Juliet.
Considering that she gave me the infernal technology to begin with, I didn’t think her tone was quite fair. However, I was glad of the warning. My stomach felt quite queasy at the thought that, if I hadn’t been at George’s, I would have used the cell-connection without thinking, and I’d owe Juliet close to two hundred bucks for the privilege of being propositioned by Spyhole in Vancouver.
The next message was from Becker, of all people.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: welcome to the real world
Dear Ms. Deacon;
My colleague tells me you’re online, so I got your address from your boss. Welcome to the real world. It’s about time you took advantage of modern technology instead of running away from it the way you do.
If anything comes up about Jason McMaster and you can’t get me by phone, you can leave a message for me at the above e-mail address. The investigation into his disappearance continues.
Sincerely,
Detective Constable Mark Becker, Laingford OPP
For three years I had been totally unreachable—no phone, no datebook, no commitments, no cash. Then, when employment struck like a ripe melon in the side of the head, I got wired so fast it felt like they’d implanted a microchip in my brain. Too much vulnerability, too quickly.
After Becker’s stupid dead body trick that morning, I had been planning to ignore him completely for the foreseeable future. I had given him courtesy at the Laingford cop-shop over the George/Hell Neighbour affair, but nothing more. Now, for some reason, he was sending me e-mail, and my gut reaction was, annoyingly, to be very pleased.
I have heard that e-mail communication has prompted a renaissance in letter writing. What I discovered during my affair with a laptop was that e-mailing is not letter-writing at all. It’s e-mailing. Letters require a legible hand, more than thirty seconds of thought, and the act of licking a stamp. E-mail is only one step away from blithering on the chat-lines. There is an inherent pressure, when the machine is humming and the online time’s a ticking, to answer quickly. I discovered that what you type in an e-mail message can be sent without sober second thought. All it takes is the momentary downward pressure of one finger.
I drafted a couple of replies to Becker’s e-mail, therefore, on a piece of paper before I typed and sent one.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: You’re welcome to the real world
Dear Detective Constable Becker;
Thanks for your note. This computer was thrust upon me for work-reasons, and while it would give me no greater pleasure than to establish an e-mail correspondence with you, I can’t afford to pay for it. Perhaps, as my employer was kind enough to give you my e-mail address, she might also be approachable about the matter of remuneration for the time online.
I have made some progress in my investigation into the disappearance of Jason McMaster, but it’s all flaky, Luddite stuff that you wouldn’t think was important. Let me know when you find his body.
Cordially,
Polly Deacon.
Twenty-Three
CAT: There’s safety in numbers—it can’t be denied / with your friends right beside you, you don’t have to hide / But someone must lead us and someone must follow / a quest by committee’s just too hard to swallow.
-The Glass Flute, Scene vii
Amber Thackeray, I concluded at the beginning of the third day of rehearsal, was stark raving mad. She had arrived late, with an assortment of satchels and tote bags strung about her person. In her arms, cradled in a baby blanket, was a small puppy. Amber’s face was alight with love, and she crooned to the creature enthusiastically as she introduced it around.
“This is Portia,” she said. “You know, like in The Merchant of Venice? I played her in my second year at theatre school. She’s only six weeks old, and she already knows her name.”
Portia the puppy, an expensive yellow lab, by the looks of her, gazed balefully out at the world from her nest of blankets, yawned and then burped.
“Oooh. I think she needs to go,” Amber said and began wriggling to remove the straps of her various purses. Shane sprang forward and helped her divest, then he followed her outside. We were all in the lobby, doing the coffee-thing and waiting for Amber. She wasn’t more than five minutes late, but most professional actors learn to be obsessive about time, if they’re to survive.
As I watched the dog-people in the cast (I was one of them) gather around the puppy and make oodgie-woodgie noises at it, I reflected that the success of our preparation time for The Glass Flute depended on Amber keeping it together. If the dog made her late, or distracted her, the show would suffer. Right then, the dog was distracting everyone.
