Something Wicked

by Carolyn G. Hart

  As for number five, was that an unforgettable night! Janet had dropped the glass of elderberry wine she was offering Mr. Witherspoon and screamed, pointing up. Everyone looked toward the ceiling of the auditorium. Up, up, up, at the beams in their gridwork. A hand dangled from an opening. A limp hand and arm. Max, followed closely by Annie, tore down the center aisle and up the front-of-house steps to the balcony and the door to the light booth. It was open. Into the booth and up the narrow steps to the attic opening, then Max, waving Annie back, inched carefully across the narrow planks that crossed the dangerous ceiling with its square openings for the lights. And finally, as they waited breathlessly, his voice floated eerily through the dusty space. “A dummy. For God’s sake, a dummy!”

  5. May 22, Annie wrote. Dangling dummy.

  The laconic notation did not adequately represent the dreadful moments when they believed a body was lodged precariously in the far reaches of the attic.

  Max grabbed up a pen from the coffee table and began to write.

  6. May 31. Quote from Macbeth inserted in Shane’s prompt card. Sam goes bananas.

  “Hey, do you have a copy of the rehearsal schedule?” Annie looked around for her purse, but Max was already pulling the mimeographed sheet from his pocket.

  He spread it open and she peered at it. “Look, that’s what I thought,” she said triumphantly. “When somebody let off the stink bomb, it was a rehearsal for Act Two. So that lets out the people who appear only in Acts One and Three. And the stink bomb is the only piece of sabotage that had to have been done by someone in the auditorium at the time.”

  Quickly, Max made a list of the cast for Act II: Henny Brawley as Abby, Janet Horton as Martha, Hugo Wolf as Jonathan, Arthur Killeen as Dr. Einstein, Shane Petree as Teddy, Annie as Elaine, himself as Mortimer, and Eugene Ferramond as Officer O’Hara.

  Annie took another bite of apple. “We have to count T.K. He doesn’t come on as Lieutenant Rooney until Act Three, but he hasn’t missed a rehearsal yet. And, of course, Sam and Burt are always there.”

  “And Cindy and Carla,” Max added. “So we’re back to the same people who were present today. Is that any help?”

  “Well, we can at least drop Father Donaldson, Ben Tippet, and Vince Ellis from consideration.” They played, respectively, Dr. Harper (Act I), Mr. Gibbs (Act I), and Officer Brophy (Acts I and III).

  Max wrinkled his nose. “Sorry to be discouraging, old top, but I don’t think we are making much progress.”

  Annie wasn’t ready to quit detecting. “Look,” she said hurriedly, forestalling suggestions of other pastimes (Max had a certain gleam in his eye), “we’ve got to look at the people involved. That’s the way to go about it. Like Poirot says, running about to and fro like a dog with a bone won’t get you anywhere. We’ve got to look at the psychology of it all.”

  “Okay,” Max said equably. “Who fits the profile?”

  She nodded approvingly. He was getting into the spirit of it.

  She printed PROFILE, then frowned. After all, it was impossible to have any idea of the perpetrator’s personality unless they knew his (or her) objective. She scratched out PROFILE and substituted OBJECTIVE, then wrote busily,

  Ruin the season.

  Get Shane canned.

  Drive Sam berserk.

  Raise a little hell.

  Max took her pen and circled the last line.

  She looked at him inquiringly.

  “As a general proposition—” he began.

  Annie shushed him. “Don’t distract me. I think we’re getting somewhere. Let’s see who might fit each category.”

  They didn’t agree in all cases, but they did come up with some possibilities.

  1. Ruin the season. Harley Edward Jenkins III got top billing. As everyone in town knew, Jenkins vociferously opposed rebuilding the theater on the harbor front. Certainly a lousily produced first play of the season would lessen the chances of a profit-making summer.

  As far as Annie and Max knew, and they chewed this over thoroughly, it would not be to anyone else’s advantage to prevent the theater from rebuilding on the harbor front. Certainly Burt Conroy was determined to see the theater rebuilt at its original site, both because he was president of the players and the community theater was his guiding passion in life, and, more prosaically but perhaps as importantly, because it was to his economic advantage as a shopkeeper to prevent Jenkins from building and leasing to a competing business.

