Murder & Sullivan Read online

  Over deep-dish pepperoni and surprisingly fresh salad she and Fred compared his tornado in the station house to hers in the creek bed.

  “I don’t know what we’d have done if it hadn’t been so dry for the past month.”

  He nodded. “It could have been worse. Compared to Martinsville, Oliver got off lucky.”

  Henry Putnam didn’t, she thought. And they moved on to more cheerful topics.

  Strolling down Main Street afterwards to pick up her viola—hardly limping at all—she thought, here I am, hand in hand with a handsome fellow after going out for pizza. I feel like a college kid.

  A horn from a car full of cruising teenagers made her jump, and a kid yelled, “Hey, Grandpa!” The others laughed. Joan looked for the doddering old man, but saw no one. Then the boy yelled again, “Hey, Grandma!” And suddenly it hit her. They mean us! They think we’re ancient—and I guess to them we are.

  Fred, whose ears had turned red, said, “I’ll show them Grandpa! Come here, woman!” He grabbed her around the waist, bent her backwards, and bussed her solidly. It was like being kissed by Clark Gable, only with sweet breath.

  “Fred!” she cried and he did it again, but gently this time, omitting the calisthenics and caressing the sensitive corners of her mouth. She put one hand up to his temple, wrapped the other around his neck, and kissed him back.

  The kids whooped and the horns blared, but she no longer noticed.

  8

  I don’t believe you know what jealousy is! I don’t believe you know how it eats into a man’s heart—and disorders his digestion—and turns his interior into boiling lead. Oh, you are a heartless jade to trifle with the delicate organization of the human interior!

  —WILFRED, The Yeomen of the Guard

  The pit was still in the basement when Joan approached it from the auditorium, her mind on Fred, not on Duane Biggy’s new rules. She leaned over the railing and called down to John Hocking.

  “How do I get down there?”

  He stood in the pit and pointed his bow to show her. “Go out up there where it says Stage Door. Take the stairs on your left. You can leave your case in the women’s dressing room.”

  “Thanks.” Duane probably said all that the other night, but darned if I remember. I did well to show up tonight.

  She descended the steep stairs cautiously, feeling her ankle again, found the dressing room, and cleared a spot for her case among piles of costumes and street clothes. Good pickings for a thief, she thought, and shook her head at unguarded purses while rubbing rosin on her bow. Grateful not to have to go onstage in costume, she hung her bag firmly on her shoulder before heading for the open door to the back of the pit. She squeezed between the woodwinds and past the cellos to her seat near the front edge, next to John.

  No sooner was she seated than someone yelled, “Keep your hands in!” The door closed and the pit vibrated and moved upwards. It felt more like a minor earthquake than an elevator, and Joan wasn’t surprised to see the irrepressible John ignore the warning and touch the wall sliding ever so slowly past them. She had yearned to do the same thing years ago, when her parents had taken her and her little brother to Chicago and they’d gone down into the old coal mine in the Museum of Science and Industry. That elevator had been just as creaky and slow as this one, but the walls had sped past to give the illusion of rapid descent into the bowels of the earth. Here there was no such illusion.

  At last they stopped, slightly below the level of the orchestra seats in the audience. Tonight, for dress rehearsal, the curtains were closed as they would be tomorrow before the performance. For a moment Joan felt jittery about the few tricky bits in the music. Then Alex raised her baton for the first upbeat. Too late now, Joan thought, and dug in.

  Tonight’s disasters were minor. No one tripped, no one forgot lines, and the orchestra and singers hit most of the same notes at the same time. The bridesmaids shrieked and ran most convincingly from Sir Despard Murgatroyd—Duane Biggy’s coaching had worked well in that scene. He stopped the rehearsal only once, to banish a few overeager choristers from the wings to the lower regions of the theater.

  “I told you last night!” he bellowed. “No one—and that means you—is allowed in the wings unless you’re going onstage in that scene. Out in the audience they’ll hear every little whisper.” He came downstage. “That means you down there in the orchestra, too, even though you can’t leave. I can hear what you’re saying all the way up here. Unless you’re blowing a horn, keep your mouths shut!” He turned his back on them.