Of course, I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut. After all, Lug-nut had been introduced to the cast not ten minutes earlier. Luggy isn’t a cute puppy, though. Even with dim pink lighting, a good makeup person and a bit of distance, he’d still look like a big old junkyard dog. A myopic mongrel with yellow eyes and clumsy feet, he is, however, old enough to know his place and keep it. I inherited him, and his life pre-Polly hadn’t been nice. He had been used as a hunting dog, kept hungry and isolated, and my home represented a significant upgrade in his lifestyle. This made him reasonably obedient and remarkably good-natured.
He went to each cast member in turn, sniffed politely at extended hands, then padded off to his usual spot on the floor by the lobby sofa. He’d hung out with me here often while I was building the puppets and Tobin, Juliet and I were the only ones in the building. I’d been meaning to bring him along again, because he’s pleasant to have around, and he’s quiet. Now that the dog/evil neighbour situation made Luggy-life at home untenable, I had let him come with me a couple of days earlier than planned. When Amber walked in with the puppy, he lifted his head, sniffed the air and then rolled his eyes at me in a weirdly human way. Obviously, we felt the same way about the infant versions of our respective species.
Rico, who was emphatically not a dog person (he and Lugnut tolerated each other, nothing more) wandered off into a back office to commune with Sam.
Meredith was not altogether delighted with the presence of two canine colleagues. She didn’t insist on their removal, which was generous of her, as that would have precipitated an ultimatum from me, and probably from Amber as well. Had she been genuinely afraid of dogs, it would have been awkward, seeing as the Equity Green Book doesn’t have a section on canine involvement in theatrical productions. I expect that she would have been well within her rights to threaten workplace discrimination if it had come to a showdown. I had already made Juliet put Luggy’s presence into my contract, and our fearless leader had obviously okayed Amber’s puppy, for reasons that were unclear. Meredith was the kind of person who is perfectly capable of taking a grievance to a higher court, and she knew we knew that. During Amber’s “Meet my puppy” scene, Meredith sat glowering on the sofa, nursing a coffee and probably plotting ways to use the dogs as a bargaining tool. I suddenly saw our van-driving dispute in a new light and trembled inwardly.
I needn’t have worried about the puppy interfering with rehearsal. Juliet, like a good matriarch, had made Arrangements.
When we entered the rehearsal room, Amber squealed in delight. In a corner of the studio, Juliet had constructed a puppy playpen, with the help of Tobin and Sam. I hadn’t been up there yet, but I should have guessed, because Tobin kept making dog-jokes in the shop when we were having a smoke. I thought he was talking about Luggy.
The playpen was constructed out of wooden latticework, left over from the set of The Gardening Show, an educational snoozer commissioned by a generous government in the early eighties. The latticework still had its fabric flowers and fake grass attached, which would turn into some interesting canine bowel movements later in the game.
Inside the playpen was a wicker basket with a pillow in it (both from the props room) and a
tray that had once carried fake food for The Eat Rite Revue, with water and feed bowls (props from the same show) at the ready. The pièce de résistance was a brightly-coloured, moulded plastic toddler’s playhouse, with a slide and everything.
“Oh, it’s sooo cute!” Amber cried and took possession.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Meredith muttered.
Juliet appointed herself nanny, and while the pup’s occasional whimpers were heard throughout the course of the morning (attended to when Juliet deemed it necessary), the rehearsal was undisturbed. Lug-nut took on the role of prison-guard, settling down on the outside perimeter of the pen and patrolling the boundaries regularly to make sure everything was secure.
I had moved the strike and set-up schedule forward a day, in case the jokester was planning another assault on the puppets. The sooner I had the cast rehearsed in the fine art of taking the set apart and putting it back together again, the sooner we could put everything under lock and key in the van.
