Peachy Scream

by Anna Gerard

  Bending to set down the champagne bottle, I turned again so that I now faced the bleachers. I reached into the belt tied about my waist and plucked out a plastic medicine bottle. I gave an exaggerated look over each shoulder, as if fearing I might be being watched, and then shook the bottle over the glass.

  I heard a sharp gasp from one of the cast—who, I couldn’t tell. But it seemed I’d struck a nerve with someone.

  “What is this?” Harry as Hamlet demanded, rushing over to where the king and queen sat, leaning forward to get a better view. “Is a villain coolly plotting some dreadful mischief? Let us see what happens next.”

  At that, I tucked away the pill bottle again. Looking once more to either side, I carried my glass of champagne over to the pair still busy with their phones. I tapped the hipster on the shoulder and with a magnanimous gesture handed him the glass. My job done, I slipped away to one side to watch.

  The player representing Chris raised the glass to take a pretend sip from the tainted drink, when another player rushed in. It was my new friend Annie aka Dorothy. Like the other two players, she was dressed in modern garb, bright cropped pants and a flowered top, her dark hair pulled up in a messy ponytail. She only vaguely resembled me, but anyone in the know would recognize who she represented.

  Faux Nina snatched the glass from the hipster youth’s hand and wagged an admonishing finger at him.

  “Aha!” Harry exclaimed, nodding. “Fate in the form of a lovely young woman has stepped in. She tells our young man that he is not of an age to indulge in strong drink and so has saved him from the poison. All is well now. Or is it?”

  At that, Faux Nina looked from the Len character back to the glass she held, and then gave an exaggerated shrug. She walked over to him and tapped him on the shoulder. He looked up, and she offered him the glass.

  “No, no!” Harry cried as the Len character accepted the champagne with a smile. “Our lady thinks not to waste a fine drink and so gives it to another, not knowing it is tainted. Will our man of business realize the error in time?”

  The stage abruptly darkened, and while the student players rushed off to the wings, the projected backdrop changed. Now, it was a scene of tall green hedges.

  “What the—” I heard Radney softly say, out of character, while Bill and Tessa had both half-risen from their seats. As for the audience, they’d fallen silent, seemingly sensing that something beyond the scope of the play was about to happen.

  Now, the only sound was the quartet’s lute playing a doleful solo. As the lights rose again, Harry moved with sober purpose downstage before turning back toward the hedges. As we all watched, the Len character wandered in front of the hedge backdrop. He stood there smiling, champagne in hand. Slowly raising the glass, he pantomimed drinking it down.

  “’Tis done,” Harry intoned in a voice that sent a shiver through me. “And now we can but wait for the end.”

  “This ain’t right,” Marvin muttered, loud enough for me to hear as he put an arm around Susie’s shoulder and glanced at the rest of the cast for support.

  I was watching too, clutching nervous hands together as I waited to see who else of the troupe reacted to the scene. It was then that the Len character clutched his throat and began staggering in front of the hedges. Finally, with a silent cry, he dropped to the stage and lay quite still.

  The backdrop flashed and changed again. This time, an image I recognized as Len’s headshot appeared, almost filling the screen. The image began to waver, and then swirl, until it splintered into dozens of virtual pieces and vanished, leaving behind a backdrop of sky and clouds.

  And at that, a scream shattered the silence.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that!” Susie shrieked, breaking away from Marvin and rushing downstage. “And if Nina hadn’t interfered, it wouldn’t have!”

  Tearing the flower garland from around her neck, she glared my way and then swung about to stab a finger in Chris’s direction.

  “You were supposed to drink that glass of champagne, you stupid girl, not Len. It only would have made you sick … sick enough to get you out of the way until I could decide what to do about you. Because I knew who you were from the start. And I knew what your crazy mother was up to, too. I even told the police she had to be the one who’d tried to kill Len that night while he was riding his bike, but they wouldn’t believe me. And when running him over with her car didn’t work … well, I knew you’d try to finish the job for her.”

