The Ruby Tear

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  “I don’t understand,” Jess said, staring at the mess in disbelief. So much for her plans to wear the pendant and earrings on opening night, and then give them back with thanks, and—maybe—as a sensible farewell. “Are they melted? What happened?”

  “It’s some kind of superglue,” Marie gulped. “Somebody’s stuck them all together. When I tried to get them apart with solvent, it just took off some of the black finish—I’ve ruined them!”

  “Marie, don’t cry,” Jess begged. “It’s the prankster’s fault, not yours. I can’t believe this is still going on. It’s like the behavior of some witless five-year-old with some kind of childish grudge!”

  And it was getting to her, she realized, breathing deeply to calm herself: she was on the edge of tears and suddenly unsure of the lines of Eva’s biggest speech, which she was to work on this afternoon.

  Marie, of course, knew how important today’s session was, and had tried to fix this latest problem without troubling Jess at all. Poor thing, she would probably feel totally responsible if a performer she was dressing got hurt or scared off—

  Unless Marie herself—? Suppose this was the extent to which Nick would go to run Jess out of the production and away from whoever he thought Ivo Craggen was. But that was nonsense! So unlike the Nick she knew—but of course that man had been twisted into a different shape by the damned accident, so who could know what was really going on with him.

  He was supposedly traveling now, but could he—if it was him—could he have paid someone—not Marie, surely not!—bribed someone to do this?

  Jessamyn felt darkly dazzled by the possibility of treachery so close to home. But Marie did have the run of the theater, like most of the staff, and could work there at odd hours without being challenged.

  I am really in bad shape if I can even think such a thing, Jess reproached herself angrily; but she was more furious with Nick, whose wild stories had planted the seeds of these paranoid speculations in her mind.

  Damn the man, if he had to leave the country to get far enough from her and from his play since her presence in it spoiled it for him, why couldn’t he have just gone? Why call her up in the middle of the night to fill her head with some wild story of supernatural vengeance, like a ridiculous parody of the Three Witches in the Scottish play?

  “Relax, Marie, it’s not the end of the world,” she said, expelling Nick firmly from her thoughts. She helped Marie to her feet and hustled her out of the costume shop. Once inside her own dressing room, Jess shut the door.

  “We’ll do without the damned things, and nobody will ever know the difference! As for Mr. Craggen, I never asked him for anything. If he wants to blame someone for what’s happened it’s going to be me, not you.

  “Only it would help if you thought about this, Marie, while it’s still fresh in your mind: have you seen anybody hanging around the place who doesn’t belong, anybody you think might have done this?”

  Marie stood hugging herself and shaking her head dolefully.

  “Think it over. I want to have a good grip on what we can say when we go see Nell Clausen and raise hell about it. Maybe we can use this to demand better security in this theater. It’s pretty clear that we need it!”

  The likelihood of money being available for this was minuscule, but she hoped that going on the offensive for a change might help Marie gather her scattered wits.

  Jess bent and peered at herself in the makeup mirror, wishing she could just go home and go back to sleep. She felt strung out from the interrupted night before. It didn’t help to see that she looked almost as tired as she felt.

  She sat down with a sigh in the swivel chair in front of the mirror. In a minute, she’d be crying herself. The pressure of rehearsal against the deadline of opening night was tough at best. She wasn’t sure how much additional stress she could handle without cracking, which of course must be the prankster’s goal.

  This thought stiffened her determination not to buckle under these despicable attacks. But if things were to change for the better—to come under control so that she could give her full attention to making her performance the best comeback in history—clearly she would have to make it happen herself.

  She tried again, turning in her chair and taking Marie’s surprisingly soft hands. She willed Marie to concentrate.

  “Don’t give up,” she urged. “Think about it, Marie! Maybe you did see something, just a glimpse or a shadow—something you weren’t even aware of noticing at the time. Think back: when you got here, was there anything unusual?”

