He sets it in her lap. “If you disagree with what I’ve done after you read it, I will personally pay for them to reshoot those scenes with a different set.”

  The fact that he’s willing to do this, and confident enough that she will understand once she reads the script, immediately and almost frustratingly takes the edge off her anger. What’s actually in the script remains to be seen, but the effort he’s going to already runs contrary to what she’d seen as thoughtless behavior. “Then I guess I’ll read it.”

  “I guess you will.” He gives her a hesitant smile.

  “Are you doing all right?”

  He moves his hand, indicating fifty-fifty. “Being back in my house is already nice. Hopefully the nightmares stop.”

  “You’re having nightmares?” It kills her that she didn’t know this. But then she thinks of something that will hopefully help him—that the dog wasn’t barking before the gunshot, so it’s unlikely he walked back and past that point again after she dropped him off. She tells him this, and he smiles.

  “A dog, Frankie? I like that you’re trying, but you know I need more than that.”

  “But now we have more reason to think you just went to sleep, and no reason to think you left and saw June before she was shot. When you got to your bungalow, you stayed there.”

  He taps his thumb on the door. “There’s something I found out that I wanted you to know.”

  “I don’t know if I can handle finding out more tonight.”

  “Why? What’d you find out?”

  She can’t look at him. If she does, and if she tells him about her mother, she will cry. What she needs is to be strong. Instead, she tells him about the tunnel.

  When she’s finished, Jack is incredulous. “And Nico knew about it? He’s used it?”

  “I don’t know when he last—”

  “Frankie.”

  “I can’t believe I even have to say this, but Nico didn’t kill her, Jack. I know he didn’t.”

  “Of course he didn’t.”

  Now it’s Frankie’s turn to look surprised. Jack, who’s always critical of Nico, agrees.

  “But just because I don’t think he killed her doesn’t mean I like this. Doesn’t mean you should look away when something’s off. Because something is off. You know it is. And you’re making excuses like you did with the telegrams and him knowing where Donna was—”

  “I didn’t look away. I got into his safe at his house when he wasn’t there. Everything is as he said it was.”

  “You broke into Nico’s safe?”

  “I didn’t break in. He gave me the combination a long time ago. There’s emergency money in there, there’s—”

  “He gave you the combination? Then of course you didn’t find anything.”

  “Maybe I didn’t find anything because there’s nothing to find.” She thinks of the police report involving Ida and the boy who drowned, as well as the letters Frankie had never read. Just because she didn’t know about those things doesn’t mean he was hiding them. On the contrary, if he was, he wouldn’t have put them where he knew she could look.

  “He bought June’s sister,” Jack says.

  “And me? He bought me too?” She glares at him.

  “You know I didn’t really think that.”

  She stays silent, stewing.

  “Come on,” he finally says. “Neither one of us is perfect right now, but you have to admit, what Nico did is bad.”

  “He did something wrong but for the right reason.”

  Jack’s mouth opens before he finds his words. “For the right reason? You mean because she was realizing there was more to life than just this?”

  “That’s what you wanted her to realize.”

  “No. She never cared about acting. She did it because her family wanted her to and because Ida gave up everything for her, and she felt like she had to.”

  “She told you that?”

  “Frankie, we had time together. Lots of time. I saw her at her best and her worst, and yes, her not liking acting but being famous for it was the problem. Think about it—what if you’re really good at something that makes the people you love happy but isn’t something you enjoy? How long do you keep at a job just because you’re good at it? She was a natural, but she never had a love for it. Me, I have a love for it. Acting, I mean, not the fame.”

  Outside, someone calls for their dog. Frankie slinks down in her seat, cautious.

  Quickly, Jack continues. “Here’s what I wanted to tell you: The reporter, that new reporter at my house the day of the conference, the one asking the questions I didn’t like? Jerry. He’s the one who brought up the staffers outside the premiere talking about the necklace.”

