Offed Stage Left Read online

  ARDEN THRASHED AROUND trying to untangle herself, her cries muffled under the drapery. Heather and Thomas managed to unwrap her, while Isobel stood rooted to the spot, staring uncomprehendingly at the length of masking still in her hand. With a start, she let it fall, just as Arden emerged from the mass of felt, her face crimson, panting with fury.

  “You bitch! What the fuck was that?”

  “It was an accident! I hardly touched it.” Isobel looked up at the bare pipe swaying high above their heads.

  Sunil knelt down and examined the top of the curtain. “The ties aren’t torn.”

  “I don’t see how it could have fallen,” Heather said nervously. “We tied them pretty tight.”

  “They must have gotten loose somehow,” Isobel said, turning her hands over as if trying to determine whether she could possibly have developed superhuman strength without realizing it.

  “What happened?” Ezra arrived in the wings with Kelly on his heels.

  “Isobel moved the masking aside and it came down,” Heather explained.

  Kelly consulted her stopwatch. “We’re due for a break anyway. Heather, get Dan and check the rest of the masking. Everyone else, back in twenty.”

  Thomas put up his hand for attention. “I’ve taken my notes, so change out of costume, please. We still have work to do.” He laid a gentle hand on Arden’s shoulder. “Any damage?”

  “No.” Arden looked daggers at Isobel. “Despite her best efforts.”

  “I told you. It was an accident,” Isobel said, tearing up in spite of herself.

  Sunil took her elbow. “Come on, let’s get changed.”

  Isobel shook him off and wheeled on Arden. “How can you think I pulled it down on purpose?”

  Arden’s blue eyes were icy. “You’re always in the wings mouthing my lines and mimicking my moves. You’d love to get me out of the way so you can play Jennie.”

  Isobel let out a gasp and pointed to Arden’s chest.

  Startled, Arden glanced down. “What?”

  “Your paranoia is showing,” Isobel spat and stalked off.

  “Oh, man, you took that over the line,” Sunil said, catching up with Isobel as she stormed up the stairs, holding her skirt up.

  “She’s crazy.”

  “Look, whoever hung the masking obviously didn’t tie the ties tight enough. She should realize it wasn’t you, but you can’t blame her for thinking it.”

  Isobel paused on the landing. “If Arden is so insecure that she’s threatened by my learning her role—which, by the way, I’m being paid to do—then I’m the least of her problems.” She thrust an accusing finger at him. “And you should be learning Sousa. What happened just now is proof of that.”

  “Yeah, that’s kind of my point.”

  “I don’t like your point.”

  “Where are you going? Thomas told us to change.”

  “I want to see Hugh.”

  They emerged onto the third floor, where the orchestra was having their first rehearsal. Even better than sharing her first regional theater job with Sunil, Isobel’s boyfriend Hugh Fremont had been hired as the show’s musical director. Isobel pushed open the door to the large studio with more force than she intended, and it slammed against the wall with a bang. Fortunately, the rehearsal was over and the musicians were packing up, filling the air with chatter. Hugh stood on a small podium, speaking to a trumpet player. Isobel liked observing him from afar. He was handsome in a bookish way, with wavy chestnut hair and green eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses. Perhaps because he was British, his gestures both on the podium and in life were elegant and restrained. He adored her, and even if she wasn’t quite as head over heels with him as he was with her, the sight of him calmed her.

  “Hugh could have done it,” Sunil said, jolting her out of her silent admiration.

  “Why would Hugh rig the masking?”

  “No, I mean he could have written a delightfully witty original score for this show instead of leaving us singing Jethro’s cringeworthy lyrics to recycled Sousa marches.”

  “You’re right.” Isobel flushed with girlfriendly pride as Hugh came toward them. “He’s a brilliant composer.”

  “Talking about me again, are you?” Hugh gave Isobel a kiss.

  “Actually, yes. We were agreeing that you should have written the score,” Sunil said.

  “Oh, I was joking,” Hugh said, flustered at having unintentionally paid himself a compliment.

