by Linda Barnes
“Lucy!” she shouted, her voice too loud, strident. It broke the mood. Spraggue’s eyes stayed with Lucy and the Count. Their passion was inspirational.
In his chair, Darien rumbled like a volcano about to erupt. Greg Hudson dug his elbow into Spraggue’s ribs and gave a knowing nod in Darien’s direction.
“Serves him right for casting the bitch,” he whispered.
“Shit!” Darien controlled himself with effort, started over in his most reasonable tone. “Caroline, dear, what I am trying to do here—” Spraggue remembered that voice from the old times in England. Darien at his angriest.
The harangue was postponed by a commotion at stage left. A brawl, it sounded like. Accusatory voices rang out. The stage manager demanded silence. Something crashed to the floor. A small terrier puppy, yapping furiously, bounded onto the stage, Karen Snow in hot pursuit.
“Caroline!” Darien thundered. “What is that creature doing in the theater?”
“Arthur, it’s not my fault. I put him in my dressing room. Well, I couldn’t leave him in that hotel room all day, could I? Someone must have let him out.”
The dog yipped.
“Just get him off my stage!” Darien yelled.
“I’m trying,” Karen answered through clenched teeth.
Caroline began a new scene. “Did you miss me, Wolfie?” she cooed down at the frightened animal. Her eyes searched the stage. “Eddie, is that you, darling?”
“God,” Hudson groaned. “Can’t she leave the undergraduates alone?”
Eddie Lafferty appeared sheepishly from the wings.
“You’ll help me, Eddie, won’t you?” Caroline pointedly ignored Karen’s efforts to trap the animal. “You can catch him. Don’t panic him now,” she admonished the seething stage manager. “Just leave him be until I come down and—”
“Stay where you are, Caroline! I want this scene finished! Karen, get that mutt off the set!” Darien stayed seated, but his voice indicated that he wouldn’t remain so for long.
The small dog was now pursued by the stage manager, Eddie Lafferty, and a stagehand whose name Spraggue didn’t know. Caroline shouted advice from above, like some divine being. “He won’t bite you. He’s really very friendly. Call him. His name is Wolf. Don’t hurt him. Don’t scare him like that!”
It was Karen who organized the successful maneuver. The three pursuers cornered the panicked animal. Eddie scooped him up and displayed him like a trophy. Everyone else applauded, except for Darien.
“Thank you, Eddie dear.” Caroline ignored Karen’s and the stagehand’s contribution to the rescue. She came down a few steps. “Now just put him in his basket—”
“Stop!” Eddie’s voice, usually so deferential, gave the order. “Stay where you are. Freeze!” He pushed the dog into the arms of the gaping stagehand, and raced up the uneven steps, past the platform where John and Emma sat hand in hand. He knelt at the first riser.
“What the hell is going on?” Darien demanded, standing.
Caroline placed a hand eloquently over her heart and gasped. She collapsed elegantly on the fifth step of the long twisting flight.
Eddie straightened up slowly, holding something carefully in his hands. Emma and John stared at it wordlessly.
“Will someone tell me what is going on?” inquired Darien.
“It’s a trip wire,” Eddie said too loudly.
Caroline burst into beautifully orchestrated tears. With a regretful glance at Emma, John Langford took the steps two at a time to comfort her.
“A trip wire?” Darien repeated.
“A thin piece of wire strung between two nails driven into the riser.”
“But—” Emma began.
“Yes?”
“But I came down those steps, Arthur. You saw me. It wasn’t there.”
“I picked you up before you reached the bottom step,” John Langford corrected her.
“Just the way you always do, darling.” Caroline’s voice had turned to ice. “Emma wasn’t in any danger. She knew that. She knew it when she planted the damn thing—”
Langford placed a warning hand on Caroline’s shoulder. “Stop it, Caroline. You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re upset.”
“Let her talk, John. I’m fascinated,” said Emma defiantly.
“How dare you, you—”
Spraggue stood up. “Arthur,” he said, “clear the stage. Get all the lights on and break for lunch. Karen, there’s a leather case in my dressing room. Could you send someone to get it? And could you stay?”
