The Cornerstone

by Anne C. Petty

  Paul turned on the siren and the lights and stomped the gas. “Here we go.”

  Claire nodded.

  Paul plowed through the traffic as if the great lumbering beast that was their class III ambulance had an invisible cowcatcher attached to the grille. Claire focused on the dispatcher’s voice, continually feeding details as they homed in on the accident site.

  “We have one person on the ground, condition unknown.”

  Paul crossed lanes and flew around an SUV that hadn’t pulled over.

  The radio crackled. “We have a car overturned, occupant trapped inside.”

  “Gonna need the Jaws of Life,” Paul commented.

  Claire said nothing. The morning was off to a great start.

  They pulled up to the crash site, cordoned off by a bank of cop cars, lights flashing. Cars and trucks streamed past, slowing for a few seconds as drivers gawked and then sped away. Paul parked the ambulance on the shoulder of the highway as close as safely possible to the point where the crash had taken place. Claire could see the cyclist, still in his helmet, lying on his, or maybe her, stomach. Hard to tell gender from this distance. At least the person seemed to be all in one piece. A small gray car sat on its roof, wheels in the air, a hundred feet or so down the side of the road where black skid marks left the pavement. The motorcycle lay on its side not far from its rider.

  Paul killed the siren. “Take the guy on the ground, I’ll check the one in the car.”

  “Right.” Although both were licensed paramedics, seniority made Paul the team leader, which was just fine by Claire.

  She jogged past an apparent eye witness, telling his story to one of the policemen, a note of awe or admiration in his voice. “His cycle blew the back tire and instead of flipping, he just laid it down on the grass of the shoulder nice as you please. I ride a bike, too, and that was a pro landing. Hardly any damage to the bike. Dunno about the guy, though…”

  Claire reached the crumpled cyclist just as he rolled over onto his back. He fumbled with the chinstrap of the visored helmet.

  “Hey, let me do that,” she told him, pushing his head gently but firmly back to the ground. “Don’t move a muscle—just let me do the lifting. Everything’s all right now, you’ll be okay.” She slipped into the comforting mantra that she used with accident victims to keep them still and not freaking out.

  “I’m just going to lift your head now and slip the helmet off, okay?” She heard a muffled response that sounded a little dazed, but not freaked.

  She eased the helmet off, put it aside, and stared.

  “Tom!”

  “Hey, Claire.” His voice was shaky, but he didn’t seem traumatized.

  “Just lie still…” She checked for broken bones.

  “I’m okay, how’s the bike?”

  “Better than you should be. Do you hurt anywhere?”

  “Just my head.”

  “How many fingers?” She made a V sign.

  “Two.”

  “What day is it?”

  “Friday. Trust me, I’m fine. I need to call the bookstore—“

  “You aren’t fine until I say so. Just stay still, please.” She went through her protocol checklist and finally decided everything was in working order. Only then did she allow him to sit up. He groaned and looked around at the flashing lights and people in uniform milling around the upside-down car. Claire could hear Paul, asking questions and giving orders in that steady no-nonsense voice she relied on.

  “Holy shit. Is that person dead?”

  “Doesn’t sound like it.” Claire stood up and took a good look. Paul was on his knees, his arm reaching through the smashed driver’s door window. He must have released the handle because at that moment the door fell open.

  “Are you okay to just sit here for a few minutes? I need to go help over there.”

  Tom waved her away. “Sure, you go.” He felt around inside his leather jacket and pulled out his cell phone. “I won’t go anywhere, just need to make some calls. Looks like I’ll be late for work.” Well, if he could joke around, she decided there couldn’t be much damage done.

  It didn’t take too long to get the college student extracted safely from her silver Nissan. They strapped her to the backboard with her broken collarbone stabilized and loaded her into the ambulance. She was weepy, but not hysterical. Tom was on his feet now, looking down at his bike and frowning. Claire scanned his stance, still alert for anything off. He knelt and put his hands on the flattened back tire, probably looking for the nail or whatever had caused the blowout.

  “You sure you won’t come back with us to the hospital? Just sit around for a bit and be sure there’s no residual sign of concussion?”

