The Roar of the Crowd

by Janice Macdonald

  I turned the phone list off and left the trailer. The kids were clearing things up, and I did a silent head count. I was missing two, but they emerged from the bathrooms just as I was about to recount. I announced they had half an hour to work on their group scenes before Janine called them to the stage, and they split into their respective groups eagerly. They were a good group.

  I stood surveying the area. Five groups of kids were congregated in various places: two at opposite ends of the long picnic tables, one set in the audience seats, one on the lawn in the sunshine, and one on the lip of the stage. Micheline appeared on the left side of the stage and made her way around the outside of the audience toward the trailer, just as the actors would do later when positioning themselves to enter from the back of the theatre. James, the sound guy, had arrived at some point and was reworking some sound cues from inside the concrete bunker booth at the right rear of the audience.

  Squirrels were chasing each other along the pathway, oblivious to my legs in their way. They split and ran behind me and into the shrubs. Birds were singing, or that might have been a sound cue. In the distance, I could hear the loud hailer from the paddleboat dock calling in boat number 5.

  It was a beautiful Edmonton summer day in late July. And I would not want to be Christian Norgaard for all the tea in China.

  25.

  Denise had given me good advice about pushing my bike up the stairs, as one of those handy troughs was built into each side of the staircase to accommodate the tires of a bicycle. This way I looked like a smart cyclist availing myself of a proper portage of sorts rather than an out-of-shape middle-aged woman panting her way up a hill, being passed by real cyclists. Still, it was heavy going, since my bicycle was built for sturdy reliability, not lithe racing speed.

  I appeared near the top of the hill at 87 Avenue, by one of the last remaining traffic circles in the city. I pedalled along a bit nervously, close to the right lip of the road. Edmonton was trying more and more to be a bicycle-friendly city, but between belligerent drivers who didn’t even like sharing their roads with buses full of socialists, let alone granola-chewing bike riders, and cyclists who ticked people off by either clogging up traffic when they could be using an adjacent bike path or riding on downtown sidewalks not designated for anything more than pedestrians, there were still a few wrinkles to iron out.

  For the most part, riding around campus was pretty safe. Cars had to watch out for jaywalking students all over the place, anyhow. But during rush hour one of the roads most frequently used to navigate out of the downtown area toward the Whitemud Freeway and the far west end of town was 114 Street past the university hospital. I decided that discretion was the better part of remaining in one piece; I ducked off 87 Avenue at 116 Street and did the rest of the route home through the mostly pedestrian throughfare of 88 Avenue, past the Students Union Building, Administration, Dentistry-Pharmacy, HUB Mall, the Fine Arts Building, Law, and then the block of student housing originally created for the Universiade Games and expanding through North Garneau at the same rate that kudzu took over the southern states.

  I got home, sweaty and self-righteous, and locked my bike into its space in the small shed beside the garbage bins. I just had time to take a shower and start chopping up salad ingredients before Denise came over.

  I also had time to mull over what I could possibly say to Christian. He was putting himself in a very vulnerable place if he knew something a murderer didn’t want known. On the other hand, he could be the murderer, threatening more people, and if I was to pop up and let him know I knew something, I would be putting myself into that same position I’d just considered for him!

  It was a mystery, and not the happy tidy sort that come with scones and lavender eau de toilette. How did one keep Christian safe if he was innocent and remain off his radar if he wasn’t?

  I decided the best course of action would be to tell Steve all about it once he got home and let him approach Christian.

  I had got just about everything ready by the time Denise arrived. She handed me a bottle of pinot grigio and a dark bottle of Chocolate Shop red wine.

  “I wasn’t sure what you were planning to make, so I erred on the side of excess,” she laughed. She kicked off her shoes at the door and followed me into the dining area. I had laid the table with my big salad bowl full of tossed greens taking pride of place. I was on my last flip of the frittata I had been easing along, so I divvied it up in the pan and served Denise straight from the stove. My mother would have disapproved, but it meant one less dish to wash later.

  “Oh yum,” said Denise, digging in happily, “it’s almost breakfast for supper, my favourite kind of meal.”

