Picture Perfect Read online

  Familiar words jarred images in her mind. She saw herself in the British countryside, kneeling beside an open pit in which lay the tangled remains of an ancient Iron Age battle. She could remember brushing earth from the bones; feeling for the pits on a sternum made by lances and arrowheads, or the cleanly severed vertebrae that cried decapitation. She had been someone's assistant then, she remembered, labeling specimens with India ink, carrying trays of bones to dry in the sun.

  Jane flipped the page and that's when she saw the hand. It was exactly as it had been when she'd found it in Tanzania, fossilized into a stratum of sedimentary rock, tightly grasping a chisel made of stone. Hundreds of anthropologists had combed Tanzania looking for evidence of the stone-tool industry they thought primitive man had the level of intellect to conceive. Following the lead of her colleagues, she had gone down one year to reopen a forgotten excavation site.

  She hadn't been looking when she found the hand. She'd just sort of turned around, and there it was, shoulder level, as if it had been reaching for her. It was an extraordinary find; delicate bones were rarely preserved. For fossilization to occur, skeletons had to remain undisturbed by animals and swirling waters and shifts of the earth, and if any pieces of a skeleton were lost, they tended to be the extremities.

  Even as she was working, she had known this would be her break into the field. She had found what everyone had been searching for. She had carefully labeled the chisel, the hundreds of digits of bone, had cleaned them and preserved them with a synthetic resin.

  Jane turned back to the book and read the caption beside the photograph of the hand.Dated to over 2.8 million years, this hominid hand and chisel are the oldest known proof of stone-tool industry [Barrett et al., 1990] .

  Barrett. Was that her last name? Or had she only been someone's assistant, someone who had taken the credit for her own discovery? She skimmed through the index of the book, but there was no other reference to Barrett. None of the other books even carried a picture of the hand; it was too recent a find.

  Shaking slightly, she walked to the reference desk and waited for the librarian to look up from her computer. "Hello," she said, flashing her most winning smile. "I was wondering if you could help me."

  SHE FOUND WILL BENT OVER A DESK THAT SEEMED TOO SMALL FOR him, sorting through paperwork. "Police reports," he said. "I hate this shit." He swept them to the side of the desk with his arm and gestured to a chair nearby. "You see your picture yet?" Will held up the newspaper.

  Jane grabbed the paper out of his hands and scanned the copy. "God," she muttered. "They make me sound like a foundling." She threw the newspaper back onto Will's desk. "And have you been swamped with calls?"

  Will shook his head. "Be patient," he said. "It's not even lunchtime yet." He wheeled his chair back and crossed his ankles on his desk. "Besides," he added, "I'm getting used to having you as a housekeeper."

  "Well, you'd better start looking for a replacement." She tossed him the Xerox copy of the page in the book she'd read that morning. "That's my hand."

  Will peered at the blurry picture and whistled. "You look damn good for your age."

  Jane snatched the paper back and smoothed it on the edge of the desk. "I discovered that hand in Africa," she said. "I might very well be 'Barrett.'"

  Will raised his eyebrows. "Youdiscoveredthis ?" He shook his head in disbelief. "Barrett, huh?"

  She shrugged. "I'm not really sure, yet. That could just be the lead scientist who was excavating the site." She pointed to the reference. "I could be 'et al.' I bullied a librarian into getting me more information," she said, beaming. "I should know who I am by tomorrow afternoon."

  Will smiled at her. He wondered what he would do when she left him to go back to her life. He wondered how empty his house would feel with just one person in it, whether she'd call him from time to time. "Well," he said, "I guess I should start calling you Barrett."

  She stopped and turned her face up to his. "To tell you the truth," she said, "I've gotten used to Jane."

  AN EARLY RISER, HERB SILVER HAD TAKEN HIS BREAKFAST POOLSIDE at six a.m.: tomato juice, grapefruit, and a Cuban cigar. Squinting up at the sun, he had opened the TuesdayTimes and stared at the picture of the woman on page 3 until his cigar fell, unnoticed, from the corner of his mouth into the shallow end. "Holy shit," he said, reaching for the cellular phone in his bathrobe pocket. "Holy fucking shit."

  THEY WOULDN'T HAVE STOPPED FILMING FOR ANY OF THE OTHER actors on the film, but he was one of the executive producers as well as the leading man, and any money wasted would come out of his own pocket. He wiped his arm across his forehead, grimacing as a streak of makeup came off on the sleeve of the velvet doublet. It was twenty fucking degrees in Scotland, but the set designer had ordered a hundred torches to line the great hall of the castle where they were filmingMacbeth . Consequently, he couldn't make it through a single take before his own sweat blinded him.

  Jennifer, his mousy little assistant, was standing with the portable phone next to a spare suit of armor. Taking the phone, he walked a discreet distance away from her and thePeople reporter who was covering the filming. "Herb," he said, still in accent, "this better be damn good."

  He knew his agent wouldn't call him on location unless it was a dire emergency, an Academy Award nomination, or a part that would boost his career even higher. But he'd already received an Oscar nomination this year and he'd been choosing his own roles for ages. His fingers gripped the receiver a little tighter, waiting for the transatlantic static to clear.

  "--newspaper this morning, and there she--" he heard.

  "What?" he shouted, forgetting the cast and crew around him. "I can't hear a thing you're saying!"

  Herb's voice came clearly into his ear. "Your wife's picture was on page three of theL.A. Times . She was picked up by the police and she doesn't remember her name."

  "Oh Jesus," he said, his pulse racing. "What happened to her? Is she all right?"

  "I just read this two minutes ago," Herb said. "She looks okay in the picture. I called you right away."

  He sighed into the telephone. "Don't do anything. I'll be home by"--he checked his watch--"six tomorrow morning, your time." When he spoke again his voice broke. "I've got to be the first one she sees," he said.

  He hung up on his agent without saying goodbye and started barking instructions to Jennifer. He called over her shoulder to his coproducer. "Joe, we've got to stop filming for at least a week."

  "But--"

  "Fuck the budget." He started toward his trailer, but then turned and touched Jennifer's shoulder. She was already bent over the telephone making plane reservations, her hair falling around her like a curtain. When she looked up he held her gaze, and she saw something in his striking eyes that very few people ever had: a quiet desperation. "Please," he murmured. "If you have to, move heaven and earth."

  It took Jennifer a moment to shake herself back to reality, and even after he'd been gone for several seconds she could still feel the heat where his hand had held her shoulder; the weight of his plea. She picked up the phone again and began to dial. What Alex Rivers needed, Alex Rivers would get.

  AT SEVEN A.M. ON WEDNESDAY, THE TELEPHONE BEGAN TO RING. Will ran from the bathroom into the kitchen, wrapping a towel around his waist. "Yeah?"

  "It's Watkins. I just got a call from the station. Three guesses who's showed up."

  Will sank down to the kitchen floor and let the bottom drop out of his world. "We'll be there in a half hour," he said.

  "Will?" He heard Watkins's voice as if from a long distance. "You really know how to pick 'em."

  He knew he had to wake Jane and tell her that her husband had come to claim her; he knew he had to say the reassuring things that she'd expect him to say during the ride to the Academy, but he didn't think he could do it. The feelings Jane brought out in him went deeper than a matter of a fateful coincidence. He liked knowing that she tried to cover her freckles with baby powder. He liked the way she had of talking with her