“My mom’s an artist,” he said. “My dad’s a … consultant. Are you okay going up to my room?”
I nodded, and followed him up a set of stairs that didn’t even have a handrail. You could have fallen right off. When we reached the second floor, I found myself facing a wall that was covered in dozens of black-and-white photos of Wyatt at different ages.
“Wow,” I said.
“For the record, I’ve asked them to change this,” he said. “But they’re kind of attached to it.”
His bedroom was straight ahead, and I almost hesitated before crossing through the door. But Wyatt went straight toward a leather sofa in the corner of the room and gestured for me to sit. Then he pulled over a bright orange plastic chair for himself.
I sat cross-legged on the sofa and rested my chin in my hands, staring at the floor. “It’s in my house,” I whispered. “It won’t leave me alone. I think it’s trying to kill me —”
“Whoa, whoa,” he said. “Slow down. Take a breath. Start at the beginning.”
I took two deep breaths, but they were that weird jerky kind of breath that happens right before you bust out in epic sobs. Somehow I managed to hold all that in and describe everything that had happened the night before, starting with the knocking and ending with the screenplay.
“So it is a line from a script.” Wyatt sat back and looked out the windows at the trees.
“It’s a scene where they’re eating dinner,” I said. “Just like in my vision. It can’t be a coincidence. It has to be another murder.”
“Okay, yes, that’s what it sounds like.” Wyatt shook his head. “But there are no unsolved murders fitting that profile anywhere in southern California. I checked after we met with Leyta last week.”
“Then maybe … maybe it hasn’t happened yet.”
“So now you’re seeing the future?”
“I don’t know, Wyatt,” I said, practically hissing in aggravation. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. For all I know, none of this is real. I could be strapped to a bed in a mental institution. You could be a figment of my —”
“I’m not a figment,” he said. “You’re not making this up. You’re not strapped to a bed in a mental ward. You’re here with me.”
I half laughed and looked up into his wide brown eyes, thinking he was joking. But he seemed perfectly sincere. I sat back and tried to relax. Something about his steady, unflappable presence centered me.
“Let’s focus on what we know,” Wyatt went on. “There’s a force in your house trying to call your attention to this particular scene, which appears to be from a movie. So the next logical step is to figure out what the movie is.”
“I brought my laptop.” I unzipped the monstrosity, pulled the computer out of its neoprene sleeve, and set it in my lap. Wyatt leaned closer to look at the screen. I half expected him to try to snatch the computer away so he could apply his superior research skills, but he didn’t.
There was a Wi-Fi network called SHEPPARD. “Password?” I asked.
He blushed slightly. “Um … I’ll type it.”
“Just tell me what it is,” I said. “I’m not going to come steal your Wi-Fi when you’re not home.”
“It’s, uh … ‘Wyattcutiepants.’ All one word. Capital W.”
“Are you kidding?” I asked.
“My mother is a creature of habit,” he said. “Every time I change it, she finds a way to get logged out and then can’t remember the new password to log back in. I finally gave up around eighth grade. Anyway, can I see the search results?”
“Sure thing, cutiepants.” I typed in the whole sentence and hit SEARCH. The results were assorted references to people named Henry — Henry Rollins, Henry James — and a movie called 50 First Dates. No exact matches.
“What if you leave off the name?” he asked.
“Then we get …” I backspaced through Henry and hit SEARCH. “… a Beyoncé song.”
“Well, that explains it,” he said. “You’re being haunted by Beyoncé.”
“Oh, this is ideal,” I said.
He smiled a little and then put his concentrating face back on. “What if you search for Charice and Henry — and movie?”
I typed it in and came up with a bunch of random unhelpful results.
“Nothing,” I said. “We need to face it. This movie doesn’t exist.”
“What if you’re right?” Wyatt said. “Maybe the killer wrote the screenplay himself.”
“That wouldn’t explain how it got in my house,” I said.
“There are a lot of things in your house that don’t seem to belong there,” he said.
I didn’t answer.
“You don’t look convinced.”
I pulled out my phone. “I left the page at home because it’s so delicate, but I took a picture. Notice anything?”
Wyatt took the phone and zoomed in on the photo. “What am I looking for?”
“The letters,” I said. “The lowercase t is always a hair above the line of the other letters.”
“And the e is lower,” he said. “So this was typed on an actual typewriter?”
I nodded. “Nobody actually uses typewriters anymore. So it’s probably pretty old, right?”
“Yeah,” he said, “but look — it’s a photocopy. See how the corner is just a copy of a dog-eared page? Maybe the original is old, but the page you found isn’t the original. Someone could have made that copy yesterday, for all we know.”
“What’s Namur?” I asked, typing the word into the computer. “In the vision I had, the girl thought about Namur.”
Our heads nearly touched as we looked at the screen. Namur turned out to be a city in southern Belgium. I skimmed the Wikipedia entry, with Wyatt reading over my shoulder.
“Not very exciting,” Wyatt said. “University … museum, belfry, cathedral, Del Mar Park …”
“Wait,” I said. “Del Mar? As in …”
I typed Diana Del Mar Namur Belgium.
It was a hit.
“Diana Del Mar lived in Namur for three years,” I read. “When she was a teenager.”
“So?” Wyatt asked.
“So … Diana Del Mar lived in my house.”
He blinked.
“Is this movie about her somehow?” I asked. I typed Diana Del Mar Charice and nothing came up.
“Wait, look,” Wyatt said, holding up my phone. “In two different spots, someone made a mistake typing Charice. See how there’s a letter X-ed out? They typed an s first. Try that.”
It seemed like a stretch, but I typed it in: Diana Del Mar Charise.
“There!” Wyatt said.
The very first result was an article titled “Diana Del Mar — Screen Star to Screenwriter,” from a blog called Learning the Craft. The author of the blog was named Paige Pollan. Her bio said she was “an aspiring ‘Hollywood type’ determined to do my homework before plunging into the swamp of Tinseltown.”
I read the blog post:
Diana Del Mar, a beloved actress in the 1930s, turned her attention to behind-the-scenes pursuits when she found herself being rejected for roles because of her “advancing” age (35! GASP!). One of her interests was writing. Rumors swirled around town that she and none other than “Hitch” himself (the great Alfred Hitchcock, newly arrived in America following the release of Rebecca) were collaborating on a project. Diana was working on a screenplay and hoped to star as the character Charise. Hitchcock would direct. Soon, however, the arrangement fell through. Some speculated that Miss Del Mar would try to produce the movie on her own, but before that could happen she was found dead in an upstairs bathtub at her home in the Hollywood Hills. [Source: Hollywood Glamour Magazine, April 1943.]
Dead. In an upstairs bathtub.
Yeah, that just about fit. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.