  Tom looked up, his expression friendly but determined. “Don’t worry about me. There’s nothing wrong.”

  “Well, would you mind signing this waiver stating you refused further treatment?”

  “No problem.” He reached for the clipboard, quickly scanned the sheet, and signed his name, Tom Brennan, in big looping letters. “You’re a good medic, Claire. I appreciate that.”

  Nonplussed, she retrieved the clipboard. “I-I try to be. If the situation was reversed, I’d want somebody competent to work on me.” Self-conscious, she shrugged but couldn’t quite muster a laugh. “Well, I need to go. You’ll be all right?”

  “Don’t worry. I’m just gonna sit down here with the bike until the wrecker shows up.” He frowned again. “That was a new tire.”

  Claire allowed herself to look at him more closely than she’d done in the theater. She’d always been somewhat put off by his shaved-head-leather-jacket look, but now she saw a young man about her age, maybe even younger, with clear gray eyes under dark brows. She guessed his hair might be black if he allowed it to grow. High cheekbones and a thin, tight mouth gave his face an intense expression. But it wasn’t just bone structure. There was something else going on with him. Something repressed…maybe that was where he was pulling his performance as Faustus from, some dark well of angst. Then she really did laugh—what a romance novel scenario. Tom would likely be mortified if he knew what she was thinking.

  “Something funny?” The skin around his gray eyes crinkled just a little.

  She heard Paul crank the ambulance. “Nothing worth mentioning. Well, I’m out of here. You be careful…I don’t like leaving you by yourself after a fall like that.”

  “Das macht nichts.” He waved a dismissal.

  What? He did German as well as Latin? Claire climbed into the back of the ambulance with their patient, her head full of questions. The Mummers had a company full of strange people, no joke. Maybe that was why Danny’d chosen to leave—he was too normal.

  Chapter 6

  Saturday night

  Tom shifted his butt in the high-backed chair onstage. His side was stiff, and when he’d showered earlier he could see his left hip and shoulder were purpling where he’d hit the ground in yesterday’s accident. Nothing broken, which was lucky, because he didn’t need something like that slowing him down. Good to know, though, that if he had been in bad shape Claire and her laconic teammate could have ably taken care of him. She knew her stuff, and his estimation of her had gone up as a result of the encounter.

  He’d wondered why she wanted to join the company since she seemed to know so little about acting or the theater or dramatic literature. She was very detail oriented, though, which made her the perfect choice for prompter and keeper of the master script with all the performance notes. For his part, Tom relished the role of Dr. Faustus. There was latent magic in those lines—and it wasn’t just the beauty of the language. He could feel it when he spoke the words extolling the virtues of the underworld, greeting Lucifer and his minions as an equal, and especially the invocations that summoned the King of Hades’ second in command, Mephistopheles. The first time he’d said that passage in Latin, what flowed through him was indescribable, even better than a hard-on. Raw power that flayed flesh off the bone. It had taken him a couple of min
utes to recover. Morris had felt it too, he could tell. In fact, it had scared the shit out of him—he’d seen it in the man’s eyes. The moment passed as soon as Bayard stopped the scene, but Tom felt the lingering sensation well past the end of rehearsal.

  Now he was being careful to, as Morris put it, dial it back, holding that undercurrent of electricity in check, creating dramatic tension onstage but not letting it overpower the acting itself. This particular scene they were rehearsing, in which Faustus has a fleeting repentance for selling his soul so easily and requires a visit from Lucifer and the Seven Deadlies to renew his commitment, was fast becoming one of Tom’s favorites.

  Tom allowed his thoughts to drift as he waited for rehearsal to begin, first back to the accident where he’d felt his body shift into protection mode moments before it hit the ground, and then further back to the time he’d discovered the Janus Theatre and the Mummers Theatrical Company. He’d only been in town a few weeks when he’d spotted the auditions display ad in some arts newspaper he’d picked up in the metro rail station downtown. Following his instinct, he’d come here, tried out for a few parts, offered his services for some non-acting jobs, and had been accepted into the fold. He was intrigued by the people in the company, and in particular its ginger-bearded director, who was brilliant and overbearing in an old-world, European royalty sort of way. It was Kit Bayard who’d suggested he look for a paying job at The Rookery, a large used bookstore on the south side frequented by the city’s academics and literati and specializing in hard-to-find, even rare, books. A number of Bayard’s valuable first-edition playbooks had come from there.