  Can you confirm or deny that two studio staffers were in the crowd outside Grauman’s talking about the necklace and lack of security? “I remember.”

  “Nico paid him to ask that.”

  “No, he didn’t.” An immediate denial. Even she hears how quickly she jumped to Nico’s defense.

  “Frankie, he did. I met the guy today. He thought I was in on it. He’s an actor.”

  “In on it.” She’s trying to understand. “In on what he was asking you? As in—”

  “As in Nico told Jerry what to ask. Exactly what to ask. Like a script. In exchange for a part in—”

  “But I was the staffer who said there was no security. And I said it to Nico. Why would he want anyone to know that? He was a part of that conversation. That doesn’t make sense.”

  “I don’t know. But Nico doesn’t make mistakes. So there was a reason.”

  “Do you hear how sinister that sounds?”

  “You didn’t know the truth about Donna. Or the tunnel. What else has he kept from you?”

  “Not telling me everything isn’t the same as lying. And for everything you just brought up, he had reasons!”

  “And you don’t think that’s suspicious?”

  She stares at him, incredulous. “You’ve never liked him. You hate him because he represents the studio and what you have to do for them, and that’s colored your judgment.”

  “Of course it has! Don’t be fooled—they want me to be a mess. They want me to need them so I do what they want me to do. So how do I know Nico’s telling the truth?”

  “I saw them! I saw the letters; I told you. And yet you’re still doubting him. You’re still trying to make me choose between him and you.” Her heart is racing, anger surging. “He came here tonight to check on me. It was his kid, his wife, and then me that he cared about. I’ve never had that. But he came to make sure I was all right, while you came to be right.”

  With that, she opens her door, letting in the cold.

  “Frankie, just because you don’t want to see something—”

  “The same goes for you, Jack,” she says, stepping onto the sidewalk. “You don’t want to see your own part in your own life. Much easier to sit back and blame others and do nothing, isn’t it?”

  Though he was about to say something, he clamps his mouth shut. Script under her arm, she tightens her robe as she steps onto the curb, and tries not to listen as his car pulls away.

  Chapter 28

  When, Not If

  Saturday, March 11, 1933

  When Frankie wakes, it’s early. There, on the nightstand beside her, is the script. She reaches for it and rolls over in bed, eyes adjusting to the print. The truth is she wants it to make her angry, just so she won’t regret how things ended last night with Jack. Still, she’s not prepared to be immediately irritated, but by page three, she’s mad. The woman is the man’s maid. Now Frankie sits up in bed and turns on the light, trying to be calm. The character lives in a tenement, destitute though morally grounded and strong, and though the man she works for is rich and people describe him as blessed, he’s lost all sense of right and wrong. To add to the situation, he’s a single father and raising his son all on his own, a child who seemingly has everything but is craving the one thing he doesn’t have: a mother. And indeed, the woman does the saving—both of the child and the man, who realizes what it is to truly be happy. It’s trite, but Frankie knows audiences are going to love it. They will relate, and they might even feel better about their lot in life. As Frankie turns the last page, she knows that it’s true—this was a tribute to both Frankie and her mother, one that only she’d recognize.

  She puts the script back on the nightstand. In an alternate version of her own story, she would’ve seen this play out in a theatre. June and Jack would be in the front row, and behind them would be an entire audience watching their every reaction. Frankie would be rows behind, off in a corner maybe, but close enough to see Jack turn. And she would know he was looking for her, and know who he really meant was saved.

  “They’re saying it was Los Angeles’s biggest known earthquake,” Virginia says, still in pajamas.

  The floor is cold, and Frankie searches for her slippers as her roommate continues.

  “John, from across the street, he said that the farther south you go, the more like a war zone it is. And he was at Verdun, so he knows. Oh, and that production assistant with the red hair was here this morning and said they need you at work.”

  “He was here?” Frankie looks at the clock. It’s barely nine a.m.

