Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle

by H. Mel Malton

  “One glance would have told you it wasn’t Jason,” I said.

  “Maybe, but you seem so interested in doing my job for me, I thought I’d better get you down here just to give you a chance to chip in,” he said. “You don’t have any idea who this is, do you?”

  I was numb. Becker had used a convenient body to try and teach me some sort of sick lesson. Or maybe he thought this was funny, I don’t know. I was determined not to show him how disgusted I was.

  “Morrison doesn’t know about this, does he?” I said.

  “Oh, he knows about the body all right. He’s going through the paperwork right now. We think it’s probably one of about a dozen snowmobilers who went through the ice this winter. Got mangled around by the ice break-up, probably.”

  “But Morrison doesn’t know you called me,” I said.

  “Listen, Polly, he feels exactly the way I do about your Nancy Drew act.” Nurse Ratched covered the face of the corpse and stood, staring at me. He had put her up to this, I was sure. It was probably their little secret. Heck, they probably did this all the time. He’d call her up and say “Hey, Babe, I’ve got someone I want to gross out. Would you take a body out of the freezer for me?”

  “I doubt this is even legal,” I said to her. She shrugged and wheeled the gently thawing sledder away. I turned to Becker and looked him squarely in the eye. “I know you think that Jason’s alive and sulking somewhere, and that’s fine,” I said. “It’s obvious that you’re not interested in pursuing any kind of inquiry, and of course that’s up to you. But there’s nothing you can do to stop me from asking questions of my own, and if Jason does turn up dead, I’ll make it my personal mission to tell your superiors what an asshole you are. As if they didn’t know already.” I turned my back on him and fled. I was upset enough to start crying, which is what I tend to do in times of extreme emotion, and I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing it.

  By the time I got to the theatre, I had brought myself reasonably under control. Becker’s plan may have been to warn me off poking around on his turf, but it just made me more determined than ever. Turf, schmurf. What happened to Jason McMaster, stage manager, was very odd, and I wanted to find out more. Seeing a drowned, ice-battered body wasn’t going to stop me, no matter what Becker thought.

  As I lifted the heavy bag containing my stage-management stuff off the bench seat of George’s truck, I remembered that I hadn’t even looked at Jason’s notebook. I’d left it drying beside the woodstove at home. As soon as the rehearsal day was over, I’d zip home and devote my evening to it. I was sure it contained something that would help explain why Jason had vanished off the face of the earth.

  Tobin and Juliet were waiting for me in the boardroom next to Juliet’s office. It wasn’t used very often, even though Juliet did have a board, but she was in complete control of the Steamboat operation, and the board only met once or twice a year to review the books and drink scotch. The president of the board, Harvey Ogilvie, was a Sikwan barrister who dabbled in amateur theatre and deferred to Juliet in every respect. Word was that they were sleeping together, which was highly likely.

  “You’re late,” Juliet said. It was ten after nine.

  “I know. I’m sorry, Juliet. The police called me down to the hospital to identify a body,” I said.

  “They found him??” She stood up so fast, she knocked her seat over. Tobin looked at her with interest.

  “Nope. It wasn’t him.” I didn’t elaborate, but I must have looked a little green, because both of them became solicitous.

  “Oh my dear, how dreadful for you. Are you all right?” Juliet said. “Was it very horrible?” Her eyes gleamed, and she picked up her chair, pulled it in closer to me and sat down again. I just nodded, and Tobin poured me a coffee.

  “I don’t really want to talk about it,” I said, giving Tobin the kind of look that meant I’ll talk about it later. “Let’s get down to business, shall we?”

  “Right,” Juliet said, her voice taking on an official, artistic director tone. “We’re glad you’re taking over the job, Polly. We’ve looked at your résumé, and you’re obviously very experienced at touring. But do you know anything about pyrotechnics?” I knew that there were several flash-pots in the show, small pyro devices that went off at exciting moments when Kevin fights the bad guys, but I hadn’t had a chance to find out about them.

