In Chapter 8, the narrator, a young and aspiring singer, recounts her unexpected encounter with Clive Calder, the founder of Jive Records. Entering Calder’s impressive three-story office and meeting his teacup terrier, the narrator feels as though she has stepped into a parallel universe where her dreams are given a new dimension of possibility. Calder’s South African accent and welcoming demeanor immediately make her feel at ease, igniting a sense of connection and destiny. Despite not having recorded anything yet, this meeting marks the beginning of her journey into the music industry.

Upon being signed to Jive Records at fifteen, the narrator, along with her family friend Felicia Culotta, relocates to New York to begin recording in New Jersey with producer and songwriter Eric Foster White. Despite her lack of understanding of the industry’s workings, her passion for singing and dancing drives her forward. She undergoes months of intensive recording sessions in an underground booth, isolating herself to focus on her music.

A humorous and humbling moment occurs when she accidentally runs into a screen door at a barbecue, highlighting the grounding experiences amidst her rising fame. This period also features her collaborations with prestigious producers such as Max Martin, indicating the start of her successful music career. The chapter emphasizes themes of youthful enthusiasm, the surreal nature of achieving one’s dreams, and the naivety and determination of a young artist at the onset of her journey in the music industry. The narrator’s experiences of forming pivotal relationships, enduring embarrassing moments, and working tirelessly showcase her evolving personal and professional life, leading up to the anticipation of her first album’s completion.

You are being provided with a book chapter by chapter. I will request you to read the book for me after each chapter. After reading the chapter, 1. shorten the chapter to no less than 300 words and no more than 400 words. 2. Do not change the name, address, or any important nouns in the chapter. 3. Do not translate the original language. 4. Keep the same style as the original chapter, keep it consistent throughout the chapter. Your reply must comply with all four requirements, or it’s invalid.
I will provide the chapter now.

CHAPTER 8
That was how she found herself a little after noon the next day,
standing on the porch of Ann Savage’s yellow-and-white cottage.
She knocked on the screen door and waited. In front of the new
mansion across the street, a cement truck dumped gray sludge into a
wooden frame for its driveway. James Harris’s white van sat silently
in the front yard, the sun spiking off its tinted windshield and
making Patricia squint.
With a loud crack, the front door broke away from the sticky, sun-
warmed paint and James Harris stood there, sweating, wearing
oversize sunglasses.
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” Patricia said. “I wanted to apologize for
my mother-in-law’s behavior last night.”
“Come in quickly,” he said, stepping back into the shadows.
She imagined eyes watching her from every window up and down
the street. She couldn’t go into his house again. Where was Francine?
She felt exposed and embarrassed. She hadn’t thought this through.
“Let’s talk out here,” she said into the dark doorway. All she could
see was his big pale hand resting on the edge of the door. “The sun
feels so nice.”
“Please,” he said, his voice strained. “I have a condition.”
Patricia knew genuine distress when she heard it, but she still
couldn’t make herself step inside.
“Stay or go,” he said, anger edging his voice. “I can’t be in the sun.”
Looking up and down the street, Patricia quickly slipped through
the door.
He brushed her aside to slam the main door, forcing her deeper
into the middle of the room. To her surprise, it was empty. The
furniture had been pushed up against the walls along with the old
suitcases and bags and cardboard boxes of junk. Behind her, James
Harris locked his front door and leaned against it.
“This looks so much better than yesterday,” she said, making
conversation. “Francine did a wonderful job.”
“Who?” he asked.
“I saw her on my way out the other day,” she said. “Your cleaner.”
James Harris stared at her through his large sunglasses,
completely blank, and Patricia was about to tell him she needed to
leave when his knees buckled and he slid down to the floor.
“Help me,” he said.
His heels pushed uselessly against the floorboards, his hands had
no strength. Her nursing instincts kicked in and she stepped close,
planted her feet wide, got her hands under his armpits, and lifted. He
felt heavy and solid and very cool, and as his massive body rose up in
front of her, she felt overwhelmed by his physical presence. Her
damp palms tingled all the way up to her forearms.
He slumped forward, dropping his full weight onto her shoulders,
and the intense physical contact made Patricia light-headed. She
helped him to a pressed-back rocking chair by the wall, and he
dropped heavily into it. Her body, freed of his weight, felt suddenly
lighter than air. Her feet barely touched the floor.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
“I got bitten by a wolf,” he said.
