Down the Rabbit Hole

by Peter Abrahams

  Ingrid had never met anyone like Jill Monteiro. Jill was an artist, not wannabe but real. Besides her role in Tongue and Groove, she’d done two off-Broadway plays, guested as a nervous flight attendant on Friends, and created a one-woman show based on the life of Jackie Onassis that she’d performed at colleges all over New England.

  “Hi, everybody,” she said, standing at the front of the stage, a slim little figure dressed in black, with curly black hair and big dark eyes. “What a great turnout, and I’m glad to see some newcomers.”

  Ingrid, sitting in an aisle seat ten or twelve rows back, glanced around. She saw lots of the same people who auditioned for every production, like Mr. Santos of Santos’s Texaco, who did a great wiseguy accent (even when he wasn’t in a wiseguy role) and Mrs. Breen, the teller at Central State Savings and Loan, who couldn’t learn her lines but could cry on cue, real tears just pouring down her chubby face (an effect that had made her performance as Mrs. Claus in the Christmas pageant really stand out); but there were also some she didn’t know; and oh my God—who was that just coming in at the back? Not…but it was.

  Chloe Ferrand.

  Chloe Ferrand, daughter of Tim, Ingrid’s dad’s boss, was the most beautiful thirteen-year-old girl in town, maybe the most beautiful girl in town period. And certainly the only one to be recognized as officially beautiful by the outside world: She was already represented by a real modeling agency in New York and had appeared in the Plow and Hearth catalog twice, once in sheepskin slippers and once lounging by a stack of Georgia fatwood kindling. Ingrid and Chloe had played together when they were little, but Chloe had left the public-school system at the end of sixth grade and now attended Cheshire Country Day. C.C.D. had its own theater program, for God’s sake. So what was Chloe doing here? Only one reason Ingrid could think of: Alice. Chloe wanted the role.

  “…have to take other parts,” Jill was saying. “And there won’t be enough parts to go around, but everyone who wants will get some job in the production. Any questions?”

  Mr. Stubbs of Stubbs Engineering stuck up his hand. “How are we going to do the parts where Alice gets smaller and bigger?”

  “We’ll get to that, Gene,” Jill said. “Did everybody sign in on the clipboard? Scripts are down front, with Post-its marking the audition scene for each role. Wait in the green room for your call.”

  Ingrid loved the green room. Some Prescott had gone all out. The walls were rich and creamy, with fluted green marble columns painted on them, the floor was a checkerboard of green and cream tiles, and the furniture was all green leather.

  Ingrid sat on a footstool in the corner, examined the script. “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. Adapted for the stage by Jill Monteiro.” She turned to the page marked with the Alice Post-it: an excerpt from the mad tea party scene. There were only two speaking roles, Alice and the Mad Hatter.

  HATTER: Have you guessed the riddle yet?

  ALICE: I give up. What’s the answer?

  HATTER: I haven’t the slightest…

  “Hello, Ingrid.”

  Ingrid looked up: Chloe.

  “Hi,” Ingrid said.

  “How’s everything?” Chloe said.

  “Good.”

  “Cool,” Chloe said. “How’s what’s-her-name?”

  “Stacy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good.”

  Chloe nodded. A wisp of golden-blond hair fell over one eye; she tossed it back into place, a little movement that seemed to attract all the light in the room. “Interested in any role in particular?” she asked.

  “Alice,” said Ingrid.

  “What a coincidence,” said Chloe. “You’d be great.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But maybe even better as the White Rabbit.”

  “The White Rabbit?”

  Chloe nodded encouragingly. She had the brightest smile in creation, would probably be doing Crest commercials any day now. She also seemed to have a tan, although it wasn’t a month for tans, even for the Chloes of the world. Not summer, not Christmas, not spring break.

  “You’ve got a tan,” Ingrid said—couldn’t stop herself.

  “Barbados,” Chloe said. “Just for the weekend. How long have you had braces?”

  “Ingrid Levin-Hill,” called someone from the green-room door. “You’re next.”

  Already? She hadn’t even read the scene once. Ingrid rose, a little unsteady.

