If We Were Villains

by M. L. Rio

  But as we were moving cautiously into the shortest calendrical month, our comfort was mostly my responsibility.

  Cleaning the Castle had become my primary occupation outside of classes, rehearsals, and homework. My custodial schedule was irregular, determined largely by when I had a free hour and nobody else was in the building. These coincidental opportunities were few and far between, and I was forced to seize them whenever they arrived, regardless of how tired I was. The second day of February found me on my hands and knees in the library, finally doing what I had put off for weeks and thoroughly cleaning out the fireplace.

  The remains of a few logs rested in the grate like a pile of blackened bones. I lifted them delicately for fear they would crumble and leave streaks of soot on the carpet, and deposited them one by one in the paper sack I had appropriated for the purpose. Despite the persistent winter chill I was sweating, fat salty beads falling from my forehead onto the hearth. When the logs were all safely stowed in their bag, I reached for a dustpan and brush and started on the pile of ash, which had built up like a mountain against the back of the chimney. As I swept, I muttered Edgar’s lines under my breath:

  “Who alone suffers suffers most i’ the mind,

  Leaving free things and happy shows behind:

  But then the mind much sufferance doth o’er skip,

  When grief hath mates, and bearing fellowship.”

  Unable to remember the following line, I stopped and sat back on my heels. What next? I had no idea, and so crawled farther into the fireplace, beginning the speech again as I resumed my sweeping. The densest mound of ash collapsed under my brush, but as I pulled it forward, something dragged beneath the bristles. A long twisted line, like a snakeskin, had appeared on the floor of the fireplace. Fabric.

  It was nothing more than a scrap, five inches long and two inches wide, curling in at the edges. One end was heavier, double-stitched—a shirt collar, maybe, or the seam of a sleeve. I bent my head low over it and blew gently, so a few little puffs of ash whirled up. It had been white once, but it was badly singed and badly stained with something dark deep red, like wine. I stared at it for a moment in consternation, then froze where I was kneeling on the hearth—so horror-struck I didn’t hear the door downstairs. But the footsteps in the stairwell grew louder as they ascended, and I came back to life with a jolt, seized the insidious thing off the floor and stuffed it into my pocket. I grabbed the dustpan and brush and jumped to my feet with one held at each side, like sword and shield.

  I was still standing in this rigid, ridiculous way when Colborne appeared in the doorway. His eyes barely widened, quickly adjusted from surprise at my presence to recognition. “Oliver.”

  “Detective Colborne,” I said, clumsy and cotton-mouthed.

  He pointed into the room. “May I come in?”

  “If you want to.”

  He slid his hands into the pockets of his jeans. His badge glinted on one hip, and the butt of a handgun bulged under the hem of his coat on the other. I deposited the brush and pan in the closest chair, waiting for him to speak.

  “Aren’t you usually in rehearsal this time of day?” he asked, tugging the curtains apart in order to peer out the window, toward the lake.

  “I’m not called for combat until five.” I rummaged through my mental archives for one of Gwendolyn’s breath control routines, hoping to clear my head.

  He nodded and gave me a quizzical smile. “And what exactly are you doing? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “Cleaning.” I counted four beats to breathe in.

  His mouth twitched, as if there were a genuine smile hiding under the superficial one. “I never thought Dellecher students the sort who did their own cleaning.”

  “We don’t, usually. I’m on scholarship.” Five beats to breathe out.

  He chuckled, like he couldn’t quite believe it. “So they’ve got you cleaning this place?”

  “Among other things.” My pulse began to slow. “I don’t mind.”

  “You’re from Ohio, is that right?”

  “You’ve got a good memory. Or have you got a file on me somewhere?”

  “Both, maybe.”

  “Should I be nervous?” I asked, but I felt markedly less so. Colborne was a more discerning audience than I was used to, but an audience nonetheless.

  “Well, you’d know that better than I would.”

  We stared at each other. He still had that two-layer smile on, and it occurred to me that under any other circumstances I would have liked him.

  “Hard not to be nervous when the police are in and out of your house so often,” I said, without thinking. He didn’t know I’d overheard his conversation with Walton a month before. If he noticed my blunder, he didn’t let on.

  “Fair enough.” He glanced out the window once more, then crossed the room and sat down on the couch in front of me. “You all read a lot, or are these just for decoration?” He pointed at the nearest bookshelf.

  “We read.”

  “You read anything besides Shakespeare?”

  “Sure. Shakespeare doesn’t exist in a vacuum.”

  “How so?”

  I couldn’t tell if he was truly interested or if it was some kind of ploy.

  “Well, take Caesar,” I said, unsure what sort of incriminating information he might hope to get from the question. “Ostensibly it’s all about the fall of the Roman Republic, but it’s also all about the politics of early modern England. In the first scene, the tribunes and the revelers talk about trades and holidays like it’s London in 1599, even though it’s supposed to be 44 BC. There are a few anachronisms—like the clock in Act II—but for the most part it works both ways.”

