Playing Juliet Read online

  “No,” I said, firmly. “I can’t imagine Mrs. Lester or Mrs. Mac or Chuck Peterson taking it. And except for them, only kids were backstage. And what would a kid do with a big diamond bracelet?”

  “If Mrs. Fredericks dropped it outside the theater, anyone could have stolen it. Then we’ll never find it.”

  There was nothing to say to that.

  We sat in silence, wondering how Mrs. Fredericks would react if she didn’t find her bracelet.

  Suddenly the work lights went on and Mrs. Fredericks walked out onto the stage with Mrs. Mac close behind her. Austin and I sat noiselessly in the shadows. It was like being in the audience during a play, only they didn’t know we were watching.

  “Beth and Austin searched this area before they went home,” said Mrs. Mac.

  Mrs. Fredericks pursed her lips but didn’t say anything.

  Austin and I looked at each other, puzzled. Then it dawned on me. I leaned over and whispered, “Mrs. Mac thought we were leaving! She doesn’t know we’re still here.”

  Great pantomime job we’d done. I hung my head and stared at my knees. If I couldn’t communicate one simple message through my body language, why did I think I could ever become an actor?

  Mrs. Mac and Mrs. Fredericks scoured the stage without saying another word, going over all the places Austin and I had looked. The silence went on so long it almost had a sound of its own.

  Finally Mrs. Fredericks straightened up and rubbed the small of her back. “We’re beating a dead horse. It’s not here.”

  There was the tiniest of rustles as Austin and I slid down even further in our seats.

  “I’m going back to New York on Wednesday. You have my phone number at the hotel if you find my bracelet before then.”

  Mrs. Fredericks walked to the front of the stage and looked out over the dark auditorium, her hands in the pockets of the most beautifully fitting slacks I’d ever seen. “If one of the kids has it and comes to you, don’t scare them. All I want is my bracelet back. My lawyer will be contacting you about posting a reward.”

  She turned and started to walk offstage but Mrs. Mac stepped in front of her. “And your decision is final?”

  Mrs. Fredericks nodded decisively. “I have an appointment with my lawyer first thing Monday morning. As I told you, I’ll be instructing him to begin eviction proceedings at once.”

  I heard someone, me or Austin or both of us, draw in a breath with a tiny gasp.

  Mrs. Mac’s shoulders slumped. She looked away from Mrs. Fredericks for a moment, then straightened her back and said briskly, “If the bracelet is an issue here, I’m sure we could arrange to replace it . . .”

  Mrs. Fredericks interrupted her angrily, waving her hand in the air. “It’s irreplaceable. That bracelet was the last present my husband gave me before he died. He can never give me another one. He’s gone and it’s gone and . . .”

  Mrs. Fredericks stopped and turned to look out at the auditorium again, breathing deeply as though she was fighting to get control of her voice. “And I miss him so much,” she whispered to the dark auditorium, just loud enough that Austin and I could hear her.

  By now we were both sitting so low in the seats, no one could have seen us, but we scrunched down even more, just in case.

  Mrs. Fredericks turned back to face Mrs. Mac. “All I can do is try to keep his name alive,” she said. “Theater meant a great deal to us both. As soon as I found out I inherited this theater, I decided to turn it into a memorial to him.”

  “The Oakfield Children’s Theater could easily become the Edward Fredericks Children’s Theater.” Mrs. Mac reached out to touch Mrs. Fredericks arm in a gesture of sympathy, but Mrs. Fredericks pulled away from her.

  “A children’s theater isn’t good enough. Not for him.” Her voice cracked. “He has no connection to this type of theater. He loved the real thing—challenging memorable plays with great actors. That’s why I’m going to find an adult company, a professional one with an outstanding reputation, and offer this theater to them.”

  They exited the stage, their voices fading as they left the wings.

  Austin and I sat in silence for a minute or two, and as we did, the lines from the Scottish play left me. I wouldn’t think of them again for months. But the line that replaced them was even worse.

  A children’s theater isn’t good enough.

