Act One (What Doesn't Kill You Prequel): An Ensemble Mystery Novella Read online

  “Very,” Mickey said.

  Maggie half sobbed, half shouted, “Somebody stabbed Becky. She’s bleeding. Call an ambulance!”

  Laura nodded. “Finally we have a plot.”

  The audience tensed, silent, mesmerized. From stage right, the director in the gypsy getup ran toward the divan, followed by other cast members. They gathered around Maggie and the other actor.

  The director—Lizbeth, she’d said?—pulled a phone out of her pocket, punched some numbers, held it to her ear, and yelled, “There’s been a stabbing at the Bear Country Theater. Send an ambulance. Please hurry!”

  A twenty-ish guy knocked over a chair at the far side of the room. He was too far away for Laura to see him well, but she could hear him as he let out an inhuman wail then shouted, “Becky!” and ran toward center stage.

  Laura put a hand over her chest. How clever. They’d made the director part of the action, as well as planting an actor in the audience. The house lights came on. She joined in a roar of applause for the amazing end to Act One.

  Lizbeth turned to the audience, tears running down her face. “Is there a doctor in the house? Please help us!”

  Laura’s hand flew to her mouth.

  Maggie

  “Tell us again exactly what happened,” the police officer instructs Maggie.

  They’re packed into the lobby of the theater, with all the uptight lawyers, who’re bitching to anyone who will listen about their time being too important to waste. No one can leave until they give their statements. Maggie wants the hell out of there, too. She’s the one covered in Becky’s blood, after all. The girl’s wide-open eyes staring past her at nothing had creeped her out. She needs a shot of whiskey, bad.

  “I’ve already told you three times,” she says to Mr. Lawman.

  He drills her with a look. “Humor me.”

  Damn. He’s sexier than she’d realized, with intense black eyes and salt-and-pepper hair—and broad shoulders she could really hang onto.

  “Got a cigarette?” she asks, using her throaty voice.

  He reaches down near his feet and comes back up with a pack of Morleys. He holds one out to her.

  “Thanks. And a light?”

  He points at the cheesy candle on the table, still burning even though the house lights are all the way up. “That’s all I’ve got.”

  She holds the cigarette’s tip to the flame, irritated that he won’t have to get closer to her. When the cigarette catches, she puts it between her lips, sucking greedily. She puffs a few times then repeats her story again, blowing a smoke ring over Mr. Lawman’s shoulder when she’s done. He’s older than she normally goes for, but what the hell? She’d slept with some honcho at the label before they’d signed her. She can’t remember much about it other than he smelled like her grandfather, but it hadn’t been that bad.

  The officer writes something down on a notepad—his number, he wants to hook up after all—and speaks without looking at her. “All right, Miss Killian. Give your contact information to the officer at the door. We’ll be in touch if we need to talk to you again.”

  She waits for him to tear off the scrap of paper he’d written on and hand it to her, but he doesn’t.

  Her voice takes on an edge. “So, I’m free to go?”

  He nods, then his eyes bore into hers. “As long as you’re not driving.”

  His words are a slap. Your loss, Lawman, she thinks. She gives him a tight fuck-you smile and heads toward backstage.

  “Maggie,” he calls after her, using her first name for the only time in their interaction.

  She turns, a smile of victory creeping across her face. He’s into her after all. She’s going to rock his socks.

  “You need to give your contact information to the officer over there.” He speaks slowly, over-enunciating and pointing.

  Dickhead. “I’m going to get cleaned up first.”

  “Make it second.”

  She fights the urge to flip him the bird. Gritting her teeth and mumbling obscenities, she stalks toward a female officer who’s playing secretary. As she’s walking, she overhears another officer interviewing Randall, Becky’s boyfriend.

  The officer is asking him, “How was your relationship with Becky?”

  Randall says, “It was great. Normal. I love her. Loved her.”

  Maggie closes the gap between herself and Randall. “Now, Randall, it didn’t sound like that to me when you were yelling at her before the show about the roses she got from her new boyfriend.” She blows him a kiss.

