Chance of a Ghost (59 page)

“Nice to meet you,” he said. “Which one was that?”

“Frances Walters. And she’s backstage right now passing on everything I told her was in confidence, just as I planned.”

“You’re very smart,” he said. It seemed I was fooling everyone I needed to tonight. Looking just over my left shoulder, Josh smiled again and said loudly, “Really! I could have sworn I met you at the Steam Fitters Convention in Atlantic City!”

I turned and saw Jerry Rasmussen was approaching. Behind him, Jeannie, Tony, Oliver, Nan and Morgan were settling into front-row seats, probably to accommodate Morgan’s hearing, although he was hardly the only one in the room with such difficulties. Jerry held out his hand and took mine as if we were old friends.

“Alison!” he gushed. “I’m so pleased to see you!” He gave Josh a look that was something other than adoring. “Who’s your friend?”

Josh missed a beat, then chuckled. “Oh, we just met!” he said, extending his hand so Jerry would have to let go of mine. “I’m Michael Ellis. Stanhope Pipe Fitting. And you are?”

Jerry straightened like a soldier brought to attention. “Jerome K. Rasmussen,” he said.

“The one who wrote tonight’s production?” Josh said, looking as awed as if being introduced to Abraham Lincoln. “It’s an honor, sir.”

“Wrote
and
directed,” Jerry corrected, but he was smiling
broadly. “So nice of you to say, Mr. Ellis.” He gestured toward me. “Might I have just a word with Alison?”

“Of course!” Josh held up his hands in contrition. “I should take my seat, anyway, shouldn’t I? Again, a great pleasure to meet you!” He backed away. I thought it a small triumph that he didn’t salaam as he went. “Nice to meet you, too, Ms. Kerby.” He went to a seat two rows behind Mom and Melissa and put his coat down on the one next to him, no doubt saving it for me.

“What a nice young man,” Jerry said. “Now, may I ask about your investigation?”

What, you haven’t gotten the six thirty news from Frances yet?
“I can’t tell you much,” I said, and then proceeded to tell him everything I had told Frances, adding, “I think it was clearly not a simple heart attack.” That covered my bases, since it would be true even if Lawrence had died of natural causes; an arrhythmia is not a heart attack. But it gave Jerry that little extra nugget of information that might make him feel he’d gotten something out of me more than I might have entrusted to Frances. I wasn’t sure this was getting me anywhere, but it was a strategy Paul had endorsed, so I was playing it through to the end.

And suddenly it seemed to pay off a dividend. “Oh, my,” Jerry said. “That’s very distressing.” But he didn’t look the least bit distressed until he spotted Penny Fields, whom I wasn’t even aware would be here tonight, entering the auditorium. Interesting; I hadn’t realized these two knew each other. “I really must go backstage. We go on in five minutes.” Jerry nodded at me, then turned to walk away. Suddenly, as if getting an idea on the spot, he turned back and asked, “Would you like to watch from the wings? You might get a more ‘inside’ look from back there.” I got a very strong vibe that he wouldn’t mind getting me away from Penny, either.

I thought it over, noting that it would help keep me from being seen with Melissa and would also get me closer to
some of the other suspects, so I said, “That would be exciting! May I meet you back there in a minute? I’d like to get a bottle of water first.”

Jerry looked quickly at Penny, who hadn’t seen him yet, and nodded. “Certainly,” he said, wiping his forehead. He was gone backstage before I could blink twice.

I walked near where Josh was sitting and dropped my glove next to him. While bending over to pick it up, I told him I would be going backstage for the performance, then added, “Michael Ellis?”

“It’s from a Monty Python sketch,” he said. “It’s a man who is never seen.”

“I know what it’s from. I’m impressed.” I stood up with the glove in my hand and casually added, still not looking at Josh, “Keep an eye on Mom and Melissa, would you?”

“Sure.” He barely opened his mouth saying it. No questions, no arguments.

