Tread the Boards (A Rivervue Community Theatre Romance, #1)

by Nikki Logan

  This time her laugh did way more than tinkle. It filled the room with its fullness and her face with light. Her joy was infectious, catching light in him and whooshing like wildfire into a spiral around his sternum.

  No. Not his sternum. His heart.

  And that was something he couldn’t afford to have happen; not when he’d be leaving this place in such a short time. Leaving Kenzie behind at Rivervue. Or a pale facsimile of Rivervue.

  Meeting someone was never part of his plan for these weeks. He was here to watch his voice find expression. He was here to watch his play come to life in the community where it meant the most. As soon as that was done, he’d start working on the next Draven, the next story, the next tiny town.

  Kenzie deserved more than a man who couldn’t tell her his truth even if he had found the words with her. Better that she never know he’d been lying to her.

  Secrets had a way of sprouting when you planted them in earth. It was up to him to keep moving so they couldn’t take root.

  Chapter Ten

  Kenzie clutched the pages of act two to herself as though they were printed on gold leaf.

  It was the most amazing script. Written from Ron de Vue’s point of view as an adult and as a child simultaneously. The two timelines ran in opposition, converging towards each other in the final act. It was the only threat to the misapprehension that Lexi was carefully cultivating, that the play was hers—the structure screamed of stage-writing experience. No way anyone would buy that this was the work of a first-timer. But so far, no-one was asking questions. Not aloud, anyway.

  The opening scenes with Ron—aged and alone in Hollywood, reflecting on his long life away from Australia—butted next to scenes with seven-year-old Ron and his older half-sisters running amok on the family farm, virtually unchecked by their busy and emotionally unavailable farmer father. Three kids who lost their mother early, looked after physically but each of them emotionally impoverished. A young Ron so terribly desperate for the love of the mother he would never know. Kenzie almost felt sorry for him.

  Almost.

  Shouldn’t that have made de Vue more determined to give his own kids the love and parental intimacy he’d never had? Or was that just in movies? Theatre had a way of getting to the truth of things more than the fantasy. A Draven, especially so.

  It was the difference between black scrim and silver screen.

  ‘So, what do you think?’ Lexi asked them all at the end of the first Wednesday-night read-through, her eyes intense.

  ‘I think it’s innovative,’ Yeates piped up immediately. ‘But it’s impossible to know where it’s going without the third act.’ His already thin lips narrowed even further. ‘It’s making it especially hard for a novice like Mackenzie.’

  It was hard to argue with the truth of a word like “novice” but she sure could take exception to Yeates’s patronising tone. Especially since she was co-keeper of the Draven secret.

  ‘I’m fine with whatever methodology Lexi’s going with,’ she offered. ‘I trust the process.’

  ‘Of course you do, Mackenzie. You don’t know any different.’

  Oh, this superciliousness was going to get tired very quickly. But before she could bite back, Lexi turned the question to the kids. ‘And what about you guys?’

  ‘I loved it!’ Emma gushed immediately. ‘I love Mary. She’s strong and knows her mind. Even when she’s young.’

  Toby wasn’t quite so gushy. ‘I thought there’d be more boys in it.’ He sounded genuinely forlorn. ‘More guns.’

  Lexi smiled and placed a gentle hand on Toby’s shoulder. She always got so soft around the kids. Especially the boys. ‘He didn’t go to war until he was eighteen. Before that, it was just him and his sisters on the farm.’

  ‘Half-sisters,’ Emma offered up.

  But Toby didn’t look any happier. His hopes for a Boys Own Adventure were clearly dashed by this news.

  ‘It’s partly what this play is about. The dichotomy of his early life with his later one.’

  ‘Di-what-omy?’

  ‘The difference,’ Lexi explained patiently. ‘Ron’s life on the farm was a million miles from his life in the war which was a million miles from his life in Hollywood.’

  ‘Is that why you’re writing it in three parts?’ Emma asked. ‘So each part of his life has its own act?’

  Kenzie glanced at Lexi as the director formulated a careful response. Keeping the truth from them all was one thing, but actively lying was another. Lexi was no liar. But needs must.

