by Molly Harper, Stephanie Haefner, Liora Blake, Gabra Zackman, Andrea Laurence, Colette Auclair
We pulled out of the parking lot and made our way into the residential area surrounding Maple Avenue. Josh frowned as we passed the respectable one-family homes. “Are you sure about these directions, Kelsey?”
“Yep.” Kelsey’s lips popped on the p sound just as she cracked her gum.
Josh looked vaguely annoyed, though I don’t know whether it was due to Kelsey’s oral pyrotechnics or because he seemed to think we were in the wrong place. I turned in to the museum’s parking lot and the color drained out of Josh’s face.
“Hey, why does that sign say ‘Vent Haven Museum’?” Josh asked, an edge of panic creeping into his voice. He tugged at his tie, which I was starting to recognize as his tell that he was uncomfortable and upset. A tiny bit of guilt tugged at my conscience, but then I remembered how he’d manipulated me at the Derby party. He’d managed to make me feel sorry for him. He’d given me hope that we might be able to put the hostilities behind us and build some sort of friendship. He had this coming. If he wanted to fight dirty, I would fight downright filthy. It wasn’t my fault that I didn’t have any exploitable phobias.
“I’m not sure,” I said blithely. “But we’re in the right spot. We should probably get inside, the presentation is starting in about thirty minutes.”
Josh was distinctly uneasy as we hustled up to the entrance of the main building.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he stammered. “What—what is this place? Mother of—” He yelped as a display came into view, showing examples of early jointed dummies, or “vents,” that looked like a collection of dismembered limbs. Even I found that to be a little off-putting, and I had no problem with dummies. A leering clay-brown head with manically wide eyes and a super-wide grin stretching its top lip demonstrated the exaggerated features found on most vents, allowing the dummies to emote to the back row of the audience if necessary.
“I read somewhere that the overdone faces communicate the appropriate emotions to the audience, but up close, they make people uneasy,” I said casually, picking through the brochures by the front desk and tucking one into my bag for future reference. I smiled at Josh, even though the cross-sectioned plaster dummy head that showed the inner works and how a ventriloquist moved the dummy’s eyes was a bit unnerving. “Then again, it’s almost impossible to create an effective dummy without them.”
Kelsey was so fascinated by the exhibits that she broke out the camera and started filming B-roll shots of the interior.
“Did you know the last stop on the tour is a big room with dozens of vents all lined up in rows of chairs, arranged in order of who made them? They call it ‘the schoolroom,’ ” she said.
Josh shuddered and turned an even pastier shade of eggshell.
“It’s kind of crazy how much entertainment history is represented in this building. Vaudeville, early TV, cartoons.” She paused, grinning excitedly. “They have this one dummy, Woody DeForest—which is pretty damn funny if you ask me—that belonged to Don Messick. Messick was a voice actor who did the voices for Scooby Doo and Papa Smurf and a bunch of other Hanna-Barbera staples. So if we go by six degrees of separation, we are that much closer to knowing my all-time hero!”
“Okay, I don’t think you can call a cartoon character your hero,” I told her. “Also, I don’t understand why you would pick Daphne as your hero when Velma is clearly the superior choice.”
“Oh, it’s easy to like Velma.” Kelsey sniffed. “Daphne’s genius was covert and misunderstood.”
Josh wheezed, pulling at his collar. “Could you two stop talking for just a minute?”
“Oh, wow, look at this!” I held up a disembodied baby-doll-style head on a stick that demonstrated how pulling the lever hidden inside a dummy’s body made the jaw move up and down and moved the eyelids. Josh recoiled, stumbling back into the wall as he glared at the pair of us with a combination of wrath and pleading. That tiny tug of conscience came niggling back at the corner of my brain, but I ignored it.
“I thought this was a vocal arts museum,” Josh hissed, tugging at his blue paisley tie to the point that it was slipping free of his collar.
“Ventriloquism is a vocal art,” I insisted brightly. It was disturbing how innocent and guileless I could make my voice sound when I wanted to. It really was.
“Turn that damn camera off, Kelsey, I mean it,” he said, yanking at his tie full-force now.
“Okay, okay,” she said, hitting the power button with a decisive snap. She shot me a significant look, which I blithely ignored.
