other options, and then my blood runs cold. Does she mean Nick? Is Nick connected to all of this?
Nick who I met years ago and forgot. Nick the producer. Nick who was so pleased to see me that first day when I thought I’d lost Emily. Nick who knows everyone in this town and has worked with everyone. Nick who lives in Bel Air. Nick whose house I just came from and whose gun lies snug in my pocket.
Oh shit.
Now that I think about it, he’s been there from day one. When Marla disappeared at the audition he was lurking outside. No wonder she ran. I remember how interested he was in the missing girl; how eager he was to hear any news on the subject. His late-night emergency visits to the studio to deal with troublesome actors. I realize I have no idea what he’s been up to since the beginning. I think of the way his arm pulled me close on the terrace and I cringe deep inside at the thought. How could I have read him so wrong? I so wanted Nick to be the man I saw that I must have ignored anything that conflicted. Why didn’t I just ask him tonight if he’d ever worked with Ben Cohan? But perhaps I’m lucky I didn’t.
“Nick Eldridge and Ben Cohan?”
Marla holds my gaze unflinching, and I feel my heart sink. “Yes,” she confirms. “Will you come up and see?”
I gaze up at the platform nearly fifty feet in the air. God knows what I’ll see up there. If there’s a body up there or in the ravine, surely someone must have found it by now.
“Tell me what Nick had to do with this, Marla. I need to know.”
“I want to show you first.”
She scrambles past me, climbing slightly higher up the rocky slope, then positions herself carefully on a knotty outcrop of vegetation and teeters there for a moment before reaching across to brush the lowest rung of the letter’s ladder. The fingertips of one hand just able to touch. She leans back away from the ledge, takes a breath, and then throws herself forward, off the outcrop. My heart skips a beat as she flies forward, in momentary free fall, before a palm slams down on the ladder’s rung. For a second she hangs precariously by just one hand before the other finds the metal and she heaves herself up fully onto the ladder.
I’ve never been scared of heights but now, here, in the darkness, I am. Scared of the darkness beneath us, scared of Marla, but most of all scared of what she has to show me. But I need to know what Nick did, how bad it is, and how the hell I’m involved in all of this.
I slowly clamber up the slope to her starting ledge and shift into the same position. I try not to think of the six-foot drop if I can’t reach the rung and the immeasurable darkness of the canyon beyond that. I take a breath and plow forward, stretching out for the chipped white paintwork of the ladder. I feel the contents of my zipped pockets shift with the movement. For a moment I am untethered, the night air all around me, my empty hands grasping at nothing before a palm thwacks onto the rung, its cool metal hitting hard. I immediately twist my body and claw my other hand up to safety too, breathless.
Then with tight aching arms, I engage my core to heave up, desperate to get my feet onto something in order to distribute the weight.
Once my feet make contact I rest my hot hands, looking up to watch Marla carefully ascending. She turns back, sensing I’ve paused.
“You okay?” she calls back.