Blood Will Have Blood

by Linda Barnes

  There was birthday wrapping under the brown paper. Mickey and Minnie Mouse cavorted with Donald Duck. Huey, Dewey, and Louie danced in a circle around a pink-iced cake decorated with three flaming candles.

  The box was plain white cardboard. No department-store name. No card. The sides of the lid were taped to the bottom.

  Spraggue slit the tape neatly with the knife.

  Tissue paper. Spraggue patted the thin white film, spread it back.

  At least the bat was dead. No doubt about that. Gray-brown wings opened wide, held with pins to a cardboard backing. The thin membrane of the right wing was ripped almost in two. Maybe when he’d shaken the box.…

  The furry body, amazingly mouselike, was small and shriveled. The head, completely severed from the body, was pinned an inch above the dark stain that marked where it should have been. Another pin stuck out of the tiny gaping mouth.

  Spraggue swallowed twice, pushed the mess away, reached for the phone. Darien answered on the third ring.

  “Arthur,” Spraggue said, “who knows about me?”

  “What?”

  “Did you tell the cast you were planning to offer me Seward? The crew? Anyone?”

  “No.” Darien’s response was definite.

  “When you called my aunt, did you do it from your office?” That would be as private as skywriting over the Charles River. Three doors. Eavesdropper heaven.

  “I may have. I think I did. Why?”

  “Thanks, Arthur.”

  “Don’t hang up! Why did you want to know about—”

  “Nothing, Arthur. Never mind.”

  “Michael?” Darien’s tone was hopeful. “Have you thought it over? I don’t mean to put the pressure on—”

  “I haven’t even started reading the damn script.” The words died on Spraggue’s tongue. He glanced at the beheaded bat, resting in fragments of bright wrapping paper.

  “I’ll take the part,” he said.

  Chapter Three

  “Places!”

  “Get with it! Cut the work lights!”

  “Just minimal blues between scenes! Take ’em down another point. Set it! Start with 47B. Preset 10. Okay?”

  “Can I take the house lights out?” The stage manager shaded her eyes, stared expectantly at the center section of the orchestra. Experience rather than sight told her where Arthur Darien sat. The director nodded, then realized that the spotlights effectively blinded the woman.

  “Please, Karen,” he shouted back.

  Karen Snow, stage manager. Spraggue checked her off on his mental shopping list. Didn’t look as tough as she sounded. Her voice was too big for her body. She gave a curt nod of her sleek dark head and paced steadily off into the wings. Authority set her tiny figure apart. In all the chaos of the long morning, Spraggue realized, he had never seen the stage manager run, never heard her voice go shrill.

  A fat man glided across the carpeted auditorium and sat delicately in the seat next to Arthur Darien’s. His face was as round and smooth as his body; his hair dark and greasy for one so pale. He folded his hands neatly over his belly, hiding the gap where his vast blue shirt failed to meet his navy pants.

  Darien smiled, said hello. He called the fat man Dennis. Dennis. That would be the house manager, Dennis Boland. One more for the shopping list. Out of the running, Darien had said. Out of town when—

  “Curtain!” The lights dimmed then came up slowly, deep blue shrouded in mist. The faint beams lit the unfinished set to advantage. All the scenery was constructed on a revolving platform. One semicircle handled the Westenra house and various rooms in Dr. Seward’s sanatorium. The other side in stark contrast to the realistic Victorian interiors, consisted entirely of steps, landings, and platforms—a constructivist approach to both the rocky seaside at Whitby and the ancient battlements of Castle Dracula.

  Now the setting was Transylvania, a chamber in the vampire’s ancestral home.

  The two actresses on stage, Spraggue decided, looked even better together than they did separately. Side by side, blond Georgina Phillips’s slight figure emphasized brunette Deirdre Marten’s model height. The blonde looked platinum; the brunette’s silky hair glistened jet black. Together, the brides of Dracula were a testament to the excellent taste of the Vampire King.

  Georgina muffed a line, broke character, groped for the correct words.

  “Stop!” Arthur Darien’s voice, world-weary, cut in. Spraggue grinned. God, he remembered that tone, that disappointed you’ve-failed-me-again sigh, that dreadful forebearance. Ten years ago, Michael Spraggue, the novice actor, had found it soul-shattering. Even now, he was glad not to be its target.