“Are you all right, Josh?” I asked sweetly.
“Fine, fine,” he muttered as sweat popped up on his brow. “Let’s just get on with this.”
We wandered deeper into the museum in search of the director. Having toured the museum before, I intentionally wandered a little until I found the main collection room: rows upon rows of dummies, each more sinister-looking than the last to the dummy-phobic eye, sitting on their pristine white display cubes as if waiting patiently for their cue to enter stage left. There were vents of every size and age—fluffy animals; cheerful boys; cranky grandpas; and sweet-cheeked, nonsmoking grannies.
Josh froze in his tracks. “I’m going to need to leave now.”
Okay, maybe Kelsey was right. Josh was so pale now that his face was the color of skim milk and his pupils were so wide there was hardly any color in his eyes at all. I chuckled uncomfortably and patted his arm. “Oh, come on, what’s scary about a sweet little puppet? Even kids love puppets.”
“Not all kids,” he wheezed. Just behind him, I saw someone from the museum staff carrying the Jojo the Caveman dummy, a bulgy, hunched male character with bushy red eyebrows and a scraggly beard. I started to call out a warning, but Josh had already turned toward Jojo. He let out a hoarse shriek, like the bark of a sea lion, and collapsed. The back of his head hit the floor with a dull, sickening thud.
The museum staffer let out a shriek of her own and called for the director. Kelsey shot me a scathing look, different now because she actually meant it. I frowned, biting my lip as I considered how much trouble I could be in if Josh had actually injured himself when he fell—beyond the obvious damage to his well-crafted hair. “Okay, maybe I was a little overzealous this time,” I admitted.
• • •
Though his head had bounced off the floor pretty good when he landed, Josh refused an ambulance. He did accept the director’s offer to rest in her office while we conducted the check ceremony. Kelsey got great footage for the Web site. Joe Burkhardt was charming and funny, using several voices and throwing them around the room to make his remarks about the museum’s importance in preserving ventriloquism’s legacy. The museum staff expressed their gratitude by making a special cave diorama for displaying Jojo the Caveman. It was marketing gold. But I couldn’t concentrate on any of it because I was worried about Josh and his bruised noggin.
The good news was that he refused to admit he had passed out due to fear of dummies. He said he had a “blood sugar drop,” which was fine with me. I couldn’t be blamed for a blood sugar drop. We loaded him into the car and drove home in silent deference to his headache. We took him to his apartment in Capital Towers, one of the newer McApartment buildings in the center of town, low on both personality and square footage.
I was a bit shocked that a status-conscious guy like Josh would live in a haven for newly divorced men and recent evictees from their mothers’ basements. I wondered if his story about Lydia and her supposed credit card rampage could be true after all, and if this was all he could afford. What if I’d been wrong at the Derby and he really was a flawed, approachable human being?
That just made me feel worse about the whole dented-skull thing.
Josh refused our help getting into the elevator, saying he would see us at work. Kelsey snatched the car keys out of my hands and held them out of my reach. “We’re going to talk and you are really going to listen to me. Because this isn’t coming from Kelsey, your awesome assistant who knows and sees all, bu
t Kelsey, your friend, who cares about you as a person and the overall condition of your soul. You are heading down a very dangerous path, Sadie. If this promotion was the One Ring, you would be Gollum. If it was a white whale, you would be Ahab. If it was the Iron Throne, I’m pretty sure you would be a Lannister, and nothing good ever happens to a Lannister.”
“Get to the point, Kels.”
“Look, at first, messing with Captain Cheekbones was fun, but the distraction is starting to affect our performance at work. And I know you don’t want that. I know Josh can be annoying and snotty sometimes, but he’s also our potential boss. Or at least, my potential boss. He could have really hurt himself today, Sadie, whacking his head like that. And it would have been entirely our fault.”
“I know,” I admitted. “I didn’t mean for him to concuss himself. I just wanted to scare him a little.”
“Well, cut it out. It used to be fun to come to work, but now it’s just sort of stressful. I know, deep down, that’s not what you want. You’re both working toward the same goal. Can’t you just suck it up and act like grown-ups for a little while?”
