Something Wicked Read online

  The phone rang.

  Annie jumped and stared at it as warily as she would regard a hungry boa constrictor.

  It rang again. Annie took a deep breath and lifted the receiver.

  The sibilant hiss over the line hit her eardrum with stiletto sharpness. “Annie, it’s time we got to the bottom of the problem.”

  Although this somewhat enigmatic pronouncement might be expected to puzzle her, Annie had no difficulty identifying the whisperer and her preoccupation. Leaning back against the coffee bar, she relaxed. “Hi, Henny.” She carefully kept amusement from her voice. Annie still felt a little awkward addressing her long-time and perhaps most avid customer, Mrs. Henrietta Brawley, in such familiar terms, but since they’d both joined the cast of the summer production of Arsenic and Old Lace, Mrs. Brawley had insisted on being on a first-name basis.

  “Shh!”

  Annie jerked the receiver away from her ear.

  “No names, please!” The S’s rustled richly. “It’s time for action. We’ve got to save summer theater!”

  The corners of Annie’s mouth edged upward. “Oh, it’s not that bad.” (In comparison to geese and ganders, Annie felt Henny’s concerns were mild.) “And maybe,” she added cheerfully, “whoever’s doing it will get bored.”

  “Evil ignored flourishes like the green bay tree,” Mrs. Brawley intoned, forgetting to whisper.

  Annie wasn’t sure whether this was an adjustment of a Biblical quotation, an observation based on the reading of more crime novels than any other resident of Broward’s Rock, or merely a social comment, so she ignored it and asked pragmatically, “What do you want to do?”

  The whisper returned. “You and I can take turns camping out overnight at the theater.”

  So far as Annie was concerned, camping—indoors or out—was a wonderful pursuit for pilgrims, pioneers, or extremely hearty party-goers, but she, personally, preferred to be pampered at a Hilton Inn, and even a Ramada would do in a pinch.

  “Absolutely not.” Pleasantly, but oh, so firmly.

  Once again the whisper fled, this time replaced by indignation. “Annie Laurance, I’m surprised at you! What do you think Hildegarde Withers would do?” A disgusted sniff. “Well, if I have to do it all on my own, I will!” A brisk click broke the connection.

  Annie stared at the receiver for a moment, then slowly replaced it. Her sense of quiet amusement seeped away, and not because of the undisguised disappointment in Henny Brawley’s voice. The unease over the play that lurked just below the level of conscious thought burgeoned like a spark fanned by a willful wind. Actually, Henny had every right to—

  “Penny for your thoughts.”

  She looked up and flashed a brief smile. “Hi, Max. I didn’t hear you.”

  “A phone call?” he asked tentatively.

  His tone was just ingenuous enough to excite her suspicion. She looked at him sharply. “Has your mother called you, too?”

  Max smiled airily. “The Japanese have a wonderfully liquid approach to such a solemn occasion. The bride and groom exchange sips of sake and become husband and wife after the first sip. We could substitute scotch.”

  Damn, he would think Laurel’s plans hilarious, but Henny’s call made light conversation impossible. Annie frowned.

  He leaned comfortably against the coffee bar and looked at her curiously. “Are they building a nuclear generating plant next door?”

  That jolted her. “For Pete’s sake, I hope not. Where did you hear that?”

  Max managed not to look toothpaste-ad handsome because his regular features—nice strong nose, firm jaw, and lake-blue eyes—had a slightly rakish air, not quite Mephistophelian, but assuredly not Eagle Scoutish. Those eyes now gleamed with quite as much pleasure as Agatha was exhibiting as she poked her head out of the painting box to watch them.

  “Had I not been taught to be forthright and honorable at all times, I would claim to have heard about it over beer at Ben Parotti’s Bait Shop and Bar, and soon a whirlwind of rumor would sweep our tiny island. There would be torchlight parades. Mystery novelist Emma Clyde would chain herself to the Post Office flagpole in protest. An absolute explosion of excitement.” He smiled regretfully at a luscious prospect denied. “To tell the truth, however, I made it up just now.”

  Annie sighed gustily in relief, then glared at him. “Why?”

  “You looked so worried,” he replied earnestly, as if that explained everything.

