by Jessa Archer
“Well then, let’s hope Muncey Theater was already suitably haunted and the resident spirit chases Amundsen away.” His teasing tone was gone now. “Because unless death worked a miraculous change of personality, Jerald would most definitely qualify as a malevolent spirit.”
“I take it you weren’t friends,” I said as we began walking back up the aisle toward the lobby. “So, your curiosity as to who killed him was—”
“Strictly professional,” Davies said. “Chief Lamm asked me to stop in after they found the body. Take a few samples, since it would be at least a day before the state crew would get in here, especially when the crime scene was old and he couldn’t even tell them for certain that the guy was murdered. And I teach one of our more popular non-major courses—an overview of forensic chemistry. Not that many of the students at SCU are likely to end up in the field, but they’ve all watched CSI, and like to imagine themselves in the role. I spend most of the semester separating forensic fact from forensic fiction.”
He glanced at the box of tools. “Where exactly did you find those?”
“Um…in the tool closet. At the back of the prop room. Why?”
“Because they’re still looking for the murder weapon.”
Ick. I nearly dropped the box in my eagerness to hand it to him. “There are more tools in there. I just grabbed a few for my stage design class.”
Sam laughed. “I’d be happy to carry these, but it definitely wasn’t a hammer. The shape is wrong. The wound on the front of his head, which you probably saw, was from where he fell and hit the metal table in the trap room. That’s probably the blow that killed him, but there was a second wound at the back of his head that knocked him down. Longer. Thinner. I was thinking maybe the flat side of one of those really big wrenches. Did you see anything like that?”
“I didn’t. But I was really just looking for hammers. Do you want me to show you where—”
“No, that’s okay. I’ll just mention it to Lamm. He said they searched the entire backstage area. Didn’t come up with anything. I was thinking more in terms of what they might be wanting to look for elsewhere.”
“So…why are you back here today?”
“Partly because I was curious about the clean-up effort. But I also saw you heading up the hill when I was coming out of the cafeteria and thought I’d pop in and introduce myself. Your mother was…” He sighs. “Your mother was a remarkable woman, Professor Alden. She was very kind when I arrived at SCU three years ago. Her sense of humor was the only thing that made faculty meetings at this place tolerable.”
I felt tears stinging my eyes and quickly blinked them away as I unlocked my office door. “Please, call me Tig.”
His smile widened, crinkling up the corners of his eyes. “And I’m Sam. Delighted to make your acquaintance, Tig. Hopefully Tandy-the-Terrible has found you a temporary office while they’re airing the place out?”
“No, she didn’t. I was afraid to ask, to tell the truth. I’ll just hold office hours in the cafeteria until this place is habitable again. And luckily, as long as I’m willing to bring a laptop, there’s a perfectly quiet office at the Coastal Playhouse. I’ll probably camp out there a bit, too. I’m headed over there now to drop off the tools and see if I can get the office set up.”
I grabbed the empty frame, and then noticed Sam staring at the other frame on my desk—the picture of me with Melinda Barry.
“That was taken at the Coastal Playhouse, right? I attended a show there last summer.”
“Yes, but this was years ago, on my ninth birthday. My parents arranged for me to have a small part in the show as a surprise.”
“At first glance, I thought the other girl was your sister because you looked so much alike. But then I remembered Caroline saying you were an only child.”
I was about to say that it was just the identical dresses, but then I realized he was right. To a casual observer, Melinda Barry and I probably would look quite a bit alike in that photograph.
“Well, I’ve got to get back down hill,” he said. “It was very nice meeting you.”
I pulled my eyes away from the picture long enough to tell Sam goodbye and then picked up the frame to look more closely. Melinda’s hair was almost the same shade of brown as mine. A similar facial shape and skin tone, and the same general build, although nature never blessed me with quite that much cleavage.
Thinking back to the recent cast photos lining the walls at the Playhouse, there was still more than a passing resemblance between myself and Melinda. Definitely enough for Alicia to latch on to.
While the notion that I would have killed Amundsen for this job was ludicrous, Melinda Barry was apparently a spurned lover. And Amundsen had made that rejection public by casting someone else in Melinda’s usual role at the Playhouse.
In five seasons on Private Eye High, I learned that there are several standard motives for murder. One is greed. One is fear. But jealousy is right up there at the top. Discovering that someone you love is cheating is one of the things most likely to push normal people over the edge.
And public humiliation? That just adds fuel to the fire.
Chapter Nine
It was one of those rare but glorious winter days on the Outer Banks. The temperature was in the low eighties, but the sun was bright enough that it felt even warmer. I’d grown accustomed to this sort of winter in Southern California, and the one part of the move that Paige and I had both considered a downside was the potential of an actual winter. On one of our holiday trips to visit Caroline, we’d gotten a light dusting of snow—not exactly a white Christmas, but close. We scraped the snow off of the tops of the cars and had just enough to build a knee-high snowman. It had been a novelty and kind of fun. But winter storms weren’t something either of us wanted to deal with on a regular basis, so it was heartening to have a day like this in mid-January, where I could roll back the Sonata’s sunroof and soak up some rays.