  ‘It’s what makes this play so challenging and interesting to stage, bringing those three parts together into one at the end.’

  ‘If only we had your confidence,’ Yeates grumbled.

  ‘You should have no trouble pulling this off, Richard. A man with your experience.’

  Experience. Petulance. Apparently the two weren’t mutually exclusive.

  ‘When will we see the final act? An hour before opening curtain?’

  Lexi’s face was fixed in that professional smile she had. The one that hid her true annoyance. ‘When it’s ready you’ll get it. I promise not to leave you short. There’s a few production surprises in the final act.’

  Ready was a good answer. True even when it was not true. The script was ready now, but the circumstances weren’t. Lexi had to keep this secret a while longer yet. Especially with Emma in the cast. Imagine the full script laying around the Conroy household. Mark Conroy was the CEO of Brachen Shire.

  ‘Well, I’m intrigued,’ Kenzie said brightly. ‘And I’m dying to know what will happen when the two parts of his life join up in the final act. So that bodes well for audience anticipation.’

  Lexi looked at her like she’d just thrown her a lifebuoy in choppy seas. ‘That’s the plan!’ Then she focused her eyes tightly. ‘Does that mean you’re staying on, Kenz?’

  Did it? The thought of dealing with Yeates’s arrogance for weeks on end did not appeal, but the opportunity to be part of something this huge … That was worth a little social discomfort.

  ‘Yeah,’ she breathed. ‘Looks like I am.’

  ‘Yay!’ Emma said, leaping out of her seat and clapping.

  Lexi’s smile said she’d had no doubt, but her eyes had leaped, clapping, out of their seat as well. Toby looked entirely unmoved and Yeates just looked smug. Like he’d been personally involved in the casting.

  How she longed to tell him that she was making this decision despite him, not because of him.

  ‘So, how’s it going to go?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll work with you individually at first,’ Lexi said. ‘And then bring you together in a week or so and start doing group work. There are only thirty-three days before the bicentennial, so we’ll have to work fast. Better clear your diaries.’ She handed out paper copies of the calendar for the four weeks of rehearsals. ‘If you can all write your availabilities on here, I’ll come up with a master rehearsal timetable and overlay it on the Larrikin production schedule. I know it’s tight but it’s doable. You guys are pros.’

  Kenzie let herself join in on Emma’s excitement even though she absolutely wasn’t a pro at anything around performance. Except how to hide it from people.

  Her first rehearsal schedule. Normally she just received the production schedule—the brown bits on the calendar that had already started a few weeks back. This would be the first time that hers would include the colour reserved for cast rehearsals.

  A whole new world.

  And it was sunny yellow.

  ‘Damned agents!’ Dylan slammed his laptop shut on a curse, yanked the buds out of his ears and tossed them across the little table. At least two other customers in Milk’n’Honey glanced his way but he ignored them long enough that they went back about their business.

  Ordinarily, he trusted his management team’s judgement completely. He’d worked with them long enough that he could speak with them, which made things easier. But ordinarily, their views aligned with his more closely. Or at lea
st they sold them to him as if they did.

  Not this time.

  All he’d wanted from his people was a good strategy for coming out as Draven. All he’d got from them were a million reasons why he shouldn’t do it. A hundred million, actually.

  What did it say about his work that his own reps thought that it would diminish in value by half if he took away the whole mystery gimmick?

  Was that all his plays were? Gimmicky?

  They’d argued, he’d pressed. They’d cajoled, he’d insisted. But, finally, they’d threatened and he found it hard to argue with the kinds of numbers they’d thrown out. Someone bright at Hansen & Associates had done some kind of market test a year or two earlier and captured the results in a startling graphic that they’d kindly screen-shared for him so he could see the carnage for himself.

  The impressive tanking of his income. Like a downhill ski event. The artist formerly known as Draven.

  But these guys were supposed to be the best. They charged accordingly. So he’d left them with the challenge and gave them a week to properly test it and see whether they could turn the proverbial sow’s ear into a purse silky enough to keep everyone happy. Including him.