  “However,” Max objected, “Harley was not in the theater when the stink bomb went off. So, if he’s involved, one of the other cast or crew members is doing his dirty work.”

  Annie put conspirator in parentheses with a question mark by Harley’s name.

  Then she shook her head. “Why would anybody do that?”

  “Money.”

  “You think Harley would bribe someone?”

  “Honey, I think Harley’s capable of any number of deceitful and disgusting acts. Besides,” Max said triumphantly, “none of the cast or crew members has any reason to ruin the season.”

  “Except Eugene,” Annie said reluctantly.

  “Still smarting because Burt forced Sam to cast Shane as Teddy?”

  “Obviously, it still smarts. Have you seen Eugene’s eyes when Shane comes on the set as Teddy?” Annie sighed.

  Under Ruin the season, Max wrote Eugene Ferramond in small script. Under Get Shane canned, he printed the name in big block letters.

  “That’s more likely,” Annie agreed. “But Eugene sure doesn’t stand alone.” She printed T. K. Horton in similarly large block letters, took another bite of apple, and added Hugo Wolf and Sam Haznine.

  Max quirked an eyebrow over the last entry. “That’s pretty subtle.”

  “If Henny’s gossip is right, Burt forced Sam to cast Shane. Don’t you think Sam would do anything he could to make Burt change his mind?”

  “I’ve never thought Sam could be that Byzantine.”

  “Speaking of Byzantine, do you think there’s anything to Henny’s idea that Shane’s behind the sabotage? You know damn well that if his wife is determined for him to be in the play, he wouldn’t have the guts to go against her wishes. But if he could cause enough trouble, fluff his lines, make Sam mad enough, and get himself fired, well, Sheridan could hardly blame him, could she?” Annie had a swift vision of Sheridan Petree’s feline face. She suspected that Shane had developed a lot of Byzantine qualities in the years he’d been married to her. The woman was awesome in the force of her personality. She reduced most people, including her surferhandsome but aging husband, to rubber-stamp marionettes.

  Under Drive Sam berserk, Annie listed Shane and Eugene again, with one caveat.

  “I really don’t think Eugene has that small a personality. I know he aches to be Teddy, but he’s doing an excellent job as Officer O’Hara, and he’s always cheerful.”

  “Cheerful—and full of facts and figures about TR. It’s almost an obsession.” Max drew a line under Eugene’s name. Under Raise a little hell, he wrote Cindy Horton.

  Annie looked at him curiously. “On the theory that she’s an oversexed snot and is capable of anything?”

  “That young lady is quite hostile to her mother,” Max observed. “Maybe she doesn’t want to see Janet succeed as Martha. Maybe she thinks she could make more time with Shane if he weren’t tied up in a play.”

  They studied their list of suspects.

  Ruin the season.

  Harley Edward Jenkins III (conspirator?)

  Eugene Ferramond

  Get Shane canned.

  Eugene Ferramond

  Sam Haznine

  Hugo Wolf

  T.K. Horton

  Shane himself

  Drive Sam berserk.

  Shane

  Eugene

  Raise a little hell.

  Cindy

  Then Max added a final category, Unknown. “And that’s my best suggestion yet.”

  At the bottom of the sheet, Annie penned: Possibl
e suspects but without known motives: Annie Laurance, Max Darling, Carla Fontaine, Henny Brawley, Janet Horton, Arthur Killeen. She finished her mug of cappuccino, then lifted Max’s from the coffee table, and saw, with regret, that it was empty, too.

  Max flipped the notebook shut with a purposeful snap and moved closer. “Now that that’s taken care of, let’s consider some more pleasurable pursuits,” and his arm slipped around her shoulders.

  But Annie looked down at her watch. “We’re due at the Petrees’. Remember?”

  “Oh, hell.” Then he suggested brightly, “Let’s skip it.”

  Annie was tempted. She almost slipped comfortably into his embrace.

  Max said silkily, “After all, do you really want to go to an enormous bash put on by Sheridan Petree ostensibly to celebrate the beginning of the theater season, but actually to showcase that god-awful house and herself?”

  It was his mention of the house that was his undoing. The house fascinated Annie.

  Clapping her hands together, she said, “Oh, come on, Max. Let’s go. I mean, you never know what’s going to happen at the Petrees’.”

  Which was, she agreed later, the understatement of the year.

