Backstage Stuff Read online

  “Oh I have digital photos on file, but I don’t print everything. I just sketched this one out because I bought a few pieces at the same auction and I wanted to be clear about which client took which piece.”

  Nellie snorted as she handed Claire her tea. It was subtle, but Jane heard it. It was the sort of sound her mother made whenever anyone pronounced the word vase, vaaaz.

  “That vaaaz,” said Nellie, “looks just like one of my sister Veronica’s bowling trophies.”

  Jane paged through the receipts Claire had brought while Tim filled Oh in on Jane’s takeover of Murder in the Eekaknak Valley.

  “She was a theater major in college, you know, and she hasn’t lost a step,” said Tim. “She was masterful.”

  “Perhaps one never loses the mastery of one’s first true vocation,” said Oh.

  “Avocation,” said Jane. “I only thought I was called to the stage.”

  Jane selected three receipts for paintings. “Are these the ones that were supposed to be sent to auction?”

  Claire nodded.

  “Did you go with Margaret to identify her brother’s body?” Jane asked Oh.

  “We both did,” said Claire. “Bruce had texted that Rick was in town, which I told Margaret. She was pleased enough that she wouldn’t have to go through the house sale business alone. I’m not sure she believed Rick had stolen those pieces anyway. She didn’t think he’d come to town if he had taken them. Anyway, I told her to rest up so she’d have her wits about her when we confronted Rick. I went back to my room to make some business calls.

  “We had vowed to find someplace in this town for dinner where the main course wasn’t breaded or deep-fried. So after Bruce called the second time to tell me Rick was dead, I went to Margaret’s room and she was getting ready for us to go out. Bruce arrived and we told her together and she was pretty strong, I’d say.”

  “Yes,” said Oh. “Identifying a body is more than difficult, but she managed the task.”

  “Keep in mind, Bruce, she’s always had a fragile nature, but she has a fine mind, a tough mind. She wanted to be a doctor, so maybe that helped today,” said Claire. “Her work as a scientist.”

  Jane looked up from the receipts.

  “Margaret has a job?” asked Jane. “I didn’t know she actually worked.”

  “Well, no, not a job, but she went to college and I think she majored in math and science.”

  “Like you majoring in theater,” said Nellie to Jane.

  “But Freddy wanted her to go into show business,” said Claire.

  “Freddy wanted everyone to go into show business,” said Nellie.

  Don waved from the doorway, yawning.

  “Maybe you theater folks can stay up all night, but saloon keepers need their beauty sleep.”

  As hard as she tried to resist, Jane caught the yawning from her father. It had been one of the longest days she could remember—after a fairly short night. Oh handed her a copy of the police report that Detective Ramey had shared with him.

  “Nice guy,” said Jane. “Nicer than any of the other police I’ve met here.”

  “He’s new, Mrs. Wheel. He isn’t familiar with your penchant for finding bodies in Kankakee.”

  “It was a nail gun,” said Jane, reading. “That’s what I thought I heard them say.” She wondered why there wasn’t more blood at the scene. Everything had been so clean. Oh would be able to explain the reason, but she really didn’t want to ask the question and have that conversation before going to sleep.

  “Jeez,” said Nellie. “That’s a new one. Who the hell would think of using a nail gun?”

  “A carpenter?” said Oh. Claire had already stepped outside and Oh turned back from the door. “All of those scene builders who were there?”

  “The Geppettos,” said Jane. She waved, covering another yawn with the other hand.

  “And Suzanne,” she added. “I’ll bet Suzanne knows her way around a nail gun.”

  21

  Amazing what six solid hours of sleep could do. Jane opened her eyes and stretched, reaching for her phone and the notebook she had parked on the table next to the bed.

