“A team of video editors has been reviewing footage from Life and Death, as well as the raw footage I shot for the YouTube series.”
“A team of video editors?” Deirdre asked. “How many people have been involved in this thing?”
“A lot, Mom. I could never have done this all by myself. But the most important has been my Facebook friend in Russia, Max.”
“You have friends in Russia?” Megan asked.
“Just the one,” Jackie answered. “But he’s the only one I need. Well, him and my friend Hazel in Alabama. The three of us are the core team. But there’s a much bigger group working on it, too.”
Megan looked at Jackie, then at her mom, and then paused a beat. As sometimes happens with close friends and relatives, the three of them burst out laughing all at once.
“I guess it is a little hard to believe,” Jackie offered. “It’s just how the Internet works. People, if they look hard enough, can find other people who are like them.”
“Okay,” Deirdre said, “there’s a team of editors.”
“Right. This team of editors was reviewing the footage of our house, of the set”—Jackie made quotation marks with her fingers—“looking for any sort of weakness, any advantage we could have over Ethan and the crew. It took them a long time, but they think they found something. A guy named Harrison, a segment news producer from Biscayne Bay, Florida, or someplace like that, found it.”
Deirdre, who was zigzagging streets to kill time on the ride home from the library, shook her head in disbelief, muttering, “Biscayne Bay.”
“In the footage I shot,” Jackie continued, “he noticed that Andersona puts her iPhone on the catering table, just off camera, before conducting interviews.”
“That’s right,” Megan said. “She did that for my interviews, too.”
“The cell signal,” Jackie explained, “can interfere with the wireless mics, so you’re not allowed to have cell phones on the set.”
Megan waited for more, but Jackie was silent. “And?” she asked.
“Don’t you see?”
“No.”
“We steal Andersona’s phone and shoot footage for The Real Family Stone of Portland, Oregon with that.”
No one responded, at first.
“Honey,” Deirdre said gently, “I’m not sure what good that would do.” Jackie didn’t respond, so her mom continued. “First, Andersona isn’t going to let you anywhere near that interview room. And even if she does want to interview you, honey, I don’t think you should talk on camera. They’ll just use it against you. And what if you do get her phone? The cameras all over the house will track the phone’s movement, won’t they?”
All her mom’s questions made sense, so Megan was surprised to hear Jackie laugh. “What’s so funny?” she asked.
Jackie explained how she had asked Hazel those same questions and more. And Hazel had answers for all of them. The team in Azeroth had been through every last detail. It would be like hitting the four-meter-wide hole in the exhaust system of the Death Star, but it was doable. The three of them would need to be Luke Skywalker, R2-D2, and Han Solo, but the plan could work.
“Pull over, Mom,” Jackie said. “I’m going to need your full attention.”
Deirdre did as instructed, and Jackie walked them through each and every detail. The more Jackie talked, the more enthralled Megan became.
The three of them committed the plan to memory, adapted it as they saw fit, and walked through it again.
After they got home, after they and the car were searched like they were terrorists plotting to blow up Seattle’s Space Needle, after Ethan yelled at them like they were his children and told them never to leave like that again, Megan looked at her watch and put Plan Chernobyl into action.
***
Jared lay in his makeshift hospital bed; he was utterly still. The only motion came from his chest as it rose and fell in time with the machine filling his lungs with a super oxygenated mixture of air.
His thoughts and memories all but gone, the only flicker of life was a small pilot light buried deep at the center of his brain. It was a still image, a photograph, of Deirdre, Jackie, Megan, and Trebuchet on the beach at Seaside, Oregon. It was a day filled with sunlight, and it was a moment filled with laughter. Jared, who had taken the photo, had told everyone to smile and “say Gruyère.” It was a silly joke, but it always made his daughters laugh. Deirdre usually groaned through her smile, but on this one day, she was laughing, too. As Jared’s life seeped away, this one happy moment was the last remaining thread connecting him to the world he had known.
The Seaside image was all that was left of Jared Stone.
Glio, not knowing what else to do, ate that, too.
***
Megan found Andersona sitting in the kitchen smoking a cigarette and staring blankly into a cup of coffee. The crew was forbidden from smoking in the house, but Andersona looked too far gone to care.
Megan was delighted to see that something was upsetting Andersona; it could only help their cause.