  “Take ten,” the voice continued sadly.

  Footsteps. Darien and the playwright left the auditorium. The dark-haired woman floated wordlessly off into the wings. The blonde bride, a pink flush settling over her round face, made a beeline for Spraggue’s first-row seat.

  “Another rewrite break!” she announced with a moan. “It’ll be my lines that go. Every time I open my mouth on that stage I can just feel Darien suffer. Did you notice?”

  “No,” said Spraggue truthfully. “Maybe it’s just a technical thing.”

  She flashed him a quick smile. “Honestly, I don’t know why he ever cast me!”

  A tall straw-blond man executed an elegant pirouette in the aisle, leaned languidly against a chair. “A man with Darien’s reputation for the ladies, especially the younger ladies, and you can’t imagine why he cast you? Isn’t that sweet!” He had a tenor that threatened to lisp.

  “Shut up, Greg,” said Georgina. “You’re just jealous.”

  “Ooooooh,” said Greg. “Is that supposed to mean that you think I harbor disgusting perverted desires for the old man?”

  Georgina giggled. “Relax, Greg. Darien’s got the hots for nothing but his show.” She sighed deeply. “Don’t I know it?” She turned back to Spraggue apologetically. “You haven’t met Greg yet, have you? Greg, this is Michael Spraggue, our new Seward.”

  “Delighted!” Greg leaned gracefully over and shook Spraggue’s hand with a light, cool grip. “How lovely to have actors to work with a week before opening! Not that the stage manager hasn’t done a bang-up job reading your lines, but she is female—and definitely not an actress. So hard to establish rapport with a nonentity. Gregory Hudson is the full name. I play Jonathan Harker, stalwart husband to Mina, our leading lady.”

  “Caroline Ambrose,” Georgina filled in helpfully.

  Greg laughed, a high tenor squeal. “She makes me feel so inadequate—so inexperienced. After all, she’s had five husbands in real life, while I—”

  “Still bad-mouthing my fellow star?” Spraggue hadn’t seen the redheaded woman approach. Now that she stood next to him, he wished she’d go back up to the top of the aisle and start again. She deserved to be watched. Alone or in a Miss America pageant, here was a knockout. Spraggue decided on a career as a connoisseur of suntan-oil commercials.

  The redhead smiled and touched his hand. “I’m Emma Healey,” she said. “Arthur told me where to find you, Michael. But I think I would have recognized you even if he hadn’t warned me. From your film, the British one—”

  “I thought no one saw that.” Spraggue answered her smile.

  “I did. Very good.”

  “Thanks. It was a long time ago.”

  Emma’s voice was terrific, low and warm. She turned away but Greg held her, a possessive arm firmly around her waist. Spraggue stared. Maybe he had summed up the lanky pretty-boy too quickly.

  “What was that you said about fellow star, Emma dear?” Greg said. “Caroline Ambrose, your equal? Come off it, darling. Who has the private dressing room? The coach? The suite at the Ritz-Carlton? The orchids delivered daily?”

  “Those have nothing to do with the show,” protested Emma.

  “But they have a lot to do with the Caroline Ambrose mystique.”

  Georgina dropped into the seat next to Spraggue. “Do you really think she sends
them to herself?” she asked slyly.

  Spraggue shrugged. “I thought they emanated from some former husband or other.”

  “Divorced or the one they say she killed?”

  “If he’s dead, Georgie, I doubt they’d even let him in the flower shop.” Greg leaned over and patted Georgina on the head.

  Emma laughed. “Oh, Georgina, have you been reading the fan mags again?”

  Georgina blushed. “Well, they do say terrible things about her. And she has been married five times. How old is she, anyway?”

  “Old enough to play Dracula,” said Greg.

  “Then how did she get the part?”

  Greg winked at Spraggue. “Listen to our ingénue prattle!” He spoke to Georgina as if she were a slow two-year-old. “Old friends, darling. She and Darien are old friends. Close friends, too.”

  “I know the story of the orchids,” Emma said quietly.

  “Tell all, darling, instantly!”

  Emma peered cautiously left and right. The stagehands rushed about, shepherded by the stage manager. No other actors were within earshot. Ambrose was on call, but probably still lazed in her dressing room. She preferred isolation and special treatment to the instant camaraderie of her colleagues.

