Something Wicked

by Carolyn G. Hart

  The Porsche gave a throaty purr and sprang forward. The sun was slipping behind the live oaks, and a pleasant mellow glow touched the marsh with enchantment, gilding the cord grass and the silvery sea myrtle. Annie welcomed the sweep of air through the open sunroof, but the breeze ruffled the sheets, so she slipped the printout into her woven wicker carryall.

  “Give me the scoop,” she asked eagerly.

  As Max turned the car onto the blacktop and they picked up speed, he asked, “Aren’t you going to read it?”

  “Nope. You can play Archie to my Nero Wolfe.”

  He hooted. “Thank God, I don’t see any real resemblance.”

  “Mentally, dear, mentally. I am trenchant—”

  “Trencher, did you say?”

  The Porsche veered sharply toward the bank as she pulled his ear for that one.

  But, as he summed up his afternoon’s work, Annie was just as pleased she hadn’t plowed through the pages.

  “So you didn’t come up with any tie to Jenkins?”

  “Nothing I can put my finger on. Oh, Burt leases his shop from him, of course, or from Halcyon Development, to be superaccurate. But I can’t discover that Jenkins is pressuring him in any way.” He frowned darkly. “Of course, they’d keep it pretty quiet, if he’s doing Harley’s dirty work.”

  “But he’s president of the players!”

  “What could be a better cover?” Max slowed to wave to the guard manning the checkpoint at the solitary entrance to the resort homes and condominiums. They drove two blocks and turned left into the parking lot of Broward’s Rock High School. Carla’s sporty yellow MG, the classic with the jaunty running boards, was slewed carelessly into a parking space just past the entrance to the auditorium, and, as they walked toward the doors, gray dirt spewed as Shane’s glistening black Mercedes wheeled in.

  “The heartthrob of America,” Max observed slyly.

  Annie would have snarled, but she was too fascinated by the appearance of Henny Brawley, a red blur on her ten-speed, coming up the road in hot pursuit of the Mercedes. Instead, she satisfied herself with giving Shane a cold glare as they climbed the steps.

  In the foyer, Carla was perched on a stepladder by the entrance doors to the center aisle, struggling with a loose hinge. She looked up briefly to smile at Annie and Max. When she saw Shane, her mouth drew into a thin line. She bent back to her work.

  Shane glared at her. “Hey, Carla, my car’s got a knock. You want to take a look at it?”

  Carla reached jerkily for the screwdriver on the ladder tray, and it clattered to the floor.

  For once, Max’s amiability deserted him. He grabbed Shane’s arm and hustled him down the aisle.

  Shane’s irritated voice rose. “But she asks for it, doesn’t she? And I’m sick of her looking at me like I’m some kind of maggot.”

  Annie bent to pick up the tool. She handed it to Carla, appalled by the burning hatred in the set designer’s eyes.

  “He’s a creep,” Annie offered briskly. “Don’t let him bug you. He’s just jealous he can’t do anything well. Your sets are fabulous.”

  Carla swallowed painfully and tried to smile. “It’s all right. I’ve heard worse. But, God, he’s sickening.” The hand that accepted the screwdriver trembled, and the thin shoulders beneath the faded denim work shirt shook.

  The auditorium door opened, and Henny charged in. “Hi, Carla. Hi, Annie. Hope I’m not late.” She paused beside the ladder. “Oh, Carla, how nice of you to fix that door. Really, you go above and beyond duty. Good work, my dear.” Henny took Annie’s arm. “Time for us to get to it.”

  Annie surged down the aisle with Henny. Obviously, this was Henny, actress, not Henny, investigator.

  Although Annie had expected a lousy rehearsal because of yesterday’s dramatics, including the Macbeth quote and Sam’s frenzy, everyone had it pretty well together this Monday evening. Janet was pale, which came as no surprise since she’d been unlucky enough—or careful enough?—to imbibe the doctored punch. Henny was marvelous, as always, her sense of timing superb. Only Shane was his usual wooden, ineffective self. If she were Shane, it would make her highly nervous to be on the receiving end of the glares from Hugo. But the magic of the play absorbed her, as it always did, and she stopped thinking about the various cast members and their rivalries.

