Tread the Boards (A Rivervue Community Theatre Romance, #1)

by Nikki Logan

  Not him. Noticing things was his business.

  If anyone had ever wondered about that hand-sized little window way up in the back wall above the auditorium, right next to the control room, they’d long since forgotten. It reminded him of a projectionist’s booth in an olde-worlde cinema, yet to his knowledge the one thing Rivervue had never been for the people of Brachen was a cinema.

  Rivervue was a ghost town today courtesy of a funeral that had brought the entire town out to commemorate. Tonight was his last night in the props room, possibly in Rivervue, and so he wasn’t going to get another opportunity to assuage his curiosity undisturbed by others. He’d waited until the morning rehearsals finished—late, as always—and emerged the moment he heard those back dock doors slamming shut behind all the black-clad mourners. The moment he was alone.

  Just him and the phantoms of Rivervue. One canine, the rest made of the leftover energy of the people and audiences that had been here over decades. The place was dripping in history. He used the ghost light left on stage to make his way through the darkened theatre towards the doors audiences used to come in. His feet were silent on the old ’70s carpet of the foyer stairs, Phantom’s collar-jingle the only soundscape to his secret business.

  Once at the top, he oriented himself and visualised where the little window was. Past Lexi’s office, past the extensive control room and into the storeroom at the end of Rivervue’s staff-only area.

  Wasn’t this just like a theatre? Half functional, half museum. One hundred per cent time machine. Boxes of leaflets, old and new, stood alongside glasses for the downstairs bar and portable bollards with chain loops. Spare chairs. A megaphone. A box of office-variety light bulbs. But right behind those a giant noticeboard was papered with yellowed posters of productions past—Streetcar, Godot, Hedda Gabler, A View from the Bridge—over forty of them, the oldest curling defiantly against the pins holding them in place. Years’ worth of plays, anything from two to four each calendar year. He cranked his head behind the mobile board as Phantom snuffled among the boxy goodness.

  A door. Right where he hoped one would be.

  Dylan worked hard to suppress his imagination, but as he turned the aged handle he waited for the flurry of snow or the sleeve of a fur coat to spill out. But instead of fawns and talking animals, the only thing that came out of that door was dust and a musty kind of funk. Optimism made him feel up and down the wall on either side of the door for a light switch.

  Click.

  It wasn’t much bigger than a stationery storeroom, but with the faded light of a decades-old bulb that blazed into life, Dylan immediately spotted the old-fashioned AV jacks sticking out of the wall. Between that and the ragged foam lining the walls, he immediately recognised what this must have been back in the day—a soundbooth.

  ‘Makes sense,’ he muttered to Phantom as he snuffled in the corners that hadn’t seen anything more than dust in decades. ‘Backs up hard against the control room.’

  How long had this room stood unused? Exactly the same time that audio graduated from quarter-inch tape to digital, probably. It didn’t take him long to find the original audio equipment stored in the cupboard below, wrapped in old, paint-covered drop sheets left over from a past production. Whose hands had touched this last? Were they even still alive? Everything was still here, dusty but ready to be reinstated at a moment’s notice. Like someone didn’t entirely trust the newfangled technology.

  But it must have held because eventually the gear and the room were closed off, covered over and subsumed by all the theatrical detritus out in the storeroom exterior.

  Forgotten entirely.

  He glanced at the tiny monitor window, pointing straight to stage. Impossible to see out of with the light on, so he flipped the switch and gave his eyes time to adjust.

  Far below, the ghost light glowed happily centre stage.

  Here was the perfect place for him to lurk and watch the goings-on down onstage. And yeah, he was aware exactly of how creepy that was. He’d thought about hanging out in the rafters like some Ron de Vue—era noir thriller, but Rivervue had no rafters, just a lighting rig suspended from its ultra-high ceiling. That left the wings, and anyone could see him there, not to mention Phantom, who had a killer nose and would ferret him out in no time. The props room was off limits now—he didn’t want to cause Kenzie any further distress. Anywhere else he couldn’t watch Larrikin come to life and after all this effort he definitely wanted to see it. Kenzie had tossed him out of her house but only Lexi could throw him out of Rivervue; and she was way too busy fighting them all being kicked out to worry about one silent Canadian.