  “Sunil’s right,” Isobel said. “You’d have written great music, not to mention superior lyrics.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve grown rather fond of ‘It’s time that I start my own band’ as an alternative to being kind to our web-footed friends,” he said with a mischievous grin.

  “Shhh!” Isobel giggled. “Jethro is right over there.”

  “Oh, yes, lucky me,” Hugh said. “He’s been running up and down between your rehearsal and mine, driving me absolutely bonkers with meaningless orchestration questions. Oh dear, now he’s tackled poor Woodiel.”

  Isobel and Sunil followed Hugh’s gaze. Jethro Hamilton was blocking the path to the coffeemaker, gesticulating wildly at the bewildered trumpeter. If Isobel hadn’t known better, she’d have pegged Jethro as one of those overgrown, socially awkward, unformed men of thirty-five who fritter their lives away in the family basement hacking the Minecraft servers of unsuspecting middle schoolers. In fact, Jethro was an adjunct history professor who had parlayed his lifelong obsession with John Philip Sousa into a musical. He had also self-published two historical mysteries and sang in a barbershop quartet called the Sundaes.

  Hugh gathered the pens and pencils scattered on his music stand and tucked them into his shirt pocket. “Let’s escape while we can.”

  They hurried out of the room and pulled up short in front of the stairwell.

  “Where to?” Isobel asked. “We’re only on a twenty, and we still have to change out of costume.”

  “We could run out to the 7-Eleven and get sandwiches,” Sunil suggested.

  “It’s too cold to go out,” Isobel protested. “Let’s just get a quick snack in the café.”

  They returned to the main floor, where the expansive seating area was occupied by quiet clusters of cast and crew. At the table nearest the door, Arden was chattering at top speed to Marissa Doyle, who doubled as Sousa’s stoic, German-born mother and his business partner’s litigious widow, Mrs. Blakely. Marissa was in her late twenties, roughly the same age as Arden, but her plump frame, frizzy hair, and belty alto had already relegated her to character roles. Isobel found Marissa funny and down-to-earth, but only when Arden wasn’t around. The two were housed together with Ezra and Chris in one of two condos provided for the out-of-towners, and they seemed to have struck up a friendship. Isobel was shrewd enough to realize that Marissa’s intermittent frostiness was a show of loyalty to Arden, but still, it upset her.

  “And then that little bitch pulled the whole damn thing down on me,” Arden finished breathlessly.

  Marissa had the grace to blush, but the trio couldn’t escape before Arden spotted them.

  “Speak of the devil,” she said waspishly.

  Before Isobel could frame a response, Sunil pulled her back and led the way toward the theater lobby.

  “Anyone want to tell me what that was all about?” Hugh asked.

  As they continued down the hall, Isobel filled him in on what had happened backstage.

  “That’s unfortunate,” Hugh said. “Arden is not untalented, but she’s hopelessly miscast. She probably knows as well as the rest of us that you would have been much better in the role.”

  “Then why didn’t I get it?” Isobel plopped sulkily onto an upholstered bench.

  “Darling, we’ve been over this. Felicity had to cast a union actor in the lead. That is absolutely, positively the only reason you didn’t get it. I was at the callbacks, remember? They all went nuts over you. Especially Jethro.”

  “He told me to look up photos of Jennie S
ousa online,” Isobel said. “He said I looked exactly like her, and he’s right. It’s a real resemblance. It’s not superficial.”

  “Look, Arden is the kind of person who’s going to feel threatened whether or not she has a reason,” Sunil said. “She probably thinks she lost Miss America because Miss South Carolina stole her butt glue.”

  Hugh laughed. “Butt glue?”

  “Yeah, it keeps their swimsuits in place,” Sunil said.

  “I’m not even going to ask how you know that,” Isobel said.

  “I dated a pageant girl in college,” Sunil explained. “I can also tell you about nipple covers, duct tape, and spoons. But I digress. My point is, all you can do is keep your head down and do your work.”

  “Ah! So now it’s okay that I’m taking my understudying obligations seriously?”

  “All I’m saying is that you should just do your job. No more, no less.”

  “He’s right. It never hurts to be discreet,” Hugh said. “Wait…spoons?”