  I’d heard the conviction in Mrs. Fredericks’s voice as she said it. She was going to close our theater.

  The work lights went off and the dim beacon of the ghost light shone just enough for us to find our way out.

  We didn’t speak till we got to the bike racks.

  “If we don’t tell anyone,” I said, just before we started for home, “maybe it won’t come true.”

  What do you do when your world starts to fall apart?

  Call your best friend.

  But Zandy was still out with her father. Her mom said she’d have her call me back, unless she got home after nine.

  “Please ask her to call even if it’s late,” I begged. “I have a question about our English homework that’s urgent.”

  Parents always buy that one.

  When the phone finally rang, I must have jumped three feet. It was just after nine, so I knew I could only talk for a minute.

  “Major disaster,” I said. “I really, really wish I could see you tonight but . . .”

  There was a short pause, while Zandy figured out what I really, really wanted to tell her.

  “Me, too,” she said, then added, “the English homework is to finish chapter eight for tomorrow’s discussion. The quiz is on Tuesday.”

  Her mother had to be standing right next to her.

  I went to bed early and lay awake, every muscle tense, listening to the late night sounds in the house: my parents getting ready for bed, their soft snores, and then their loud ones. By the second loud snore, I was out the window and on my way to Zandy’s.

  If I kept this up, I’d forget how to use the front door.

  “We can’t let her take our theater away,” Zandy sounded so forceful I could almost believe we had a chance to save it.

  “Shh,” I whispered. “Your mom will hear us.”

  I leaned back on the wall next to her bed, exhausted. It had been a long day. Church, lunch with Zandy’s dad, searching the theater, and now another late night bike ride.

  I was okay until I told Zandy what Austin and I had seen . . . and heard. Putting it into words convinced me my theater was gone. I closed my eyes and let my head drop forward. I didn’t have any energy left to fight. We had lost our theater.

  But Zandy sounded ready to lead a battle.

  “Mrs. Fredericks may own the theater,” she said, much more quietly but just as intensely, “but the city owns the land. It’s going to look really bad to evict kids from a theater in a city park and hand it over to some grown-ups.”

  I was too tired to nod, and she couldn’t see me in the dark anyway.

  “Especially when we’ve used it for fifty years.” I could hear Zandy twirling her hair around her finger so fast I half expected to see sparks flashing. “Maybe if we call the newspapers, or the TV news station, they could take pictures of the eviction. If people see all our costumes and stuff just dumped on the sidewalk, I bet they’d be mad. And our parents and all the theater kids from the last fifty years, everyone who’s ever worked in the theater, would protest it. There must be thousands of us.”

  I sat up and whispered urgently, “We can’t tell anyone! Not until we hear this officially from Mrs. Mac or somebody. Now it’s just information we learned by eavesdropping.”

  “But the eviction starts tomorrow!” Zandy protested.

  We both sat quietly for a few minutes, Zandy twirling, me biting my lip.

  What will happen to the picture of Romeo and Juliet? I wondered.

  “Think she decided to take away the theater because she was mad about the bracelet?” Zandy finally whispered.

  “It sure didn’t help. B
ut I don’t think she likes kids that much. She’d made up her mind long before then. She wants a professional company in our theater. Adult actors.”

  And Austin and I had shown her, again and again, that this would be possible as we kept pointing out just how good our theater was. Just as good as a professional one.

  Zandy and I sat in silence listening to each other’s breathing. I was thinking about everything I’d lose when the theater closed. I know Zandy was, too. She and her father had just begun to know each other—they might never find another way to connect. He’d talked about coming to one of her shows, but if the theater closed, she wouldn’t be in another play until after we were in high school. Will he still want to see her perform more than a year from now? Or will he have lost interest by then?

  I heard Mrs. Fredericks’s voice in my head: “A children’s theater isn’t good enough. Not for him.” Even in my memory, her words cracked with emotion. We didn’t have a chance.

  But Zandy hadn’t heard the finality in Mrs. Fredericks’s voice.

