Author: Emily M. Danforth
Category: LGBT
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/emily-m-danforth/page,16,568862-plain_bad_heroines.html
“Maybe it’s the ghosts who don’t want us filming there,” the studio guy said. “They’re camera shy.”
“Let’s hope so,” Bo said, twirling his pasta around his fork. “That would call for a little method acting, yeah, Harps?”
“Whatever it takes,” she said.
“Speaking of,” Heather said, turning to Bo. “Tomorrow? You want to catch Merritt up? Or do you want me to?”
Bo made a kind of have at it, I’m still chewing gesture.
“Merritt,” Heather said, pulling her plate closer and taking up her fork and knife. “Did Lily Strichtfield ever get in contact with you? About playing Clara?”
“Not really,” Merritt said. “Her assistant sent me an email saying she might have some questions for me at some point. But I haven’t heard anything else.” She started to say something more, stopped, then said it anyway. “I sort of assumed she would be here tonight.”
“Us too,” a studio person said.
“She has a scheduling conflict—” Heather started.
“Is that what we’re calling it?”
“Will she still be there tomorrow?” Merritt asked.
“No, I’m sorry,” Heather said. “That wasn’t very clear. She’s actually left the production. Our shoot schedule wasn’t working for her—”
“It was a little more than that,” the ghost-obsessed studio guy said.
“The point is that she has another project she’s committed to and we tried to rearrange”—Heather paused, cutting at her food—“but we couldn’t make it work. She can’t do both.”
“We could have made it work,” Bo said. “Probably. But we’re using it as an opportunity to go another way.”
“Which is what way?” Merritt asked, trying to remember the name Harper had said out by the dumpsters. It hadn’t been the thing she’d most wanted to pay attention to out there.
“Do you know Audrey Wells’s work at all?”
“No,” Merritt said.
“She’s great,” Harper said. “She’s really great.”
“She is,” Bo said. “But she’s not known. We had cast her as Eleanor, but we’re thinking of her now for Clara.”
“Huh,” Merritt said, processing the news. Eleanor Faderman was no Clara Broward. The roles were nothing alike.
“Audrey’s been at this since she was a toddler, literally a toddler. She knows her way around a movie. And I think there’s something there.” He pushed his chin out, extended his neck, and scratched at it roughly. “More than competency, I mean,” he added. “I think she might be our dark horse.”
Harper was fiddling with the cigarette refill she had at some point placed behind her ear. “I don’t think she’s ever really had the chance to do something better,” she said. Then she seemed to realize that she held the full attention of the table. She dropped her hand from her ear and said, more loudly, “Before now, I mean. She’s been good in whatever she’s been in, but it’s all been sort of . . .” She let the thought trail away.
“Low rent?”
“Cheese bucket?”
“No one’s arguing that she’s a bankable name,” Bo said. “This is part of the allure. She’s fresh.”
“Yeah, but the thing is that she’s not,” studio person said. “Take a look at her IMDB page sometime.”
“Right, fine,” Bo said, shaking his head. “I think we’ve established that she’s been in a lot of crap before now. This would clearly be a role that would ask more of her.”
“Yes, and I don’t see it,” Heather said. “I don’t see Audrey Wells making a leap like this. Even if she could, the risk outweighs the reward. And then there’s Caroline to factor in.”
“Caroline is no factor at all,” Bo said. “Not in this.”
“That is what you keep saying,” Heather said.
“Who’s Caroline?” Merritt asked Harper, which, in that moment, was like asking the whole table.
“Caroline Wells,” Harper said. “Audrey’s mom. She’s an actor, too.”
“I don’t know her,” Merritt said.
“You probably do,” someone said. “She’s an eighties scream queen. She did the House Mother movies?”
“Not my genre,” Merritt said.
“She was also on that weird, like, half-animated dramedy that the critics loved but nobody actually watched. Remember, the Fern thing? I think she might have won an Emmy for it.”
“Fern Feldstein Loves You, Baby,” Harper said.
“Yes! It was funny. I heard—I didn’t watch it.”
