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where most of
the studios I’d worked for were located.
    Of all the studios in Burbank to choose from,
the place I’d edited Machupo had – get this – forty
different sound stages, each filming separate television shows,
pilots, sitcoms, or movies. Forty different dreams being turned
into reality at any time. Yes, there were forty stages, but forty-one buildings. Way out on the rear lot was a lonely
outlying building that no one ever used. I’d driven past the place
many times on my way to prop storage. It was an isolated Quonset
hut of a building, a silvery arch of metal that sat shimmering in
the sun at the base of the San Fernando foothills.
    Officially, it was listed on the studio maps
as ‘Sound Stage Macbeth’, which meant you couldn’t even mention the
damned name of the place. See, people in the entertainment biz are
superstitious to a fault. The play Macbeth is considered the
unluckiest play in theatre. It’s such bad luck that actors won’t
even say the play’s title aloud. So the name of that specific
studio was like a little mental sign that read, “Keep Out, Here Be
Dragons.”
    And Dora was telling me to go right into the
thick of it. I didn’t have a clue as to who the ‘mother of all
riddles’ might be, but I knew that’s where Dora was pointing. She’d
even ended her note with an old showbiz proverb. We don’t say ‘good
luck’ in my field. We say, ‘break a leg’, or ‘knock ‘em dead.’ Or
‘see you on the green.’
    I hesitated on the way back to my car.
Returning to Burbank meant heading back towards Los Angeles.
Heading back towards Mitchel. That was enough to make me halt in my
tracks. I forced myself behind the wheel of the car, forced myself
to ignore the part of my brain that was yammering, “What are you
doing?”
    Yes, it was wild, it was crazy, it was
possibly stupid, but you know what? After you find out that you
married the living incarnation of Pestilence, that you’d been
sleeping with the being who’d doomed billions of humans from
smallpox or measles or the flu, you find yourself open to a lot of
strange things.
    Freeze Frame.
    Pan shot across the high desert outside of
Bakersfield. A bit of artistic lens flare, dial down into where a
disheveled but unbowed blonde finishes pumping her car full of
high-octane gasoline. She pays and then pulls out onto the freeway
with a screech of tires on cold asphalt.
    She throws the motor open wide with a roar,
kicking up a cloud of go-to-hell dust as she races south like the
devil’s after her.
    I was heading back into La-La Land. Whether
in wisdom or foolishness, I didn’t know.
    Hang in there with me, therapy buddy. I
really need the support right now.
    Because deep down, I wish I knew what the hell I was getting myself into.
     
     

Chapter Ten

     
    Here’s a fun trivia question for your next
party game: in September, what’s the average number of days that
the Los Angeles basin gets rain? Any takers? If you picked anything
higher than ‘one’, then I’m afraid you’re picking a number that’s
too high.
    Now, anyone want to take a wild guess which day the rain decides to fall on?
    If you chose ‘the one day that Cassie drives
back into the city’ then you win the dining room set and the
all-expense-paid trip to Fiji.
    It really messed traffic up on the freeway.
What should have been a two-hour drive from Bakersfield took more
like four. And that’s not all.
    The rare summer-fall rains in the San
Fernando Valley are things feel great at first. That lasts until a
half-hour after they roll out. Then the summer heat, now fortified
with an injection of moisture, turns the entire city of Burbank
into a sticky, gloppy imitation of Houston on a bad hair day.
    Speaking of bad hair, the resulting extra
humidity was turning me into a blonde puffball of frizz. Luckily,
as I pulled the Porsche through the studio’s security gate, the
guard managed to control his laughter as he buzzed me through.
Misty raindrops sprinkled