Chapter Six:  The Discovery

The producer leaves with Localad's manuscript after reading the first gripping chapter at the shop's counter.

Localad said yes before he'd fully thought about what he was agreeing to, because it was the kind of request that didn't feel real in the moment it was made, and because some small, hopeful, foolish part of him, the same part that had kept him writing for twenty years without an audience, wanted, badly, for someone to finish the story he'd started.

"It's my only copy," he'd said, which was true, and he'd said it mostly to see what Desmond would do with the information.

"I'll mail it back," Desmond said, already halfway to the shop's door, and phone forgotten on the chair until Localad pointed it out. "I promise. I don't usually do this."

"Do what?"

"Take things," Desmond said, and something crossed his face that Localad couldn't read yet, though he would come to understand it much better in the following weeks. It was the look of a man who has just found, unexpectedly, the thing his job exists to find, and doesn't yet trust the feeling enough to say so out loud. "I read a lot of scripts. A lot of books people think should be movies. Most of them, I can tell by page three."

"And mine?"

Desmond looked at him for a long moment, the book held against his chest like something he was worried someone might take back. "I don't know yet," he said, which Localad would later realize was, for Desmond Ferris, an almost unbearably honest thing to say to a stranger. "I want to find out."

He gave Localad a business card. It was cream-colored, embossed, with a production company logo Localad didn't recognise and had a phone number at the bottom. Then he got into the tow truck's passenger seat still holding the book, and Localad stood in the doorway of his shop and watched the truck pull away down the coast road until it turned a bend and was gone, and only then did he look down at the card in his hand and think: “Oh Jesus, what have I just done?”

For three days nothing happened.

Localad told himself this was to be expected. Important strangers did not normally read unsolicited manuscripts taken from provincial bookshops. They more likely placed them on elegant surfaces, forgot them during expensive arguments and rediscovered them years later beneath architectural magazines.

He didn't tell Marjory that night. This was partly caution and partly because saying it aloud would make hope visible, and visible hope can be pointed at. It felt too strange to say out loud, too much like a story he'd invented to entertain himself. “A Hollywood producer read the first chapter of my book and drove off with my only copy.” It sounded like the setup to a joke, and Localad had spent enough of his life being disappointed by things that sounded too good to be true, to know better than to get his hopes up over a stranger's polite curiosity.

He went back to the shop’s ledger, reconciling the invoices. He told himself, over the following days, that nothing would ever come of it. That Desmond Ferris would get home, get distracted by whatever expensive private argument had brought him to this coast in the first place, and forget all about a manuscript he’d picked up on a whim in a failing small-town bookstore. Producers, Localad imagined, must regularly pick up dozens of things on dozens of whims. It would take its place on a shelf somewhere in Los Angeles, unread past chapter three, and Localad would eventually write a polite email asking for it back, and that would be the end of the strangest afternoon of his year.

He did not, in fact, get a chance to write that polite email. On Sunday afternoon, while Localad was opening a box of paperbacks, his mobile rang.

It was an unknown number.

He nearly ignored it. Unknown numbers were usually banks, insurers or people offering to improve the shop’s internet presence by destroying what remained of his will to live.

“Localad?” asked a voice that took him a full second to place, brisk and warm at the same time, the particular register of someone who has learned to sound sincere for a living and mostly means it.

The voice was Desmond’s.

“I finished it.”

Localad sat on the box.

“That was quick.”

“I missed an exit.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not. Listen carefully. Has anyone else seen this book? Agent, publisher, producer, anyone?”

“No.”

“Have you submitted it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Localad considered several answers and selected the least humiliating.

“I was busy.”

Desmond laughed once. “You were frightened.”

Localad disliked him immediately for being right.

There was movement on the line, doors closing, voices in the distance.

“I want the film rights.”

The words entered Localad’s mind, discovered no appropriate objection and stood awkwardly in the centre of it.

“To Purradise?”

“No, to the distributor invoices. Yes, to Purradise. I want the movie rights. The book. Has anyone optioned it, has it been submitted anywhere, is there an agent, a publisher, anything?"

"No," Localad said, sitting down hard on the still unopened box of delivered paperbacks.

Localad looked through the stockroom door at Harbour Page: the leaning shelves, cracked bell, faded carpet and all the stubborn evidence of a life he had not meant to become permanent.

“Why?”

“Because I read until four in the morning. Because Jasmine is the first lead character I’ve met in years who behaves as if grief has real consequences. Because the Wound is an image people will remember. Because the ending refuses to lie.”

Desmond stopped.

There was a pause on the line that felt, to Localad, like it lasted a very long time, though it was probably only a few seconds.

When he continued, his voice had lost some of its polish.

“And because I’ve spent fifteen years finding profitable things I don’t believe in. I’d like, just once, to try the reverse.”

Localad did not yet know this was the first honest confession Desmond Ferris had ever made in years. He only knew his hands were shaking.

"There's nothing. It's not even published." Said Localad.

"Good," Desmond said. "That's very good. Localad, I really want to talk to you about the movie rights to your book."

“How much are the film rights worth then?”

“That,” said Desmond, slowly recovering his professional tone, “is precisely the question you should not let me answer without a lawyer.”

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