“We need to hear the truth behind what you’re saying, Myra,” Tim would say in a voice that seemed to originate from somewhere around his knees and emerge as a cross between a Noël Coward leading man and the character of Lady Bracknell from The Importance of Being Earnest. Instead of taking it as direction from Tim, all of the actors scanned their scripts to see where this line came from and tried to figure out how they had lost their places.
By the end of the first week of rehearsal, Chuck Havens, in his role as Malachi, the would-be-ne’er-do-well-bon-vivant-possible-murderer, had adopted a strange tic of stroking his beard every time he spoke. Problem? Neither Chuck Havens nor Malachi had a beard. Problem number two? The gesture effectively covered his mouth in such a way that each of his lines came out a cross between a mutter and a mumble at the beginning and end of his beard stroking. When Malachi spoke, one didn’t wonder so much whether or not he might have committed the murder, one wondered if he was speaking from a cell phone with bad coverage.
Henry Gand as Perkins the gardener was a passable actor, actually quite believable. In the second act, however, he delivered a monologue to the comatose mother, Marguerite, played by Nellie, in which he confessed his unrequited love and during which Don, who had taken to staying and watching rehearsals when he drove Nellie over, coughed and hacked, making it impossible for anyone to hear Henry’s speech straight through.
At the end of the second week of rehearsal, it was clear that Mary Wainwright could not memorize the part of Hermione. In fact, she seemed totally distracted, and most nights read her lines from the script, which she refused to relinquish, with a kind of hysterical edge. She ended each sentence with a questioning up-speak quality, as if her character were always on the verge of laughter or tears and wanted someone to tell her which would be more appropriate. Even when announcing a meal—Mother, oh Mother, breakfast is ready—Mary turned Breakfast is ready into a maniacal existential query.
Rica Evans, a good actress—and in her one scene with Henry Gand a more than good actress—owned the stage. Jane hadn’t really immersed herself in a theatrical production since college, but she remembered the thrill of seeing people who became real onstage, merging a kind of empathy for character as well as a kind of energy that told a story above and beyond their written and memorized lines. Jane could see that in a good play with an adequate cast, Rica would be a star. In Murder in the Eekaknak Valley, she did the best she could to underdramatize the overwritten lines and to make the unrealistic plot ring true.
Jane found Rica’s scenes with her comatose mother, played by the one and only Nellie, especially poignant. Since Nellie had no lines to speak and was ordered by the script and faux-British Tim to lie as still as possible in her hospital bed, Jane could imagine her mother listening to a daughter’s confession of love and misplaced affection throughout her life and, finally, asking for forgiveness and understanding. Rica’s plea to her mother, just before the murderer was revealed, never failed to move Jane, even if she was busy polishing silver or replacing handkerchiefs in pockets or repositioning plants backstage, which were seen through the open French doors, representing the garden to which characters retired in almost every scene.
Actually, Jane was moved only on the nights when Nellie didn’t attend rehearsal and her part was played by two pillows covered by a Victorian crazy quilt, since on those nights, Rica was able to finish sentences and build the emotion properly so that her final confession, a combination of human suffering, wry acceptance, and daughterly love, could be delivered. Corny and sentimental as the speech was, it got to Jane every time.
On the nights Nellie was called to rehearsal and Don coughed through the second act, Nellie herself was impossible in the last scene. Unable to lie still, she tossed and turned, making her coma look more like an epileptic seizure. Every time Rica confessed her indiscretion with the son of the town’s prominent banker, the result of which was pregnancy and her flight from the small town, Nellie would grunt and snort until Tim called cut and begged her to lie still.
“Stop worrying, Tim. You can just give her a Tylenol PM during the show,” said Mary Wainwright.
Jane looked at Don, sitting in the third row, who had also heard the remark. They smiled, both of them knowing it would take an elephant tranquilizer to quiet Nellie down.
After two weeks of rehearsals, just over a week before opening night, Tim once again began his nightly pleading with Nellie.
