A Midsummer Eve's Nightmare

by Fletcher Crow, Donna

  Although Elizabeth’s heart thumped so loudly she could barely hear Richard’s words, the experience had been far less terrifying for her. She hadn’t seen the car until it was past, and by then she was safe in Richard’s arms. But she knew it had brought back to him the anguish of losing his first wife. Elizabeth felt again the pain she had experienced vicariously that night at The Eyrie when he had told her about it. That had been just one of the times she had fallen in love with him.

  And this was another. She wrapped her arms around him, offering reassurance to them both. Was that what marriage was all about—at least the ‘for better’ part—a lifetime of falling- in-love experiences?

  “Richard, darling, it’s all right. I’m fine. Not a scratch.”

  “Thank heaven.” He let his breath out in a rush and hugged her tighter yet.

  They sat for several minutes, locked in each others’ arms, trembling and rejoicing in just being together. Alive.

  Then from across the park, the clear notes of a recorder group floated to them gently as an angel’s song, “Abide with me. Fast falls the eventide. The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide. . .” Without speaking, barely loosening their grasp on each other, Richard and Elizabeth stood and began strolling across the park. They paused at the stone bridge curving across the creek and listened to the last phrase of the song, “. . .through life, through death, O Lord, abide with me.” They smiled at each other and, arm in arm, crossed the bridge, the breeze blowing the notes of a new song after them. This time “Morning Has Broken,” even though it was almost evening.

  Beyond the playground the narrow, winding path led gently upward through verdant bushes and under thick trees as the early evening shadows lengthened across their private, green world. Nothing could have been more soothing to their shattered nerves. The path was so narrow Elizabeth clung close to Richard in order to be able to walk side by side. Concentrating on the strength of his presence and the beauty of nature, she forced all her doubts, fears and questions from her mind to revel in this time alone with the husband who was such a gift. Once again she was convinced of the fallacy of the popular notion that marriages weren’t made in heaven.

  She felt it was almost a calling to be an object lesson in this world of broken marriages and broken hearts and shattered dreams to the fact that marriage wasn’t as outmoded as so many claimed. Nor was happiness impossible, even in an imperfect world.

  They walked for some time over the rough dirt trail before the sound of pounding feet and heavy breathing behind them penetrated Elizabeth’s consciousness. Her arm tightened around Richard. Oh, no. What now? Was someone coming after them to break in on their idyll with bad news? They could almost feel the footfalls on the earth and the breathing on their backs when they turned and stepped aside into the bushes.

  Without a sideways glance the straining jogger pelted past them. “Was that Larry?” Elizabeth asked. “He looks so frail. I had no idea he was into athletic training.”

  “Or that he would leave his wires and circuits long enough to take a run in the park?” Richard grinned at her.

  They walked on, the trail becoming increasingly rougher and steeper as they went further into the wilderness area. Richard’s arm remained warm and sheltering around her, but Elizabeth still couldn’t get the incongruous image of Larry jogging out of her mind. Larry: Sally’s boyfriend—maybe? Larry: Alone in the kitchen fixing Erin’s light —and what else? Larry: jerking the cord that knocked her off her feet at the college—an accident, surely? Larry: Now racing through the park—why?

  TWELFTH NIGHT

  “Nothing that is so is so.”

  - Feste

  Chapter 12

  STILL AT A LEISURELY pace they turned back down the trail toward the theatre. The youthful recorder group, two young men and a long-haired girl with soprano, tenor and alto instruments, still sat cross-legged in the grass, now playing “The Bluebells of Scotland.” The honeymooners walked up the steps and around the side to the entrance of the Bowmer Theatre. “It was built in 1970 in honor of Angus Bowmer who launched the festival in 1935.” Elizabeth smiled at a favorite childhood memory. “My parents brought me here the opening season. I was only 12 years old then.”

  Richard counted on his fingers. “My, you’re well preserved.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him. “Not opening of the festival, idiot. Opening of the Bowmer theatre.”

  “Ooh.” He ducked as she slapped at his shoulder.

