Chapter 7
Englebert rehearses his talking points the entire brief drive into town.
“Item one. Condolences, but brisk ones. Vivian respects brisk. Item two, the schedule. Item three, the stand-in question, which I will raise delicately.”
“You’ve never raised anything delicately in your entire life.”
“I raised you, in part, and look how you turned out. Item four—”
“There’s no item four. If you get to item four, I’m pulling the emergency brake.”
The Community Center lot is empty except for Dana’s Subaru, parked crooked across two spaces. The lobby doors are unlocked and I can hear water running.
The kitchen is off the gym’s east side, a long galley of steel counters and industrial fixtures.
The lights are on. Dana is at the sink with her sleeves pushed up, and the drying rack beside her is full of goblets, pewter and brass, upside down, rinsed and gleaming.
She’s working on the next one with a brush, a sink full of soapy water holding the rest.
“Oh, no,” I say.
Dana looks over her shoulder. “Morning. There’s coffee, and I made it, so it’s actually drinkable this time.” She reads my face, and the brush stops. “What?”
“How many have you washed?”
“Most of them.” She looks at the rack. “The corn syrup sets up like varnish if you leave it, and half these belong to people who want them back, and I—” She stops. “Why does it matter how many I’ve washed?”
“Annabel needs the goblets. She thinks the sickness came from something Damien ate or drank, and a potion leaves residue on whatever carried it.”
Dana turns off the tap.
“I’ve been here since six,” she says. “I couldn’t sleep, and there was a kitchen full of dirty dishes with my name on it. It seemed like something I could actually fix.” She sets the brush down on the drainboard, aligning it parallel to the sink edge. “Did I just wash the evidence?”
“Not necessarily. Annabel says washing fades it, but doesn’t erase it. She can still read a washed cup. It’s just fainter.”
“Fainter.” She looks down the rack. “So I made her job harder, but not impossible?”
“Basically.”
“Story of my week.” She dries her hands on a dish towel. “Okay. What does she need, exactly?”
This is something I’ve come to like about Dana. You hand her a catastrophe and she asks for the specs.
“All of them. However you can pack them. And anything else from the banquet table. Pitchers, the ladle, the cooler—”
“The cooler’s in the storage room. The ladle’s in the sink.
” She’s already moving, pulling a stack of cardboard boxes from beside the recycling.
“I hadn’t gotten to the ones left in the sink, the tray on the back counter, and” —she points with her chin— “the tall one. Pru’s.
I saved it for last because the corn syrup got inside all the grooves in the stem and I was dreading it. ”
We pack the goblets in newspaper like we’re moving house.
Englebert supervises from the counter, which is to say he sits with his tail wrapped over his feet, periodically announcing that we’re wrapping something incorrectly.
At some point, I notice the forest of slim glass bottles in the recycling bin the newspaper came from.
“Skye’s,” Dana says, following my eyes. “Came by first thing this morning to collect his things from the dressing room. All his juices, the little bottles. His ‘vitamins’, she called them. Swept the whole shelf into her bag.” She fits a lid onto a box.
“She was crying the entire time. Poor kid. I gave her the good tissues from the office and she apologized to me for using them.”
“Where’s Vivian?” I ask.
Dana’s hands keep wrapping, the same speed as before.
“In the back,” she says. “She’s been here since before I have. Walked down here this morning. Your cat has a nine o’clock. She’s expecting him. Take the hallway past the fuse box.”
“How are things?” I ask. “With Vivian, I mean.”
“Don’t,” she says. “You’re a nice person and a good journalist, but I’m not talking about my marriage next to a sink full of somebody else’s crime scene. Go do your meeting. I’ll finish the packing.”
* * *
Vivian is in the storage-room-turned-dressing-room, sitting on a folding chair in front of the costume rack. Macbeth’s cape hangs on the end of the rack.
“Mari,” she nods. “And the maestro. I assume you’ve come to tell me what you believe is to be done. I hope so, because I have no idea.”
“We’ve come to confer,” Englebert says. He ascends a costume trunk in two moves and arranges himself at her eye level. “How is our Macbeth? Have you heard?”
“Sleeping. His mother says his color’s good.
His color is always good. He pays people for that.
” She rubs her eyes. “Ms. Carter fed me banana bread at midnight and asked me if the show could be pushed to October, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her the Community Center is booked all month for the Harvest Festival, so as far as she knows October is under consideration. ”
“October,” Englebert says, “is not under consideration.”
“No. It isn’t.” Vivian looks down. “Here’s where I am.
I have a sold-out house, a waiting list, a lead who can’t be woken up, and no understudy for him, because I spent the understudy budget of my attention on Lady Macbeth, since Pru hasn’t acted in the last decade and Damien had done Broadway and assured me he didn’t need one.
I planned for the wrong emergency.” She sighs.