  The older woman shook her head again, then paused, frowning. “Well, there was a man—of course there are always lots of people downtown, but at three in the afternoon, in the stage-door alley it did seem a little odd, someone standing out there in the cold like that, at that hour.”

  “What did he look like? What was he doing?” The thought occurred to her that perhaps Ivo had come around looking for her. Maybe he had sneaked in and ruined the jewelry himself, for reasons of his own.

  “Just a guy,” the dresser said helplessly, which pretty well clinched it: no heterosexual woman could look at Ivo Craggen and say he was “just a guy.”

  “A tallish man, I think,” Marie continued slowly, “but hunched down into his coat—it’s so cold out, everybody’s all muffled up. You wouldn’t know your own mother from an Eskimo out there today.”

  “Then he had a hat on? Gloves? A scarf, maybe?”

  “A scarf,” Marie agreed, dubiously. Pushing out her lower lip in thought, she turned to combing out Eva’s second-act wig, a lustrous black fall of curls. “And a hat, a regular man’s hat, though I can’t imagine why; it certainly can’t keep your head warm. I remember thinking, that guy’s ears must be freezing! You see everybody in woolen caps like Russians this winter, or fur hats even, the men too.”

  “But what was he doing? Do you remember? Maybe he’d just stopped there a minute to have a smoke out of the wind.”

  Marie squinted, trying to see into her memory. “Blowing on his hands, that’s what he was doing, so I couldn’t even see his face: his hands hid it, and no, he had no gloves on, now that I think about it. I thought he was waiting for someone out there. But he didn’t seem to be watching the people going by, and when I looked back before letting the door lock behind me, he was gone.”

  “Listen, he was probably nothing to do with us,” Jess said, hiding her disappointment at the meagerness of this report. “But if you do spot him again, you tell me right away, okay? Now, I would love a cup of tea before everybody else gets here. Something with a little caffeine in it and a wedge of lemon. My throat’s dry as burned toast.”

  Looking relieved, the dresser went out to the staff lounge for the tea. Jess began voice exercises, dropping her jaw and vocalizing from the diaphragm to open her throat and soften the stiffness out of her neck. She needed to disperse her tension and get her thoughts focused on the tortured relationship of Marko, the head of a family steeped in centuries of profitable crimes and machinations, and Eva, the idealistic niece come home to claim the emerald, which she wanted to sell for money to redress those crimes.

  Marko had his own ideas about the emerald. He wanted to use it as bait, to bring vengeful family enemies to the treaty table, where they could be slaughtered with the treachery he felt they deserved.

  Perhaps she could use the increasing unease about the theater prankster (and now this prowler in the alley, if that was what he had been) to put a little extra edge on her character’s nervous determination.

  It was something to try, anyway, and see how Walter and the others reacted.

  The rehearsal went well. Anthony radiated a heightened degree of anxiety himself, giving the character of Marko an aura of frenetic despair. He demanded that the attacking enemy be defeated and punished, but it was obviously justifiable vengeance against him and his that he feared.

  Anita MacNeil, playing Marko’s estranged wife Hildegarde, picked up on this and developed a quirky sort of murderous inte
nsity that set off Eva’s quiet insistence to admirable effect.

  Jess did not talk to Nell Clausen that day, although Nell, very un-theatrically dressed in a casual but beautifully tailored suit, did look in on the rehearsal. It had occurred to Jess, as she was trying on her first act costume, that since the jewelry had been in Nell Clausen’s safe-drawer, it might just be possible that Nell herself was involved somehow in this latest destructive incident.

  But that made no sense. Why on earth would she? Well, she was an old friend of Anita MacNeil’s and had in fact originally suggested Anita for the part of Eva. Could the two of them be trying to shove Jess aside so that Anita, who was now Jess’s back-up for Eva, could take over the major role?

  Now there was a paranoid idea! Not that such machinations were unknown in the competitive hotbed of theater. But to even imagine that the gracious, unflappable Nell would stoop so low seemed downright demented. She was the calm, sound business head that kept the Edwardian afloat, highly unlikely to involve herself in a backstage feud even for a friend. Nor could she have been easily duped somehow by Anita. Nell was a smart lady.