  “Break a leg,” said Chloe.

  There were two stools onstage. Ingrid sat on one. Mr. Santos sat on the other, the script in his huge hand, oil stains under the fingernails.

  “Anytime,” said Jill Monteiro, from somewhere in the darkened seats.

  “Me?” said Mr. Santos.

  “From the top,” said Jill.

  Mr. Santos frowned at the script. “I’m at the top,” he said. He shook himself, as though discarding the character of Mr. Santos and allowing the inner Mad Hatter to emerge, then cleared his throat, forcefully enough to cause bleeding, Ingrid thought, and spoke through gritted teeth: “Okay, paisan, time’s up on that freakin’ riddle.”

  Out in the darkness, something dropped on the floor. Ingrid opened her mouth, closed it, began again: “I give up.” Her instinct was to be breezy in the tea-party scene, but following Mr. Santos’s lead, she tried nervous instead, flashing him an anxious glance. “What’s the answer?”

  Mr. Santos laughed suddenly, startling her—a loud, cruel, triumphant laugh, but more Daffy Duck than Joe Pesci. For such a big guy, Mr. Santos had a surprisingly high voice. “How the hell would I—” he began, before a cell phone rang in the pocket of his overalls. “Geez.” He fished it out and said, “Santos,” listened for a moment, then rose and peered past the footlights, shading his eyes. “Hey. Screwup down at the station. Be back as soon as I can, okay?”

  Jill’s voice came out of the darkness. “No hurry,” she said.

  “Thanks,” said Mr. Santos. He turned to Ingrid and in a stage whisper said, “That scared look you did—wow. Just like Diane Keaton in Godfather Two.”

  Mr. Santos left. Jill called out, “Send another Mad Hatter.” Then to Ingrid: “This will probably be a little more conventional.” And to herself, so quietly Ingrid almost didn’t hear: “Please God.”

  A man walked onto the stage, script in hand. Ingrid had never seen him before. He was tall, with short-cropped gray hair, high cheekbones, and only one or two wrinkles, but deep.

  “Your name, please?” said Jill.

  He gazed into the orchestra seats. “My name is Vincent Dunn,” he said.

  “Thanks for coming out,” Jill said. “This is Ingrid.”

  He turned to her. “Hello, Ingrid.” He had a soft voice, kind of a monotone.

  “Hi,” said Ingrid.

  He sat on the vacant stool.

  “Whenever you’re ready, Mr. Dunn.”

  “Vincent, please,” he said in his quiet voice. He glanced down at the script. His face seemed to change, although Ingrid was at a loss to say exactly how, but it became a little unstable. And when he spoke, his voice had changed too, no longer a monotone but not musical either: It was too discordant for that.

  “Have you guessed the riddle yet?” he said; there was a slight pause before riddle, and the word itself seemed to squirm around aggressively, like a living thing. Maybe it was the aggression part that reminded Ingrid of her talk with Ms. Groome, and the way Ms. Groome had trapped her with questions.

  “I give up,” Ingrid said; and heard defiance in her tone, defiance she wished she’d mustered with Ms. Groome. She hadn’t cheated on that quiz. “What’s the answer?” Ingrid said, making it a demand.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Vincent Dunn, slowing down the rhythm slightly on idea to suggest just the opposite of what he was saying, that he knew the answer damn well.

  The script now directed (wearily) for the next line of dialogue, but Ingrid found herself narrowing her eyes and sharpening her tone. “Why waste time
asking riddles that have no answers?”

  “Aha!” said Vincent Dunn, reading from the script: “Another riddle!” He smiled like he was enjoying himself.

  “Not all questions are riddles,” said Ingrid, giving him the schoolmarm effect, straight from Ms. Groome.

  Now for the first time, Vincent Dunn raised his eyes from the page and looked at her. A long time seemed to pass. “Your hair wants cutting,” he said.

  “You should learn not to make personal remarks,” Ingrid said, maybe getting too prissy; she wanted a do-over on that one. “It’s very rude.”