  The officer raises an eyebrow. “Tell me about that, son.”

  Maggie leaves Randall sputtering and beelines for the secretary-slash-officer.

  “Maggie Killian,” she says, jutting out a hip and stabbing a fist on it, to give Mr. Lawman the best view of what he wouldn’t be hitting. Ever. Even if he begged.

  “Um—” the mousy woman says.

  Maggie raises an eyebrow. “Which part was confusing, Maggie or Killian? I can repeat it. S-l-o-w-l-y if that helps.”

  The woman’s cheeks flush. She looks behind Maggie, her eyes wide and questioning.

  “Whatever,” a man’s voice says.

  The officer scribbles down Maggie’s name, and then, as Maggie whispers them, her address and phone number. While she’s writing, Maggie steals a glance back at Officer Hottie, but he isn’t looking her way.

  “Ma’am?” the female officer says.

  Maggie doesn’t respond. And why would she? She’s no ma’am.

  “Ma’am.”

  Maggie continues to ignore the woman.

  “Um . . .” The officer looks down. She clears her throat. “Maggie?”

  “Yes?” Maggie tilts her head and smiles sweetly.

  “We have a long line of people to process. You can go now.”

  Maggie deigns a glance at the line. She’d cut in front of a bunch of lawyers? Fuckin’ A. Make them wait on her for a change, instead of the other way around. She hates the scum suckers. The lowlifes who can’t get people to stick to their contracts, to their commitments. She struts out, her heels clacking on the marble floor, thinking how much better it would have been if a lawyer got stabbed instead of a sweet girl like Becky who never did a thing to anyone.

  Emily

  Katie was drinking too much. She was doing her best to hide it, but I knew her well, and, like too often lately, I found myself in the role of enabler. My therapist had brought it up first, when I told her about my father going AWOL on me. She’d gently suggested that I couldn’t bring him back by making everything right all the time. I knew that, but it was a hard thing to shy away from. I cared about Katie, as a friend, and I wanted her to count on me, as my boss. She wasn’t my daddy. I also knew that. I would’ve traded her for him in a heartbeat, though.

  Katie spoke, and her voice was so loud I didn’t know whether to put my hands over my ears or her mouth. Plus, she was laughing like a schoolgirl at the crude jokes of some old law school friend. Evan, I thought she’d said. He was a greasy-haired jerk on top of being insufferably conceited, if you asked me. But Katie hadn’t asked me. Not that or anything else. She was barely acknowledging my presence now.

  Michele was giving her statement to the police, and I was counting the minutes until I could insist to Katie that we were leaving. At least they’d moved us away from the body and near some windows, where we could watch the rain. And where it didn’t reek of booze—unless you were standing near Katie.

  I studied her. Red and blue lights alternated on the side of her face, strobes from the ambulance outside. She was such a great lawyer and friend when she was sober. So beautiful. So smart. So talented. But so self-destructive. Her brother, Collin, and I were just about ready to ship her to rehab, even if she’d hate us both forever for it. But I was damned if I did, and damned if I didn’t, because Rich was none too happy about my conversations with Collin, yet I had no one else to talk to that cared about Katie like I did.

  “His feelings for you are not appropria
te toward a married woman,” Rich had told me.

  Notwithstanding that Rich spoke like he had a stick up his butt, he was probably right about Collin. I felt guilty as soon as I thought that, though. The stick-up-his-butt part. Rich was very good to me, and we had a nice life together. Even though he didn’t love horses, he’d suffered through my college rodeo career without complaint. He made it okay for me to spend hours on horseback every weekend, even now. He helped me—was still helping me—through the heartbreak of my dad abandoning me. He encouraged me to pursue being a paralegal, which had turned out to be the perfect career for me, since I’d married him instead of going to law school. And most important, he kept my mother at bay. I could forgive a lot for that alone.

  “Done,” Michele said at my shoulder, interrupting my thoughts.

  “Jealous,” I said. I hoped they’d get to me soon.

