Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle

by H. Mel Malton

  Twenty-Four

  DRAGON: How dare you touch my treasure pile? How dare you touch my stuff? / It took me years to steal this, but I’ll never have enough.

  -The Glass Flute, Scene ix

  I have to admit that I was more than a little miffed. I don’t often lose my temper, and if I’m angry I cry more often than I yell. However, this deliberate vandalism of my work felt like a kick in the kidneys. I was, after all, the puppet designer on this show, and I’d built the pink daisy myself.

  A foam rubber sleeve, painted green, was the stem, which grew up out of a plastic flower pot-base, rather along the lines of an Audrey-the-plant puppet in Little Shop of Horrors. The flower pot has a hole in the bottom, and the puppeteer (Shane, in this case) wears the puppet like a bulky, full-length glove. The arm becomes a living stem, and the hand goes into the flower-head, to work the simplest of hand-puppet mouths. It’s a fun character to manipulate, because the neck/stem is pliable, which makes the head more expressive. The mouth is small and lined with soft terrycloth, so the hand operating it can do neat things, like bunching the material up to make the lips purse. It was one of my favourites. I’d soft-sculpted a wide, sweet face that exuded flowery innocence. The day before, Shane had worked the daisy like a master, giving it exactly the personality it needed to come alive.

  The little mouth was stretched and distorted now, choked by the thick pink sausage of foam rubber. The audio cable around its neck was neatly knotted. Another puppet murder, horribly sexual this time.

  I guess I overreacted a bit. I pounded up the stairs, two at a time, to ask Kim to call the police. Then I continued on up to the rehearsal room.

  Ruth was just coming down to find me.

  “My audio cable’s disappeared again,” she said.

  “It’s downstairs,” I said, “wrapped around the neck of the daisy.” Kim appeared at the bottom of the staircase.

  “Polly, the police want to know the nature of the injuries,” she said. I had gabbled to her that there had been an accident in the shop. (I told you I overreacted.)

  “You called the police?” Ruth said. “Are you crazy, kid?” The cast had come spilling out of the studio to see what was happening.

  “Someone’s murdered the daisy puppet,” I said to them. “And someone hung the Kevin puppet yesterday, and they’ve used audio cables every time and Jason’s vanished and don’t you guys think this is serious?”

  Meredith turned to Juliet, who was beside her on the landing.

  “Now do you see what I mean?” she said, loudly enough to make sure I heard it.

  “Polly, dear, what do you mean someone’s murdered a puppet?” Juliet said. “What were you smoking at lunch?”

  “Come down and see,” I said, beginning to feel like a fool. “But don’t touch anything. Becker will want to see this.” Fat chance. I went to the phone, where an OPP dispatcher was waiting patiently on the end of the line.

  “The other lady said there was a shop accident,” she said. “Do you need an ambulance?”

  I tried to explain.

  “You’re saying that someone has vandalized a puppet? That’s too bad, ma’am, but I don’t think you should be calling us,” she said.

  “Is Becker there?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Detective Constable Mark Becker. Is he there, please?”

  “Um, not at the moment, ma’am. Would you like his voice mail?”

  I said yes, and there was a click.

  An androgynous, “just stay calm” recorded voice came on the line. “Welcome to the Laingford OPP voice mail system,” it said. “If you know the extension of the person you are calling, please enter it now.” I waited for other options, having no idea what Becker’s damn extension might be. The receptionist could at least have connected me directly, I thought. The cast members, along with Ruth, Juliet and Kim were heading for the shop stairs.

  “Press One for our staff directory, or spell the first three letters of the name of the person you wish to speak to.” I stabbed at the buttons, struggling with my mild numerical dyslexia to spell what I thought was “BEC.”

  “Don’t touch anything down there, okay, you guys?” I called to the group on the shop stairs. The voice-mail system clicked once, then delivered a brain-liquefying, high-decibel fax screech into my ear. I slammed the phone down and followed the crowd.

  “If one of you did this as a joke, it’s not the least bit funny,” I said. They were gathered in a circle around the violated puppet on the work table.

