The Roar of the Crowd

by Janice Macdonald

  I was among the first to arrive at the Fine Arts Building. Micheline was helping Tracey, the stage manager, set up the coffee she’d ordered, and two of the junior actors, who were hired to fill ranks, learn the ropes, and earn points toward their Equity cards, were setting up chairs in a wide semi-circle. A few of the regular actors were huddled off to the side, and when Amanda and Louise entered the hall together, they made a beeline for that group.

  I tried to chat with Micheline, but she was less forthcoming under the watchful eye of Tracey, who was the consummate professional. Or maybe she didn’t know any more than what she had said on the phone. Kieran could be very closemouthed.

  Taking a cup of coffee, I went to sit on one of the chairs. Soon I was joined by Amanda, which was kind of her, as I knew her better than any of the rest of the company. Kieran walked into the hall, and all eyes went to him immediately. The man knew how to make an entrance, that was for sure. He walked over to Micheline, put a hand on her shoulder, nodded at something Tracey said, and then with a subtle movement of his arm, suggested everyone take a seat. We did.

  “Thank you all for coming in early. As I am sure most of you have been told, we have lost a great actress and compatriot: Eleanor Durant is dead.”

  There was a low buzz, which Kieran silenced by a slight raising of his voice.

  “I have been in touch with the police, who are coming to speak with all of us today. I would request that you give them your full cooperation. It seems that there is some question as to how Eleanor died, and an investigation will ensue. I’ve been assured this should not affect our production dates in any way. It will, however, make life a bit more hectic for Thalia, who will have to rejig Eleanor’s costumes to fit Louise, who will be playing Hero, and Stacey, who will take on the role of Desdemona.”

  The buzz was stronger now. Stacey, one of the student actors, looked as if she was going to burst into tears. Louise was sitting on the other side of Amanda from me, so I couldn’t gauge her reaction.

  So, we were going to be questioned by the police. I wondered what the investigators would make of this gang. There was a self-aggrandizing mode that many actors popped into when speaking to strangers, as if they were auditioning and needed to be the centre of attention. I hoped they realized that being the focus in a police investigation was exactly what they didn’t want to be.

  I also wondered who would be leading the investigation. If he had been in town, it probably would have been Steve. He worked out of the southside precinct and somehow drew the majority of university details. His take on it was that, having a sociology degree and an ease with the campus made him the likeliest for the role.

  I didn’t have to wait and wonder long. There was a knock at the door, and in came Steve’s partner, Iain McCorquodale. With him was a striking woman with long dark hair pulled back into a clip, highlighting the business cut of her pinstriped pantsuit. This must be the new detective Steve had spoken of, Jennifer Gladue. I noted that he hadn’t mentioned to me how attractive she was. Perhaps he just didn’t think that would be something that would interest me, and it likely shouldn’t have. Most times it wouldn’t. It was probably just because I was missing him and feeling a bit edgy about how we’d left things before he had gone to Sweden.

  Iain conferred with Kieran and commandeered a table in a corner of the hall. Detective Gladue introduced herself to us and asked us all to print our names on a clipboard she handed us. From it, she read and checked off names as each of us was sent to the corner to give our statements.

  I was completely in the dark as to times and circumstances relating to Eleanor’s death, but I didn’t want to appear ghoulish by asking Amanda if she knew any more than I did. Instead, I sat there, trying to subtly listen in on conversations to my right and left.

  “I heard she was found in her hotel suite.”

  “Really? I heard she was killed in the river valley, on one of the running trails.”

  “Who found her?”

  “Kieran, I think, but it might have been the manager of the hotel.”

  “Some joggers spotted her body.”

  “The hotel manager was called in about some noise.”

  “Noise? Like a fight?”

  “No, the television was on all night, way too loud. It was disturbing folks on either side of her room.”

  “There was blood everywhere, is what I heard.”

  “Blood? Was she shot? Or stabbed to death?”

  “No one is saying.”

  “Has Kieran said anything to you?”

  “He just told me to round everybody up for this morning.”

  Just then, Detective Gladue stepped into the centre of the group and called my name. As I stood up, I could sense she was eyeing me curiously. So she knew who I was, in that I was connected to Steve Browning. I wondered if she had been contemplating how easy Detective Browning was on the eyes and seeing me as a potential rival. I hoped not. My sense of our relationship was not sturdy enough at the moment to withstand that sort of energy coming at me.

  I smiled what probably looked like rictus to her, in an attempt to mask my own sense of discomfort, and followed her over to the table where Iain was set up with double-paged statement sheets and a small voice recorder.

  “Hey, Randy, fancy meeting you here,” he drawled drily. Iain and I had an odd relationship. He had been Steve’s partner almost as long as I had, and had been at times leery of how much Steve shared with me about the general workings of their job. He had also seen me get embroiled in various situations that he felt were unseemly for an amateur. On the other side of the coin, we had been through a lot together and had shared more than one of the weird adrenalin rushes that come when you realize you may be about to die. And that was a bond of sorts, undeniably.