  “Clever man,” Colborne said, after a moment’s consideration. “You know, I remember reading Caesar in school. They never told us any of that, just dragged us through it. I must have been about fifteen and I thought I was being punished for something.”

  “Anything can feel like punishment if it’s taught poorly.”

  “True. I guess I’m just wondering what makes a kid about that age decide to devote his whole life to Shakespeare.”

  “Are you asking me?”

  “Yeah. I’m intrigued.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. It was easier to keep talking than to stop. “I got hooked early. The high school needed a kid for Henry V when I was about eleven, so my English teacher took me to the audition—she thought it might make me less shy, I guess—and somehow I wound up onstage with all these boys with swords and armor, who were all twice my size. And there I was, shouting, ‘As young as I am, I have observed these three swashers,’ just hoping people would hear me. I was terrified until opening night, but after that it was all I wanted to do. It’s a kind of addiction.”

  He was silent for a moment, then asked, “Does it make you happy?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Does it make you happy?”

  I opened my mouth to respond—yes seemed the only possible answer—but then I closed it again, uncertain. I cleared my throat and spoke more cautiously. “I won’t pretend it’s not difficult. We’re always working and we don’t sleep much and it’s hard to have normal friendships outside of our sphere, but it’s worth it just for the rush we get, being onstage and speaking Shakespeare’s words. It’s like we’re not really alive until then, and then everything just lights up and the bad stuff disappears and we don’t want to be anywhere else.”

  He sat inhumanly still, keen gray eyes fixed on mine. “You paint a very good picture of addiction.”

  I tried to backtrack. “It sounds overdramatic, but that’s just how we’re wired. It’s how we feel everything.”

  “Fascinating.” Colborne watched me, his fingers laced between his knees, the pose casual but every muscle in his body taut with expectation. The ticking of the mantel clock was enormously loud, beating directly against my eardrums. The scrap from the fireplace felt like a ball of lead in my pocket.

  “So,” I continued, anxious to c
hange the subject, divert it away from what I had just said. “What brings you back down here?”

  He leaned back, more relaxed. “Sometimes I get curious.”

  “About what?”

  “About Richard,” he said, and it was jarring to hear him say it so easily, the name we all avoided like a curse word, something even more profane than the oaths and obscenities we used so liberally. “Don’t you?”

  “Mostly I try not to think about it.”

  Colborne’s eyes flicked from my feet to my face and back. An evaluative look. Measuring the depth of my honesty. “I can’t help but wonder what happened that night,” he said, one hand drumming idly on the arm of the sofa. “Everyone seems to remember it differently.” There was a subtle, cloying challenge in his voice. Answer if you dare.

  “Everyone experienced it differently, I think.” My own voice was cool and flat, my nerves settled again by the fact that he’d given me a part to play, and as a casting director he was no more imaginative than Gwendolyn. I was peripheral, a bystander, an unwilling witness who just might be won over. “It’s like watching the news. When there’s a disaster, does anyone really remember it the same way? We all saw it from different angles, different vantage points.”

  He nodded slowly, considering my rebuttal. “I suppose I can’t argue with that.” He pushed himself to his feet. When he was upright again he rocked back on his heels, looked up at the ceiling. “Here’s what I struggle with, Oliver,” he said, speaking more to the light fixture than to me. “Mathematically, it doesn’t make sense.”

  I waited for him to elaborate. He didn’t, so I said, “Math was never my strong subject.”

  He frowned, but there was a flicker of amusement in his expression. “Surprising. After all, Shakespeare is poetry—most of it, anyway—and there’s a certain mathematical pattern to poetry, isn’t there?”

  “You could say that.”

  “In any mathematical equation, a series of known and unknown variables add up to the given solution.”

  “That’s about what I remember of algebra. Solve for x.”

  “Precisely,” he said. “Well, here we have an equation with a known outcome—Richard’s death. We’ll call that x. And on the other side of the equals sign we have your—that is, the fourth-years’—accounts of the event. A, b, c, d, e, and f, if you will. And then there’s everyone else. We’ll call them y. Nine weeks later we have all the variables accounted for, but I still can’t solve for x. Can’t get the two sides of the equation to balance.” He shook his head, the motion measured and deliberate. “So what does that mean?”

  I stared at him. Didn’t answer.

  “It means,” he went on, “that at least one of our variables is wrong. Make sense to you?”

  “To a certain extent. But I think the premise is flawed.”

  “How so?” he said, the question wry, almost teasing.

  I shrugged. “You can’t quantify humanity. You can’t measure it—not the way you mean to. People are passionate and flawed and fallible. They make mistakes. Their memories fade. Their eyes deceive them.” I paused, just long enough that he might believe I hadn’t planned what to say next. “Or sometimes they drink too much and fall in the lake.”

  Colborne blinked and a kind of profound confusion surfaced in his expression—as though he wasn’t sure whether he might have miscalculated me. “Is that really how you think it happened?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course it was.” We’d been saying it for weeks. Yes. He fell. Of course he did.