  “The opening play was the same for both, though—Merchant of Venice—Shylock was Angus Bowmer’s favorite role. He played it in nine festival productions and directed it for the opening of the Bowmer.”

  Her reminiscence had taken them inside the wide glass and natural wood lobby. An usher showed them to their seats and, their hearts singing praises for Elizabeth’s narrow escape and the beauty of life, Elizabeth and Richard settled in to enjoy Shakespeare’s most musical play—Twelfth Night. A few minutes later Gregg, as Count Orsino, entered and directed his attendant musicians, “If music be the food of love, play on.”

  Elizabeth blinked to be sure. Could this possibly be the same actor who, two nights ago, had been such a compelling, frightening and tragic Othello? Now he looked so young, so lithe, so fair. It was amazing what slight-of-hand costuming, makeup and expert acting could perform.

  And Elizabeth’s thought seemed to set the perfect tone for a play peopled with characters who were not what they seemed, nor even what they thought themselves to be: Viola was not the boy she dressed as; Orsino was in love with love, not with Olivia; Olivia’s mourning for her brother was merely a convenient excuse; Sir Andrew Aguecheek was a clown, not the dashing suitor he imagined himself to be; Malvolio’s self-importance was more in his mind than even in Maria’s counterfeited letters. . . and on through the tangled foolery, songs and dances of the plot.

  And all Elizabeth’s who is right? and what is real? feelings were enhanced by the director’s creativity in transporting the play from Elizabethan England and setting his Illyria in the antebellum Southern United States with the white-pillared, broad-porticoed plantation mansions of Olivia and Orsino facing each other, and Olivia costumed as a hoop-skirted Southern belle while Orsino wooed his lady in ruffled shirt and a pearl grey swallowtail coat.

  “What I am, and what I would, are as secret as maidenhead,” the disguised Viola told the Countess Olivia, and Elizabeth, thinking of the secretive people surrounding her, found herself nodding.

  Then once again, Elizabeth found herself focusing on events close at hand when, in act three, Viola and Olivia sat in the Countess’ garden. Erin’s natural, soft southern drawl was only slightly exaggerated as Olivia asked her supposed page boy, “I prithee, tell me what thou think’st of me.”

  Viola replied, “That you do think you are not what you are.”

  Olivia fluttered her fan and batted her eyelashes. “If I think so, I think the same of you.”

  Viola spread her knee-breeched legs wider apart to appear more mannish. “Then think you right: I am not what I am.”

  “A murderous guilt shows not itself more soon than love that would seem hid,” Olivia brought the conversation to a close.

  In spite of her determination to put questions behind her and to revel in the play, Elizabeth found herself going round and round in her mind. Who of the real life cast around them was not what they were? Did someone bear a murderous guilt she couldn’t divine? Viola had said it best: “O time! Thou must untangle this, not I; it is too hard a knot for me to untie!”

  All seemed to be, as Feste declared, “Nothing that is so is so.”

  Then at last, for the characters in the tangled stage plot, all was revealed in Shakespeare’s wonderful balance of sense and nonsense as Feste said, “The whirligig of time brings in his revenges.”

  The entire cast joined in a reprise of the gentle ballad:

  O mistress mine, where are you roaming?

  O, stay and hear; your true love’s coming. . .
/>
  Journeys end in lovers meeting. . .

  Present mirth hath present laughter. . .

  Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,

  Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

  And Richard leaned over and kissed Elizabeth. It was a delightful play. A delightful evening. But would time untangle the knot of what was that was not for them? As Shakespeare always did, this play brought to her anew so much beauty of language, so much truth, so much insight into human nature. If only she could remember it all. But one truth she would not forget: What appears, is not; what is, appears not.

  Chapter 13

  ELIZABETH STOOD AND APPLAUDED with those around her until her hands stung. Then, since they were going to the backstage party, Richard suggested they resume their seats until most of the 600 playgoers had left the theatre. “It was wonderful! Let’s go congratulate them,” she said when the last notes of the stage music ended.