  So Iain and I tolerated each other, in that great Canadian understanding of the word. I smiled wearily at him, and he motioned for me to sit down. Detective Gladue sat at the end of the table, taking notes. I could almost see her invisible antennae, bobbing between us, trying to gauge the relationship.

  “I am going to be asking you a few questions to establish where you fit in this situation. Please take your time and be as clear as possible in your answers. Answer all questions verbally, please, as I am recording our conversation for transcription purposes.” Iain pointed to the recorder. “Please state your name, telephone number, and the position you hold with the theatre company.”

  “My name is Miranda Craig, and I go by Randy, in case anyone mentions me.” I tried to get a smile out of Iain, but it was no go, so I just recited my telephone number dutifully and continued with my role. “I have been hired by a grant to the Freewill Shakespeare Festival to run a high school camp experience for a three-week session during the course of the run.”

  “You’re going to be a camp counsellor?”

  I wasn’t sure I didn’t detect a sneer in Iain’s question. I would have loved to hear a replay of the recording.

  “Not so much a counsellor as a facilitator. I’ve been working from the main office of the Festival to create materials to augment the teenagers’ experience. They will be learning about the times, focusing on one of the plays, doing some acting exercises, learning a bit of stage fighting and fencing, and putting on a truncated, one-hour version of Much Ado About Nothing on the last day of the camp, as a matinee performance for their families and invited guests.”

  Iain shrugged. To him, it probably sounded like what I did in English courses for my college students, all wedged into a three-week outdoor experience. He wasn’t far off base, really.

  “And you got this job how?” Detective Gladue looked over her clipboard at me.

  “Do you mean what are my qualifications to teach Shakespeare to fifteen-year-olds, or who pulled strings to get me hired?” Okay, so that came out a little bit more belligerently than I’d intended.

  “Just wondering how you ended up in this company, Ms. Craig.” She was glacial, and I had to admire that. What I wouldn’t give for a bit of
that poise. I could feel the heat sliding up my neck toward my jawline. Soon the telltale flush would creep onto my cheeks and she’d know she’d got to me.

  I shrugged. “Well, my friend Denise Wolff recommended that I apply for the job, which she had heard about through her work with the artistic director and other folks in the Department of Drama. I was probably in a better position to take it on than some people, since I didn’t have any spring or summer sessional work lined up. Being as I come from the English end of things, I wasn’t enmeshed in getting ready for a Fringe show. And I needed the money.”

  “Why would connections to a Fringe show matter?” Detective Gladue sounded more curious than interrogatory.

  “Well, to get a slot in the Edmonton Fringe Theatre Festival, you have to put your name and a bond of something like $500 in around November of the previous year and hope that your name is drawn in the lottery. You are informed by the end of December whether or not you have been allotted a time in one of the eleven venues, and that is when the fire hits the belly. Most Fringe performers are either in school till May or holding down one or two other jobs, and so early planning and rehearsals all take place in and around some really wacky schedule adjustments.” I shrugged. “Chances are Kieran was turned down by two or three of his first choices for this gig, if they found out they’d got Fringe slots.”

  “How many shows take place at the Fringe?” asked Iain, interested in spite of himself.

  “There are eleven venues, each showing somewhere between eight and ten shows in rotation. Then there are more than forty ‘Bring Your Own Venue’ sites, featuring one to four shows, so it’s hard to gauge. Those get added to the mix after February, and I’m not totally sure what sort of bond is required in order to get into the programming.”

  “So you are saying that the possibility of doing a Fringe play, depending on whether or not you get a slot, which is totally random and up to chance, are how actors in this city organize their year’s commitments?” Detective Gladue sounded incredulous.

  “Actors, directors, designers—and they run the risk of their play being panned by a critic who normally writes car columns in the newspaper, or having no one come to their show because they are scheduled in at eleven o’clock every night. Fringing is a phenomenon. It’s a chance to be experimental and edgy, and you take away 100% of the box office and create a larger audience for yourself, because more than just the theatre set come to the Fringe. The Fringe is big.”

  Iain jumped in, probably sensing the edginess between me and his new consort. “So, back to the situation at hand. You have mostly been downtown, not here in the rehearsal hall?”

  I nodded. “There was a first-day reading for each play, and we were invited to come to that. I did, because I thought it would be useful to make notes about which actors might be able to help the kids with soliloquies, and I also wanted to check how Kieran had cut Much Ado. I have to take out more than half of it, and I figured I would start from his cut and then go further.” I was oversharing. I always seemed to do this when being questioned by the police. “I went to the party that Kieran held after the first week of rehearsal, too. But aside from that, I’ve been mostly downtown or working from home.”

  “So, tell me what your experiences with Eleanor Durant were, if any.”

  I had been thinking about that ever since Micheline had called. When you are told that someone has died, I suppose it is only natural to flick through all your memories of that person, polishing them in your mind.

  It’s not as if Eleanor Durant was the only celebrity I had ever met. I had volunteered at a lecture for Roberta Bondar, shaken hands with Béla Fleck, and once, when I was eleven, been kissed on the cheek by Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau on a campaign visit. Eleanor was probably the only one I’d talked to for more than two minutes, though.