  Colborne sighed, his breath heavy in the lukewarm library air. “You know, Oliver, I like you. Mostly in spite of myself.”

  I frowned, unsure if I’d heard him right. “Strange thing to say.”

  “Well, truth can be stranger than fiction. My point is, I’d like to trust you. But that’s a lot to ask, so instead I’m just going to ask a favor.”

  I realized he was expecting a reply, so I said, “All right.”

  “I’m guessing you’ll get a good look at this place as you clean it,” he said. “If you find anything unusual … Well, let’s just say I wouldn’t mind being kept in the loop.”

  A pause followed, like a scripted beat between lines in a play.

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Colborne’s eyes lingered on me a moment longer, and then he walked slowly back across the room to the stairs, where he stopped. “Be careful, Oliver,” he said. “As I said, I like you. And—let me put this in such a way that you’ll be sure to understand—Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

  With that he left, a small smile on his mouth, at once sad and mocking. I stood motionless as his footsteps creaked on the stairs, and only when I heard the front door close behind him did I unclench my fist in my pocket. The blood-spotted scrap there was crumpled and damp with sweat.

  SCENE 4

  I gave Colborne a five-minute head start because I didn’t want him to catch me leaving the Castle. I stashed my cleaning supplies under the kitchen sink, pulled my coat and gloves on, and left through the back door. I ran the whole distance to the FAB without stopping, frost crunching under my feet. By the time I arrived my limbs were numb, my eyes watering from the sting of the sharp February air.

  I let myself in through a side door and listened carefully. The third-years were in the auditorium, stumbling through the second act of Two Gentlemen of Verona. Hoping not to run into anyone loitering backstage, I hurried into the stairwell, one hand skating along the railing as I took the steep steps to the basement two at a time.

  A sprawling undercroft lurked beneath the Archibald Dellecher Theatre and all of its tributary hallways and anterooms. Usually only the technical crew ventured into that low-ceilinged, dimly lit warren, to unearth old props and furniture long ago deemed irrelevant and doomed to eternal storage. I hadn’t planned to go there, hadn’t even thought of it until I was halfway to the FAB, desperate at first just to get the hell away from the Castle. But as I crept down two or three shadowy corridors crowded with theatrical refuse, I realized my own accidental brilliance. Nobody could ever find anything in the undercroft, even if they knew exactly what they were looking for. Before long I stumbled into a cobwebbed corner where a bank of lockers (probably ripped out of the crossover sometime in the eighties) leaned tiredly against the wall. Rust leaked from their gills like old dried blood and crept across their gaping, sharp-edged doors. It was as good a place as any.

  I shoved a battered trestle table out of my way, then waded through the rubbish piled up in my path. The first locker had a padlock hanging on the door, the catch spotted with rust like a bad tooth. I removed it, pulled hard on the handle, and swore as loudly as I dared when the door sprang open and cracked against my shin. The locker was empty except for a chipped mug bearing a faded Dellecher coat of arms, a black ring of coffee clinging to the bottom. I reached into my pocket to find the scrap of fabric I’d plucked from the fireplace. I squinted at it in the dim light, and that ominous red stain glared back. I wasn’t even sure it was blood, but my own paranoia dragged me back to the day of Richard’s memorial service, when I’d found Filippa alone by the fireplace. I thrust the thought away with alarm. There were no locks on the library doors, so it might have been any one of us. The air in the undercroft felt frigid. Any one of us might have done what? Suddenly nauseous and impatient to get the thing out of sight, I bent down and stuffed it into the mug. If anyone else found it there, they’d just think it a rag—stained with paint or dye or some other innocuous thing. For all I knew, it was. I chastised myself for being excitable. Alexander was right about that much: if we didn’t keep our wits about us, everything would come undone. I slammed the door, then hesitated. I didn’t know the lock’s combination. I didn’t want to return to it, ever, but just in case, I left it dangling, open.

  I shoved the trestle table back in front of the lockers, hoping that maybe nobody else would bother moving it, that nobody would even know I’d been there. I stepped back and stood staring
at the small wheel of the lock, the tiny gap between the shackle and case. How tremendous the agony of unmade decisions.

  SCENE 5

  I got lost on my way out of the basement and was late for combat call. James, Camilo, and three second-years were already there.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry, I lost track of the time.”

  “Where’ve you been?” James asked, with a strange deadpan expression. I was burning to ask him the same question, but not in front of other people.

  Camilo interjected. “Let’s talk later. We’ve got a lot to get through and not a whole lot of time to do it. Did you two work this over the weekend?”

  I glanced at James, who said, “Yes,” before I could answer. We’d only run through the blocking twice, because he’d been out of the Castle most of the day Saturday and all day Sunday.

  “Then let’s get started,” Camilo said. “Shall we go from Edgar’s challenge?”

  The set for Lear had been outlined on the floor in blue spike tape. It was a curious design, the proscenium stage stretching into a catwalk that ran down the center aisle of the audience. We called it the Bridge; the elevation was marked at four feet.