Backstage Stuff

by Sharon Fiffer

  “Hell no,” said Don. “She said she didn’t want to learn to smoke a filthy cigarette. Next thing I know, she goes and talks to Henry, comes back to me, and asks me to drive her home. She quit the play. Said she didn’t want to make a fool of herself onstage anymore, doing unnatural things and being something she wasn’t. My date ended up going home with Henry and taking Nellie’s place in the show.”

  “And you’ve always wondered if she regretted it?”

  “Nope. But I’ve always known Henry regretted it.”

  Jane walked over to the doors to the house and listened for what scene they were on. Henry, as Perkins the gardener, was doing his speech about his unrequited love for Marguerite.

  “Isn’t this the part of the play where you’re supposed to be coughing and causing trouble?” asked Jane.

  “Your mom put the pillows into the bed. She went out for some air. I was watching her, but now she’s out of sight. I was just going out to get her; it’s getting too dark for her to be out there.”

  “I’ll go,” said Jane.

  * * *

  “Come out of the woods, you chicken, and pick on somebody your own size.”

  Jane came up behind her mother, who stood next to Marvin’s table saw and spoke directly to the trees behind the building. Jane had often wondered if she had inherited the stealth qualities Nellie employed when she sneaked up on Jane, and she knew the answer as soon as Nellie, without turning to her, said, “Where the hell you been all this time?”

  No. Jane would never be able to catch Nellie by surprise.

  Jane tried to explain efficiently what had happened at Marvin’s memorial, since she had a few questions to ask her mother, and standing in the approaching darkness, away from all of the other cast members, might be the best place to get a few honest answers.

  “What did that doofus Rick look like as a grown-up?” asked Nellie.

  “He spoke highly of you,” said Jane. “Perhaps you should be more respectful—”

  “That little juvenile delinquent never spoke a straight sentence in his life,” said Nellie. “If he spoke highly of me, which I doubt, he meant just the opposite. He was a con man when he was a teenager. Freddy knew it, too. Freddy loved Margaret, who was a nice little girl, but not that Rick. Slimy bastard.”

  “He was just a kid when you knew him,” said Jane. “How can you say that?”

  Nellie inhaled deeply, then exhaled through her mouth. If Jane didn’t know better, she’d think that Nellie was practicing her cigarette-smoking technique out here.

  “Look, just because somebody’s a kid doesn’t mean they don’t have their personality yet. Age—young or old—doesn’t give anyone a pass to be a liar. Rick was phony. He kept telling me how pretty I was and what a good actress I was, stuff like that. Pretty soon, he was asking if he could borrow my key to the theater club, because he’d lost his. Like Freddy would ever trust that little crook with the keys to the kingdom. Or he’d ask one of us to buy him beer. He was probably thirteen, the little brat. Stuff like that. He’d buddy up to get his way.”

  “Wait? You had a key back then? What about the ones we found?” asked Jane.

  “Freddy kept spares in the chest on the porch, in case we ever needed to get in. He was always worried about us. I think he saw us as a bunch of misfits and thought we might need a place, you know. And he was protective of all of us. Like he was of Margaret.”

  “So anybody who had worked with Freddy had access to the theater club all these years, even you?”

  “Yeah, I got the old key somewhere,” said Nellie, flipping the new key, the one Jane had found, and the chain around her neck to the outside of her collar. “Unless Freddy changed the locks, I could have gotten in if I wanted to.”

  “Great,” said Jane. “I’ll add you to my list of suspects.”

  “You know who did it. That dummy was here,” said Nellie.

  “Right, Mr. Bumbles. The same Mr. Bumbles who was put back into the closet at the theater club. So whoever was here got him out and brought him here and…”

  A small floodlight attached to the back corner of the theater building clicked, illuminating the table saw as well as Jane and Nellie. Jane wasn’t aware that they had moved to activate the motion detector, but she knew it could have been a breeze tossing a leaf, a squirrel, a …

  “Bat,” said Nellie, pointing up to the light.

