Macdeath (An Ivy Meadows Mystery Book 1) (17 page)

“Thanks,” I said after spilling my guts. “I needed someone to listen.”

Cody nodded solemnly, then said, “Can I come see your play?”

Cody rarely made requests.

“Oh. Wow. It’s um, it’s Shakespeare. Do you think you’d...”

“I like Shakespeare. To be or not to be!”

Guileless, maybe, but obviously I wasn’t giving him enough credit.

“Well, there are only a few more performances...”

Why didn’t I want him to come? I wasn’t sure, but there it was.

“I know. Matt said he’d take me.”

“Yeah. Okay. Great. I’ll get some comps for you.”

Somehow. I’d given all my complimentary tickets to my neighbors and Olive Garden friends, but didn’t want Cody to know he hadn’t been first on my list. As he should have been.

I sat back, annoyed with myself. Did I always use Cody as a sounding board without thinking of him, without considering what he wanted? The tin of makeup in my shorts shifted uncomfortably. I took it out of my pocket.

“What’s that?” asked Cody.

“Makeup. The old-fashioned kind, where you just smear it on your face.”

“Don’t you smear the new-fashioned kind, too?”

He had a point.

“Yeah, but this is thicker. They call it pancake.”

“
Pancake
.” Cody’s sweet tooth asserted itself.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with pancakes, it’s just...Here.” I unscrewed the top of the tin and handed it to him.

He sniffed it. “Doesn’t smell like pancakes.” He was about to dip a finger in it.

“No!” I leapt up, snatching it away from Cody, my heart beating a mile a minute. What in God’s name had I been thinking?

Cody’s eyes filled with tears. Shit. I put the lid on the makeup and sat down next to Cody again.

“Sorry. Sorry, hon. It’s not about you. I think this makeup may be...” What? What did I think? “Bad.”

“Like poison?” Cody’s eyes had dried, but a sort of serious excitement shone in them.

“Maybe. I’m not sure.”

“Why don’t you test it? Like on CSI?”

Of course. Pinkstaff would test it for me, I felt sure.

At that moment I realized I’d underestimated Cody and had for years. I’d yelled at my parents to treat him like an adult, and yet I kept him in the role of baby brother. I resolved to get to know him all over again and to start right then.

“So,” I said. “I never knew you liked Shakespeare.”

CHAPTER 33

Our Poisoned Chalice

I called Pinkstaff after my picnic with Cody. We met up the next day for a bedside lunch at Uncle Bob’s house. Deli sandwiches for all, courtesy of Pink. In between bites of pastrami on rye, I explained my suspicions.

“And you want me to take taxpayers’ money and test this makeup?” Pink put down his half-eaten sandwich and turned to Uncle Bob. “Just last week, Olive wanted me to exhume Simon’s body.”

I did. C’mon, they did it all the time on TV. And how hard could it be to dig up a freshly dug hole?

Pink picked up a pickle and waggled it for emphasis. “Changed her mind when I asked her to get permission from the widow.” Uncle Bob nodded at the pickle and took a ginormous bite of his potent-smelling chopped liver sandwich.

I had been all ready to get a hold of Nuala. Even found her contact info in Ireland. Well, I found her headshot and agent’s contact info, but it would have been easy from there.

“
And
to cough up $10,000 for the exhumation.” Pinkstaff punctuated this with a bite of pickle.

Yep, that was when I decided it wasn’t such a great idea.

“But testing this makeup shouldn’t cost much at all,” I said. “It’s just a teeny tiny tin.” It was actually regular size, but I was wheedling.

“Alright, alright.” Pink finished his pickle.

I saw—and ignored—the “poor deluded Olive” look he shared with my uncle.

“But I have to tell you, I probably wouldn’t do this if you weren’t Bob’s niece.” Pink held his hand out for the tin. “And if you weren’t so damn cute.” My uncle frowned at his last comment (or maybe his smelly sandwich). I just smiled and handed over Simon’s pancake makeup.

Being on my own at Uncle Bob’s office on Wednesday gave me the opportunity to research how he might have been poisoned. Helped me not a whit. All I really discovered was that it was possible someone put something in his Big Gulp while he’d left it unattended on the table in the greenroom.

I got to the theater a little early that night, my mind stuck on the problem. I checked on the nail in the cup of Diet Coke that still sat on our dressing room counter. Though the Coke had not dissolved the nail, it did jostle something loose in my brain.

