Change of Scene: A 100 Page Novella (2 page)

“Got it.” Greer nodded for emphasis. “An investigator? Why an investigator?”

“That fire was set illegally,” the deputy said, his face grim. “This ain’t Hollywood up here. Somebody’s ass is gonna be in a sling.”

*

Even with the air conditioner in the Explorer at full blast, she could smell the smoke as far as half a mile from the farm. What would the fire mean for the shoot? Would it be shut down, or would she need to find alternate locations? One thing was certain, damages meant lawyers and insurance people. Not good.

Without even realizing it, she was immediately in location scout survival mode. She glanced down at her cell phone, checking to see that it was fully charged.

More sheriff’s cars blocked the entrance to the Miller farm. Greer pulled up alongside a sour-faced female deputy. “I’m with the
Moondancing
crew,” she announced. “The deputy down the road said it was okay for me to come up now.”

“Over there,” the woman said, pointing toward the driveway to the base camp. “But stay out of the way.”

The production company’s base camp was eerily quiet. Half a dozen crew members sat under the canopy outside the catering wagon, sipping from water bottles and talking quietly, but otherwise the site, which would normally have been bustling with activity, looked deserted.

She found Hank in his RV, seated at a desk, talking rapidly on the phone, his back to her. She tapped his shoulder, he wheeled around, and she saw that his face and clothing were streaked with soot and sweat.

“Okay, yeah. She just came in. I’ll get back to you as soon as I know more. The investigator’s with Dave Walker, our special-effects guy right now, and as soon as he talks to the cast, I’ll send them back to the hotel.”

Hank hung up and rubbed his forehead, smearing the soot up into his hairline.

“How are you?” she asked, fidgeting with the phone she’d tucked into the pocket of the canvas fly-fishing vest she wore on locations.

He shrugged. “Shell-shocked.”

“Who got sent to the hospital?”

“Ahmed, one of the special-effects guys. When the fire started to spread, he got a little too close, trying to put it out. He’ll be okay. They really only took him for observation.”

“Everybody else is okay?”

Another shrug. “I just talked to one of the studio’s lawyers in L.A. They’re notifying the insurance people.”

She nodded. “I’ve got all the releases in a file in my room back at the hotel. Photographs of everything, too. Will we have to shut down the whole shoot?”

“I hope not.”

His face brightened a little.

“We got killer stuff. I can’t wait to see the footage. The fire was amazing. Huge billows of smoke. Of course, Danielle went all drama queen when she saw it was the real thing. But we kept the cameras going. Her whole face was black with the soot. Those avocado trees are oily as hell. Who knew? She was coughing and gagging. The real deal. I’m telling you, it was killer.”

Danielle could have been killed, Greer thought. Everybody could have, if the wind had kept gusting. But all Hank Reitz cared about was his killer footage.

“Will the locals make you shut down the movie?” Greer repeated.

“Depends on what the sheriff’s investigator has to say. The guy’s got a bug up his ass about us doing the fire without a special permit. Apparently, we should have had one.”

“I
told
you we needed a permit,” Greer said plaintively.

“Well, we didn’t get one. And now we’re fucked,” Hank said with a shrug. “Hindsight and all that.”

“How did it get out of control, anyway? Dave assured me he was going to take every precaution.”

The RV door swung open, and one of the production assistants, a young kid named Eric with tattoo sleeves on both arms, stepped inside. “Uh, Hank, somebody to see you.”

“Not now,” Hank snapped. “Get his name and his number. I’m in a meeting.”

“Uh, well…”

“The hell you are,” a man’s voice called out. He shoved Eric aside. He was older, in his late seventies, at least, but tall and big-boned, with a deeply tanned bald head and a full white beard. He wore a short-sleeved Western-style pearl-snap shirt, newish jeans with a sharp crease, well-worn cowboy boots, and a look of pure outrage.

“Who’s this?” Hank asked, looking at Eric.

“This is the man whose farm you just about burned down today,” the old man said, thumping his own chest. “This is Mac Miller, the guy who’s gonna sue your ass and maybe even get it thrown in jail for trespassing and I don’t know what all else. I’m thinking you might want to have a meeting with me.”