  Jane covered her head and ducked. When Jane was young Nellie had always warned her that the bats flying around the streetlight in front of their house were just waiting to swoop down, nest in her hair, and infect her with rabies. It was an effective means of getting Jane to come in from playing as soon as it got dark enough for the streetlight to turn on. Even though Nick had done his best to convince Jane that bats were really friends and the best means of mosquito control, Jane had never quite shaken the earlier lessons of Nellie.

  “You know, you’re not necessarily right about the person who killed Marvin bringing Bumbles here,” said Nellie.

  “Yeah, right, I forgot,” said Jane. “Bumbles acted alone.”

  “No Smarty Pants, I was thinking maybe Marvin was the one who had the dummy with him. Bumbles had a broken leg, right, and Claire said you found out that the guy who was restoring and repairing those dummies was Marvin. Maybe Marvin had old Bumbles out here to fix him and whoever was here and pushed the beam saw Bumbles and decided to take the dummy back.”

  “Why?” asked Jane. “Why would it matter?”

  Jane noted that one corner of the cover on the table saw had come untied, and she reknotted the lace to keep the tarp down over the equipment.

  “Well, maybe it was somebody who wanted to play another trick with him,” said Nellie. “Freddy was always playing tricks with those dummies. Leaving them around holding notes for us, spying on us. Creepy as hell.”

  “Or maybe it was someone who didn’t want anyone to connect Marvin with Bumbles or the theater club,” said Jane. “What if someone wanted Marvin out of the picture … and then saw he had Bumbles with him and knew that the dummy would connect Marvin to Freddy and the family and the club and…”

  “Nellie,” called Don. “Tim wants you onstage for this scene.”

  Nellie shook her head and muttered something, but went into the theater.

  Jane remained looking out into the woods and continued with her train of thought. What if someone knew something about this play or the theater club and wanted to stop anyone else from discovering a connection to that group? If Jane hadn’t been working on the sale with Tim, if they hadn’t been connected to the Kendell mansion or family, and they had just found these scripts and decided to put on the show … all of the theater club stuff would be forgotten. Buried with Freddy. But if someone came out to talk to Marvin or just saw Marvin with Bumbles, they would know that someone might connect Marvin with Freddy. So they came out back and saw Bumbles and tried to take him away and maybe Marvin tried to stop him? No, Marvin was at the saw when the beam fell—no sign of a struggle. He had his back to the tree where the beam had been leaning.

  Jane could hear the actors speaking onstage. Rica Evans and Mary Wainwright were doing their big mother-daughter scene, after which Rica would turn to Marguerite in the hospital bed and deliver her monologue, her apology for running off to New York. It really wasn’t such a terrible play. Melodramatic, sure, but some of the speeches were really well-written. Maybe if Freddy had kept at it, he really would have written a play that could have provided for Margaret.

  “We meet again … same place,” said Chuck Havens. “Keep this a secret, okay?”

  At first, Jane thought he was teasing her about keeping their meeting secret, but when she looked at him, she saw he was referring to the cigarette he was lighting.

  “I don’t want it to get out that I relapsed,” said Chuck. “Last time I gave in and had a cigarette, Mary threatened to tell my students, which would have made my life a daily hell.”

  Jane shook her head and placed a finger over her l
ips.

  “I wanted to smoke in the play, you know, to give me an excuse, and besides, I’m a suspect. Everyone thinks I did it so I might as well be a smoker. These days, though, if you smoke cigarettes, it’s worse than being a murderer.”

  Jane only half-listened. What if it was something about the theater club connection that made Marvin a target? Penny Kendell was the first person to be injured—Bryan was a theater club member, and the accident could just as easily have been staged for him. What if they were all at risk because of something connected to Freddy and Freddy’s club? What did they know that others might not? Henry and Nellie were also part of the theater club.…

  A crash and a scream came from inside the theater. Chuck dropped the cigarette, crushed it out, and popped a mint Life Saver in his mouth in one fluid motion. Illicit smoking on or near high school property had clearly given him some practice in quick response and cover-up.

  Jane beat him into the theater in time to see Don onstage with his arm around Nellie. Although she was shaking her head and insisting that she was okay, she wasn’t wiggling out of his grasp as Jane was more used to seeing.