  I was pouring us each a glass of white wine as she said that, and my openly quizzical look made her laugh. “Okay, maybe not breakfast completely.”

  We ate without talking for a bit, and then didn’t talk about anything of consequence for a few minutes while I cleared the plates away and Denise refilled our goblets. I wasn’t sure if it was because we were tired of the subject or shy of starting in again, but neither of us seemed all that eager to discuss the problem at hand.

  “Brad called me this afternoon,” Denise said after a brief shared silence.

  “Really?” Brad was the chair of the English department. “What about?”

  “He wanted to know if I was going to be able to teach this fall, with the ‘unresolved issues involving me,’ or whether he should consider reassigning my classes.” Denise’s chin crumpled as she said this, and tears welled up and overflowed her eyelids and rolled down her cheeks. “I thought he was going to offer some sort of solidarity message, like ‘we’re all behind you,’ but he just wanted to see how he could minimize the damage. I have a feeling that if this isn’t ‘resolved’ in time, he’s going to suggest I bow out of the roster, just to keep people from whispering in the halls.”

  “You never know, it could boost enrollment if they all thought you were Lizzie Borden. Brad should be considering that aspect of things. He could definitely prove that English courses had high enrollments and should be immune from the next round of cuts. You could be the hero. People in modern languages and theatre tech would be wooing you to teach for them. Think about it,” I rolled on hyperbolically, trying to turn Denise’s tears into laughter. “You could singlehandedly save the University of Alberta. Other institutions would be scrambling for their own murder suspects to keep their programs solvent. Brad would be down on his knees, thanking you for your mixing yourself up so handily in ‘unresolved issues,’ really. I can see it.”

  Denise was hiccoughing with laughter and dabbing at her eyes with her paper napkin. The danger was over.

  “Well, if he’s going to be a dick, we’d better get this whole thing resolved as soon as possible,” I concluded, pushing back from the table and ushering Denise into the living room, where I had laid out my calendar pages, a couple of pencils, a pile of sticky notes, and my laptop.

  For the next couple of hours, we dredged through our memories and email folders to figure out when various things had occurred. Denise could detail her first date with Kieran, but she couldn’t recall exactly who had introduced them. She tried to remember whether Sarah, whom she had known from grad school courses, had approached her at the New Year’s Eve party or one of the theatre opening nights she had attended as a Sterling judge to consider the cross-departmental Romeo and Juliet, but she had the sense of there being a lot of bonhomie and wine glasses surrounding them.

  “So it was Sarah’s idea to have the double class?” I asked.

  “Oh yes, I give her complete credit for the idea,” nodded Denise. “I did a lot of the formatting of the lectures, providing the historical and literary context, and made up the charts we use in our presentation as to how much background materials a Drama student would receive about the play as opposed to an English student, and the questionnaire for the students about how comfortable they felt in performance mode, and how much it differed from having to do a gro
up oral presentation in other classes. We were trying to examine the playing field, as we knew it wasn’t even; the kids self-select into courses that allow either for quiet absorption with minimal but hopefully some interaction, or totally hands-on extraverted interaction and the promise of audience. If we could minimize the discomfort on one hand, and check the level of background info received on the other, we might be able to make a case for an equality of intellectual wrestling with the same material.” She smiled wanly. “We were trying to mend fences and build bridges between the departments. Maybe it was all in our heads, but it seemed there was always such a wall between us, and a territorial fight. That’s why we picked Romeo and Juliet for our test run, of course. It was always about the ‘two houses, both alike in dignity.’”

  “Such a cool project,” I agreed. “And did it do what you wanted, do you think?”

  Denise shrugged. “You know, until Eleanor died, I was thinking it had worked miracles. There was talk of having a shared lecture series in the fall, and we were encouraged to run the shared course again in the spring of next year. The presentation about it was pounced on when we submitted it for Congress, and we were actually invited to present down in New Orleans, so people have been talking about it. But now, I have no idea. Sarah is not someone I feel like calling at the moment, and she certainly hasn’t contacted me. For all I know, she’s going to take the whole presentation on herself, though how one person at a dais talking about cross-campus collaboration is going to play, I’m not sure.”