  They were nearing the marvelous scene when Mortimer lifts the window seat and finds the body, one of the most delicious moments in theater. Onstage, Max strode around the living room. Janet picked up her pail from the sideboard and her cape, hat, and gloves from the table and left for the kitchen. Alone, Max continued his search for his lost manuscript. Annie’s lips parted in an anticipatory smile.

  Max lifted the lid of the window seat. The business called for him then to drop it, walk away, do a double take, and dash back. Instead, he remained in a half crouch, staring down.

  Henny and Janet were just offstage, of course, ready to come on.

  Max turned, his face grim.

  Henny and Janet stepped onstage, puzzled, then hurried to him.

  He reached out to bar them from the window seat. Janet craned to look past him, her hands flew to her throat, and her high, agonized scream rose in the musty air of the auditorium, then splintered into choking sobs.

  7

  “Freddy,” Janet wailed. Fat tears coursed down her face; her makeup was streaked and blurred. “Somebody killed my Freddy!” And she rocked back and forth, clutching the stiff, bloodstained carcass of a huge orange cat.

  Her cries brought everyone running. Max reached out gingerly, offering to take the animal. Annie joined him and thrust some wilted tissues at the hysterical actress.

  Hugo and Arthur rushed up from the subterranean dressing rooms. Backstage steps led down to the greenroom, the men’s and women’s dressing rooms, even two small cubicles with tarnished stars pasted on the doors, restrooms, and a labyrinth of partitioned-off areas, including the prop shop, wardrobe, storage, and a dimly lit boiler room. Hugo glared dourly at the dead animal, as if it were a personal affront, while Arthur wrung his hands, mute and miserable.

  Vince Ellis jammed a hand through his flaming red hair. It wasn’t often that anything caught the Gazette owner off balance. Annie would bet at that moment he regretted trying out for the role of Officer Brophy.

  Father Donaldson, present for his role as Dr. Harper in Act I, hurried from a wing. “Here, Janet,” he intoned in his deep, soothing voice, “let me have Freddy.” Somehow, he succeeded in lifting the cat from her arms. Max looked relieved. The Episcopal priest, who good-naturedly played clergy for the summer theater in everything from The Importance of Being Earnest to Murder at the Vicarage, continued to quietly reassure, his ruddy face grave. T.K. jerkily patted his wife’s heaving shoulders.

  It was the Hortons’ cat. The information came out in choked fragments from a shocked Cindy, for once subdued. Her father stood red-faced and silent. Freddy hadn’t come home this morning. They had worried a little, but he was a tom and occasionally roamed, although he usually stayed in their backyard. He liked to sun on the patio. Cindy last saw the cat before they left for the Sunday afternoon rehearsal. “He was asleep on the retaining wall.”

  “Freddy was almost fifteen years old. We got him when Cindy was just a baby. Oh, how could anyone do it?” Janet moaned. Father Donaldson, with another reassuring word, carried the body offstage.

  T.K. cleared his throat several times. “Come on, now, honey. It won’t help to cry. Freddy wouldn’t want you to cry. He’s not hurt now.”

  If she were Freddy, Annie thought, that would hardly be her attitude, but T.K. was desperately trying to console a desolated Janet and might be forgiven a little latitude with the truth.

  In the downstage right wing, Sam backed away from Father Donaldson. At the moment, he looked decidedly green and his eyes were scrupulously averted from the carcass. Ben Tippet, who ran Tippet’s Garage and was onstage for a few minutes in Act I as the prospective boarder who is saved from po
isoned elderberry wine only by Mortimer’s frantic intervention, looked from the cat to Sam to Janet, then muttered, “I gotta go. A transmission to put in,” and scuttled offstage.

  “This is beyond the pale,” Burt announced shrilly. “I want to make it clear that if I ever discover who perpetrated this outrage, that person will never in my lifetime take part in any production mounted by the players.”

  To Burt, of course, that fate was far worse than being cast out into the wilderness.

  Even Shane looked sickened. “This is shitty.”

  Henny Brawley, lean as a whippet in bright crimson warmups, was staring at Shane, her face creased in a puzzled frown.

  Eugene’s broad face puckered. “Who would do such a thing?”

  And that was the question in every mind, Annie knew. How could anyone stalk a pet, murder it, then plant the bloodied corpse, and wait for its discovery?

