“Oh, for sure,” Bo said, not at all embarrassed by this fact. “That was the whole point of today.” He nodded at the large video cameras at the back of the room. “Two of those were running as soon as you guys came in here, and then there are also cameras there and there.” Now he was pointing at the bookshelves and a plant in the corner. “And mics here, here, and here.” He gestured to other objects in other places, one of them on the desk beside him. It looked like a container for holding writing utensils.

  “Out front, too,” Noel said. He, at least, did seem embarrassed by these revelations.

  “Yep,” Bo said again. “That was great stuff, actually. Much more tension in the meet-and-greet portion than I was anticipating.”

  “Merritt doesn’t like me,” Audrey said, shaking her head. She was nine parts embarrassed to one part impressed by his orchestrations.

  “Ehhh, maybe,” Bo said. “I’m not sure that’s it.” His smirk was like that of a ten-year-old finally being discovered in the best hide-and-seek spot. “Have you ever heard of Thomas de Mahy, the Marquis de Favras?”

  “No,” Audrey said. His question felt like a trap. Another one.

  “Riddles, Bo,” Heather said again.

  “No, it’s not a riddle,” Bo said. “He was an aristocrat, got caught up in French Revolution drama and publicly executed as a martyr. But he’s most famous now for his last words, which he spoke immediately upon reading his death warrant: I see that you have made three spelling mistakes.” He shook his head to himself, clearly still delighted. “Dude’s about to be offed and still it’s: I see that you have made three spelling mistakes. That’s Merritt. That’s Merritt exactly. It’s not about liking or not liking you.”

  “Hmm,” Audrey said. Even if he had a point, she wasn’t convinced by it.

  “And that moment between the two of you, out front, read beautifully on camera.”

  Audrey didn’t know where to look, or even who to say this to, really, since they had apparently all been in on it. “I feel like such an idiot.”

  “Honey, you’re not at all,” Caroline said.

  “You’re not,” Bo said fast, swallowing his smirk. “How could you know? Look at all the people I recruited to pull it off.”

  Audrey nodded. His explanation didn’t help much. She got conned. But also buried somewhere in there, if she was being honest with herself, she was intrigued by Bo the Magician explaining his tricks. And that curious part of her asked: “So was it worth it? Were we interesting?”

  Gray had been looking at his phone. Now he looked up. “Yes. Decidedly.”

  Bo took it from there. “I didn’t even know about whatever this Merritt/Harper thing is until last night. If it even is a thing. But I mean, couldn’t be better, really—and we’ve barely even stirred the pot.” He looked at Heather, practically winked at her. “I mean, better than stirring the pot: we haven’t even added the main ingredient.”

  “Who’s the main ingredient?” Audrey asked. She felt like she’d lost her capacity to be surprised.

  “Where’s the main ingredient,” Bo said. “Brookhants.”

  She stared at him without changing her face.

  He kept going. “I mean, I know I don’t need to tell Jules Coburn’s* offspring this, but part of the appeal for a lot of these real-deal horror nerds is the narrative of the curse surrounding the movie.” Bo was animated about this: big gestures, voice full of ambition and excitement. He was also clearly speaking from his wheelhouse. “You know, all the stories that leak from sets about how it felt like something supernatural kept interrupting production, because an evil force didn’t want the movie to get made. People eat that shit up.” He added, “Don’t get me wrong, I eat that shit up.”

  “I think we have a little familial experience in that realm, huh?” Caroline said.

  “I guess,” Audrey said. She still wasn’t ready to look at her mother.

  Unsurprisingly, Gray and Noel now chimed in with their own additions. Location shoots in haunted places, chaos and calamity following particular actors or directors, movies in jeopardy and those never finished or those that perhaps shouldn’t have been (cue a Dracula cackle here): The Exorcist, The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, Poltergeist, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, and of course, House Mother 2.*

  It should be of no surprise that horror movies tend to collect more of these stories than other kinds of films, even though there are supposedly curses in other genres: The Wizard of Oz and Waterworld and even Superman (some of its earliest versions, anyway). However, it’s obviously scarier (contextually) for a movie about a ghost to supposedly have an authentic ghost on set, or for the devil to mess with a production about, say it with me, Readers: the devil. (Though surely not Mary MacLane’s Devil. That guy’s too busy being charming.)

