Our call to return to work came about forty minutes later. As it turned out, I had to eat my sandwich on the way back to the set.
It was another two hours before I was finally dead enough to satisfy Victor. We had moved the reflectors eight times, the cameras three, and changed one of Jackie’s lines to fit more closely the excellent imitation of Deborah she was doing. By the time I was released from my corpsehood, my left leg had fallen asleep, and I had a headache, a backache, and a neck ache from lying on the pavement in such an uncomfortable contortion for so long—and it must be said that I was also thoroughly sick of lounging about in a shirt soaked with blood, fake or not. Altogether, it was enough to make me rethink my decision to become an award-winning star of the screen. Still, great art comes with a price, and today was Dexter’s day to pick up the check.
It was with no reluctance at all that I yielded my spot in front of the camera. I stood and stretched and tried to get a little bit of feeling back into my leg as Jackie conferred with Victor. By the time I could walk again without looking like Long John Silver, they were already setting up for a series of close-ups of Jackie as she reacted to things that weren’t really happening. As fascinating as this kind of self-induced psychosis usually is, I’d had enough after about five minutes, and so I bade a fond farewell to the hypnotic lure of the cameras and headed back to the trailer to change clothes and relax.
I could hear my phone ringing as I climbed the three steps to the trailer’s door, and it did not take a rocket scientist to figure out that it was Rita calling again. I trudged through the living-dining room and in to the dresser, stepping carefully around the box of Kathy’s stuff this time, and glanced down at the screen: Yes, indeed. It was Rita—and she had called seven more times while I lay dead in the street. Really, the woman was obsessed with me, and I wasn’t even a star yet.
I put the phone down and started toward the kitchenette for a soda—and I paused. Nineteen phone calls seemed excessive, even for Rita, unless she was calling about something very important. The only real question was, important to whom? At first I had suspected that Deborah had told Rita everything in a fit of Dexter Hatred, and Rita was calling to screech clichés at me about my utter depravity. This was a conversation she could have quite well without me, and I preferred that she would.
And if Rita had won the lottery, wonderful; it would cushion the blow as she started her new and Dexter-less existence.
But if, on the other hand, she was calling to report a calamity of some kind …
It could not be something drastic enough to require an ambulance or police intervention, or I would have heard about it from one of the cops here on the set, or from Vince, or perhaps even from Deborah. And that left—
What?
It is true that I am not actually human, and I do not have the reckless illogical feelings of that wild, windblown race. But I do, unfortunately, share one or two human failings, and one of the deadliest of these is curiosity. Nineteen phone calls to report something that was incredibly significant, but neither too good nor too bad; it was a true riddle, and I do not like riddles. They are an affront to my hard-won and well-polished self-esteem, and the more impossible they seem the m
ore I hate them—and yet, I still feel compelled to find the answer.
And so finally, after several minutes of fruitless conjecture, when I had reached the teeth-grinding stage, I surrendered, picked up my phone, and called Rita.
“Oh, Dexter, thank God,” she said, instead of a more traditional “Hello,” and her voice told me right away that I could safely rule out the Winning-the-Lottery option. “I have been calling and calling and— Oh, my God, where have you been? I don’t know what to do, because— Why didn’t you answer?”
In the present case, I didn’t answer because I could not squeeze a single syllable into the spaces between Rita’s words. But that wasn’t really the question. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’m working with the movie people this week.”
“Television,” she said irritably. “Dexter, it’s just a pilot—and you don’t call, and you don’t answer—and I am going right out of my mind!”
It didn’t seem like that would be a long trip, but I wanted to know what was wrong, so I just said, “Well, I am sorry, but we’ve been working long days—and I have a speaking part now, Rita. I mean, as an actor.”
“Yes, I know, Astor said you— But that’s just it!”
“What is?”
“Astor!” she wailed. “I don’t know where she—she hasn’t even—Oh God, I should have let her have her own phone.”
I knew Rita and her conversational patterns well enough to know that, at last, we were approaching the answer. Our problem had something to do with Astor—but could it really be about Astor not having a phone? “Rita, calm down,” I said. “What about Astor?”
“Calm down?!” she said. “When I have searched high and low and called you two dozen times and— Dexter, I don’t have any idea where she went!”
“She’s missing?” I guessed. “Astor is missing?”
“Yes, of course, that’s what I’ve been— Dexter, what do we do?”
“Did she stay after school?” I asked hopefully.
“She didn’t go to school!” Rita bellowed, sounding like she was tired of telling me the same thing. “She never even got there this morning! And then the school called to say she was absent and it was just that awful recorded message and I couldn’t get through to anybody in the main office and she hasn’t gone anywhere that I can find because none of her friends know oh Dexter, she’s gone!” It was a remarkable sentence, delivered at high speed and top volume without a single breath, and I spent a moment marveling before the actual words sank in.
“Rita, are you saying she’s been gone since this morning?”
“And I caught her last night; she snuck out of the house! And didn’t even come home until— I heard the door, or I wouldn’t even know—and now she’s completely gone!”
“Last night?” I said, trying to grab onto some small chunk of floating logic. “She snuck out last night, but she came back and went to school this morning?”
“I dropped her off in front of the school like always, and Cody, and then I took Lily Anne to day care. And by the time I got to work, the school is calling and— Dexter I’m going out of my mind; I don’t know what to do!” she yowled, which I took for a yes. “Please, you have to— I don’t know what to do!”
“All right,” I said, and because there was really nothing else I could possibly do, I added, “I’m on my way.”