Darien gaped. Then he shrugged. “An hour for lunch,” he said. “Be back at one-thirty. Now clear the set.”
Caroline sniffed loudly. “Take me down to my dressing room, John. I’m not hungry—”
Langford escorted the weeping Caroline down the stairs, gazing helplessly at Emma. It was Caroline’s best performance of the day. She gave Emma one reproachful stare, kissed Eddie gratefully on the cheek, reclaimed her puppy, and allowed Langford to half-carry her from the stage. Spraggue restrained his applause.
The theater began to empty, though some of the actors hesitated, watching Spraggue curiously as he removed a magnifying lens from the leather case a stagehand had brought up. Darien was the last to leave.
“Well,” said Karen Snow, her lips tightly pressed together, “you asked me if I thought the other actors knew why you were here. They’re not that dumb. They’re on to you now.”
“Good.”
“Why?”
“The joker’s been giving us warnings. I wanted to return the favor.”
“So he’s warned,” she said. “What next?”
“Either he gets more careful, he stops, or he gets caught,” Spraggue said.
“I hope he stops,” Karen said.
“Not me. I’m starting to look forward to meeting this joker of ours. I hope the bastard doesn’t quit.”
“Just make sure you catch him soon.”
Chapter Twelve
There were fingerprints on the riser—too many. Eddie’s, of course, and probably the prints of the stagehand who’d set up the platforms and the carpenter who’d built them. Spraggue photographed them all, feeling vaguely silly. Now he’d have to fingerprint the entire cast. And he was certain the joker had used gloves. Everyone used gloves. He inspected the nails, driven in clean and straight. Could tiny Georgina swing the necessary blow? The wire itself, Karen identified easily; right off a roll in the electrician’s booth. Kept on an open shelf in an unlocked room. Available to all.
Spraggue shook his head, disgusted. “You’d better go get some lunch while there’s still time,” he said to Karen.
“What about you?”
“Not hungry.”
“Did the joker leave you another note?”
“Can’t find one.”
“I’ll bring you back a sandwich,” she said.
Spraggue went to pay a condolence call on Caroline Ambrose. Her dressing-room door was partially open.
Caroline was alone, standing in front of her full-length mirror. She preened, testing one famous expression after another. Her smile faded and her fingers gently massaged her temples, her forehead, desperately smoothing age-wrinkled skin.
The face reflected in the glass was a classic. Caroline Ambrose had huge violet eyes under arching brows, porcelain skin, delicate bones, a cloud of dark hair, and a sweet triangular smile. Cloying, Spraggue corrected himself, not sweet. A self-conscious smile designed to evade laugh lines. Appraising eyes that constantly searched, for approval, for weakness, for gain.
Caroline mascaraed her long lashes, replenished her scarlet lipstick, patted more color into her cheeks. She made Spraggue long for the uncompromising face of Karen Snow, not beautiful, but real. He much preferred the intelligence in Karen’s eyes to the fake docility in Caroline’s.
Spraggue rapped at the open door. Caroline was still engrossed in her reflection.
She turned, offered him a three-quarter profile and a madonna smile. It was one of her best. She w
as often photographed that way.
“May I come in, Miss Ambrose?” Spraggue said with what he hoped was the right touch of deference for a request from a second lead to a star.
Her triangular smile widened speculatively. She patted a place on the bench close beside her and beamed as he sat down.
“Call me Caroline, Michael. Please.”
“Caroline.” He said her name lightly, approvingly. “I hope my knock didn’t frighten you.”
“Oh, no.”
“Good. After what you’ve been through—”
“Just frightful, isn’t it?” She shivered, then smiled at her pretense. “The things actors have to put up with.”
“You, especially.”
Caroline flushed with pleasure. “So you, at least, have noticed. There is such envy in the theater.”
“You seem to take it very calmly. If you had gone a few more steps down that staircase—”
She put a hand on his arm. “Please, don’t even say that. I’m not calm, not at all.” She allowed a lip to quiver. “Really, I shouldn’t have been left here alone.”
So John Langford had deserted her. For Emma? “I’m sorry,” Spraggue said.