  “Jason had a lot of pyro experience,” Tobin said. “He was ASM for a LiveShow production of Guy Fawkes: The Musical, and he pre-set all the smaller flashpots. It’s one of the reasons we hired him.”

  “Do I have to get a licence or anything?” I said.

  “Not for the small stuff, but if anyone asks, you’re qualified,” Juliet said and winked. “Tobin will show you what’s involved. It’s not very difficult. You just have to be very careful to follow the same procedure every time. And don’t let the actors near your equipment.”

  Tobin and I arranged to have a pyro-lesson after rehearsal, and I felt an excited twiggle in the pit of my stomach. Blowing things up sounded like fun.

  We dealt with several other technical matters, including the van-load, which would be rehearsed towards the end of the week as if it were part of the show. Jason’s prompt-book (which included a script covered with blocking notes, the time sheets, prop lists and schedules) had a preliminary sketch of what goes where. Jason’s hyper-efficiency had led him to label each and every item in the pack with a name, so that each piece of equipment was the responsibility of a particular actor.

  Before Shane came aboard, the actor who was supposed to play Kevin had been a guy called Steven Higgs. Juliet told me that Higgs was very short, barely five feet, and a master puppeteer who had worked on the Fraggle Rock TV series. Jason had taken Higgs’ size into account, and assigned only the small stuff to him. Since Shane was a strapping six-footer, the list would have to be reworked. I noticed that Jason had given the balance of the small stuff to Amber. The heavy pieces, which included the lighting boxes and the black drapery (which weighs a ton) bore Meredith’s and Brad’s names. I knew Meredith would take pride in being able to lift one of the 80-pound lighting crates by herself, but I didn’t think Brad would be able to. The first pack would, as usual, be an actor-management nightmare. It was the stage-manger’s job to stay in the van and arrange the pack. This job is uncomfortable and hard on the back, as I knew very well. It occurred to me that by the end of the tour I would probably be a few pounds lighter and a good deal stronger.

  Before the meeting ended, I brought up the matter of the driving, telling Juliet about Meredith’s request the day before.

  “She’s pushing for everybody to take a turn,” I said. “I’m not prepared to let that happen.”

  Juliet’s eyes widened for a fraction of a second. “Meredith did mention this to me,” she said. “I don’t see anything wrong with the idea. I told her that I would discuss it with you. The driving bonus isn’t that much money, after all.”

  “It has nothing to do with the money,” I said. “It has to do with control. If you let the actors drive, you open the whole tour up to a kind of anarchy that can get out of hand.” I knew this from experience. When the deputy is the back-up driver and the navigator, the SM and the deputy develop a kind of intuitive understanding that makes the travelling smooth. Routine on the road is extremely important. Without it, the bickering becomes unbearable. I told her so, adding a short, hair-raising anecdote about an actress who insisted on driving the scenic route along a coastal highway in California during the U.S. tour of Can’t Read, Won’t Read. “I’m driving and I get to pick the route,” she’d said. I was young and inexperienced then. We were two hours late for our gig, we burned out our brakes and very nearly cannoned off the cliffs into the Pacific. I’ve never forgotten it.

  “If you want the driving to be shared, I’m off the show,” I said.

  Eighteen

  KEVIN: It’s lonely on the road, Cat. Why don’t you come with me?

  CAT: You�
�re human, kid, and driven. Creatures like to wait and see.

  -The Glass Flute, Scene v

  With Juliet’s word that I would have my way on the driving issue, my mood began to improve. It had already been a stressful morning, and the rehearsal hadn’t even started yet.

  The rehearsal space was deserted. I didn’t bother turning on the fluorescent overheads yet (they buzz like a swarm of angry bees), and the morning light filtering through the small, high windows in the top floor room was soothing. The main curtains on the playing box were closed in pre-set position, ready for the top of the show. We would begin blocking that morning.

  I spent a few moments going over the notes from the production meeting, which were written in a spiral-bound notebook similar to the one Jason had used. The stage manager’s job is largely a matter of co-ordinating a million little details, and if they don’t get written down, they tend not to get done. I had scribbled a note to myself to look at the mouth mechanism of the Kevin puppet, which Shane had said was a bit loose, so I went backstage to get the puppet from its pre-set position behind the stage right curtain.

