The Case of the Plagued Play

by David Lewman

  “Cool,” Corey said. “I wouldn’t mind living in a huge house like that.”

  “So many more places to lose stuff,” Hannah pointed out.

  “No problem,” Corey said. “If I lost anything, I’d just have my servants find it.”

  The three friends sat in the last row of the theater. Theo sat by himself in one of the middle rows. Mrs. Gordon said they could all help her by letting her know if any of the cast members were hard to hear or understand.

  She turned to the five actors standing onstage. “Remember to send your voices right to the back of the hall. What’s it called when you do that?”

  “Projecting!” the five kids answered loudly.

  “I had no problem hearing that,” Ben whispered to Hannah and Corey.

  “All right,” Mrs. Gordon said, taking a seat in the third row and opening a notebook. “I think the opening’s in pretty good shape, so let’s start with the third scene. Places, please.”

  The scene went fairly smoothly. It started with one of the brothers and one of the sisters who had inherited the mansion arguing onstage. Soon another brother and another sister joined them. All four seemed to know their lines and where they were supposed to move (which Mrs. Gordon called their “blocking”).

  Club CSI watched the scene, getting caught up in the story of Nobody’s Home. “They’re good,” Corey whispered to Hannah, who nodded.

  “It looks like fun to be in a play,” she whispered back. “Maybe I’ll try out next year.”

  But suddenly the scene came to a halt. Four actors stood onstage, waiting. Nothing happened.

  “Kelly!” Mrs. Gordon called from her seat in the auditorium. “Where are you?”

  Kelly peeked out from the side of the stage. “Sorry, Mrs. Gordon, but I’m supposed to enter carrying a wet umbrella, and it’s not here with the props.”

  Mrs. Gordon sighed and called out the stage manager’s name. “Courtney?”

  Courtney appeared next to Kelly.

  “Where’s the umbrella?”

  Courtney shrugged. “We can’t find it. It’s not in its bucket underneath the prop table. I’ve looked everywhere.”

  “All right,” Mrs. Gordon said, writing a note. “Let’s start from right before Kelly’s entrance. Kelly, just pretend you have the umbrella. And let’s try to keep going. Don’t stop unless you have to.”

  They started again. Kelly entered, pretending to shake off the water from an umbrella. It was supposed to be raining outside. She was playing an accident-prone sister named Penelope who was always late.

  “Seems like Kelly’s taking the part to heart, losing her umbrella,” Ben whispered to Corey, who stifled a laugh.

  But soon it was all right to laugh, because Penelope had several clumsy moments that were really funny. She knocked over a gong, then turned and walked right into a potted plant.

  “For a ballet dancer, she’s really good at being clumsy,” Corey joked quietly.

  “Maybe she’s good at acting clumsy because she’s a ballet dancer,” Hannah replied. “She’s got great control of her body.”

  The four other actors seemed inspired by Kelly’s comic performance. And the laughter from Club CSI. The scene went well.

  For a while.

  Then an eighth grader named Tim stopped in front of a bookshelf and just stood there saying, “Um . . .”

  Everyone stared at him.

  Then he asked, “Line?”

  Courtney started to read his next line to him from offstage, but Mrs. Gordon interrupted.

  “Tim, we’re past the point where you can call for your line if you forget it,” she said. “When we open this Friday, you won’t be able to call for lines. You’ll just have to keep going.”

  Tim looked out into the auditorium. “But I didn’t forget my line, Mrs. Gordon.”

  “Then why didn’t you say it?” Mrs. Gordon asked, confused.

  “Because I never learned it,” he explained. “It’s a long speech, and I’m supposed to be holding open an old book, so you said it would be okay if I taped the speech inside the book and read it.”

  “Okay,” Mrs. Gordon said slowly. “Then why didn’t you read your line?”

  Tim gestured toward the bookshelf. “Because the old book isn’t on the old bookshelf.” The other cast members giggled.

  Courtney started to come onto the stage to look for the missing book, but Mrs. Gordon stopped her. “Courtney, please stay offstage. Read Tim’s speech from your script, and let’s keep going.”