  First she sent Nick an e-mail, telling him it was practically opening night and his grandma’s stage debut. It was easier to type debut than try to explain comeback using this tiny little cell phone keyboard. She gently reminded him that it might be nice to try to call Nellie over the weekend if they went into town. He had been so good about keeping in touch with her and, as he had requested, Jane had kept her part of the bargain, joining Facebook and Twitter, even if she was a reader and lurker. She followed all of the news and tidbits about the dig, then sent Nick private messages. She hadn’t wanted Nick to know that he was her only Facebook friend, but how could she hide all that information on the side of the screen? It wasn’t that she wanted other imaginary online friends—she couldn’t help it—she thought of all the Facebook friends and tweetees as imaginary. Even so, having only one friend made her sound lonely—in a not-so-imaginary way.

  Jane watched today’s slideshow of the artifacts they were finding. Seeing Nick looking so tanned and tall and grown-up, holding his own among the college students who were all there for credit or the graduate students who were there for internships, warmed her absentee mother’s heart. This was a good summer for Nick. And Charley? He looked good, too. It would catch her by surprise, seeing Charley in a photograph. He wasn’t in many. Jane assumed that was because he was usually the photographer, but every once in a while, his crinkled half smile would take her by surprise.

  Jane had spent the winter mourning the loss of her marriage, but not because she thought it should continue. She knew better. She and Charley had chosen occupations that kept them from each other, their passions were separate—equal maybe, and sometimes even equally respected by the other, but certainly separate—and that should have been the biggest clue that things were ending. But Jane didn’t like to fail at anything. And she didn’t love Charley any less exactly. But she had to be honest with herself. She didn’t love him any more, either. And to stay married to someone, to really make it for the long haul, Jane knew you had to keep loving the other person more.

  Jane let the screen on her phone go dark.

  She jotted down things she needed for tonight’s dress rehearsal. Tim had informed her just before leaving last night that there might be a few extra people in the audience tonight.

  “How many?” Jane had asked. “Who?”

  Tim had shrugged and just said that the president of the theater board had left a message for Tim on his cell phone that he would see him at the invited dress.

  “It’s an invited dress?” asked Jane. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t invite anybody,” said Tim. “Probably just a few board members are coming. No big deal,” he added, obviously unaware of what an invited dress could turn out to be.

  When Jane appeared in a play in college that held an invited dress rehearsal, it was treated like an opening night. The actors invited their friends and other students in the department came. For some of their shows, the audience on the night of the free invited dress was larger than any their entire run. Tim might be right that just a few board members would be attending, but Jane didn’t want to take any chances. She planned on inspecting all the props and checking everything onstage herself long before they raised the curtain at eight. The cast was called for six, so that gave Jane the entire day to run errands, hem her mother’s stage nightgown, pick up sand at the hardware store or think of something else that could represent the stepfather’s ashes, and maybe even figure out who killed Rick Kendell. And Marvin. Poor Marvin. Jane thought about how unfair it was that a first murder was so often forgotten in the face of a second.

  Nellie was in the kitchen making breakfast when Jane came in, searching for coffee. When Jane asked her why she hadn’t gone in to work with her dad, Nellie shrugged.

  “It’s practically opening night, ain’t it? I took the day off.”<
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  Jane looked at Nellie, who turned away quickly, flipping pancakes expertly, catching one after the other in the frying pan. Something was different. Was Nellie wearing makeup? Eyeliner? Mascara? Jane thought of a dozen different jibes, payback for all of the times Nellie teased her about a different haircut or laughed at her outfit or said her earrings were too dangly or told her if she consented to wear lipstick, she ought to at least pick out a nice shade. Jane smiled and touched her mother’s shoulder.

  “You look so pretty,” said Jane.

  Nellie slid the pancakes onto a plate.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Jane poured coffee for both of them.

  “Is this okay for tonight?” asked Nellie, waving her hands over her face.

  Jane nodded. “Maybe a little stronger on the eyeliner, but that’s all. You don’t really need blush, being that you’re in a coma and all.”

  “Yeah, but I come out of it at the end,” said Nellie, pouring syrup on a pancake for herself and cutting up a plain one for Rita, who sat at her feet.