“I can’t stay still, Lowry. The scene doesn’t feel right.”
“Nellie, please,” Tim said, holding up his hand.
“The words seem all wrong,” said Nellie.
“What are you talking about?” Jane asked. Tim had already stalked off to the back of the stage where he usually retreated when things began to go south, busying himself rearranging plants and complaining that they needed watering.
“All this pap Myra’s saying? It isn’t right. Myra’s supposed to ask about Hermione and what she was like as a little girl since she had left her. Marguerite, me, I raised that girl for her. And all the money Myra sent home? I used it to protect them from all these vultures. Myra’s supposed to come home dead broke and Marguerite’s supposed to save the day.”
Jane looked at Nellie, who seemed dead serious. Jane had never known her mother to claim to have one creative bone in her body. Why now was she trying to rewrite Freddy Kendell’s play?
Tim came back to the front of the stage to address the cast.
“We don’t have that much time left, people. We have a beautiful set, thanks to our carpenter, Marv, and Henry, of course, who’s really pitched in and helped to build everything. And thanks to Jane, who’s made sure everything looks good and works right. But, actors! Please. Mary, you have to learn your lines. Patty, you have to make your lines real. And Nellie, you have to lie still. Rica has this beautiful speech and you are stealing the entire focus from the play’s big moment.”
“I’m trying to tell you it shouldn’t be the big moment, Lowry, it’s—”
“Mr. Lowry.”
Everyone turned to the back row of seats. With a few lights on the stage and the rest of the houselights dimmed, it was difficult to make out any more than what might have been a human shape standing in the aisle near the main entrance to the theater.
“Mr. Lowry, a moment?”
Tim excused himself and whispered to Jane as he headed back to the shadows. “Maybe that’s the custodian, finally, to finish up the lighting stuff. Take over for me. Pep talk them or something.”
Jane was more interested in the person whose imperious voice could get Tim to respond so obediently, but she nodded and cleared her throat.
“We’re going to take it from the second-to-last scene. Where’s Henry?”
“He’s working out in the parking lot with Marv on the latticework for the garden,” said Chuck. “I’ll get him for you.” Havens headed backstage where there was a door leading directly to the large parking lot that adjoined the cultural center.
“Places for scene four,” said Jane. “Marguerite, you can take a break—we’ll probably use your stand-in pillows in this scene anyway, since the bed is pushed to the back.” Jane asked a few of the dinner guests to make the slight adjustments to the furniture.
Jane hopped onstage and recentered the black urn supposedly containing the ashes of Marguerite’s late husband. Freddy had specified this particular prop and Jane smiled at how perfect it was for the job—both macabre and trophylike at the same time.
Nellie, still shaking her head in imaginary conversation with Tim, walked over to Don, whispered something, and together they stepped out one of the side doors. It was after eight, according to the clock at the back of the house, not totally dark outside yet. Mid-June, it was already warm enough for mid-summer. Jane and Tim had propped a few of the side doors to the auditorium open to get a breeze and now Jane noticed a moth at play in front of one of the stage lights.
Jane had one of those giddy romantic moments where all things rea
l fell away. She had no past life, no almost ex-husband, no son with whom she could communicate only via computer messages, no obligations, but was just a college girl again, directing a play in a summer theater. The hammering from the parking lot had stopped but there were voices still drifting in. The clicking of Rica/Myra’s heels on the stage as she paced back and forth, going over her lines, provided a beat, and Jane remembered what it was like to be eighteen years old, dreaming about a life in the theater. As unreal as she knew her fantasies about it had been, every once in a while life gave you a moment like this when it felt like the romance was the one true thing.
This particular romantic moment was interrupted, as moments always are, by something real; often something small, like a hammer to the thumb, a broken stiletto heel, a lightbulb popping as it burns out in its socket. In this case, though, on a warm June night in Kankakee, the something real was a scream of bloody murder, a shout for help, and Jane’s mother, Nellie, yelling that someone had murdered Henry Gand.