  But what about Anita? She was ambitious, and not young enough anymore to wait calmly for her own success to be earned (which it mostly wasn’t, as hundreds of New York waiters with stage resumes could testify). Maybe she was desperate enough to try to drive Jess out of the cast, counting on psychological hangovers from the accident to have weakened her rival?

  Jess stared gloomily at her own reflection (noting in passing that Eva’s dress still gaped at the neckline). She had never indulged in suspicion of her fellow professionals. (Well, not since she had been a very much younger, very much sillier girl, just starting out.) She wasn’t going to start now if she could help it.

  That kind of paranoia was poison to a production. You had to be able to count on your colleagues, and she was damned if she would let her trust in them be undermined by some incidents of petty vandalism.

  If they didn’t trust each other on the stage, who in the world could performers trust? And lack of trust could wreck the delicate balance of the play itself, as it was developing under Walter’s careful attention.

  In the end, she said nothing that day about the glued jewelry to anyone. She persuaded Marie agree to keep it to herself as well. Jess wanted to mull the whole business over quietly, and think about who to approach about stopping it, and how.

  And the last thing she wanted to do was to add to the company’s jitters about these spiteful little gestures. It didn’t take much to start theater people whispering about a jinx on the production. She herself couldn’t shake a lingering nervousness. When she started for home after the rehearsal something snagged her attention. She looked around, expecting to see—what? Anita, smiling a secretive smile of satisfaction?

  In fact Anita was there, climbing onto the back of the motorcycle ridden by her boyfriend. Anthony Sinclair mimed acting as her equerry, stooping with his hands linked for her to step into in order to swing up and astride a tall, imaginary horse. As the biked pulled out into traffic inches ahead of a UPS van, a yellow cab drew into the curb space and Sinclair stepped back out of the way of the opening door.

  A change in his posture—a greyhound tension, keen and taut—made Jess stop to watch.

  A woman got out of the cab and looked up at Sinclair—she was a head shorter than he—saying nothing as far as Jess could see from a distance of some twenty-five feet. It was Anthony who spoke, starting eagerly forward, reaching to embrace the woman.

  She fended him off with a handful of papers: mail, perhaps, or documents. She spoke; slowly the actor lowered his head and looked over the proferred papers. He snatched them and angrily stuffed them into his coat pocket without looking at them.

  The woman continued speaking. That was his wife, Sally Sinclair, barely recognizable without stage makeup and costume lighting. She was smaller than Jess would have expected—smaller than she had seemed playing the old lion’s young wife in “Uncle Vanya” in a recent, much celebrated bare-stage production.

  Smaller, but not less impressive: she was an olive-skinned woman in a fur hat and coat, regal as a queen of the jet set. It looked to Jess as if she never took her eyes from Sinclair’s face or raised her voice. Only a rapid, low ripple of speech, passionate with intense emotion, was audible to Jess.

  Sinclair stood with his head bowed and his face averted, like a courtier taking a verbal lashing from a superior. There were no fireworks, no dramatics, perhaps because they were so deeply sunk in the intensity of their emotions that for once neither of them was aware of having an audience—Jess.

  Nobody else had stopped to look; this was New York.

  Only when his wife finished speaking, touching Sinclair’s cheek with her gloved fingertips and withdrawing quickly into the waiting cab, did he break his apparent paralysis. He lunged forward, grabbing at the side of the taxi, calling out in a hoarse voice. But the cab pulled away, leaving him staggering in the gutter.

  Afraid that he might actually fall, Jess started toward him. He steadied himself with both gloved hands braced on the trunk of a parked car. When she anxiously spoke his name, the face he turned toward her was so bleak and drawn that she was stopped in her tracks. This was no moment for a sympathetic intrusion.

  She gave an awkward little wave and called casually to him, “I thought we could share that cab, but no such luck! See you tomorrow, Anthony!”

