“Hon,” Alex Rivers said, “can you get me something to drink?”
I blinked at him, but he was already moving away with the director at his heels. Who the hell did he think he was? Who the hell did he think I was?
His assistant. Or rather, he had been looking for his assistant and couldn’t find her, and decided that obviously I’d been placed on this earth to serve at his beck and call. Like everyone else. I watched him settle into his high canvas chair, the soft seat and back molding around him, already cast in his form.
There was nothing I liked about him. I thought about what I would say when I called Ophelia.Guess what, I would begin.Alex Rivers is a pompous bastard who orders people around. He’s so wrapped up in himself he can’t see two feet away from where he’s standing. And even as I was thinking this, I was walking toward the tent with the movable feast.
I hated him for making me forget what I had been about to say; I hated him for getting me to come here in the first place; I especially hated him for making my pulse catch at odd intervals, pounding like the drums of the natives I sometimes heard over the wind when I was digging on site. I picked a red plastic cup from a stack on a table and filled it to the brim with ice, knowing that it would take only minutes to melt. Then I added juice—papaya, I guessed—and I stirred it with a disposable knife, waiting until the cup began to sweat and the liquid had taken the temperature of the ice.
Alex Rivers was still sitting on his royal throne, leaning toward a woman who was dusting his face with a light powder. When he noticed me, he reached out his hand for his drink and awarded me a second smile. “Ah,” he said. “I was beginning to think I’d never see you again.”
I smiled at him and dumped the juice and the ice, even the cup, into his lap. For a moment, I watched the stain spread over his trousers. “No such luck,” I said, and then I turned and walked away.
CHAPTERELEVEN
I expected Alex Rivers to curse under his breath, demand my name, order me to be fired. As for me, I kept walking, with every intention of leaving the set, even leaving Tanzania. But Alex Rivers did the one thing that could make me turn around: he laughed. He had a deep, rich laugh, the kind that rained down warm. He caught my eye the moment I looked back. “So,” he said, smiling. “I assume you felt my temper needed to be cooled off?”
I probably could have withstood his wrath, but his understanding was my undoing. My knees began to shake and I grabbed onto a piece of lighting equipment just to stay upright. I was struck by the full force of what, exactly, I’d just done. I had not spilled a freezing drink on some assistant, some costume designer. I had deliberately antagonized the man I was supposed to be working with. The man who was paying me three hundred and fifty dollars a day just to be helpful.
He stood up and walked toward me, holding out his hand as if he knew very well I was seconds away from falling down. “Alex Rivers,”
he said. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
From the corner of my eye, I noticed the crew pretending very hard to look busy while they watched the scene unfolding before them. “Cassandra Barrett,” I said. “FromUCLA.”
His eyes brightened to a shade of silver I had never seen before. “My anthropologist,” he said. “It’s good to meet you.”
I glanced down at the crotch of his wet khaki pants, soaked in a stain the shape of a butterfly. I smiled right at him. “The pleasure was all mine,” I said.
He laughed again, and I found myself hoarding the sound so that I would be able to remember it later when I was in my bedroom at the lodge, the old yellow ceiling fan spinning over my head. He took my arm. “Call me Alex,” he said. “And I’ll get you a script so you know what’s going on. Bernie!” he called out. “Come over here and meet our technical advisor.”
The director of the film, who looked for all the world like a shadow ready to jump at Alex’s commands, shook my hand politely and excused himself to find someone in the cast. It was easy to see that this was Alex Rivers’s show. He started talking to me before I registered the importance of his words. “You want me to dig something up?” I said.
“Now?”
Alex nodded. “The scene we’re shooting this afternoon involves my character’s initial discovery of the skeleton. I mean, I could sort of go on instinct, but I know I wouldn’t be right. There has to be a method, doesn’t there? You don’t just reach into the sand and pull up a leg bone?”
I winced. “No,” I said. “You certainly do not.”
He had taken my arm and was pulling me toward the gaping hole where most of the finds from Olduvai Gorge had been unearthed. “I just want to watch you for a little while,” he said. “I want to see your movements, and your concentration, those kinds of things. That’s what I need.”
“What you need is a tarp,” I said. “If you were really going to find something of value, you’d have set up a black tarpaulin over the site so that whatever bones you do locate don’t get bleached out by the sun.”
Alex grinned at me. “That’sexactlywhy I wanted you here,” he said.
He motioned to two men who were standing off to the side, fixing the leg of a tent. “Joe, Ken, can you guys find some kind of tarpaulin to stretch across this thing? It has to be—” He glanced at me. “Does ithaveto be black?”
I shrugged. “Mine usually are.”
“Black, then.” As the men turned to go, Alex called back the one named Ken. “Congratulations on the little girl,” he said. “I heard you got the news last night. If she looks like Janine, she’ll be a beauty.”
Ken broke into a big smile, and ran off after the other prop man. I stared at Alex. “Is he a good friend?”
“Not particularly,” Alex said. “But he’s a member of the crew. It’s my business to know something about everyone on the crew.”
I squatted down at the edge of the site and sifted through the chalky dirt. If he was trying to impress me, he wasn’t going to get very far.
“That’s impossible,” I said. “I mean, there have to be at least a hundred people around.”
