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“Only, he didn’t know the hose was hooked to a well.”
Mick knew where this was going. “Oooh, Derryville well water always smells like rotten eggs.”
She nodded. “Yep. The first woman who got out, a redhead in a white dress, started shrieking first about her clothes, then about the smell of the water.”
Mick wondered where Jared had been during this whole fiasco. Or Gwen’s Aunt Hildy. The old woman had been front row center, he’d lay money on that. If there was excitement to be found anywhere near the inn, she was sure to be part of it.
“He had one of the sound guys flipping a big piece of flat aluminum to make storm sounds, but the aluminum got slippery from the sprinkler, flew out of the sound guy’s hands, and nearly decapitated another contestant.”
This time Mick snickered out loud. She shot him a look that said she didn’t appreciate his laughter.
“Come on, Caroline, you gotta admit it sounds pretty funny.”
She shook her head. “Yeah, so funny that one of the other contestants burst into laughter. Which made the nearly decapitated one shove him. And, since the ground was wet…”
Trying to keep a straight face, Mick said, “He fell?”
“Oh, he completely wiped out. We’re talkingThree Stoogesstuff here.”
Mick bit the inside of his cheek this time.
“He took-out four other people along with him, until nearly a carful of our enthusiastic, energetic contestants were throwing mud into each other’s faces.” She finished off her beer in one long pull. “My God, if they’d been naked we could have charged money and sold drinks.”
“Mud wrestling usually just involves girls.”
She grunted. “I guess you’d know.”
“I’m not a big fan of mud wrestling,” he said, not rising to the bait of her casually tossed-out insult. “I prefer the good old standard wet T-shirt contest. Much less messy.”
“The only good thing,” she continued, not rising tohisbait, either, “was that the camera operator we’d had ride undercover in the limo didn’t get caught in the mud battle, so that’s one less thing she can hate me for.”
Finishing off the vegetable stir-fry, he added some ginger and a few other spices, then spooned it over two plates of rice. He carried them over to the table and sat next to Caroline.
“She hates you?”
“Everybody except Charlie hates me. But he’s an all-around nice old guy who likes everybody.”
“Charlie?”
“Addison. He’s the tech director. You helped him get a room to rent in town.”
“Oh, yeah,” Mick said, suddenly remembering the man. “He likes a good cigar. The smoke from the Shin house wasn’t a problem.” He chuckled as she wrinkled up her nose. “I took him to see rentals the same day you showed back up in my life.”
She merely shrugged, her shoulders still slumped, her lips pulled down in a frown as she began to nibble on the vegetables.
“Caroline, you’re incredibly likable,” he said, remembering her earlier comment.
“Oh, it’s not me they hate,” she said, admitting it grudgingly. “It’s my title. I don’t take it personally. Everybody always hates the assistant producer because we tighten the purse strings whenever the studio says to.”
He suddenly sympathized with her, being surrounded by hostile co-workers. “Why do you do it?”
“I love it.”
“Oh, that makes a lot of sense,” he said, meaning exactly the opposite. “You love working with people who don’t like you.”
“Like I said, it’s not me, personally, they don’t like,” she said. “It’s the job. We’re the narcs on the set, the penny-pinching critics who report every single thing back to California and try to rein in impossible directors.”
“What fun,” he mumbled as he sipped his beer.