  He gathered everything together in a bundle and scooped it under one arm while signalling to Phantom with the other before tossing his thanks to Dasha Murumbul as he stalked out of her cafe.

  ‘Thanks for the wi-fi.’

  For a guy who spent so much of his time pretending to be someone he wasn’t, you’d think he’d be better at lying to a bunch of virtual strangers. After all, that’s all the people of Brachen were to him. He’d known them, what, weeks? Why exactly was he obsessing about the same lie he’d been telling for years?

  Brachen wasn’t the first town that had been nice to him.

  Brachen wasn’t the first town to have welcomed him inside their theatre.

  They weren’t even the first people who’d let him inside their homes.

  But they sure were the first people who’d let him inside their heart. One heart in particular.

  Ugh.

  Dylan’s feet stilled and he turned his head first left, then right, along the Brachen River; deep grey-blue, lined with its trailing willows and banked by pretty native sedges filled with hidden life. Somewhere below, a duck was giving the audition of its life.

  This place, this whole town … There was something very soothing about it. Something very right. And it wasn’t just about the hours that he spent with Kenzie in that little, windowless props room.

  Brachen was changing him in ways he’d never expected.

  It was only as he stepped back down off the footbridge on Rivervue’s side that he realised he’d farewelled Dasha aloud—in public.

  First Kenzie, now the local cafe owner.

  He was doing the full Tin Man; slowly unlocking after an eternity standing, frozen and oilless. Was it him? Or was it this place? He’d had other coffees in other towns and never spontaneously spoken.

  The Brachen Bicentennial poster mocked him as he let himself back in Rivervue’s foyer.

  If it was this place, how was he going to go back to business as usual in four weeks when Larrikin debuted to the world and he moved on to his next project, his next town?

  How was he going to go back to silence?

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘When I offered to come with you to tell your parents, I didn’t think you’d take me up on it,’ Dylan murmured as they approached the meticulously painted picket gate between multi-coloured fragrant hedges. It was easily one of the prettiest cottages he’d seen around Brachen.

  Kenzie led the way up the short, pretty path. ‘Not my parents. I’ll tell them myself at dinner tomorrow. This is Nanna’s house. She’s going to take this hardest; I could use the support.’

  So much dread.

  So incredibly baffling.

  ‘I won’t exactly be able to contribute,’ he reminded her, though Kenzie was hardly about to forget something as fundamental as his mutism.

  She paused on the single step to the porch of the immaculately maintained old cottage and turned back to him. ‘I don’t need you to contribute, I just need you to be there.’

  Need.

  That was a big word. An even bigger concept. He’d had a lot of needs in his life, but this might be the first time anyone had ever needed him. Or had the emotional honesty to say it aloud.

  Answering was a no-brainer. ‘You’ve got me.’

  Nanna Russell surely had to be a fearsome crone in her gingerbread house, for Kenzie to be so afraid of her. Yet the elderly woman that opened the door to them seemed everything but. First up, she was tiny. Smaller even than Kenzie. She was silver-haired and bespectacled and just downright adorable with the richest and deepest of smiles. She looked like she’d climbed out of a cookie box.

  It hit him then. Kenzie wasn’t afraid of her nan, she was afraid for her. Because of her love for the woman. And the feeling was very clearly mutual. Nanna’s eyes sparkled with love when she saw who was at her door.

  ‘Here you are,’ the softest of voices said. ‘The kettle’s just boiled.’

  She pushed the screen door open and stepped back to give them access into her home. Perfectly tidy. Furnished circa 1978.

  ‘Dylan, this is my nan, Lucy Russell.’ There was a tightness in Kenzie’s voice that infected him, made him anxious where before he’d only been vaguely curious. ‘Nanna, this is Dylan, a friend of mine. He’s visiting Brachen from Ottawa. He speaks French.’

  Every part of that was true. And it neatly circumvented the need for Kenzie to lie to someone important to her and so, in that regard, it did the trick.