  Slowly, reluctantly, she began to laugh. “So okay,” she agreed, “nothing’s that bad.” Then her brows drew down again. “But, Max, I am worried about the play.”

  “The play? Oh, well, sure. But what else is new?” He walked around the coffee bar and lifted down two mugs from her collection. Each mug carried in bright red script the name of a famous mystery.

  Annie automatically noted the titles, The Innocence of Father Brown and The Rasp. “Do you think we have time?” She glanced at her watch.

  “There is always time for coffee,” he said reverently.

  As he poured, Annie sniffed the richness of the dark Colombian brew. Oh, well, she and Max usually arrived promptly for rehearsals, and almost everyone else ran late. She accepted the mug.

  “So, why are you upset about the play?” He paused, and rephrased the question. “Or, more upset than usual? Has anything else happened?”

  “Mrs. Brawley called.” She cleared her throat. “Er—Henny.”

  He sipped and waited.

  Annie struggled to explain. “Now, look, you know I don’t let things bother me.”

  A thick golden brow arched sardonically over one quizzical blue eye.

  “I mean,” she amended quickly, “I know I stew around and get mad, but we’ve agreed to go with the flow over the play.”

  An encouraging nod.

  “I can be relaxed, too,” she insisted.

  He patted her shoulder, his expression unaltered.

  “Dammit, Max,” she spewed, now pushed to the limit, “I am not uptight!”

  “I didn’t say a word,” he said virtuously.

  “It’s just that all those things that have happened, well, you have to admit they are worrisome.”

  “The play is being presented by the Broward’s Rock Players. The director is Sam Haznine, the famous Broadway director. The stage manager is Burt Conroy, president of the players and a moving force in the Broward’s Rock Merchants Association.” He recited it as a litany. “In short,” and now his tone was brisk, “this production is not, as we’ve discussed before, any responsibility of the charming proprietor of Death on Demand.”

  “Yes.” It was an unwilling agreement. “Darn it, I wish we’d never agreed to be in it. After all, we didn’t have to.”

  “We had a gilt-edged invitation.”

  “Yeah,” she said ruefully. “Us and Shane.” She grinned. “Maybe we all deserve each other. Just because you produced a couple of plays off-Broadway and I tried to be an actress, we’re classified as big New Yorkers with experience in The Theater. That’s just about as phony as Sam Haznine being a big-deal director.”

  “Actually, Sam was a fairly big deal, until he had three flops in a row,” Max said mildly. “That’s why the players were able to hire him to direct the first play of the summer. He has to have some success somewhere, even if it’s a little island like Broward’s Rock. And you have to admit Shane has more experience than we do. He really was in all those surfer movies in the sixties.”

  “Where he learned nothing,” she said darkly.

  “How to surf?” As always, Max’s tone was gently amused and reasonable.

  She shook her head impatiently. “Shane isn’t the point. He may,” she admitted, “be part of the problem, but he isn’t the point. I’m worried about Henny.”

  Max looked surprised. “Is she going to quit or something?” For the first time, he sounded concerned. “Actually, she’s a great Abby.”

  “Quit? You’ve got to be kidding. She’s enjoying this more than anything since s
he bought a full run of Nero Wolfe first editions in jacket from an estate dirt cheap. No, it’s all the mess. She wants to investigate! Find out who’s behind all the trouble.” Annie’s brows drew together once again in a tight, worried frown. “Max, maybe we ought to help her.”

  He finished his mug of coffee, put it down with a decisive bang, reached over, and gently smoothed away the line between her nose. Then, with elaborate gestures, he curved his hands as if lifting an extremely heavy round object from her shoulders.

  “I do not like mimes,” she said stiffly.

  He shook his head and repeated the movements.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded suspiciously.

  “Lifting the weight of the world from your bowed shoulders.”

  The corners of her mouth twitched. “So okay. Point taken. I’ll lighten up. And you’re right, I guess. I’m not the director. I’m not president of the players. So—”

  “That’s my girl. Come on, let’s go to rehearsal and wow ’em. And who knows? Maybe everything will go great today.”

