Curtains for Romeo

by Jessa Archer

  “Please, call me Tig. And it’s no problem. I don’t really have many personal things in here yet any…way…” I trailed off as my eyes fell on one of the few personal items I had left in the office. The photograph with me and my parents with Melinda Barry was now on the desk, even though I was positive I’d left it inside the box.

  Dr. Peele followed my gaze to the photograph, coloring slightly. “Again, I must apologize. I didn’t mean to snoop. The picture was on top…and I was surprised to see that you know Melinda.”

  I found myself repeating what I’d just told Ben—that I didn’t really know Melinda Barry. “I was a huge fan when I was nine. And my parents arranged for me to play a small part in the show that night. Is she a friend of yours?”

  “Yes, she is. And a major supporter of the arts in Caratoke, as well. The Coastal Playhouse would have closed a decade ago if she hadn’t purchased the building.”

  “Oh. I knew a wealthy donor bought the place, but I didn’t realize it was her.”

  “Indeed,” Peele said, moving toward the door. “She leads a fairly stressful life most of the year. Working with the Coastal Players is her summer hobby. A way to unwind. Well, I’m sure you have a lot to do, so…”

  Peele glanced at the photo one last time as he headed for the door. I wondered if Melinda Barry knew this guy had a raging crush on her.

  “Did you find the book you needed?”

  “I didn’t. It must be at his house. Or else he lost it, which I’m afraid is entirely within the realm of the possible.”

  “Do you want me to keep an eye out for it?” I asked.

  “That’s very kind of you. It’s The Crucible. And I really hope Jerald didn’t lose it, because it was signed by Arthur Miller. I don’t have many signed editions—hard to come by on a professor’s salary—and that play is one of my favorites.”

  I smiled. “Mine, too. I’ll let you know if I find it. What about the rest of the books? Should I box them up for his family, or…”

  “Well…truthfully, I doubt his sister would find them of much use.” Peele glanced at my own small box on the desk, and added, “Perhaps you should keep them, given that your own collection seems a bit…anemic.”

  And then he was gone, before I remembered that I needed to ask him about the repairs to the Playhouse. Oh well, I thought. I could always email him, and I needed to hurry anyway if I was going to make it to class on time.

  After class, I joined Ben in the cafeteria so that we could set out his work schedule and discuss the logistics for transporting my set-design class from the gym to the Playhouse. A few members of the class hadn’t been too happy about being a repair crew for the Coastal Playhouse, but I’d made some vague promises about extra credit and ordering pizza. Even rich college kids can apparently be bribed with free food.

  “We should probably drive out and look things over, though,” Ben told me. “I’m done with classes for the day, if you want to head up there. I’d just need to go grab the keys from my dorm room.”

  A few minutes later, we were on Route 12, the main artery of the Outer Banks, headed north toward Duck. The town acquired its odd name from the community’s first postmaster, back when the area was better known as a destination for duck hunting than for its beaches. It sits on a narrow piece of land between Currituck Sound and the Atlantic Ocean—so narrow, in fact, that you can look in one direction and see the sound, and a few blocks later, look down one of the roads lined with beach rentals to see the barrier dunes and walkways leading to the shore.

  The Coastal Playhouse is located on the sound side of the island, with the main entrance facing Currituck Sound. I remembered watching the sunset over the water as Mom and I waited in line or walked along the wooden deck toward the theater after eating at the restaurant next door that provided the dinner portion of the dinner-and-a-show package. The restaurant had cycled through several owners and name changes. This is pretty common for restaurants in the Outer Banks or pretty much any tourist area, since they need to make enough money during the summer to ride out the lean winter months when the area was little more than a ghost town.

  Duck Soup, the most recent restaurant to occupy the building, was run by Alicia Brown’s parents. They were both very nice, and I never understood why fate had stuck them with an unpleasant daughter like Alicia. The place was the Browns’ third restaurant on the Outer Banks, and they actually did serve duck soup, but more as an afterthought than as a featured menu item. Marx Brothers pictures—including a signed poster from the movie Duck Soup—competed for wall space with other classic movie memorabilia. While it would never merit a mention in the Michelin Guide, the seafood platter was decent when Mom and I ate there with Paige five or six years back.