11
By the time Jane got out the rear door to the parking lot, everyone in the cast was standing in a semicircle. Jane pushed her way past the cast members and saw her mother kneeling next to the body of a small older man wearing a plaid shirt and jeans, pressing her apron against the bloody wound on his head. Don also knelt next to the body, feeling for a pulse, asking calmly if anyone knew CPR.
Tim shouted that the ambulance was on the way. Rica Evans seemed to remain in character as Myra, regally commanding everyone to step back and go back inside to the theater so the ambulance could get through. Mary Wainwright and Chuck Havens, both pale, were clutching each other. And Henry Gand, who wandered out from the theater tucking in his plaid shirt, asked what the fuss was about.
“Marvin?” Henry asked, seeing his friend lying on the ground. “What happened to Marv?”
“I thought it was you, Henry,” said Nellie. “When did you two start dressing like twins?”
There was a park behind the cultural center with a walking path and a sculpture garden. In the clearing between where the parking lot ended and the green space began, Marv, the carpenter, had set up his power tools with thick extension cords running along the ground into the backstage area. He had stacked lumber, plywood sheets, under two tarps. Several large wooden beams, eight to ten feet in length, were propped against a giant oak. Jane saw that one beam—the one that must have struck Marv on the head—lay on the ground next to him, apparently pushed aside by either Don or Nellie, whoever had reached Marvin first.
Jane walked over to the oak, stood next to the beams, and looked up. The tops of the boards were firmly stuck into the fork of two branches. There was nothing precarious about their placement. Either Marvin had not planted this beam as firmly as the others to prevent it from being blown down or dislodged by passersby, or someone had come along and pushed the board over on top of the man.
If Nellie were ever made into an action figure, thought Jane, she would be the opposite of a nodder. Nellie was a shaker, a perpetual-motion doll whose primary movement was the negative head shake. She moved through her life disagreeing with people out loud and silently to the voices with whom she argued inside of her own head. But now, Jane noticed, her mother was shaking all over. Don had lifted her to a standing position and kept his arm firmly around her shoulders. Nellie looked up and around the group for Jane and when Jane caught her mother’s gaze, she expected her to look upset, shocked. She did not expect the eye-narrowing, flare-throwing anger that crossed her mother’s face.
“Who in the hell killed Marvin?” said Nellie. “You couldn’t find a sweeter man than that one right there.”
“A beam fell, Nellie,” said Henry. Jane noted he was shaking, too. “See how he had them stacked there? He must have just put that one up and not secured it. I was helping, then I went to go use the bathroom. Maybe if I’d…” Henry’s voice broke.
Jane saw her mother start to answer, but whatever she was going to say was drowned out by the ambulance siren.
The cast and crew of the play stood aside in small groups next to the theater, waiting and watching. The police arrived and began taking statements, beginning with Henry Gand, who was, by this time, openly weeping, apologizing and blaming himself for not securing the beam that had fallen and killed his friend Marvin. Jane saw the policeman who seemed to be in charge signal to one of the paramedics to come over and assist Henry.
Jane studied the gravel on the parking lot side of the tree where the beam had fallen. She had a million questions to ask Nellie, who was talking a mile a minute to Don, but there was a sea—okay, pond—of people between them, and Jane wanted to memorize the angle of these boards before it got too dark to see anything. She remembered that her fancy phone had a decent camera and she wedged it out of her jeans pocket and snapped a shot of the boards just as she heard a familiar voice.
“It seems unlikely that if a beam fell, it would come down cleanly without dislodging any of those branches or stirring up this gravel. Also, how could it have been angled so it would fall that way?” asked Detective Oh. “The rest of these boards are placed just so … that weeping gentleman couldn’t have placed it at an opposing angle so it would fall … there would be no room for him to do so. Is that what you were thinking, Mrs. Wheel?”
“Yes. That’s what I was thinking,” said Jane. She smiled at Oh, wanting, of course, to ask how he managed to arrive at this moment, but waiting to see if the scene told her what she wanted to know. That is what Oh always advised her. Look to see what the scene tells you before you ask a question.
