Chance of a Ghost

by E. J. Copperman

  Jeannie grinned. “Yeah. Josh.”

  “Stop it,” I told her.

  “Uh-huh.” The woman could squeeze more innuendo out of a nonword than most could find in five paragraphs. It’s an art.

  “He seems like a very nice young man,” Nan said, still scanning the crowd.

  “Ten o’clock,” Morgan told her. I was about to tell him it was much earlier than that when I saw Nan turn her head to that vantage point, and my eye followed. Tyra Carter had stuck her head out of the stage right wings. “Is that…?”

  “Yeah, that’s Tyra,” I said. “Probably looking to see if I’m talking to Penny and convincing her to give Tyra her job back.”

  “Maybe you should go talk to Penny,” Morgan said quietly.

  “What?”

  “Let’s kick the beehive a little. See what happens.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what would happen. “Easy for you to say,” I answered.

  “You’ve got enough backup here,” Morgan nudged.

  I didn’t say anything, but I walked back—past Josh, who looked perplexed—to Penny and said hello. I fought the urge to look at Tyra, but Penny, standing next to her last-row-on-the-aisle seat, was clearly looking over my shoulder.

  “What brings you to the show tonight?” I asked her.

  “Well, Frances has been talking about it. But mostly I’m here because of what you said,” Penny answered, and if that hadn’t already thrown me off, what she said next definitely would have. “I’m giving Tyra her job back like you suggested, and I knew she’d be here tonight, so I came to give her the good news.”

  “Can I sit down?” I asked. Penny gestured to go ahead, and we took the two last seats in the house. Literally. “Why did you decide to do that?”

  “She called me after she talked to you. For some reason, she thought it was your fault I hadn’t rehired her.”

  “Imagine,” I said.

  “I told her you had nothing to do with it. I hadn’t even realized she wanted to come back before you said something,” Penny went on, possibly not noticing my comment. “And once we spoke, I understood how badly she wanted it. I told her I’d think about it, and now that I have, I’m going to hire her back on a trial basis and see if things have changed.”

  Having digested that piece of information, I was ready to press on. “That’s not the only reason you’re here,” I told Penny. Matter-of-fact. As if I were sure. “This isn’t your first time here; you’re a regular at the troupe’s performances, aren’t you?”

  Penny blushed a little and looked toward the stage. “How did you know that?”

  “The way Jerry Rasmussen looked at you when you came in. He knew you well. Was it because of Lawrence Laurentz?”

  She nodded. “I think Larry would want me to see what the group was up to. He really loved the theater, you know, and even after they…after he had to leave the group, he kept tabs on what they were doing. I’m just keeping up for him. How did you know about Larry and me?”

  I didn’t want to risk Tyra’s impending reemployment and I couldn’t tell her that Lawrence had confirmed it for me himself. “I can’t divulge my sources,” I said. That’s really more true of reporters than detectives, but people don’t know that. “But that whole story about going to fire him was a lie, wasn’t it?”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Frances and Jerry standing in the aisle, talking to Mom, who had separated from the group, perhaps to avoid sitting next to Melissa while the lights were up. The three of them were laughing about something.

  Penny looked up at the stage. “No, that was real, but I’d fired him three nights before. Larry really could be a very dear man when he wanted to be, you know,” she said. “He was older than me, but we bonded. I really did have some very warm feelings for him. We had two relationships, a professional one and a…personal one, and they were separate. I miss him.” She looked like she might cry.

  “I’m sure he was very nice,” I said, since I was never supposed to have met Lawrence. I spotted Jerry looking out from the wings—the side opposite where Tyra had been a few minutes earlier, and I stood up. “I think I’d better get back there,” I said. “Thanks for getting Tyra off my back.”

  Penny smiled. “No problem.”

  I walked down the aisle to the foot of the stage, then up a few stairs to the stage itself and immediately to the right to get back to the wings. Sure enough, Jerry Rasmussen was standing there waiting for me.

  “That must have been some water bottle,” he said.