I thanked him with my eyes and walked down to the front row, where Jeannie was bouncing Oliver on her knee, Tony was going through the diaper bag and Nan and Morgan were watching opposite sides of the stage, occasionally turning to scan the crowd. The couple that surveils together stays together.

“See anything interesting?” I asked Morgan, who did not break his pattern to look me in the eye. “Break the case wide open yet?”

“Not yet,” he answered. “But I am wondering who the younger woman in the red and white striped top is in the back.”

“That’s Penny Fields,” I told him. “Strange that she’s here, don’t you think?”

He tilted his head: “Maybe, maybe not. Could just be because one of her employees is in the cast and one of her ex-employees is working backstage. Show some support.” Then he finally looked me in the eyes. “But I doubt it.”

I told them I’d be in the wings for the performance.
Jeannie held Oliver close to her, probably hoping he’d be asleep soon.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Tony asked. “In case something happens?”

“Nice try,” Jeannie told him, “but you’re staying out here with me and your son.”

“I really don’t think it’s necessary,” I answered him. Oliver’s eyelids were dropping, and he put his head down on Jeannie’s chest, fading. “But I asked Josh to keep an eye on Mom and Melissa. Would you look out for them, too?”

Jeannie grinned. “Yeah. Josh.”

“Stop it,” I told her.

“Uh-huh.” The woman could squeeze more innuendo out of a nonword than most could find in five paragraphs. It’s an art.

“He seems like a very nice young man,” Nan said, still scanning the crowd.

“Ten o’clock,” Morgan told her. I was about to tell him it was much earlier than that when I saw Nan turn her head to that vantage point, and my eye followed. Tyra Carter had stuck her head out of the stage right wings. “Is that…?”

“Yeah, that’s Tyra,” I said. “Probably looking to see if I’m talking to Penny and convincing her to give Tyra her job back.”

“Maybe you should go talk to Penny,” Morgan said quietly.

“What?”

“Let’s kick the beehive a little. See what happens.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what would happen. “Easy for you to say,” I answered.

“You’ve got enough backup here,” Morgan nudged.

I didn’t say anything, but I walked back—past Josh, who looked perplexed—to Penny and said hello. I fought the urge to look at Tyra, but Penny, standing next to her last-row-on-the-aisle seat, was clearly looking over my shoulder.

“What brings you to the show tonight?” I asked her.

“Well, Frances has been talking about it. But mostly I’m here because of what you said,” Penny answered, and if that hadn’t already thrown me off, what she said next definitely would have. “I’m giving Tyra her job back like you suggested, and I knew she’d be here tonight, so I came to give her the good news.”

“Can I sit down?” I asked. Penny gestured to go ahead, and we took the two last seats in the house. Literally. “Why did you decide to do that?”

“She called me after she talked to you. For some reason, she thought it was your fault I hadn’t rehired her.”

“Imagine,” I said.

“I told her you had nothing to do with it. I hadn’t even realized she wanted to come back before you said something,” Penny went on, possibly not noticing my comment. “And once we spoke, I understood how badly she wanted it. I told her I’d think about it, and now that I have, I’m going to hire her back on a trial basis and see if things have changed.”

Having digested that piece of information, I was ready to press on. “That’s not the only reason you’re here,” I told Penny. Matter-of-fact. As if I were sure. “This isn’t your first time here; you’re a regular at the troupe’s performances, aren’t you?”

Penny blushed a little and looked toward the stage. “How did you know that?”

“The way Jerry Rasmussen looked at you when you came in. He knew you well. Was it because of Lawrence Laurentz?”

She nodded. “I think Larry would want me to see what the group was up to. He really loved the theater, you know, and even after they…after he had to leave the group, he kept tabs on what they were doing. I’m just keeping up for him. How did you know about Larry and me?”

I didn’t want to risk Tyra’s impending reemployment and I couldn’t tell her that Lawrence had confirmed it for
me himself. “I can’t divulge my sources,” I said. That’s really more true of reporters than detectives, but people don’t know that. “But that whole story about going to fire him was a lie, wasn’t it?”