  But when I pulled into the parking lot, Duck Soup was gone. Not just in the usual sense of having a new name or being empty awaiting new owners, but entirely gone. Nothing but an empty lot. And over on the other side of the restaurant, a small strip of stores—beach gear, souvenirs, a fudge shop, and a little coffee shack—were closed down and boarded up.

  “What happened?” I asked, nodding toward the vacant lot.

  “They tore the restaurant down after the last big hurricane. Couple of years back. Amundsen said the owners were selling out to some development corporation. The dinner option for our dinner-and-a-show package is handled by the place down the road now. That one with the big fish on the sign.”

  “And the shops?”

  Ben shrugged. “One of them closed last season. Just the usual churn of these small businesses, I guess. Don’t know about the others. A shame…I hit up that fudge store almost every day during the season. It was mostly to blame for my freshman fifteen.”

  I laughed, looking at his thin frame. “I guess you lost it sophomore year?”

  “Nope. Believe it or not, these are not my skinny jeans.”

  My surprise at the changes next door meant that I didn’t really notice the theater itself until I turned off the ignition. The large wooden Coastal Playhouse sign that stood near the road was splintered into two pieces, both of which were leaning against the back of the building. Aside from the broken sign, there was some minor damage, but it didn’t look too awful. I’d been afraid there would be loose boards and shingles everywhere. There were a few bits scattered around in the parking lot, just not nearly as many as I’d imagined.

  Ben seemed to be thinking the same thing. “Amundsen made it sound like the place was about to collapse. I haven’t been out this way since the season ended. Not much to do on this end of the island after the weather turns colder.”

  That’s probably true for a lot of people, but I’ve always enjoyed the ocean in the off-season, even in midwinter if the sun is out. Most of the beaches around here are fairly crowded in the summer and even into September, when the water is still warm. Later in the year, though, you can sometimes walk for a mile without seeing a soul, especially up on the four-wheel-drive area where Travis and I used to go. There’s more development up that way now, but large stretches are dedicated nature reserves that can’t be developed.

  Similar nature reserves all along these barrier islands mean that land for commercial use is a premium. This made the fact that the lot next door was still empty a bit strange. The theater really didn’t seem to have taken much damage from the storm, so it seemed unlikely that the restaurant would have been hit that hard, either.

  “Maybe the damage is inside?” I suggested.

  “Only one way to find out.”

  Ben pulled out his ring of keys. We went first to the back door, because that was how he usually entered the building and he wasn’t entirely sure which of the keys opened the front. But the broken sign was blocking the rear entrance. The split was jagged, running almost exactly down the middle. Someone had fitted the two halves mostly back together, and set the sign up pointing outward. Even though the vast majority of traffic this time of year was locals, I was glad someone had thought to do this so we hadn’t entirely lost the advertising
in the interim.

  It was odd to see the sign at this close range. I ran my finger along the twirl of the black villain’s mustache that formed the background for the huge red letters that spelled out Coastal on the left half and Playhouse on the right. The bottom section read, Live Theater! Family Fun! Shows Nightly!, with (In Season) stenciled in smaller letters below.

  Ben and I had almost finished sliding the left side of the sign away from the door when he snagged his forefinger on a nail poking through the back. He swore under his breath and stuck the finger in his mouth.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said, pressing his thumb against the cut to stanch the bleeding. “There’s a first-aid kit inside. Let’s just go around front. One of these keys has to fit that door.”

  As we pushed the sign back into place, I noticed that the nail was a bit rusted, except for the outer rim of the nail head, where the rust had been scraped away. There were two indentations in the wood on each side where someone must have tried to pry the nail out, and similar grooves near the other nail holes.