“Here?” she asked.
She saw his thigh muscles clench and relax as he began to
unconsciously rock himself back and forth.
“When I was younger,” he said, then flashed his white teeth in a
pained smile. “Maybe it was a wild dog and I’ve romanticized it into a
wolf.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Did it hurt?”
“They thought I would die,” he said. “I had a fever for several days
and when I recovered I had some brain damage—just mild lesions,
but they compromised the motor control in my eyes.”
She felt relieved that this was starting to make sense.
“That must be difficult,” she said.
“My irises don’t dilate very well,” he said. “So daylight is extremely
painful. It’s thrown my whole body clock out of whack.”
He gestured helplessly around the room at everything piled up
against the walls.
“There’s so much to do and I don’t know how to get a handle on
any of it,” he said. “I’m lost.”
She looked at the liquor store boxes and bags lining the walls, full
of old clothes and notebooks and slippers and medications and
embroidery hoops and yellowed issues of TV Guide. Plastic bags of
clothes, stacks of wire hangers, dusty framed photographs, piles of
afghans, water-damaged books of Greenbax Stamps, stacks of used
bingo cards rubber-banded together, glass ashtrays and bowls and
spheres with sand dollars suspended in the middle.
“It’s a lot to sort out,” Patricia said. “Do you have anyone to come
help? Any family? A brother? Cousins? Your wife?”
He shook his head.
“Do you want me to stay and talk to Francine?”
“She quit,” he said.
“That doesn’t sound like Francine,” Patricia said.
“I’m going to have to leave,” James Harris said, wiping sweat from
his forehead. “I thought about staying but my condition makes it too
hard. I feel like there’s a train already moving and no matter how fast
I run I can never catch up.”
Patricia knew the feeling but she also thought about Grace, who
would stay here until she had learned all she could about a good-
looking, seemingly normal man who had found himself all alone in
the Old Village with no wife or children. Patricia had never met a
single man his age who didn’t have some kind of story. It would
probably prove to be small and anticlimactic, but she was so starved
for excitement she’d take any mystery she could.
“Let’s see if we can figure this out together,” she said. “What’s
overwhelming you the most?”
He lifted a sheaf of mail off the cross-stretcher breakfast table next
to him like it weighed five hundred pounds.
“What do I do about these?” he asked.
She went through the letters, sweat prickling her back and her
upper lip. The air in the house felt stale and close.
“But these are easy,” she said, putting them down. “I don’t
understand this letter from probate court, but I’ll call Buddy Barr.
He’s mostly retired but he’s in our church and he’s an estate lawyer.
The Waterworks is just up the street and you can be there and
change the name on the account in five minutes. SCE&G has an
office around the corner where you can get the electric bill put in
your name.”
“It all has to be done in person,” he said. “And their offices are only
open during the day when I can’t drive. Because of my eyes.”
“Oh,” Patricia said.
“If someone could drive me…,” he began.
Instantly, Patricia realized what he wanted, and she felt the jaws of
yet another obligation closing around her.
“Normally I’d be happy to,” she said, quickly. “But it’s the last week
of school and there’s so much to do…”
“You said it would only take five minutes.”
For a moment, Patricia resented his wheedling tone, and then she
felt like a coward. She’d promised to help. She wanted to know more
about him. Surely she wasn’t going to quit at the first obstacle.
“You’re right,” she said. “Let me get my car and pull it around. I’ll
try to get as close to your front door as I can.”
“Can we take my van?” he asked.
Patricia balked. She couldn’t drive a stranger’s car. Besides, she’d
never driven a van before.
“I—” she began.
“The tinted windows,” he said.
Of course. She nodded, not seeing another option.
“And I hate to bother you when you’re doing so much already…” he
began.
Her heart sank, and then immediately she felt selfish. This man
had come to her home last night and been sassed by her daughter
and spat at by her mother-in-law. He was a human being asking for
help. Of course she would do her best.
“What is it?” she asked, making her voice sound as warm and
genuine as possible.
He stopped rocking.
“My wallet was stolen, and my birth certificate and all those kind
of things are in storage back home,” he said. “I don’t know how long
it’ll take someone to hunt them down. How can I do any of this
without them?”
An image of Ted Bundy with his arm in a fake cast asking Brenda
Ball to help him carry his books to his car flashed across Patricia’s
mind. She dismissed it as undignified.
