And Reed had no idea.
I felt a dim surge of hope.
“Listen,” he went on. “I’m an artist. What I’m going for is the integrity of the scene. So I don’t want to have to force you to cooperate … but I will, if you make me. Do you understand? If I hurt you, it will be your fault. You’ll only have yourself to blame.”
He reached up and gently peeled the tape off of my face. The feeling of being able to stretch my jaw and breathe through my mouth was an overwhelming relief. And somehow I managed to contain my screams. It wouldn’t do any good to make him angry now.
“Let me touch up your makeup,” he said, retrieving a tackle box from the sideboard. With a practiced hand, he dabbed a wedge-shaped sponge in pancake foundation and spread it lightly over my chin and lips. Then he fluffed powder over my whole face. After that, he picked up a lip pencil. “Open your mouth a little.”
I felt nauseated. I couldn’t believe we had kissed. That I had enjoyed his kisses. Now his gentle touch — as if he had the right to touch me at all — made me want to scrub my skin off.
“Good girl.” He wiped at the lip liner with the side of his thumb. “Now pout.”
I closed my eyes and puckered up. I could feel him apply the lipstick with short, dragging strokes.
“Smudge your lips together,” he said.
I obeyed.
“All right, now we’re going to run lines. I’ll be playing Henry.” He set the makeup kit back on the sideboard.
The sideboard.
There are knives in the sideboard.
Obviously, I couldn’t do a thing until he cut my hands free. And my legs. But he’d have to, eventually. When Charice died, she was walking away from the table. I couldn’t do that if I was bound to the chair.
If I could get a knife …
I would have only one chance. If I failed, he’d probably be so angry that he’d kill me before we finished the scene … like Paige? Is that what he’d done to Paige?
I forced myself to stop stealing glances at the sideboard.
Reed went around to the other side of the table and sat down, all business. “The thing to remember about this scene is that even though she married him for his money, she’s grown to love him, in her own way. But Henry’s feelings for her have vanished. At this point, he’s stringing her along — but Charice doesn’t know that. She thinks he still loves her. So there’s this pathetic element of hope in her performance.”
I remembered Diana Del Mar’s shining, begging eyes from the footage I’d seen.
“All right.” He cleared his throat, then picked up his wine glass and leaned toward me. “My dear, this is a night to celebrate our past.”
In less than an instant, he’d morphed from a crazed, twitchy serial killer to a calm, suave guy. I stared in confusion.
He raised an eyebrow.
Remembering myself, I looked down at the script. Then I looked back up. “I’m supposed to be pouring wine.”
“That’s blocking,” he said impatiently. “That will come after we’re comfortable with the dialogue. You need to feel the scene before you try to act it.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
“My dear, this is a night to celebrate our past.”
I forced myself to focus on the words. “And — and our future, I hope.”
He chuckled softly and sat back. “I remember the night we met. In New York. You were leaving that nightclub….”
“Chico’s,” I read.
“You dropped your handbag, and by the time I picked it up, you were already in a taxi. My father told me to forget it — that there couldn’t be anything of value inside such a cheap, ugly little thing.”
The conviction with which he said the lines made me feel like he was somehow talking about me — that I was the cheap, ugly little thing.
“I remember.” My voice trembled and I fumbled the words as I read. “But my grandmother’s sapphire bracelet was in that bag.”
“So I told the old man to go to Halifax, found your address, and hopped in a cab to follow you home.”
“It’s a good thing you did, too,” I read. “Marge didn’t have the taxi fare.”
“Madge.”
That line wasn’t in the script. I looked up at him. “What?”
“Not ‘Marge’ — Madge. Attention to detail, Willa.”
“Right, right, sorry,” I said. “Um … Marge didn’t have the taxi fare.”
“Madge, Willa.”
I was trembling all over.
“Don’t cry,” he said. “Don’t you dare cry. It’s a five-letter word. Say it — Madge.”
“Madge,” I whispered. “Madge didn’t have the taxi fare.”
“Madge was never good for anything.” He picked up his wine glass and swirled it. “She was a hanger-on, a second-rate back-row chorus girl.”
“We used to have fun, though. She was nice, in her own way.”
“If I hadn’t shown up, you two would have spent the night in debtors’ prison.”
“I suppose so.”
“When I handed you your bag … the look in your eyes … I’d never seen anything like it. I’d never seen someone who looked so alive, from the inside out.”
The script said, Charice smiles into her wine glass, pleased.
I looked down at the table. No way was I going to be able to force a smile.
Reed leaned forward, getting into the dialogue. “On our honeymoon, in Namur … those were the happiest days of my life. I felt that I’d plucked a jewel from the night sky, and there you were — all mine.”
“I remember Namur,” I read. “The little boy who sold apples next to the hotel, and that old woman who kept offering to tell our fortunes.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I wonder what she would have seen. I wish I had known.”
“You do?” He set his wine glass down. “I don’t. I’m glad I didn’t know. At least I had some happiness before I figured out who you really were — why you’d married me.”
“Oh, no, Henry —”
His voice sank to a growl. “Days of happiness — followed by years of misery. The peculiar misery of a man whose wife sees him as a sucker. Someone to steal from, lie to. A plain old mark to be cheated and cheated until he has nothing left to surrender.”
“But that’s not true. I cared about you from the beginning. I loved you.”
Reed closed his eyes. A small, rueful smile came over his lips. “You may love me now, Charice, but I’m afraid you never did back then. If you had … why, life would have been so beautiful. Such a dream.”
“It can be one now,” I said. “The way I feel about you now …”
He looked up at me, and I met his eyes. I didn’t need the script. I knew this line by heart.
“This is the kind of dream you don’t wake up from, Henry.”
There was a long, heavy pause.
“Maybe for you it is, my darling. Maybe for you.”
The script said, Charice hears everything that’s missing from his voice — mercy, hope, and most of all, love. She fights to keep tears from her eyes.
The next line was Reed’s. “I suppose we oughtn’t to continue this charade any longer. I’ve lost my appetite anyway.”
“Please stay, Henry. Please let’s give it another try. I’m so different now. We’re both so different.”
“No, my dear. It’s no good trying to keep a thing alive once it’s gone. One last toast? Raise your glass to what we might have been. In another world, another life.”
Reed raised his glass.
“It says I raise mine,” I said. “But I can’t.”
“No, of course not,” he said, snapping out of character. “We’ll get to that after we run the lines a few more times. All in all, I’d say you did okay. I think we can work together and get a performance to be proud of.”
Charice raising her wine glass was the last thing on the page — on any of the pages I had.
The footage flickered in my memory — Diana standing and turning away from the table, her wine glass slipping from her hand, her slow descent to the floor as she realized what was happening. She had tried to grab hold of a little table. There was no little table in this room. So what if I tried to grab hold of the sideboard instead? What if I could reach the knife?