  Peggy, one of the extras playing a party guest, had run down the steps at stage left and come around to the front of the stage. Standing between the front row of seats and the edge of the stage, her head was at eye level with the stage floor.

  “I can see it, it’s this front leg on the right,” she said. She then corrected herself. “Stage left.”

  Standing directly in front of the raised stage made it easy to look under the hospital bed, now sloping sharply toward the floor. When Jane joined Peggy at the edge of the stage, she could see that one of the legs had telescoped, which would have thrown Nellie to the floor had she been lying on the bed when it happened. Peggy explained to Jane that Nellie had tossed a heavy bag full of books onto the bed, books that were going to be placed around the set and in the bookcase stage left, but which Nellie thought were right in the way of some of the actors. She had hefted the bag onto the bed and the leg had collapsed with such a loud crash that Rica Evans, pacing upstage, had screamed.

  Peggy also told Jane that Don had bounded onto the stage like a real hero and grabbed Nellie, who Jane could hear now had reclaimed her wits and begun swearing like a sailor.

  “Who in their goddamn infernal wisdom decided to mess around with this bed? I could have fallen off and broken my neck. Was it you, Lowry? I told you I didn’t want it up any higher, that it was just fine the way it was.”

  “Take a ten-minute break everyone,” said Tim. “We’ll fix this and start the last scene in ten.”

  Tim looked toward the back and Jane was afraid he was going to call out for Marvin. In fact, Jane started when she thought she saw Marvin himself come out from offstage, but it was Henry, dressed as Perkins the gardener—the pants and shirt so similar to what Marvin had been wearing last night.

  Jane took the steps up onto the stage two at a time and knelt next to Henry.

  “It’s these adjustable legs,” said Henry. “Somebody moved the bed and this little knob got pushed so that it was about to come out. See how you push in these buttons together and the legs slide up and down, then you let them out and the leg catches? When weight hit the bed, the leg just slid on down to the lowest position. Could be when somebody made the bed, they just moved it and the thing gave. Feels solid, doesn’t it, Jane?”

  Jane squeezed the buttons and with one arm supporting the frame, could feel that the adjustable leg adjusted, sliding up and down with ease. Jane also knew that it would take more than moving the bed or making the bed to make one of these legs become precarious enough to collapse when weight hit the bed. Besides, the “someone” who made the bed was either Jane or Nellie, and Jane knew she hadn’t moved it off its marks. And Nellie? She could make a bed with perfect hospital corners, tight enough to bounce a dime on the sheets, and never move the bed frame an inch. This bed had been deliberately rigged. If Nellie had flopped down on the mattress as she did every night—a dramatic drop backward that always got a laugh from the crew when places were called—she could have slid right onto the floor. She could have been injured as seriously as, say, someone who arrived home to a darkened house where marbles had been spilled on the floor. Jane Wheel knew it didn’t take a Jane Wheel to figure out this was another one of Bumbles’s prank accidents.

  Jane decided not to mention this to Henry, who was checking all of the legs to make sure they were locked.

  “Henry, that plaid shirt looks just like the one Marvin wore,” said Jane, gently, conscious that she was reminding him of his lost friend.

  “Yes, I borrowed some of his work shirts for my Perkins wardrobe. I didn’t have the right thing in my closet, and you know we all pretty much self-costume around here,” said Henry. “Makes me feel a little closer to him now,” he added, his blue eyes wet and bright.

  Henry evened up the legs of the bed and sat on it himself, bouncing a bit to make sure that the frame was solid. Don had come over to Jane’s side, watching Henry along with her.

  “Seems like old Henry knows how to fix it,” said Don.

  Jane looked at her father.

  “Henry could always take things apart and put them back together.”

  Don strolled back to where Nellie was putting on a large nightgown over her clothes, arguing with a crew member who had suggested she remove her sweatshirt and slacks so the nightgown would not be so bulky.

