“That makes sense.” Mum nodded her agreement. “I want to go to the garden centre, so I’ll drop you off. You can bus to the theatre.”
“I’ll need some money,” I smiled hopefully.
Leaning back in her chair to reach the bench, Mum dragged her purse towards her, fishing out a $20 note which she handed over with the instructions to buy lunch as well and return the change. The problem of how Severn was filling in his day was solved by Grant, who emerged from his office looking grumpy.
“You’re good with computers,” he began, slapping his hand onto Severn’s shoulder in what looked like a gesture of friendship but actually stopped Severn from escaping. “I’ve got a problem I’d like you to look at.”
“That’s him lost for the next few hours,” Mum grinned. “Help me get these costumes washed and then we’ll go.”
With the two of us working together it didn’t take long to spray stain remover on two dozen make-up covered collars and throw them all into the washing machine. Then I quickly stuffed my maglight, black jeans and t-shirt into my backpack, grabbed my jacket and joined Mum in the car where I threw my backpack into the back seat, asking Mum to bring it into the theatre later.
“He’s quite mature for his age, isn’t he?” Mum mused as she pulled the car out of the driveway.
“Huh?” I did a bad imitation of not understanding her.
“Severn,” she smiled innocently. “He just seems a lot (she paused for dramatic effect) older (another pause to let the word sink in) than he looks.”
She knows! I am convinced the woman knows! How could she? Why is my mother so normal looking but so freaky weird? I mumbled something unintelligible then quickly changed the subject to what she was going to buy at the garden centre, feigning deep interest in the colour of pansies (which I recognised) and several other fancy named plants that meant nothing at all. Still, it passed the trip to Anita’s house without any further references to winged technicians.
“See you at the matinee,” I called over my shoulder as I ran up to Anita’s front door.
Going into Anita’s bedroom is like walking through a time tunnel back into your childhood. I like Anita a lot. She’s always cheerful, even when everything is going wrong – like our science experiments always do – but no-one could claim she was high in braincells. I don’t think she’ll ever grow out of her obsession for dolls and fluffy bunnies. Soft toys were everywhere, shelves of them lined the walls and about a hundred more jostled for space on her pink, frilly bedspread. She was even wearing bunny slippers with her jeans and a cute little pink top with diamante hearts stuck to it. But she wasn’t as naïve as she looked, as proved by the smutty comments she passed as we began to read through Tasha’s books.
Anita had the diary. The temptation had been too much and she had started reading it the night before, marking the best bits with pink Post-its so she could read them out loud to me. I was half listening to her while the other half of my brain was concentrating on her school exercise books. Tasha had been failing maths spectacularly. I picked up a folder, covered in a collage of film stars cut from magazines. It was labelled Theatre Arts. I flicked through the pages of photocopied notes the Dilly was so fond of handing out, searching for Tasha’s project notes. We were supposed to be using the show as our practical project, so we were supposed to be keeping a journal of our thoughts and experiences. Obviously mine had left out a great deal. I wanted to read what Tasha had to say. Maybe, amongst her thoughts on the show, was a clue.
I found it. Hand-written. On the bottom of an essay. Just a few words but as soon as I read them, thoughts started crashing into place in my head and suddenly everything made a whole heap of sense.
I must have been sitting staring at it for some time before Anita’s voice finally broke through the wild thoughts whirring madly around my brain.
“Earth calling Riley! Come in Riley!”
I shook my head.
“Sorry. I was miles away.” I pretended to look at my watch. “Oh, is that the time? I’ll have to fly.”
“What shall we do with this stuff? Her mother will have a fit!”
I thought carefully and fast. I had stopped listening to Anita’s reading of the diary but there could be something useful in it. Plus I wanted that essay.
“Why don’t we pack everything except the diary into a bag and you can take it to her mother. I’ll take the diary and give it to the police guy – in case there’s anything in there that might identify who killed her.”