  “She probably doesn’t even know who to give the theater to,” she persisted. “I bet all the famous acting companies she knows are in New York and have their own theaters already or won’t want to move all the way across the country to a small town in California. She’d change her mind if we found her bracelet.”

  I opened my eyes and sat up straight. Was there hope?

  “But how can we find it?” I asked.

  Since neither of us had any ideas, the conversation stalled again, till Zandy asked the same question Austin had. “Could someone have stolen it? Found it and took it and sold it?”

  “But everyone who was backstage wants the theater to stay open. And who would know where to sell stolen jewelry?”

  “Everybody knows you take stolen goods to a fence. Like Fagin in Oliver!.”

  “Knowing a fence in a play isn’t going to help.”

  “It was based on a famous book by Charles Dickens.” Zandy sounded a little indignant.

  “Which was written more than one hundred years ago,” I reminded her. “Do you really think anyone at the theater knows a fence? Or would recognize real diamonds, especially ones that big? I didn’t when Mrs. Fredericks showed them to me.”

  Zandy made a small sound of agreement. “Maybe we could post a picture of it on the call board? One of the little kids might have picked it up, didn’t know it was valuable, and kept it just because it was pretty.”

  “We better hope that didn’t happen, because they’d probably lose it.”

  I had a horrible vision of one of the little Mice finding the bracelet on the floor, putting it in her backpack, and leaving the backpack and bracelet in her school cubby till the end of the year, when it would be thrown out and disappear forever. I shook my head to make the scene go away.

  “That’s why we have to return our costume jewelry to the shop every night,” said Zandy. “They’re afraid we’ll lose it.”

  It’s true—your jaw really does drop open when you’re totally surprised.

  I closed my mouth and grinned in the darkness. “Would you repeat that?”

  “That’s why we have to return our jewelry . . . to the shop . . . every night.” Zandy had a matching grin. I could hear it in her voice.

  “If you saw a big, shiny bracelet lying around backstage after the play, what would you do?”

  “Pick it up, take it to the costume shop, and plunk it right in the drawer of the jewelry cabinet.”

  Suddenly I wasn’t tired at all. We both knew exactly where that bracelet was.

  Now we had a new problem. How did we tell Mrs. Mac?

  This one we could solve.

  “Do you know Mrs. Mac’s home phone number?” I asked.

  “No. Can’t we call her at the theater?”

  “She won’t be there. Tomorrow’s Monday. The theater’s dark.”

  “Mrs. Mac needs to get that bracelet back to Mrs. Fredericks in time to stop the eviction,” I reminded her.

  “We’ll have to email her. Now.”

  “Do you know her home email?”

  “No. Can’t we email her at the theater?”

  “Even if she’s there tomorrow, the eviction people may not let her in to use her computer. Or her phone.”

  “Do you know where she lives?”

  “No.”

  “What else can we do?” The excitement was gone from Zandy’s voice.

  “If you were going to break into the theater,” I asked slowly, “who would you get to help you?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Then how or which way should they first break in?

  Question, my lords, no further of the case,

  How or which way: ’tis sure they found some place

  But weakly guarded, where the breach was made.

  Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 1

  Who would I ask to help me break into the theater?” Zandy gave a small groan of pure misery. She hates doing anything her mother wouldn’t like. But the answer to my question was so obvious, she replied to the one I hadn’t asked yet. “It’s too late to call Austin now.”

  So we texted him.

  We knew Austin. Ultimate techie. He’d never turn off his cell phone. Even if he was asleep, he’d get the message.

  He must have been awake because his answer came back immediately: I CAN GET US IN. MEET BACK PORCH.

  Zandy and I gave ourselves a high five. A quiet high five. It looked like all our problems were solved.

  We’d been pretty sure Austin would help. The theater meant as much to him as it did to us, only in a different way. Where else could he use power tools, run electrical wiring, or program a lighting board? He’d loved showing off the backstage to Mrs. Fredericks. Of course he was going to help us.

