The Roar of the Crowd

by Janice Macdonald

  “Well, as you probably know, people are treating Denise as if she is some sort of pariah because the scuttlebutt is she is a ‘person of interest’ in your investigation.”

  “There are quite a few persons of interest in our investigation,” he answered drily.

  “I’m sure there are, but no one else in the theatre community seems to be so clearly interesting to you.”

  “And your point?”

  “I’d like to be a character reference for Denise.”

  “She isn’t applying for a job, Randy, she is a person of interest in a murder investigation.”

  “But she couldn’t have done it.”

  “Because she is of good character?”

  “She didn’t even know that Kieran was fooling around with Eleanor. How could she have a motive if she didn’t know she had a motive?”

  “It’s difficult to prove a negative, as you well know. She can tell you and she can tell us that she didn’t know about her boyfriend’s proclivities, but we have a witness who heard her arguing with Kieran a week before the murder.”

  “Who?”

  Iain just looked at me.

  “Where were they supposed to have been arguing?”

  He smiled at me patiently, the way uncles do when you beg them to tell you what is in the biggest birthday present wrapped in the hall. He opened the Tim Hortons bag and handed me my dessert, a Canadian Maple doughnut.

  “Okay, I get that you can’t tell me anything, but please consider other avenues of investigation while you’re looking into things. Because I know she couldn’t have murdered a woman, in cold premeditation stalking her with a knife and hiding her body and then getting home unseen and then looking me straight in the eye and asking me for help because she has become a person of interest. And if she didn’t do it, that means there is still someone out there who did.”

  Iain reached for my detritus on the picnic table and packed it all up in the bag, which he crumpled in one hand as he pushed up and away from the picnic table.

  “I know you are missing Steve, and I know it’s an edgy time for you, caught up in the whole community under the microscope there, but let us do our jobs, Randy. We’re good at it. You can stop worrying about us getting the wrong man, or woman, or whomever we determine is guilty once our investigation is complete. Okay?”

  There wasn’t much I could say to that except to nod and thank him for lunch. And hope that he wasn’t whipping off an email to Steve about what a busybody his girlfriend was.

  Two fit middle-aged women ran down the road, presumably circling the entire park as part of their exercise routine. Watching them, all happy and healthy, I briefly considered jogging back to the theatre along the road, but on the off-chance that my imaginary serial killer was watching and really was after exercisers, I decided to hold off on sweaty exercise for the time being. To play it safe, I would avoid scene study, too.

  The rest of the afternoon was busy but satisfying. I was pretty sure I had everything ready for the camps. Telling Micheline I would see her the following Monday, I headed for the park gates to catch the bus back home. I would have two days and the weekend to mentally prepare to be a bardic camp counsellor.

  18.

  If I had felt at all relaxed over the four short days, that feeling disappeared in the next week’s blur of activity. My camp began, and while there actually were more kids attending who wanted to be there than kids who had been forced into it by their parents, it was an uphill slog to jolly them all into being a working unit, which was required if they were going to manage to get scene work of any value accomplished.

  Meanwhile, both Much Ado About Nothing and Othello had opened, to some acclaim. Micheline had managed to attract a stellar crew of Edmonton glitterati to attend the opening nights of each, and while Liz Nicholls, the long-time theatre critic for the Edmonton Journal, had utterly dumped on the comedy, people were coming out to it in droves, probably because of the newsworthy elements of having a purportedly murdered character actually murdered. Louise was shaky in the role, but it wasn’t as if she had all that much to do besides look cow-eyed at Christian, cry on cue when he dumped her at the altar, and then spend most of the second act hidden away and claiming to be dead.

  Whatever brought people to the amphitheatre, it was the magic of experiencing Shakespeare out in the open, brought into a contemporary feel through the setting and costuming, that made their evenings so wonderful. No one who came to see the Freewill shows went away disappointed. If the rain held off and the mosquitoes didn’t get any worse, we were headed for the best year ever in terms of box office and refreshment sales. Micheline had mentioned that she was phoning in a second order of tee-shirts, so merchandise was moving well, too.

  Kieran must have been told things were going well with the camps, or else the stress of rehearsal and getting the play up and running had dissipated enough for him to turn back into Mr. Nice Guy. He had come up to me during the lunch break while the kids were spread out around the picnic tables at the top of the hill, hunched over smart phones or laughing together about whatever teenagers laugh about. I sat there hoping it wasn’t me he was headed for. Kieran plopped himself down beside me and nodded, pleased with what he was seeing.

  “It’s a good crowd this year, eh?”

  I nodded and finished chewing the huge bite of sandwich I had taken just prior to his arrival. Grace in action.

  “Are you finding any budding thespians?”

  Finally I could swallow. “There are a few who have the necessary audacity, the class clown sort. I have one or two girls with intensity, but I’m not sure whether that translates to stage presence. We’ll see once they get up on their feet with their scenes. So far we have gone through some games and puzzles on Shakespeare and his times, to get them primed. Janine is coming in this afternoon to give them an hour or so of stage-fighting techniques, which should be worth a laugh.”