  The doors to the theater swung outward, and paramedics hustled through the lobby with a stretcher. Was it my imagination or did I smell something coppery and stale? Long hair spilled off one side of the stretcher, and a murmuring arose. I watched them exit through the glass double doors and didn’t look away until they’d loaded the stretcher into the ambulance at the curb.

  “All righty, then,” I said, after the vehicle’s sirens blasted through the air and it pulled away into the night.

  “Good night,” said the man Katie had introduced me to earlier.

  I waved. “Good night.” Katie didn’t seem to notice her friend leaving. I turned back to Michele. “Do they know who killed her?”

  “It seems like they suspect someone from the cast. They didn’t say so outright, but apparently someone in the audience”—she waved her arm around—“saw a person stab her, but whoever it is didn’t get a look at the face.”

  “A man or a woman? The killer, I mean.”

  “They don’t know. A cloaked figure. Very mysterious in a B-movie way. So they were asking me if I’d seen anyone suspicious.”

  “Did you?”

  “No.” She blew some hair off her forehead.

  “Me either.” Our table was by the door between the theater and the backstage area, so it seemed like we should have seen something. Then I remembered something odd. “You know how we had an empty chair by me at our table?”

  “Yeah?”

  “As we were leaving the table, I noticed an off-white tablecloth draped over the back of it. At least I thought it was a tablecloth. I assumed a theater employee accidentally left it there, like they’d noticed a stain when they were setting up the room or something. But I don’t think I saw it there when we first sat down.”

  Michele’s eyes widened. “You’ve definitely got to tell them about that.”

  “I will.” I shivered. “The killer could have been standing right behind me.”

  “That’s spooky,” Michele said.

  I lifted my braid off the back of my neck. It had gotten sticky hot in there. My hair was starting to come loose, and I tried to weave fallen strands back in, without much success.

  Katie barked out a sudden laugh. Michele and I turned to look at her. So did almost everyone in earshot. I wanted to throw my arms around her and hustle her away from their judgment. I stepped between her and the crowd.

  “Was she like this in law school?” I blurted.

  Michele turned sad brown eyes on me. “She was the life of the party.” Her words came out slowly. “But not like this. Is this normal now?”

  I started nodding, taking my time like Michele had. “It is.”

  “But it’s not affecting her work?” Michele’s voice had a hopeful sound to it.

  “Ummmm . . .” I sucked air in through the gap in my front teeth and looked at the ceiling. “I wouldn’t say that. She’s starting to come in later. She looks rough, and people have to notice. I’m worried about her.”

  Michele chewed the inside of her lip, then she reached out and grabbed me by both arms. “I’m so glad she has a friend like you. She’s always been a little fragile, but covered it up with her natural gifts, the things that make people think nothing could possibly be wrong. But she seems perpetually wounded. Inside.”

  Katie stepped away from Evan for a nanosecond. “Is the bar open? We’ve been here for-e-ver,” she said, drawing out the “ver.”

  Just then a tall harried-looking man with more teeth than chin walked to the front desk and raised a hand like he was asking our permission to speak. “Excuse me. The buffet is set up on the sidewalk under the awning for people that would care to box up dinner to go as they leave.” He bolted the second he finished speaking, his eyes downcast.

  There were groans that it was raining, intermingled with applause.

  “Something about witnessing a murder doesn’t make me very hungry,” I said.

  “I’m starving,” Katie announced.

  Well, I thought to myself, Lord knows she needs some food in that stomach.

  “Evan,” she said, tugging on his arm. “Want to come with me to get something to eat?”

  He grimaced. “Uh, no?” he said in a question.

  I liked him a little better, even if he was kind of a guido.

  She laughed and moved closer to him, tilting her head down and looking up at the same time. “Oh, come on.”

  He capitulated, his eyes glowing. I’d have to whisk Katie away before he got her to leave with him, no matter how mad it made her, because my friend, wounded or not, wasn’t the one-night-stand type. I couldn’t let her wake up to that tomorrow.

  Ava

  “The show will be suspended pending the investigation,” Lizbeth announces to no one in particular. Most of the cast is in earshot, though. Lizbeth wipes a tear from her eye. “Until they find out who did this to Becky.”