  The Porsche swept into the lot behind the high school. Designed and built in the fifties, the dingy, orange-brick building had the ramshackle look of a once avant-garde structure whose glory days have passed. The endless facade of slanted windows, with a later addition of a blue tint to shade the subtropical sun, looked cheerless and tacky. Even the palmettos had a ragged air, and the untended yard was hummocky.

  It wasn’t Broadway. It wasn’t the Helen Hayes. It wasn’t even a real theater, but the high school auditorium had it all over a storefront or the local Moose Lodge, so the players needed to be duly appreciative of the loan of the premises from the Broward’s Rock School Board (for a set percentage of the gross, of course). Without the auditorium, the players would have no stage at all. Ever since a January fire left the Broward’s Rock Playhouse a blackened shell, it had been touch and go whether the summer season could be mounted. And this summer season had to succeed, or the campaign to rebuild the playhouse, the ruins of which Annie could see from the front windows of Death on Demand, would founder and fail. The insurance coverage wasn’t nearly enough to meet present-day construction costs.

  The players faced enormous obstacles, from overt and legal maneuvers to underhanded and deceitful sabotage.

  Max suspected Harley Edward Jenkins III of engineering the setbacks which had dogged the company since rehearsals began.

  Of course, Annie knew Max was prejudiced, to say the least. He’d despised Harley ever since the businessman had attempted to hire Max and his problem-solving agency, Confidential Commissions, to take some compromising photos of a competitor. (South Carolina statutes made it tough to establish a detective agency; Max insisted no law prohibited an energetic entrepreneur from solving assorted problems.) As for the photos, Harley wanted to use them for leverage in a business deal. Max had made it very clear that Confidential Commissions didn’t stoop to that kind of snoop.

  So it was no surprise to Max when civic appeal left Harley unmoved, and that Harley, as CEO of Halcyon Development, creator of the resort community on the island, was vigorously opposed to rebuilding the theater on the choice location overlooking the sound. Instead, Jenkins wanted to open another retail shop there. The playhouse had never brought in as much as a business would at the site, but the original bylaws, offered by Halcyon Development and agreed to by property owners, provided for the continued support of a theater there “so long as the theater company meets its own expenses.” No one foresaw the burning of the theater and the subsequent cost of rebuilding. The Broward’s Rock Players insisted the clause mandated that the theater be rebuilt by Halcyon Development. The corporation disagreed, and claimed, moreover, that if the players didn’t have a successful (i.e., debt-free) summer season Halcyon Development would be free of any further responsibility for the theater, and could build and lease the site to any business of its choice.

  At this point, Sunday, May 31, the players were determined to mount a successful summer season to maintain their claim to the harbor-front site and, hopefully, to force Halcyon Development to rebuild in the fall.

  As the Porsche jolted to a stop, gray dust rose in dispirited swirls in the unpaved lot.

  Max surveyed the skipping dust-devils. “We’d better remind Burt to have somebody wet down the lot before opening night.”

  Annie was hopping out. “Let’s hurry. It looks like almost everyone’s here.” She noted the half dozen cars, and the two bikes, Henny Brawley’s bright red ten-speed and director Haznine’s cheaply rented bent and battered old-fashioned no-speed.

  She moved eagerly toward the school. Despite the problems with the production—and God knows there were many, ranging from the miscasting as Teddy of a California surfer running to fat to the series of odd tricks that had plagued the play since rehearsals began—she still looked forward to rehearsals. She loved Arsenic and Old Lace. She loved the dear old sisters so busily dispatching lonely old men to, they were certain, a finer world. She loved nervous, alcoholic Dr. Einstein with his plaintive “No, Chonny, no!” And she adored Max as Mortimer. There was something about Max in a double-breasted suit and a snap-brim felt hat that melted her bones. She picked up speed. She heard a soft chuckle behind her as she pulled open the faded red door.

  Then she pulled up short, stopped by a frazzled voice climbing until it neared falsetto.

  Sam Haznine, his pudgy shoulders tightly hunched, stood with his back to them, clutching the receiver of the pay phone in the lobby. “I know it’s hot. Goddamn, I’ve been hot ever since we hit this godforsaken outpost, but, sweetie, it’s gonna get better. Stick with me, honey lamb. We’re going to bust out of this swamp right back to Broadway. Please, sweetie, don’t go. It’s just one more week and we open and then it will all be gravy, I swear to God.” He paused, pulled a wilted handkerchief from a hip pocket, and mopped the back of his neck. The director’s seersucker pants hung limply on his pear-shaped frame.