“Mac Miller?” Hank shot a look at Greer. “Is this the guy you’ve been dealing with?”

“No!” Greer said sharply. “Garland Miller is the homeowner.”

“Garland?” The old man’s upper lip curled in disgust. “Is that what he told you? I might have known he was behind this. Garland don’t own shit.”

“That can’t be right,” Greer said. “All the neighbors told me Old Man Miller owned this place. Garland met me at the farmhouse. Showed me around, signed all the release forms. He gave us permission to film. We paid him a fifteen-thousand-dollar fee to allow the filming.”

“If you did, you’re dumber than you look,” Mac Miller said.

“Is Garland your son?” Greer asked. “Maybe he just assumed he had the right…”

“Garland don’t have no rights to nothin’. He’s my nephew. I thought we’d run him off the last time he rolled through here, but I guess he came back while I was out of town.”

“
You’re
Old Man Miller?” Greer asked, her voice little more than a whisper. She closed her eyes as a wave of nausea washed over her.

“I’m James McMahan Miller, and I own this land and the farm your people just about burned to the ground. I own those beef cattle your people let escape from my pasture, I own the goat barn you destroyed, and I own the fifteen acres of avocado groves you just wiped out. Fifteen acres of prime avocados that were going to be picked next week. Fifteen acres of trees that are right now just a smoldering pile of black ash. You’re by-God right I’m Old Man Miller.”

Greer recalled the prediction made just an hour earlier by the sheriff’s deputy up the road. Somebody’s ass would be in a sling, he’d said. And now hers was.

*

“We got this,” Dave Walker had assured her. She could almost hear his voice whispering in her ear as she drove away from what was left of the Miller homestead, with the stink of smoke clinging to her hair and clothes.

On the way back down the mountain to the hotel in Paso Robles, Greer called Garland Miller’s cell phone and got a recording.
“The number you are calling is either not in service or has been disconnected.”

She cursed softly and floored the Explorer’s accelerator.

“Garland Miller’s room,” she told the desk clerk at the Hilton. “Two-oh-four.” The young woman punched in his room number, stared at her computer screen, and frowned. “Oh, him. He’s gone. When our housekeepers went in to clean this morning, they found both his rooms empty. And they’d been trashed. The coffeemaker, towels, bathmats, all the bed linens, including the bedspreads were missing.”

She tapped an icon on her computer screen and a second later, the printer sprang to life. The clerk stapled the sheets of paper together and handed them across to Greer, whose head was starting to throb.

The printout ran to eight pages of items that had been charged to Garland Miller’s rooms. It was as though a band of gypsies had moved into the Hilton for three nights. The bar bill alone was $600, room service was $1,300, in-room entertainment—dial-up porn—accounted for another $300. A $500 surcharge had been added to the bill, because Garland and company had smoked in a no-smoking property. The last two pages of the printout inventoried all the items Garland Miller had looted from his suite: ice buckets, glasses, bath towels, pillows, blankets, bedspreads, lamps.…

Greer looked up at the room clerk. “A rollaway? He stole a rollaway bed?”

“And a laundry cart,” the clerk added. “Fully loaded.”

In all, the tab ran to $9,678.42. Which meant that the movie company had dished out nearly $25,000 to lease property from a man who didn’t own it.

CHAPTER 2

A week earlier, as her charcoal gray Explorer bumped slowly along a rutted gravel road in the hills above Paso Robles, Greer studied the passing landscape. It hadn’t rained in longer than she could remember—going on a year in L.A. where she lived, and for sure not in a long time in the central California coast.

Dust swirled up from the roadbed, covering her windshield and caking in her mouth and nostrils, but she kept driving. The pastures here should have been green and verdant this time of year, according to her research. Instead, everything was a sepia print of beige and brown. Her mission was hopeless, she felt sure.

According to her GPS she’d traveled exactly 3.2 miles down old Trading Post Road, as instructed by the clerk in the convenience store back in town. “Look for a big gray barn, and a pasture with cattle,” he’d said. She’d seen a field a ways back, with a couple of bored-looking goats scrambling over the rocky terrain, but not another living thing, unless you counted the buzzards gliding in the currents overhead.

The road wound around the hillside and climbed in altitude. Where the hell was she? At least thirty miles from town, that much was sure.