  Backstage all was abuzz. Victoria had said the party would be low-key, but now in the afterglow of a superb performance, there was no suppressing the jubilant cast and crew. There was a great deal of laughter and talk of “being on” tonight as cast members, who had shed their stiff, heavy costumes for comfortable jeans and sweatshirts, made a beeline for the abundant food and drinks.

  “What a perfect Southern belle you made!” Elizabeth hugged Erin. “No one would ever know you’d been sick a day in your life. There was so much energy in the whole production. It communicated itself to the audience.”

  Erin got no more than a thank you out before the actor who played Feste came in singing, “come and kiss me sweet and twenty.” He lifted Viola, now transformed back into Janice-from-Dartmouth, off her feet, and whirled her around. Janice shrieked with laughter, while their friends applauded.

  Then the Elizabethan dancers and singers from the outdoor performance joined them, adding their crumhorns and lutes to the music of the evening.

  But Elizabeth, with the warning still fresh in her mind that all that is so is not so, looked around carefully for anything she might learn. Dirk sat in a corner on a seaman’s trunk, not joining the festivities. He was apparently there as Erin’s special guest, yet she pointedly ignored him as she joked and flirted with company members. He looked unconcerned. Bored, even. But was it so?

  Elizabeth picked up a bowl of popcorn and a bottle of her own favorite Mystic peach from the refreshment table and walked to Erin’s abandoned boyfriend. She handed the bottled drink to him. “It’s a party, Dirk, not a wake.” Then she regretted her quip, reminding her as it did of Sally.

  Dirk, however, seemed appreciative of the drink and of her attention. They talked a little about the play and Erin’s recovery, then Elizabeth steered the conversation to Dirk himself. “Do you have a theatre background?” She sat on the floor near him.

  He gave a self-deprecating smile. “Not unless you count seeing a lot of horror and action movies as a kid.”

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “Hard to say. I was an Air Force brat. We moved about every five years. I was born in Mississippi, started grade school in Germany, finished in Colorado, junior high in Korea. That was when my parents divorced. Mom took my little sister back to her home in Minnesota; I stayed with Dad, went with him when he was posted back to Europe. He’s in California now— at Edward’s.”

  “That must have made school incredibly difficult.”

  He shrugged. “Not the studying. Curriculum is exactly the same in every military base school in the world—has to be with kids bouncing in and out like popcorn.” Appropriately for his words, he picked up a handful of popcorn from the bowl. “Making friends was almost impossible. It never seemed worth putting the energy into a relationship that I knew would be transitory.”

  “College?”

  “Studied business at Southern Cal. Lived off campus. Again, good for studying, bad for social life.” He ran his fingers through his sun-streaked hair. Just then Erin issued a peal of laughter. He paused to watch her in the center of a small group, talking animatedly and tossing her long, tawny hair. “I guess that’s what attracted me to Erin. She’s such a warm people-person. I was tired of being a loner.”

  Elizabeth was amazed at what she was hearing. The picture Dirk painted seemed the exact opposite of the persona he projected of a suave, international playboy.

  “Do you have a job?” Dirk was so happy to talk, Elizabeth saw no need to make her questions subtle.

  “I’m with a stock brokerage firm in LA. I took an extended leave to be with Erin this summer. I hoped we could work out something permanent.” He shook his head. “I don’t know, though. Looks like I might as well go back to LA before the only thing that gets made permanent is my leave from the firm.”

  Elizabeth nibbled thoughtfully on a handful of popcorn as Dirk fell into a brooding silence. What is so is not so, she thought again. At least, what appeared to be was not necessarily so. Dirk was an international jet setter only in the sense that he had traveled the world as the child of an Air Force officer. He wasn’t wealthy unless he had made some astonishingly clever investments. And he certainly wasn’t carefree. Or was he? All she knew was what he told her. He certainly seemed sincere, though, and her heart went out to him.

  On the other side of the stage Tom, still in his Feste role, started a lively fiddle tune, and in one of the mercurial changes that seemed so typical of her, Erin skipped over, grabbed Dirk’s hands, and pulled him to his feet. “Come on, let me teach you the Irish jig.”