  Chris stood there opened-mouth during the woman’s tirade, pretty much like the rest of the cast. Even the audience sat in stunned silence, while the lute player, with a sudden discordant flourish of strings, abruptly halted his playing.

  And supposedly Chris’s mother was the crazy one?

  Susie’s voice had been steadily rising. “You thought you could fool us, but I was smarter. I had the perfect plan to get rid of you, to keep you away from my Len, and no one would have suspected a thing. They’d all think it was just one of those silly tricks, like all the others I’d been playing on the troupe.”

  With a final screech, she abruptly charged in Chris’s direction, crying, “And then you made Len drink from the wrong glass, and that ruined everything!”

  “I–I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Chris managed to choke out as she turned and sprinted toward the nearest wing.

  What would have happened next had Susie caught her, I wasn’t sure. But the drama ended almost as soon as it began, when Harry rushed across stage to block Susie’s progress. She sidestepped him with greater agility than he expected, however, which left it up to me. And as I wasn’t sure that I could hold onto her even if I did catch her, wrapped as I was in my bulky cloak, I did the next best thing. I stuck out my booted toe and caught her ankle, sending her tumbling to the stage.

  For a moment, there was dead silence, so complete that I could hear passing traffic a block away. And then a man’s enthusiastic, “Bravo, bravo!” rang out from the audience, followed by a slow clap.

  I gazed out into the bleachers to spot none other than the Reverend Dr. Thaddeus Bishop, who had risen from his seat and was applauding. A few others stood, and then more, until the whole audience had leaped to their collective feet in a standing ovation.

  Harry, being Harry, responded to the adulation with a sweeping bow. Then, with a gesture first to the audience, and then to Susie, still huddled where she’d fallen, he called, “Sheriff Lamb, can we prevail upon you to send a few of your finest up onstage?”

  Looking again toward the bleachers I saw Sheriff Lamb, along with at least three of her deputies. Presumably, they’d been sitting there the entire time. As the officers made their way onto the stage amid still more applause, Harry turned back to the wings.

  “Mrs. O’Malley,” he called, “would you be kind enough to ring down the curtain on this tragedy?”

  * * *

  “I tell you what, Number Nine, I’m sure going to miss these fine breakfasts. You think that Tanaka fellow would ship to Atlanta?”

  It was the Monday morning after the Georgia Amateur Shakespeare Players’ final performance at Shakespeare on Cymbeline Square. Despite being down two players after opening night—Len, who was temporarily lying at the Heavenly Path Funeral Home and Crematorium, and Susie, who was still in the county lockup waiting to make bail—the subsequent performances of Hamlet had gone off pretty much flawlessly. Chris had been bumped into the role of Ophelia, and another of Mrs. O’Malley’s students had filled the parts left open in the wake of Chris’s moving up in the ranks, leaving me to sit happily in the audience.

  But more importantly—at least, for the festival coffers—was the fact that the crowds for Saturday and Sunday had been even larger than that for opening night. Probably because they’re hoping we’ll unmask another real-life criminal onstage, had been Harry’s cynical explanation.

  Now, I grinned at Marvin over my cup of coffee and replied: “I don’t think Peache
s and Java has a mail-order business yet, but I’ll be glad to pack up some of the leftovers for you and Radney. You two are going to stay long enough for the service this morning before you drive back, aren’t you?”

  Because more than the cast of Hamlet had changed since Friday night.

  Following Susie’s onstage confession, both she and Chris had been taken into custody. The younger woman—she had revealed her gender deception once the cuffs were on—had been released a few hours later, however, once Sheriff Lamb agreed that nothing tied her to Len’s death.

  Apparently, the sheriff had accepted Chris’s claim that her infiltration of the GASP troupe had been a sincere if perhaps misguided attempt to get to know her estranged father before she revealed her true identity to him. As for the Pazaxa, her doctor had confirmed that the antidepressant was a legitimate prescription, to be taken as needed. And as the bottle held the exact number of pills as the refill was for, that meant the benzos in Len’s mimosa had not come from Chris’s stash.

