If I could open the phone I could listen to that recording of the meeting, too. Emily clearly had evidence of some kind, worth keeping.
And if I could just get to that call list, I could see who it was she spoke to last and when. I pick it up again, turning it in my hands as if there might be a secret way to unlock it, like a Chinese puzzle, but it’s just a regular iPhone.
Wherever Emily went for those six days, she reappeared on the twelfth of January and continued her life as before: she attended auditions, sent and replied to emails, and sent her agent self-tapes, new headshots. I click open the photo attachments, and relief floods through me as I see her face. Real Emily’s face. After questioning myself for so long I was half expecting to see Joanne staring back at me but it’s most definitely Emily, the girl I met four days ago, looking happy and healthy and real. And for the first time since she disappeared I feel a rising panic because she’s gone and no one knows but me.
From skimming her emails after the twelfth, I can see she came back from wherever she went with a renewed vigor. Either her plan worked or it didn’t and she had to come up with a better one.
I think back to the day I met her at the audition. She seemed confident, friendly, happy to be there but we’re actresses, aren’t we, it’s not hard to put on a professional face.
I sieve through what I can recall of our conversation for anything telling. The only thing that springs to mind is the call she mentioned she was waiting for. If only I could get on that bloody phone and see if she got that video call just before she disappeared for the second time.
Then a memory surfaces. I recall Zooming George every day while I was away filming on a fantasy film in Romania. I’d Zoom him every evening on my phone in my freezing-cold trailer on the grounds of Bran Castle in Transylvania until I realized the calls weren’t included on my data plan. Then I started Zooming him back at the hotel on their Wi-Fi at night instead. I downloaded the desktop version and found to my despair the previous call durations. My entire call log was viewable from the laptop.
I open up the finder on Emily’s computer and search for Zoom.
The icon appears and I click on it. On the user name and password screen her password details autofill; all I have to do is click. The Zoom screen bounces open, her account filling the screen.
I see her last call. From this Wednesday.
Moon Finch Multimedia 10 Feb 2021 Call ended 2m 52s
I tap on the call and the call time appears: 1:18 p.m.
This is it, the call she was expecting, a call that came while I was still in that audition room.
I pull up Google and search Moon Finch Multimedia. It’s a production company. I forgo their website and head straight for their Internet Movie Database page to see what they’ve produced. They’re easy to find and as I scroll through their credits I realize that a lot of the big films I’ve watched over the last few years have been at least partly produced by this company. They’ve worked with or through most of the studios.
It looks like they’re the developmental arm of a larger company. I take a closer look at their logo: a small plump bird silhouetted in front of a full moon, its beak held high and open, mid-song. It’s a familiar logo, I’m sure I’ve seen it countless times in opening credits without even noticing.
Emily spoke to somebody at Moon Finch for almost three minutes before she disappeared four days ago.
They could have been calling her about the job she was waiting to hear about. They may have given her bad news. Or good news, she could have rushed off to meet them—though she wouldn’t just abandon her car and her things, especially if she had to travel to meet them.
I tap on Moon Finch’s in-development credits. There are thirteen projects in pre-production. I look at a few but most are still untitled with only a director or a lead attached. If she was waiting to hear back about the lead in one of these films, then she was right, a job like this truly could have changed her life. Which leads me to ask, what the hell happened on New Year’s Eve that warranted such a job offer?
Did she overhear something she shouldn’t have; did she see something?
Whatever happened I now know that Emily spoke to someone at that production company from 1:18 to 1:21 on Wednesday the tenth of February and then disappeared.
I pull up the staff page for Moon Finch. There are nine executives working for the company and three executive assistants. Of the executives, five are male and one is female. I jot down their names on the notepad. It’s only a hunch at the moment, nothing more, but I have a feeling I don’t need to write down the woman’s name.
One by one I google their photos and study their faces. Faces that under normal circumstances I’m sure would look completely innocuous now take on all the shades of misdeed. Men who could be husbands, fathers, or brothers now become leering and capable of anything. I study the face of the man who appears to be the primary producer at Moon Finch, Ben Cohan, but it’s impossible to tell anything from looking.
I don’t recognize a single one of them, though I can see I have auditioned for some of their previous films. It’s funny who and what sticks in the mind and what refuses to be pinned down. After all, I now know I met Nick two years ago and I didn’t recognize him at all when I met him again this week.
If a production company of Moon Finch’s caliber was willing to offer Emily an opportunity of that magnitude, then I have to wonder what she had on them.
I turn to her emails for some kind of answer. Finding nothing in her inbox, I run the cursor down Emily’s neatly archived mail folders until I reach the computer-generated folders at the bottom of the screen. RECOVERED, DELETED, DRAFTS.
I dive into the DELETED folder, hoping that her trash hasn’t been recently erased, but I’m not in luck. The file is empty, as is DRAFTS. I don’t exactly know what the RECOVERED folder is but I click on it next.
The file is full. I stare at the emails, every email the same, all duplicates. Every single email is from Emily to Emily. There must have been an error in sending so she sent and re-sent over and over. There’s no subject in the subject bar, and every single email has two attachments. There’s eighteen of them, identical.
I open one. It’s empty except for the two attached files. One labeled: Bel Air.m4a. The other: San Fernando.m4a.
Emily sent two audio files to her laptop from her iPhone. One must be the meeting she recorded. I know a couple of the major studios are out in the San Fernando Valley where the second recording was obviously made. But the first recording, Bel Air, is a mystery.
Emily must have deleted the email that actually made it into her inbox, but her laptop somehow managed to recover copy upon copy upon copy of its duplicates here.
I tap on Bel Air.m4a and it opens in Voice Memos.
Its creation date is 1 January this year. My breath catches. Emily made an actual recording of whatever happened on New Year’s Eve. Whatever is on this forty-nine-minute-long recording must be the leverage Emily used to secure the offer of a lifetime.
23
New Year’s Eve
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 13
I grab a cushion from the sofa, turn a fresh page in my notepad, and hit play on the New Year’s Eve audio file Bel Air.m4a.
At first there is only silence. I increase the volume and the room slowly fills with the comforting ruffle of white noise. The muffled sound of bass music through a wall, the reverb and screech of voices having fun in other rooms, with the scrape and rustle of a pocket in the foreground.
A party from the safety of a pocket or bag.
Now the sound of a voice close, the words not quite distinguishable. I pump up the volume further until a male voice comes into focus, the tone cloying, coaxing.