Prologue
Teddy Ray Fletcher
“A tusk?” he repeated, just to make sure he’d heard right.
“Awoodentusk,” the voice clarified. Teddy heard the whoosh of traffic and the sound of a car door closing. Why was it that managers and agents were always going places when they called? Did they save all their phone calls for their commutes?
“Three broken arms, two broken legs, and five concussions between the four of them,” Steph D’Arezzo finished over the hum of an accelerating car.
Teddy looked down at his desk, an acrylic thing his ex-wife had gotten him from IKEA before the divorce.
A very stressful production schedule looked back up at him.
He looked away from it, trying to focus on the picture of his two kids grinning from within his arms, their tiny handsclutching the tiny pumpkins he’d bought for them at the pumpkin patch that day. They used to be so little. And so inexpensive.
“Okay, so you’re telling me that my entire costume and hair team went into the desert and stood under a wooden tusk, which then collapsed on top of them. And now they can’t work on the movie, which startstomorrow.”
“Costume team, hair team,andyour gaffer, Teddy. And there’s no need to sound so judgmental about the wooden tusk. It was on a giant wooden walrus sculpture, after all. Don’t you know anything about festivals? Haven’t you been to Burning Man?”
Teddy squinted at the far wall in his tiny office, trying to imagine the fast-talking, suit-wearing, phone-addicted Steph D’Arezzo doing drugs in the desert. “Haveyoubeen to Burning Man?”
“We were all in our twenties once. No, don’t take the five right now, are you even looking at your GPS?”
Teddy assumed she was talking to an Uber driver and ignored the last comment. “So they were at Burning Man?”
“No, this wasbetterthan Burning Man,” she said. “It was UnFestival in Terlingua.”
“UnFestival? I’ve never heard of it.”
“Of course you haven’t,” Steph said dismissively. “It’s exclusive.”
“Ah,” he said. “Invite only.”
“No, Teddy, it’suninvite only.”
“Okay. Uninvite only to UnFestival. Where a wooden walrus fell on my crew.”
“Just the tusk,” she clarified. “Will it stop dinging at me ifI put on my seat belt? Oh good. And the walrus was part of the Alice in Wonderland theme, Teddy. It wasn’t just a random wooden walrus out on a mesa.”
She scoffed as ifthatwould be bananas.
“And how do you know all this before I do?” he asked.
“Ah, well, about that,” Steph said, and it was in that briskI have some bad newsvoice that all managers seemed to have.
Teddy’s butthole clenched.
“I heard because it came bundled with another thing. I got a call from Winnie’s agent, and she’s going to call you later tonight when she knows more, but she wanted to put me and your male lead in the know, in case the story broke over social media before then. Winnie’s in the hospital right now.”
Shit.
Winnie Baker was a wholesome child star turned wholesome made-for-TV-movie actress, and she was going to be one of the leads in his first-ever Christmas movie production. More importantly, she was the star his director had specificallychosento work with to make her directorial debut, and Teddy had to keep his director happy, because she made the Hope Channel happy.
And gettingDuke the Hallsdistributed by Hope—and their new streaming platform Hopeflix—was the only thing that could turn Teddy’s desperate Christmas movie gamble into real money. God knew his day job making cheap pornography wasn’t paying for his son’s art school tuition or his daughter’s startup making carbon-neutral sex toys.
And Christmas movies couldn’t be that hard to make, right? They werealmostlike porn. The scripts were on the flimsy sideand the production times were shorter than a community college wintermester.
But now the wooden tusk. Now no Winnie Baker.