According to the Theatre for Young Audiences Agreement, the set-up and take-down time for a set isn’t supposed to take more than forty minutes from start to finish. The time-limit is there to encourage theatre companies to keep the size and scope of the sets down to a minimum and protect the actors and stage managers from burnout. Technical directors and set designers take it on as a personal challenge. Over the years, they have perfected the art of building massive, complicated sets that fit together like Meccano or Lego, come apart into a million different pieces so they can fit into the van, and can be unloaded and set up in forty minutes, provided the cast does everything at a brisk trot, has eaten a hearty breakfast and doesn’t make any mistakes.
According to Meredith (who, in case anyone had forgotten, reminded us that she had done the show before), the setup/take-down time on the last tour was about thirty minutes. Perhaps the entire cast of the last show was made up of triathletes. I didn’t ask.
The black velour curtains that were used to create the play-box mini-theatre were heavy, but reasonably simple to deal with. They either fit like sleeves over the steel pipes of the frame, or were velcroed on. For transportation, they had to be folded and rolled like pastry, plush side in, and placed in a series of big hockey bags, which were marked according to which side of the playbox they belonged to (stage right, stage left, proscenium curtain, etc.) The puppets were packed away in wheeled touring cases, according to the “what’s where” chocolate box diagram on each lid.
The frame itself was held together with key-clamps, ingenious connectors invented by a Canadian engineer with a vendetta against theatre people. The key-clamps allowed technical directors to construct extensive scaffolding which was strong, safe and came apart easily—a designer’s dream and an actor’s nightmare.
I put Amber and Shane on curtain duty and Brad and Meredith (did I mention she’d done the show before?) on frame construction. Meredith had come to rehearsal with her own Allen key, a pricey Lee Valley tool with an ergonomically designed hand-grip. I gave Brad a plain one from the tool box.
Recognizing that Meredith already knew how to strike and set up the frame as efficiently as humanly possible, I left her alone to talk Brad through the process. She gave instructions in a kindergarten-teacher tone, and I just prayed that Brad would keep his cool.
We left the set in pieces on the floor when we broke for lunch. Amber and Shane headed off to town with the dog to parade it up and down Main Street, after Juliet had explained to Amber that puppies need to be socialized as soon as possible.
“Let people pet her and introduce her to all the other dogs you meet,” she said.
“Since when did Juliet become a dog-wrangler?” I muttered to Tobin, on my way down to the shop. I was carrying the big pink daisy that has a cameo appearance in Scene Nine. One of its petals was hanging by a thread, and its mouth was torn a bit in one corner.
“She’s got a bunch of dog-books on her desk,” Tobin said. “I guess she’s reading up on it.”
“Vicarious puppy-parenting, you think?”
“Seems so. I would have pegged Juliet as a cat-person, though, not a Barbara Woodhouse type.”
“Wonders will never cease.”
I left the daisy downstairs on the shop table, its mouth propped open so the air could quick-dry the contact cement repair I’d made. I looked around for Rico, in case he wanted to do lunch, but Kim said he’d gone out already.
Brad was waiting by the front door. “Can you give Meredith and me a lift into town, Polly?” he said. “We want to go to that vegetarian place.” Meredith emerged from Juliet’s office, looking smug, and joined him.
“Sure,” I said. “You need a ride back, too? I’ve got a lot of errands to run.” Sharing my lunch hour with Meredith and Brad was not in the script.
“No, we’ll walk,” Meredith said. “We’re on a plan.”
“A plan?”
Brad grinned a little sheepishly. “Meredith’s helping me lose weight,” he said. “We’re jogging together in the mornings before rehearsal, and power-walking at lunchtime. Meredith used to teach aerobics, eh?” I’ll just bet she did, I thought. I could just imagine her up there at the front of one of those classes, screaming commands into a Madonna-style headset microphone, wearing one of those high-cut leotards that are reserved for those with buns of steel. She’d be a tyrant. Still, she obviously had Brad eating out of the palm of her hand (even if all he was getting were celery sticks and tofu), and he could stand to shed a few pounds.