  “Good job, Randy. I’ve called Louise, David, and Christian in for an hour to run their duo scenes. We’ve got to get her a bit more comfortable in her roles. However, we can gather in the green room till three, if that gives you enough time with your fighting.”

  “That should be fine. I need to keep watering the kids or someone will keel over with sunstroke, so we’ll be off the stage by three and settling back here for scene work and a crossword puzzle till it’s time for them to head out.”

  “Do you think it’s warm enough for sunstroke?”

  “This is not the sun of our childhoods, Kieran. I don’t trust it not to fry our brains while we’re not looking. I get sun rashes now, when I used to just brown up without thinking about it.” I reached down to the plastic tub at my feet and hauled out the large bottle of sunscreen I had on hand for those who forgot their own. “My motto is to be prepared for the worst so you can enjoy the best.”

  Kieran laughed and pushed himself up off the picnic bench.

  “You have a point there, Randy. Well, I’d better get my head in the game. If you see Louise or the boys looking lost, let them know I’m in the green room, okay?”

  He strolled down the path toward the stage, and then skirted it to the left and disappeared behind the white column marking the edge of the set. You wouldn’t know from our exchange that he was mourning a lost love, let alone missing a leading actress, except for perhaps a weariness around the eyes, which someone else could just as easily take for squinting against the sun. If Kieran was missing Eleanor, he was doing a magnificent job of hiding his feelings. Of course, before he was the artistic director of the festival, he had been an actor. Denise had told me about his years in Stratford, which may have been part of his allure, as the Festival there in southern Ontario was a sort of mecca for her.

  Had Eleanor ever played Stratford, I wondered. It might be worth finding out how far back her relationship to Kieran had gone. This might not have been a new thing at all. Instead of usurping Denise in Kieran’s affections, Eleanor may have been just starting up a new chapter in a long-running
serial.

  The kids were getting restless and I could see Janine trudging up the hill toward the chain-link gate, so I clapped my hands to get their attention. I gave them a five-minute warning, time to hit the washrooms and pack up their lunch detritus, and meet on the stage.

  Janine and I conferred. Some of the actors and stage folk didn’t want me hanging around when they took the kids through their paces. Others were far more nervous of the kids than of a full audience and seemed to want me to hover and maintain a sense of authority while they did their thing.

  Janine was of the confident type, and she had soon herded the kids into pairs and started her exercises to limber them up, all the better to fling themselves about in pretenses of battle. I walked back up the hill to sort my puzzles out of my files and haul my boxes back to their hideyhole in the trailer. Micheline was at her desk, counting ticket stubs from the evening before and entering the numbers into the columns of her spreadsheet. She was humming, so I assumed beer sales the night before had been good.

  As she got to the end of a column and hit enter, she turned and smiled at me.

  “Hey Randy, how goes the pied pipering?”

  “That’s what it feels like, for the most part,” I sighed and lowered myself onto the leather couch along one wall of the trailer. The other desk belonged to Maggie, the top of hill/volunteer coordinator, and while she probably wouldn’t have minded my using her chair while she wasn’t there, the couch looked comfier. “I am not sure how these kids are going to get old and mature enough over the span of the next year to enter university, to tell you the truth.”

  Micheline had grown kids, so she laughed.

  “You’d be surprised at what a difference a year and a grad corsage can make. They’ll be running the world in another ten years, you know.”

  “Heaven help us all.”

  “Well, I can’t see them making a worse mess of it, can you?”

  “Oh, you bet I can. These kids can’t spell, they don’t read, they barely pay attention to politics, and they are so tied up in social media that they have a skewed concept of what is happening in the world.”

  “What do you mean? Surely they’re more aware of politics around the world. We get more information, quicker. Uprisings and protests are shown on Twitter before they get coverage on the news.”

  “That’s part of the trouble, I think. We see so much so quickly that we are getting paranoid about the level of unrest in the world or violence on our streets. I read statistics the other day that crime is actually way down all over the world, but we keep calling for more police presence and more prisons, partly because we are just more paranoid, but partly because we see things so quickly and become so saturated with every story that we begin to think there are killers on every corner.”

  Micheline thought for a minute and then shrugged. “I see your point, but I think kids are pretty much as focused on things as any generation before them. It’s their time to release their sillies before putting on their big-kid pants and getting down to business. They’ll do fine.” She swivelled her chair around to look straight at me. “Besides, there is a killer on our corner. We don’t even have to go online to get paranoid.”

  She had a point.

  19.

  I made it home before the rain started.

  Ever since the flooding that had sent southern Alberta into a tailspin and created the greatest natural disaster in Canada, strong rainstorms had a sobering and frightening effect on westerners. More and more intersections would turn into small lakes and sinkholes would appear in various spots on previously impermeable roads. It was a combination of water tables rising, the Gulf Stream slowing down and letting major weather patterns sit too long in one place, and elements of our provincial infrastructure having been left unmaintained or upgraded through the glory years of getting us “debt free.” It was all probably due to mankind’s egregious misuse of the planet and willful human error and we were responsible for it all. I knew we had to take the blame for our voting history, at any rate.