  “So how is this not just The Blair Witch Project, though?” Audrey asked. “Or Paranormal Activity? Or any of the other found-footage stuff?”

  Heather laughed at that question with particular relish, though Audrey hadn’t intended it as pointed so much as genuine.

  “Not you, too!” Bo groaned and leaned back in a huge stretch, his shirt riding up in front, which exposed a fold of fuzzy belly. He resituated himself, pulled his shirt back down, and said, “I mean, a lot of the recent found-footage stuff is tired, I hear you—shaky cam and a bunch of jump scares. But Blair Witch is the better analogue here anyway because of its meta making-a-movie thread. And listen, nobody loves Blair Witch more than me. I cut my teeth on that movie. I saw it six times. I mean, I’m talking back-in-the-day six times, like in a movie theater in a mall.”

  “Only six?” Noel said.

  Bo chucked a pad of Post-its at him. “I think it’s very fair to call it formative. OK? The Blair Witch Project will forever hold a formative place in my cinema psyche. But a crucial difference here, as you might recall, is that they’re only pretending to make the documentary about the witch in that movie. It’s not its own viable, stand-alone thing, it’s just part of the fictional plot—that witch is a fucking fake. We’ll actually be making our scripted movie based on a very real, nonfiction curse.” He picked up one of the sides from his desk and shook it around at them. “And we’ll be making it as a film that could hold its own were we asking it to. Flo and Clara will get their due. But while we’re doing that, we’re gonna do this other thing, too. And then my job is to figure out how to cut those things together without ruining either of them.”

  “Or both of them,” Heather said.

  “Always the champion for my cause,” Bo said.

  “You should tell her what you mean by stir the pot,” Noel said rather solemnly. “I mean, what we’ve already done.”

  “I was gonna do that, Noel,” Bo said. “Thank you.” He was still trying for affable, but it had just cracked. It was clear he didn’t especially love this guy telling him what to do, and probably wouldn’t have gone along so easily were he not in salesman mode. He ran his hand over his moustache a couple of times. “Listen, Brookhants will give us plenty to work with. I was out there a few months ago and it’s unreal how beautiful and enchanted, I guess, it is.” He glanced at Heather quickly, looked away. “Everywhere you point your camera, there’s something better to shoot.”

  “But,” Noel said loudly.

  Bo gave him a back off and let me do this look. “We will have a few things in place to get you three talking or reacting.” He sensed, rightly, that Audrey was bothered by this admission. She had stiffened into a starched-shirt posture.

  “This will not be anything over the top, Audrey,” Bo added, like he thought he shouldn’t have to. “Nobody will be chasing you through the woods with a chain saw.”

  “Just maybe with a cursed book,” Noel said.

  “Dude,” Bo said. “Give it a rest a minute, yeah? I’ve got this. I don’t need you to do the subtitles.”

  “You sure?”

  Bo paused pointedly, staring hard at Noel with his mouth partially open and his shoulders pushed forward in a kind of boxer-at-a-post-weigh-in-press-conference hunch. When it seemed clear that Noel wasn’t going to chime in again, Bo relaxed and said to Audrey, “Think stuff like sound effects or props, you know, maybe we add some fog to the trees.”

  “OK,” Audrey said, unsure.

  Heather shook her head and said, “If we’re coming clean, let’s go the distance.” She smiled at Audrey like a parent attempting to explain away the bad behavior of their child. “Some of it will absolutely scare you, we hope. That’s the point. But it’s nothing that will put you in any kind of danger.”

  “Of course not,” Bo said as if even the insinuation was distasteful.

  “But it might feel really personal,” Noel said. “Especially because it will mean you’re never really alone when you think you’re alone. Not while you’re there.”

  “Not true,” Bo said. “Bathrooms and bedrooms will be off-limits entirely.”