  “Yes, your majesty,” John muttered. Biggy whirled on the pit.

  “I heard that! Who said that?” His eyes raced from one player to another, and Joan felt like an innocent schoolchild accused of something unthinkable. Cold perspiration trickled down her neck and under her arms. She wiped her chin rest and carefully avoided looking at John, who sat beside her like a stone. For a long minute Biggy stared down at them, while the singers behind him rolled their eyes.

  “All right, Duane,” Alex said calmly. “We get your point. Let’s get on with it—we don’t want to be here all night.” Joan blessed Alex for demonstrating more common sense with him than she sometimes did with the symphony.

  At last Biggy shrugged. Looking daggers back at them, he slowly left the stage, and they finished the first act.

  By the time the pit was lowered for a break and she escaped from its tight quarters, Joan found the couples already pairing off downstairs. She felt for Liz MacDonald, whose crush on David was even more painfully obvious tonight than it had been the night before, and just as matter-of-factly ignored. Tonight, though, the towhead ghost Liz was rebuffing again would not take no for an answer, and the dynamics had gone from piano to mezzo forte.

  “Liz, let the man be!”

  “You just butt out, Chris Eads. What I do is no longer any of your business.”

  “It’s my business if you make a fool of yourself. He don’t even want you, and I do!”

  “It’s too late now. We’re divorced.”

  “And whose fault is that!” He stared tight-lipped at David.

  “You know whose fault it was.”

  “Let me make it up to you, Liz. I’ll be a better husband this time.”

  “Run along, Chris. You had your chance.” Liz turned her back on him. Chris clenched his fist, but put it in his pocket.

  Joan turned away. The whole exchange was too painful.

  The orchestra members hadn’t wasted words on Biggy’s explosion. Joan figured they were inured to it by Alex’s frequent outbursts—almost all were members of the Oliver Civic Symphony. But she wasn’t surprised to find choristers complaining while they sweated in the hot dressing room. Standing with a gaggle of girls in line for the all-too-scarce toilets, she heard a high young voice float out of a bilious green stall.

  “I don’t know who he thinks he is! And the other night he was, like, so rude to Amy’s father! What did your dad say, Amy?”

  “Not much.” In line ahead of Joan, red was rising in the already made-up cheeks of a blonde bridesmaid Joan recognized belatedly as Amy Putnam, Laura’s big sister, but Amy sounded calmer than she looked.

  “Well, my dad would be furious!” said the closeted voice. “He’d probably stomp out and never come back.”

  The stall door opened, and Amy swapped places with a girl about her age who set to repairing her eyeliner without bothering to wash her hands.

  “Dad’s pretty cool,” came Amy’s voice from inside the stall. “Compared to the characters he gets in court, Biggy’s nothing.”

  “I guess not.” The other girl made a face at herself and then giggled. “Biggy’s not as big as he thinks, is he?”

  “Not as big as my dad,” Amy said, and flushed the toilet. Joan entered the next cubicle before Amy emerged. You’re lucky in your father, Amy, she thought. But then, so were my two—I only wish they could have had him longer.

  Andrew had loved Ken, but Rebecca had idolized him and clung to his
memory. For years after his death she had turned a stony face toward any man who so much as looked at her mother, but she had warmed up to Fred. Or was that wishful thinking?

  When she went back for her viola, Amy was gone, but the lower hall was still crowded. She was stuck in a traffic jam of singers keeping out of Biggy’s way and ghosts hurrying to get up onto the stage and into their frames. She pushed carefully, not wanting to risk viola or bow, and tried saying “Excuse me,” but no one seemed to notice. Certainly no one yielded.

  Great. All I don’t need is to be late for the pit to rise. I hope they’ll at least wait for me—I can just imagine what Duane Biggy would do if I tried to climb down from the stage after the pit was up. How did I get myself into this, anyway?