Anita obviously hadn’t thought of that as a possibility and came over all dramatic. I sent her off to find a plastic bag and quickly stuffed the essay into my pocket while she was out of the room.
Now to go somewhere private where I could figure out what to do next.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
KFC won the vote as to which fast-food chain to have lunch at. I had left Anita’s much earlier than I had intended and I had plenty of time to bus home and have lunch there – with Severn. But more than his company, I needed to think through what I had read on the end of that essay. Was it possible? I needed to read the last few entries in the diary. I ordered some chicken then added another piece, plus chips, potato with gravy, a pepsi (up-sized to large) and a chocolate mousse, justifying it all to myself on the grounds that it was going to be a long day with two shows and one less crew member on the floor, then carried my laden tray to a table in the emptiest part of the room.
The diary was hot stuff. It was pretty rude in parts too. I know I had told that annoying jerk at the police station that she was my friend, but the more of the diary I read, the more I thought she deserved all she got. What a cow! If she had still been alive, I would have killed her myself. I read a few of the scathing comments about me, others in our class, me and Mum and Grant, the dancers in the chorus, me and Severn, then concentrated on the last few entries.
Things had certainly heated up between Tasha and Jason Broderick. The dancers hadn’t rehearsed at the same time as the actors, so she hadn’t met Jason until we hit the theatre. If you took her diary as gospel she had orchestrated a pretty determined campaign to catch him. (She had planned a little side mission to trap Severn just to annoy me, and right till the last entry she thought she was winning! Silly cow!) To anyone with half a brain it was easy to see that, rather than being the handsome hero of romantic fiction, Jason was just as cheap and easy as Tasha. I doubted if she was his only conquest and I presumed he picked up a new one every show.
I read the final two entries several times as I munched my way through chips dunked in gravied potato, compared it with the note on the end of the essay and began to plan. I needed to talk to Severn.
I think better on my feet so, clutching a chicken drumstick to eat as I walked, I wandered off in the general direction of the theatre. It was only four blocks away, across the Square, but I still had nearly half an hour to kill before the theatre would be open. I detoured through the mall, wandering aimlessly through clothing shops, cd stores and strange little gift shops, oblivious to what I was looking at, thinking furiously. I arrived at the stage door just as the mechanist was opening up.
“Out front today, are we?” he asked as he turned the key in the huge old padlock and dragged open the heavy door of the leading bay.
“Huh?”
He indicated my blue jeans with a wave of his hand.
“You’re not dressed to work. I thought you must be watching from out the front this afternoon.”
“Oh, no. Sorry.” I apologised for my lack of understanding. “I’ve been at a friend’s place. Mum’s bringing my blacks.”
“They haven’t caught up with him then?”
“Sorry? What?”
“Your friend. The young guy on the sound board. The one who disappeared. The police haven’t caught up with him yet?”
“Look!” I tried my best exasperated tone to cover my confusion. “Yes, I was visiting a friend. But obviously not whoever you think I was with. My friend’s name is A-ni-ta (I drag
ged it out slowly so he would get the point). She’s in my class. And if you must know, we were sorting out Tasha’s stuff from school to pass on to her mother!”
The last sentence shut him up. He mumbled an apology and disappeared off into the darkness of the empty theatre. I followed him inside, worrying about what he had said. If he assumed I knew where Severn was, then how long would it be before Seth and his team figured it out too. Or the police, for that matter.
How long? Not long enough. Seth before the show and the police when it finished.
The vampires arrived in a group, early as usual. What do you call a group of vampires anyway? A clutch? A horde? A swarm? In their case maybe a huddle. They walked through the scenery dock into the wings then stopped to form a tight circle. I couldn’t hear anything but it looked like they were getting some sort of pep talk from Seth. Then they broke off and started their presets with such determination that I could only assume they were trying to keep busy to avoid talking to anyone outside their group. None of them looked very happy. Except the Reverend, who have me a wink and a wry grin as he passed on his way to do his pre-show checks.