  He gazed at her for a moment, as though offended, then changed completely, growing brisk and host-like: “I want a clean cup,” he said. “Let’s all move one place down.” All at once, utterly insane.

  Ingrid tried some exasperation, Scarlett O’Hara style. “This is the stupidest tea party I ever was at in all my life!”

  Vincent Dunn went still, then delivered the last line on the Post-it page in a quiet, reasonable tone that was somehow still insane: “Who’s making personal remarks now?”

  A moment of silence. Jill Monteiro came down the aisle and into view beyond the glare of the footlights.

  “Interesting,” she said. “A little…darker than I’d imagined, but interesting. Have you done much theater, Mr. Dunn?”

  “Vincent, please,” he said, back in the soft monotone, his face again inexpressive. “A little bit. Years ago.”

  “Where was this?” said Jill.

  “Various places. Nothing worth mentioning.”

  “Are you new in town?”

  He nodded, then looked down at his feet. He wore brown leather lace ups like Dad’s, but scuffed and without those tiny holes in the toecap. Could middle-aged men be shy? Vincent Dunn seemed to be. “I thought maybe this might be a way of meeting a few people,” he said.

  “It’s a great way of meeting people,” Jill said. “And I’m delighted you came out. In fact, Vincent, with Mr. Santos called away, would you mind staying out here while we run through the other Alices?”

  “Not at all,” said Vincent Dunn.

  “And one other thing,” she said. “I was thinking—depending on the abilities of whoever got the role—of having the character sing the little song that’s in the book. The words aren’t coming to me offhand but it goes to the tune of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.’ Can you sing, Vincent?”

  “A little,” he said. He licked his lips and sang.

  “Twinkle twinkle little star,

  How I wonder what you are.

  Up above the world so high,

  Like a diamond in the sky.

  Twinkle twinkle little star,

  How I wonder what you are.”

  It was beautiful. He hit every note and had a much bigger voice than Ingrid would have guessed; but more than that, he gave you the feeling of great big universe and little lonely guy.

  “Wow,” said Jill. Ingrid knew Jill was much too professional to give anything away at auditions, but she did now.

  He looked at his feet.

  Ingrid got off her stool. “Thanks, Mr. Dunn.”

  “Vincent,” he said to her. “Please.”

  “And thank you, Ingrid,” Jill said. “I’ll let you know by tomorrow.” She called to someone in the wings: “Send in Chloe Ferrand.”

  Ingrid went into the entrance hall, a huge octagonal room hung with artists’ renderings and blueprints of the reconstruction plans, and looked out the window. No silver TT, no green MPV. She sighed. After a minute or two she began sidling back toward the theater. She opened one of the doors, stood behind the last row of seats.

  Up onstage, Chloe, glowing in the footlights, was saying: “Why waste time asking riddles that have no answers?” Her voice ran up and down the scale like a flute. She shook that blond wisp out of her eye, all girlish innocence and wide-eyed freshness, at the same time impossibly good-looking, oozing stage presence.

  Vincent Dunn said, “Aha. Another riddle.” He smiled again as though enjoying himself, maybe this time even more. Even more. Did that mean Chloe was doing better? One thing was certain: Ingrid hadn’t looked like Chloe up there, not close. A thousand Dr. Binkermans couldn’t take her to that level. After a minute or two she knew she’d blown it, her reading way off the mark.

  Ingrid went home in a gloomy mood. Wide-eyed freshness was obviously the way to go. What had she been thinking?

  The Echo lay on the kitchen table.

  Big headline: TWO ARRESTS IN FLATS MURDER. No surprise there, but seeing it in print gave her a jolt anyway.

  The Echo had pictures of the men, two scuzzy-looking guys named Albert Morales and Lon Stingley. They shared a basement apartment on Packer Street, were currently unemployed, and had long criminal records—drug possession, public drunkenness, vagrancy, car theft, shoplifting. Ingrid went over that part twice. What was missing? No crimes of violence, no breaking and entering. She gazed at their faces, faces with too much hair, too many scars, not enough smarts. The bigger the crime, Holmes said, the more obvious the motive. That was one of his basic rules. So what was the motive here? Ingrid had heard these men, drunk, yes, but sounding mournful about Kate’s death, as though they’d liked her. Did that mean they hadn’t done it? Did it mean one of them couldn’t have broken in and stood over the bed? Why repair the grate first? Why repair it at all? And what was the point of that break-in? Ingrid had no answers. Why couldn’t this have been an airtight case?