  Virgil Shoals and David Putnam pushed through the crowd toward her as they headed for the stairs behind her. David wore Sir Roderic’s black frock coat, with a gray waistcoat and trousers. His collar was turned down over a loosely knotted tie. Very becoming.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” David was saying. “I understand what you’re up against.”

  “I didn’t do the work,” Virgil began.

  “But the other guy’s shoddy execution makes you look as bad as if you had,” David finished for him. “You can’t let him get away with it. That kind of thing will ruin your reputation.”

  Joan was shocked. The man who sent Zach Yoder to her knocking him behind his back? What had happened to David’s protestations of last night?

  “Excuse me!” she said loudly. Over several heads, David spotted her.

  “Make way for the orchestra!” he sang out good-naturedly. “Let this woman through—she’s about to miss her pit.” The crowd parted magically, and Joan saw a clear path to the door. Still indignant, she thanked the people who let her by, but couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge David’s making them move.

  “Boy,” she said to John, as the pit rattled upwards again. “You think you know someone.”

  He cocked his head at her.

  “Trouble?”

  “I’m just disappointed in someone.”

  “Sorry to hear it. You sure were glowing when you came in tonight.”

  Had it been that obvious? She started to answer—what? What if Fred, too, turned out not to be what she thought? The elevator stopped, saving her from the need to reply, and Biggy’s silence reigned until Alex got the signal to begin. Then the music—even the filler notes the violas spent so much of their time playing—commanded her concentration and put thoughts of men in a back corner of her mind while she counted rests and repeats.

  9

  Alas, poor ghost!

  —ROBIN, Ruddigore

  The advantage to playing viola, Joan thought, beyond the deep, lovely tone of the instrument itself, was that most of the time she could manage the notes. The advantage to playing in an orchestra was that she never had to manage them alone. Comfortable with the knowledge that she would never achieve perfection, she seldom suffered from preperformance jitters.

  On opening night, though, she wasn’t surprised to see plenty of jitters in the cramped dressing room. Most of the teenagers in the chorus couldn’t stop chattering as they squeezed into what looked like miserably hot costumes and slathered on greasepaint under the supervision of Esther Ooley. Joan had dressed at home in her coolest black cotton skirt and scoop-necked shirt. Long black was the uniform for every orchestra she’d ever played in, and she chose comfort over formality every time.

  A few of the older chorus members and most of the women principals, who didn’t have individual dressing rooms, kept to themselves and scarcely responded to greetings. Catherine Turner was one of them. Even though Fred had broken up with her almost two years ago, Joan was relieved not to have to decide whether to speak to her.

  In the pit, wind players were practicing solos or just blowing warm air into their instruments, and string players were running over passages with tricky fingerings and string crossings. Some were truly warming up; others were skittering panicky bows across strings instead of pulling tone out of their instruments.

  Inhale that, and you’ll be sorry, Joan told herself. With more than half an hour to curtain, she gave herself permission to climb the stairs and wander backstage, as much to avoid the tension as to escape the heat and stretch her legs.

  Things looked different back here. The frames for the ghostly portraits in Act Two were clustered together behind the backdrop for Act One. She couldn’t tell how they had been modified since David’s disaster—was it only two nights ago? They were the only sturdy things in sight. Up close, the stone walls for the castle in Act II and Rose Maybud’s cottage in Act I revealed themselves as insubstantial fakes. The trees were flimsy cutouts, and even the fishing nets of the seaside village had been painted onto the scenery. Knowing that real walls and nets would have been impractical and added nothing to the operetta, she nevertheless felt vaguely cheated.

  A faint buzz was rising from the early comers. She resisted the temptation to peek around the curtain to look for Fred, who was due to attend opening night if no emergencies kept him away. He wasn’t likely to waste time sitting there early, though.

  “I’ll get there eventually,” he’d promised, and she was sure he would. Solid, reliable, that was Fred. But not what you’d call predictable. She grinned, remembering.