  With a wicked gleam in her eye, Emma stepped to the center of the aisle and performed her story à la Shirley Temple.

  “Once upon a time,” she lisped, “Princess Caroline was married to a gorgeous South American millionaire. This was after her first two marriages, you understand, and before her last two. He was tall and dark and very handsome, although he was much older than our Caroline. He owned all the coffee beans and all the pineapples and all the orchids in Colombia.”

  Emma struck a tragic pose, one hand flattened against her brow, and continued. “They met when he visited New York and adored Caroline in Strange Interlude. He went backstage. Our Caroline, bored with her second husband and sniffing endless cash, bedazzled him.”

  “I don’t know how she does it,” said Georgina. “I haven’t even been married once!”

  Emma turned. “Don’t interrupt! He whisked Princess Caroline off to his homeland and, somewhat belatedly, wed her. Rumors began to issue from the jungle. She was pregnant. She wasn’t pregnant. She’d lost a child, perhaps deliberately. Her husband beat her. She beat him. You know the stuff. After a year, Caroline reappeared in New York, alone. She filed for divorce on grounds of extreme mental cruelty.” Emma’s voice rose to a crescendo. “And now, every day, she gets a memento of that happy year: orchids from the Colombian’s equatorial plantation. If she’s acting, they arrive at the theater; between shows, at her domicile—”

  “Sort of like DiMaggio and the red roses on Marilyn’s grave,” sighed Georgina.

  Greg snorted. “At least he had the decency to wait until she was dead!”

  Georgina ignored him. “You’d think he’d have given it up after she remarried.…”

  “Caroline got two dozen white orchids the day she married Harvey What’s-his-name,” Emma said. “That little affair only lasted six months or so and the flowers kept on arriving. Caroline didn’t protest. There’s a certain amount of notoriety, press coverage, et cetera, in being the Orchid Lady.”

  “Maybe,” said Georgina dreamily, “he does it to make her feel guilty for leaving him. You know, one day the orchids won’t arrive and she’ll wonder why and then she’ll pick up a newspaper and read his obituary and—”

  Greg giggled. “Georgie, you’re wasted here. Really. Why don’t you write for the soaps?”

  “Well, it is a good story.” Georgina looked questioningly at Emma. “If it’s true.”

  Emma smiled down at the earnest blonde. “As far as I know, honey, it’s true.”

  “We’ll just have to get Lady Caroline to come up and play Truth with the peons one of these days,” said Greg.

  “Truth?” asked Georgina.

  “It’s a game, darling. A lovely game.”

  “What are you up to now, Greg?” Emma’s eyes narrowed. They were an incredibly intense emerald. Spraggue couldn’t remember ever seeing eyes that exact shade. They made him wonder about contact lenses.

  “I just thought we might have a game of Truth to pass the time,” said Greg with a great show of injured innocence.

  “Darien only called a ten-minute break—” began Spraggue.

  “Rewrite breaks take forever,” Greg interrupted.

  “Darien might remember,” Georgina said hopefully. “He might realize we’re all waiting and send someone to give us the okay. Then we could go out for a drink or—”

  “Darien? Remember the peasants?” Greg gave his curious squealing laugh. “If, by chance, he should notice the time, he will send a messenger straight down to the dressing rooms where that great British actor, John Langford, holds court with Caroline, Our Lady of the Flowers—”

  “Gus Grayling’s down there, too,” said Georgina. “Have you met him, Michael?”

  “No.”

  “If Grayling is down there,” continued Greg, “it is only on sufferance. He’d certainly be a third wheel, what with Caroline bent on making Langford husband No. 6. Remember, as Van Helsing, Gus may have the most lines in the play, but Count Dracula is the lead. And”—Greg turned to Emma—“if we were to tempt Lady Caroline to play Truth with us, she would certainly tell you that she is the star.”

  “I’ll play,” said Georgina. “If you’ll teach me.”

  Greg winked at Emma. “We’ll need more victims, don’t you think?”

  “Let’s see. Me and you and Georgie and Michael.” She grinned at Spraggue and he decided he might not mind being a victim. “We’ll get Eddie! He’d love to play.”

  “With you, dear Emma, I doubt it. With our lovely stage manager, now.…”

  “Have you seen him, Greg?” Emma cut the blond man off.