  Radney, however, had done a count of his meds and decided he was a couple of pills short. And given that none of the troupe had bothered locking doors during their stay, Susie would have had easy access to Radney’s shaving kit, which also would have given her the opportunity to loosen the cap on his body wash as one of her “tricks.”

  Chris’s mother, Amanda Boyd, had not been so lucky when it came to her dealings with the law. After Sheriff Lamb had contacted the Atlanta officials citing Susie’s claims, they’d agreed to take a second look at the hit-and-run. Fortunately, the paint-transfer evidence results had finally come back from the Atlanta lab, and the data showed that Len’s road bike had been hit by the same make and model car as Amanda owned. With that, Amanda Boyd had confessed to the attempted homicide by vehicle of her ex-husband and was waiting to be bailed out of an Atlanta jail cell.

  As expected, Chris had been devastated by twin losses. First, of the father she’d barely known but had hoped to establish a relationship with, and, second, of the mother who had raised her but had turned out to be deeply flawed. I suspected she also was dealing with guilt over the fact that Len might still be alive had she not unknowingly handed him the tainted mimosa that had been meant for her. For it now was common knowledge among the troupe that Len probably had died, not from just the Pazaxa, but from a drug interaction made more deadly by the alcohol.

  As for me, I was definitely rethinking the whole peach mimosa toast thing. In fact, I’d about decided that my next guests would be lucky even to get orange juice with their breakfast!

  Unexpected, however, was the way Tessa and Bill had swooped in as surrogate parents. The pair had taken Chris under their collective wing as soon as Deputy Mullins had dropped her off at the B&B late that Friday night. They had been the ones to encourage her to go on with the play, reminding her that it was the best way to keep her mind occupied. They would take their surrogacy even further, as I’d learned the next evening from Bill.

  “Tessa and I told Chris we’d look out for her when we all get back to Atlanta,” he had explained as he accompanied me through my ritual lockdown of the house. “It’s probably too late for her to get a dorm for the school year, but we have a spare room at the house she can stay in until she figures things out.”

  They also had coordinated with Dr. Bishop, whose appearance at our opening night had not been coincidental. He’d been intending to let Susie know that the autopsy was complete and that Len’s body would be released. Instead, the Benedicts ended up arranging for the pastor to conduct a private service and cremation in Cymbeline so that Chris could take her father’s ashes home with her.

  “That Dr. Bishop is quite the persuasive man,” Tessa had confided to me after speaking with him on Sunday. “Do you know he actually drove over to the county jail and got Susie to sign a letter allowing Chris to approve all the arrangements? So after the service on Monday, we’ll drive the rental car to Savannah to sprinkle some of Len’s ashes on his parents’ graves. And then Chris will take the urn with the remaining ashes back to Atlanta.”

  Which was the reason for the separate travel arrangements with Radney and Marvin.

  There ain’t no point in just the two of us rattling around in that bus with Harry, Marvin had told me when Tessa had announced their plans. I’d rather rent us a Lincoln and drive home in comfort.

  Now, however, Radney was nodding in response to my question about Len’s memorial.

  “Yeah, we’ll be there. Len and I might not have been bros, but I worked with him for a good while. And Marvin was the guy’s partner for years, so I guess it’s only right he’s there too. Mostly, though, we’re doing it for Chris … er, Christina.”

  “Chris is fine,” a familiar voice spoke up behind us. “Christina sounds, I don’t know, kind of prissy.”

  Chris came strolling into the room, trailed by Mattie. Since her masquerade had been revealed, she’d pretty much abandoned her hipster wardrobe for clothes that, if not more stylish, were a bit more feminine. The jeans were the same tight black ones, but she’d topped them with a tailored pink blouse that showed off a figure no one had known she had. As for the dyed black hair, while nothing could be done about the color for the moment, instead of scraping it back off her forehead and covering it with the knit cap, she’d let it dry to its natural wavy state.