  “What makes you think one of us did it?” Meredith said.

  “Nobody here is that sick,” Amber said. I was more interested in Shane’s reaction. The day before, when he had seen the Kevin puppet hanging in the box, he had moaned and turned sheet-white. This time I didn’t catch his initial reaction, but his lips were set in a thin white line, and he looked ill.

  “That puppet was fine at twelve-thirty,” I said. “Whoever set this up did it sometime between then and now.”

  “We’ve all been in the studio, Polly,” Juliet said.

  “Not everybody, not all the time. People were out at lunch. We all came back at different times. People left to go to the washroom. We weren’t working with everybody at once. Kim, did you see anyone go down to the shop?”

  “I’ve been working on the benefit project with Sam and Rico in the back,” Kim said, looking uncomfortable. Generally, she never left her desk. Maybe she was feeling guilty about being away from standing guard over the front door.

  “Well, I left for a lunch thing at 11:30, so I’m out of the loop,” Rico said. I looked at him, surprised. It wasn’t as if I was accusing my friends, was it?

  “It was probably some kid who snuck in from the park,” Brad said. “Spring fever and a dirty mind, you know? This is gross, Polly, but it’s not exactly murder. Any more than Jason taking off was murder. Can we get back to rehearsal? I want to try my new song.”

  “We’re not doing any music until I see if this audio cable still works,” Ruth said, moving forward.

  “Wait! Don’t touch it!” I said. Obviously, everybody thought I was crazy. Maybe I had been smoking too much dope, or maybe I’d just had too much on my mind and was seeing crime in pranks and murder in a simple case of lover’s sulk. Whatever the case, my credibility as a competent stage manager and all-round sane person was being undermined, big-time.

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” Ruth said.

  “Polly, that cop’s not going to come and take fingerprints off a goddamn puppet,” Meredith said.

  “Okay, so he’s not. But I think this is beyond just a bunch of dicking around. Where’s Tobin?” I knew he kept a Polaroid camera around for shots of van packs and the occasional record of a nice bit of pyro circuitry.

  “He went to Toronto about an hour ago to pick up the UV bulbs,” Kim said.

  “I’d like to get back,” Juliet said. “We can talk about this later, Polly.” I had been standing there, feeling like an escaped nutcase, scanning the shop for the camera. There it was, on the supply shelf next to a tin of contact cement. I grabbed it and took a quick shot of the mayhem before Ruth removed the audio cable from the daisy’s stem and everybody trooped silently back to rehearsal. Ruth gave me a speak to you later look, and so did Juliet. I expected a carpet-call before the day was out.

  Shane lagged behind and spoke to me quietly at the bottom of the stairs.

  “You free after rehearsal, Polly? We’ve got to talk.”

  “Sure, Shane. About this prank-stuff, you mean?” He nodded.

  “Falls Motel Pub,” he said. “Around five-thirty?”

  “Okay.”

  To say I was intrigued would be putting it mildly.

  The cable, in spite of having been used as a garrotte, worked fine. Ruth was shutting me out, which hurt, but the rest of the rehearsal was her baby anyway, so I stayed out of it, taking notes.

  Brad loved his new song and Shane, as the Axe, came up with a peculiar little wordless voice, sor
t of nasal and full of humour, to accompany Brad’s singing. We would have to keep a lid on Shane’s enthusiasm, though, because the Axe tended to interject with an expressive whine whenever the Woodsman had a line. It was funny sometimes, but not every time, and Brad’s patience was not a commodity plentiful enough to squander.

  “Sorry about being short with you down there,” Ruth said softly to me as she handed over the photocopies of Brad’s new song. “Rose called to say her brother is probably going to die soon, so she’s staying on for another two weeks. I’m feeling bitchy and abandoned.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “We’ll talk about it after, if you want.” She squeezed my hand and the music rehearsal continued.

  At the end of the day, Amber volunteered to put the puppets away into their road-cases.

  “We might as well get in the practice,” she said. I had been wondering how to bring the subject up myself, for fear of further puppet-mayhem, and I appreciated what I recognized as a sympathetic gesture.