  “Places!” Bayard’s baritone cut across the backstage chatter. Claire watched Tom get up with a flinch and take his mark. Silence descended, and Ruben adjusted the spots to focus on the figure of Faustus standing beside his desk. Lucifer, a portrait photographer in his forties who said he’d wanted the part because he got to wear red face paint and horns in costume, entered and commanded Faustus to have a seat and observe a little show cooked up by the underworld entertainment board.

  “Go, Mephistopheles, fetch them in.” He waved grandly.

  One by one, Pride, Covetousness, Envy, Wrath, Gluttony, Sloth, and Lechery paraded across the stage as Faustus questioned each regarding his or her particular talents. When he inquired of “Mistress Minx” what manner of apparition she was, Addie oozed voluptuousness that ensured no one would miss the double entendre of her answer: “I am one that loves an inch of raw mutton better than a plate of fried stockfish”—a line guaranteed to draw laughter from the audience—“and the first letter of my name begins with Lechery.” Tom leered at her appropriately.

  The mage’s allegiance to Hell firmly reestablished, Lucifer turned and led the Sins offstage, calling back to Faustus, “I will come for thee at midnight.” The lights dimmed to a single murky pool encircling Faustus in his ornate chair with Mephistopheles hovering at his shoulder like a vulture.

  “Farewell, great Lucifer,” Tom said, signaling their retreat with an upraised hand. He then got up and turned to his companion. “We twain shall be off as well. Come, Mephistopheles!” Linking arms, Hell’s lieutenant and Faustus exited stage left, like mates off to a rugby match. The lights winked off, but for a second or two a murky red haze lingered around Faustus’ chair instead of plunging the stage into the intended blackout. Claire put the script down and rubbed her eyes. No, the effect was gone. The house lights came up. She cut a quick look at Bayard standing in the wings beside her. Although he chewed the end of an index finger as he stared at the chair in Faustus’ study, there was no other sign he might have seen anything amiss. But then he pulled out his cell phone and called someone. Claire listened intently as he talked to Ruben.

  “So what was that just now?” Bayard turned and faced the lighting control booth nestled in a small balcony above the back row of seats. “Is that so? No, everything’s fine.” Bayard walked out onstage and stood beside the chair, seeming lost in thought. He didn’t ponder long, though.

  “All right, everyone. Gather round, please.” He addressed this to the empty rows of seats in front of him, but his voice carried well enough that within a minute or two the entire cast and crew had gathered.

  “Very well done,” he said, sweeping his gaze over the assemblage. “The play is in brilliant shape, so we’ll call it a night. Go home, get a good night’s sleep. I needn’t remind you full dress rehearsal is in two weeks. This is the first time the Mummers Theatrical Company has mounted a production of The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, so donors and patrons will be attending the opening night performance, and I feel safe in saying they are in for an amazing evening of theater.”

  The guy playing Lucifer—Dave? Drew? Claire couldn’t remember—initiated a brief round of applause, followed by laughter and heated chatter as the troupe dispersed. Bayard stayed onstage, conferring with Ruben. Claire would have paid good money to stay and eavesdrop, but that wasn’t happening. She collected up her things, went to the back of the theater, and stood around by the double doors, waiting for Addie. There was that business of a promised tarot card reading and the building’s so-called resident haunt she wanted to ask about. She also wanted to compliment Addie on her interpretation of Lechery, which was both campy and chilling, probably exactly what the great Marlowe’d had in mind. Being one of the Sins looked like it would be a fun part—you got all dressed up in an outrageous costume and only had one or two lines to learn. Claire had dallied with the notion of trying out for one of those parts, but was so certain she’d screw up the dozen or so words allotted to her, in the end she’d backed out of the audition. Still, it was fun to watch Addie vamp it up. She wondered if there was a subtle difference in meaning in Marlowe’s use of the term Lechery, as opposed to Lust, the name moderns applied to that particular Sin. She’d have to ask Morris. Of anybody in the cast, he’d be the one most likely to know.

