The Case of the Plagued Play

by David Lewman

  The stage manager peeked out on to the stage.

  “After rehearsal yesterday, I put the white sheet in the closet myself. Did you move it?”

  Courtney shook her head. “No, Mrs. Gordon. I don’t know what happened to the sheet.”

  Mrs. Gordon sighed. “All right,” she said. “It couldn’t have gotten far. Let’s find that sheet before we continue.” She climbed up the steps on to the stage and headed backstage to look for the missing sheet. The other cast members started searching the set, the wings (the offstage areas to the right and left of the set), and the backstage area behind the set.

  Except for John.

  He stayed on the set, plopping down into an easy chair. He pulled some sheets of paper out of his back pocket and studied them.

  “Why isn’t John helping to search for the missing sheet?” Hannah whispered.

  “Maybe he wants to study his lines,” Corey said. “He was messing up pretty badly before.”

  “Or maybe he isn’t searching for the sheet because he already knows where it is,” Ben suggested.

  John didn’t budge from the chair. Now and then he looked up from the sheets of paper he was studying, but he didn’t look for the missing white bed sheet at all.

  After a few minutes Mrs. Gordon came back onto the set. “Okay,” she said. “I give up. I can’t find the sheet anywhere.”

  “Neither can we,” Melissa said, entering from the left wing.

  “Any luck?” Mrs. Gordon asked the other cast members as they returned to the set. “Anyone?”

  They all shook their heads. Even John, who hadn’t looked at all.

  “All right,” Mrs. Gordon said. “We’ll have to improvise.” She turned to the stage manager. “Courtney, what do we have that we can temporarily use in place of the sheet? A blanket? A towel? A poncho?”

  Courtney scurried backstage. They all stood on the set, waiting. In a couple of moments she returned carrying an old curtain. “Will this work?” she asked. “It’s a little dusty.”

  “Ew,” Tessa said. “I have to put that dirty curtain on my head?”

  Mrs. Gordon took the curtain from Courtney. “This’ll do fine, Courtney. Thank you.” She shook the fabric a few times. Dust filled the air.

  Kelly sneezed.

  “Here, Tessa,” Mrs. Gordon said, handing the curtain to her. “It’s not dirty. Just a little dusty. Don’t worry.”

  Tessa took the prop, looking totally worried.

  “Put it in the closet, and we’ll start from your line as you cross to the closet to get the sheet,” Mrs. Gordon instructed, walking back down the steps to her seat in the auditorium. “By the way, from now on, at the end of a break like this, I’ll just ask you to ‘restore.’ That means to go back to the last place we started, with yourselves and all the props and furniture put back in the positions they were in at that point.”

  Holding it at arm’s length, Tessa carried the curtain to the closet, put it in place, and closed the door. Then she crossed the stage and waited.

  “All right, Tessa,” Mrs. Gordon said. “Go ahead.”

  Tessa said her line, crossed to the closet, and took out the curtain. When she put it on her head, she acted as if its dustiness didn’t bother her at all. That was good acting.

  At the end of the rehearsal, the actors all sat on the edge of the stage, writing on the backs of their scripts as Mrs. Gordon gave them notes.

  Like the day before, there were a lot of notes.

  When she’d finished giving her specific comments, Mrs. Gordon looked up from her notebook to address the whole cast.

  “Now, this is a general note for everybody. Let’s be very careful with where we put our props. I’m tired of all these props going missing. You all need to step up your efforts a notch. We open Friday night. Today is Tuesday. I don’t want you to embarrass yourselves in front of our first audience. Before tomorrow’s rehearsal, make sure all your props are where they should be.”

  The cast members seemed discouraged. They stared at their scripts or drew little circles on the stage with their fingers.

  The only one who didn’t look crestfallen was John. He just looked distracted, as though he was thinking about something else.

  “I think we need to talk to John,” Ben whispered.

  “Agreed,” Hannah said. Corey nodded.

  As the actors trudged out of the theater, Hannah, Corey, and Ben caught up with John. He looked lost in thought.