  “Sorry,” Courtney said as she scurried offstage. She read Tim’s speech somewhat woodenly while Tim moved his lips, pretending to read from an invisible book.

  The rest of rehearsal went okay, but the actors seemed to be losing their excitement. So many stops had ruined the atmosphere. When they were almost out of time, Mrs. Gordon called the five cast members to the edge of the stage. They sat there with their feet dangling over the side.

  Mrs. Gordon gave them lots of notes she’d written down during rehearsal—when to be louder, when to be softer, when to be more energetic, when to turn their faces out toward the audience so everyone could see their expressions. It seemed as though there were an awful lot of ways for an actor to mess up.

  All the cast members wrote down Mrs. Gordon’s notes, scribbling like mad on the backs of their scripts.

  “Finally,” she said, “please remember to keep going. Even if something goes wrong. I don’t care if the roof caves in, keep going until the fire department arrives. Then you can stop.”

  The cast members laughed. A little nervously. They all knew rehearsal hadn’t gone smoothly, and in just a few days they’d have to perform Nobody’s Home for a real, live audience full of their friends and families.

  “All right,” Mrs. Gordon said, standing up. “I’m going to find the missing props and make sure everything’s all in place for tomorrow’s rehearsal. See you then. Same time, same theater.”

  She walked up the steps and onto the stage and then went back to the prop table. Theo had left while Mrs. Gordon was giving notes, and the cast members and the stage manager looked eager to get home, eat dinner, and start their homework, but Kelly stopped them at the back of the auditorium.

  “Guys? Can you stay a couple more minutes?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Tim said. “What for?”

  Kelly gestured toward Hannah, Corey, and Ben. “I’ve asked Club CSI to investigate what’s been going on with our show.” She sat down next to Hannah. “As you could see during rehearsal, we’ve been having a lot of problems with props and things going missing.”

  “How long has this been going on?” Hannah asked.

  “About a week,” Kelly said.

  Another girl, Melissa, spoke up. “Mrs. Gordon thinks it’s just a bunch of accidents, but some of us think it’s something else.”

  “Like what?” Corey asked.

  Melissa looked around nervously. “Like someone is trying to sabotage the play.”

  The other kids nodded seriously.

  “Who?” Ben asked. “Who would do that?”

  They all looked stumped. Then a girl named Tessa, the youngest member of the cast, timidly raised her hand. “I heard the auditorium is haunted,” she said, her eyes growing wide. “Maybe the ghost is stealing the props.”

  A boy named John snorted. “Come on! I think maybe you’re getting a little too caught up in the play. Like we really are in a haunted mansion!”

  “Whoever’s doing it,” Tim said, “it’s really messing up our rehearsal process. We’re afraid the play’s going to be a disaster. Which would be totally humiliating.”

  Ben, Corey, and Hannah exchanged quick nods. “Don’t worry,” Ben said. “We’ll take the case. We’ll find out who is trying to sabotage the school play!”

  Chapter 4

  The next morning, Ben, Corey, and Hannah talked about their new case as they hurried toward their forensic science class.

  “Thanks again for agreeing to take on the case
, guys,” Hannah said. “I really want to help Kelly out if we can.”

  “No problem,” Ben said. “Besides, I know someone in the play too.”

  “You do?” Hannah said, surprised.

  “Yeah,” Ben said. “Well, not exactly in the play, but working on it. The stage manager, Courtney, is in my honors math class.”

  “Is she a seventh grader?” Corey asked.

  They turned left into the hallway with all the science classrooms. Posters for Nobody’s Home had been tacked up on the bulletin boards.

  “Actually, she’s a sixth grader,” Ben said, “but she placed into seventh-grade honors math.”

  “She must be really smart,” Corey observed.

  Ben nodded. “She is, but she’s also shy, and sometimes she gets picked on. People make fun of her for loving math so much.”

  “She didn’t seem that shy at rehearsal,” Hannah remarked.