  I stood at my kitchen window watching a stream of water run down the middle of the alleyway, whipping small branches along with it. Summer in Edmonton was never predictable. I hoped that this rain would abate in time for people to decide to head to the park for the show tonight. Othello would be nice and atmospheric with a darkened sky and glowering clouds. As long as the weather wasn’t life threatening, the Shakespeare plays went on. Most of the audience was covered under the high tent, and anyone who had decided to watch from a blanket on the lawn could scramble under cover if need be. The worst thing was a grey day leading up to the show, as it meant the house would be small and the mosquitoes might be plentiful. Of course, Maggie’s volunteers in the concession would do a booming business in bug spray.

  The rain seemed to be settling in for a while, though it didn’t seem as militant as before. I turned on the lamps in my living room and decided to settle in for the evening. I had puzzles to mark for the kids who had turned them in, a slide show of costumes to put the finishing touches on, and the mail to go through.

  I made myself a pot of tea and hauled it to the coffee table, along with some apple slices and a pile of crackers. I thought I had a heel of cheese still in the fridge, but I was mistaken, and the remains of the small jar of cheese spread I found pushed to the back was dried out and definitely non-foodlike, so it was now soaking in the sink, prior to recycling the jar. I was loath to break into the sandwich slices and portable goodies, as I needed them for my daily lunches. Somehow, I was going to have to fit in a trip to the grocery store soon. My time was so focused on being down in the park and I was so exhausted at the end of the day that most of my weekly tasks had gone by the wayside. It was a good thing I had planned my outfits for the whole stint of the camps, or I’d be stuck wearing the same grimy jeans for the last three days straight.

  I knew a lot of my tiredness had to do with being outside for so much of the day. It was not for nothing that mothers took their children to the park each day to run off their energy; there was nothing like a few hours in the outdoors to make me sleep like a baby. I only hoped the kids under my care were wearing out on a par with me. We had another fortnight to go, and I wasn’t sure I could harness all that energy they demonstrated initially.

  When I had Friday’s material ready, my clothes laid out and the lights off, I dragged myself to bed. It might have been glorified camp counselling, but I was putting as much energy into three full weeks with these teens as I’d require for a spring session intensive course. I felt utterly justified that I was earning my cushy grant.

  It was funny to think that Micheline and I had enjoyed such a good chat this afternoon after the edginess she’d demonstrated when I first came on board. There was no doubt she had thought the grant should have gone to someone in the Drama department. I was pretty sure there were another couple or three folks in the cast and crew who had thought the same. Amanda, bless her soul, was just happy the position had been filled and welcomed me with open arms, thrilled she wasn’t going to have to handle senior high hormones with her bard.

  There wasn’t so much a rivalry between the Drama and English departments as there was a détente. Each of them taught courses in play analysis, but there was a definite slant to each. While English could defend itself as being essential to liberal arts and general literacy, Drama had always been an outlier. It had strong support from the Faculty of Education, which needed teachers schooled in theatre arts, but it vied with art history and music appreciation and film studies for the general students looking to fulfill their fine arts credits. In order to keep all the specialized courses for the thoroughbred BFA acting students on the books, it needed to keep its theatre history and overview play analysis courses afloat.

  So maybe that whole ages-old rivalry between departments had also fuelled Sarah Arnold’s attitude toward Denise. She had been outwardly welcoming and happy to work with her, but really quick to turn on her when the going got tough.

  I fe
ll asleep wondering how Denise was feeling and making a mental list on which “call Denise” was at the very top.

  20.

  Friday went by in a blur, with the kids working feverishly on the monologues they’d be giving for a select audience of Kieran, Coby, Morgana, and Christian the following Monday. And by “select” I meant the adults I could round up. The kids were also eager to find out the casting for their scenes and excited to consider they’d be working on costuming and staging by the end of the next week, in order to present them to their parents and invited friends the following Saturday, prior to the matinee of Much Ado. I made sure the weekly paperwork was in to Micheline in plenty of time and clocked out at 4:30, just as several of the actors were drifting in to warm up prior to their six o’clock call.

  I was hoping to have a completely untheatrical weekend, but Denise called with tickets to the new Stewart Lemoine play at Teatro la Quindicina, and I couldn’t resist. I promised to meet her for dinner first at the Next Act the next day.

  That meant I had all of Saturday, till five o’clock, at any rate, to reclaim my life without Shakespeare Camp. I woke to no alarm clock, showered for ten minutes more than necessary, and popped across the hall with my load of laundry before settling in with a breakfast of coffee and eggs. I was still sitting there, with my hair turbaned in a towel, basking in the sunny eastern window, when the ululating ring of the Skype program on my computer sounded. I swivelled around to my desk and grabbed my laptop. It was Steve. It had to be.

  “Hey there, Sultan! What is it with women being able to do that with towels? Do you get taught that in gym class or something?”

  “No, I think we’re born knowing how, you doofus.”

  “What’s shaking?”

  “It’s Saturday morning and I am trying to figure out why I ever thought running a Shakespeare camp for a group of sixteen-year-olds would be a good idea. What about you?”

  “I am mycket nyfiken men mycket trevligt,” he responded.