“No, that’s not how you’d know her now,” Heather said, turning to Merritt. “She’s the actress who got attacked by the dog . . .”
“Oh yes!” Elaine said, clapping her hands once. She was clearly excited to be a part of the conversation again. “After she crashed her car. She was on something, wasn’t she? Or sauced? And she drove up onto the lawn where there were children playing and when she got out the dog attacked her? They put out the surveillance tape. It was horrible.” Elaine didn’t say any of this like she thought it was so horrible.
“That’s Caroline,” Heather said.
“Caroline Wells is neither here nor there,” Bo said. “Audrey Wells, who we’re talking about, has done a little of everything. Lots of television, but she’s done some features, too.”
There was a pause where it seemed like the other studio people might have things to add, but none of them did.
“Well, she’s not her mom, right?” Merritt said. “People do have their own identities.”
“Yes they do,” Bo said.
“I’m excited about her,” Harper said, her lovely face turned toward Merritt. Hers really is a lovely face, and I’ll tell you: I don’t throw around that kind of BS. Right then her eyes were bright and big, as if she could maybe hypnotize with her level of sincerity.
“Listen, I’ll make sure you’ve seen her clips before tomorrow,” Bo said. He tapped at his phone then, busily, making a show of making this happen for Merritt.
“I’d like that,” Merritt said. And she did want to see them, sure. But she didn’t know why he was acting like her thoughts on the process, the way she would or wouldn’t ultimately weigh in, would make a difference to anything he was deciding. They hadn’t consulted her before casting Lily Strichtfield, or apparently before parting ways with Lily Strichtfield. Why bother now?
She didn’t know how to accurately read any of this. Her pasta was congealing before her. She’d yet to take a bite. “So she’s coming tomorrow,” Merritt said, “but you’ll still be making your decision about her?”
“Yes,” Heather said.
“My decision is already made,” Bo said. “She’s Clara.”
“It appears that you’re not on the same page about this,” Elaine said.
“No, we’re not,” Heather said simply.
“Right,” Bo said. “Tomorrow, if the both of you could just spend some time with her, I think that would be really useful.”
It took Merritt a moment to even realize he was speaking to her.
But Harper said, “Yeah, I would have anyway. Of course.”
Merritt didn’t know what she would have done anyway. She didn’t even know what the next day would look like. This was not her world and she felt that acutely. But what Bo was asking seemed a small enough thing. I mean, what else was she in town for?
“Whatever’s helpful,” she said.
“I’m really glad you’re here,” Bo said. “We all are.”
“I know I am,” Harper said before eating a fry. Her off-menu food looked, it must be said, fantastic. Fries and mashed potatoes and a small green salad with grated lemon zest atop its leaves like cartoon gold dust.
The business portion over, they ate their cooling dinners quickly and said their goodbyes.
Not even an hour later, Merritt would be in her hotel bed looking at Twitter and Instagram and other places the photos from their evening had already popped up online. She thought her eyeliner looked gunky but
her earrings were on point.
While she was scrolling and evaluating (and mostly avoiding the comments) there came a brand-new post: Harper Harper at some party with her arm around Annie Meng, their foreheads sweaty, their bodies nested in a way that suggested their comfort holding such a pose together.
There Merritt was in her baggy pajama shorts, stray minibar cookie crumbs on her pillow, and Elaine sleeping in the room next door, while Harper Harper’s night hadn’t even finished yet. Which made Merritt’s part in it, what? A pit stop? A speed bump?
Don’t say obligation, Readers. Don’t even think it.
And back at Brookhants, someone had tried to burn down The Orangerie.
Unreal, this life. Completely unreal.
Gray Dawn, Bleak Mo[u]rning
The night Eleanor Faderman was found dead it snowed thirty-one inches at Brookhants.
And it was still coming down the next morning.
The blizzard spread across New England, but Rhode Island received the worst of it and the Brookhants estate seemed to hold the storm’s heart. And it wasn’t only the snow, it was what the wind had done to it. Overnight it had formed drifts that reached up, like arms in cloaks, to hang from the bottoms of windows, and worse: drifts that crested into frozen waves that blocked doorways, forcing those inside to tunnel out and those outside to tunnel in.
