Page 16 of Nantucket Gala

Henry could hear a tiny gasp escape his grandmother’s lips. “Did Francis steal the ideas?” Greta asked finally. “I always wondered why his stories changed so spectacularly in the eighties. I always wondered what, exactly, inspired him. It’s soclear now. Oh, but I wonder who! Maybe that cinematographer of his. Perhaps he paid him off and told him to keep quiet?”

“Sophia says she wrote them herself,” Henry said.

Greta was quiet. In the background, Anna’s baby wept, but the sound grew thinner and smaller as someone, probably Anna, took the baby out of the room.

Henry thought,I should be in Nantucket. Why am I here in this tiny, smelly, badly carpeted room?

“Grandma?” Henry asked because he was afraid Greta wasn’t there anymore.

“I’m here. I’m just surprised,” Greta said with a laugh. “Wow. If you’d have told me back then that she was the brains behind those films, I don’t know what I would have said.”

“Do you think you would have believed it?”

“I don’t know,” Greta said. She sounded mystified. “I thought I was ahead of the game with women’s rights. I thought women should have every creative job there was. But when I first met Sophia, I assumed she was a bad actress who’d struck it big with Francis Bianchi. I liked her, but I never sensed any kind of creative vision behind her.” Greta sighed. “I hate the way that sounds. I’m sorry, Henry. I’m not proud of this.”

“Thank you for being honest,” Henry said. “It makes it all the more remarkable. Why did she want to hide the truth? Especially from you?”

“That’s what I keep coming back to,” Greta breathed. “I always spoke about my novels, about my ideas. Why didn’t she join?”

“Maybe Francis said she couldn’t?”

“Maybe. He was an arrogant son of a gun,” Greta remembered.

“He was wanted for murder?” Henry asked, hoping his grandmother would tell the story in her own words.

“Nobody could prove anything,” Greta said. “He had plenty of alibis. But even I felt it was fishy.”

“Did he seem capable of committing murder?”

“I asked your grandfather that,” Greta offered. “Bernard said that Francis was always passionate and didn’t always have control. Bernard thought maybe it was an accident. Something like that. But they never released the notes from the investigation. They must have questioned Francis for ages.”

Greta sounded far away, suddenly, as though she’d dropped into her own memories.

Henry’s throat was tight. “I can’t stop thinking about the film they were about to make.The Brutal Horizon. I skimmed some of the script at Sophia’s place. I think it would have been a masterpiece.”

“You’re probably right,” Greta said. “What a tragedy that we’ll never see it.”

Henry was quiet. He didn’t know what to make of any of this.

He didn’t know how to think about his “favorite screenwriter” of all time.

“I guess this means Sophia is really my favorite screenwriter?” he suggested.

Greta laughed. “It sounds that way.”

“She told me not to tell anyone.”

“I imagine she knows you’d tell me,” Greta said. “Maybe it’s part of the reason she told you. She wanted it to get back to me.”

Henry hadn’t thought of that. He guessed his grandmother was right.

“Francis died a few years back,” Greta said thoughtfully. “He must have been nearly ninety.”

“A long life.”

“And he never made any other films?” Greta asked.

“No,” Henry said. “Once he left the United States, it was over for him. He never directed anything again.”

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