  She poured herself some orange juice and grabbed a slice of quiche, then sat down at the table. “I really appreciate everything all y’all have done. Right now, I don’t have anyone else. As far as I’m concerned, my mother’s dead to me, too. I mean, she tried to kill my real father … and for money.”

  Abandoning the quiche, Chris grabbed a paper napkin and abruptly swiped at her nose and eyes, while Mattie laid a consoling muzzle on her knee.

  “She called me from jail last night and admitted everything,” the young woman went on. “She acted like she’d done it all for me. She said that my father still had a life-insurance policy in my name that was worth a lot, but if Susie found out about it, she’d make him switch it to her. So Mom told me she had to … you know, take care of him so I could get the money. She said it was to make up for the back child support he owed.”

  She paused and snuffled into her napkin again. “I mean, I could have used the money for school and stuff. But no way would I have gone along with something like that. Besides, even if her stupid plan had worked, she probably would have kept all the money for herself.”

  Talk about ironic, I thought. Chris probably was going to get that insurance policy settlement, after all … and maybe a lot more, depending on what Len’s will said.

  Then the young woman straightened. “But that’s not the weirdest part. I still haven’t figured out how Susie knew who I really was.”

  “Actually, my dear, I’m afraid I may be somewhat responsible for that.”

  This came from Tessa, who had just walked into the dining room along with Bill. While the latter went to the sideboard to fetch coffee for both of them, she took a seat alongside Chris.

  “Oh, I didn’t do anything on purpose,” she hastened to clarify when Chris shot her a disbelieving look. “But you know that, as secretary of the Georgia Amateur Shakespeare Players, it is my job to do the preliminary screening of all prospective troupe members. And it just so happened that Susie was volunteering in the GASP office the day your application came in. I remember that she was looking at your headshot and said it reminded her of photos she’d seen of Len when he was a teenager. Except your hair was black, and his used to be blond.”

  “My real hair color is blond too,” Chris said in a small voice.

  Tessa gave her a comforting pat on the hand.

  “Anyhow, we laughed about it—well, at least I did—and then Susie offered to do the research on you. I was swamped with work that day so was glad of the help. She must have found out something on the Internet that allowed her to put two and two together. Not that she said anything to me about what she’d learned. In fact, she even recommended you for member
ship.”

  All the better to keep an eye on her unwanted stepdaughter, I told myself. Obviously, Susie had connected some of the same dots I’d linked together to figure out Chris’s true identity. Though, as Wife Number Two, she would have had the advantage in already knowing about Wife Number One.

  Chris sat silent another moment. “And what about my father?” she finally asked Tessa. “Do you think that Susie told him about me … or that maybe he guessed on his own?”

  “I’m not sure, my dear. But if he did know, I think he probably was pleased that his estranged daughter had gone to that sort of effort to get to know him again.”

  It was the smallest of straws that Tessa offered, but Chris seemed happy to grasp it. She snuffled again for a moment, and then excused herself from the table, leaving the rest of us to a silent meal.

  Well, almost the rest of us.

  “Anyone seen Harry this morning?” I asked. For the actor’s usual spot at the table was empty, without even Yorick there to serve as placeholder. And while everyone else’s suitcases and hanging bags were already lined up at the front door ready to be loaded into respective vehicles, I didn’t recall seeing Harry’s luggage.

  “Spielberg? He’s probably upstairs still packing,” Marvin opined. “Don’t worry, Number Nine. I’m sure he’ll be down in two shakes.”

  But when we’d all finished our respective breakfasts and Harry had still not made an appearance, I did begin to worry. Excusing myself, I headed for the tower room.

  “Harry?” I called as I knocked on the panel then opened it. I could see light from the landing, and so I called up the ladder, “Harry, are you up there? You’re late for breakfast.”