A Puzzle in a Pear Tree

by Parnell Hall

  Cora shrugged.

  Harvey elbowed his way through the crowd, slipped out the gym door.

  “Chief Harper left by now?” Sherry asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Long gone. Him and Doddsworth.”

  “Think we’ll get some action?”

  Cora grinned. “Count on it.”

  45

  “YOU LOOK RAVISHING.”

  Cora fixed Aaron Grant with an evil eye. It was dress rehearsal, and Cora was clad in her milkmaid outfit. Her white cotton blouse was pushed low to leave her arms and shoulders bare. Her peasant skirt was short enough to require lacy bloomers, a last-minute addition from the costume mistress. Sandals were another added touch, as was the flower in her hair.

  Aaron, in a red-and-blue uniform, looked tame by comparison.

  “Gee, thanks, soldier boy. What fife-and-drum corps did you escape from?”

  “I’m not sure if we’re military,” Aaron said amicably. “But I’m not really up on the British army. On the other hand, I’m quite sure you’re . . . rural.”

  “What gave it away? My skivvies, or my lack of breeding? Oh, look at the lady dancing!”

  Sherry Carter, with her hair up, silver earrings, pearl necklace, and blue satin gown, looked positively gorgeous.

  “Oh, dear,” Aaron told her, grinning. “This will never do. You’ll upstage that girl who gets all the dumb presents.”

  “Hey, that’s my lawyer you’re talking about,” Sherry said. “She happens to be very good.”

  “So where is Becky?” Cora demanded.

  “It’s hard to tell in this crowd,” Aaron said. “This place is a zoo.”

  The dress rehearsal was the first time the cast of The Twelve Days of Christmas and the high school chorus had rehearsed together, and it was a bit of a shock. In addition to the choir, each grade from seventh through twelfth had a representative number. So the whole student body was there.

  Luckily the singers didn’t require costumes, just green pants and red shirts for the boys, and red skirts and green tops for the girls, so the dressing rooms weren’t jammed, but the gym floor was so crowded it was almost impossible to move.

  Harvey Beerbaum pushed his way toward them in his lords a-leaping costume. His ruffled shirt, purple velvet pantaloons, and golden slippers were vivid, to say the least. Cora found it impossible to look at him with a straight face. “You held out on me,” he grumbled. “Chief Harper told me what the poem said. It was even on the evening news.”

  “I was sure he’d tell you,” Cora said modestly, “but it was his place, not mine.”

  “Well, it’s wonderful news for you, Miss Carter. The bit about the best friend doing you wrong, I mean. I gather Miss Baldwin is not your best friend.”

  Before Sherry could reply, Becky came walking up with Dan Finley in tow. Becky, in pink and white, looked like something out of a children’s book, all sweetness and sugary innocence, just the sort of lass to receive mountains of gifts from her hopelessly smitten true love.

  Dan Finley, however, looked exactly like a harried cop.

  “I still have my shadow,” Becky told them. “I swear Finley’s gonna go onstage with me, like those gangsters in Kiss Me Kate. Really, Dan, these are just high school kids. I doubt I’m in much danger.”

  “A high school kid got killed,” Dan pointed out stubbornly.

  In the painful silence that followed that observation, Jimmy Potter hurried up. “There’s no puzzle in the pear tree, Miss Felton! Isn’t that great news? I just checked. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Where’s the pear tree now?” Harvey Beerbaum asked.

  “On the props table.”

  “Is anyone watching it?”

  “No.” Jimmy’s eyes widened. “Oh!” He whirled and darted away.

  “Was that nice?” Cora Felton asked Harvey.

  He shrugged. “These puzzles keep appearing. Someoneought to watch the tree.”

  “That might be a good job for you,” Becky told Dan Finley. “As for me, I guess I better warm up.”

  She sailed off toward the piano with Dan persistently behind.

  “Is he the only cop around?” Cora asked.

  “The only one I’ve seen,” Aaron said.

  “From both sides of the ocean?”

  “No sign of Doddsworth either. But his daughter must be here. All the high school kids are.”

  “That’s right, isn’t it?” Cora murmured. “If you people will excuse me for a moment . . .”