  “Our phone lines are still down. Sorry, I thought you were sleeping.”

  Getting to work is a challenge, both from the fact that many streets are a mess but also from the fact that Frankie wants to slow down to look at the damage. The quake was centered in Long Beach, a small community now reeling with the most extensive destruction: collapsed houses and destroyed schools and fire-gutted neighborhoods and broken families. Let this be a reminder, the man on the radio says, no matter how fancy we think we are, Mother Nature can and will put us in check.

  Houses thrown off their foundations. Walls crumbled. Sidewalks split. Wrecking crews are scattered throughout the city, there to finish the job, like putting animals out of their misery. Friends and neighbors and strangers, everyone is outside, sweeping glass and shoveling concrete and uncovering cars from beneath bricks. At a park, food stations are set up alongside long tables as if the city is preparing for a massive picnic.

  Once she gets to work, the talk is endless. Everyone has a story to tell. Where were you? What were you doing? Betty looks as though she hasn’t slept in a week, even though the quake was only yesterday.

  “You hear about the prop room? All the china and crystal, gone. And that big chandelier fell. It’s just glass in there.”

  “It could’ve been worse,” Frankie says, the mantra everyone repeats in a disaster.

  Betty hands her a stack of messages. “Now we circle the wagons. Damage-control time, literally and figuratively. Nico’s already out handling the big messes.”

  Frankie gathers reports on all their stars and sends off a cleaning crew to remove what sounds like a roomful of broken liquor bottles from an actor’s house before then concocting a cover-up story to hide the fact that another one of their stars was trapped in his pool house with the pool boy. It’s lying, yes, but it’s a lie she endorses, because why should the public crucify the actor for his own choice in his own life? If lying is what protects him and his desire to be with the pool boy, then she will lie. The whole day, Nico’s gone, and his absence only prolongs a sort of limbo, some uncertain territory where he could still be upset at her accusation. The only way she can gauge whether things have gone back to normal is when she sees him. Putting out fires, he told her about his tasks for the afternoon. Thankfully not real ones.

  On the way home, she stops at a local market and joins the line for food.

  “There’s the reminder, isn’t it? And that’s just the part we see.”

  A man stands on the sidewalk, gesturing to a giant sheer rock wall behind the parking lot. The layers of earth are exposed like a slice of cake, but the layers aren’t straight—they’re ruffled like a bedsheet. Countless times, she’s walked past this and wondered at the sight but never stopped to appreciate the force involved in actually bending the earth like this. Within seconds, another woman stops and stares.

  “When did that happen?” she asks, eyes wide.

  The man replies, with a laugh, “Not yesterday.”

  Offended, the woman shakes her head as she walks away, finally calling back, “They need a tree to block that. No one needs to see that.”

  Now the man smiles at Frankie. “A tree’s not going to make it go away.” He laughs. “Out of sight, out of mind, I suppose. Which works till you realize it’s been under your feet the whole damn time.”

  Candles and canned food and heavy blankets and a battery-operated “farm radio” that Susan finds in the small storage basement. The power’s still off all through the night, and it’s cold, colder than before, and Sunday morning, Frankie wakes up to the phone ringing, which at least tells her that’s back on and gives her hope. She clicks the light switch, but there’s nothing.

  “Frankie,” Virginia yells down the hall.

  For a fleeting moment, Frankie waits for her to tell her it’s Grant. Grant, whom her roommates haven’t even asked about, as if suspecting that the man they’ve never met would naturally disappear at the first sign of trouble. Frankie thinks of Jack’s visit after the quake, there to check on her, sure, but with the goal of getting her to turn on Nico.

  “My suspicion,” Nico says when she picks up the phone, “is that you’re not eating properly and everything in your refrigerator needs to go in the trash.”

  “All true.”

  “Well, we’ve got more power than we know what to do with and food coming out of our ears, so six p.m. dinner is on. We’ve canceled enough. If this earthquake taught us anything, it’s that if you’re lucky enough to be alive, you better live.”