  “John?” Hannah asked.

  Startled, John turned around. “Yeah?”

  “You’re really good as Horace,” Hannah said, smiling. She’d learned that it never hurt to start out with a compliment when you were going to question a suspect.

  But John didn’t smile back. “Thanks,” he said, “but I’m not really sure about that.”

  “Have you got a second to talk?” Ben asked.

  Melissa and Tessa passed by them, chatting.

  John shook his head. “Nope. Gotta go. Sorry.”

  He turned and hurried out the doors. They slammed closed, and he was gone.

  “That was weird,” Corey said.

  “John really didn’t want to talk to us,” Ben mused.

  “Maybe it’s me,” Corey said. “I think I forgot to put on deodorant this morning.”

  He sniffed his armpits, then smiled. “Nope! Fresh as a daisy!”

  Chapter 6

  The next morning was a beautiful day in their small Nevada town, but the members of Club CSI were worried.

  How were they going to talk to John?

  As they walked to school together, they discussed possible methods.

  “I think what we need is an interrogation room with bright lights and a one-way mirror,” Corey suggested.

  “I think you’ve been watching too many cop shows on TV,” Ben said.

  “Okay, fine,” Corey said, picking up a rock and tossing it at a tree. Whack! Even though the tree had a narrow trunk, Corey nailed it. “Maybe we could find out what his favorite food is. Like, say, maybe it’s ice cream. Then Hannah could invite him to an ice-cream place—”

  Hannah looked annoyed. “I am not asking John out on a date!”

  “Who said anything about a date?” Corey asked. “This is just a friendly trip to get ice cream.”

  “In other words, a date,” Hannah said.

  “There’d be nothing to worry about,” Corey reassured her. “I’d be stationed in the corner, disguised as an ordinary ice-cream eater.”

  “This whole plan just sounds like an elaborate way for you to get ice cream,” Ben said, laughing.

  They were about a block from Woodlands Junior High School. That didn’t give them much time to figure out a way to approach John.

  But then John stepped out from behind a tree. Right in front of them.

  “Hey,” he greeted.

  “Hey,” Corey said. “We were just talking about you. Listen, do you like ice cream?”

  Ben looked curious. “Were you waiting for us?”

  John looked embarrassed. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry about yesterday. I wanted to talk to you guys, but I didn’t want to do it around the other cast members.”

  “What did you want to talk about?” Hannah asked encouragingly.

  John motioned for them to follow him. The four of them stepped behind the big tree where John had been waiting.

  “I’m worried,” he said, lowering his voice.

  “What about?” Ben asked.

  “That it’s my fault,” John explained.

  Corey was confused. “That what’s your fault?”

  “All the stuff that’s been going wrong with the play,” John said. “All the missing props and everything.”

  “Why would that be your fault?” Hannah inquired. “Are you the one moving the props and sabotaging the play?”

  John shook his head. He paused a moment, picking at the tree’s bark. Then he took a deep breath and spoke quickly, as if he wanted to get it over with. “About a week ago, just befo
re all these problems with the play started, I left my copy of the script in the boys’ locker room.”

  Corey made a puzzled face. “Why?”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose!” John blurted. “I was carrying the script with me everywhere, so I could learn my lines. I pulled it out of my backpack and then got distracted.”

  “By what?” Corey asked.

  “I don’t remember,” John said. “Someone snapped a towel at me or something. That’s not important. The point is, by the time I realized my script was missing, more than an hour had passed. And then by the time I found it, another hour had passed.”

  Ben leaned against the tree, thinking. “So you’re afraid that while your script was sitting there in the locker room for two hours . . .”

  “Someone copied it or took pictures of the pages,” John said. “And then put it back.”

  “If somebody did that, someone who’s not working on the play could know about all the scenes and the props and would be able to sabotage it,” Hannah said. “This person might be sneaking into the auditorium and misplacing props.”

  John nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “That’s what I’m worried about. The more stuff that goes wrong at rehearsal, the more I think about it and the harder it is to concentrate on my performance. I keep messing up.”

