Another Thing to Fall Read Free Page A

Friday dutifully jotted some notes on her clipboard. “Should I use the Internet or—”
    “Just check it out. And do something about her clothes, okay?” Greer scurried away, even as Tess marveled at the man’s ability to switch from bossy-brittle to seductive-supplicant and back again without missing a beat. She wondered if he ever got confused, used the imperious tone on those he was trying to impress, then spoke beguilingly to those he meant to dominate. “On the boat or on the shore, it’s the larger irony that concerns me. ‘Everything connects,’ like it says in
Howards End
.”
    Tess didn’t have the heart to tell him that the epigraph for E. M. Forster’s novel was
only
connect. Everyone made mistakes. She just wished the man would stop trying so hard to impress her and perhaps do something as rudimentary as introduce himself.
    Mr. Natty Boh’s cell phone rang for what Tess estimated was the seventy-fifth time since they had left the boat. The ring tone was the
brrrrrrring-brrrrrrring
of an old-fashioned desk phone, something black and solid. It was a ring tone that Tess particularly hated, even more than the one on her friend Whitney’s phone, which played “Ride of the Valkyries.”
    “What? WHAT? You’re breaking up, let me go outside.”
    Greer returned as soon as her boss left. They seemed determined to keep an eye on Tess at all times, although they had let her shower alone. “I sent your clothes off with the P.A., Brad.”
    “P.A.?”
    “The production assistant from the boat. And I realized something — I know you.” The rounded
O
sound — knOOOOOOHw — marked her as a native Baltimorean, although one who seemed to be trying to control her
o
s and keep her
r
s where they belonged.
    “I don’t think so,” Tess countered.
    “I’ve
seen
you,” she insisted, eyes narrowed until they almost disappeared in her apple-cheeked face. “You’ve been in the paper.”
    “Oh, well, who hasn’t? I’m sure you’ve ended up in the paper yourself, a time or two. Engagement announcement, perhaps?” The girl wore a simple, pear-shaped diamond on a gold band, and she reached for it instinctively at Tess’s mention, but not with the expected tenderness or pride. She twisted it, so the stone faced inward, the way a woman might wear a ring on public transportation, or in a dangerous neighborhood.
    Tess babbled on: “Like Andy Warhol said — in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. Actually, he didn’t
say
it, he wrote that, in the notes on a gallery exhibit at the University of Maryland of all places. And most people get it wrong, refer to so-and-so’s fifteen minutes of fame, which isn’t the same, not at all….”
    She hoped her prattling might derail the woman’s chain of thought, but this Greer had a pointer’s fixity of purpose.
    “You weren’t in the paper in a
normal
way,” Greer said. “It was something odd, kind of notorious.”
    “One of my favorite Hitchcock films,” her boss said, returning to the trailer. “Written by Ben Hecht, with uncredited dialogue by Odets.”
    “No,
she’s
notorious.” Greer used her clipboard to indicate Tess. “She’s been in the paper.”
    “The local paper?” asked Mr. Natty Boh, suddenly all bright interest.
    “Yes,” Greer said.
    “No,” Tess said. “I mean, not really, not often. I started out as a reporter at the old
Star,
and I’ve worked for the
Beacon-Light
as a consultant, nothing more. Maybe that’s why she thinks I’ve been in the newspaper.”
    A lie, but an expedient one, one she assumed would dull the man’s interest. Besides, how could a Hollywood director, assuming he was that, care who had been mentioned in a Baltimore newspaper?
    But now he seemed even more focused on impressing her, extending his hand, something he hadn’t done even while she was treading water. “I’m Flip Tumulty.”
    “Oh, right, the son of—”
    At this near mention of his famous father, Flip’s features seemed to