“Tiffany covers Pru. Nobody covers Damien. If he wakes up in time, we have a show. If he doesn’t, I’m deciding which is worse: canceling the whole thing, or putting a Macbeth on stage who’s holding the script. ”
“There is a third possibility,” Englebert says.
“Englebert.” Vivian pinches the bridge of her nose.
“I have had this conversation with you several times, including right on that stage, in front of the entire company. You cannot play Macbeth. I say this with immense professional regard. Half of Burlington is on my waiting list. They believe you are a theater cat. A charming, ordinary theater cat who was in a magazine.”
“I am aware of the constraint. I have spent the night refining the proposal accordingly, and Marigold has it in writing, though I shall summarize, since the document runs slightly long.”
“It runs three pages,” I say.
“I am nothing if not thorough.” He sits taller.
“The proposal is this. Rehearsals resume tomorrow evening. The company cannot sit idle. Idleness breeds indifference, and indifference breeds actors who forget their blocking. At those rehearsals, I shall stand in as Macbeth. I know every word in order. I do not require the book. Prudence can play the scenes against a partner who gives her the correct cues at the correct tempo, the lords can rehearse the banquet against a Macbeth, and the production keeps its pulse.” He pauses.
“And concurrently, we select a human understudy. He learns the role this week, at pace, with my personal coaching. If Damien wakes, no harm done. The understudy has had an education. If Damien remains unconscious, the understudy goes on, off book or nearly, and the show” —his tail settles over his feet— “goes on.”
Vivian is quiet for a moment.
“A rehearsal stand-in,” she says. “And a performance understudy.”
“The stagecraft term is ‘walking cover,’” Englebert says. “In my case, the term will require some flexibility.”
“Who?” Vivian says. “Who is the understudy? That’s the entire question. Mayor Blackwood offered, before you ask. He offered last night, in the parking lot, while spinning in circles.”
“Not the Mayor,” Englebert says, with feeling.
“Then who?”
“Gabriel Morgan.”
I turn to look at him, eyebrow raised.
“The funeral director?” Vivian asks.
“The funeral director,” Englebert confirms. “Consider this. The role of Macbeth demands, above all else, a man who can stand in front of a room in a state of catastrophe and hold it steady. Gabriel does this professionally, several times a month, for audiences experiencing genuine grief, and he has never once lost the room. He is grave, in every sense, when the text requires it, and he is in on the joke the rest of the time, which is precisely the temperament this company runs on. He is free most evenings. He is only of the few men in this town not already occupied with another role in the production, and as an added bonus, his daughter is on a first-name basis with most of the cast as well as several local woodland creatures.”
“Has he ever acted?” Vivian asks.
“He delivers a eulogy for a stranger roughly twice a month and makes the family believe he knew the man. I invite you to find better training.”
Vivian sits back.
“He does have a voice,” she says. “I’ve heard him at services. He buried my neighbor’s mother in June, and he read the twenty-third psalm beautifully.” She looks at me. “Would he do it?”
“I have no idea,” I say. “He’s a single dad with a business where the clients arrive unscheduled. It’s a lot to ask.”
“Which is why we shall not ask,” Englebert says. “Marigold shall ask. Gently. Socially. She will float the idea, in the manner of a friend — a loved one, perhaps — floating an idea, rather than presenting it in the manner of a summons.”
“You’ve clearly never seen me float an idea. Subtlety isn’t really my area of expertise.”
“I have seen you do a great many things. You’ll manage.”
“Rehearsal tomorrow at seven,” Vivian says.
“Company call. I’ll tell them Damien’s condition is unchanged and the show is proceeding.
Maybe both of those things can be true. Englebert will stand in.
And Mari… If you could. Float it today. If Gabe says yes, I want him at table work tomorrow night with a script in his hand.
If he says no, I need to know by dinner, because my next call is to a man in Brattleboro who once played Judas in Godspell and has never let anyone forget it. ”
“Understood.”
“And tell Annabel—” she stops. “Tell her the company is grateful. And that if someone did this to Damien, in my theater, with my banquet, I want to know who.”
“Of course,” I say.
“Come, Marigold,” says Englebert. “You have evidence to deliver and a production to save, and I have a role to prepare.”
* * *
Dana has the boxes packed, labeled, and stacked by the lobby doors. She helps me carry them to the car.
“You’ll tell me what she finds?” Dana asks.
“I’ll tell you what I can.”
“Fair enough.” She shuts the trunk. “Drive slow over the railroad crossing. The town keeps saying they’ll fix it, but I’ve yet to see any proof.”
Englebert is already in the passenger seat when I get in, sitting up, facing the windshield, and as I pull out of the lot, he begins, with the windows down, in a voice pitched for the back wall of theatre that far exceeds the Duskboro Community Center in size:
“Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?”
It’s going to be a long few days.