Bonds do form quickly in rehearsal, I knew this, but the speed with which we had established factions was slightly disturbing. Amber and Shane were glued together, the missing Jason having been apparently wiped from Amber’s memory. I figured that they’d likely remain that way throughout the tour and speak as one, but at least they’d be on my side. Meredith and Brad, on the other hand, could present a dangerous united front if any issues came up that needed arbitration.
In the van, Meredith raised one.
“I think we should draw up a list of every day we’re on tour, with a seating plan,” she said. She was sitting in the front passenger seat, and Brad was on the bench seat in the back.
“Why?” I said.
“Because it’s more comfortable up here,” she said. “I know you like the deputy to navigate, but I think it’s only fair that everyone gets a chance to sit in the comfortable seat, seeing as you’re not willing to let anyone else drive.”
“I agree,” Brad said. “Riding shotgun is way more fun.” He sounded like he was fifteen years old.
I allowed myself a small, weary sigh.
“Sure, Meredith, if you think it’s important. I don’t think I’ll have time to get around to it, though. Will you take care of it?”
“I’d be glad to,” she said. “In fact, I’ve already done it. Juliet loves the idea.” So that’s what Meredith was doing in the artistic director’s office moments before. I should have guessed. It annoyed me that Meredith had proposed an idea to Juliet before running it past me, but it was a minor thing, and at least I hadn’t been petty about it. If I’d offered any argument, I suspected it would have given the actress a great deal of pleasure to tell me that Juliet had okayed it already. Perhaps, I thought, I should have a quiet word with Juliet and suggest that Meredith have a rider attached to her contract, making her the assistant stage manager. Juliet could give her a few extra bucks, and I could give her all the scut work she could handle. That might cool her jets.
I dropped them off at the Green Beanery and headed up to the post office to pick up the package of dancewear I’d ordered from the costume shop in Laingford.
On the way up the street I saw Amber, Shane and the puppy, attracting the kind of attention you’d expect from passersby. Three beautiful, fair heads, three expensive, gorgeous creatures with perfect teeth and contented smiles. A young woman with a camera had posed them on one of Sikwan’s downtown benches and was taking their picture. I recognized her as a reporter for one of the local newspape
rs and figured it wouldn’t be long before the golden children were front page news. Hmmph. Luggy and I had never been in the paper, although there had been a grainy shot of George and me coming out of the Sikwan courtroom during the trial of Francy’s murderer.
After lunch we put the set together again and continued to work through the script, perfecting puppetry technique and fine-tuning the blocking. Ruth was scheduled to join us for the afternoon so we could start fitting the music in. She was on hand to play the music live for the first week, but when we were on tour, we would be performing with audio tapes. The tapes would gradually replace Ruth towards the end of the week. There was no point in messing around with tapes before we started doing runs of the show, because of all the stops and starts involved in early rehearsals. We only had a week, though, so the sooner we could stumble through it, the better. Having Ruth on keyboard in rehearsal, knowing we’d only have tapes in performance, was like being an astronaut at a pre-lift-off banquet. You know the future holds nothing but food-in-a-tube for the duration.
When we got to Scene Nine, just before Ruth was due, I realized I’d left the flower puppet drying in the shop and went down to get it. I passed her on the stairs.
“Be warned,” I said. “Amber’s got a puppy up there, and at some point we’ll have to give it a lesson in staying away from cables.”
“Oh, God,” Ruth said. “Another cable trashed? That was my last one.”
“No, the puppy didn’t touch your stuff. She’s being seriously chaperoned, but she won’t be for always, you can bet on it. They’re waiting for you. I’ll be up in a sec.”
Down in the shop, I discovered that someone had made a few adjustments to my repair job. The big foam flower was on the work table where I’d left it, but it was horribly disfigured. The pink petals which had surrounded the face had been torn off, rolled up into a sausage-shape and stuffed cruelly into the puppet’s mouth. There was an audio cable wrapped around its neck.
Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle Page 39