  Annie held a finger to her lips and began to tiptoe across the scuffed tile to the double doors at the, center aisle. One door sagged from its hinges. Once she and Max were safely out of the foyer, she said softly, “Poor Sam.” Then, a little wearily, “Poor us. What’ll you bet it will be some rehearsal today?”

  But Max was looking toward the stage. “Not all the fireworks are going to come from Sam.”

  She looked down the aisle and saw Hugo Wolf rising from his seat as Burt Conroy darted out on stage.

  Even in the somewhat dingy auditorium, Hugo commanded attention. As he stalked with measured tread toward the stage, every eye turned toward him.

  What was it that distinguished Hugo? Not his size, although he was over six feet and solidly built. Not even his looks, although he had a dark, twisted countenance that made her think of a Borgia contemplating a dinner partner. Hugo had presence, that mysterious quality that makes men stand out from their fellows. You knew when you looked at him that he was a heavy hitter, and, if the set of his shoulders meant anything, and she was quite certain it did, he was ready to unload this afternoon.

  It was easy to understand, when Hugo reached the stage, why he was cast as Jonathan, the menacing, saturnine older brother who has returned to terrorize his screwball family. Hugo’s thick, silvery eyebrows tufted in a grim frown as he glared down at Burt Conroy.

  “Dump Shane.” His hard-featured, broken-nosed face was implacable.

  To Annie’s surprise, Burt Conroy didn’t crumple on the spot.

  Feeling a little as though she was intruding in a death scene, Annie slipped into the third row. She cringed as her chair squeaked. Max quietly joined her.

  But every eye was focused on Hugo and Burt.

  Standing in the center of the stage, the president of the Broward’s Rock Players and stage manager of Arsenic and Old Lace pleated his hands nervously against the trousers of his pale blue leisure suit, but his reedy voice was firm. “I am surprised at you, Hugo,” he chided. “You are experienced enough to know that the direc
tor makes all casting decisions and—”

  “I’m experienced enough to know this play’s a disaster.” Hugo’s gravelly baritone carried from the first seat to the last. Everyone watched, mesmerized, because there was no mistaking the icy fury in his voice.

  Serving as president of the players, despite the customary internecine squabbles among its members, hadn’t prepared Burt Conroy for this confrontation. Nor had his years as a successful owner and manager of Stuff ’N Such, a knick-knack shop on the waterfront that carried everything from memorabilia to quite old and valuable wooden duck decoys. Burt’s normally grayish face flushed a dull saffron and he took a deep breath, but Hugo plowed right ahead, his deep voice and superb diction flooding the auditorium.

  He had an audience, all right. Of course, not all the cast members were there. Only Act II was on this afternoon’s schedule and several of the characters didn’t appear in it. But those present hung on every word.

  Carla Fontaine, the set designer and chief carpenter, rocked back on her heels and looked up tensely. Her shining long black hair shadowed her patrician face, but her hands gripped a hammer so tightly that her knuckles blanched. Normally, she was remote and aloof, immersed in her work on the set, not even accepting graciously the compliments that had been showered over her superb creation: the Victorian stairs that dominated upstage right and were so essential to a successful production of Arsenic and Old Lace. Now her worried eyes showed just how much the production meant to her.

  Arthur Killeen, the local druggist who played Dr. Einstein with raffish charm, stood at stage left, waggling his hands in helpless dismay. Brushing back a strand of thin black hair, he tried to break in, “Now, Hugo, it’s too late to make changes.” Hugo ignored him, increasing his volume just a little.

  Henny Brawley bounced on her sneakered feet at the top of the downstage left steps. Her bright black eyes darted from face to face and her fox-sharp nose quivered with interest. In her brilliant crimson warm-up and with a calico headband holding down her salt-and-pepper hair, Henny looked like a bony geriatric jock, but she could pick up and discard personalities faster than Sherlock Holmes could fashion a disguise. She was a superb Abby. At this moment, she looked torn between being a theater stalwart and jumping ship to join Hugo’s insurrection.