Snow curled, like prying fingers, into the spaces between window and sill, and it slithered through the gaps between door and threshold, depositing white snakeskins on entryway rugs.
At Breakwater, enough snow had managed to scuttle indoors that it was noticed by Libbie Brookhants as she made her way up the twisting Spite Tower staircase. Some even dripped over the spines of the shelved books that lined the stairwell, as if it was hanging from the eaves of a roof. She shivered seeing it.
So much snow had blown against the tower’s many windows that it seemed they’d been covered in mourning shrouds, so even as the day filled with light, the windows let little of it inside.
Gray Dawn, Mary MacLane called it in her book.
Gray Dawn, Libbie Brookhants said to herself as she settled at her desk in the center of the round tower room, the peak of its ceiling high above her. It was like sitting beneath an open umbrella, the rafters its ribs.
As you may know, Readers: it’s bad luck to open an umbrella indoors. And in Spite Tower, the umbrella ceiling was never not open.
And the glass eyes from Harold’s stuffed birds and furry things mounted about the room were never not watching. The talking boards stacked on the shelf never more than half asleep, never not waiting for the scrape of charcoal to wake them up. The spoils of his strange travels, canes and statues, urns and books, all on the precipice of vibration should Libbie stray too close.
She shivered again. She set the book on the desk and stared at it. She was tired.
She’d barely slept, it’s true, but she’d not meant to sleep at all. She’d intended to wait only for Alex to fall asleep before she could, alone and unobserved, do something with the book. (Though she had no idea what that something should be.)
But Alex didn’t fall asleep right away. Too much had happened that night, too much had happened before that night, and so too much climbed into bed with them, sat heavily upon them, and kept them up and thinking, even if they did not say the things they were thinking to each other.
Especially because they did not do that.
And so while she had waited for Alex to fall asleep beside her, Libbie herself had drifted off. Into what seemed at first a happy dream—until it slithered into nightmare.
Libbie Brookhants had dreamed of a bright summer day there at Breakwater, the sun enormous and yellow in the cloudless sky. A group of her friends walked in a row down the steep wooden staircase that led from the terraced lawns and gardens to their private stretch of beach. They all wore wool or flannel bathing dresses—bulky and buttoned and built for modesty—but at least their legs and arms were exposed and some of them, like Libbie, had left a few of those top buttons undone as well.
In this dream, Alex was jovial and still young—Alex the Flirt, as she’d been when they’d first met in college—soon splashing and smiling in the waves, her shoulders warm from the sun when Libbie touched them, which she felt free to do many times. Everyone was laughing and relaxed, easy with one another. They drank tart lemonade from their picnic basket before kissing with puckered mouths in the surf. They did not hide these kisses. At some point, Alex’s strong hands were on her, there in waist-high water, wave-hidden hands pulling Libbie in and holding her close against the throb of the tide before moving slowly down the front of her sopped flannel costume before eventually, teasingly, resting between her legs. Libbie almost melted at the pleasure of their closeness in the sun and salt, their friends on the shore watching, until that pleasure melted into something else—the way it happens in dream time—the mood shifting as abruptly as the turn of a kaleidoscope lens, the colors jumbling to form a new pattern from the same elements, this one bleak and wrong.
Now wave after wave of seaweed tumbled toward them, thick and stinking, black seaweed like matted nests of hair or piles of rotting snakes, until the waves were more seaweed than water and everyone fled to the beach.
Everyone except Libbie, that is. She was stuck in place.