  “I know,” Ben said. “I noticed that too. She seemed more comfortable and confident than I’ve ever seen her.”

  “The theater must really suit her,” Hannah said.

  “Just like the lab suits me,” Ben said.

  He opened the door to the forensic science classroom, and they headed in together.

  “Please take your seats,” Miss Hodges said from the front of the room. “We have a lot to do. Today we’re going to learn about paper chromatography.”

  Paper what? Corey thought. This sounds complicated.

  “Don’t be afraid of the word ‘chromatography,’ ” Miss Hodges said, fiddling with the pencil in her hair. It was as if she’d read Corey’s mind. “The ‘chroma’ part means ‘color.’ ‘Graphy’ is ‘writing.’ So chromatography is just color writing.”

  “Sounds more like art class than forensic science,” grumbled Ricky Collins, a guy who liked people to think he was tough.

  “Well,” Miss Hodges said, “we might use chromatography to see if a piece of evidence from a crime scene matches a sample from a suspect.”

  Miss Hodges looked at her students, who were staring at her blankly, and smiled. “I see a lot of puzzled faces. Okay, let’s take it one step at a time.”

  She explained how a person could take a piece of paper with a mixture on it and put it into a liquid. As the paper soaked up the liquid, the different parts of the mixture would make different colors on the paper. That could help an investigator figure out what substances the mixture was made up of or identify it.

  “Let’s try it,” she said, bringing out beakers with liquid in the bottoms. “You can do this with all kinds of mixtures, but today we’ll do it with ink.”

  The students broke into groups of three. Hannah, Ben, and Corey stuck together. Miss Hodges gave each group a piece of special paper (coffee filters cut into long strips) that had a dot of ink on it and three pens labeled 1, 2, and 3. At the top of the paper directly above the first dot was the letter A. Each group’s job was to put three more dots of ink, from three different pens, horizontally across the paper. At the top of the paper, directly above each new dot, they wrote 1, 2, 3, to match the pen it came from. Then they had to carefully put their pieces of paper into the liquid.

  Corey stared at the piece of paper in their beaker.

  “Practicing mindfulness again?” Ben joked.

  “I’m watching the four dots, but nothing’s happening,” Corey said. “Maybe we did it wrong.”

  “Miss Hodges said we have to give the liquid time to soak into the paper,” Hannah said. “We just have to be patient.”

  “Not my favorite word,” Corey complained.

  He didn’t have that long to wait, though. As the liquid soaked into the paper, the little dots of ink started to turn into lines of color.

  Miss Hodges walked around the classroom to see how each group was doing. “Look at the colors that appear on the paper. Are they the same as the original dots?”

  Corey looked closer. The ink dots had looked as though they were just one color. But as the liquid traveled up the paper, the dots separated into different colors. What had looked like a solid black dot now had a blue part and a red part.

  “Remember,” Miss Hodges said. “When I gave you your paper, it had one original ink dot on it, labeled A. Which one of the ink dots you added is now showing the same color pattern as the original dot, A? Number one? Number two? Or number three?”

  Every group got the right answer: number three. When they looked at the color patterns on the paper, it was easy to see that the color patterns of ink dot number three matched the color patterns of the original ink dot A. The original dot must have been made with pen number three.

  “Cool!” said Ricky. His friends in the back of the class looked at him, surprised. “I mean, if you like that kind of thing,” he added quickly.

  “So I think you can all see that paper chromatography can be very useful in helping an investigator decide what kind of ink was used to write a note found at a crime scene,” Miss Hodges said. The students nodded in agreement.

  “CSIs can also use paper chromatography for lots of other mixtures besides ink,” she went on. “Even the dyes in candy.”

  Ricky cracked another joke. “Now a candy lab would make forensic science fun!” His pals laughed.

  Corey didn’t laugh, but his stomach did growl at the mention of candy.

  Luckily, forensic science was followed by Corey’s favorite period: lunch.

  In the cafeteria, Ben, Hannah, and Corey decided to start their investigation by coming up with a preliminary list of suspects.