  Audrey ignored Bo and looked at Noel, trying to decipher his meaning. Something in his expression made her understand without really understanding. “What did you do, Noel?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “They asked me, it wasn’t my idea.”

  “I told him he had my blessing, honey,” Caroline said.

  “Last night . . .” Audrey said, still knowing without knowing.

  Noel half sang, “Whaaaaaat’s the ra-cket, yel-low ja-cket?”

  “You’re an asshole,” she said. She shook her head, felt a blush rise up her neck.

  “It’s just an app,” Noel said quickly. “It gave me remote access to your phone. I really thought you’d figure it out sooner.” As an afterthought, he added, “Gray asked me to do it.”

  “I was only the messenger,” Gray said, his hands up.

  “How did you do the yellow jackets?” Audrey asked, feeling stupid, just so stupid, but also relieved. “Oh my God—were you in our house? I thought I heard something but I couldn’t—”

  “I wasn’t,” Noel said. “I swear to you. I wasn’t there. I installed the app to play the book—earlier, I mean, when I had your phone. I didn’t have anything to do with the yellow jackets.”

  Even as Audrey looked in her mother’s direction, Caroline was already saying, “Me either, honey. None of us planned for the bugs. It was a fluke.”

  “Or part of the curse,” Gray said.

  “Wouldn’t that be something?” Bo said.

  Audrey looked around his office, still trying to avoid eye contact. Again, there was that vintage House Mother poster of Caroline mocking her from the wall. She couldn’t let herself believe any of them, not right as they were admitting that they’d all been in on this together. Also, because a big part of her really wanted the yellow jackets in the sink to be just another piece of the setup.

  “Wait, were you filming me last night, too?” She knew the answer and it was bad. This was all bad.

  “Just with our own security cameras,” Caroline said, as if this was somehow not an invasion. “I didn’t let them add any others—I only shared the footage with him. That’s all.”

  They had cameras in the living room, in the kitchen, one that caught the front yard, and another the driveway. Bo would have seen all the angles of her terror.

  He seemed to sense that his pitch was getting off course. “Listen,” he said, “I know this is a ton to take in, but the thing to focus on here is that it worked, right? It was an effective method of eliciting a stellar performance.”

  “I wasn’t performing,” Audrey said.

  “Fair enough,” Bo said. “But now you know.”

  “That it’s all fake, honey,” Caroline said.

  “Exactly,” Bo said. “Just like anything else on a set. So, I mean, Heather’s right, you’ll still have moments of genuine fear, because you won’t know the specifics of what we have planned for you, but you won’t be, like, incapacitated by it because you’ll be in on the larger operation.”

  “But you can’t let on that you are,” Heather said.

  “Right,” Bo said. “That is the crux of it.”

  “And you’re saying Harper and Merritt really don’t know?” Audrey said. “About any of this?”

  “Not until after we wrap,” Bo said. “If we can keep it going for that long. Big if—knock on wood.” He actually rapped his knuckles on his desk.

  “How is that even legal?” she asked. “I mean, is it?”

  Heather took this one. She seemed very ready to. “Rhode Island allows for one-party consent in all video recordings unless they’re taken in places where a person can reasonably expect privacy—changing rooms, bathrooms, locker rooms.”

  “So I would be that consent?” Audrey asked. “The one party?”

  “No,” Bo said quickly. “That’s not—don’t look at it that way. We’re all getting recorded all the time, every day. Brookhants already has security cameras running 24/7, that’s before we even get there to add ours. Harper and Merritt will know eventually, Audrey—just not out the gate. We need to let things marinate out there a while.”

  Audrey had piles of questions about how this could possibly work, how Harper’s contract could even allow for it and what it would look like in the day-to-day, how they could keep it a secret for so long—or if they should do such a thing, even if they could.

  What were the ethics of being one of the magicians if you were doing tricks for people who didn’t know that they were not only at your show, they were in it? They were part of the act?

  But that afternoon she asked only one of those questions. It was the question that had been blinking before her since Bo had started his explanation: “Why not pick Harper for this? She’s the better actor and the name.”