  “Cold spoons on your eyes,” Sunil said in confidential tones. “Gets rid of the bags in no time.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis.

  Isobel gave an exasperated sigh and turned to Hugh. “How did your rehearsal go? Better than ours, I hope.”

  “Well, nobody got beaned by falling scenery. There were a few surprises in the parts, and as far as the drummer was concerned, time is a magazine. But all the cuts worked, which was what I was most concerned about. Oliver and I spent hours marking them all in, and we were so bleary by the end it wouldn’t have surprised me if they’d been a complete disaster.”

  “Too bad Oliver got stuck accompanying our tech rehearsal,” Isobel said, thinking of Hugh’s unfailingly eager assistant.

  “That’s all right. He’ll get to hear the orchestra at the dress tomorrow. You all will.”

  “Dress!” Isobel sprang to her feet. “We were supposed to change. Come on!”

  She planted a noisy kiss on the top of Hugh’s head and sprinted toward the stairwell, Sunil on her heels. In her dressing room, Isobel divested herself of her elaborate costume as quickly as she could and hung it on the rack next to her name card. Comfortable once more in jeans and one of Hugh’s sweaters, she returned to the theater feeling more sanguine. The anticipation of singing with the orchestra for the first time had jolted her out of her doldrums. So what if the show was terrible and she should really be playing the lead?

  Her script was lying open next to the seat she’d inhabited earlier. Isobel gasped and snatched it up.

  In crude block lettering, someone had scrawled, “Die, bitch!” with an arrow pointing to one of Jennie’s pink highlighted lines.

  THREE

  ISOBEL RIPPED THE OFFENDING page from her binder, crumpled it in her hand, and furiously thumbed through the rest of her script looking for more graffiti. Arden must have written it as a warning to back off learning her role. Isobel paused. But if that were the case, why not scribble across the whole page, totally defacing it? She uncrumpled the paper and examined it again. The arrow was pointing very precisely to the name Jennie, the point colliding with the J. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe whoever wrote it was trying to make it look like Isobel had it in for Arden. But who would go to that kind of trouble? And why?

  She looked around the theater. Cast and crew members were scattered around, both on and offstage. Breaks were determined according to Equity rules, which meant that the crew generally worked through them. Furthermore, some actors might have changed their costumes and returned more or less immediately to the house. Whoever had defaced Isobel’s script had done it brazenly, with plenty of witnesses. On the other hand, nobody would think twice about an actor or even a crew member picking up a script, and if the scribbler had been seated, he or she would have been well hidden from prying eyes.

  “Are we picking up where we left off or—” Sunil appeared at the end of the row, slightly out of breath, and caught the distress on her face. “What’s wrong?”

  She pulled down a seat for him and handed over the script page.

  He scanned it, his brow creasing in concern. “You have to show this to someone.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “Don’t you see? It looks like I wrote it about Arden.”

  He looked up. “What? No, it doesn’t. Why would you write ‘Die, bitch!’ in your own book?”

  “Shhh! Because she is a bitch.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t need to make a note to remind yourself. And you don’t actually want her to die.” He hesitated. “Right?”

  She smacked his arm. “Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t think someone is trying to make me look bad?”

  “I think you’re being paranoid. Someone is threatening you. Probably Arden. I mean, it’s your script.”

  “That was my first thought,” Isobel admitted. “If that’s the case, then it’s best to pretend I didn’t see it and act like nothing happened.”

  “I think you should show it to Kelly. She’s experienced and not easily ruffled. Not Heather. She strikes me as pretty green.”

  “I refuse to acknowledge Arden’s grandstanding by showing Kelly or anyone else. And what if we’re wrong and Arden didn’t write it, and I accidentally show it to the person who did?”

  “You’re reading way too much into this. You pissed off Arden when you pulled the masking down on her. You heard her in the café. Of course she wrote it.”

  Isobel sat up. “What if the masking wasn’t an accident? What if someone rigged it for me to bring down on Arden?”

  “How many times have you moved the masking aside for Arden?”

  “I’ve never had the opportunity before.”