  Jane did not want to argue with her mother, not with her wearing makeup and serving up blueberry pancakes when it was only a Thursday, but Jane didn’t think Nellie’s interpretation of the smile on Marguerite’s face at the end of the play was accurate. Nellie had said all along that when Marguerite smiled, it meant she woke up and had known who committed the murder all along, but Jane saw it differently. From her first reading, she had interpreted the beatific smile that was on Marguerite’s face to mean that she had died a peaceful death when her daughter and granddaughter were reconciled and the killer unmasked.

  Since there were no final lines given to Marguerite and the stage direction was simply Marguerite, breathing softly in her hospital bed, smiles as the lights fade, Jane figured there was no reason to argue the interpretation with Nellie. She had told Tim’s friend Bill, who was running lights, to fade the spot on Marguerite quickly, just in case Nellie decided to turn the enigmatic smile into a wide-eyed grin. That should ensure a peaceful final curtain.

  Jane dragged her large leather tote bag over to the kitchen table. She had scored the bag at a garage sale for next to nothing and it had become her favorite accessory. Tim always fought her on the use of that word: An accessory accessorizes, dear; it adds glamour and glitz and style and pulls your look together. Jane preferred to think of accessory as essential, something that added to her effectiveness, and this tote held almost everything she needed in her day-to-day.

  Reaching into the bag and fishing through the mini-notebooks, hand sanitizer, packages of plastic gloves, energy bars, digital tape recorder, tissues, antiseptic wipes, Gummi Grapefruits, scissors, stapler, double-sided tape, she finally found the object of her desire.

  The sewing kit was the only item she had purchased at her first estate sale. She had wandered among the piles of linens and stacks of dishes and precariously balanced china cups, musing on the life of this elderly woman who had died alone in an upstairs bedroom, according to one of the neighbors gossiping to whoever would listen. Jane was so overwhelmed with the stories told by each of the items, the contents of her drawers and jewelry boxes now turned out and exposed to the world—gold portrait stickpins wrapped in tissue, a celluloid box with two pale, dry, four-leaf clovers tucked inside—she could barely focus enough to select one thing to buy. She found the sewing kit on a dressing table, reached for it as another person pushed past her and, with a satisfied smirk, grabbed a rhinestone encrusted hand mirror. Jane had no desire for the mirror, no desire to see herself—she wanted to see the old woman, to hold something in her hand that had been held by her, something that had been of use, that had been cherished and needed. The sewing case. For one dollar, Jane bought a share in another’s history. Soft baby-blue leather with a sturdy zipper and button flaps opened to reveal threads, needles, a finely balanced pair of scissors, and a silver-engraved thimble—EDS. Jane made up a name for the original owner of the thimble and, today, hoped Edna Dolores Savarin would smile down on her and aid her in hemming Nellie’s nightgown. Jane thought this might be the closest she came to true prayer.

  Jane set the sewing kit on the table and pulled out the scripts she had confiscated from Mary last night and the five additional she had voluntarily surrendered. Jane lined them up on the table in front of her and got up to replenish her coffee.

  “Mom, bring me your costume and I’ll get started hemming it so you can manage your curtain call,” Jane called. “And a spool of white thread, too.” Jane knew that the threads in the case were no longer strong, and she couldn’t bear to unravel them from their tiny Bakelite spools.

  She could have left this chore up to the costume helper or Tim for that matter. He could sew a better hem than Jane could. But there was something soothing about this work. It made it okay for her to dawdle over coffee and sit in her mother’s kitchen. Besides, the hardware store didn’t open until nine and hand sewing would help her think.

  Each of Mary’s pilfered scripts looked slightly different. They varied in usage—from new-looking to worn and bent—but their differences were greater than their individual condition issues. The shades of yellow on the covers varied from a pale butter to an orange-gold. On one of the covers, the lettering was in red rather than black and two of them had a variation of the author’s name. The others were all by Frederick Kendell Junior except for two that were more casually attributed to Freddy Kendell.

  Jane opened up one of the scripts.