  She meandered back to the dressing room, tuned her instrument to her tuning fork’s 440 A in relative quiet, and slipped into the pit in plenty of time. She felt in her handbag for the set of well-broken-in strings she always carried in case of emergency. They mattered here more than usual, as there was no way to escape from the pit to change a broken string, or time for a new one to stay in tune.

  The concertmaster stood and pointed to the oboe to sound the A, first for the woodwinds, then for the brasses, and finally for the strings. Joan checked her tuning softly and waited in the hush that followed. Then Alex entered the pit, the lights dimmed, and they rode up to applause that sounded as if more than a few out-of-towners had driven to little Oliver for some summer fun. Alex bowed to the audience, turned, and began the overture, this time for real. It went well. Then the curtain rose.

  With an audience things were different, and not just because there was no chance to start over again if something went wrong. The first laughter rolling out of the darkness (at Rose Maybud’s gifts: “a set of false teeth for pretty little Ruth Rowbottom, and a pound of snuff for the poor orphan girl on the hill”) perked up the members of the cast, who were soon performing their best by far since the orchestra had begun rehearsing with them. So, for that matter, was the orchestra.

  From time to time, when something went particularly well, Joan and John grinned at each other. At the end of the first act, even Alex applauded the orchestra before leaving the pit. Not inclined to move, Joan relaxed in her chair and looked up at the faces peering down at them over the railing. And there was Fred. He jerked his head toward the stairs. Well, all right. She loosened her bow and laid it on the stand, but tucked her viola under her arm, unlike John and several violinists, who had left their instruments trustingly on their chairs.

  If I did that, I’d sit on it, sure as anything.

  Fred met her at the top of the stairs. She thought he looked tired.

  “It’s going well,” he said.

  “We’re not too loud?”

  “No, the balance is fine.”

  “That’s good. I’m really impressed by some of the singers. I’d hate it if we drowned them out.”

  He nodded. “The program says Judge Putnam is in the cast. I didn’t recognize him.”

  “David’s a ghost in the second act.”

  “David, is it?” Deadpan. “You theater types get chummy awful fast.”

  Joan wouldn’t bite. “It was the Putnam’s little girl I spent the tornado with.” Looking out at the audience, she spotted Laura’s blonde head, second row center. It didn’t reach the top of her seat. “Fred, they let her come. Look—she’s down front with her big b
rother. Still awake, too.”

  He smothered a yawn. “Sorry. Long day.”

  “See you afterward?”

  “Sure.” He smiled. “You’d better scoot.”

  She ran back down and made it through the doors after everyone had already been seated. She threaded her way through winds and cellos to her seat just in time for the pit to rumble stageward, only to wait interminably before Alex got the signal to begin conducting and the curtain finally went up on Act Two.

  “Hurry up and wait,” John murmured. “Just like the army.”

  The second act began smoothly enough. But ten minutes later, while the orchestra played an interlude and the stage darkened briefly before the ghosts’ scene, a peculiar look on Alex’s face told Joan that something must be wrong onstage. Funny, though—the audience wasn’t responding or laughing, as you would expect them to at a major goof. It must not be that obvious.

  She marked time while the ghostly portraits came down out of their frames for their slow march. Then she played in unison with their eerie chorus:

  Baronet of Ruddigore,

  Last of our accursed line,

  Down upon the oaken floor—

  Down upon those knees of thine.

  * * *

  John, who could see the stage out of the corner of his eye, even while playing, whispered during a rest, “He’s done it again.” He could mean only one thing—David had fallen asleep.

  Now what? Joan wondered, while shifting positions to negotiate moving octave sixteenths with as few string crossings as possible. Duane Biggy can’t go over and yell at him in the middle of a performance.

  The answer turned out to be simple. A voice Joan didn’t recognize sang David’s “Beware! beware! beware!” It had to be one of the ghosts already onstage.

  That ought to wake him, she thought. And the audience won’t know that he should have sung it—well, most of them won’t.

  But David didn’t climb down from his frame. Instead, his understudy stepped seamlessly into the role of Sir Roderic. The voice sang,