“That probate court letter is going to solve the problem of
identification,” she said. “That’s all you need for the Waterworks, and
when we’re there we’ll get a bill printed with your name and this
address on it to show the electric company. Give me the keys and I’ll
get your car.”
—
The tinted windows kept the front seats of his van dim and purple,
which wasn’t such a bad thing since they were covered in stains and
rips. What Patricia didn’t like was the back. He had screwed wood
over the back windows to make it completely dark, and it made her
nervous to drive with all that emptiness behind her.
At the Waterworks, they discovered that he had left his wallet at
home. He apologized profusely, but she didn’t mind writing the one-
hundred-dollar check for the deposit. He promised to pay her back as
soon as they got home. At SCE&G they wanted a two-hundred-fifty-
dollar deposit, and she hesitated.
“I shouldn’t have asked you to do this,” James Harris said.
She looked at him, his face already reddening with sunburn,
cheeks wet with the fluid streaming from beneath his sunglasses. She
weighed her sympathy against what Carter would say when he
balanced their checkbook. But it was her money, too, wasn’t it? That
was what Carter always said when she asked for her own bank
account: this money belonged to both of them. She was a grown
woman and could use it however she saw fit, even if it was to help
another man.
She wrote the second check and tore it off with a brisk flick of her
wrist before she could change her mind. She felt efficient. Like she
was solving problems and getting things done. She felt like Grace.
Back at his house she wanted to wait on the front porch while he
got his wallet, but he hustled her inside. By now it was after two
o’clock and the sun pressed down hard.
“I’ll be right back,” he said, leaving her alone in his dark kitchen.
She thought about opening his refrigerator to see what he had
inside. Or looking in his cupboards. She still didn’t know anything
about him.
The floor cracked and he came back into the kitchen.
“Three hundred fifty dollars,” he said, counting it out on the table
in worn twenties and a ten. He beamed at her, even though it looked
painful to move his sunburned face. “I can’t tell you how much this
means to me.”
“I’m happy to help,” she said.
“You know…,” he said, and trailed off. He looked away, then shook
his head briskly. “Never mind.”
“What?” she asked.
“It’s too much,” he told her. “You’ve been wonderful. I don’t know
how I can repay you.”
“What is it?” Patricia asked.
“Forget it,” he said. “It’s unfair.”
“What is?” she asked.
He got very still.
“Do you want to see something really cool? Just between the two of
us?”
The inside of Patricia’s skull lit up with alarm bells. She’d read
enough to know that anyone saying that, especially a stranger, was
about to ask you to take a package over the border or park outside a
jewelry store and keep the engine running. But when was the last
time anyone had even said the word cool to her?
“Of course,” she said, dry-mouthed.
He went away, then returned with a grimy blue gym bag. He
swung it onto the table and unzipped it.
The dank stench of compost wafted from the bag’s mouth and
Patricia leaned forward and looked inside. It was stuffed with money:
fives, twenties, tens, ones. The pain in Patricia’s left ear disappeared.
Her breath got high in her chest. Her blood sizzled in her veins. Her
mouth got wet.
“Can I touch it?” she asked, quietly.
“Go ahead.”
She reached out for a twenty, thought that looked greedy, and
picked up a five. Disappointingly, it felt like any other five-dollar bill.
She dipped her hand in again and this time pulled out a thick sheaf
of bills. This felt more substantial. James Harris had just gone from a
vaguely interesting man to a full-blown mystery.
“I found it in the crawl space,” he said. “It’s eighty-five thousand
dollars. I think it’s Auntie’s life savings.”
It felt dangerous. It felt illegal. She wanted to ask him to put it
away. She wanted to keep fondling it.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I wanted to ask you,” he said.
“Put it in the bank.”
“Can you imagine me showing up at First Federal with no ID and a
bag of cash?” he said. “They’d be on the phone to the police before I
could sit down.”
“You can’t keep it here,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “I can’t sleep with it in the house. For the past
week, I’ve been terrified someone’s going to break in.”
The solutions to so many mysteries began to reveal themselves to
Patricia. He wasn’t just sick with the sun, he was sick with stress.
Ann Savage had been unfriendly because she wanted to keep people
away from the house where she’d hidden her life savings. Of course
she hadn’t trusted banks.
“We have to open an account for you,” Patricia said.
“How?” he asked.
“Leave that to me,” she said, a plan already forming in her mind.