“I’m being foolish, I know.” Caroline smiled bravely. “But I can’t dwell on such things. It might affect my performance.”
It certainly wasn’t affecting her performance at the moment, Spraggue thought.
“These things have happened to me before, you know.”
“Trip wires?”
“No, no. But my dressing room has been broken into twice—and I have had setbacks in my career. Jealous people who’ve taken advantage—”
“Do you know who set that wire?”
“Why, no, Michael. I feel it. I’m very sensitive to these things. I feel who my enemies are. I always have enemies.”
“Have you discussed your suspicions with Darien?”
“Arthur? He never listens to me. He believes in the goodness of humanity at large, particularly the female gender. It’s one of the truly delightful things about him.”
“You’ve known him a long time.”
“We do go back a ways. But then,” she smiled archly, “I understand you know Arthur from your past as well.”
Terrific. Just what he needed: a discussion of his own past. Lesson number two: get the man to talk about himself. Even without a script, Caroline sounded programmed. He said nothing. Let her think he was hard of hearing.
After a moment’s pause, she chattered on. “Arthur and I have been friends forever, really. I am so grateful to him. It’s the old story: he took me under his wing from my first New York show, and we’ve never really lost touch. I depend on him so much. He and Spider and I were the three musketeers for a while. You could never find one of us without the other two.”
“Spider?”
“Dennis, Dennis Boland. I shouldn’t call him Spider. He hates it, really. An old childhood nickname. Sometimes they can be so hard to lose.”
Spraggue murmured agreement.
“Haven’t you met him? A dear man. He’s the house manager here. So devoted to Arthur—and to me.”
With a start Spraggue realized that it was his line, that he was expected to say something like “That shouldn’t be too difficult,” to take part in the flirtatious little skit Caroline Ambrose was constructing.
He picked up his cue, somewhat tardily. Caroline beamed. He had passed the test. From now on, he would be Michael Spraggue, that charming young actor. He bit his lip.
“It’s rather a sad tale,” she rattled on. “Spider—Dennis—comes from a very cruel background, very poor. He and Arthur were boyhood friends in New York. They lost touch. It’s so easy to lose touch. Arthur always had that genius, you know. Scholarships, Eastern colleges. And then when he was a successful New York director, he went to a party. And there was Spider, his best friend from the hard times. I don’t think they’ve been separated since.” She sighed deeply. Every word had been spoken as if rehearsed many times before, each gesture, every graceful turn of the head choreographed. The sigh completed the tale. It was again his cue. Spraggue searched for the expected line.
“And you became Spider’s friend, too.”
She opened her violet eyes wide. “But of course. He is a darling man. I was married to Domingo, my third husband, then. Domingo de Renza.”
She paused. Spraggue nodded encouragement. De Renza, huh? Emma hadn’t exaggerated about the wealth of Caroline’s ex.
“Domingo took a great liking to Spider.” Caroline laughed, a carefully calibrated trill. “He visited us at the plantation, almost lived with us.” With a graceful arm movement, she indicated a lush mass of spotted and streaked violet and yellow blooms. “Domingo still sends me flowers, you know. Every day. And Spider arranges them for me. He adores orchids, and he knows how much it pleases me to have them done really well.”
“How kind of him,” Spraggue said, feeling that he’d become enmeshed in a drawing-room comedy, seeking vainly to return to the question of who she thought had arranged the trip wire. Not that her opinion would hold much water. She lived in fantasyland.
“I love coming down to the dressing room each morning to find something delicate and exotic. Domingo understood that part of me so well.” She detached one violet spray from the arrangement and held it against her cheek. “I rarely wear them, but just knowing they’re available picks up my spirits. That’s why I think she took them that day.”
“She?”
“Emma, darling. That is what we’re talking about, isn’t it? Who set up the trip wire. Perhaps I shall wear some of my orchids to Arthur’s party.”
“When did Emma take your flowers?”
“Let me see. Not long ago. Last Monday, I think it was. Naturally, she denied it. But I knew. I always know. She wants everything I have. She already has that lovely role and now—” Caroline caught herself. She had been frowning. She checked her image in the mirror to make sure no wrinkles remained. “Arthur must have told you about his party. Tomorrow night. Right here in the theater—”
“What about dress rehearsal?”