“I’ll think about it,” I grumbled. “And I do feel bad, Kelsey, really. The way he dropped like a sack of wet concrete drove home the whole ‘Josh is, in fact, human’ point. That and seeing his apartment building, which was plain sad.”
“An apology, which Josh richly deserves, would be a good place to start.”
I snatched the keys out of her hands. “I said I would think about it.”
• • •
Apparently I did not think quickly enough. The next time I saw Josh, he was perfectly friendly. We swapped objectionable salad ingredients at a working lunch because Josh couldn’t stand avocado and I hated black olives almost as much as I hated C.J. Rowley. He even joked with me about the brochure I was printing about the “Unique Museums of Kentucky.” There was no hint that I’d sent him into the mouth of a dummy-phobe’s version of hell. And because he was pretending the whole thing had never happened, I decided to do the same and skip apologizing. I rationalized the potential apology away as being a painful reminder of Josh’s dummy trauma.
I was aware it was a stretch.
That wasn’t soul-cleansing enough for Kelsey, who enforced her own brand of office justice the following week. We had stayed late, going over the copy I’d planned to use on the travel guide sample pages for the state fair campaign. It was good, if I did say so myself, but a little generic. I needed to hone it to fit with my concept, which I hadn’t nailed down 100 percent yet. Meanwhile, Kelsey was threatening to nail my fingers down 100 percent if I didn’t make a damn decision on my opening paragraph.
“Just another hour, Kels, I promise.”
“So you told me,” Kelsey muttered. “About an hour ago.”
“I have peanut butter M&Ms in my office,” I singsonged.
“You’ve had peanut butter M&Ms in your office all this time and didn’t mention it? You are really pushing it, woman.”
“I’ll go get them.” I sighed, rising from my chair.
“And we’re out of the good red pens,” Kelsey called as I reached the hallway. “While you’re out there, can you grab another box from the supply closet?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Since the supply closet was all the way at the other end of the office, I stopped there first. After an incident involving an intern selling our printer cartridges on eBay, we kept the supply closets locked. Ray, Kelsey, Josh, and I were the only ones with keys for our department’s supplies. I pulled my key from my jacket pocket, put it in the lock, and heard, “Hey! Hey! I’m in here!”
“What the— Josh?” I called. “What are you doing in the supply closet?”
I opened the door and wham! I was shoved unceremoniously into the darkened closet, stumbling into a bulky figure.
“No!” Josh yelled, bumping me to a wall in his haste to get to the door. “Don’t let the door close!”
I turned just in time to see Kelsey’s face grinning from the light of the hallway. “You two have fun!” And then she slammed the door.
Josh battered his fists against the door as I yelled, “Kelsey, what are you doing?”
“You’re taking too long fixing your working relationship with Josh. So I thought I would help the process along.”
“I told you I would think about it!” I exclaimed.
“Not good enough,” Kelsey yelled. “Work it out.”
“Kelsey, open this damn door, right now!” Josh yelled. “This is illegal and insane!”
“You’ll be fine. There’s water, a bottle of vodka, PB&Js, and some Ho Hos in the top drawer of the spare filing cabinet.”
I reached behind said five-drawer filing cabinet and flipped the light switch. (Ray didn’t quite think it through when he moved the cabinet in there.) Blinking rapidly against the intrusive light, I saw that Josh had tossed off his tie and opened the top two buttons of his shirt collar. His light blue shirt was damp with sweat. He tore open the top drawer of the cabinet and rummaged around until he found a large bottle of water. He glugged down a good portion of it before he came up for air. Which reminded me: “But what if we have to go to the bathroom?”
“There’s a bucket in the corner,” came her muffled reply.
“I’m going to kill you, Kelsey!”
“No, you aren’t!” she cackled. “You’ll thank me later, I promise. Now, I am wedging a chair underneath the doorknob. It’s six o’clock. I am going out for a steak and a very large vodka-based drink. I’ll come back around midnight to check on your progress. If you two can’t find some common ground and agree to work together like a big boy and girl, I’ll leave you here overnight.”
“Kelsey!” we cried together, banging our fists against the door.