“And put on a dry shirt.”
—
They stood at the counter of First Federal on Coleman Boulevard half
an hour later, James Harris already sweating through his fresh shirt.
“May I speak with Doug Mackey?” Patricia asked the girl across
the counter. She thought it was Sarah Shandy’s daughter but she
couldn’t be sure so she didn’t say anything.
“Patricia,” a voice called from across the floor. Patricia turned and
saw Doug, thick-necked and red-faced, with his belly straining the
bottom three buttons of his shirt, coming at them with his arms
spread wide. “They say every dog has its day, and today’s mine.”
“I’m trying to help my neighbor, James Harris,” Patricia said,
shaking his hand, making introductions. “This is my friend from high
school, Doug Mackey.”
“Welcome, stranger,” Doug Mackey said. “You couldn’t have a
better guide to Mt. Pleasant than Patricia Campbell.”
“We have a slightly delicate situation,” Patricia said, lowering her
voice.
“That’s why they let me have a door on my office,” Doug said.
He led them into his office decorated in Lowcountry sportsman.
His windows looked out over Shem Creek; his chairs were made of
burgundy leather. The framed prints were of things you could eat:
birds, fish, deer.
“James needs to open a bank account, but his ID has been stolen,”
Patricia said. “What are his options? He’d like to get it done today.”
Doug leaned forward, pressing his belly into the edge of the desk,
and grinned.
“Darlin’, that’s no problem a’tall. You can be the cosigner. You’d be
responsible for any overdrafts and have full access, but it’s a good
way to start while he waits for his license. Those people at the DMV
move like they get paid by the hour.”
“Does it show up on our statement at all?” Patricia asked, thinking
about how she’d explain this to Carter.
“Nah,” Doug said. “I mean, not unless he starts writing bad checks
all over town.”
They all looked at each other for a moment, then laughed
nervously.
“Let me get those forms,” Doug said, leaving the room.
Patricia couldn’t believe she’d solved this problem so easily. She
felt relaxed and complacent, like she’d eaten a huge meal. Doug came
back in and bent over the paperwork.
“Where are you from?” Doug asked, not looking up from his forms.
“Vermont,” James Harris said.
“And what kind of initial deposit will you be making?” Doug asked.
Patricia hesitated, then said, “This.”
She unfolded a two-thousand-dollar check and pushed it across
Doug’s desk. They’d decided depositing cash right away was a bad
idea, especially given how seedy James Harris looked today. He’d
already reimbursed her in cash, and it burned inside her purse. Her
face burned, too. Her lips felt numb. She’d never written a check this
big before.

You are being provided with a book chapter by chapter. I will request you to read the book for me after each chapter. After reading the chapter, 1. shorten the chapter to no less than 300 words and no more than 400 words. 2. Do not change the name, address, or any important nouns in the chapter. 3. Do not translate the original language. 4. Keep the same style as the original chapter, keep it consistent throughout the chapter. Your reply must comply with all four requirements, or it’s invalid.
I will provide the chapter now.

8
Everything in the Ingraham house feels like it’s waiting for Blanche to return.
I walk in the next morning, feeling heavy and slow, last night’s failed date with Eddie sitting like a
rock low in my stomach. It somehow seems fitting that this should be the day I’d agreed to go over
and start packing up some of Blanche’s stuff for Tripp.
Bea’s ghost last night, Blanche’s today.
It’s been months since she went missing, but one of her handbags is still sitting on the table in the
foyer. There’s a pile of jewelry there, too, a coiled necklace, a careless pile of rings. I imagine her
coming home from a dinner out, taking off all that stuff, tossing it casually against the wide glass base
of the lamp, kicking her shoes just under the table.
The pair of pink gingham flats is still lying there, too. It was July when she went missing, and I
imagine her wearing them with a matching pink blouse, a pair of white capris. Women here always
dress like flowers in the summer, bright splashes of color against the violently green lawns, the
blindingly blue sky. It’s so different from how things were back East, where I grew up. There, black
was always the chicest color. Here, I think people would wear lavender to a funeral. Poppy-red to a
wedding.
I’ve never tried to take anything from Tripp. Trust me, he’d notice.
Unlike Eddie, Tripp has kept all the pictures of Blanche up and in plain sight. I think he might
have actually added some. Every available surface seems overcrowded with framed photos.