Her phone dinged, signaling yet another incoming text, probably from Hank Reitz. She felt a bead of perspiration trickle down her back. Today was Friday. Principal shooting on
Moondancing
had started two weeks ago, and the cast and crew were scheduled to move up the coast for the exterior shots by Monday. Despite the hundreds and hundreds of miles she’d searched and photographed in the central coast of California, she still hadn’t found the exact right spot the director was seeking.

“GREEN!”
he’d texted in all caps, like she was either stupid or blind or both. “Get me a green field, with trees with green leaves. And a barn.”

Barns were a dime a dozen here. The steep cliffs and rolling surf of the Pacific was only an hour away, but this was still an agricultural area, with plenty of vineyards and small wineries dotting the countryside. Lots of cows, too—or was she supposed to call them cattle? Greer didn’t know or care. She was a city girl, born and raised in L.A. The green part was the problem. They could fake the seasons with spray-paint and artificial snow and all kinds of movie magic, but Hank Reitz and his art director, Helena Freed, were emphatic. For this film, nothing less than real green trees would do.

She was still pondering the cow/cattle question when she saw it, just ahead in the bend of the road, where the terrain flattened out. Fence posts strung with barbed wire separated it from the gravel roadway, but the big gray barn was unmistakable, and as she stared, three cow-type creatures ambled across a rolling pasture that was the most beautiful, the most emerald green pasture she’d seen all summer.

“Finally,” she muttered. She drove around the corner and parked at a metal gate that blocked passage to a wide gravel drive. The gate was padlocked, and there was a large
NO TRESPASSING
sign tacked to a towering pine tree on the right side of the drive.

Trespassing for a film location scout, Greer always claimed, was in the eye of the beholder. And as long as nobody at the other end of this road was beholding a loaded shotgun, it was all good.

She scrambled out of her truck and walked over to the gate, a slight figure in dusty jeans, a navy tank top, and her ever-present red low-top Keds. A navy Dodgers cap was jammed over her curly shoulder-length blond hair.

From here, she could see a low, red-shingled house with a weather-beaten porch, maybe a quarter mile up the road. A rusting white pickup truck was parked beside the house.

“The owner, Old Man Miller, he don’t much like strangers,” the convenience store clerk had warned. “In fact, he don’t like locals much either.”

Greer had thought about that the whole way up the road. She was used to dealing with difficult people, had been doing it her whole life. It was her gift, talking to people, winning them over, persuading them that her way was the best way.

She used her hands to shade her eyes as she walked the fence line. Off in the distance, she could see rows and rows of trees with thick, glossy leaves. This, the helpful clerk said, was an avocado grove, irrigated with water from a small lake. The grove was fenced off from the cow pasture, where a dozen or more large dark cows milled around a galvanized metal trough.

Greer took her cell phone from the pocket of her jeans and began snapping pictures—of the barn, the cows, the green, green pasture, and the line of trees. After each click, she texted the photo to Hank Reitz.

She was walking over toward the barn when she heard the
ding
notifying her of an incoming text.

“PERFECT
!
”
Reitz texted back.
“BETTER THAN PERFECT. EXACTLY WHAT WE NEED. YOU’RE THE BEST!!!!”

Yes, Greer thought as she carefully clambered over the padlocked gate to the Miller ranch. “I am the best. Now, let’s see if I can make Old Man Miller believe that, too.”

*

When she got within a hundred yards of the ranch house, Greer sensed a subtle inexplicable darkening of her mood. It wasn’t that the place wasn’t photogenic. The ranch house had seen better days. Its porch roof sagged, and the paint was faded and peeling. An open-air shed held a pile of what looked like junk machinery, including an old truck resting on concrete blocks. A dog wandered up the road, gave a couple of desultory barks in her direction, and then wandered back toward the house. Flies buzzed around a pile of what looked like dog crap. The place literally reeked of
Grapes of Wrath–
flavored authenticity. If her phone had been equipped with smell-o-vision, Hank would have been orgasmic, she was sure.

The general state of decrepitude was a good sign for purely practical reasons. If the property owner needed money, he’d certainly be more willing to entertain the idea of allowing a movie to be filmed here.