She called helplessly to her friends as they stood onshore, their toes just out of the water’s reach, silently watching as she was pulled farther and farther out, struggling against the waves and the black tangles until this unhappy scene flowed to another, and the beach and her friends drifted away, and Libbie, still in her bathing costume, wet and shivering, was standing in fetid water, oily and rank and up to her knees, the bodies of hundreds of wasps floating around her, there in the fountain in front of the Brookhants Main Hall. All of the students and faculty—and Flo and Clara and Eleanor Faderman, too—circled the fountain and stared grimly while a man in a smart suit, a man who most resembled her dead husband, Harold, sat casually on its rim, smoking a cigar while he instructed Libbie to clean herself. He tossed a cloth and a bar of soap at her, which she did not move to catch. The items bounced off her stomach, and when she looked down to see, that stomach, her stomach, was pregnant and stretched obscenely in her bathing dress. The bar of soap and cloth lay atop the black water until they sank into it as if sucked down by some unseen mouth. Into the fountain not-quite Harold threw his cigar, which hissed unnaturally as it went out, and then he reached down to the ground and pulled up something Libbie couldn’t see until it cleared the rim: a large tub of bathing salts with a garish pink-and-white-striped label, Dr. MacLane’s Arsenical Bath Salts—Guaranteed to Restore Virtue in All Ruined Women. A pen-and-ink drawing of Mary MacLane in a fashionable hat smiled coyly from the label’s bottom corner.
Then the drawing moved. It winked at her as its mouth stretched to say, “Time for a bath, Libbie!” And then again and again until the gathered students and faculty joined in, until it became a chant: Time for a bath, Libbie! Time for a bath, Libbie! And shadow Harold opened the tub and began pouring black salts into the fountain. But as they streamed out, right before they hit the water, they snapped into yellow jackets and were upon her.
Libbie Brookhants had woken to a room creeping with thin light. It was nearly seven. She was shivering with sweat and tied up in her nightgown.
But Alex, thankfully, was now asleep beside her. At least there was that.
She slipped from the bed and washed her face at the sink in her dressing room, making only whispers of noise as she dressed quickly in the half dark.
She then quietly, oh so quietly, took the copy of Mary MacLane’s book from where she’d hidden it from Alex: beneath her pillow.
Had there ever been a more obvious cause for a nightmare?
By the time the Eckharts arrived that morning and tunneled into the house, their noses and cheeks red, their coats and hats as if frosted with grainy buttercream, Libbie Brookhants had been at her desk in the tower for hours—grog
gy and addled and not yet solving the problem of Mary MacLane’s book.
The Eckharts were loud. They had to push back the snow that tumbled in with them. They stomped their feet and brushed the buttercream from their shoulders, sounding like people very glad to again be indoors.
She then quietly, oh so quietly, took the copy of Mary MacLane’s book. Had there ever been a more obvious cause for a nightmare?
They were also, Libbie saw, as she came down the tower stairs to greet them and ask about their trek, conspicuously without Adelaide.
Max reported that she was feeling poorly. He said she’d had some trouble even getting to their cottage the night before, though given the storm, they’d all had some trouble with that, and he’d hoped sleep would cure her. But then during the night she’d woken him, shaking his shoulders and calling his name. He’d found her up and out of bed with her coat over her nightclothes: pale, fever soaked, and talking nonsense about needing to come back here, to Breakwater, at once.
“Here?” Libbie asked. “Why on earth?”
“We don’t need to go into all of that, do we, Max?” Hanna, who had already seemed unhappy with her son’s storytelling, called from the dining room. She was on her way to the kitchen to fetch a mop. “Mrs. Brookhants doesn’t need the bother. Between her fever and this lack of sleep, is it any wonder Addie can’t keep her mind fixed on what’s real?”
“It really was only nonsense, Mrs. Brookhants,” Max said. He lowered his voice a little. “She had some idea about the storm causing the tide to rise and it carrying you off. I told her, ‘Addie, it doesn’t matter how much it snows—the water can’t come all the way up those rocks in one night.’ But she said it would. She wanted us to come see that you were alright, even though I said you were sleeping warm in your bed and that we’d be the only thing bothering you. I’m sure it’s the news of the girl that’s done it. My mother said it got in her head funny as soon as she heard.” Great clumps of snow had fallen from the sides of his boots and he stooped to gather it in his hands, which made no sense, as it was melting even as he did so.