  “Really burns you, doesn’t it, darling? So young, so insensible to your overwhelming charms.… Good for him. Some men ought to be able to resist you. Right, Spraggue?”

  Spraggue looked at Greg curiously. His tone said clearly: keep away from Emma. Spraggue shrugged. It was a little difficult to keep his eyes off the tight, low-cut blue leotard Emma had chosen as rehearsal wear. It gave rise to some speculation. She hardly bounced, but her nipples were clearly outlined against the tight-stretched cloth. Excellent musculature or a very thin bra. Her jeans boasted a designer’s name scrawled across the molded ass.

  “Eddie!” Emma called toward backstage. “Come on! We’re playing a game and you’re it!”

  As soon as Eddie lumbered on stage, Spraggue knew he must play the madman, Renfield. Mostly, it was the eyes. Large, wide, far-apart eyes. If they’d been brown, they’d have been fine—warm, dark, puppy-dog eyes. But they were cold, staring blue, slightly watery. Discomforting eyes. A pair of hornrimmed glasses stuck out of his breast pocket.

  “Is it that sensitivity shit?” he asked good-naturedly, vaulting down from the stage to join the group in the front row. “My acting teacher doesn’t hold with that junk. Said I should learn to speak.”

  “Ah, yes, enunciation!” Emma sucked in her breath and stood up tall, an inspiring sight.

  “The arts and English literature!” echoed Georgina.

  “Shakespeare!” Greg trumpeted. He bowed his head.” When will we see his like again?”

  “Shut up,” said Eddie calmly. “What’s going on?”

  “Truth!” answered Greg in a whisper.

  Georgina raised a hand prettily. “Doesn’t this game have any rules?”

  “Of course! Eyes on a level,” commanded Emma. “Everyone sit on the floor, cross-legged.”

  “Unless modesty forbids,” Georgina said. She was wearing a skirt.

  “Emma has no modesty,” said Greg. “The first truth!”

  “How do you play?” asked Georgina.

  “It’s like this,” Greg began. “We go around the circle. Everyone has to tell one truth—”

  “Something you’ve never told anyon
e before!” added Emma.

  “Does it have to be about yourself?” asked Georgina uncertainly.

  “Unless you’ve got the dirt on someone else here!”

  “Who starts?”

  “Emma!” Greg said positively. “She has the most lurid past, tells the most fascinating tales, and takes forever. Then we run out of time and no one else has to give.”

  Emma shook her head. “Let’s start with someone new,” she said coyly. “Fresh blood. How about it, Michael?”

  “No!” said Georgina. She blushed and looked around the circle. “It’s not fair. I mean, this is his first day and—”

  Spraggue smiled at the little blonde gratefully. He had a few truths he’d just as soon keep to himself.

  Greg laughed. “Then you, Georgie. You’ll have to take Michael’s place.”

  “Come on,” Emma said softly. “Just tell us one teeny truth and we’ll let you alone.”

  Georgina breathed deeply and looked at no one. “Since everybody seems to know,” she said finally, “I’ll make it official. I have a crush on Arthur Darien. I like older men.”

  Emma raised a perfect eyebrow. “Why not Grayling then? He’s older than hell—and he’s always panting after you!”

  “Is that why you’ve got the picture of that old coot in your dressing room?” asked Greg simultaneously. “Boyfriend, Georgie?”

  “My grandfather!” The blush spread over Georgina’s cheeks and down her throat. “And while we’re on truths, I wish you’d all call me Gina, not Georgie. Gina’s my professional name.”

  “That’s just it,” answered Greg. “Gina sounds like a professional name. Some women are Ginas; some are Georgies. To me, you’re a Georgie.”

  “You’re next, Greg,” said Emma. Georgina shot her a relieved smile.

  “Let’s go the other way ’round the circle,” said Greg.

  “Let’s not,” said Spraggue.

  “Come on!”

  “Okay, okay! How’s this one? Short and sweet.” Greg held up both hands for silence.” When I was twelve years old I slept with my first cousin.”

  “And was your cousin a him or a her?” asked Emma sweetly.

  “Now, now, darling. No explanations. A simple truth, that’s all. And I assure you, it is the truth and I’ve never told anyone before.” He nodded at Eddie, next in the circle. “Over to you.”