I could recreate the crime scene by putting a Big Gulp on the table where Uncle Bob left his. I wasn’t sure how this would help me learn anything new, but I’d seen it in cop shows. The detectives always seemed to make a new discovery when they did it. What did I have to lose?

I ran out of the theater to where Homeless Hank waited in his typical corner. “If I gave you ten bucks, would you run down to the corner and get me a Diet Coke Big Gulp?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Miss.” He smiled at me, his white teeth (probably dentures) glowing against his sun-baked skin. “That stuff’ll kill you.”

Sheesh, was there an anti-Diet Coke conspiracy?

I quickly convinced Hank that I didn’t want something healthier, gave him the ten dollars, and agreed to meet him outside the stage door at intermission.

Hank was a man of his word. At intermission, I found him outside the stage door with a big, sweating plastic cup of Diet Coke. I thanked him, told him to keep the change, and walked into the greenroom with my Big Gulp.

“Mmm,” I said, trying to draw attention to myself in a room full of buzzing actors. “Gotta love a Big Gulp.” Uninspired, I know. I never was great at improvisation. “Except when you drink too much and have to pee,” I said loudly.

I really should take an improv class.

I set my drink down on the table and ambled nonchalantly around the corner into the hall where the bathrooms were. I stopped and peeked back around the corner. I could just see the fake blood-stained table where my Big Gulp sat. Jason walked by it. My chest tightened. I hadn’t talked to him since overhearing his weird phone call with Edward. I shook my head to clear it. Needed to concentrate on the task at hand.

I was beginning to think I had wasted ten bucks. This was a pretty silly idea. I mean, if someone did something with the Big Gulp now, it would mean they wanted to harm me, right?

Wait, someone had stopped at the table. Though he had his back to me, I could see the black unitard with jagged silver stripes.

Riley.

He looked around to see if anyone was watching, then picked up the Big Gulp and carried it backstage.

Riley? What did he have to do with anything? Hmm. He
had
been really solicitous about my uncle. And he had worked with Simon in Flagstaff.

I was about to follow him backstage when he returned, Big Gulp in hand. He put it back down on the table.

I leapt out of my hiding place and nabbed him. “Hey! Why did you take my Big Gulp?”

“Uh, five second rule?”

“What?”

“You know. You left it there for more than five seconds, so I figured it was fair game.” Riley
was
good at improv.

“I’m pretty sure that only applies to food dropped on the floor.” I took my drink from him.

“Sorry.” He looked like a dog who’d been caught going through the garbage.

“Why did you take it backstage?” Dang. Not only did I need to work on my improv, I needed to improve my indirect questioning skills.

“So I could drink it without anyone seeing.”

“But you brought it back.”

“It was Diet Coke.” He made a face.

For heaven’s sake. I started to defend my soft drink of choice, but had another question to ask. “What about Simon?”

“Huh?”

Too indirect that time. “Had you worked with him before?” I knew he had, but I wanted to see what he would say.

Riley now looked like a puzzled dog. “Yeah, in a couple of shows. I do a lot of Shakespeare.”

“What did you think of him?”

Riley shrugged. “He was cool.”

The loudspeaker squawked. “Places for Act Four.”

I went backstage, climbed into the cauldron with my fellow witches, and formulated my next question to them carefully, not sure who I trusted. “I just caught Riley sneaking off with my Big Gulp. Do you think it’s okay to drink? I mean, I couldn’t catch bedbugs or anything, could I?” Riley had been joking about bedbugs a little too often for some of our tastes.

“I wouldn’t drink it,” Tyler said as our cauldron rose up into the flyspace.

“Me neither,” agreed Candy. “You never know what he put in it.”

“You think he’d put something in it?” I asked.

“Maybe a roofie,” said Tyler.

I shook my head. Though the date rape drug Rohypnol was pretty easy to get in close-by Mexico, it wasn’t Riley’s style.

“You know Riley. I’m still mad he put that fake cockroach in my coffee cup.” Candy shivered melodramatically. “About swallowed the dang thing.”