  Cora elbowed her way ruthlessly out onto the gym floor. It was tough going. Red-and-green teenagers were everywhere, looking remarkably similar. Picking one person out in this mob scene was not going to be easy.

  Cora completed a circuit of the court. Maxine Doddsworth was nowhere to be seen, but a girl talking to a pimply-faced boy with wire-rimmed glasses and a blond ponytail seemed familiar. The girl was gaping up at him with soulful eyes.

  It was the actress Cora had seen working with Rupert Winston. The one who had taken over Dorrie Taggart’s part. Laura.

  Cora stomped on a foot or two, pushed through the crowd, said, “Hi.”

  The boy and girl looked at her without a trace of welcome. Clearly she was an annoyance.

  “Hi, there,” Cora said blithely. “I saw you last night in the theater rehearsing the play.”

  “Yes. And that’s what we’re doing now,” the girl said. “This is Konstantine.”

  “Oh. Pleased to meet you, Konstantine.”

  The boy smiled.

  “In the play,” the girl said. “I’m Nina. He’s Konstantine.”

  “And Konstantine’s your lover?”

  She frowned. “Don’t you know The Seagull?”

  “Never saw it.”

  “He’s Nina’s childhood friend. He wants to be her lover. But she runs off with his mother’s lover. It’s part of his tragedy—the disillusionment that leads him to kill himself.”

  “Really? He kills himself over you?”

  “No,” the boy said. “He kills himself for failing to achieve his dreams. He’s a minor writer, real minor, manages to get stories published, but fears no one reads them. He compares himself unfavorably to Trigorin—that’s the more successful writer Nina has the fling with.” He shrugged. “Basically, he kills himself because it’s the only way he can achieve the romantic image of himself he’s aspired to, having fallen short in his Art.”

  Cora nodded approvingly. “That’s fascinating. Does Rupert agree with that interpretation?”

  The boy flushed, and Cora belatedly realized Rupert not only agreed with the view but had probably authored it.

  “So,” she said, turning her attention to the girl. “When you took over the part you weren’t prepared? You hadn’t learned the lines?”

  “No. That’s why we’re rehearsing them now.”

  “Can you learn them in this short a time?”

  “Two weeks? Sure. I could learn them in one.”

  “Laura’s going to be good,” the boy playing the suicidal Konstantine said.

  “As good as Dorrie Taggart?”

  “Oh, sure. Laura can act rings around Dorrie.”

  That had not been Rupert Winston’s assessment the night before. Cora figured the girl’s presence was at least partly to blame for the boy’s gushing praise. “Oh, is that right?” she asked the young actress.

  The girl made a face. “Please. Dorrie’s dead. But I would certainly hope to be better.”

  “She’ll be great,” the boy assured Cora passionately.

  “Glad to hear it. Tell me, had you learned any of the lines in advance, just in case you had to take over Dorrie’s part? Or was your getting the role a complete surprise?”

  Laura’s eyes flicked.

  “Something wrong?” Cora pressed.

  “I don’t want him to tease me for it.”

  “Tease you for what?”

  “When I heard about what happened to Dorrie, it occurred to me that Mr. Winston might choose me for the part. So
I sort of looked the lines over. Before he told me, I mean.”

  “Well,” Cora said approvingly. “That was definitely the right thing to do.”

  The gym lights blinked out, precipitating a burst of shouts, protests, giggles, and the usual juvenile horseplay.

  Onstage, a spotlight came up on Rupert Winston and Mr. Hodges. Rupert, as usual, was self-assured and content to be the center of attention. The music teacher, on the other hand, seemed to have a bad case of stage fright. He looked as if he were on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He kept shuffling his feet, fidgeting, and fumbling with his clipboard. He snuffled, cleared his throat twice, and asked for quiet three times to absolutely no avail. Rupert Winston let him fail two more times before thundering, “QUIET, PLEASE!” in a voice that shook the rafters.

  “Thank you,” the music teacher said when the room instantly fell silent. “This is the dress rehearsal, so you are dressed.”

  This got a laugh.