There are at least five of their wedding day, Blanche smiling and very blond, Tripp looking
vaguely like her brother, and nowhere near as paunchy and deflated as he looks now.
He’s sitting in the living room when I come in, a plastic tumbler full of ice and an amber-colored
liquid that I’m sure is not iced tea.
It’s 9:23 A.M.
“Hi, Mr. Ingraham,” I call, rattling my keys in my hand just in case he’s forgotten that he gave me a
key so that I could let myself in. That was back when he still pretended like he might go into work.
I’m not even sure what he does, if I’m honest. I thought he was a lawyer, but maybe I just assumed that
because he looked like the type. He doesn’t seem to own any other clothes besides polo shirts and
khakis, and there’s golf detritus all over the house—a bag of clubs leaning by the front door, multiple
pairs of golfing shoes jumbled in a rattan basket just inside the front door, tees dropped as carelessly
as his wife’s jewelry.
Even the cup he’s currently drinking his sad breakfast booze in has some kind of golf club insignia
on it.
There’s a photo album spread across his lap and as I step farther into the dim living room, Tripp
finally looks up at me, his eyes bleary behind designer glasses.
“Jan,” he says, and I don’t bother to remind him it’s Jane. I’ve already done that a few times, and
it never seems to actually penetrate the muck of Woodford Reserve his brain is permanently steeped
in.
“You asked me to start on the second guest room today,” I tell him, pointing upstairs, and after a
beat, he nods.
I head up there, but my mind isn’t on Tripp and Blanche.
It’s still on Eddie, on our dinner last night. The way he’d just nodded when I had said I’d walk to
my car on my own. How we’d hugged awkwardly on the sidewalk, and how quickly he’d walked
away from me.
I’d thought—
Fuck, it doesn’t matter. Maybe I’d thought something was happening there, but clearly, I’d been
wrong, and the only thing currently happening was that I was heading into the “second guest room” at
the Ingrahams’ house to pack up … who knew what.
The bedroom was on the second floor, and it was relatively small, done all in shades of blue and
semi-tropical floral patterns. There were boxes and plastic storage containers on the floor, but I had
the feeling Tripp hadn’t put them there. He had sisters. Maybe they had come to prepare the room for
me to pick up, a sort of pre-cleaning to maintain the fiction that Tripp had his shit together.
Which he decidedly did not.
I’d only been up there ten minutes before I heard him coming.
I think that once in his life, Tripp had probably been a lot like John. Not as pathetic, of course,
and blonder, handsomer. Less like something that grew in dark places behind the fridge. But there’s a
similar vibe there, like he’d totally eat food with someone else’s name on it, and I bet more than one
woman at the University of Alabama had turned around surprised to suddenly find Tripp Ingraham in
the doorway, had wondered why someone who looked so innocuous could suddenly feel so scary.
But all the drinking had foiled Tripp on the creeper front. I think he meant to sneak up on me there
in the “blue bedroom,” but I could hear his tread coming down the hall even though he was moving
slowly, and, I think, trying to be quiet.
Maybe don’t wear golf shoes on hardwood floors, dumbass, I thought to myself, but I was
smiling when I turned to face him there in the doorway.
“Is everything okay?” I asked, and his watery hazel eyes widened a little. There was a sour look
on his face, probably because I’d ruined whatever it was he’d hoped for. A girlish shriek maybe, me
dropping a box and clasping my hands over my mouth, cheeks gone pink.
He would’ve liked that, probably. Tripp Ingraham was, I had no doubt, the kind of asshole who
had jerked steering wheels, jumped in elevators, pretended to nearly push girlfriends off high ledges.
I knew the type.
“You can pack up everything in here if you want,” Tripp says, rattling the glass in his plastic cup.
“None of this really meant anything to Blanche.”
I can see that. It’s a pretty room, but there’s something hotel-like about it. Like everything in here
has been selected for just how it looks, not any kind of personal taste.
I glance over beside the bed, taking in a lamp meant to look like an old-fashioned tin bucket. The
shade is printed in a soft blue-and-green floral pattern, and I could swear I’ve seen it before.
Wouldn’t surprise me—all the knickknacks in these houses look the same. Except for in Eddie’s
house.
It strikes me then that actually, everything in these houses seems to be a pale knockoff of the stuff
at Eddie’s, a Xerox machine slowly running out of ink so that everything is a little fainter, a little less
distinct.
And then I realize where I’d seen that tin bucket lamp.
