“Yes,” said Addie, great granddaughter of Addie Kline, twin sister of Betty, script girl who disappeared. “She went for a hike and never came back. Search teams looked, but they didn’t find her.”
“Where was this?” Bernie said.
“Death Valley. She was working on the Greed shoot. My great grandmother Addie was never the same, my mom told me. Apparently she felt that part of her soul was missing. I just wanted to know if you found out anything. I don’t like stories without endings.”
“Stories without endings is the modern way,” Bernie said.
“I know,” Addie said, “but that seems perverse to me. Our lives have a beginning, middle and end, so why shouldn’t the stories about them have the same structure?”
“I don’t know,” Bernie said. “This is above my pay grade. Are you a professor or something?”
Addie smiled. “In training.”
“Got any money?”
“Some. Why?”
“We’re going to need some heavy equipment, a backhoe maybe, for a day or so.”
“What for?”
Bernie turned to me. “I think Chet knows.”
Oops. Hadn’t really been following this, mostly on account of some interesting scraps I was finding under the table.