“Check your schedule, darling. The technical people will be doing some dreary run-through onstage, but the front-of-the-house areas will be devoted to the party. Black tie, just like the galas old what’s-his-name, that man who killed himself here—”
“Phelps.”
“That’s it. Arthur’s so keen on the idea. Just like old Phelps used to throw. All the actors, members of the press, plenty of photographers.…”
Darien had mentioned it. The chance to meet the backers of the show.
“I suppose you already know most of the people really involved in producing the show. As the star—”
Nothing he might have said could make her happier. Her eyes lit up.
“Well, I do know some of the more influential backers—”
“Any of them coming up from New York? Or is Arthur keeping this a local venture?”
“Why, darling”—she batted her eyelashes—“I really couldn’t say. Jamie Blakeley could be considered local. He has pieds à terre in so many cities. He practically insisted on my being in the show. He’s the one who gave me my little dog.”
Spraggue filed the name away. Blakeley. Aunt Mary would know him and he would know the other backers. Caroline chattered on, leaving him no chance for escape.
A huge party at the theater. Actors, director, press. Terrific. What an opportunity for the joker.
Spraggue heard wary footsteps behind him. Caroline halted in midsentence and gushed: “Oh, Dennis, darling, I was just telling Michael all about you and how much you do for the company and here you come right on cue. Michael Spraggue, meet Dennis Boland.”
The fat man smiled, but the smile wasn’t pleasant. “We’ve met,” he said. Spraggue was forcibly reminded of the despised childhood name, Spider. The house manager looked like a great bloated spider hanging in the corner of the room.
“How nice,” Caroline said blankly. �
�Mr. Spraggue’s been asking me absolutely penetrating questions about the company ghost. I think he’s been hiding his true vocation from us.”
Neither of the men responded.
“And you did my flowers so exquisitely this morning, Dennis. It’s too sweet of you.”
The fat man oiled his way over to Caroline’s dressing table and took her hand in his. With surprising grace, he bent and kissed it.
“It’s nothing, Caroline, nothing in the world,” he murmured. Spraggue sat up straighter. He had heard that voice before. In the wings that morning, yes. But somewhere else.…
Caroline smiled graciously. The performance would have been perfect, except for the tiny red mark that remained on her wrist when Spider let her hand slip away.
Spraggue stood. “I’ll leave you two,” he said. “It’s a busy day for me.”
“I’m sure it is,” Boland said.
Spraggue left them there, a frozen tableau, and walked down the hallway, lost in the memory of an unctuous voice. Then he had it. One line: “I just hope you know what you’re doing,” spoken behind Darien’s closed office door.
Chapter Thirteen
“Psssst!”
Spraggue stopped in his tracks. The conspiratorial hiss came from his left, somewhere up ahead, off the passageway. It was repeated, louder. A handle turned and a doorway pushed open an inch. Dracula himself motioned Spraggue inside his dressing room and swiftly closed the door.
John Langford was a good two inches taller than Spraggue’s six feet one. He dressed with a contrived casualness that must have cost. Designer jeans, leather vests, elegantly tailored shirts that clung to his broad shoulders and fashionably tapered torso. A thin gold chain around his neck. The intensity he gave to every performance was visible now. It kept him from looking ridiculous as he raised a warning finger to his lips and jerked open the connecting door. No eavesdroppers.
Spraggue felt as if he’d been dragged into some den from the Arabian Nights. Caroline Ambrose had restricted her dressing-room decor to orchids and some twenty photos of herself in various roles, including an unmistakable Lady Macbeth. Langford’s dressing room had been completely transformed.
It had a rug. None of the others did. A worn but garish Oriental too large for the space, it rolled at one end. Spraggue decided that it must have been confiscated from the properties department. All chairs but one had been removed and replaced by piles of bright orange and purple cushions. The single ornate chair was the mate to Darien’s office throne. What gave the place such a cavernous air was its lack of light. Heavy dark cloth had been tacked over the two high windows. Candles in ornate brass holders flickered.