  She’d also noticed Tom seemed a little stiff moving through some of the more active scenes. Maybe she ought to question him about it, although admittedly if she hadn’t seen him on the ground yesterday, she’d never have guessed he’d been in a traffic accident. She supposed the bike was in the shop and wondered how he’d gotten to rehearsal.

  Addie was coming up the aisle with Tom in tow. He seemed to be moving okay from what she could see, but as they drew closer she could tell he was favoring his left side.

  “…and I think this play is just the most exciting thing I’ve been involved in for ages—” Addie was gushing. Which she did better than anyone Claire knew. Tom had a pinched look around the eyes that Claire instantly recognized.

  “You should have come with us to the hospital and at least gotten a pain prescription,” she said, reaching out for his injured arm almost without thinking. He flinched away.

  “It’s just bruised.”

  Addie looked from one to the other. “What are you guys talking about?”

  Claire bit her tongue. Maybe it wasn’t her place to tell anyone about the accident since Tom hadn’t shared that little piece of excitement with the cast.

  “Dropped my bike in traffic yesterday,” he said. “Claire came to my rescue.” He gave her the briefest of smiles.

  “Wow.” Addie was bugeyed. “You’re really lucky you weren’t killed!”

  There was an awkward silence in which the strangest expression passed over Tom’s face. Like that illusion onstage tonight…Claire was sure she’d seen it, but when she blinked it was gone.

  “So,” Morris said, coming up behind her. “Who’s up for a drink in honor of the brilliant Mummers’ acting society?”

  Addie grinned and raised her hand. “Me!”

  He looked at Tom, who shrugged. “Why not?”

  “And the lovely Miss Porter?” Morris cocked his head and rocked back on his heels, hands in the pockets of his wool blazer.

  “Well…” There she was again, caught between duty and guilty pleasure. She felt like Faustus tempted by the Seven Deadlies, only this t
ime there were just three of them. As far as she knew, she was the only one who lived at home with a parent and had a compelling reason not to stay out late. Addie was divorced from some guy in Boston, where they’d been patrons of the arts and attended a lot of galas and parties for ballet and drama until he’d cheated on her with a very young ballerina. Morris was a bachelor, but as to whether he had a significant other, who knew? And Tom? She had no idea what his story was, but he’d become more interesting with each rehearsal.

  Addie looped her arm through Claire’s. “She’s in. Who’s driving and where are we headed?”

  “I’ve got a rental car…might as well use it,” Tom offered.

  “Driver picks the place,” said Morris.

  Tom wrestled the keys out of his jeans pocket. “I know a good biker bar not too far away.”

  Addie squeezed Claire’s arm. “I’m definitely in.”

  Morris looked skeptical. “You’re not serious.”

  Tom cracked a smile. “Nah. It’s just a neighborhood pub with really good stout.” Claire wanted to giggle—it was clear two could play at this dead-pan humor thing. Funny how fascinated she’d become over the dynamic between Tom and Morris, on and now off stage.

  “Okay, I’ll tag along.” Once again, her mother would need to wait while she spent some time just for herself. She felt guilty as all hell, but had no willpower to turn her new friends down and go home.

  * * * *

  The pub, Doyle’s Tavern, was exactly as Tom had described it—hidden away on a side street with roomy padded booths, dark-paneled walls, dim shaded lamps, and a heavy-duty wooden bar with beer on tap and a brass foot-rail that ran its entire length. The tables between the booth seats appeared to be made of lacquered, and much scarred, solid pine planks.

  On the tableside menu, the food list offered fare such as seafood chowder, haddock smokies, lamb stew, and a cheese board with Irish and French cheeses served with bread sticks or cracked-wheat crackers. The special of the day was smoked ham, Stilton cheese, tomato, and onion piled on toasted pumpernickel bread. The beer side of the menu was arranged into stouts, ales, and lagers with names like Guinness, Murphy’s, Beamish, Harp, and Smithwicke’s. Claire felt as if she’d stepped through a time-tunnel leading straight into downtown Dublin.