Most shows have a resident practical joker. Riley was ours. He’d written “Feel my steel” on one side of his broadsword, stuffed his unitard to give himself man-boobs, and posted a fake online review on the greenroom bulletin board, where the supposed critic got him and Jason mixed up and said Riley was “the best Macbeth ever.” Everyone thought it was real (including Jason, who was royally pissed) until we noticed that the critic spelled witches “whiches.”

“He’d probably just add salt or booze or something, but still,” Candy said. “I wouldn’t drink it.”

Music began, and the lights dimmed. In the minute I had before the cauldron descended to the stage, I thought about Riley. He could’ve tampered with my Diet Coke. There was no way to be sure unless I asked Pinkstaff to test it, too, and I had the feeling that wouldn’t go over well. He could have put something in Uncle Bob’s Big Gulp as well. That possibility brought up another question: If it was Riley who put something in my uncle’s drink, could the poisoning have been accidental, a practical joke gone wrong? If that was the case, did that mean nothing else was “foul play?”

By the time we touched down onstage, I realized my crime scene reconstruction had been a bust. I wasn’t closer to any sort of truth.

CHAPTER 34

Come What May

Jason paced the stage under the dim work lights. He always arrived at the theater before the rest of the cast to get into character. He’d texted me earlier, asking me to meet him an hour before call. Said he wanted some private time with me. Probably also wanted to know why I’d been avoiding him. It was Thursday night. We hadn’t spoken since I overheard Edward and him on the phone on Saturday.

Now I stood in the shadowy wings, behind a velvet curtain like the one Jason and I had wrapped ourselves in on opening night. God, that seemed like a long time ago.

Jason delivered Macbeth’s lines to the dark emptiness. “Come, seeling night...”

Falconers used to train their birds by sewing their eyes shut. “Seeling” them.

“Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day.” Macbeth was asking the night to give him strength to murder his best friend. “And with thy bloody and invisible hand, Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond, Which keeps me pale!”

The creepy speech was too much, and Jason delivered it too well. I decided to leave. Maybe we could talk later, in the open, in the sun.

I must have made a noise. Jason turned. He was already in costume, sans boots. He followed my eyes to his bare feet and smiled a slow smile.

“My boots make too much noise,” he said. He walked toward me silently, his eyes locked on mine. “I was afraid you weren’t going to come.”

I stepped out from behind the curtain, but held onto its soft strength with one hand. “Why?” My laugh sounded nervous, even to me.

He continued toward me with that catlike walk. “I thought maybe you were done with me.” He watched me for a reaction. I was careful not to give him any.

“I was...busy.” I couldn’t meet his eyes.

“Yeah, that’s what Genevieve said.”

He was close now, so close I could smell the woodsy scent of the soap he used.

“She said she saw you with another guy.”

“Another guy?”

“Come on, Ivy. She was on some commercial shoot at Encanto, and saw you on a picnic with some blonde guy.”

Cody. An involuntary smile must have crossed my face, because Jason’s grew dark.

“I don’t like to share,” he said.

“He’s not the reason I didn’t return your calls.”

“Why then? You haven’t talked to me since I was in the hospital.”

It was true. I’d ignored his calls, and even managed to avoid him offstage during the shows on Sunday and Wednesday.

“Why?” Jason planted himself inches from me. I could feel the heat from his body along the length of mine. I wanted to touch him so badly. Even now.

“I don’t understand why it’s such a big deal,” I said. “You didn’t return my calls for almost a week when Uncle Bob was in the hospital.”

“That was different.” Jason’s voice was husky with some emotion. Anger? Jealousy?

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. That was before we...made love.”

He said the words awkwardly, like they didn’t quite fit in his mouth. I saw the seducer mask slip from his face, a glimpse of a real connection behind his eye.

Or I wanted to see it. I wanted the Jason I thought I knew. The one I’d trusted enough to get close. Sex to me was never just recreational. My heart always came with the deal.

“Ivy.” Jason stood in front of me, glowering. The muscles in his neck were tense, and he looked dangerous. And, God help me, hot.

Down, girl. This is the guy who lies about why he was in the hospital, who shares some weird secret with Edward, who has a dead girlfriend.

“What’s going on?” Jason grabbed my shoulders. “Who is this guy?” I could feel his fingers press into the flesh above my shoulder blades. Not hard or hurtful. Strong. Powerful. Compelling.

Ivy. Don’t forget the dead girlfriend.

“Who is he?”

I looked Jason in the eye. “Wanna trade secrets?”