It suited me fine if they didn’t want to talk to any of us – I certainly didn’t want to talk to them. Well, not to Seth or the girls anyway. So when I went around behind the backcloth to go to the other side of the stage, the last thing I was expecting was for Seth to be waiting for me. I know my heart missed a beat when he stepped out from beside the rain truck and clamped his hand on my shoulder.
“Where’s Severn?” he growled.
Sometimes my brain reacts surprisingly fast. In a split second it registered a desire to scream, then a desire to blurt out some dumb reply like “I don’t know”, then it calmed down completely and I knew exactly how to deal with Seth Borman. I stopped dead in my tracks and spoke in the calmest, lowest, most determined voice I could muster.
“Take your hand off me!”
His fingers tightened their grip on my shoulder.
“Where is he?” he growled again.
“Take your hand off me,” I repeated, just as determinedly. “The police are wondering what Tasha was doing on the flyfloor with no knickers on, and who she was doing it with. If you don’t remove hour hand right now, I will scream very loudly, then I will say that you attacked me. Can you afford a night in the police cells, Mr Borman?”
Seth shoved me away from him and stormed off, muttering obscenities. I wanted to sit down and shake for a bit but opted instead for heading as fast as I could in the other direction, back to Mum’s dressing room where I stayed until she turned up with my bag of stage blacks. By the time I had changed my clothes, most of the cast and crew had arrived and I knew Seth would be safely away in the flys dropping in cloths and flats for the opening scene.
It was a typical matinee performance – so flat I heard the stage manager asking lighting if there really were any people in the audience and, if so, were they actually alive?
The police filed in as the audience were filing out. Detective Ugly Blue Tie spotted me straight away and headed me off as I tried to make my escape. Today the tie was an explosion of orange and green – perhaps he was colourblind.
“Miss Lowe!” He stepped in front of me to block my path. “You were supposed to present yourself at the station to make an official statement!”
Present myself? I had a wicked mental picture of me, in Christmas wrapping paper with a huge pink bow, curtseying to the Queen.
“Oops, was I? Sorry.”
“It is important, you know. I was hoping you would co-operate.”
“Yeah, well, like I said, I didn’t realise. Sorry. Anyway, I am co-operating – I’ve got something in my bag I was going to give to you guys.”
Detective Annoying Pen Tapper didn’t say anything. He just cocked his head to one side like a demented parrot and raised one eyebrow.
“I’ll go and get it,” I said, sidestepping him as I spoke. I dashed for the dressing rooms, returning a few minutes later to thrust Tasha’s diary into his hand.
‘It’s her diary,” I explained.
“May I ask where you got it?” he replied coldly.
“It was in her school stuff. My friend, Anita, collected Tasha’s stuff from her locker to give back to her mum, but we thought you might want to see this, in case there’s anything useful in it.” I was trying to sound helpful; gritting my teeth and forcing myself to smile.
“Is there?”
“Pass.”
“Oh come now, Miss Lowe,” he wasn’t even attempting to hide his disbelief, “are you telling me you haven’t read it?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you,” I replied in as frosty a tone as I could manage. “I was only given it this morning – on my way here – and I have been too busy. As a matter of fact,” I was getting into the swing of this untruth now, maybe I can act, “I was going to read it between the shows, but then I didn’t expect you to turn up. Now you have, so you get the diary and I don’t get to read it.” He didn’t need to know that I had already read it cover to cover, and several bits more than once. I smiled sweetly and turned to leave.
“The station, Miss Lowe! Statement! Tomorrow!” Detective Starched Underpants snapped to my retreating backside.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
The cop had put me in a bad mood, so I decided to work it off. I was half way across the stage, pushing red feathers with the oversized stage broom, when I realised that he had irritated me so much about the diary, I had completely forgotten to tell him about the note. Oh well! Serves him right, poncey git!
The note got me thinking. I started making a mental list of the things I knew, ticking them off in my mind in time to my rhythmic sweeps with the broom.