  Mr. Hodges waited nervously for the noise to subside. “Tonight we are going to try to get through the whole pageant without stopping. Treat this as a real performance. There are a lot of you here, just getting you on and off the stage will be complicated.”

  It certainly was. Mr. Hodges had a plan that consisted of everyone waiting downstairs except the singers performing and the singers about to go on, which meant the choir would sing while the seventh-grade chorus went downstairs and the eighth-grade chorus came upstairs, or something to that effect. Cora would have been willing to bet any amount Hodges cared to name it wouldn’t work.

  “After the senior song is the last choir number,” Hodges concluded, “leading into The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

  Rupert Winston pounced on his cue. “Please pay attention, actors, you have many duties here. There are more of you than anybody else. So your first duty is not to sound like a herd of buffalo. Your second is to get in place on time. There are too many of you to get backstage during the last choral number without thundering up the stairs. So you have to start earlier. You move silently, single file, on tippytoes, without talking, during the senior song. And when I say silently, I mean silently. The seniors spent a lot of time rehearsing, and they deserve to be heard.”

  “Thank you,” Mr. Hodges said. “Seniors and choir members: as soon as you are done, get downstairs. The Twelve Days of Christmas is . . .” He looked at Rupert. “Would the word chaotic apply?”

  “That will do nicely, thank you. After our song we will all take our bow, and part to the sides while the choir comes forward. Then all the other singers will mob the stage for a huge communal bow.”

  Everyone cheered.

  Rupert put up his hands. “After that, hang in. We’ll give you your notes and send you home. All right, people, places, please! Everybody, break a leg!”

  From the expressions this benediction produced, it appeared not all Bakerhaven High students were familiar with the theatrical version of “good luck.” After some confused general milling, almost everyone headed downstairs.

  “I’m not looking forward to this,” Cora groused.

  “Relax,” Sherry said. “It’s a dress rehearsal. How awful could it be?”

  Actually, as it turned out, it could be pretty awful. The choir was made up of the best singers in the school. That left the worst singers to do the class numbers.

  Also, despite Mr. Hodges’s explicit instructions, no one got the entrances and exits right. As a result, it was difficult to build up much pace.

  The Twelve Days of Christmas wasn’t much better. Cues were dropped, entrances were missed, props were misplaced. One turtledove jumped her cue, coming in an entire line early, so the song should have gone “Three French hens and a turtledove; One turtledove; and a partridge in a pear tree.” Naturally, nobody sang this.

  The lords a-leaping completely missed their entrance, although they managed to be onstage for the first reprise.

  The twelve drummers drumming made their entrance minus a prop, although here again no one sang “Eleven drummers drumming and one drummer pantomiminga drum.”

  The maids a-milking, in Cora’s humble opinion, were terrific. She was right on beat if not exactly on pitch. Actually, she shouted rather than sang her line. If Rex Harrison could speak entire songs in My Fair Lady, why couldn’t she be forgiven one phrase?

  In fact, Cora decided, The Twelve Days of Christmas was a smashing success because they got through it without stopping and nobody died.

  Rupert Winston, however, was not so easily pleased. Just as Cora and Sherry and the other actors were all congratulating themselves on the fact that it was over, Rupert leaped up onstage to remind them he had notes.

  Did he ever. While Mr. Hodges’s notes to his seven singing groups took a total of four minutes, Rupert Winston’s notes ran an extremely tedious forty-five.

  “There is an old adage in the Theater,” he began. “Bad dress rehearsal, good performance. By that yardstick, this will be the best play mankind has ever seen.”

  After that bit of praise, he got nasty. Before he was done, all the pipers piping were seething, and one of the golden rings had been reduced to tears.

  Of Cora’s performance, Rupert remarked, “It is rare that one sees an actress demonstrate her deficiencies so openly and utterly.”

  It was a huge relief when the actors were finally released. Most merely shed their clothes hastily and left, planning to take their makeup off at home. So it was virtually a mass exodus. What with the show running long, and notes running even longer, and everything starting late to begin with, it was nearly a quarter to eleven when the pageant actors gratefully fled the theater.