  Full-length photos might have helped, especially if they’d showed Albert Morales or Lon Stingley in dirty Adidas sneakers spattered with green paint. But these were just their faces. She stared at the photos until they turned into meaningless dots.

  twelve

  WEDNESDAY AFTER SCHOOL. Ingrid home alone. She sat at the kitchen table, math homework in front of her, rain whipping by outside at a sharp angle. She counted the problems—six factoring, eight solving for x. X, that obsession of Ms. Groome and all her buddies in the math police.

  Ingrid gazed at the page in the textbook, saw a maze, a thicket, a minefield, endless. Suppose she could do each problem in two minutes; the whole thing would take six plus eight makes fourteen times two—twenty-eight minutes. Practically a whole half hour, a serious amount of time, torn right out of her life, lost without a trace, wasted forever. A sin.

  “Can you believe this, Nigel?”

  Nigel, sleeping on the floor, one paw awkwardly over his face as though warding off the light, had no response.

  But what about if she went a little faster, one and a half minutes per problem? That would be…let’s see, fourteen times a minute and a half, minute and a half being tricky…twenty-one minutes. Still too big a chunk of time. One a minute would make fourteen minutes, but even that, so close to a quarter of an hour, was too much. Math homework was worth ten minutes, not a second more. That meant doing better than one problem a minute.

  How much better? How quickly did she have to do each problem to get the whole stupid thing over with in ten minutes? Was there a way to figure it out? Time—ten minutes. Problems—fourteen. What else was there? Just the amount of time per problem, which was what she wanted to know. Call that G, for Griddie.

  She wrote G on a corner of the textbook page, remembering too late the rule about not writing in textbooks. G was the time for one problem. For all of them, it would be…fourteen times G. She wrote 14 in front of the G. Total time—14G. But total time was also ten minutes. Hey. 14G = 10. So G…turned out to be one of those messy divisions that wouldn’t come out even, forty-two point something. Call it forty-three. Forty-three seconds. Hey! That was the answer. Wow. Forty-three seconds per problem, painlessly quick, if you wanted to be done in ten minutes. But impossible, as least for her. She sucked at math.

  The phone rang. Ingrid grabbed it, thinking Jill Monteiro, her heart racing even though she knew she’d blown the audition. But it wasn’t Jill.

  “Ingrid? Hi.”

  “Hi Joey.”

  “Hi.”

>   “Hi.”

  “What’s happening?” Joey said.

  “Homework,” said Ingrid.

  “Me too. Math.”

  “Me too.”

  “Um,” said Joey. “Who have you got?”

  “For math?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Ms. Groome.”

  “You’re in Algebra Two?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m in Pre-Algebra. Mr. Prindle.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Gay.”

  “Gay gay?”

  “No,” said Joey. “Just gay.”

  There was a silence.

  “How’s Nigel?” Joey said. “Your dog.”

  “He’s sleeping right now,” Ingrid said. “He sleeps a lot.”

  Another silence. “Do you think dogs dream?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “About what?”

  Ingrid glanced at Nigel. If he was dreaming, there was no sign. “I don’t know,” Ingrid said.

  “You think there’s a way to find out?” Joey said.

  “What dogs dream about?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You mean like an experiment or something?”

  “Yeah.”

  An interesting idea, the kind she wouldn’t have had in a million years. “You could do something for the science fair,” she said.

  “I’ve already got a project.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m building a catapult.”

  “A catapult?”

  “Like in Lord of the Rings where the orcs lobbed the bodies into Minas Tirith.”

  “Cool.”

  “Not full-scale,” said Joey. “I could lob maybe mice.”

  “That wouldn’t be as scary,” Ingrid said.