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the book. “Do you know what a black hole is?”
    â€œWhat Jerry Allenberg has instead of a soul?” Pagan shrugged off Mercedes’s look, “Oh, come on, you know I was either drunk or distracted between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. My high school diploma’s strictly ceremonial, thanks to Universal Pictures and all those lovely tutors fudging my scores.”
    â€œA black hole is this area in space with gravity so strong it sucks everything, even time, into itself. Nothing, even light, can escape.” Mercedes wasn’t reading from her book as she spoke, and her eyes lit up as she went on. “This physicist, Finkelstein, discovered the event horizon, which is like a boundary around the black hole. Once you cross the event horizon, you can’t go back. You’re trapped forever.”
    â€œSo you’re saying I’ve been sucked into a one-way pit of darkness?” Pagan nodded. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
    Mercedes went back to reading. “The constellations are different in the southern hemisphere,” she said. “Maybe I can find a telescope while we’re there so I can see them.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    Burbank, California
January 2, 1962
    PATADA
    A kick between the legs, usually executed by the follower.
    The Warner Bros. studio lot lay shrouded in morning fog at the foot of the January-green Hollywood Hills. Pagan rolled down the window of the limousine as the guard waved them through the gate to inhale the crisp air and get a better view of the famous water tower perched like a long-legged heron over the blank-faced soundstages and trees still leafy for the California winter.
    Pagan had always loved the bustle of the Warner lot, but she hadn’t been there since they’d shot exteriors on its Western street for Little Annie Oakley , when she was ten. It was 7:00 a.m., and the studio was abuzz, an uncanny small town all its own, but one populated by time travelers and circus folk.
    Transferred from the limo to a golf cart driven by an assistant in a Yankee hat, Pagan watched an eight-seat electric vehicle hum past, carrying a flock of flappers in feathered headbands and spit curls.
    Her cart zoomed by the commissary, turned left and nearly smacked into a clutch of cowboys, guns at the hip. Nearby, three ten-year-old girls practiced a soft-shoe in an empty parking space. Their mothers sat in folding chairs nearby, knitting or watching critically. “One and two and ba-da bam !” one woman shouted, smacking her hand hard on her thigh. “Do it again.”
    Hang in there, kid , Pagan thought. She’d been that girl. Mama had been that woman. No tap dance had ever been good enough. No line reading was ever exactly right. That was how excellence was earned, Mama had said. She may have been right, but it was so very exhausting.
    The cart purred onward. The soundstages loomed like windowless mausoleums on either side as grips and wardrobe assistants ambled along, paper coffee cups steaming.
    â€œWhat are you shooting?” Pagan’s driver asked.
    â€œNot shooting yet,” she replied. “We’ve been rehearsing at a dance studio since Christmas, but now we need a soundstage big enough to choreograph this big number before we head to Buenos Aires to shoot.”
    â€œAll the stages at Universal taken?” He shook his head. “Didn’t know they had such a busy slate.”
    â€œMaybe yours are just better,” Pagan said. “But don’t tell anyone over there I said so.”
    He laughed as they pulled to a stop in front of Stage 16 and she alighted from the cart. “But I’ll be sure to tell everyone here you said it.”
    Smiling, she sailed through the door cut into the side of the soundstage with its Authorized Personnel Only sign, and stepped into the echoing dark of the stage. She stopped to let her eyes adjust to the spot of light along the back wall. A dusty piano crouched there. A