  The tech crew was not so lucky. Naturally, Rupert Winston had notes for them. Missed cues (for which Rupert had just minutes ago vented his spleen on the actors) he now blamed scathingly on the unfortunate Alfred Adams.

  Rupert might as well have saved his ire. Alfred was a punching bag, so conditioned to receiving criticism that insults rolled off his back. The teenager listened to Rupert’s rant passively, serenely nodding at all the salient points. With no opposition, Rupert eventually wearied of his tirade. He ordered Alfred off to bed, blaming the techie’s miscues on sleep deprivation, and followed the poor boy out, reminding him for good measure of every early, late, or errant light. On his way he hit the switch for the house lights, plunging the gym into blackness.

  Up in the rafters, Cora Felton let out her breath with a soft sigh. She’d been hiding in the light booth since the end of actors’ notes, until Rupert’s decision to retry one of the light cues had sent Alfred Adams scrambling obediently into the booth and Cora scrambling desperately into the grid. She had stayed there for the rest of the tech notes, waiting with mounting impatience for a chance to climb down.

  But she hadn’t expected to climb down in the dark.

  The grid over the stage consisted of a series of parallel two-by-twelve beams running upstage and downstage about eighteen inches apart. From Cora’s point of view, each beam was a two-inch step in the middle of a three-foot-wide, thirty-foot-deep hole.

  Cora’s progress across the grid was slow. Only panic had gotten her out on it to begin with, and that had been with the lights on. With them out it was impossible. Even crawling, as she was, on her hands and knees, she’d grope for a beam that wasn’t there, tangle herself in a rope that was. Encounter a clamp or a light cord. Or a hole in the grid for lifting scenery through.

  Cora slipped, fell flat, clung to a beam. Cursed.

  Prayed for a light.

  And then, like an answer from heaven, there was one. Cora couldn’t see where it came from, but she could see the grid. See the rope. See the beams. See the two-by-four nailed across them that had just tripped her.

  See the stage below.

  Good God, it was worse than in the dark.

  Cora fumbled for handholds. Found an upright two-by-four. Clung to it. Pulled herself to her knees.

  Looked down toward the source of the light.

 
The door was open. Light was streaming in from the foyer.

  Someone had slipped in through the gym door.

  Which was closing again.

  Cora looked toward the light booth ladder ten feet away. She had to reach that ladder. On hands and knees, she crawled across the beams. Her drawstring purse hung down, bumped against the grid. She couldn’t risk sparing a hand to pull it up.

  Just two more beams.

  Cora reached the ladder. Grabbed it. Slung her leg over. Reached down, grabbed her purse, slung that over too.

  The gym door clicked shut.

  The light went out.

  In pitch-blackness, Cora backed down the ladder to the loft. So where the heck was the other ladder? She groped along the platform, touched a two-by-four nailed flat along the edge as a handhold. She gripped it, slung her legs over the side, found the second ladder, climbed down.

  Cora peered out into the darkness from behind a stage-left flat. She saw nothing, but she was convinced that she could hear a creak on the stage-right stairs leading up from the audience.

  She reached into her purse, pulled out her gun, clicked the safety off.

  The intruder was coming slowly across the stage, feeling his way cautiously in the dark.

  Cora slipped back into the wings, crept downstage. Fumbled on the wall for the light switch. Found it, pushed it on.

  The she stepped out onstage and leveled her gun at the intruder, trapped in the blazing, pitiless glare of the lights.

  Jonathon Doddsworth.

  46

  “GREAT SCOTT! WHAT THE DEVIL ARE YOU DOING WITH THAT pistol?”

  “I’m aiming it at you.”

  “I can see that. Would you please put it down?”

  “No. I like it fine just like this.”

  Jonathon Doddsworth gawked at her. “Are you demented? Have you taken utter leave of your senses?”

  Cora frowned. “You really need to brush up on your people skills. Perhaps you’re out of practice. Here’s a hint. Questioning a woman’s sanity is not the way to her heart.”

  Doddsworth took a step toward her.

  “Stay where you are,” Cora told him crisply, in a tone gleaned from TV shows. “Keep those hands where I can see them.”