Action! by Carolyn Keene Page A

is make believe you’re Esther.”
    I bit my lip. “It’s hard to do that when there’s a big camera pointed at me and twenty people standing around watching,” I said. “Ever since I started working on
Stealing Thunder,
I’ve learned a lot about how expensive it is to make a movie. I keep thinking that if I mess up, it will cost everyone time and money.”
    Luke gave me a sympathetic smile. “There is a lot of pressure,” he agreed. “But you have to try to forget about that when you’re acting. As soon as Morris calls for action, you have to forget everything except what Esther is thinking.”
    “I’ll try,” I said. And I would. But I had a feeling it wouldn’t be easy.
    The morning’s scene went off better than I expected, though. We were at the Rackhams’ cabin on the soundstage. Mary Lupiani had dressed the set so that it looked like a cheerful family home, with a teapot on the stove and Esther’s half-finished knitting on the couch. The lighting director had set up giant lamps outside the fake windows of the cabin so that it appeared as though sunlight was streaming through the glass. Luther Eldridge was there, explaining to Mary just how to position the tea service that I would use in the scene.
    Looking around at the cheery “house”—and knowing that it was all historically accurate, thanks to Luther—made me feel better. Maybe I
would
be ableto pretend I was Esther. As long as I blocked out the director, the cinematographer, the camera operators, and the rest of the crew, I could make believe I was a real frontier girl in a real nineteenth-century frontier cabin.
    Having Luke and Ben there helped. They’d already filmed a bunch of scenes in this cabin—all the scenes of the Rackham boys planning their heist. So they were very comfortable on the set. They treated the place as if it really was their home. And as soon as they stepped into the cabin, they began acting like their characters, John and Ross Rackham. Their whole personalities changed. Instead of the sweet, fun-loving Alvarez brothers, they became the cocky, dangerous Rackham Gang.
    The scene we were going to film was one in which Esther has finally discovered that her brothers are planning to do something illegal. She doesn’t know exactly what their scheme is, and she doesn’t know that it involves the Mahoney Anvil office. But she knows they’re up to no good. In the scene Esther begs her brothers not to commit a crime. She’s supposed to be terrified by their plans, and pleads passionately against them doing anything illegal.
    I figured it would be easy enough to act like that. If someone I loved was planning to commit a crime, I’d be passionately against it too. I thought back oversome of the mysteries I had solved. One thing I’d discovered was that not everyone felt the way I did about crime—or about family. I’d seen cases in which sisters and brothers had plotted against each other. It made me wonder how much the real Esther had known about her brothers’ crime. Her diary showed that she knew
something.
But those missing diary pages still nagged at my mind. Luther had told me that people assumed Esther tore the pages out herself, to protect her brothers. But I couldn’t help wondering if maybe the Rackham boys had taken their sister’s diary and ripped out the pages that might incriminate them. They were true criminals—they would probably rather protect themselves than respect their sister’s property.
    I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts of the old mystery. I didn’t have time to think about solving it right now. I had to solve the mystery of how to conquer my own fear!
    Morris gave us about ten minutes to rehearse the scene. I found that I wasn’t so nervous when it was just practice. It was easy to pretend I was Esther Rackham, that this was my cabin, and that these were my brothers. But then Morris called for take one, and my heart began to pound again.
    “Action!” Morris called.
    Ben