From the corner of my eye, I saw Frances and Jerry standing in the aisle, talking to Mom, who had separated from the group, perhaps to avoid sitting next to Melissa while the lights were up. The three of them were laughing about something.

Penny looked up at the stage. “No, that was real, but I’d fired him three nights before. Larry really could be a very dear man when he wanted to be, you know,” she said. “He was older than me, but we bonded. I really did have some very warm feelings for him. We had two relationships, a professional one and a…personal one, and they were separate. I miss him.” She looked like she might cry.

“I’m sure he was very nice,” I said, since I was never supposed to have met Lawrence. I spotted Jerry looking out from the wings—the side opposite where Tyra had been a few minutes earlier, and I stood up. “I think I’d better get back there,” I said. “Thanks for getting Tyra off my back.”

Penny smiled. “No problem.”

I walked down the aisle to the foot of the stage, then up a few stairs to the stage itself and immediately to the right to get back to the wings. Sure enough, Jerry Rasmussen was standing there waiting for me.

“That must have been some water bottle,” he said.

Twenty-seven

It had gotten dark sometime around five that afternoon
, and the sky was now that combination of gray and pink that makes you think snow is on the way, though there was none in the forecast. The front gate at Brookside Assisted Living Facility was less of a wrought-iron cliché and more like the tollbooth at a rather sedate theme park. I gave my name to the young man in a polo shirt sitting in the little structure, he pushed a button and the gate in front of us rose up to let me drive through. The same thing had happened a moment before with Jeannie’s minivan, and she was waiting for me to go through to push on ahead, having gotten directions from the polo shirt guy.

“Why do they call this place Brookside?” Melissa wanted to know as I drove the Volvo through the gate. “I don’t see a brook.”

“Well, my development is called Whispering Lakes,” Mom pointed out. “There are no lakes there, either.”

“It’s just a name, Liss,” I said. “It sounds nice, that’s
all.” I had lost the argument in which Liss was to ride in Jeannie’s van in case anyone was watching when we got out. She wanted to stay with me, Mom and Josh, mostly because she wanted a less crowded venue to vet Josh. My daughter doesn’t miss a trick.

For his part, Josh had kept up the conversation, but it was clear he saw I was on edge and was waiting until we were alone to ask what was wrong. I had to put on a better show to convince him that it had nothing to do with him, which it didn’t.

“Maybe there’s a brook in the back,” Mom suggested. We drove on.

Melissa thought it strange that I kept standing in front of her as we got out of the van, and then seemed to abandon her into the custody of Jeannie and Tony (Frances and Jerry knew Mom) once we walked into the clubhouse, a large, more or less octagonal building at the front of the facility. A sign directly out of someone’s home printer was taped to the door—“
Peter Pan
by the New Old Thespians”—and listed the date and time.

Inside, I strode rapidly ahead, to put distance between me and Liss and Mom. Josh kept pace with me but took the opportunity to ask, “Should I not have come? Am I going to be in the way?”

“No!” I said a little too loud. “I was afraid you were thinking that. No. It just…occurred to me that if the killer is here tonight…”

“You don’t want to be seen too close to Melissa. Very smart. Do you think Lawrence really was murdered?” Josh had increased his pace when I’d explained, and now I was having just a little trouble keeping up with him through the corridor to the auditorium.

“The only thing I know for sure on this one is that I don’t know anything for sure on this one,” I said. Josh grinned. I was starting to really like that grin.

“This sounds like fun,” he said.

Frances Walters was the first familiar face I saw when we got to the auditorium, which appeared to have doubled as the dining room. A stage of sorts, really, as Jerry had said, risers put up at one end of the room, stood in front of a good number of folding chairs, most of which were empty at the moment. The residents appeared to have left the front three rows almost empty, perhaps so they could leave more quickly if the show turned out to be a stinker. I gestured—surreptitiously, I hoped—to Jeannie for her to find seats for Melissa and herself, then walked to Frances. Mom walked over, having seen that Frances’s face showed recognition. Josh walked to one side of the room and leaned against a post, looking casual.