  Elizabeth leaned back against the trunk Dirk had abandoned. A noise on the catwalk overhead took her attention. A thin young man with thick glasses was leaning far across the rail, adjusting a light. She waved to Larry. He waved back, pliers in hand. Didn’t he ever quit working?

  She got to her feet and crossed Olivia’s porch to the refreshment table again. The popcorn had made her thirsty, so she took the last bottle of Mystic peach. She looked around for Richard. And Tori. Her sister was the one who had said, “I’ll see you backstage,” yet she was practically the only person in the company Elizabeth hadn’t seen since a brief, across-the-stage wave when they first arrived. She wondered if Tori might have gone downstairs to see to a costume. But that was unlikely. Tori wasn’t the workaholic Larry appeared to be.

  She walked along the back of the set. The party seemed to be thinning out a bit, it must be nearly midnight. Many had probably gone home to bed by now, especially those with matinee performances tomorrow. Then Elizabeth stopped. She heard a deep, familiar voice just on the other side of the canvas flat. She didn’t exactly mean to be eavesdropping, but, well, if she didn’t eavesdrop, how would she hear? And if she just walked around and joined Richard, she might interrupt what sounded like a very serious conversation with Gregg. She smiled. Only her Richard could talk philosophy in the middle of a party with the Irish jig being danced not six feet away from him.

  “I know you don’t approve of me, Richard—”

  Richard interrupted Gregg’s statement with a sound of protest.

  “Okay, I should say Elizabeth doesn’t approve of me for her sister. And I can’t blame her. When Ellen walked out on me—and I can’t say I blame her much—I hadn’t been a good husband—fond of practicing love scenes with my costar after rehearsals, boozing after the show—all the typical things. Anyway, my mother and all three sisters sided with Ellen. That probably tells you I wasn’t blameless, but then I already told you that. Most of our friends were already Ellen’s.

  “So there I was, sans friends, sans family, sans anything but my career. Do you blame me for being fascinated with a girl like Victoria and all her traditional values? She was like the answer to all the prayers I never prayed.”

  “An answer from a God who never existed?” Elizabeth could hear the gentle smile in Richard’s voice. It made her smile.

  But the next minute the smile faded from her face. Her first thought at the sight of the two men in snappy casual attire was that some actors, perhaps from somet
hing at the Black Swan, hadn’t changed out of their costumes. Then she recognized Detective Sergeant Lempson, who had been in charge that first night, and a short, black detective whose name she couldn’t remember. The Irish jig came to a ragged stop.

  Lempson waved at the musicians. “That’s all right, carry on. We just want to talk to a few of you.” In spite of his invitation, however, the music didn’t resume. Lempson turned toward the side where Elizabeth was standing.

  “How did you know we were here?” she asked the tall, red-haired detective.

  “Been visiting with Trevor Stevens. He said a bunch of you were over here.”

  Richard and Gregg walked around from behind the set. Elizabeth couldn’t help noticing how ashen Gregg looked, especially next to Richard’s olive skin and dark hair. “Let me guess— Dr. Hilliard’s report?” Richard said.

  “And you are?” Lempson asked. Richard gave his name and the officer looked back in his notes. “Ah, yes. You requested they run the potassium chloride test.”

  Richard nodded. “I assume it was high, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  Lempson ran his fingers through his sandy hair. “You might say that. 4.5 is a normal reading. That young lady’s was 9.5.”

  “How long would it take a dose like that to kill her?”

  The sergeant shook his head. “That amount wouldn’t have needed to be in her system long to get a reaction, especially with her weak heart. Not more than an hour or hour and a half, the doctor figures. It might have just worked its way through her blood stream, or something might have triggered the final response.”

  The two detectives moved on, taking names and asking the key preliminary questions— were you working in Othello two nights ago? Detective Rory Fellows introduced himself to Elizabeth. She gave her name and explained she was in the audience. He nodded, made a note, and moved on. She returned to her thoughts. An hour to an hour and a half. That meant during the time of the play. So the specter of someone poisoning the juice on the props table wasn’t so fanciful after all. Of course, Sally might have had something to drink backstage if she was thirsty between acts.