  He stared hopelessly at her, his handsome face as pale as the papers sticking out of the pocket of his coat. She had the feeling that he barely saw her and she suspected, with embarrassment and pity, that his eyes were blind with tears.

  My God, she thought fervently as she hurried away down the street leaving him to the privacy of his pain, Marie is right about those two! Any woman who thinks she can take Anthony Sinclair away from his wife is in for one hell of a rude awakening! And then came a plaintive thought that she quashed quickly: was Nick ever that much in love with me? Could he ever have been, if things had turned out differently?

  If she got any deeper into that, she’d be in tears herself.

  Only later, as she unlocked her own door, Jess remembered that she ought to have been on the lookout for a stranger, the man Marie had seen in the alley. The man who might have slipped into the theatre somehow, and gotten at the Berlin iron pieces in Nell’s safe-drawer.

  If someone had done that, what else could he do?

  Collectibles

  The re-blocked Scene Two was a problem. Jess had trouble replacing the old cues with new ones. Her continual blowing of two crucial lines was not improving her temper.

  The theater was icy because repair work that could no longer be put off was being done on the old boiler in the basement. Jess rehearsed in her coat, which made her feel heavy and clumsy where she needed to be light, almost ethereal: she was the idealist (and perhaps an ideal herself) in Marko’s grasping family and represented their redemption, if they had any.

  She needed to fly, but felt only able to clump around flubbing her lines right and left like a stage novice.

  Anthony Sinclair was little help at first. He had been touchy and absent-minded since that brief meeting with his wife outside the theater. The story of the glued jewelry had gotten out, of course, and he seemed particularly upset over it, although he clearly also had other things on his mind too.

  In the first break he went to the office to talk to Nell, he said, something about the payment schedule. Jess hoped he wasn’t spending his paycheck wildly on something that was leaving him strapped and in need of advances on his salary. There were tales of Anthony hiring detectives to watch Sally when they were apart, but also of his suddenly buying her some incredibly expensive gift as part of the campaign to lure her back to him.

  He was also upset because the theater trickster had struck again that morning, filling Jessamyn’s bottle of Evian water (kept handy for between-scene refresher sips) with some sort of ammoniac solution.

  Marie had discovered th
e substitution right away—you could hardly miss the ammonia smell so it had hardly been a serious attempt at injury, but still, what a spiteful thing to do! This whole thing was just getting wilder and meaner, and Jess knew it was wearing her down and clawing her memory to shreds just when she needed it most.

  Maybe they were right—the production staff who were talking about calling in some help—the police, hired guards, even a private detective had all been suggested.

  But—the show; the publicity; costs; the delays and interruptions; and a hundred other objections had divided opinion and obstructed action so far. Jess hated to be the cause of a ruinous uproar, pitting members of the company and their feelings and ideas about who was guilty, against each other. She certainly didn’t want to be blamed or stuck being labeled a Jonah, liked or even loved by her friends—but unemployable in her profession.

  And it wasn’t all that bad, really.

  Better to tough it out, as long as she could, anyway. And unless anybody else in the company became a target too. That would be the last straw, and the police would have to be told. But it hadn’t happened yet.

  Anthony returned from Nell’s office looking worried. He came over to Jess. “I told Nell about the ammonia. My God, how childish! But dangerous, too. Are you sure you don’t want to try rehearsing somewhere else? My place, Walter’s, even, or over at Anita’s apartment. Just for a few days, to make life more difficult for this joker, if you can call him that! We need a more obvious way of closing ranks against him, and this would be a clear communication.”

  “Him or her,” Jess answered evenly. “We need to start getting the feel of our moves here on the stage, Anthony. Johnny’s watching everybody now. He may be a stage-struck kid, but he’s smart too. He’ll catch the bastard sooner or later, which he can’t do if we’re working in somebody’s apartment. Thanks for offering, though.”

  “Well, I’m worried for you,” he said. “The world is full of crazies these days.”