  Jane looked over at Tim. He was decked out as suave Detective Craven but looked more like a trench coat–wearing six-year-old holding back tears. Rica Evans had gone off into a corner, her lips moving, going over lines. Mary Wainwright was still clinging to a script, or more accurately, scripts. She must have snagged scripts from the extras if not the principals since she had several opened and bookmarked to her various scenes. She planted them all over the stage. Jane saw one on the bar, one tucked under the pillow on the hospital bed; another was balanced on the rim of a potted plant. Chuck Havens was stroking his imaginary beard, Henry Gand was stashing his tools in the wings and vocalizing, and the other cast members—Peggy and the rest who played the dinner-party guests—were chatting and milling about.

  “Enough,” said Jane, loudly enough to silence the cast and two volunteer crew members who were underutilized and bored silly. She looked over at Tim with her brows raised. She didn’t have to ask the question out loud. Tim answered by giving an enthusiastic nod and raising his hands in the air in surrender.

  “I’m taking over as director,” said Jane, “and we’re going to have this play ready to open in two days. We’re running through this final scene now, double-time, really fast, to make sure everyone has lines and blocking—then we’re taking it from the top. Speed run-throughs to set everything. Tomorrow night, we are treating dress rehearsal as a performance—and you are all going to be ready.”

  Jane walked through the set, snatching up Mary’s scripts.

  “Mary, you are now officially off book. You know more than you think you do. Trust yourself and when you need a line, call “Line,” and Don will give it to you,” said Jane, handing her father a script and explaining his new duties as prompter. Jane trusted that Don’s sense of duty and the concentration necessary to stay on book would prevent the coughing and sneezing attacks that began whenever Henry had a line.

  “Chuck,” said Jane. He smiled up at her, his right hand cupping his chin. “You don’t have a beard. Stop that gesture now. We can’t hear your lines if you cover your mouth.

  “Tim, lose the phony accent. You go from Brit to German to some weird Scandinavian and it’s a distraction. This play takes place in the Eekaknak Valley. That’s Kankakee, people. Be articulate without being affected. Got it?”

  Tim nodded, beaming. No one had ever looked so pleased when publicly berated.

  “Rica, what you’re doing is lovely, but you need to vary your seriousness. I know you’re trying to balance the scenes you’re in, but don’t worry about the others. You can be
playful with Craven and still be true to your character.” Rica looked so pleased to be given a note that Jane noticed she had a lovely smile, which no one in this cast had ever seen.

  “Henry, you’re a little erudite for a gardener, so unless you know a secret about Perkins’s life, you can tone it down a bit.

  “Cousin Flip, party guests, and other cast and crew? Quiet when you are offstage. This is no longer a recreational and social activity. People will be paying money for tickets and they expect to see a coherent story effectively told onstage. They don’t want to hear offstage giggles and gossip. Crew members, I’ve asked you to wear all black for the entire week,” said Jane, looking over her volunteers, one decked out in a red T-shirt and khaki cargo pants and the other in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. “Do so tomorrow and wear gym shoes so you are quiet and fast and efficient when you dash out to set props. And stop making eye contact with various people in the front of the house. No interaction with the audience, please.

  “And Nellie,” said Jane, squaring off and facing her mother. “No more using pillows as your stand-in. You need to be in the bed, remaining still and quiet. No muttering, no huffing and puffing and critical remarks, and no tossing and turning. No sound, no movement during the speeches of the other actors. You agreed to do this part, Marguerite, in this play, so please do it or allow us to find a substitute right now.”

  If the cast and crew had been standing at attention as Jane asserted authority, the new stillness, when she ordered Nellie to straighten up and fly right, raised the ante on silence to an otherworldly level. All the clichés of quiet—hearing a pin drop, quiet as a morgue, still as death—were dwarfed by the collective breath-holding, muscle-freezing, airless, zero-gravity atmosphere that enveloped the theater when Jane and Nellie faced off. Time did not exactly stand still, but it did hold its breath until Nellie began nodding her head. Standing there in her five-foot majesty, wearing an oversized white nightgown over her clothes, she looked from side to side at the gaping cast and crew of Murder in the Eekaknak Valley.