  “Looks like someone tried to remove the nails,” I said. “Guess they just missed one. You’ve had your tetanus shot recently, I hope?”

  Ben nodded and we went around to the main entrance on the deck. The small outdoor stage, where the after-show musical revue was usually held, was in need of some minor patching and the whole area needed a good scrubbing, but I was relieved to see that the damage could easily be remedied by eight students with hammers, nails, trash bags, and a few wire brushes. By the time my set-design class was allowed to return to Muncey, the outdoor damage, at the very least, should be repaired.

  I tried four keys before locating the one that fit the lock. Ben flipped on the light in the foyer and went behind the ticket counter to find the first-aid kit, leaving me in the lobby to look around. A wave of nostalgia hit me, along with the inevitable grief. This was the only time I’d stood in this lobby without my mom.

  The place really hadn’t changed much over the years. A red velvet rope that blocked off the entryway to the main theater appeared to have been replaced recently. The cast took a new photo at the end of each summer season, and there were a few new pictures arranged on the black wall in matching silver frames with ornate scrollwork along the edges. For some reason, the frames seemed familiar. Maybe I’d simply stood there at some point before, tracing my finger over the pattern.

  I quickly scanned the photos, which were in chronological order, looking for Melinda Barry. The actress was in four cast photos from the 1990s, but then she disappeared for nearly two decades. Skipping to the more recent photos, I spotted a woman who might be Barry, but it was hard to be certain. The hair was shorter, and this woman was a little heavier. And a good bit older, of course.

  “Yeah, that’s her,” Ben said, tapping the woman’s image with the knuckle of his now-bandaged finger. “And there, and there…going all the way to this one here. So, I’m guessing Melinda started back with Coastal Players around ten years ago. They took a photo at the end of last season, too, but Amundsen must not have gotten around to hanging it yet.”

  I stood on tiptoes and pointed to the photo of the first year I visited. “That’s how I remember Melinda Barry. If they take these after the final show of the season, then I was here the night this picture was shot. Melinda still looks really good for her age, though. She must be close to fifty by now, but she looks at least a decade younger.”

  “Forty-seven,” Ben said. “I know this only because Amundsen kept bringing it up after casting Bethany. That’s him, in the pirate get-up.”

  I peered at the picture more closely. He was in full costume, with a long black wig, in this photo. I wouldn’t even have known it was the same guy as in the newspaper article.

  Looking back, though, I noticed the same man in five other photos over the past decade. The three most recent showed him as the villain—once in gangster attire from the 1930s, once in a leisure suit (which made me curious about the specific play that season), and once in a traditional villain’s top hat. In the first two, he played the hero—as what appeared to be a Canadian Mountie the first year and a lifeguard in one of those one-piece suits from the early 1900s in the second.

  “Does the director always take a role in the show?”

  I wasn’t entirely averse to the idea, but it wasn’t something that either the dean or Peele had mentioned as part of my duties. Also, I was under the impression that a key goal of the program was to provide summer jobs for students and a few community actors.

  Ben snorted. “No. That was just Amundsen. Dr. Peele is only in one of the cast photos, and he ran the place for the first couple of years before Amundsen took over.”

  He nodded toward one of the pictures where Peele was the villain and Melinda Barry was the vamp, wearing a dress that looked like a slightly altered version of the red number she’d worn when I was a kid. The two of them were hamming it up big time for the camera.

  “Dr. Peele did fill in for Raymond, the piano player, when he was out for a couple of shows last season. Raymond’s been working here for nearly twenty years. He told me Amundsen hired the same rich kid to play the villain for the past three seasons, knowing the guy was going to split in early August so he could goof around for a few weeks before the semester started back up. He wasn’t even that good of an actor, but by casting him, Amundsen could get his own ego fix for the last few weeks of the season and be able to plaster his pretty face on the Playhouse Wall of Fame.”

