Something Wicked (6 page)

Annie reached down automatically to retrieve it.

Henny paused, pulled another apple from the pocket, polished it on her skirt, and took a generous bite.

Annie began to grin.

Managing somehow to chew and talk simultaneously, Henny gestured with the partially eaten apple. “I
know
who’s behind the sabotage!”

“Really!” Annie exclaimed.

“Good going,” Max applauded. “Who is it?”

“It’s obvious, clear as the nose on your face. No two ways about it.” An English accent became pronounced at this point.

They waited.

Henny Brawley nodded emphatically and the complex hairdo began to wobble. “Our troublemaker is Shane Petree.”

She said it so confidently that they both leaned forward, entranced.

“How do you know?” Annie asked eagerly. “Did you see him with the prompt card? Did you find some cards in his car? How did you figure it out?”

Their visitor ignored the questions. Instead, she gnawed ferociously on her apple, chewed, swallowed, then demanded, “Who
obviously
doesn’t want to be in the play? Who was cast
only
because his wife made it a condition of her financial support of the players? Who has
refused
to learn his lines, been consistently late to rehearsal? In short,” and she spaced the words out dramatically,
“who—is—the—only—person—not—trying—to—make—the—play—a—success?”

“Shane!” they chorused.

Henny beamed her approval at their sagacity, then finished the apple, tossed the core toward a wastebasket, which it missed, and wiped her hands on her cardigan. Another apple bounced onto the floor. Annie picked it up.

“Proof?” Max inquired mildly.

“Proof? Why, a woman’s intuition, my dear. You can count on it every time.”

Swinging around, Henny darted back to the front door, and another apple went careening across the room. “So, I just wanted you both to know. Just in case.”

“Just in case what?” Annie cried, as the door opened.

“I’m off to keep an eye on Mr. Shane Petree. He won’t
do any more dark deeds, I can assure you,” and she was through the door and gone.

Annie looked down at the two apples in her hand. “Ariadne Oliver,” she announced.

Max was stretching out again on the couch. “Spare me. I don’t think I want to know any more than you’ve already told me.”

Annie crossed to the bookcase, slipped her hand along the C’s, withdrew
Hallowe’en Party,
and tossed it to Max. Then she threw an apple.

Absently, she began to eat the one she held. “Darn it,” her voice was indistinct, “she really had me going. I thought maybe she was on to something.”

Max firmly put his apple and the Christie novel on the table and picked up his coffee mug.

Annie gave a muffled whoop of pleasure as she found the notebook she’d been seeking underneath a stack of
Ellery Queen Mystery
magazines.

Max watched indulgently as she listed the malicious tricks that had been played on the cast and crew of
Arsenic and Old Lace.

As for number five, was that an unforgettable night! Janet had dropped the glass of elderberry wine she was offering Mr. Witherspoon and screamed, pointing up. Everyone looked toward the ceiling of the auditorium. Up, up, up,
at the beams in their gridwork. A hand dangled from an opening. A limp hand and arm. Max, followed closely by Annie, tore down the center aisle and up the front-of-house steps to the balcony and the door to the light booth. It was open. Into the booth and up the narrow steps to the attic opening, then Max, waving Annie back, inched carefully across the narrow planks that crossed the dangerous ceiling with its square openings for the lights. And finally, as they waited breathlessly, his voice floated eerily through the dusty space. “A dummy. For God’s sake, a dummy!”

The laconic notation did not adequately represent the dreadful moments when they believed a body was lodged precariously in the far reaches of the attic.

Max grabbed up a pen from the coffee table and began to write.

“Hey, do you have a copy of the rehearsal schedule?” Annie looked around for her purse, but Max was already pulling the mimeographed sheet from his pocket.

He spread it open and she peered at it. “Look, that’s what I thought,” she said triumphantly. “When somebody let off the stink bomb, it was a rehearsal for Act Two. So that lets out the people who appear only in Acts One and Three. And the stink bomb is the only piece of sabotage that had to have been done by someone in the auditorium at the time.”