  So lurking it was.

  Not like he hadn’t had practice at being covert. He was virtually a specialist.

  From here, he could watch Larrikin’s birth. Here, he could wait out Hell Week in secret and be a part of the test audience for the final tech-run. Here, he could watch others bring his words to life.

  It was like touching lightning. That moment.

  In here, he wouldn’t have to deal with the real world at all. The world that included expectations and sensitivities and hurt feelings.

  And bumbling, mute, maladjusted playwrights.

  Right through his childhood he’d hated the presumption that because he couldn’t speak that he was somehow broken. Inept. He liked it even less when it was true. There was no getting around the truth of Kenzie’s accusations—he was the cause of all her misery. He had been slow with the truth, which meant she walked right into the shock discovery about her family.

  Mackenzie Russell didn’t need him in her life. She could enjoy him, yes, but she’d be as fine without him as she was before he pedalled into town. The same went for him. He had to keep reminding himself that life would go on and his time at Rivervue would just be another memory. Among hundreds.

  But Kenzie wasn’t one of hundreds. She was rarer than that. And rare things were hard to earn. And even harder to keep.

  Among the more emotional ramifications of his absence, Dylan’s apparent departure meant there was no-one to coordinate the final prop audit. This late in the production Larrikin’s crew had either scrounged, repurposed or built everything they needed, and Bruce would see that everything was placed where it belonged as Hell Week progressed. No matter what, the guy was a professional.

  Today they were still working with main props only but by Wednesday they’d be furnished with all the little details that made immersion happen. Until then, it fell to Kenzie to double-check that they had what they needed now as they brought all the individual scenes together into acts and then all three acts together into a play.

  Into Larrikin. At last.

  Eight weeks earlier, she would never have imagined that she’d be treading the boards above her head instead of lurking down here beneath them. But time changed everything. Hopefully, once a bit more passed she’d be able to wake up each morning without the sick ache of grief in her chest. It sure did make delivering lines with gusto more of a challenge.

  Except the painful scenes: for them she could go full method.

  All Larrikin’s secrets were out in the open now. Lexi no longer had to tap dance around missing pages or heavily redacted scenes. There were moments when she’d had to force herself to trust her friend but, of course, Lexi was right: it hadn’t taken more than a day to learn her part for act three because it largely comprised a series of mime-like vignettes that she and Yeates performed to a pre-recorded narrative from her great-grandfather’s memoir. No wonder Lexi was casual about it—all the heavy narrative lifting was being done in Yeates’s croaky, aged voice-over and the performers only needed to create the visual vignettes to support it. Not his finest work, but the words he narrated brought the whole play to its end and—she hated to admit it—even left a person feeling sorry for the Larrikin.

  And for Mary.

  And for de Vue’s abandoned family, for anyone who could do the mental maths.

  Kenzie took advantage of a lighting delay and
jogged down the steps towards the green room and her once tranquil Props HQ.

  That space would never be the restful sanctuary it once was now that it was haunted by the ghost of Dylan North. He’d managed to soak into the woodwork the way varnish soaked into the old furniture stacked on the shelves. Maybe that was one good thing that would come from the plans to close Rivervue: if they managed to start up again somewhere else at least she’d have a clean slate to work—

  ‘Oh!’

  Surprise stilled her feet as a loud thumping echoed through the small space.

  ‘Phantom!’

  Relief tsunamied right through her as the solid little dog wiggled towards her. They met in the middle, down low where her hug could fully encircle Phantom’s thick neck. He returned the favour by stepping up onto the fold of her knees and hooking a single paw on her curled arm. She had no shortage of dogs at work to hug if the mood took her, but this one was different. This one was Dylan’s. And circling her arms around Phantom was a substitute for embracing Dylan.

