She goes to move farther up the slope but I stop her. “You told me we were meeting Emily. Emily’s not here, is she?” I demand, urgency clear in my tone.
She looks down at my hand on her arm, and when she looks up her eyes sparkle with tears in the moonlight. “No. No, she’s not here,” she says, a deep weariness seeming to crack open inside her as she stares out at the twinkle of LA beyond the sign. “I needed to get you to come here with me. I needed to tell you what happened, Mia. I need to tell someone what they did. What they did to her. I’m sorry I dragged you into this, but I promise you, you were already involved. I knew you’d never come if I told you.” I feel my stomach lurch. Emily is dead. They killed her. Marla tricked me into coming here and Emily is dead. Her heartbroken eyes find mine. “I miss her so much, she was my friend, Mia. A real friend, we went through a lot. And she never let anything get her down. I’ve never known anyone like that before.” She swipes at her wet cheeks with the sleeve of her sweater and looks up at me. “Will you come up with me? I need to show someone, someone else needs to know what happened, you can see her from up there.”
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.
“Yeah.” I catch my breath and continue.
The wind grows in strength as we rise. I watch carefully as Marla sidesteps from the top of the ladder onto the strut-platform surrounding it.
Beneath me the ground is no longer visible in the darkness. Instead I focus only on the rungs in front of me, but as I reach the final rung my head crests the top of the letter and the glittering blanket of light that makes up Los Angeles comes into view. I catch my breath at the twinkling beauty of it laid out beneath the clear night sky. Beside me Marla shifts to make room on the thin platform, wedging her body between the waist-high metal of the sign and the support strut behind her. Once she’s comfortable she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a packet of cigarettes.
With incredible focus, my limbs completely reluctant, I shift my weight around the ladder, lodging myself between the strut and the corrugated metal of the letter to join her on the thin platform.
I rub my aching knuckles, clawed from clenching the rungs too tightly, and watch as Marla lights a cigarette, ridiculously at ease forty-five feet above the dark hillside. I pat my zipped pocket instinctively for reassurance as she slips her lighter back into her jeans and takes a deep drag, casting her eyes out across the Los Angeles skyline.
I take it in too, the brilliant fluorescence of civilization against an otherwise black landscape, the American street grid system glowing as far as the eye can see out across the horizon. I search for the distant glinting of the Downtown high-rise buildings, hoping to locate my own building among them. But a tendril of smoke floats past and I turn my attention back to Marla, who is watching me.
“Thank you by the way,” she says. “You kept looking for me, didn’t you? You didn’t know me but you kept looking for me. I appreciate it; that you were worried. It means a lot. You’re a nice person.” She offers me a cigarette from her packet; I shake my head. “Didn’t think so.” She smiles and slips the pack away.
“Where is Emily, Marla?” I ask.
She raises her arm, index finger pointing out across the darkness, like the ghost of Christmas future, off into the distance. I follow its trajectory. She’s pointing southwest from where we are to a patch of darkness on the otherwise twinkling horizon. I squint, slowly making out a glint of moonlight in the black. My brain struggles to make sense of it; it’s a body of water. A lake perhaps. “Is that Silver Lake?” I ask.
“Lake Hollywood,” she answers inscrutably in a puff of cigarette smoke. There’s an air of Lewis Carroll’s Caterpillar about her. I study her angular features, catching a flash of her bone-white teeth as she lifts her cigarette to her full lips once more.