  I dedicate this play to my grandchildren, Ricky and Margie.

  Follow your muse, children, and you will never take the wrong path.

  That was slightly different from the dedication in the script Jane had been using, wasn’t it? She opened the next script, which she noticed had a faded number four penciled into the inner corner.

  To Rick and Margaret. The future is yours.

  Odd. Jane opened up each of the scripts and found five different dedications. The one that interested Jane the most was the one in the script with the title printed in red.

  To Margaret … your future is here. I have done my best.

  Jane opened up the script and began to read the play. When Nellie came in with a spool of white thread and a giant sewing basket, she looked at the scripts spread out on the table and saw Jane engrossed in a copy. She set down the basket, refilled her daughter’s coffee cup, and left the room. If Jane hadn’t been totally absorbed in what she was reading—yes, Murder in the Eekaknak Valley, but a considerably different version than the one that was to have its invited dress rehearsal that very night—she would have heard her mother heaving open the door to the attic, pulling down the creaky ladder, and climbing up to a small storage space under the rafters. Jane, however, was oblivious.

  Since she was familiar enough with the play to skim through many scenes that were the same or almost the same as the version they were doing, Jane was midway through by the time Nellie returned to the kitchen.

  “I apologize,” said Jane, looking up at her mother.

  “It’s about time,” said Nellie.

  “Do you know what I’m talking about?” said Jane. “Why I’m apologizing?”

  “Maybe,” said Nellie, pouring herself a cup of coffee and topping off Jane’s mug.

  Jane leafed through another script until she got to the second act. In the first one she read, Marguerite was not in a coma. She was ill, and in and out of consciousness. She revealed the family secrets that had driven Myra away from home: the abusive second husband, the affair with Perkins the gardener. In the next script Jane chose, she compared the same scene, and Marguerite revealed that Perkins the gardener was the father of Myra.

  “Holy Toledo,” said Jane. “Freddy was a real writer, wasn’t he? He never stopped rewriting.”

  “Yeah, he drove everybody crazy. He would have a new idea every day,” said Nellie. “And when he was afraid we’d all get mad at him, he’d have that dummy, Bumbles, announce there was a new version. It was creepy, but then He
nry would yell at the dummy about memorizing lines and we’d all start laughing because it was so goofy to be arguing with the doll and Freddy would just jolly us all up again and we’d start over.”

  “So the play was never produced, but…”

  “You ask me, Freddy never wanted the play put on. We’d be almost ready and Freddy would give us a new script. He liked writing and he liked rehearsing, having everybody around for the club, but he didn’t give a damn about the play being put on.”

  “Maybe that’s why all those little Mr. Bumbles notes were stuck in the scripts. They were Freddy’s way of warning people away from the play itself,” said Jane, picking up another script and paging through. “After he had his heart attack and couldn’t keep the club going, maybe he couldn’t bear to destroy the copies of the play, but he worried about somebody coming in and finding all those scripts.”

  “Like Lowry,” said Nellie.

  “Yup, just like that. What do you know about the club and the group who was rehearsing the play after you dropped out?”

  “Well, I met your dad and I walked. If I thought we were really going to do the damn play, I might have stuck with it. But Don came along just when I was getting fed up anyway,” said Nellie. “Tell you the truth, I never really saw the people from the club after that. Henry kept calling for a while, but he got fed up, too. He wanted to be an actor so he moved to California. And Marvin wanted to make sets for plays that really got put on, so he moved to Chicago. I’d see him around every once in a while, though. Came back here a lot. Let’s see,” said Nellie. “Rica Evans’s mom passed away, and that Bryan Kendell married one of the girls in the group, not that Penny but—”

  “Rica Evans’s mother?” said Jane.

  “Yeah, I didn’t know her very well, she was a lot older than me. But Rica looks like her, so I asked her and she said her mom was Barbara, who I remember from rehearsals and stuff.”

  “Was there anybody in this town who wasn’t in Freddy’s theater club?” asked Jane.