  “I was going to suggest that,” Juliet said.

  It was Brad who noticed that the “what’s where” chocolate-box diagrams had been tampered with. The diagrams on the lids of both the red case and the blue case had little drawings of each puppet or prop, and how they fit into the box. The drawings for the Kevin puppet and the daisy puppet had ugly red X-es drawn through them, in what looked like crimson lipstick.

  “The puppy did it,” Meredith said.

  Twenty-Five

  CAT: That flute packs more potential than you think, my little friend / Keep it safe and never lend it, or you’ll meet a sorry end.

  -The Glass Flute, Scene v

  The cast was on break and nobody came downstairs to have a smoke with me, so I had time to brood by myself, sitting at the worktable where the violated daisy still lay, corpse-like. I decided to start a kind of log-book of incidents after that. I turned to the back of my stage manager’s notebook and wrote “Weirdness” at the top of it, then lit a cigarette and prepared to write down every odd thing that had happened so far, but before I could get to my list, I had to give the daisy back some of its dignity.

  I removed the rolled-up foam petals from the puppet’s mouth and unravelled them. Like a pink twinkie, the outer wrapping surrounded a special filling—a tiny scrap of paper, many times folded. When it was opened up and smoothed out, it turned out to be a piece of a photograph, torn from a magazine or something, with a glossy finish. The people in the photo were smiling. It looked to be part of a group shot, because there were legs and torsos filling in the background. The fragment showed a man’s face, with weathered, dark features and a kind of rakish charm, flanked by two other faces that were vaguely familiar, both young men. Other faces and bodies in the shot had been torn away, leaving only those three. The young men were younger versions of Jason and Shane, I thought. Somebody, and I was sure that it was a member of the cast, was trying to tell me something.

  I started my Weird Incidents list.

  Shane is taken in by Rico’s outfit. When he discovers this, he goes berserk and tries to kill him.

  Jason’s vest is found floating in the shop pool. No Jason. (Okay—I was willing to entertain the possibility that Jason had scrammed when Shane arrived. I didn’t buy it, but I was willing to borrow it.)

  The vest is moored to the deck with an audio cable from Ruth’s gear. It’s tied in a neat knot.

  Meredith implies that Shane has once been a hooker. (The nasty remark just before Becker arrived in the studio.)

  Amber reveals that she’s pregnant.

  Somebody sneaks into Juliet’s office at night to search the pockets of Jason’s vest.

  Somebody hangs up the Kevin puppet with another of Ruth’s audio cables, and Shane says a message was left for him to come in early.

  Somebody violates the Daisy puppet and leaves a cryptic photograph behind, to be found by the person who would ultimately have to fix it.

  There were seven incidents so far. Amber’s pregnancy could hardly be called an incident, an accident maybe. While I hadn’t a clue as to who was responsible, I was reasonably sure that there would be more weirdness. Three of the incidents were decidedly sinister. I was still expecting Jason to show up dead, although nobody else seemed to agree with me. The two puppet murders were just plain spooky, and I was convinced that they were connected to Jason’s disappearance in some way.

  I did a quick glue-job to stick the petals back on the puppet head and stashed the photo in the envelope flap at the back of my notebook, along with the polaroid of the scene of the daisy crime. No matter what anybody said, I was going to go and show this stuff to Becker and Morrison. At least then they’d know that something peculiar was going on, even if they weren’t interested in pursuing it. Then, when Jason turned up dead, there would be a file of sorts for them to go on. I wouldn’t even take the credit, dammit, just as long as they used it.