  “Please be sure to point that rich kid out when we hold auditions next month,” I said. “And also anyone else you know who might run off. You’re not thinking of doing anything like that yourself, are you?”

  “No worries. The guy graduated last year. And as for me running off, I’m on scholarship. It covers tuition, room, and board. I’ve got bills to pay, so my only possible conflict will be with my second job.”

  We went into the main theater, which seats about a hundred people. Everything was intact. As we approached the edge of the stage, I picked up a whiff of mold, but for a waterfront place that had been closed up for months, a bit of mold isn’t all that unusual.

  “Do the shows still draw a decent crowd?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Ben replied. “In July, it even sells out sometimes.”

  I could remember a time when the shows usually played to a packed house, not just sometimes, so this statement made me a bit anxious to see the books and to ask Dean Prendergast—Marjorie, I thought, you have to get used to thinking of her as Marjorie—whether the theater was expected to turn a certain profit. Having just suffered through the final years at the Wildwood Theater, as they struggled to make ends meet and to find a way to pull in more patrons, I wanted to know exactly where things stood. That way, I could start thinking of ways to turn things around if they were bad. I really didn’t want to preside over the death throes of another community theater.

  The manager’s office was backstage. Ben didn’t have a key for it, but it was already open, something that seemed to surprise him. It was a small room, with a rickety wooden desk and a somewhat newer printer table. The desk was bare, aside from an envelope from Caratoke Fine Photography. I pried the envelope open and pulled out the most recent cast photo. This one showed Bethany next to Amundsen. He was dressed as a cattle baron, and she was in a blue saloon-girl dress, making a duckface for the camera.

  “Guess we need to add a frame to the shopping list,” Ben said.

  “No,” I said, now realizing why the frames on the wall had seemed so familiar. It was possible that I’d seen them on previous visits, but I had definitely seen one much more recently. “There’s an empty frame like this one in my office back on campus. Amundsen must have ordered it and never got around to framing the photo.”

  Ben was staring down at the desk now. I wasn’t sure why until he ran a finger through the dust that covered most of the surface. The only two sections that were clean were the spot where the envelope had been
and a larger rectangular patch directly in front of the office chair.

  “We may not need a frame,” Ben said. “But we’ll need to add a new laptop to the list. Might want to mention it to the cops, as well, since I’m pretty sure that computer belonged to the Coastal Players, not to Amundsen.”

  Chapter Seven

  I had just dropped Ben back on campus when my cell phone rang.

  “When are you going to be home?” Paige asked.

  “Maybe ten minutes. Why?”

  “There’s a crazy lady in our driveway. The reporter you mentioned yesterday. She’s all angry because it’s cold out and I wouldn’t let her come in or give her your number. I…shouldn’t have, right?”

  “No, you absolutely should not have,” I said. “If she comes back to the door before I get there, tell her you’re going to report her to the police for harassment.”

  “Okay. Now I hope she comes back to the door.”

  When I reached our cul-de-sac, a white SUV was parked smack in the center of my driveway, blocking both sides. I pushed the garage door remote and pulled up alongside the curb, but didn’t cut the engine, hoping Alicia would get the hint and move. Instead, she got out of her car.

  I rolled down the window. “Move so I can park!” I didn’t add the word stupid, or any of the other words I was thinking, but I’m pretty sure they were conveyed by my tone of voice.

  Alicia huffed and backed part of the way out, then drove back up. This time, her tires edged off the concrete and onto the flowers lining the driveway, but at least there was enough room to pass. I gritted my teeth and pulled my car onto the left side of the drive.

  “Is there something I can do for you, Alicia?” I asked as I got out of the car.

  “Well, for starters, you can teach that daughter of yours some manners. I’ve been sitting out here in the cold for the past half hour. I showed her my press credentials, my identification, and even explained that we were in school together. But she still wouldn’t let me in, or give me your cell number, or even say when you’d be home. Maybe that’s how things are done out in California, but now that she lives in the real world, she needs to learn to treat adults with respect. She was downright rude.”