  “Exactly. And it was sheer chance that you happened to do it today. Let’s say someone did loosen the ties on the masking on purpose. How could they predict it would be you who brought it down—and how could they know it would be on Arden?”

  “I guess you’re right,” Isobel said uncertainly. “You don’t think somebody is going out of his or her way to frame my conscientiousness as something more sinister?”

  “I think you’ve developed a tendency to infer malice aforethought because you solved a few mysteries last year. But you’re looking for meaning where there is none.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Isobel wasn’t convinced, but she stuffed the page into her pocket and put the matter out of her mind for the rest of the afternoon rehearsal.

  By the time the company broke for dinner, the general consensus was that things were moving more quickly than anticipated. Isobel, Sunil, and Hugh decided to splurge at a nearby Chinese restaurant. When they returned for the evening rehearsal, Isobel had a long stretch when she wasn’t needed onstage, so she joined Hugh in the pit to help him and Oliver touch up the few mistakes Hugh had identified in the orchestra parts that morning. Over the monitors, they heard Marissa and Chris rehearsing the scene where Mrs. Blakely threatens to ruin Sousa if he doesn’t pay royalties to her husband’s estate.

  “I need higher stakes from you both,” Ezra instructed them.

  “It’s a friggin’ tech rehearsal,” Chris said.

  “And you may as well use it to work on the scene. Which needs work,” Ezra snapped.

  “Ezra does not sound gruntled,” Hugh remarked.

  “It’s not their fault,” Isobel said, shaking a bottle of Wite-Out. “There are no stakes. Sure, they squabble over the band’s royalties, but it’s not exactly the stuff of great drama.”

  “Ezra is well aware,” Hugh said. “That’s why his only hope is to get them to commit one hundred and ten percent.”

  “It’s a losing battle.”

  “You know what’s a losing battle?” Oliver piped up. “Trying to get Jethro to fix the story. It’s not like John Philip Sousa’s going to see it and complain that the details of his life are wrong. If it isn’t dramatic, rewrite it. Change it. Add some tension, manufacture conflict. But don’t put the audience to sleep for the sake of historical acc
uracy.”

  “Hear, hear,” Hugh concurred.

  “And that’s exactly why screaming at Marissa and Chris isn’t going to help the scene. Or the show. It’s a fundamental flaw in the narrative.” Isobel screwed the top back on the Wite-Out. “This is empty.”

  Hugh yawned and pushed away the second trombone part he was working on. “I don’t know about you, but I could use a cuppa.”

  “There’s coffee in the green room,” Isobel said.

  Hugh gave her hand an affectionate squeeze. “A cuppa is only ever tea. And that’s what my sleepy British soul is craving. Hold the fort, Ollie, there’s a good chap.”

  “You know, he doesn’t always talk like Lord Grantham,” Isobel told Oliver. “Only when he’s making fun of himself.”

  She linked her arm through Hugh’s, and they exited the orchestra pit into the vom underneath the stage, so named for the vomitoria in Roman amphitheaters. Stairs on either side of the curving passage led to stage level and the wings, and offstage left, a second flight continued up to the dressing rooms and the green room. Despite the fact that every backstage lounge was called the green room, Isobel had yet to be in one that was actually painted green.

  Livingston Stage Company’s non-green room was empty at present, but the coffeepot on the sideboard was full. Isobel poured herself a cup as Hugh microwaved water for tea. Leaning against the counter, she felt the crumpled script page in her pocket and suppressed a fleeting impulse to show it to Hugh.

  “This isn’t ideal, you know,” he said, indicating the humming microwave. “As my Irish friend Niall says, ‘ye can’t make tea unless it’s bailin’.”

  “Two minutes on high isn’t close enough?”

  “No, and neither are you.” He pulled her toward him and kissed her. She melted at the warm softness of his mouth. “You’re not on for a while, right?” he murmured.

  “Mhm.”

  They maneuvered to the lumpy couch, a green room staple, and made themselves comfortable. The microwave beeped, but Hugh ignored it.

  They were interrupted by Sunil not long after. Isobel and Hugh sprang apart, grinning sheepishly.