  She looked at the watching faces and wondered.

  The freckles stood out starkly on Vince Ellis’s ruddy face.

  Carla stood with her hands jammed into the pockets of her dungarees, her arms tight to her body, as if she were cold. Long, dark hair framed a sensitive face, frozen now into immobility. Her violet eyes kept glancing at Janet and then away. Once, she shook her head, as if irritated at her own inability to help. Annie admired her compassion, because she felt certain that Janet was the kind of dithery, male-dependent female Carla most abhorred.

  Hugo’s silvery black eyebrows were bunched in a furious line. Annie wondered if he were angry at the disruption of the play, or if he liked cats. One thing she was sure of … he didn’t especially like Janet. Funny. She didn’t have an idea in the world what Hugo was thinking behind that brooding, saturnine face.

  Sam held a hand to quivering lips. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Burt shot him a look of unconcealed contempt. “For God’s sake, it’s not even your cat.”

  “Blood,” Sam said faintly. “Can’t stand blood.”

  “Don’t look.”

  Janet’s face was beginning to puff from her weeping, and her hiccoughing sobs shook her plump shoulders. T.K. grabbed her elbow and glared at all of them impartially. “We’re leaving,” he said harshly and began to steer Janet toward the steps. He moved with lowered shoulders, ready to bull his way ahead, an ex-jock in uncharted seas.

  Henny held up a hand. “Do wait a moment.”

  “What for?” T.K. demanded gruffly.

  “Someone brought Freddy here,” she said firmly. “Don’t you think we should try to find out who?” She scanned the waiting faces. “One of us, don’t you think?”

  There was a moment of stiff, shocked silence, then voices erupted.

  “That’s absurd!”

  “Just a minute, Henny—”

  “Not me!” Shane objected loudly. “I’m no nut case. But somebody damn sure is.”

  Arthur tossed his head, flipping the dark hank of hair out of his eyes. “I would hate to think it of one of us.”

  Sam seized on Shane’s response. “Jesus, the hunk put his finger on it. We’ve got us a nut. Oh, God, that’s all I need now. A nut!” He clapped his hands to his head, moaning.

  Eugene twirled his eyeglasses on their long black ribbon and looked like TR learning that his Bull Moose party had gone down in defeat.

  “Cool it, everybody.” Max’s voice and demeanor were as pleasant as always, but the voices stilled. “Henny’s right, you know. Somebody brought Freddy in here and put him in the window seat. We have to find out who did it.”

  T.K.’s bristly blond brows knitted in concentration, and his heavy head began to nod. “Yeah. Goddammit, yeah. One of us. Who the hell else?” He peered suspiciously from face to face.

  “I don’t think so.” Carla’s voice was cool. She stared at Max thoughtfully. “I was the first to arrive tonight, and I didn’t see anyone carrying anything large enough to contain the cat.”

  “Of course not,” Henny observed.

  Burt shot her an irritated glance. “If nobody carried the cat in, how the hell did the cat get in the window seat?”

  “The operative question is when, not how,” Henny retorted, “and the answer’s quite obvious. The deed occurred some time between rehearsal yesterday afternoon and Carla’s arrival tonight.” Henny’s bright dark eyes gleamed.

  “I got here the same time as Annie and Darling.” Shane was, as usual, supremely self-centered. “I wasn’t clutching no bloody cat.”

  “The thing to do is look around and see if the building’s been broken into,” Cindy offered. It was her first suggestion. Annie shot her a look of surprise and grudging respect. She’d always assumed Cindy was stupid as well as horny, but now the teenager’s sea green eyes were calculating and intelligent.

  Max’s voice sliced through the chorus of assent. “All right—but we’ll look in pairs.”

  “Do you figure it’s dangerous?” Eugene demanded.

  Hugo smiled sourly. “I rather think Max would prefer no one do a solo survey and produce a conveniently broken window.”

  They divided into pairs, with Annie and Eugene left to guard Freddy, who had been placed in an empty cardboard box by Carla. The box sat by the prop table. “I don’t want it to disappear,” Max said briskly. “We can at least see whether the bullet that killed Freddy can be traced.”

  Annie’s mind whirled with fragments of thought about bullet and cartridge case comparisons, rifled bores, and powder pattern distribution. But a ballistics department needed the gun to make a match. Was Max trying to frighten one of his listeners?