  Max drove slowly, obviously in no hurry to reach the Petrees’. But he smiled at her, and his eyes did that nice crinkle. She smiled back. Max was born to wear a dinner jacket. The crisp white emphasized his even tan, the flash of his dark blue eyes, and his blond hair, tousled now by the warm air sweeping through the open sunroof. And was there a more perfect place in this world than Broward’s Rock on the eve of summer? The sweet scent of blooming magnolia mingled with the sharper tang of the salt marsh. The offshore breeze rattled the palmetto fronds and the glossy magnolia leaves, but the loudest evening sounds came from frogs singing their mating melodies. Then the Porsche headlights swept over a salt marsh, and Annie glimpsed a four-foot-tall Great Blue Heron, with a long yellow bill and distinctive black plumes trailing from his white head. Startled, the majestic bird squawked and rose into the night sky, his three-foot wings flapping majestically. The road swung inland, and great spreading branches of live oak trees, festooned with Spanish moss, met overhead.

  Annie slid forward eagerly in her seat when they reached the enormous circular drive that served the Petree mansion. The drive was jammed with cars parked along both sides. Two stewards from the country club served as valet parking attendants. Light spilled from every window of the two-story, Mediterranean-style home, and the blare of Dixieland jazz reached the foot of the drive. As they began the long walk up to the front door, Annie began to feel festive. She loved Dixieland, Sheridan always had fabulous food, and the interior of the Petree house was unsurpassed for grandiosity.

  Max considered the house, which had the stark grace of a villa perched on a Greek headland, to be an abused possession, lovely on the outside, rotten on the inside. In sunlight, its white stucco exterior glistened, as hard as Portland cement. Now, at night, it had the rich gleam of a moonlit Parthenon. Spotlights in the garden illuminated the brilliantly purple bougainvillea clinging to the facade. But the exterior of the house didn’t hint at the opulence of the interior, the sheer, overwhelming, sense-assaulting ostentation. Ribbed brass ceilings glittered like gold bullion, satin-covered furniture glistened like luxurious pincushions, bronze-and-crystal chandeliers gleamed like shiny ribbons of neon. Here was a material glorification of the sensual, the visual equivalent to a romp in a California hot tub or its historical precursor, a Roman bath. Annie wondered if the other guests shared her faintly decadent feeling. If so, they hid it beneath social faces as they eddied across the pink marbled foyer into the enormous living room with its lush polar-white carpet, mirrored back wall, and, centerpiece of the room, a six-foot-tall oil derrick of gleaming Steuben glass.

  Sheridan Petree stood beside the shimmering statue, her scarlet lips curved in a faint smile. Her hair swung long and loose and was the dusty gold of the Serengeti Plain. Her backless lamé dress, molded to her generous figure, repeated the gold motif of the ceiling. She looked past a circle of admirers at Annie and Max and lifted a heavy crystal goblet in salute.

  “All she lacks is a twenty-one-gun salute,” Annie murmured.

  Max took her elbow and maneuvered her past a group of grazers clustered near the buffet. “Do I sense hostility, love?”

  “There’s something about Sheridan that rouses even my most dormant hostilities,” she admitted. Was it because to her Sheridan and Shane epitomized the idle rich? But Max was, most of the time, idly rich. She couldn’t pretend his forays for Confidential Commissions amounted to more than an interesting hobby. But Max was attractively rich. And the Petrees, to her mind, were most unattractively odious, self-absorbed, snobbish, lazy—and very, very rich. Sheridan’s father had been quite famous in west Texas. Hunter Prentiss was a roistering, self-made oil man who had made and lost a half dozen fortunes, but, fortunately for Sheridan, was on a high roll when he was killed nine years before in a barroom brawl. Sheridan made reference to Hunter Prentiss on every possible occasion. A larger-than-lifesize portrait hung against the far mirrored wall, mounted between an elephant head and a tiger pelt, animals the oil man had killed with his very own .458 Winchester Magnum, displayed on a mahogany rack nearby. There was no corresponding portrait of Shane. Annie wondered if sometimes Sheridan’s husband didn’t weary of hearing incessantly about Daddy’s exploits. Of course, in Annie’s view, if Sheridan was not a delight, Shane was certainly no prize. If it wasn’t a marriage made in heaven, it seemed a nice combination of people who probably deserved each other.

