Chapter 22: The Thread

Pia had left the cracked phone on the glass table beside the sofa, under a folded program.

Keith picked it up and held it in his open hand.

"This was my phone eleven years ago," he said.

He spoke to the room, not to a camera, and the theater went still enough to hear the lights hum.

"I didn't turn it on for eleven years, because it held the night I lost the best thing that ever happened to me."

He pressed the button.

Behind him the big screen flickered, and Pia's camera in the booth swung onto the glowing display.

The thread appeared forty feet wide.

It had a star and a letter M at the top, and a gray bubble at the bottom with a time under it.

Keith read it aloud in a level voice.

"'Don't wait for me. This isn't your world. Don't call me again.' Three oh seven in the morning."

A sound went through the house, low and angry.

"I was in a car on a night shoot in Burbank at three oh seven," Keith said.

"The call sheet has my name on it. I never held this phone between two and six."

He turned and looked at the man in the velvet jacket.

"Somebody did."

Ashton had backed up against the sofa.

"This is absurd," he said.

"Is it?"

"You can't prove anything with an old phone. Anyone could have written that."

He pointed at me.

"Mara could have written that. She was a teenager with a grudge."

"I was eighteen," I said, "and I was standing in the rain."

My voice carried.

I had never heard it so steady.

"You walked out the studio gate with an umbrella. You said Keith didn't want to see me."

"I was being kind."

"You were being his assistant."

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