Read Online Double Image by David Morrell - Free Book Online Page B

But I
don’t want
any magazines.”
    Jennifer started to giggle.
    “Ma’am, I’m not selling magazines. What I want to do is take some photographs of a house across—”
    “
Photographs of our house
? My husband will go insane. He hates anybody knowing anything about our private life. The last movie he produced was about Arab terrorists. He says, if they find out where we live, they’ll blow us up in our sleep.”
    Jennifer bent over, trying to stifle her laughter.
    “Ma’am, I have no intention of photographing your house. I want to photograph
Rudolph Valentino’s
house.”
    “Rudolph Valentino? You’re not making sense! For all I know,
you’re
a terrorist. Young man, I can see you from the house. If you don’t leave right now, I’m calling the police!”
    “Please, let me explain!”
    The intercom had been making a slight buzzing sound. Now it went dead.
    When Coltrane turned to Jennifer for moral support, he found her slumped on the curb, holding herself, laughing. “Only nineteen more houses to go,” she managed to say between guffaws. “At this rate, you’ll be done by next summer.”
    “Maybe not,” a voice said.
     
4
     
    JENNIFER STOPPED LAUGHING. They spun toward the gate, where an attractive, delicate-looking woman in her late twenties studied them. She was tall and slim, wearing tan slacks and a brown cardigan. Her arms were crossed. A kerchief covered her hair.
    “Are you really from
Southern California Magazine
?”
    Jennifer stood and showed her best winning smile, gesturing toward the logo on her sweatshirt. “Cross my heart.”
    “Just a second.” The woman reached through the bars on the gate and pressed the intercom.
    The tinny voice responded immediately. “Young man, I told you—”
    “Mother, don’t call the police. These people seem all right. I’m going to let them in.”
    “But—”
    The woman took her finger off the intercom’s button, then pressed numbers on a keypad on the other side of the gate, freeing an electronic lock. “You’re serious about photographing a house across the canyon, Mr. . . .”
    “Mitch Coltrane. This is my editor, Jennifer Lane.”
    “Diane Laramy.”
    They shook hands and stepped through the gate.
    “What’s this about Rudolph Valentino?”
    Coltrane explained the assignment as they climbed a smooth slanted lawn, stopping with their backs to a lemon tree at the hill’s highest point.
    “And there it is.” Jennifer sounded amazed. She showed Packard’s photograph to Diane, then pointed down toward a curving street of houses on an opposite but lower hill. One sprawling red-roofed structure stood slightly apart, perched on an eroded slope, solitary on a dead-end road. Its walls were still white. It still looked like a Spanish monastery. But there the similarity ended. The invasion that Packard’s photograph had predicted made Falcon Lair look besieged.
    “I was beginning to think this project couldn’t be done,” Coltrane said.
    “Eerie,” Diane said. “Looking at that photograph and then at the house, I feel as if I’m in the past and the present simultaneously.”
    “That’s the idea,” Coltrane said.
    He and Jennifer crisscrossed the hill, leaning this way and that, all the while comparing their view of Falcon Lair to the perspective in Packard’s photograph, trying to find the exact spot where Packard had set up his camera.
    Scraping his back against the lemon tree, Coltrane smiled. “Well, I’ll be . . . Yes. Right here.”
    “Let me see.” Jennifer hurried to Coltrane’s left.
    Bemused, Diane joined Coltrane on his right. He raised the photo so that it obscured the view, then lowered it, the Falcon Lair from the 1920s replaced by the Falcon Lair of the present.
    “It’s like a weird kind of double exposure,” Diane said. “This lemon tree wouldn’t have been here then.”
    “Or the lawn,” Jennifer added. “And obviously not your house.”
    “And none of these other houses.” Coltrane continued to