  Five minutes later, we were wheeling our bikes down the driveway. I suppose we should have felt as carefree and happy as all those kids in books who sneak out at night and have wonderful adventures—from Tom Sawyer to the Berenstain Bears. But Zandy had never snuck out at night before and she jumped at every sound. It didn’t help that it began to rain so hard we could barely keep our bikes on the road. We were dripping wet by the time we arrived at the small porch on the back of the theater. We stashed our bikes in the bushes and huddled together under the little roof covering the door.

  “Where’s Austin?” Zandy whispered anxiously.

  We saw him almost as soon as she spoke. He was as soaked as we were. We waited for him to drop his bike beside ours, but he rode it up onto the porch and leaned it against the wall. He grinned at us, pulled a can out of his jacket, and shook it vigorously.

  “You’re going to have to hold my bike so I can climb up,” he said.

  “What are you doing?” demanded Zandy. “Where’s the key?”

  “What key?” Austin stopped shaking the can, a puzzled look on his face.

  She pointed at the door. “You said you could get us in.”

  “Yeah,” he said slowly. “But I don’t have a key to the door.”

  “Then how are we going to get inside?” She was starting to sound mad.

  “There’s a padlock on the flat house. I’ve had to open it so many times I’ve got the combination memorized. We’re going in through there.”

  “Then why are you messing around over here?”

  “Because I’ve got to disable the alarm before we go inside,” he said and pointed the can at a round metal square mounted high on the wall. “I’m going to squirt shaving cream in that box. The foam should muffle the noise when the alarm starts ringing.” He grinned and started shaking the can again. “I read about this on a website. I’ve always wanted to try it.”

  I was afraid Austin was enjoying himself too much.

  It looked like Zandy thought so, too. She crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes. “Just why are you worrying about the alarm going off?”

  “If we trigger it by opening the door or something, the police could come and find us . . . and . . .” I could see that Austin
was starting to lose confidence as Zandy continued to glare at him.

  She sighed in exasperation. “That alarm’s been broken for years. It kept going off during the very first play I was in, back when I was seven, and no one could figure out how to fix it. So they pulled the wires out. They’re still there on the wall in a big knot.”

  “Are you sure?” Austin looked at the can of shaving cream and dropped his arm to his side.

  I didn’t have to ask. As soon as I heard her say it, I realized she must have known the alarm didn’t work. That’s what had given her the courage to come here in the first place.

  “Mrs. Mac showed the whole cast where they were tied, so we wouldn’t worry about the alarm starting up again when we were onstage. I still check them on opening nights.” She looked a little embarrassed. “It’s just a habit.”

  Even best friends have secrets they don’t share. I didn’t know Zandy did that. And she definitely didn’t know I touched the picture of Romeo and Juliet before every performance.

  Austin put the can in his jacket and pulled out a flashlight. “Flat house,” he said, shoved his bike with ours in the shelter of the bushes, and led the way as we sloshed through the mud and rain to the far side of the building.

  The flat house is a kind of shed built on the outside of the theater. It’s only used to store old flats and leftovers from the shop, and it looks like it. It has the kind of door you’d expect to find on a shed—old wood boards with a big latch held by a padlock. No one who saw it would guess that inside was a door that opened directly to the scene shop.

  Sheds aren’t the kinds of places that have a porch or any kind of overhang. There was nothing to do but stand in the rain as Austin held his flashlight in his teeth and dialed the combination. But in a few seconds, Austin pulled the lock off the latch. He slipped it into his pocket before he opened the door, and we stepped inside.

  We couldn’t turn on a light, because someone outside might see it. We waited in the dark, dripping and listening, just in case there was an alarm we didn’t know about.

  When we didn’t hear anything, Austin turned his flashlight back on. He kept the beam turned down, shielding it with his hand. We moved slowly across the concrete floor, trying to avoid the jumble of old flats poking out unevenly into the narrow aisle, the pieces of lumber leaning against the wall, and the piles of leftover building materials everywhere. Austin had just opened the door that led to the shop when there was an enormous crash. Zandy had knocked over a couple of empty paint cans.