Quickly, Max made a list of the cast for Act II: Henny Brawley as Abby, Janet Horton as Martha, Hugo Wolf as Jonathan, Arthur Killeen as Dr. Einstein, Shane Petree as Teddy, Annie as Elaine, himself as Mortimer, and Eugene Ferramond as Officer O’Hara.

Annie took another bite of apple. “We have to count T.K. He doesn’t come on as Lieutenant Rooney until Act Three, but he hasn’t missed a rehearsal yet. And, of course, Sam and Burt are always there.”

“And Cindy and Carla,” Max added. “So we’re back
to the same people who were present today. Is that any help?”

“Well, we can at least drop Father Donaldson, Ben Tippet, and Vince Ellis from consideration.” They played, respectively, Dr. Harper (Act I), Mr. Gibbs (Act I), and Officer Brophy (Acts I and III).

Max wrinkled his nose. “Sorry to be discouraging, old top, but I don’t think we are making much progress.”

Annie wasn’t ready to quit detecting. “Look,” she said hurriedly, forestalling suggestions of other pastimes (Max had a certain gleam in his eye), “we’ve got to look at the people involved. That’s the way to go about it. Like Poirot says, running about to and fro like a dog with a bone won’t get you anywhere. We’ve got to look at the psychology of it all.”

“Okay,” Max said equably. “Who fits the profile?”

She nodded approvingly. He was getting into the spirit of it.

She printed
PROFILE
, then frowned. After all, it was impossible to have any idea of the perpetrator’s personality unless they knew his (or her) objective. She scratched out
PROFILE
and substituted
OBJECTIVE
, then wrote busily,

1. Ruin the season.
   

2. Get Shane canned.
   

3. Drive Sam berserk.
   

4. Raise a little hell.
   

Max took her pen and circled the last line.

She looked at him inquiringly.

“As a general proposition—” he began.

Annie shushed him. “Don’t distract me. I think we’re getting somewhere. Let’s see who might fit each category.”

They didn’t agree in all cases, but they did come up with some possibilities.

1. Ruin the season.
Harley Edward Jenkins III got top billing. As everyone in town knew, Jenkins vociferously opposed rebuilding the theater on the harbor front. Certainly a lousily produced first play of the season would lessen the chances of a profit-making summer.

As far as Annie and Max knew, and they chewed this over thoroughly, it would not be to anyone else’s advantage
to prevent the theater from rebuilding on the harbor front. Certainly Burt Conroy was determined to see the theater rebuilt at its original site, both because he was president of the players and the community theater was his guiding passion in life, and, more prosaically but perhaps as importantly, because it was to his economic advantage as a shopkeeper to prevent Jenkins from building and leasing to a competing business.

“However,” Max objected, “Harley was not in the theater when the stink bomb went off. So, if he’s involved, one of the other cast or crew members is doing his dirty work.”

Annie put
conspirator
in parentheses with a question mark by Harley’s name.

Then she shook her head. “Why would anybody do that?”

“Money.”

“You think Harley would bribe someone?”

“Honey, I think Harley’s capable of any number of deceitful and disgusting acts. Besides,” Max said triumphantly, “none of the cast or crew members has any reason to ruin the season.”

“Except Eugene,” Annie said reluctantly.

“Still smarting because Burt forced Sam to cast Shane as Teddy?”

“Obviously, it still smarts. Have you seen Eugene’s eyes when Shane comes on the set as Teddy?” Annie sighed.

Under
Ruin the season,
Max wrote
Eugene Ferramond
in small script. Under
Get Shane canned,
he printed the name in big block letters.

“That’s more likely,” Annie agreed. “But Eugene sure doesn’t stand alone.” She printed
T. K. Horton
in similarly large block letters, took another bite of apple, and added
Hugo Wolf
and
Sam Haznine.

Max quirked an eyebrow over the last entry. “That’s pretty subtle.”

“If Henny’s gossip is right, Burt forced Sam to cast Shane. Don’t you think Sam would do anything he could to make Burt change his mind?”