  A poor substitute but she’d take it.

  ‘What are you doing here, beautiful?’

  No answer, of course, but his hug—and hers—said more than words ever could. His happy heart thumped against his hard little body. Finally, Kenzie straightened and looked at the note laying on the bed she still hadn’t pushed back into its corner. The pillow she hadn’t even plumped. It was like a shrine to the man who’d lain there.

  Or a fossil captured in time.

  Didn’t want to rob him of his big debut, the note said. I’ve registered his microchip to you, Kenzie. I know he’ll be happy and safe in Brachen.

  Kenzie slid down onto the mattress. Dylan loved this dog; Phantom was his company and his best mate. Leaving him behind meant he was going somewhere he couldn’t take him, and there was only one place in this wide, brown country that a man couldn’t easily take his dog …

  Out of it.

  She tossed the items in her hands onto the bed and sprinted for Rivervue’s back dock where Dylan’s bike was chained up. Phantom scrabbled after her, thinking it was a great game. But when she got out there, there was nothing. No bike. No chain.

  No Dylan.

  Her eyes searched the parkland along the river and even across to the business and tourism strip on the other side.

  No Dylan.

  The hole in her gut that had only just started to crust over tore open anew.

  She’d told him to go. Had he taken her so very literally?

  She sank down onto the step. Phantom came and sat next to her—partner in sorrow.

  ‘He’s gone,’ she whispered to the deaf dog.

  Phantom tipped his head as though trying desperately to hear.

  Realistically, Dylan could have gone anywhere: whichever country or city or tiny hamlet was his next target. But everything in her cried home.

  Dylan had gone back to Canada. He might as well have gone to Saturn.

  When she found the strength to head back to the props room, she saw the neat pile of cards next to the note and Kenzie turned them over one by one. Sit. Stay. Bark. Off. All Phantom’s training signs. He’d learned them quickly, so now just about anyone could give the signals and get the right behaviour in return. All he had to do was walk onstage, sit at Toby’s side then bark in response to something the young Ron de Vue said and follow him offstage. Pure light relief.

  Pure Larrikin.

  They’d rehearsed it enough times Phantom probably didn’t even need the cards, but they were there just in case.

  A mournful note resonated deep in Kenzie’s chest, radiating outwards. She knew Dylan was gone from this room, gone from Rivervue, but leaving Phantom behind meant he was really … gone.

  She had to remind herself that she’d only known him a matter of weeks. Never mind that it felt so much longer. Never mind that he’d filled a void that she hadn’t even known she had. He wasn’t some device to ease her loneliness, he never had been. He was a famous, talented, travelled human being, in demand the world over. She’d treated him like her lackey but he was anything but.

  He was Draven.

  No wonder he’d taken off. He must have been bored out of his planetsized mind in Brachen—with her.

  Phantom’s powerful jaw opened wide and the sound he made as he released his doggie tension perfectly matched the tortured sound she realised she was making.

  ‘Looks like it’s just you and me now, buddy,’ she croaked instead, curling her fingers in the tufts behind his ear. ‘I’ve lost Dylan, I’ve lost my sanctuary and I’m probably going to lose Rivervue but at least I still have you.’ She pushed to her feet. ‘Come on. Let’s go get you checked out at the clinic.’

  A doggie medical had been on Dylan’s list before she’d read act three and discovered who he was. For Phantom’s sake, she could see that through, but mostly it was something constructive and familiar that she could do when everything else around her was in total freefall.

  Action—any action—was better than nothing when you were a doer.

  And Kenzie Russell did better than anyone else she knew. She’d been processing her worries like that her whole life. Get back up, get back on and get back into it. No reason this would be any different. Besides, she had a Hell Week to survive and a debut to deliver—she was too busy to indulge her grief. By the time Larrikin was over she’d have exorcised all memory of Dylan Raven North clear out of her.