“What is wrong with you people?” Josh yelled, kicking the metal door. “I just want to come to work every day. I did not sign on for this! Dummies and getting trapped in dark rooms with crazy women! I just want to work like a normal person!”
Josh slumped against the door and slid down, coming to rest on the carpet. He looked up at me, making huge anime eyes that reminded me of a blue-eyed basset hound. “Why didn’t I just take that nice safe job at that nuclear testing facility in an undisclosed location? I could have learned to live with the end-of-the-workday strip searches.”
“I take it that you don’t have a cell phone with you?” I asked. He shook his head. “Me neither. How long have you been in here?”
“Over an hour.” He sighed, drinking more of the water. “Right before quitting time, Kelsey asked me to help her move a ream of copy paper and next thing I knew, wham! I’m in the closet. I guess everybody left for the day without checking the supply closet to see if their colleagues were being held captive inside.”
“Damn unreasonable of them,” I agreed. “Hey, take it easy on the water. I do not relish the idea of hearing you pee into a plastic mop bucket.”
I plopped down on a few boxes of copy paper and tried to sit as primly as I could in a skirt and heels. Josh relinquished the bottle and wiped his sleeve across his brow. “Sorry, it’s just that I couldn’t find the switch. And I didn’t know any of Kelsey’s ‘supplies’ were in here. I’ve been sitting in the dark, without any idea whether I’d be let out.”
“I’m sorry. I knew I shouldn’t have threatened to lock Kelsey in the closet with Charlie. It gave her ideas. I am a bad influence.”
“Frankly, when I first got shoved in here, I assumed you’d put Kelsey up to it,” he said, eyeing the vodka bottle with heavy consideration.
“What!” I cried. “That’s mean. My shenanigans are charming and slightly exasperating. This is like something out of a serial-killer movie. We’re lucky Kelsey isn’t throwing a lotion bottle at us and screaming about getting the hose again.”
“Your ability to find the silver lining is incredibly disturbing. And need I remind you that your last ‘shenanigan’ nearly gave me a concussion?” he asked, sternly.
&n
bsp; “I didn’t know you were going to faint!” I cried.
“But you knew something was going to happen, otherwise you wouldn’t have ambushed me like that. Do you have any idea what it was like, being trapped in that place, trying to put on a brave face for the sake of not humiliating myself in a work situation?”
I pursed my lips, trying to find the right words without incriminating myself, just in case Kelsey had a camera hidden somewhere. “No. I am sorry. It was wrong to do that to you and I appreciate that you didn’t go running to Ray to tell on me. Did you hear that, Kelsey? I said I was sorry!” I yelled, in the hope that she was still lingering in the hallway. No such luck.
Grumbling, I stood and pulled the vodka out of the cabinet and cracked it open as Josh said, “I thought at the Derby that we had some sort of moment when you scraped my frantic ass off the floor and kept me from humiliating myself in front of my psycho ex. I thought we’d reached a sort of ceasefire.”
I took a long, gulping drink from the vodka bottle. Josh pulled a face. “Good God, straight from the bottle? Really?”
I gestured to the small space. “Closet.”
He rolled his eyes, but snagged the bottle from me and took his own, much smaller, dose of vitamin V. Wincing, he practically whispered, “Anyway, we had what I thought was an important moment, and then you went right back to cold-shouldering me, before sending me into that hell-den of dummies. I don’t get it.”
And I was suddenly uncomfortable with the emotional and physical proximity in what felt like a tiny prison cell filled with Hammermill products. Josh sounded genuinely hurt. I sighed, taking another drink. Fine; if we were going to do this now, trapped in a supply closet, hovering around a bottle of Stolichnaya, all cards were going on the table. “I saw you, Josh.”
Josh handed me one of the less squished PB&Js and sat down, cross-legged. “Saw me what?”
“I saw you right after your little scene, talking to Gina in the hallway, laughing your ass off. Somehow, you managed to snap right out of your little panic episode and go back into charming mode with Boobs McGee.” He gave me a look so blank, I wondered if he’d hit his head again. “Look, we’re competing for a job, and I understand that we’re in a bit of a theatrical profession, but there’s no reason to play insane mind games with me. Was that even your ex? Or was it some actress you hired to make me feel sorry for you?”