Night Night, Sleep Tight by Hallie Ephron Read Free Book Online Page A

them.
    “Really?” Henry was saying into the phone. “All right then!” Deirdre looked over at him. He was smiling. Some good news?
    Deirdre pulled one of the copies of Singing All the Way Home off the shelf and opened it. There were no pages bound into it. Instead, tucked inside was a pocket folder that held a sheaf of papers—an unbound manuscript, carbon copies on onionskin paper. Centered on an otherwise blank first page were the words “WORKING TITLE: ONE DAMNED THING AFTER ANOTHER,” and below that, “by Arthur Unger, 1985.”
    Deirdre turned to the next page and read.
    CHAPTER 1: EXIT LAUGHING
    The writing was on the wall of our office at Twentieth Century Fox when the secretary didn’t show up and the phones disappeared. We were screwed. Shafted. Sucker-punched. Time to strike the set.
    Deirdre smiled. She could hear her father’s voice. For a moment her chest tightened and her vision blurred.
    Beneath the opening paragraph, text was formatted like the slug lines and stage directions of a movie script.
    INT. TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX - SCREENWRITERS OFFICE - DAY (1963)
    ARTHUR UNGER opens the door to his office and starts to enter. He’s trim, middle-aged, wears a suit and holds his hat. Stops. He looks surprised. Dismayed.
    His secretary’s desk is empty. Disconnected phone wires are coiled on the floor.
    ARTHUR crosses to the window, looks two stories down to a deserted studio street where a huge movie poster for Cleopatra is plastered across a wall. In front of it is an empty phone booth.
    ARTHUR raises the window. Sits on the ledge.
    No, I didn’t jump. Two stories up? Not high enough to kill me, and damned if I was going to let the sons of bitches cripple me for life. When I went outside to use the pay phone, I swear there were vultures circling overhead. Could’ve been a scene out of Hitchcock, but Hitchcock worked for Universal.
    Turned out hundreds of us arrived on the Fox lot that morning to find our office phone lines disconnected and our typewriters returned to Props.
    It was a clever device for a screenwriter’s memoir, alternating between the idiosyncratic formatting of a screenplay and straight narrative. Odd that Arthur had kept this carbon copy tucked in the cover of a movie script. Almost like he’d hidden it there.
    As Deirdre flipped to the last chapter to see how far Arthur gotten, Henry’s voice pulled her off the page. “All right. Uh-huh. Sure. Don’t worry, I won’t forget.” Clearly, he was winding up the call. Deirdre put the empty script cover back on the shelf and carried the folder with the manuscript pages to her bedroom, where she slipped it into the drawer in her bedside table.
    When she returned, Henry had hung up the phone. Deirdre said, “Was that Sy?”
    “ Sí, ” Henry said, deadpan.
    “So?” Even if it was a wildly inappropriate time to be cracking jokes, Arthur would have appreciated the old comedy routine that he’d reprise himself whenever the opportunity presented itself. It was one of the perks, he used to say, of having a friend named Sy.
    “He’s coming over tomorrow morning to talk about Dad’s will.”
    “What won’t you forget?”
    “Huh?”
    “You told him you wouldn’t forget something.”
    “When the police come back to search the house, there shouldn’t be anything here we don’t want them to find.” Henry went into the kitchen and came back out with a large black plastic garbage bag, into which he dumped the contents of the ashtray.
    “That’s a big bag for a few ashes,” Deirdre said.
    “There’s more. Things Dad would want me to get rid of.”
    “What things?”
    Henry’s answer was cut off by the phone ringing again. Both Deirdre and Henry froze, waiting for the answering machine to kick in. After the beep, this time they heard a woman’s voice: “Hey, Zelda? You there? It’s Thalia.”
    Deirdre might not have recognized Joelen’s voice, but she definitely recognized those nicknames. Zelda, the smart but painfully