  “Bingo,” Bo said. “That’s why it can’t be her.”

  “Explain that to me.”

  Bo was delighted to do so. “Because Harper’s natural, and somehow mostly endearing, instinct is to post every fucking thing that happens to her—which her fans want and expect her to do, by the way—and when she goes to make this movie some spooky shit is gonna happen to her. We’re banking on her sharing it. Harper’s our leak. And she can’t be in on the fix if she’s the leak. I mean she’s good, but she’s not that good.”

  “I don’t know,” Heather said, “she might be that good.”

  “But why risk it?” Bo said. “This way whatever she posts about what’s going on will be as authentic as anything on socials can be. Otherwise it would just be bought and paid for.”

  “Isn’t that a distinction without a difference?” Noel said.

  “Who even invited this guy?” Bo said. He was less aggressive than he’d been with Noel before, but he still said it not so much like he was kidding.

  “You did,” Audrey said. She wasn’t kidding, either.

  Bo went on to explain some of how they planned to pull this off: the hidden cameras and recording equipment strung up in all kinds of places, the plant and body mics, the video drones, the separate crew dedicated to following the three of them around in order to get behind-the-scenes footage that would end up being much more than that. Audrey tuned in and out of his explanation. She felt embarrassed and disappointed, but she didn’t feel this way entirely, or even predominately, because she’d been tricked.

  Instead, it was because she felt like her original thoughts about all of this, about being asked to play Clara, had been validated. Of course they had never really wanted her to act in a serious dramatic role opposite Harper Harper. Of course she wasn’t actually good enough for Clara and Clara alone. They’d picked her because they thought she’d be desperate enough to be their pawn, the sucker stooge tasked with making sure the more important leads hit their marks in scenes they didn’t even know they were in. This was the rare case, she’d already decided, where being kept in the dark was preferable, where it meant that you were the more valuable party.

  Audrey would have forty-eight hours to make her decision, per the agreement made as she and her group left Bo Dhillon’s bungalow that day. But—in the car on the way to her house, in the kitchen with takeout, Gray and Noel still tagging along, even as Noel scooped dan dan noodles with one hand and pulled up various examples of cinema verité on his phone with the other, and they all tried to voice the potential career benefits of taking the job—Audrey had her mind made up. She was a no. It was a pass. Put her in the back with Lily Strichtfield because this wasn’t the project for her. She even suggested, when Gray eventually said that he really had to be going, that they call Bo now and tell him no deal. Get it over with. She was that sure.

  “At least sleep on it,” Gray said, waving his hand over the motorized trash can until the lid flipped open its plastic mouth. “You don’t have to take the full two days, but please at least sleep on it. It’s much too big an opportunity not to do at least that.” He’d started to dump his leftovers when Caroline sped over to stop him, taking the container right out of his hand. “I plan to recycle it, Caroline,” he said, rolling his eyes.

  “Yeah, but we compost, too,” she said.

  Audrey thought Gray looked rather pathetic in that moment, the trash lid smacking shut next to him, his shirt wrinkled, a dribble of sriracha down its front. She said, “Fine. I’ll sleep on it.” She had every intention of calling him the second she woke up to say, “Nothing’s changed—please tell them no.”

  After Gray left, Audrey and Caroline and Noel settled outside on the patio furniture and rehashed it all again, around and back and over. It was impossible for Audrey, now sitting on the other side of the doors she’d had to will herself to close the night before, not to keep thinking of how frightened she’d been and how the two people sitting beside her had helped to pull it off.

  “You’re totally sure it wasn’t anything other than the audiobook last night?” she asked. “Like maybe they put a fog machine out here or something? Or maybe Bo got somebody else to do the bugs if you two didn’t?”

  “I really don’t think so, honey,” Caroline said. “It was a rushed deal—we weren’t planning this for weeks or anything.” She scrunched up her face—a move she used a lot in the House Mother movies—before asking, “Are you so mad that we helped him? I went back and forth and back and forth, but I didn’t want you to miss out on this because I wouldn’t do my part.”