  She and I had exchanged pleasantries at the first reading. I had remarked how much I had enjoyed her television show, and we had shared a laugh or two about favourite episodes. Then we had started talking about places near her apartment hotel and I had steered her to various places, including Audreys Books, only three blocks from her.

  At Kieran’s party, she had sought me out to tell me how much she had enjoyed shopping at Audreys and at the Alberta Craft Council’s shop down the street from the bookstore. Denise and she had started talking about running and the various trails and stairs through the city. That had morphed into talk about running shoes and shoes in general. We had also connected over the shared need for shoe stores that carried half-sizes and shops that carried long-length trousers. These weren’t actually things I wanted to share with Detective Gladue listening in; it would make me sound so materialistic to admit that all we had spoken of was where to shop for what.

  “We spoke about pretty mundane things, really. She had never stayed in Edmonton for any length of time, so it was mostly filling in with where to shop, what to see while she was here, where to eat, that sort of thing.” I shrugged.

  Iain was writing something down and seemed happy to move on, but Jennifer Gladue seemed skeptical. I guess I didn’t look like the sort who might give shopping tips to a television star.

  “Did you meet with Eleanor Durant at other times than scheduled festival events?”

  I had to stop and think about that one. There had been a couple of smiles and nods on the street, one of them on the High Level Bridge. I was walking home to my apartment just a block south of the bridge and she was jogging north toward her downtown apartment. That time she had just nodded and smiled and didn’t even slow down to take out her earbuds and talk. I had been grateful, since all I wanted was to get into my apartment and relax after a long day, and the last place I could think of to unwind and visit would be in the middle of a half-mile-long bridge high above the North Saskatchewan River. Not that I am afraid of heights or water. It’s bridges that make me nervous. After all, everything made by humans eventually wears out or breaks. Maybe I’m afraid of engineers.

  I must have been drifting for a bit, because Detective Gladue brought me back to her question by tapping on the side of the table twice, the way Chinese people do to ask for more tea.

  “We ran into each other a few times on the street, and she was probably at Oren Gentry’s funeral, though I don’t remember seeing her there. We didn’t socialize, though, if that’s what you mean.”

  I had no idea what Detective Gladue meant. She was giving me a look as if she couldn’t imagine what someone like Steve Browning, or Eleanor Durant, either, could see in me. While I was not usually prone to making snap judgments about people, I really didn’t like her. And I had the idea the feeling was mutual.

  Iain McCorquodale must have been picking up on the tension between us, because he took over the conversation, asking me a few more general questions about the way the Festival camp program was coordinated, and pretty soon I was back in the circle of chairs, picking up my satchel and sweater. I’d been told we could leave, but I wanted to talk to Micheline or Amanda before I headed home, to let them know I would be putting in some hours from my apartment. There was no point in heading downtown if Micheline was here all day, and I could just as easily cut Shakespeare cards at home.

  I was planning a Shakespeare game, a modified version of Happy Families, where in order to win, you had to complete sets of characters in the plays. I was going to need at least five decks of cards for the run of the camp. I had to cut out card stock, then print the character onto one side. I was still experimenting with tracing the design onto the card versus glue-sticking a printed image onto the card and then sending all the cards through a laminator at the library. Micheline had suggested printing them directly onto manila stock on an oversized printer, but I had been put off by the costs of that approach, which would still leave me cutting out each separate card, as well as having to find my way out to the wilds of the west end of town and back. So I was back to trying to tough it out with my original plans.

  Micheline nodded distractedly when I approached h
er with my farewells, and Kieran saluted from where he was sitting nearby. I let myself out of the darkened rehearsal hall and wandered out into the sunlight between the Fine Arts building and the Timms Centre for the Arts. I was two blocks west of my apartment. I was also approximately one block north of the best salad in Edmonton, and my stomach was rumbling. I headed south, with no recriminations, and was happily ensconced at a table at the Greenhouse with a quinoa and jerk chicken salad and a frothy latte, when my phone buzzed.

  I dug in my bag for my phone and monkeyed with the easy-lock action for a minute before I could access the text message. It was Denise, wanting to know how I was. The news must have hit the airwaves, or maybe Kieran had let her know.

  I texted back my whereabouts and she told me to sit tight, as she could meet me in ten minutes. I figured that free time would give me a very good excuse to cap off my meal with a frozen yoghurt concoction and call this my big meal of the day. The bowl, covered in sunflower seeds and shaved coconut, was just being delivered as Denise strode in. She followed the waiter to the counter, put in an order for a small-sized steak salad, and then joined me.

  “I am eating away my grief,” I said in response to her raised eyebrows to the fulsome bowl of sweet excess in front of me.

  “Grief? Really? How well did you know Eleanor Durant?”

  “Don’t you start in on me. I’ve already had it up to here with that new detective grilling me over my actions and interactions. I have no idea what Steve sees in people. He said she was a good fit with the team, but as far as I can tell, she is going to rub people the wrong way and he and Iain will be having to run behind mopping up after her.”

  Denise beamed one of her megawatt smiles at the fellow bringing her salad and cutlery, which I supposed was as good as the tip I had given him before. He seemed to think so, and I was sure I detected a lilt in his walk away from the table.