  “I’m not sure about this,” Ben said. “We really haven’t done any investigating at all. Isn’t it a little early to be listing suspects?”

  “Normally, yes,” Hannah said. “But in this case, it seems as though the circumstances narrow the list down right away. Whoever’s trying to sabotage Nobody’s Home would need to know the script. . . .”

  “And they’re keeping the script secret,” Corey said. “So the mystery won’t be ruined.”

  “Right,” Hannah agreed. “Also, the, uh . . . What’s the word for someone who’s committing sabotage?”

  “ ‘Saboteur’?” Ben suggested.

  “ ‘Jerk’?” offered Corey.

  Hannah laughed. “Anyway, the person who’s messing with the props would have to have access to the auditorium during rehearsals.”

  “So, access to the theater and access to the script,” Corey said. “That means the five cast members, the stage manager, and the director. Seven suspects.”

  “What about the playwright, Theo?” Hannah wondered aloud. “He was there yesterday.”

  Ben and Corey thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” said Ben thoughtfully. “Kelly mentioned that yesterday’s rehearsal was the first one he’d been to, and the props have been going missing for a while.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” said Hannah. “We can cross him off our list.”

  Ben nodded reluctantly. “So our suspect list makes sense, but we still need evidence. We need to investigate.”

  “I say we go back to rehearsal this afternoon,” Hannah said firmly, “and keep a very close eye on each of the seven suspects.”

  “Sounds like more mindfulness!” Corey said.

  Chapter 5

  Did the eyes in that painting just move?” Penelope asked.

  Her brother Horace stood up. “Which painting?”

  “That one,” Penelope said, pointing. “The one of the ugly man.”

  “That ugly man,” Horace said, “is our grandfather.”

  Corey, Hannah, and Ben were watching the rehearsal of Nobody’s Home from the back of the auditorium. They tried to read the body language of the actors, to see if any of them seemed as though they might be guilty of sabotaging the play.

  But it was tricky since the five students were playing roles. They weren’t being themselves. The things they were saying were lines they had memorized. Their movements had been given to them by the director, Mrs. Gordon. And their faces were supposed to exp
ress the emotions of their characters, not necessarily their own emotions.

  “Maybe we should be backstage,” Corey whispered to Hannah and Ben, “watching the props.”

  “I’m not sure Mrs. Gordon will let us hang around backstage during the rehearsal,” Hannah whispered back. “We might get in the way of the actors.”

  “I think the key is to carefully observe the suspects every time the rehearsal stops,” Ben murmured.

  “But the rehearsal hasn’t stopped,” Corey whispered a little too loudly. “And they’re supposed to keep going no matter what!”

  At the front of the auditorium, Mrs. Gordon turned around and glared. She was the only other person watching today. Theo hadn’t shown up. Corey knew the junior varsity basketball team had practice every day this week for a game on Saturday afternoon.

  Club CSI stopped talking immediately. They didn’t want to get banned from the rehearsals. That might bring their investigation to a complete halt.

  John, the actor playing the part of Horace, messed up several of his lines, but everyone kept going. He seemed distracted.

  Ben wondered if John was nervous because he’d done something to jeopardize the play.

  Tessa, who was playing the part of Millicent, crossed the stage and opened a closet door. She stepped into the closet, saying her line, “It might not have been a ghost you saw at all. It might simply have been someone wearing a sheet. Here, I’ll show you.”

  But when she came back out of the closet, she wasn’t carrying a sheet. She was just pretending to carry a sheet.

  “Whoever was trying to make us think he was a ghost might have covered himself with a white sheet, like this,” she said, pretending to cover her head with the sheet that wasn’t there.

  “He or she,” Tim said in his role as Bernard.

  “Hold!” Mrs. Gordon said. It was what she called out every time she wanted the actors to stop.

  Tessa turned toward the seats in the auditorium. “But, Mrs. Gordon, I thought you said to keep going no matter what.”

  “I did,” Mrs. Gordon said, standing up. “But we need to rehearse this scene with the sheet. Where is it? Courtney?”