  As Max and Annie came even with the elephant head, Eugene Ferramond, dignified in his tuxedo, waved a genial hand.

  They paused and said hello.

  “Pretty nice, this,” Eugene observed.

  Annie looked at him sharply. She would have thought Eugene would find this room distasteful in the extreme, but he was nodding serenely at the elephant head. And, my God, if he wasn’t Teddy to the life tonight!

  “Big-game hunting is quite a test of a man.”

  “Actually, quite a test of the prey, don’t you think?” Max asked.

  Annie could have hugged him. It might not be murder to gun down magnificent creatures, but it ranked high on Annie’s sin list.

  Eugene was oblivious. He looked admiringly at the mounted gun. “You know, TR was partial to the Winchester. He always used forty-five-caliber bullets of three hundred grains, backed by ninety grains of powder, when he hunted elk. Of course, he made it a rule never to shoot at anything but bucks—unless it was the rutting season.”

  “Good,” Annie said dubiously.

  “The bucks’ flesh is poor then.”

  They edged away, leaving him absorbed by the elephant’s head.

  When they reached the crystal oil derrick, their hostess held out her hand and took Annie’s in it. “So glad you both could come,” Sheridan murmured insincerely.

  They exchanged smiles, which had all the warmth of a west Texas winter sunrise.

  Sheridan’s voice was cool, too, uninfected, with only the faintest hint of her southwest origin. Her accent owed more to her Boston finishing school and her ricochet around the jet-set ports of call—Malibu, Monte Carlo, St. Thomas, Rio, and, now, Broward’s Rock.

  The smile scarcely caused a ripple across Sheridan’s face. Her skin was smooth and unblemished, thanks, Annie felt sure, to the very finest of plastic surgeons. Not a single wrinkle splayed out from her amber eyes, even though she must be in her early forties. Was she older than her husband?

  Feeling vaguely guilty, Annie increased the wattage of her smile. “Oh, we wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” she cried heartily and felt embarrassed when she saw Carla’s quick, sardonic glance as she joined them.

  Sheridan looked past Annie at Carla. “Everyone’s raving about the sets, my dear.”

  Carla flushed with pleasure and ducked her head.

  The contrast between the two women was striking. Carla stood at an a
wkward angle, her dark hair falling across her face, while Sheridan posed beside the crystal derrick, her body as clearly on display as a Rubens nude. Most women wouldn’t have dared to stand beside the glittering oil derrick, fearing they would be overshadowed, diminished. Sheridan was not. She dominated the room, and she knew she did so. It was clear in the arrogant lift of her head, the satisfied curve of her scarlet mouth, the blatant play of her dress against the glistening brass ceiling. And tonight, she was clearly in high good humor. She squeezed Carta’s arm, then waved an imperious, diamond-heavy hand, beckoning Sam Haznine nearer.

  Sam swerved immediately toward Sheridan. The pudgy director clutched the hand of a girl who couldn’t be a day past nineteen and who sported the spikiest purple-and-pink hair Annie had ever seen. This must be sweetie, she thought, carefully avoiding Max’s twinkling eyes.

  Sheridan’s disdainful glance moved from the top of that neon-bright hairdo to the white, out-of-style sandals, just slightly scuffed. Then she looked away, dismissing the girl. She spoke to Sam as if he were alone. “Come tell us what happened today, Sam.”

  The girl’s face flushed, and she grabbed at Sam’s elbow. “Let’s go get something to eat,” she said loudly.

  Sam gave her a hunted look, but he scuttled directly to Sheridan, the girl trying to hang back.

  Sheridan’s lips curved.

  Annie had a sudden sharp desire to puncture that envelope of self-satisfaction. What would Sheridan do if Annie loudly announced how Shane had performed behind the backdrop with a randy refugee from the sandbox set? Annie profoundly wished she had been endowed with what Miss Marple so lovingly described as “a wicked tongue.”

  Sheridan proceeded to underline her lack of regard for social niceties. Turning her unreadable amber eyes toward Sam, she drawled, a ripple of amusement in her voice, “Here I am with the director and two stars of the opening play. Now’s my chance to find out what happened this afternoon. Shane came home from rehearsal as puffed up as a tomcat in a backyard brawl, and I can’t get a word out of him.”