  “In two hours, just about anyone could have been in that locker room and done it,” Corey said.

  “Any boy,” Hannah corrected.

  Ben checked his watch. They needed to get going if they were going to be on time for homeroom.

  “Do you have your script on you right now?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” John answered. “I haven’t let it out of my sight since.”

  Ben pulled out a large plastic bag from his backpack and held it open. “Drop your script in here.”

  For the first time that morning, John smiled. “Do you always carry plastic bags with you?”

  “Of course he does,” Hannah said, grinning.

  “You never know when you’re going to encounter important evidence,” Ben said.

  “Or a sandwich,” Corey added.

  John dug his script out of his backpack and dropped it into the plastic bag. Ben zipped it closed.

  “What are you going to do?” John asked. “Check it for fingerprints?”

  “Exactly,” Hannah said.

  “Which means we’ll need to take your fingerprints for comparison,” Corey said as he shouldered his own backpack. “Meet us at the forensic science classroom at the beginning of lunch. It’ll only take a second.”

  “Thanks,” John said. “I’ll see you then.”

  “Don’t be late,” Corey said. “We don’t want to be late for lunch.”

  “Or homeroom,” Hannah added. “Come on.”

  In the forensic science classroom, which Club CSI nicknamed “the lab,” Miss Hodges was setting beakers on the tables. “Today we’re going to continue working on chromatography. It’s a big part of forensic science and definitely deserves more than just one class session.”

  Corey was relieved. Chromatography was pretty complicated, and he wasn’t sure he’d grasped all the concepts in the last lesson.

  “But instead of ink,” Miss Hodges continued, “we’ll be analyzing these.” She turned a bag over and dumped leaves on the front table.

  “My dad has me analyze those all the time,” Ricky announced. “Only he calls it ‘raking.’ ” His buddies at the back of the classroom laughed.

  After watching Miss Hodges’s demonstration, Ben, Hannah, and Corey got to work doing paper chromatography on leaves. Following the instruction sheet, they pressed a green leaf down hard onto the same kind of chromatography paper they had used yesterday. The green pigment stuck to the paper.

  Next they inserted the strips of paper into beakers with some rubbing alcohol at the bottoms, being very careful not to let the green pigment touch the alcohol, at first. As the alcohol soaked up into the paper and through the area with the green pigment, different colors appeared.

  “This bottom band of color looks olive green,” Hannah observed, jotting notes.

  “But the band above it looks more blue green,” Ben said.

  Corey peered at the strip of paper hanging in the beaker. “Then there’s a yellow band of color.”

  “And above that, it gets more orangish,” Hannah reported.

  Once everyone in the class had observed the different colors revealed by the chromatography, Miss Hodges wrote the names of the leaf pigments on the dry-erase board at the front of the classroom:

  Blue green = chlorophyll a

  Olive green = chlorophyll b

  Yellow = xanthophyll

  Orange yellow = carotene

  Red = anthocyanin

  “During the summer, when there’s lot of sunlight, the leaves are full of chlorophyll, so they look green,” Miss Hodges explained. “But when the weather changes in the fall, the leaves lose chlorophyll. The green goes away, and we see the other colors, like yellow and orange.”

  Miss Hodges tossed her dry-erase marker in the air and then caught it. “Now what, you may ask, does this have to do with solving crimes?”

  Ricky raised his hand.

  “Yes, Ricky?” Miss Hodges asked.

  “What does this have to do with solving crimes?”

  Miss Hodges raised an eyebrow and one side of her mouth. “Any ideas?”

  Ben raised his hand, and Miss Hodges called on him. “It might help you match leaves from a crime scene to leaves on the shoes of a suspect.”

  “It also might help you figure out what time of year a crime happened, based on how much chlorophyll was left in the leaves,” Hannah added.

  “Excellent!” Miss Hodges said. “As the labs from the past two days should have shown you, paper chromatography is another very useful tool in the forensic scientist’s kit, so it’s important for all of you to understand it. Also,” she added, winking, “it’s sure to be on the next test.”