  The search was fairly simple, since an iron grille, locked with a padlock, separated the auditorium and its front foyer from the main corridor leading to the schoolrooms. That left the auditorium itself, the front foyer, the attic area, and, of course, the bewildering labyrinth of nooks, crannies, and hallways branching dark and twisted beneath the stage like the gnarled offshoots from a cypress.

  Annie waited, listening to the faint eddies of the voices of the searchers. She looked occasionally toward the box just offstage. Freddy was missing after rehearsal on Sunday. Most of the cast arrived for tonight’s rehearsal around seven P.M. A space of little more than twenty-four hours. The three Hortons had been absent from their house for the two hours of rehearsal Sunday—and again for the period of the Petrees’ party Sunday night. Freddy was last seen shortly before two P.M. Sunday.

  Had anyone been late to rehearsal Sunday?

  Shane.

  The name popped up like a red cherry on a slot machine.

  But, for God’s sake, why would Shane kill the Hortons’ cat?

  But then, why would any of them kill Freddy?

  What could possibly be the point of this macabre and distinctly nasty exercise?

  But what was the point of erasing the chalk marks from the stage, setting off a stink bomb, removing rehearsal notices from the callboard, sawing through the rope to the house curtain, artistically draping a dummy from the gridwork, and inserting the lines from Macbeth in Shane’s prompt card?

  What had been accomplished?

  A harassed director. A furious president of the players. A skittish cast. And, today, a thoroughly demoralized—and perhaps even terrified—group.

  Annie stared at the box. The pranks had gone from sophomoric to vicious—which certainly removed three possible suspects: the Hortons—T.K., Janet, and Cindy.

  She turned and paced downstage and stared sightlessly out at the empty auditorium.

  Eugene cleared his throat once, but said nothing.

  But were the Hortons above suspicion?

  Was it her own advancing age that said, “Oh, yeah? Wait a minute!” Or did it spring from years of consorting, in a literary way, with writers who could invest with horror such commonplaces as an eight-year-old’s playhouse or a cheery mound of bright yarn and shiny knitting needles: Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, Margaret Millar, Helen McCloy, Charlotte Armstrong.

  What the human mind can conceive, Richard
Lockridge once remarked ….

  T.K. adored his wife. But he must know that Janet was emotionally tied in some way to Shane—and it didn’t take a Basil Willing to figure out just how. Just how angry might T.K. be?

  As for Cindy—To what lengths would the sixteen-year-old go to strike out at her rival for Shane’s attentions, even though the other woman was her own mother? Could anyone so cold-bloodedly kill a pet that had grown up with him? Briefly, with a shudder, Annie thought of The Bad Seed.

  Could Janet be distraught enough over Shane to kill her own pet to inflict unhappiness on Cindy?

  Footsteps sounded behind her. She swung around to face Eugene as he joined her in looking out over the auditorium.

  “TR was an outstanding success as police commissioner in New York. He would go out late at night to see if the beat patrolmen were on duty. The tabloids nicknamed him Haroun-el-Roosevelt.”

  Annie stared at him blankly.

  Eugene smiled genially. “That was after the famous caliph who enjoyed slipping around Baghdad unrecognized after dark.”

  A nut. Sam was looking for a nut.

  She felt a quiver of relief when the steps leading up from the dressing rooms creaked. Hugo emerged brushing a dribble of cobweb from his immaculate pinpoint oxford shirt. It matched perfectly the sky blue of his faded denim slacks. But Hugo didn’t look pretty in his outfit. His face was too rugged, his dark eyes too daunting, and his manner too assured. “Anybody who wanted to get in this godforsaken hole could have gotten in.”

  Carla moved out from the shadows behind him. “There’s a loose window in the wardrobe area. And just some cardboard in place of window panes in the east corner of the prop department.”

  Shane and Henny followed close behind them. “The door leading outside from the boiler room is secure,” the latter announced.

  Father Donaldson and Vince, murmuring earnestly to each other, stood in the balcony. Then Vince shouted, “Nothing open or broken up here.” The Hortons came down the center aisle from the front foyer, and Sam and Burt returned through the left wing.

  “Tighter than a drum,” T.K. reported.