  ‘Bonjour, Dylan!’ Nanna said with exaggerated brightness and a terrible accent, obviously exhausting her supply of French. Her papery hand then rested on his and drew him towards her, curling around his fingers a little. Her blue, blue eyes sparkled and as they did they looked decades younger and weirdly familiar. But they were just a match for Kenzie’s. ‘Come in, both of you.’

  The way she looked at Kenzie with total adoration, there was nothing in Nanna’s manner that he could imagine objecting to her granddaughter taking the stage. If anything, she looked like a woman who would unconditionally support Mackenzie if she decided to liberate every cow in this district from its paddock.

  In a matter of minutes, they were both seated in a bright open sunroom at the back of the cottage and provided with tea and butter cake. For the first ten minutes he sat quietly as Kenzie and Nanna chatted in equally soft tones; no old-lady monologue or polite small talk, Kenzie was as genuinely interested in Nanna’s garden as Nanna was in Kenzie’s latest work tale.

  But he knew Kenzie well enough to see the discomfort in her eyes, her posture. And of course, Nanna did too.

  ‘Mackenzie,’ she breathed. ‘What are you here for? You’re making me twitch.’

  ‘Sorry Nanna. I just …’ She took a deep breath. ‘I wanted you to know that Rivervue Theatre’s new production is for Bicentennial Festival.’

  That wasn’t even the bad news part, but Nanna’s frail little body froze in an awkward position. Armed for bad news.

  ‘It’s called Larrikin – The Woman Behind the Man Behind the Legend. It’s about Ron de Vue, Nan.’

  That frail spine was going to snap clean through if she stiffened any further. It took Dylan a moment to notice that his was just as tight. He glanced at Kenzie.

  ‘What woman?’ Nanna croaked.

  Kenzie’s brows dropped. ‘It’s weird but it’s his sister, Mary.’

  That brought Nanna’s eyes back up to hers. ‘Mary? Oh.’

  ‘Did you know her?’ she asked.

  It only occurred to him then that Kenzie’s nan was probably old enough to have known the de Vue family—or parts of it, anyway. Brachen was a small town now, even smaller back then.

  ‘I know of her. She was very nice. Toughened by the land but so very kind after …’

  Kenzie’s usually pink cheeks were blanching as
he watched. He wanted to reach across the gap between their seats and take her hand but that would only derail what she’d started to say. Instead, he just pumped as much confidence as he could in his gaze. To bolster her from across the table.

  ‘There’s more, Nan. I’m … um …’

  Kenzie glanced at him somewhat desperately, looking for inspiration. All he could offer her was an encouraging smile.

  Come on, Beautiful. You can do this.

  ‘I’ve been cast in the play, Nan. I’m playing Mary.’

  If there was one thing harder than watching a frail old lady cry, it was watching a frail old lady try not to. Nanna summoned up all her strength to stop those glittering tears from actually spilling over—and in that moment the family resemblance with Kenzie was profound—but it was a visible battle and they were both losing.

  ‘Oh, Nanna.’ Kenzie’s tears spilled over, rolling down pale cheeks. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  What the hell? This was proper devastation unfolding in front of him and he suddenly felt like an intruder in this most personal of moments. Confused, he flicked his attention between the two women, anxiety ratcheting up his back.

  ‘Mackenzie.’ The word was as papery as the hand that reached out to her granddaughter. ‘Don’t cry.’

  That just doubled Kenzie’s waterworks into full body racks, but Nanna was made of stern stuff and she still refused to let a single tear actually roll. The two clutched hands as Kenzie struggled to check her emotions.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Nanna crooned. ‘Don’t cry, sweet, sweet girl.’

  Okay. What was he missing? Glancing around the flower-filled space told him nothing, it only confused him more. Such sorrow did not belong here among such prettiness. He was just going to have to ride this out. Entirely impotent.

  ‘I’ve let you down,’ Kenzie sobbed.

  ‘No. Never.’ Nanna looked positively fierce. ‘It’s just a silly play. It means nothing.’

  Well, that stung! He wondered if Kenzie felt it, too, given how invested she was in Larrikin. But she was so overwrought right now she wasn’t feeling anything but grief.