I pulled into the Playhouse parking lot a few minutes later. While I supposed I’d eventually get used to a blank spot on the landscape next door, it was still unnerving to see empty space where the restaurant once stood. It made the theater look oddly off-balance. I wondered what would eventually pop up in that location. Even on the sound side of the island, waterfront property generally didn’t go undeveloped for long.
After leaving the box of tools in the lobby, I poked around a bit inside the building, opening various doors until I located a broom and a dust-cloth. When I stepped into the theater manager’s office, however, it occurred to me that I probably shouldn’t disturb anything. If the university decided to file charges for the theft of the laptop, there might be fingerprints on the desk or other clues.
I was about to close the door when I spotted something I hadn’t noticed last time—a small wooden file cabinet beneath the printer stand on the far side of the room. It clearly wasn’t intended for storing confidential items, since there was no lock on either of the drawers. But if there were print copies of records for the Coastal Players, that’s probably where they would be. And I needed those in order to do my job. A quick peek couldn’t hurt as long as I was careful.
Pulling my sleeves down over my fingers, I tugged at the edges of the top drawer to coax it open. On the off chance that the thief was ungloved and had decided to go poking around in here, that should keep the prints on the handle intact.
Unless, of course, the thief also opened the drawer by grabbing the sides, in which case I’d just wiped his prints away.
Oh, well. It was done now.
The top drawer was filled with office supplies, printer cartridges, and so forth. When I opened the bottom drawer, however, I saw two black ledgers. One was marked 2007–2008 and the other was 2009–2010. A manila envelope was taped to the back of each ledger, with RECEIPTS scrawled along the edge in blue marker.
Given the date, these were probably the last two ledgers before the Playhouse shifted everything over to the computer. That also meant that they weren’t likel
y to have much information that I needed. Still, I sat down on the floor next to the cabinet and pulled the books into my lap. A quick thumb-through showed that my original assessment was correct. The only thing of interest was the back page of the 2010 ledger, where several business cards and other slips of paper were clipped to the top.
I spread the scraps onto the floor in front of me. One card was for a bookkeeper, hopefully the person who was still handling the accounts. There was also a card for a florist, a realtor, a chiropractor, a pediatric nurse, an insurance agent, and a paralegal, among others. All of them were female, a pattern I might not have noticed if not for the fact that the various non-business card scraps of paper were all handwritten phone numbers and women’s names—Deanna, Zoya, Stephanie, Ardi, Jennie, Brandi with a heart drawn over the letter i. There were at least a dozen more. Most of the scraps were brightly colored, scrawled on pieces torn from the back of the programs printed for Coastal Playhouse productions.
One of the business cards stood out, however. Melinda Barry Eastland, Board Chair, Eastland Charitable Foundation. In addition to the usual contact information—email, website, phone, and fax—there was a number handwritten in small, neat print along the bottom edge of the card.
I pulled my phone out. Not to call the number, but to look online for more information about Melinda Eastland. A quick Google search pulled up dozens of sites, most of them connected to her charity activities. Some showed her with a much older man, with both of them usually in formal attire. From the captions, I gathered that the man was Melinda’s husband, New Jersey State Senator Philip Eastland. They were married in 1999, a few years after the senator’s first wife died of cancer. The senator had no children from either marriage.
If the pictures of Melinda and Philip Eastland were any evidence, their union was a happy one. They were laughing together in several photographs, and she could be seen whispering something into his ear in another one. This didn’t exactly fit the mental image that I had formed, given Ben’s belief that she and Amundsen were having an affair. But maybe she was in an open marriage. They weren’t exactly unheard of in Hollywood. Maybe they were common in political circles as well.
The bulk of the images, however, showed Melinda engaged in activities funded by the Foundation. Most were with children, many of them coping with cancer. In one, she was on the floor helping a small girl build a house with wooden blocks. In another, she was at an animal shelter of some sort, laughing as the puppy she was holding licked her face.
In none of them did she look like the type of woman who would kill someone. Ben had said she was really nice, and that’s what came through in the photographs. It was also what came through in the article I skimmed through and a brief video interview in their local paper.
I looked down at the cell number printed at the bottom of the business card. Had anyone notified Melinda of Amundsen’s death? You’d think that someone would have, probably Martin Peele, since he said they were friends. But Ben had said the affair wasn’t common knowledge among the faculty, so it was possible that she still didn’t know, right?
Why deny it? I was trying to find a reason to call the number. Simply put, I wanted to hear the woman’s reaction to the news about Amundsen before mentioning my suspicions to Travis. As much as I wanted Alicia’s focus to shift elsewhere, I didn’t like the idea of pushing the spotlight onto an innocent person. I might not be able to tell anything for certain from talking to Melinda Barry, but it couldn’t hurt.
So, I dialed the number. Given that the card was in a ledger from ten years ago, I was fairly certain I’d get one of those automated messages that it was no longer in service or else be kicked to voicemail. But the call went through.
I hesitated for a moment, and then said, “Is this Melinda Barry?”
“Melinda Barry Eastland, yes. Who is this?”
