Stranded (34 page)

“Good thing I never wanted to be a cowboy,” he muttered.

Altogether, in spite of the unruly rope, it was a most enjoyable day. With a most satisfactory good-night kiss at the end of it.

Monday afternoon was another rehearsal, and it was a hectic time because Lucinda wanted it done with a full setup of props. So I lugged props onstage for each skit, offstage after the skit was over, plus dashed up to the third floor numerous times because some little thing always seemed to be missing. Then someone bumped into the lamp in the parlor scene skit and smashed the shade. A loose board popped up and ripped one of the spangled costumes. Doris prompted one of the Stooges with the wrong lines. Tempers flared several times.

Mac’s performance went off great as far as his lines went, not so great with his rope performance. It tangled around his feet. It snagged on his belt buckle. It wrapped around his body and knocked his hat off. Everyone was tittering rather than laughing outright, because this wasn’t the part that was supposed to be funny, and Mac looked thoroughly frustrated.

The chorus line had a few glitches too, with the revolving wagon wheel looking more like the flat tire on Norman’s Dorf. One woman seemed to have forgotten the difference between left and right, and soon the whole lineup was more like a traffic jam than a chorus line. Stella had a cold, and her song in the street scene sounded as if she was gargling the words underwater.

Lucinda dropped her head on her director’s stand at the end of the rehearsal. “I keep telling myself that it’s always like this, and there’s nothing to worry about. Always, just a few days before performance, it seems like everything is falling apart. But then it all works out okay.”

I wanted to say that I was sure it would all work out okay this year too, but my tongue tangled in doubt because the chorus line was beginning to look more like a choreographed riot and the skits as if a traitor had sabotaged the scripts. But I put the best spin I could on it and said hopefully, “Everyone’s working very hard. Mac says he can fix the lamp shade.”

Which he did, with duct tape that he ran out to the hardware store and bought. Though I have to admit I half-–expected Charlotte to produce a roll of it from her purse.

A full dress rehearsal was scheduled for Wednesday, but Tuesday everyone got a day off to recuperate from Monday’s near fiasco. Mac and I spent the morning wandering through Hello’s antique and gift shops. Posters about the coming Revue were up everywhere, prints made from a photo of a previous year’s chorus line in an organized moment. In the afternoon Magnolia decided she wanted to drive down to Hayward because someone in the RV park had told her about a yarn shop there and she needed some special yarn for a project at the house in Phoenix. She and Geoff invited Mac and me to ride along.

When we reached Hayward, Mac and Geoff headed for a car parts store. Something about needing windshield wipers and spark plugs, although I suspected they were just avoiding yarn. Posters about the Revue were in windows everywhere here too. I went with Magnolia to the yarn shop, but I’m about as good with yarn as Mac is with rope, and I slipped away for a quick side trip to the Nugget. I’d been wondering if KaySue had come up with any ideas about who’d murdered Hiram, and I also wanted to see if she was doing okay. And, though she wasn’t high on my list of suspects, she hadn’t slipped off it.

In midafternoon, business was light in the Nugget, and I found KaySue drinking a soda and leafing through a
People
magazine at the far end of the counter. She was still wearing the carousel earrings. I walked up behind her and tugged her long blond braid lightly.

“Hi, KaySue. Remember me?”

She swiveled on the counter stool. “Hey, I sure do.” I was surprised at how pleased she seemed to see me.

“I just happened to be down this way with some friends, so I thought I’d drop in and see you.”

“Want a cup of coffee?”

“No, thanks anyway. Is everything going okay?”

“I guess.” She shrugged in a so-so way. “I’ve been out with a guy who works at the Ford dealership a couple times.” She wrinkled her nose. “But he’s no Hiram. They haven’t caught Hiram’s killer yet?”

“Not yet. There was also a fire at the house the other night. It destroyed the back side of the house. Abilene and I had to move out.”

“Why would someone want to burn the house down?”

The first question most people asked was about how the fire got started. But KaySue’s first thought was that the fire had been set on purpose. Hmmm. Interesting.

“The fire department says it was probably caused by the old wiring. But I keep thinking maybe there’s something in the house that the killer doesn’t want found, and the fire wasn’t an accident.”

“Like what?”

My turn to shrug.

“I think Lucinda knew about me,” she said slowly. She twisted her feet childlike around the stool’s center pedestal and fingered the thick braid hanging over her shoulder.

“What makes you think that?”

“I hadn’t thought about it before you were here last time, but then I got to thinking about something Hiram said once, not long before he was killed. That he’d bought something special for me, something I was really going to like, and he thought maybe she’d found out about it.”

Carousel horses. Lucinda had said she hadn’t known anything about them until after Hiram’s death, but was that true?

“And so you think . . . ?”

She jumped to her feet, blue eyes blazing in one of those spitfire swings of temper I’d heard about. “Sometimes I think I’ll just go up there and face her down. Do whatever it takes to get the truth out of her about how she killed him!”