  Kevin wasn’t where I had left him the night before. Nothing ticks a stage manager off more than someone mucking about with her or his preset. It’s like someone going through your purse—it feels like an invasion. If something is moved from preset before a show, it can be disastrous, which is why we tend to be sort of anal about it. Clicking my tongue in annoyance, I stepped past the side curtain and into the box, expecting to find the puppet on the playing shelf where I suspected that Shane had left him after some last-minute practice, after the rest of the cast had gone home. It showed enthusiasm, at any rate, I thought benevolently. Still, I would have to have a word with him about the sanctity of the preset.

  It was pitch-black in the box. Rather than open the curtains, I flipped the switch on the ultra-violet lights, and all the preset props and puppets sprang into glowing reality. As I stepped forward, something soft brushed my face. I looked up and nearly choked on my tongue, because Kevin was hanging from an overhead pipe centre stage, limp and dead-looking, with an audio cable tightened around his little terrycloth neck.

  Oddly, my first thought was not that Shane had played a prank, but that Becker had somehow managed to get into the theatre and had strung up the puppet as a warning to me—another of his sick lessons. The last time I had interfered in police work, I’d found my best friend Francy hanged in her own kitchen. It was ridiculous to think that Becker was responsible, of course, but that was my first thought. My second thought was to get to the bathroom as quickly as possible, because I was about to throw up. The dead puppet had done what the half-frozen snowmobiler had not.

  “Anybody here?” It was Shane’s voice. Oh, golly. I swallowed carefully, three times, and called out in what was supposed to be a strong voice, but sounded more like a kid with a stomach-ache.

  “I’m in the box, Shane. Would you come here a second?” If he had done the dirty deed, I knew I’d be able to tell as soon as I saw his face.

  “Everything okay?” I heard him walk across the room.

  “Fine, fine. I just need your help.”

  There was a rustling of material and Shane joined me in the box. The UV lights made his white T-shirt and his teeth glow. UV makes human flesh go a sort of dull greeny-blue colour, and he looked like a Martian. He was looking at me expectantly, and I pointed upwards. He followed my gesture and when he saw Kevin, he let out a moan I don’t think I’ll ever forget. It was full of sorrow and shock, and quite genuine. He may have been a good actor, but there are some things you can’t fake. His face went white—I know this for a fact, because it started to glow like his shirt. A second later he was very, very angry.

  “You think this is funny, do you?” he hissed at me, his face inches away from mine. “Who told you, Polly? Who?”

  “Told me what?” I said, stepping back.

  “You know damn well what, or you wouldn’t have set me up like this. Telling me to come in early for some extra coaching, and then luring me back here to show me . . . this.”

  “I didn’t tell you to come in early,” I said.

  “You didn’t leave that message at the motel?”

  “No, of course not. I have enough to do without giving any of you guys extra coaching. Besides, you don’t need it. But I’d have thought you had enough respect for the puppets not to pull a stunt like this.”

  “You think I did it? Kill my own character? You must be crazy.”

  “Then who did?”

  “I don’t have a clue, Polly. Look, there was a message, I assumed it was from you, at my room last night telling me to come in early. I was kind of worried, because I thought I did okay yesterday, and your note sounded like I was a puppet-retard or something, and needed remedial help.”

  “Retard” is not my favourite word, but I let it go. “Well, whoever sent you the note was the one who strung up Kevin, I guess. I have a nasty feeling we have a nutbar in the cast. You promise it wasn’t you, Shane?”

  Shane just looked at me.

  “Okay, okay. It wasn’t you, and it wasn’t me. We’d better take him down before the others get here. Grab that stepladder from backstage, would you?”

  The audio cable which had been used to hang Kevin was, again, from Ruth’s keyboard. One end had been made into a very professional-looking noose, and the knot used to tie the cable to the overhead pipe was equally as neat. The cable was ruined, which meant there would be no music again until I went to visit Fish. I made a mental note to ask Ruth to strike her equipment every night from now on, and we’d lock it in the storage closet.