“Antigone Alden. We met years ago. My dad is—”
“James Alden. You’re the birthday girl who stole my spotlight on closing night.” She laughed. “I remember wishing a few years later that I had a videotape of that song so I could prove to my friends that I knew you before you made it big. You were adorable, and by far the best actress in Private Eye High.”
“Wow. Thank you.” I was so starstruck by Melinda Barry that summer that it had never occurred to me that she might have followed my career.
“How did you get this number, though? It’s not one that I normally give out.”
“Well, I’m currently at the Coastal Playhouse and I found your card in one of the files. I’ve taken over managing the—”
“Jerry finally quit, did he? He was threatening that again when I saw him over the holidays. Or did the college get tired of his nonsense and fire him?”
I paused, trying to read her tone. There was definitely some animosity in the mix, but she didn’t seem to be trying to hide the fact that she saw Amundsen over the holidays.
“Not exactly,” I said. “So…no one contacted you?”
“Contacted me about what?”
“Dr. Amundsen was found dead two days ago. In the theater.”
The silence on the other end extended for so long that I grew worried. “Ms. Barry? Are you still there?”
“Yes. What happened? It must have been sudden. I just saw him a few weeks ago.”
“They’re not entirely certain,” I said, deciding it might be best to remain vague on the suspicions of foul play. “He was found in the trap room. It’s possible that he fell.”
That wasn’t exactly a lie. It was actually more than possible that he fell. The only question was whether the cause of that fall had been someone whacking him upside the head.
“Oh my God. That’s awful. Have…I mean, are they planning a service of any sort?”
“I’m not sure of the exact time yet, but yes. They’re holding a memorial on Friday.”
“Thank you for letting me know,” she said, still sounding a bit stunned. “I’m…a little surprised Martin didn’t call.”
I was surprised as well, but I said, “He’s been really busy trying to reschedule travel for himself and over a dozen students. Their flights were canceled due to an air strike, and they’ve been pretty much on standby since Thursday.”
“Oh, well, I guess that makes sense, then,” Melinda said. “Will you be at the memorial service?”
“Yes. Are you planning to go?”
“If I can. I’ll have to juggle a few things, but…I worked with Jerry each summer for nearly a decade. It doesn’t seem right not to pay final respects. Thank you again for calling.”
I stashed the phone back in my pocket, wondering what, if anything, I’d gained from the conversation. Melinda sounded genuinely shocked, but she was an actress, and all I had to go on was her voice. That meant I was still left with little more than my gut instinct.
And that instinct still said the woman wasn’t a killer.
Maybe the person who had argued with Amundsen at the Blue Lagoon wasn’t Melinda Barry Eastland after all. Maybe the professor simply had a type. How many of the women whose phone numbers were scattered on the floor in front of me fit that same general physical description?
Only one way to find out. I clipped the cards back into place and put the ledgers back inside the cabinet. Then I slid the envelope with the cast photo into my bag.
Perhaps Paige and I should splurge and have dinner out tonight. I’d heard really good things about the seafood at the Blue Lagoon.
“This place looks expensive,” Paige whispered as the hostess seated us at one of the smaller tables near the window. “I thought we were on a budget.”
The Blue Lagoon was fairly empty, both because it was a weeknight and because it was off-season. Like most restaurants on the Outer Banks, it would be packed to the rafters from mid-May to early September.
“We are on a budget. Don’t order the lobster.”
“Can I order scallops?”
I scanned the menu and winced at the prices. “Yes, if we split a dessert.
We’ll be eating scrambled eggs and tuna sandwiches for dinner the rest of the week, either way, but it will be worth it if this gets Alicia Brown off my back.”
Paige arched an eyebrow and looked around the mostly empty dining area. “Please, please tell me that horrible woman is not meeting us here for dinner.”
“That horrible woman is not meeting us here for dinner.” I pulled the envelope with the most recent cast photo out of my bag and tapped the picture of Melinda Barry. “Who does she look like?”
“Hmm.” Paige stared at the photo for a minute. “She looks a little bit like an older version of Amy Adams in American Hustle. When she had the dark curly hair. And…she also looks a little bit like you.”
“You think I look like Amy Adams?”
“Not really,” Paige said, grinning. “That’s more the bit that doesn’t look like you.”
The server who came over to take our order was female, and therefore not the one who’d spoken with Alicia. I looked around the restaurant, but she seemed to be the only one on duty.
“So…” Paige said, when the waitress was gone. “What does the picture of the woman who looks more like Amy Adams than you have to do with us being here for dinner? And what does it have to do with that nasty Alicia person?”
“One of Alicia’s sources is on the waitstaff. He was working the night Amundsen died. Said that he had a fight with someone here at the restaurant. Someone who matched my general description.”
Paige chewed thoughtfully on end of her straw. “Why do you think the woman in the picture is the one the waiter saw? I mean, it’s not like you have blue hair and you’re six feet tall. A lot of people could fit your description.”
“True. But…it’s possible that she had a motive.” I briefly outlined what Ben had told me. “Jealousy can be a pretty powerful emotion.”
Paige nodded, giving me a look that said she knew all about that.
“How was school today?” I asked. “Did Nathan get you there on time?”