Tour Stop - The Silent Treamtnet by Melanie Surani

Blurb: Twenty-eight year old Katrina Jaitley is rebuilding her life after escaping an abusive boyfriend. The last thing she needs is the mystery she stumbles on during a bout of retail therapy. But she can't ignore the coil of film -- a piece of movie history -- she finds hidden inside her purchase. Unfortunately, Peter, the handsome host of the estate sale, disappears before Kat has a chance to return it to him. Curious, Kat watches the strip and is shocked to witness the brutal murder of a famous 1920's silent film star by a fellow actor. When a news article cites Kat as the film's owner, her already complicated life goes from bad to worse. Someone is stalking her. Are they trying to silence her or what she has discovered?

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An excerpt from The Silent Treatment

THE WORST PART about working the vampire shift was that apart from Bridget, Kat experienced little human interaction since moving back to Memphis. Bridget still had college buddies who she went drinking and sleeping with, two activities Kat thought better about participating in for the time being. That left Kat stuck either in front of the computer or TV, or in extreme cases, at the twenty‐four hour Walmart.

Solitude in those first two weeks after two years of limited privacy was a welcome relief in most respects. Kat left her belongings, however few, in the living room and returned to find them where she left them, not thrown in the trash. Her computer no longer had a keylogger, thanks to a few hours spent with Bridgetʹs IT savvy brother, and she was free to search whatever she wanted without fear of lecture afterward (Why were you looking at ticket prices? Are you thinking of leaving me?), Kat couldnʹt shake the feeling that someone was going to burst through the door. The baseball bat she kept under her bed wouldnʹt help if someone startled her in the living room.

After placing the Missed Connections ad online and praying Peter would respond, Kat surfed the Internet until her eyes burned. Since her mind was on the coiled piece of film sheʹd found and she desperately wanted to watch it, she focused instead on silent movies, her favorite escape subject.

Her interest began with a poor copy of Metropolis, recommended by a pen pal as being the best thing heʹd ever watched. The release date put her off since so many ʺclassicʺ movies her mom subjected her to involved fast‐talking pictures from the thirties. Three years before the decade change, the constant talkers were quiet, gestures theatrical, and Kat put her own inflection on the written dialogue.

She found a used copy of the novel on which Metropolis was based— written by the directorʹs wife—to fill in the gaps left by massive editing and plot restructuring that rendered the film nearly incomprehensible. Though historians and buffs wanted to experience what the film looked like on opening night, one‐fourth had either been lost or destroyed like so many of its silent brethren.

That was what made the news article on the computer screen stand out.

The complete three‐hour version of Metropolis was found in an unlabeled canister in the Museo del Cine, a film museum in Argentina.

Kat blinked at the screen. ʺAll that time.ʺ The butchered, washed out copy that lay buried somewhere in the box of movies sheʹd dragged to the middle of the living room wasnʹt the end of the story but the beginning.