“I’ve never thought Sam could be that Byzantine.”

“Speaking of Byzantine, do you think there’s anything to Henny’s idea that Shane’s behind the sabotage? You know
damn well that if his wife is determined for him to be in the play, he wouldn’t have the guts to go against her wishes. But if he could cause enough trouble, fluff his lines, make Sam mad enough, and get himself fired, well, Sheridan could hardly blame
him,
could she?” Annie had a swift vision of Sheridan Petree’s feline face. She suspected that Shane had developed a lot of Byzantine qualities in the years he’d been married to her. The woman was awesome in the force of her personality. She reduced most people, including her surferhandsome but aging husband, to rubber-stamp marionettes.

Under
Drive Sam berserk,
Annie listed Shane and Eugene again, with one caveat.

“I really don’t think Eugene has that small a personality. I know he aches to be Teddy, but he’s doing an excellent job as Officer O’Hara, and he’s always cheerful.”

“Cheerful—and full of facts and figures about TR. It’s almost an obsession.” Max drew a line under Eugene’s name. Under
Raise a little hell,
he wrote
Cindy Horton.

Annie looked at him curiously. “On the theory that she’s an oversexed snot and is capable of anything?”

“That young lady is quite hostile to her mother,” Max observed. “Maybe she doesn’t want to see Janet succeed as Martha. Maybe she thinks she could make more time with Shane if he weren’t tied up in a play.”

They studied their list of suspects.

1. Ruin the season.
   

   Harley Edward Jenkins III (conspirator?)
   

   Eugene Ferramond
   

2. Get Shane canned.
   

   Eugene Ferramond
   

   Sam Haznine
   

   Hugo Wolf
   

   T.K. Horton
   

   Shane himself
   

3. Drive Sam berserk.
   

   Shane
   

   Eugene
   

4. Raise a little hell.
   

   Cindy
   

Then Max added a final category,
Unknown.
“And that’s my best suggestion yet.”

At the bottom of the sheet, Annie penned:
Possible suspects but without known motives: Annie Laurance, Max Darling, Carla Fontaine, Henny Brawley, Janet Horton, Arthur Killeen.
She finished her mug of cappuccino, then lifted Max’s from the coffee table, and saw, with regret, that it was empty, too.

Max flipped the notebook shut with a purposeful snap and moved closer. “Now that that’s taken care of, let’s consider some more pleasurable pursuits,” and his arm slipped around her shoulders.

But Annie looked down at her watch. “We’re due at the Petrees’. Remember?”

“Oh, hell.” Then he suggested brightly, “Let’s skip it.”

Annie was tempted. She almost slipped comfortably into his embrace.

Max said silkily, “After all, do you really want to go to an enormous bash put on by Sheridan Petree ostensibly to celebrate the beginning of the theater season, but actually to showcase that god-awful house and herself?”

It was his mention of the house that was his undoing. The house
fascinated
Annie.

Clapping her hands together, she said, “Oh, come on, Max. Let’s go. I mean, you never know what’s going to happen at the Petrees’.”

Which was, she agreed later, the understatement of the year.

Max drove slowly, obviously in no hurry to reach the Petrees’. But he smiled at her, and his eyes did that nice crinkle. She smiled back. Max was born to wear a dinner jacket. The crisp white emphasized his even tan, the flash of his dark blue eyes, and his blond hair, tousled now by the warm air sweeping through the open sunroof. And was there a more perfect place in this world than Broward’s Rock on the eve of summer? The sweet scent of blooming magnolia mingled with the sharper tang of the salt marsh. The offshore breeze rattled the palmetto fronds and the glossy magnolia leaves, but the loudest evening sounds came from frogs
singing their mating melodies. Then the Porsche headlights swept over a salt marsh, and Annie glimpsed a four-foot-tall Great Blue Heron, with a long yellow bill and distinctive black plumes trailing from his white head. Startled, the majestic bird squawked and rose into the night sky, his three-foot wings flapping majestically. The road swung inland, and great spreading branches of live oak trees, festooned with Spanish moss, met overhead.