  After class, Hannah, Corey, and Ben found John waiting for them outside the lab. They took him to a deserted hallway, near the school’s old trophy cases, to get his fingerprints.

  “There,” Corey said as John pressed his last finger onto a white card. “Now we just have to see if anyone else’s prints are on your script.”

  “Can I watch you do it?” John asked.

  “Well,” Hannah said, “we’ll do the analysis after school. Don’t you have rehearsal?”

  John nodded glumly. “Yeah, I do. But I doubt I’ll enjoy it much.”

  Chapter 7

  While John was not enjoying his rehearsal of Nobody’s Home in the school auditorium, Club CSI was analyzing the fingerprints on his script in the empty forensic science classroom. Miss Hodges had given them permission to work in the lab. She had also taught them a new technique for finding fingerprints that weren’t immediately visible.

  “As always, just be very careful with any equipment you use,” she said as she went into her tiny office. “If you need me, I’ll be right here, grading the chromatography lab reports.”

  Ben carefully took the plastic bag holding the script out of his backpack. Then he put on plastic gloves and slipped the script out of the bag. Still holding the script by its edges, he looked around.

  “Where should I put this?” he asked.

  “Somewhere really clean,” Corey said. “So I wouldn’t suggest taking it to my bedroom.”

  Hannah spread clean aluminum foil on one of the lab tables. Then they divided the script into three sections. Each member took a section and then began to place the pages into plastic containers with iodine crystals inside. Then they covered the containers and floated them in warm water in the sink. The iodine quickly turned into vapor and, like magic, any fingerprints on the pieces of paper became visible.

  “Hey,” Hannah asked suddenly. “Are either of you reading the script? Because I don’t think Mrs. Gordon actually wants us to know the ending.”

  Corey and Ben shook their heads
. “We’re too busy looking for fingerprints on the script to actually read the script,” Ben said.

  “Besides, reading the ending would ruin the play,” Corey added. “And we’re still going to opening night, right? I mean, we already paid for our tickets. And I don’t think there are any refunds.”

  Once they finished exposing any fingerprints on the pages of the script, they moved to the microscopes and started to examine the prints under magnification to see how many of them belonged to someone other than John.

  But after careful examination they had their answer: zero.

  “Every single one of these fingerprints belongs to John,” Hannah said, sounding frustrated.

  Ben took the stack of index cards and put them in an envelope. “I guess nobody took his script while it was in the locker room. It just sat there for two hours, and then he came back and got it.”

  “He’ll be relieved to hear that,” Corey said, digging an orange out of his backpack and starting to peel it. “He seemed really worried that he’d ruined the play.”

  “Well, he may feel relieved,” Hannah said, “but I feel frustrated. I was really hoping that a fingerprint from John’s script might lead us to a suspect.”

  Corey separated a section from his orange and offered it to Hannah. She shook her head. He popped the segment into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed.

  “What about Mrs. Gordon?” Corey asked.

  “What about her?” Ben replied.

  “I mean, as a suspect,” Corey said. “I was just thinking about the notes she gave at the end of rehearsal yesterday. She seemed really mad. And worried that the play might end up being embarrassing.”

  Ben looked confused. “I agree that she seemed upset. But I don’t see how that makes her a suspect.”

  Corey stood up and paced around the lab, thinking. “Maybe she’s unhappy with the play, so she’s sabotaging it.”

  Now it was Hannah’s turn to look confused. “Corey, that doesn’t make any sense. If she’s worried about being embarrassed by the play failing, why would she try to make it fail?”

  Corey shrugged. “I’m just tossing out theories. Think of it this way: About a week ago, Mrs. Gordon realizes the play isn’t going to be any good. In fact, it’s going to be a huge failure. Which will make her look really bad, since she and the other eighth-grade English teacher are the ones who assigned their students to write a play, then picked out Theo’s play to put on, then Mrs. Gordon cast it and directed it. If the play bombs, she’s going to look like she didn’t know what she was doing. Maybe she’ll even get fired.”