She loomed over me, tall and blond and strong, a Viking in a mini skirt, and I felt a spurt of alarm at what she might do. Something stronger than throwing soup in Lucinda’s face, I was afraid.

“Oh no, KaySue, I don’t think that would be a good idea.” I pushed her back toward the stool because she looked as if she might dash out to her pickup and roar up to Hello right now. “If she’s guilty the police will figure it out. Don’t do anything you might regret.” As an afterthought I added, “Lucinda’s taken karate lessons, you know.”

“I’m not afraid of her,” KaySue scoffed. “And if she did kill Hiram, she shouldn’t get away with it.”

I agreed with that, but I still wasn’t ready to erase KaySue’s name completely from my list. She might be naïve, but she wasn’t dumb, and she looked at me as if she guessed what I was thinking.

“You don’t think I went up there and started the fire, do you?”

“The thought has occurred to me,” I admitted.

“Why would I do that?”

“Maybe Hiram dumped you, and you wrote him a threatening letter before you went up there and killed him. And you were afraid we might find that letter too, and it would be quite incriminating. So you decided you’d better make sure it was destroyed.”

It was a possibility that had just occurred to me. She blinked once as if flabbergasted by my accusation, then blinked harder to hold back the tears glistening in her eyes. I felt a stab of remorse. She was really upset that I’d think such a thing.

Or maybe she was a really great actress . . .

“That’s crazy,” she said finally with a vehement shake of head that swung the braid like a blond whip. “He didn’t dump me. We loved each other. He had something . . . something nice for me.”

I knew that to be true. And in all honesty it did make my accusation look a little far out. Unless Hiram had planned the carousel horses as a parting gift because he was going to marry Lucinda . . .

“You’re on Lucinda’s side, aren’t you?” she accused suddenly. She planted her fists on her hips. “Because you’re her age, and I’m not. And you don’t figure anyone as young as I am could really be in love with someone Hiram’s age!”

I also blinked, uneasily wondering if there could be truth in that. Ageism in reverse? “I’m not on anyone’s side. I just want to find out who killed Hiram.”

“It wasn’t me!” She squared her shoulders, her eyes blue ice now. “And don’t come back again.”

She turned and stalked off toward the kitchen, exit punctuated by the swinging of the door behind her. I was sorry our brief relationship had ended this way.

I was also sorry that deep down inside, I was now almost certain Lucinda was the killer. I’d tried my best to wiggle around it, but there it was.

The full dress rehearsal started at one o’clock Wednesday afternoon. There were several crises. The tape with the music for Stella’s “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue” number in the street scene exploded.

“A tape can’t explode,” Lucinda protested.

The woman handling the sound equipment lifted a handful of stuff that certainly looked like exploded tape. “No?”

The chorus line did fairly well, except when a tumble by a woman on one end rippled through the line like falling dominos. Except the ripple stopped at Magnolia, who stood firm as a redheaded statue.

I tried not to think about murder every time I looked at Lucinda. A killer? No, she couldn’t be. Yet the thoughts wouldn’t go away. Instead of seeing her waving her hand to direct the chorus line, I saw her waving something behind Hiram’s head, bringing it down hard . . .

Someone produced a second tape for Stella. Her cold was gone now, and she no longer sounded as if she was gargling underwater. Good. That much was encouraging.

But Mac’s battle with the rope was no more successful than before. Finally he tossed it aside in disgust. Lucinda waved him on. But a few moments later a voice broke into the monologue.

“Bring back the rope!” The hoarse yell boomed from Doris Hammerstone, in that voice that sounded more longshoreman than LOL. She pounded her fist on her clipboard. “Bring back the rope!”

Someone else took up the cry. “It’s better with the rope!”

Hey, I realized, they were right! Maybe getting tangled in the rope wasn’t authentic Will Rogers, but with Mac it added a charm all his own. The cowboy bumbler spouting words of wisdom. I added my own cry. “Bring back the rope!”

Lucinda, with a kind of resignation, waved toward the rope, and Mac retrieved it. “Just do whatever comes natural,” she said.

What came natural to Mac with a rope was getting his feet, arms, and neck tangled in it, and he started adding a few comments of his own to those of the original Will. “This thing’s as tricky as a politician writing a new law, ain’t it?” he suggested.

About that time, I made a decision. I was not going to think about murder and Lucinda now. After the Revue, yes, I’d have to do something about my suspicions then. I wasn’t certain what. Talk to Kelli, probably. But Lucinda wasn’t going to take off and disappear in the next few days, so there’d be time enough after the Revue.

Then, two things happened.

The first was that evening when Kelli came home and handed Abilene several folded sheets of paper. “My friend Linda in Texas faxed that to me today.”

Abilene unfolded the pages. She got a strange look on her face, a light of happiness and yet uncertainty too, as if the pages were a wonderful gift, but she wasn’t certain it belonged to her. “This is it? It’s all legal?”

“It’s all legal,” Kelli assured her. “She’ll send a certified copy in the mail, but this says it all.”