“That’s from Southern Manors, isn’t it?” I ask, nodding toward the bedside table. “I was looking
at their website the other night, and—”
Tripp cuts me off with a rude noise, then tips the glass to his mouth again. When he lowers it,
there’s a drop of bourbon clinging to his scraggly mustache, and he licks it away, the pink flash of his
tongue making me grimace.
“No, that lamp was Blanche’s. Think it had been her mom’s or something, picked it up at an estate
sale, I don’t know.” He shrugs, belly jiggling under his polo shirt. “Bea Rochester wouldn’t have
known an original idea if it bit her in her ass. All that shit, that ‘Southern Manors’ thing. All that was
Blanche’s.”
I put down the half-empty box. “What, like she copied Blanche’s style?”
Tripp scoffs at that, walking farther into the room. The tip of his shoe catches an overstuffed trash
bag by the door, tearing a tiny hole in it, and I watch as a bit of pink cloth oozes out.
“Copied, stole…” he says, waving the cup at me. “They grew up together, you know. Went to
school at the same place, Ivy Ridge. I think they were even roommates.”
Turning back to the stack of books on the bed, I start placing them in the box at my feet. “I heard
they were close,” I reply, wondering just how much more info I can get out of Tripp Ingraham. He’s
the only one so far who hasn’t talked about Bea like the sun shone directly from her ass, so I wouldn’t
mind hearing more of what he has to say. But gossip is tricky, slippery. Pretend to be too interested,
and suddenly you look suspicious. Act bored and nonchalant, sometimes the person will clam up
totally, but then sometimes they’re like Emily Clark, eager to keep sharing, hoping to find the right
worm to bait the hook.
I don’t know what kind Tripp is, but he sits on the corner of the bed, the mattress dipping with his
weight.
“Bea Rochester,” he mutters. “Her name was Bertha.”
I look up at that, tucking my hair behind my ear, and he’s watching me, his eyes bleary, but
definitely focused on my face.
“Seriously?” I ask, and he nods. His leg is moving up and down restlessly, his hands twisting the
now empty cup around and around.
“She changed it when she went to college, apparently. That’s what Blanche said. Came back to
Birmingham one day all, ‘Call me Bea.’” He sighs again, that leg still jiggling. “And Blanche did.
Never even mentioned her real name to people far as I know.”
Bertha. The same sits heavily on the tongue, and I think back to those pictures I looked at last
night, those red lips, that shiny dark hair. She definitely didn’t look like a Bertha, and I couldn’t blame
her for wanting to change it.
Plus, it was another thing we had in common, another secret tucked against my chest. I hadn’t been
born “Jane,” after all. That other, older name was so far behind me now that whenever I heard it on
TV or in a store or on the radio, part of a snatch conversation as I walked by people, I didn’t even

Through the dense, entangled jungles of the equatorial night, a formidable creature moved silently, its path lit only by the occasional gleam of its eyes reflected by the moonlight. Ignoring its hunger, it ventured determinedly toward a native village, encircled by a palisade, where preparations for a grand feast stirred the air with excitement and anticipation. Inside one of the huts, Tarzan of the Apes lay bound, contemplating his imminent death and the fates of Jane and their son, left vulnerable by his capture. Despite several visits from his nemesis, Rokoff, who taunted and abused him, Tarzan remained defiant, his mind racing for any avenue of escape.

As night deepened, a panther, Sheeta, silently infiltrated Tarzan’s prison, offering a momentary flicker of hope but ultimately failing to understand the task of freeing Tarzan. Instead, Sheeta became distracted by an approaching native, whom it brutally killed, momentarily stalling the villagers’ plans for Tarzan. Despite the interruption, Rokoff and the villagers soon rallied, dragging Tarzan to the stake in the village’s center for a savage ritual intended to culminate in his death.

Rokoff took sadistic pleasure in taunting Tarzan about Jane’s supposed danger, aiming to deepen his despair with the prospect of his family’s suffering. The ceremony began, warriors dancing menacingly around Tarzan, spears at the ready. Yet, as the ritual reached its climax, a distant, primal scream—answered by Tarzan—halted the proceedings. Sheeta, having momentarily fled, returned in a whirlwind of fury, standing protectively beside Tarzan. The sight of the fearsome panther alongside the bound Tarzan struck a moment of terror in the hearts of all present, pausing the dance of death in its tracks.