  After the break, we began the arduous work of hauling all the equipment downstairs and learning how to pack the van. Jason had left his “who lugs what” list in his promptbook, and we followed it, more or less, just because it was there. He’d assigned light stuff to Amber and to the original actor, Steven Higgs, whom Shane had replaced. He’d given Brad heavy stuff, but then he hadn’t met him and didn’t know (Brad told me while we were striking the set) that he had back trouble. So I just switched Brad’s and Shane/Steven’s list. Some of the puppets (the dragon and the serpent) were too bulky to fit into the road cases and had their own personal hockey bags for transportation. Amber got those. Brad and Amber got the steel pipes that made up the frame, which were heavy, but bungee-corded together in groups of three, they were easy to carry with one person on each end. Shane and Meredith hauled the lighting boxes, the drapery bags and the road cases. I hauled the sound equipment that we would be using on the road, a tapedeck, amp and speakers. There was no point in loading Ruth’s keyboard, because she wouldn’t be joining us on the road, but we did need to include the sound gear in the pack, because it took up a fair amount of van space.

  By the time we got all the stuff downstairs, everybody was sweaty and red-faced.

  I’d backed the van up to the loading door at the side of the theatre and we began the pack, following the pattern Tobin had taped to the back door. The frame pipes went in first, on the floor, followed by the big road cases and the lighting boxes. It was satisfying, in a way, like building something out of Lego. Every available cranny in the pack was used. Sometimes, we had to take stuff out and fit it in a different way, and when we had finished, there was still one puppet bag left, forgotten beside the loading door.

  “If that happens on the road, we’re dead,” Meredith said. “Whose responsibility is that one?”

  “Mine,” Amber said, in a small voice. “Sorry. I thought I accounted for everything. We could put it on the seat in the back.”

  “No room, with all of us crammed in there,” Meredith said.

  “Chill out, Meredith,” I said and tossed the forgotten puppet bag on the back seat. “We’ll remember it next time.”

  I slammed the rear doors of the van, packed to the roof with equipment, and sighed with relief.

  “Well done, guys,” I said. A tiny little beep sounded behind me and I turned to see Meredith, a grim expression on her face, holding a stopwatch.

  “From when we started carrying everything downstairs to now, it took us seventy two minutes and forty seconds,” she said.

  “Not bad for the first bash at it,” I said.

  “Unless we can shave a half-hour off that, we’ll be getting into some serious overtime issues,” she said. “The Green Book allows for forty minutes, tops. If the load takes over an hour, it’ll cut into our lunch break and travel time. It’s big bucks, and I can’t be responsible for waiving the OT fees.”

  “Overtime! Terrific,” Shane said, sarcastically. “That’ll mean more cashola on the paycheck. Let’s do the whole thing in slow motion from now on.”

  “We could cut your
big song at the end,” Brad said to him. “That would shave off a boring fifteen minutes.”

  “Juliet’s not going to like this,” Meredith said.

  “Meredith, this was the first strike, load and pack we’ve done. It will get faster, it always does. Now would you put your stopwatch away and relax, please?” I said. It was the official end of the third rehearsal day, and Meredith had very cleverly let a huge emotional fart over what was supposed to be an atmosphere of mutual congratulation and positive karma. I wanted to strangle her.

  “I think we should both keep time sheets when we’re on the road,” she said. “Just to make sure they’re accurate.”

  “If there’s overtime due, then it’ll be submitted and paid for,” I said. “You can keep an extra log of our hours if you want, but your time would be better spent working on your puppetry techniques.” I know that was snarky, but I couldn’t help myself. Shane snorted and Amber giggled nervously.

  Meredith’s face contorted, but she didn’t say anything. She stormed back into the building, headed, I imagined, straight for Juliet’s office.

  “Let’s call it a day,” I said. “Ten a.m. tomorrow, please.”

  Shane stayed behind for a moment to confirm that we were meeting for a drink at the motel pub and then melted away. I stood leaning against the Steamboat Theatre van, feeling irritation, frustration and stage-manager’s angst turning my neck muscles into Kuskawa granite. My shoulders were up around my ears, my back was killing me from stooping and lifting in the confined space of the van, I had a headache and I realized I’d forgotten to eat lunch. Three days into rehearsal and I felt like I’d aged ten years. This, I reflected, is why I gave up the theatre biz and moved north. Coping with the complicated egos and adolescent needs of actors is no picnic. At this rate I would be getting through an ounce of homegrown a week.