  Twenty-eight

  The play began almost immediately upon my arrival backstage. I’d scarcely gotten my bearings and was still trying to find a place that wouldn’t be in someone’s way, when the “orchestra”—a lovely little man who must have been in his eighties playing a spinet piano to one side of the stage—struck up what I’m sure Jerry would have called “the overture.”

  Jerry was so busy giving orders to cast and crew that I don’t think he heard a note of the music. He was one of the lucky ones. It was, in a word, awful.

  The scene backstage was just short of chaos: It was a small cast, consisting of Frances as Wendy, a guy named Morris as Peter Pan, a flashlight as Tinker Bell, Jerry himself as Captain Hook, a woman called Marjorie as Mr. (?) Smee, and assorted chorus members. When I say “assorted,” I mean three.

  The only stage crew member was Tyra, but when you had Tyra, you didn’t really need anyone else. She was holding a ladder with one arm and what appeared to be a doghouse with the other. I decided to approach her with the good news from Penny, since having a happy Tyra backstage with me was greatly preferable to an angry Trya.

  I sidled over to her. “Do you have a second?” I said softly.

  “I have a cue coming up,” she hissed back, watching the stage. “What do you want?”

  “Penny’s giving you your job back,” I said. “It wasn’t my…”

  “Seriously?” Tyra said in a louder, excited tone, drawing a glare from Jerry. “How did you do that?”

  “I didn’t,” I explained. “She just told me when I saw her, and I thought you’d want to know. So we’re good, right?”

  The piano playing stopped and the curtain (some window treatments raised on PVC piping the Thespians appeared to have brought with them) started to rise (Jerry pulled the string on one side). “Gotta go,” Tyra said, and ran onto the stage with the ladder and the doghouse, which she placed strategically where the curtain had met the stage. She exited to the other side of the stage, so we couldn’t continue the conversation.

  That forced me to watch the show. Talking to Angry Tyra would have been preferable.

  From my vantage point in the wings, I could see the stage right side of the audience, the left side if you were facing the stage. I had learned this during the Harbor Haven High School production of Pippin some twenty years earlier. From here I could see Mom, Melissa and Josh, but not the Hendersons or Jeannie and Tony. I assumed Oliver was asleep, since I heard no crying from the front of the house.

  The dialogue was audible but not decipherable. Apparently Jerry had “adapted” the classic tale of the boy who wouldn’t grow up by turning it into the story of a woman named Wendy who was born a senior citizen, decided it was fabulous and refused to “grow down.” When she meets Peter Pan, who is—elbow in the ribs, nudge nudge—a never-aging peanut butter tycoon (I am not making a word of this up), Wendy, dressed in an “old lady” dress slit up the side and tights to “show off the gams,” Frances had told me, tries to convince him that “it’s way cool to be old” via a series of sketches and songs that had nothing to do with each other, aside from the fact that they were all terrible. Mr. Pan, I could only assume, would learn his lesson and wrinkle up stat to join in the fun.

  The songs—because there is no other word for them—were on a par with the rest of the production, sad to say. But every time I looked over at Jerry when he wasn’t onstage in the role of Captain Hook, a Somali pirate—I’ll give you a moment—he was be
aming. Clearly, the production was exactly what he’d envisioned when he sat down to write this catastrophe.

  I gave a glance to the crowd of about fifty. (Well, actually about a hundred, if you counted the ghosts floating around the room.) Melissa seemed to be stifling a good number of laughs, and Mom appeared more horrified by some of the script’s more blatant land mines. One, describing Neverland as “a place where everyone is on Medicare,” was especially unnerving.

  Josh had his hand shading his eyes, either trying not to see what was going on in front of him or attempting to conceal the fact that he was dozing off.

  At one point in the first act, Wendy tried to convince Peter Pan to come with her to Managed Care Heaven and burst into a song that must have been called “In Flight” only because previous versions had used up “You Can Fly” and “I’m Flyin’.” Frances warbled:

  We can soar

  Don’t be a bore

  Come along with me

  To maturi—ty!