  Her words drop like bombs, and we’re already shell-shocked. People are hugging, some are crying, and most of them are trying to figure out what on God’s green earth just happened. None of us saw the killer—some psycho in a Ku Klux Klan sheet, from what I hear. I sure didn’t see him. It wigs me out that it could be anyone in here, except Maggie. And I can’t help but wonder if whoever killed Becky meant to get me, since she was filling in for me in my role.

  It takes a moment, but Lizbeth’s words finally sink in. Suspended pending investigation. The show. My income. That big, fat raise I would’ve been getting for stealing the lead role just turned into a hole in my pocketbook instead. A bigger hole, since somebody had cleaned out my checking account and charged up my cards, even opened new ones. Zach, for his new squeeze, skinny white bitch. I was sure of it. Who else could it be? I curse my luck and shuck the wig. My scalp itches from the cheap piece of shit. I start to pack up. I feel really bad for Becky, but I feel pretty bad for me, too.

  Just when I’m ready to leave, Ryan, Maggie’s boyfriend, if you can call him that, shows up. She glares at him and motions him to follow her into a wardrobe closet, like it’s her office or something. I slow down on purpose so I can listen. Within seconds, she’s yelling. Her words are muffled by the door, but it’s clear she’s chewing his ass out. The girl is a shrew. Her man, on the other hand, is fine. Blond hair, curly and a little too long in the back. Heavy-lidded blue eyes. Lips pink and fat that make me imagine biting into them. Worn-out boots and jeans. An ass made for squeezing. The gossip is that he’s a musician about to get his big break. I don’t follow the country scene, but I can see myself getting into whatever he does.

  The door bursts open and Maggie stomps out. Her man follows a few steps behind her, his face purple. He looks like he needs someone to help him through this difficult time, and Maggie’s not my friend. I may never even see her again after tonight, since the show’s dead in the water. Literally. Plus, I need someone to help me through a difficult time, too.

  I smile at him and let my eyelashes bat slowly. “You okay? Sound like she rip you a new one.” I lay my accent on him thick.

  He moves closer, shaking his head. “She can be such a bitch.”

  “Oh, sugar,” I purr. “Do
n’t I know it?” I slip my arm through his. Zach and whatever-her-name-is can eat their hearts out.

  Michele

  I navigated the downtown streets away from the theater. The rain had stopped, although in the distance the electricity still lit up the pitch-black sky. The drive back to the hotel was so short, I wished I’d walked—some air would have done me good after a night like the one I’d just had. I’d left a seething Katie in Emily’s custody by their car, after we’d wrested her away from Evan, which was harder than helping my veterinarian papa separate nursing calves from their mamas when I was younger. Katie had reminded us, loudly, that she was a grown woman and could make her own mistakes. Her long red hair had risen above her and undulated in the air, making her look like a drowned Medusa. Except that it really didn’t, and I knew she wasn’t. My overactive imagination was unsettling at times. But I saw what I saw.

  I sighed. I loved the Katie that had been my first-year roommate. But this Katie? The one who downed six glasses of wine in two hours? She sent my tension meter skyrocketing, and it had already been high enough. Coming to this reunion. A woman murdered before my eyes. Yeah, I was feeling a little stressed-out. Maybe that was the reason for seeing things that weren’t there.

  As I stopped for a red light, my cell phone rang. Sam, my sweet son, was with my almost-ex-husband, who wouldn’t call me even if Godzilla were stomping through downtown Houston. I knew without even looking that meant the caller had to be my mother. I picked up, but only because I knew she’d keep calling until I answered.

  “Michele?”

  I made a frowny face she couldn’t see. “Hi, Mom,” I said.

  “How was the reunion, dear?”

  I crossed my fingers. “Great.”

  “Are people asking you about your divorce?”

  Dios mio. I sighed. “No.” Because I wasn’t telling them. I was already enough of a failure for abandoning the practice of law to become an underpaid editing assistant at a tiny publishing company.