Beyond the groups clustered around the police and the ambulance, Tim Lowry was being questioned by two tall female inquisitors who, it appeared, could teach the Kankakee police a thing or two about good cop/bad cop. Apparently they believed in bad cop/bad cop, as they took turns asking questions, one woman beginning to talk before the other finished. Tim was looking back and forth rapidly, unable to get a word in edgewise.
“Over there, with Claire?” Jane nodded her head in the direction of the trio, after allowing the scene to tell her what she needed to know. “Margaret Kendell, I presume?”
As anxious as Jane was to meet Margaret Kendell, she needed first to talk to Nellie, who was now telling a young police officer that someone had clobbered Marvin Gladish and they better check the walking path because whoever it was might have cut out fast through the wooded path.
Although it was now dark, Jane could sense the officer’s eyes rolling from where she stood. To him, Nellie was an excitable old lady upset about the accident that had befallen her old friend. Since no one had been working with Marv except for Henry, who had gone in to use the backstage bathroom, the logical supposition was that the beam fell on Marv as he bent over his makeshift worktable. An accident, without a doubt.
“Claire finally reached Margaret, who had been at her London flat until yesterday. She offered to accompany her here, to see how you and Tim were doing with the sale. There is a problem, it seems with the auction items,” said Oh. He also watched Nellie talking with the police officer. “That problem, however, pales when compared with tonight’s accident.”
Jane turned back to Oh, but before she could correct him, he nodded.
“Yes Mrs. Wheel, you’re right. Alleged accident.”
12
After the police and ambulance left, Jane was reminded that unlike what happened in fiction, in real life, after death, accident or not, someone was always left to clean up. In the movies, after the ambulance disappeared down the street, the next scene involved principal characters talking, snooping, questioning, debating, driving, kissing … in some way investigating something. Rarely was any name-above-the-title character left to sweep up debris, scrub up a stain, or put away props and lock up backstage cabinets.
Jane mulled this over as she packed up the borrowed bar set and cocktail shaker used in the second act, the crystal champagne bucket, and the costume jewelry they had tried out tonight for the third act reveal of the
thief’s bag. Jane wanted a real treasure trove of jewels to spill out onto the carpet and she had gathered the shiniest baubles she could find to see what carried visually to the back of the house. None of the stuff was real, although some of the signed costume pieces were highly collectible. Jane counted the brooches, bracelets, and rings, borrowed from Tim’s inventory along with two long rock crystal necklaces from the Kendell house. Freddy had specified so many of the props he wanted to use for his play and Jane had actually found two huge boxes in the third-floor ballroom marked Eekaknak stage props. Even the paintings and statues were stored as Eekaknak props. Jane discovered that the first trunk had almost everything she needed, which made her hunting and gathering even easier. She added the jewelry to the other borrowed props and locked them into the backstage cabinet. She would have to take another look at them before deciding what they would use—that is, if the production of Murder in the Eekaknak Valley was going to go on as planned.
“Almost finished, Mrs. Wheel?” Detective Oh had walked from the stage out to the rear parking lot and back several times, counting steps. He had also paced the walk to the dressing rooms, lobby restrooms, and the front parking lot.
Jane knew he was gathering information, but she was also sure that after she had waved everyone on ahead to meet, comfort each other, and debrief at the EZ Way Inn, Detective Oh had decided to stay behind so she would not be alone in the theater. Even after she assured him that the custodian stayed on the premises until midnight and there was a police officer assigned to the parking lot—a bone thrown to Nellie, who insisted someone must have come out of the woods to dislodge the beam—“dislodge the beam” being the language that the police substituted for Nellie’s more descriptive “clobber Marvin,” although no one in uniform believed anyone had come from or fled to the wooded area. Since no one had seen any strangers around Marvin’s workspace and everyone in the cast and crew was accounted for when the beam had to have fallen, the police had, so far, unofficially declared Marvin’s death an accident.
Backstage Stuff Page 9