  I’ll spare you the rest; suffice it to say, the point of the song was that they could take to the skies and blow this Popsicle stand for a better place where the grandchildren really do call and persimmons are always on sale at the Stop & Shop. I saw Tyra shift into high gear, indicating that a “special effect” was about to take place. She picked up a fishing rod—no kidding—and headed to the edge of the wings just this side of where she might be seen by the audience.

  Frances did a couple of Rockettes kicks, having been handed a top hat and cane by Tyra on her last pass, and sang about the exciting trip she and Morris were about to take. As the piano pounded away, she led him around the back of a stage flat painted with a window full of starry skies.

  From the wings, Tyra cast the fishing rod. Attached to the end was a heavy cutout, perhaps made of sheet metal because it didn’t flutter or fold and seemed to have weight, of “Wendy” and “Peter Pan” flying off toward Neverland, where the early bird special is offered all night. With practiced precision—Jerry had told me this was the third time they’d performed this particular theatrical gem—Tyra manipulated the cutout into the space where the stage flat’s window showed the moon, and the dark cutout set against the “glowing” moon actually made for an effect that was sort of neat. If Frances hadn’t been offstage, singing, “We can be back in time for canasta,” it might have been a nice little moment.

  The act ended when the song was put out of its misery, so the “curtain” came down and the audience’s sparse applause indicated there were people in the auditorium who actually liked the show. I guessed we’d see a smaller crowd when the curtain rose for act 2.

  The intermission was going to be exactly fifteen minutes, Jerry told me in no uncertain terms, so I had to do a good deal of detecting quickly. It would have been better if Paul had been there, because I wasn’t really all that sure of what to ask or to whom I should be putting the questions. “Just observe as much as you can,” he’d say. “You’ll learn more when people don’t think you’re trying to learn anything.”

  Taking this imaginary advice, I looked out past the end of the curtain to check on my entourage first; Mom had walked down to Jeannie and the others, and they were clearly quite amused by the production. Liss especially was laughing as they no doubt relived some of the particularly excruciating elements of act 1. Morgan had stood and was pretending to stretch for the intermission, but I knew he was scanning the crowd. He seemed interested at one point in something near the back of the house, which I couldn’t see from my vantage point. Josh hadn’t joined them but was instead standing near the rear of the auditorium, leaning in a corner opposite where Morgan was watching, observing. I could bet he would be reporting back to me later.

  Mostly, it looked like Josh was watching Penny Fields, who was sitting quietly in her seat, doing something with a smartphone in her hand. I hadn’t pegged Penny as a heavy app user, but you never could figure people.

  Given the short time I had, I figured it was best to let my operatives (I had decided to think of them that way) do their work and concentrate on my own backstage. Before I could head for Frances or Jerry, though, Tyra came bounding over and stopped me in my tracks.

  “Penny texted me!” she crowed. “You were right—I get my job back.” Then her face darkened a bit. “But only on a trial basis.”

  Uh-oh. “So what does that mean?” I asked as if I didn’t understand the term.

  “If they don’t like what I’m doing, they’ll fire me again,” Tyra said with a moan. She could go from exultant to miserable in a nanosecond.

  I didn’t like Tyra when she was miserable. “Well, you do good work. They won’t have any reason to fire you,” I encouraged her.

  She looked skeptical. “They didn’t like it when I was doing the tire thing at the same time.”

  “So you won’t do that again.”

  “I have to,” Tyra said. “I need the extra money.”

  I looked behind her. “Oh, there’s Frances. I should go tell her how much I’m enjoying her performance.” And I bolted past Tyra before she could find a way to blame me again.

  Frances, in costume already for the second act (since she wore the same thing throughout), had a bottle of water in her hand and was talking to herself when I reached her. I debated addressing her, since she seemed engrossed in preparation for the second act, but she spotted me and approached.

  “Alison! What do you think?”

  I was afraid people would ask me that, so I’d prepared an answer. “Oh, you’re marvelous, Frances!” I said. “Your professional experience is really showing.”