  And life could get back to normal.

  Chapter Seventeen

  This old sound room may have been locked up tight for decades, but it had been silent witness to every call of every production ever done at Rivervue. The old speaker on the wall still broadcast every sound that came from the stage manager’s feed in the control room next door.

  Handy. But not essential. Dylan had been imagining this moment in his head for so long he could have called the show himself.

  The final technical run.

  He’d intentionally stayed the heck away from Rivervue during Hell Week so that he could have this moment. The moment that gave him his joy. The moment he saw a play coming to life for the very first time in the community for which it was the most meaningful. He never came to opening night—too full of people, too full of posers—and the raw energy coming off the cast, with such high stakes, had a way of getting in the way of all the beauty. Final tech run was still about learning, perfecting, but it was nonstop. No safety net. And audiences tended to be full of family and friends, which made it a great night to be spying.

  He was Rivervue’s friend. They felt like his family.

  But it had been a tough call, staying away, when just seeing Kenzie at a distance was every bit as uplifting. Lucky he was made of strong stuff. He never would have made it this far in life without some pretty solid willpower.

  Down on stage, Larrikin’s final act opened on Ron de Vue’s Hollywood agent, dressed in a dated black suit and spotlighted at a lectern far stage left: he was giving the eulogy for his most famous client. As he delivered the eulogy, he shrugged off his jacket, lost his tie, flicked open the buttons at his throat and slowly sank down onto the stage, scooping up a rather full glass of red wine until the audience realised they were looking at the same scene from the play’s opening. Where Larrikin began. The night after Ron’s funeral.

  Dylan craned his neck to see the audience below through his little peephole.

  ‘Fifteen per cent,’ Bruce Clifton murmured through the old speakers, and Dylan imagined capable fingers poised on the digital touch screen. ‘Standby to fade up to eighty-five.’ Then, as Ron’s agent rifled through some documents down onstage, ‘Cue fade.’

  Rising stage lights washed out the follow spot and revealed the agent surrounded by Ron de Vue’s mounded life hoardings, deciding what the public would get to know and what would be consigned to the trash forever. The World War II satchel from the opening scene now bulged with items. The agent picked up some pages of a tatty manuscript and started reading.

  ‘Fade-o
ut lights. Standby audio, cue thirty-nine …’ Bruce’s voice was barely a murmur.

  In the pitch dark that followed, a man’s voice—more gravel than whiskey—swilled around the audience and down onto the stage as the crew effected a fast prop change. Dylan narrowed his gaze. Did he imagine it, or could he see Kenzie scurrying into position in her 1950s frock, in front of a 1950s law-office desk and hitting her mark ready for when the lights kicked back in?

  ‘My father took his last breath just two weeks before Jimmy Dean took his …’ Gravelly Ron said.

  It was impossible not to grin as a big ego poked its head out from the wings and glared up at the control box in silent outrage.

  The words were the same, but this wasn’t Yeates’s voice-over. What would the guy be thinking right now? That Lexi had replaced him because he wasn’t good enough? That he’d failed to pull off old Ron’s broad Australian drawl accented with just the right amount of North American twang? Was he already casting his mind through every man in Brachen wondering on whom he’d be heaping his revenge?

  Probably.

  In truth, there was only one man Yeates could blame for the replacement of the voice-over he’d recorded, and he was a she. It took a fair degree of confidence to change a Draven—not many directors would have the brass ones—but Lexi Spencer had confidence in this project, an extra degree of investment, and she’d made the call to swap in the original de Vue memoir recordings. His research material. Another one of her production surprises. It sure had impact. And Larrikin was infinitely better for it.

  That was the worst—and the best—part of being a playwright. Watching people improve his work.

  How was Kenzie coping, sitting down there in the dark hearing a new voice all of a sudden? She was pretty adaptable, she’d rolled with every inconvenient punch Lexi had delivered with this play, so what was one more?