  Relief. He was telling the truth; he was proud she was thinking critically, and she didn’t ruin anything with her accusation.

  When she’s about to leave, she spots the neighbor with the fig tree locking his front door behind him. Quickly, she grabs the garden clippers that her downstairs neighbor keeps in a basket by the hose and crosses the street. The man listens with confusion as she explains herself and why she’s holding clippers. Wary but in a hurry, he waves his hand toward the tree before shutting his car door. Frankie finds a branch and does as Nico’s taught her, making a clean cut at a forty-five-degree angle. Ultimately, she takes the tips of four branches. The more, the better, he’s told her, in case some fail.

  It’s ten to six when Frankie rings the bell. Angela’s wearing the same apron she always does, and the familiar sight—a vestige of the past—makes Frankie hopeful that things can return to normal.

  “He’s teaching Gabriella soccer out back. So far, he claims she’s better than anyone ever was at that age, ever, in the history of the world, and I’ve lost two flowerpots. They’re blaming the earthquake, but I know.”

  Frankie holds out the fig cuttings, wrapped in damp newspaper, and Angela sighs.

  “You too? We’ll be out of yard soon.” Then, as she heads back to the kitchen, she adds, “Be sure to score the bottoms.”

  The little bathroom attached to his office is filled with cuttings in pots, many with bright-green leaves that angle toward the window. Frankie had never even tasted a fig till she met Nico, but he could charm a snake by describing them, listing off flavors and profiles like wine: dark blackberry or bright strawberry, notes of floral honey or sweet melon.

  Along the wall are shelves, each with cuttings in various stages, and one with soil-filled pots, ready with the special mix he uses. She takes four prefilled plastic pots to the little potting table. Working in the dimming light, she scores the bottom of each section of branch, scraping away the bark, then inserts one into the first pot, another into the second, and is working on planting the third cutting when it meets resistance. Something hard is mixed in with the potting soil. Digging her hand in, she freezes when her finger touches something smooth.

  Even as she pulls it out, she understands she will not come back from this. This solid truth in her hand will change everything, forever. But it’s as if her body has chosen to learn what her heart’s not ready for, because her hand works on its own. She shakes the item loose.

  There, covered in dirt, is June’s necklace.

  Flecks of green blaze through the dirt. Even now, the giant emerald is radiant, desperate to be seen. With the tip of her finger, she brushes the smooth facet, and color bursts through. Suddenly, it feels heavy in her hand. Hot, as if she’s touched something she shouldn’t have.

  If he didn’t walk in now, as the necklace dangles from her open hand, would she have put it back? She will wonder this later. If she had the chance, would she simply reach for a different pot and act as though all is normal and well and she didn’t just find something that swings like a hammer into her heart? What lengths would she go to, to preserve what’s left of her life? Put the necklace back. Let its existence swirl like a fury in her mind over dinner. She’d mull it over at home and have time to decide what to do, and then she’d act. She’d turn him in. She’d confront him. She’d do something. Of course she would. Wouldn’t she?

  But the decision is made for her. There is a loud exhalation of breath, as if this evening is nothing more than an inevitability, a necessary bridge that must be crossed but could never bear the weight. When, not if.

  Silently, she turns to him, the necklace still in her hand. All her words are gone, and in their place is a mounting horror, because of course this necklace went missing the moment June was murdered, and yet here it is.

  Nico nods as if affirming her thoughts. “Well, it’s not good, but it’s not what you think. Come sit.”

  In shock, she leaves the necklace on the potting table, abandoned in a filthy coil. Nico’s office door is closed, and Frankie sits across from him at the desk when she realizes that she’s not afraid, but maybe she should be.

  “I didn’t kill her,” he says, and she’s relieved and then angry because it’s what she wants to hear, but at this point, her heart is flying against all logic.