One. Tasha had come back to the theatre, after it was supposedly locked up.
Two. She had got in through the fire door, which she, or someone else, had fixed for exactly that purpose.
Why?
Three. She had come here to meet someone, by invitation. They had written her a note asking her to come. No, not asking – telling! It wasn’t a question, it was a command – a promise?
Why? And how did it fit with what I had read on the bottom of her theatre studies assignment?
Four. Why was easy - sex! She had come prepared. No knickers. Think! That proves there was someone else involved, and it had to be a man. If she had just come backstage to nose around or to play some kind of prank, she’d have been wearing trousers. A short skirt and no knickers definitely meant a meeting with a male.
Five. If the only person who was missing from the show, apart from Tasha, namely Severn, was not the guilty party, then the person who invited her must still be around, attending the shows and carrying on as normal. Normal? Half of them are vampires! What’s normal about that?
And why in the fly tower, if it wasn’t Seth Borman?
Six. Oh stuff six! Food! I stored the broom back in the wings and headed to Mum’s dressing room.
“We’re doing Chinese take-aways,” Mum called out cheerily from behind a layer of cleansing lotion before I had barely entered the tiny room and well before I had said anything. Creepy!
“Sounds good. Where are you going for it?” I replied.
“Ah! That’s the catch,” Mum laughed. She rubbed her face vigorously with a paper tissue, screwed it up and threw it at the rubbish bin. “I was hoping to persuade you to go for it.”
“Ah!” I replied, playing the game. I thought for a bit. ”Ok. I can do with a walk. “What do you want?”
As usual in any attempt to talk me into running messages, Mum was well prepared. She simply smiled and handed me a $50 note, a list and a small jute carry bag.
“It’s all on there,” she smiled again.
Realising I had been truly conned into providing food for half the company, I gave in gracefully, took the bag, the list and the money, and set off out of the theatre, notes and knickerless dancers forgotten in favour of important thoughts like beef and black bean sauce or lemon
chicken? Wontons or no wontons? Important stuff. Vampires were the last thing on my mind, so I jumped about a mile when one materialised beside me. I keep forgetting how quietly they move.
“Sorry,” the Reverend apologised as he saw me jump.
Shoving the change from the $50 angrily into the pocket of my jeans, I spun away from the shop counter, intending to bite the Reverend’s batty little head off. Then I had a better idea. Throwing my arms around him, I enveloped him a bear hug, pulling him tightly towards me in what, to the other customers in the take-away, must have looked like a reunion of long-lost lovers.
“David, sweetie, darling,” I crushed him close so I could whisper in his ear, “We need to talk.” Then, raising my voice back to its normal level, I dragged him to a seat in the corner and forced him to sit down. “Sugar gliders,” I announced happily, knowing I wasn’t making much sense, at least to the Reverend. “I used to go to the Sydney zoo all the time to watch them. You remind me of them, you know. They fly. On little tiny wings. Like little bats.” I smiled knowingly. ‘How’s the lighting?” I appeared to rapidly change the subject, “Had any more trouble with the right-hand lavenders on the front bar?” I smiled again. The Reverend winced. He got my point. I continued to smile. “Oh, sorry, got to go, my order’s ready. Gotta fly.” I grabbed the containers of take-away foods, stuffed them into my carry bag and exited the shop as dramatically as I could, waving theatrically to the Reverend as if I was heading out to conquer a new land and not just trot back down Gloucester Street to the theatre.
I was back in the theatre and halfway through the scenery dock when he caught up with me.
“Fair swap,” he suggested, plunging his hand into my carry bag without waiting for my reply. “Black Forest chocolate for a couple of wontons?”
I slapped him away then conceded. “Ok, but only a couple.” I opened the bag and he took one, popping it into his mouth before handing me in turn a chunk of chocolate wrapped in a piece of paper that had obviously been recently ripped off the fish and chips he was carrying in his other hand.
Blood in the Wings Page 10