Page 21 of Romance Is Dead

He cracked the tab on his can as he dropped onto the couch. “Did you have any epiphanies overnight about who the face in the photo could be?”

“Unfortunately not.” I opened my own drink and took a long sip of the sweet bubbles. “It’s just too blurry.”

“Like a photo of Big Foot,” Teddy added solemnly.

“We should make a list. Of who it could be.” I grabbed a pen and pad of paper and scrawled “suspects” at the top.

“Sure, you can help yourself to my belongings.”

I gave him a withering glare. “You were going to use these?”

“Yes.” He crossed his arms. “Maybe I write poetry at night.”

“Do you?”

“Workshopping pickup lines is an art form.”

I decided to ignore him. “Ok, so the face in the photo is suspicious, but we don’t know for sure that they’re the killer. That means we can’t exclude women from the official suspects.” I started to list everyone I knew on set. “Natasha, Brent, Chloe, whoever’s in the photo—”

“Mara,” Teddy interjected.

“It was not Mara.”

“How do you know? Was she in your trailer?”

“Not the whole night, but—”

“I thought you wanted to solve this?” He reached over and tapped the paper. “On the list.”

I gritted my teeth. “Fine.” Then, below Mara’s name, I scrawled Teddy’s.

“Hey!”

“You showed up at my trailer after the murder, which means you were at base camp but unaccounted for at the time of his death. Suspicious.”

“This,” Teddy said, pulling up Trevor’s Instagram photo, “looks nothing like me. My jawline is way squarer!”

I shrugged, unmoved. “We also have to unofficially add the entire crew.” Becoming overwhelmed, I rubbed my temples. “That’s so many people.”

“And my hairline is better, too.”

“You’re supposed to be helping me!”

Reluctantly, Teddy put down his phone. “It’ll be fine. We’ll figure out who the face in the photo is, talk to him, and go from there. One step at a time.”

Shockingly, Teddy was making a lot of sense. I took a few sips of my soda, feeling the wisps of stress start to dissipate. He was right, we had to focus on finding the man in the photo. But in the meantime, I had a lesson to teach.

I stood and placed my half-empty can on the counter. “Should we get rehearsing?”

“Oh. Yeah.” Teddy reached for the scripts that were resting on the desk. “The seance scene, right?”

I nodded, taking the stapled stack of paper and paging to the scene we’d be shooting the next morning. It was going to be a fun one.

Our characters, a few hours into their beer-fueled party, stumble upon an old Ouija board in one of the bedrooms. They use it in a game of truth or dare, holding a seance and giving the witch’s spirit permission to enter the mortal world. It’s the scene that kick-starts the rest of the movie—not a particularly serious scene, but an important one.

I held the script but didn’t bother reviewing my lines. I already had them memorized. “Ready?”

We started at the top, with Teddy’s character pulling the Ouija board out of the closet. He had to keep checking the script, and there were a few spots when I could sense nervousness creeping in. He wouldn’t meet my eyes, shifting on his feet and running a hand along the back of his neck instead of fully committing to acting out the scene. I slowed us down, making sure he had his lines memorized before we continued.

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