  “Thank you,” she agreed. “Jerry gives us such wonderful material. You know, we haven’t deviated one word from his text. He’s so creative.”

  That was one way to put it. “The effects are very interesting,” I said, moving off the subject of “the text.” “Did Tyra create them herself?”

  “Oh no, that’s Jerry again,” Frances said. “On nights that Tyra’s not here…” She lowered her voice. “You know, she doesn’t have the commitment some of us do; but, anyway, when she’s not here, Jerry works most of the effects himself.”

  Now that was interesting, because that fishing-rod thing had given me an idea about how Lawrence’s “invisible” person might have dropped a toaster on him. “No kidding,” I said. It was a placeholder.

  “Oh yes. He practices all of them over and over until he knows they’ll work.”

  “So you don’t have to be as strong as Tyra to handle them,” I said.

  Frances shook her head. “Oh no. Even I can do them if I have to, but I’ve never done it in performance.”

  I thanked her and moved on to where Jerry was addressing the chorus. “Don’t drop your consonants!” he scolded. “This audience probably can’t hear half of what you’re singing, so you have to enunciate even more severely!” The group of performers, mostly in their sixties and seventies, looked properly chastised.

  There was no time to react when Jerry suddenly turned toward me. “So! What do you think of the experience, Alison?”

  That was going to be tough to dodge. “Being backstage is very exciting!” I tried. “I love seeing how everything works.”

  Jerry’s eyes sharpened. “What do you think of the show?” he asked. Being blunt and to the point; how was that fair?

  My mind raced, and the best I could come up with was, “I’ve been so busy watching all the excitement back here, it’s been hard for me to concentrate.” Yeah, you try it sometime.

  He scowled. “That bad, is it?”

  “I’m not a critic,” I said. My mother always said, when you can’t say something nice, stall.

  “How can you say that in the middle of a performance?” Jerry demanded.

  “How could you ask in the middle of a performance?” I countered. The best defense and all that.

  “Do you understand the dynamic of a theatrical troupe?” Jerry went on, loudly enough to turn some heads backstage. “It is a delicate thing, a china cup.”
He started to advance on me like an invading Visigoth. “One tiny flaw, one scratch, and the whole thing can come crashing down!”

  Jerry was so incensed that I backed away from him as he walked toward me. We must have looked as awkward as the dances he had no doubt choreographed himself for the production. He actually looked like one of those murderers in the 1940s movie noirs, coming at the camera with hands raised, about to strike (usually by strangulation). I was seriously unnerved.

  “You’re trying to ruin my play!” Jerry snarled.

  “I’m really not,” I tried to say, but it came out as a squeak. I was actually thinking, It doesn’t need my help, but that wouldn’t have done much good out loud, either.

  I kept backing up, and he kept coming. Vaguely, I became aware of some noise behind me that sounded like people talking and some gasping all of a sudden. I might have heard Jeannie yell, “Hey!” Jerry actually stopped and shouted, “Look out!” And then something weird happened.

  There was suddenly no floor under my feet. That came as something of a surprise for the feet in question, I have to tell you, and they didn’t take kindly to it. They flailed about for a second while my head seemed to develop an overwhelming interest to inspect the auditorium’s ceiling, and I fell backward.

  Right into Josh Kaplan’s arms.

  I don’t know where he came from, but suddenly Josh was holding me up, and not a nanosecond too soon. He looked me in the eye with an expression of some perplexity, and said, “What was that about?”

  “What…where…?” I wasn’t at my most coherent. I looked around for Jerry, who was standing at the skirt of the stage, staring down at me. He looked absolutely horrified. “Are you all right?” he asked. Hardly the tone of a man who had been doing his best Hannibal Lecter impression only a moment before.

  My posse—that is, the Hendersons, Mom, Melissa, Jeannie and Tony (and Oliver, if you want to count him sleeping in the sling around Jeannie’s neck)—swarmed around me. Josh put me down, and my feet were mostly solid on the floor. Mostly. I told them all (including my feet) I was okay, and physically at least, that was true.