  “Shane?” I said, after he had replaced the backstage ladder and I had preset Kevin in his proper spot

  “What?”

  “What was it you thought somebody had told me that would have made me pull this ugly trick?”

  “Ancient history, Polly. I’d rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind.” Actually, I did mind. If Shane was holding some sort of clue as to who our prankster was, I wanted to know about it. Then I remembered Meredith’s crack the day before, about Shane turning tricks in Toronto. I’d forgotten about it in the excitement of Becker and Morrison’s pseudo-investigation.

  Whatever the “ancient history” was that Shane alluded to, it was obviously painful. I couldn’t make him talk about it, but I resolved to do a little digging into our star’s background.

  Shane and I agreed not to tell the cast about the morning’s incident. The schedule had been screwed up enough the day before, and there was a lot of work to be done. We opened the show in less than a week, and in the biz, the show takes precedence over just about everything else in the world. Even puppet murder. After having spent time on Day One getting used to the puppets and how they worked, the next challenge for the cast was to learn the intricate blocking patterns of The Glass Flute.

  “Blocking” is one of those terms that has been used by theatre people for ages, but hasn’t got a clear derivation. It might have come from the woodworking practice of sketching or “blocking out” the general shape of something before cutting it. It also might refer to the areas of the stage, which are divided into squares, or blocks and labelled “down stage right”, “up centre” and so on. Blocking simply means where you’re supposed to go and when you’re supposed to go there.

  It’s up to the actor to write down all her or his blocking into their script, so a scene is performed the same way, every time. It’s up to the stage manager to write down everybody’s blocking in the master, or prompt-script, because actors and directors always forget to take notes. It’s an art that is deadly dull to everybody except stage mangers, so I won’t go on about it.

  Because the show is choreographed like a ballet and the lines are all sung or spoken in verse (doggerel, actually, but then Juliet isn’t Will Shakespeare), having one’s part down cold is more than usually important.

  The scripts were mailed to the cast the month before the first rehearsal, along with t
he contracts and the invitations to Juliet’s costume ball. It was expected that they’d be more or less line perfect (“off-book”) at the start of the rehearsal period. This was not usual for most theatre companies, but we had an insanely short rehearsal period, so any head-start we could get was welcome.

  The only person with an excuse for not having a reasonable handle on his lines was Shane. Because of his last minute casting, he hadn’t even seen the script until his arrival. Luckily for him (and for us) he was a remarkable quick-study. When we started the laborious process of blocking, he was off-book for the first three scenes.

  Meredith was off book completely, no surprise, as she’d done the show before, and Amber was well on her way.

  “I don’t want to hold anyone back,” Amber said to me during our mid-morning smoke break. “Shane and I worked on lines until about two a.m. last night. It’s amazing how fast he can pick them up, eh? He was like that at theatre school, too—a quick-study.”

  “Was Jason in the picture when you guys were at Kingsway together?” I asked.

  “Well, sort of—near the end,” she said. “Shane and I had been seeing each other pretty steadily for a couple of months, but then he got the lead role in the year-end production opposite this other girl. I auditioned for the part, but I didn’t get it, which really hurt my feelings. So he was rehearsing with her during the day, and hanging out with her at night. I knew it was over.”

  “They were running lines, I take it,” I said. I wasn’t trying to be facetious. It’s just that theatre people bond very tightly, very quickly, when they’re all in a show together. Frequently, they end up sharing a bed. It’s a work-perk, like my cell phone.

  “Yeah. Running lines to begin with, then running something else,” Amber said. “Jason was SM-ing the show, and I started hanging out with him instead. We’ve been together ever since.”

  No wonder then, that Jason had flipped out when he heard Shane was on the show. An old flame. Not even really so old. According to their résumés, Shane, Amber and Jason had been at the Kingsway Theatre School together in 1997, the year Shane had graduated.