  I tried to get us back onto our goal of timelining events, though privately I figured I would stick Sarah Arnold onto a list of her very own and deliver her to Steve along with Christian’s weird phone call. There was a motive in there somewhere, at least to cut Denise out of the research paper and discredit her contribution.

  We sorted out Denise’s version of when Kieran had first let her know Eleanor was in the mix for playing Hero.

  “Everyone was talking about the fact she was in town. I think she’d been down to one of the Die-Nasty live improvised soap opera evenings and charmed the socks off everyone. So Kieran said he should see if he could nab her for the festival. He had made the general announcement of what plays were going to be produced and a list of the actors hired. I guess he hadn’t finalized the cast lists, because the next thing you knew he was announcing Eleanor as the headliner.”

  “Would it have been a good choice?”

  “Oh, for sure. Eleanor didn’t have the internal gravity to play a Beatrice, but she could have been an adorable Hero. She skewed very young, even more so in person than on TV.”

  “So you spent quite a bit of time with her?”

  “Enough, I guess. I quite liked her, but then I had no idea she was screwing my boyfriend, eh? We met at the party Kieran had for the cast in May, where they unveiled the set and laid out the rehearsal schedule. I liked her, and we even met up to go running a few times after that, but the connection dwindled. Maybe she had a conscience after all and couldn’t keep up the pretense one-on-one.”

  “You went running together? I know you talked to her about trails, but I didn’t realize you actually went out together. Tell me you didn’t run the Queen Elizabeth Park steps together.” No wonder the police were all over Denise for Eleanor’s death.

  “Of course we did. I showed her two or three circuits that offered hill and stair challenges. I warned her, though, about running alone at certain times of day.”

  We marked down the May date for the cast party, and for good measure I marked down the date of the party when I’d met Eleanor, which was a lot closer to the start of the rehearsal process. Kieran certainly believed in a lot of parties to build cast camaraderie.

  “So, in your estimation, when do you think Kieran began his affair with Eleanor?” There was a date worth knowing, I figured.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” moaned Denise. “I feel so utterly idiotic, not having any intuition about that.”

  “Was there a date that got broken because he had to do some extra work? Or was he late for anything when you were supposed to meet?” I knew I was pushing Denise close to painful areas, and she’d already cried once this evening. I hated to persist when she was so vulnerable, but I reminded myself that it was precisely because she was so vulnerable that we had to continue.

  She shook her head slowly, staring at a corner of my living room but probably not seeing the crammed bookcase, my banjo or the small television that resembled a large computer monitor. She was walking through memories, looking through the good times for the small, irritant pieces of grit that she had ignored or brushed aside at the time. I let her be, silently wondering if I’d ever have the strength to examine that sort of situation.

  If I was exposed to the world as naïve and unaware, would I be able to step out of the pain and look objectively at the situation? Would it even be a good thing to do? Or would it be like picking at a scab, not allowing it to heal naturally and in its own time?

  Trouble was, Denise didn’t have the time to hide away, lick her wounds, and reemerge whole. She had to be one step ahead of the metaphorical gallows if she was going to maintain her liberty, let alone her reputation. I admired my friend her strength of purpose. It didn’t surprise me, though. Whatever Denise did, she did beautifully.

  A tiny little voice at the back of my brain said words that I might have been submerging for a while. “If she does everything perfectly, could she have pulled off the perfect crime?” I stood up suddenly to silence the doubt and went to put the kettle on for tea while Denise continued to sort through her memories.

  “You know, there were a couple of times when he begged off going out after rehearsal, right around the time you started prepping for the camp course. I didn’t mind, all in all, because Sarah and I were prepping the abstract for New Orleans, and one evening I had time to drive you out somewhere for Mardi Gras masks.”

  “I remember that! Let me see, I can even figure out what day that was from emails.” I scrolled through my Friends folder to early June and clicked open two or three emails from Denise before I found the one that noted she could take me out to the party store that evening because plans had fallen through and she was free.

  Memories of that evening, when we had laughed at the crazy piñatas and Denise had talked me out of buying plastic disposable dishware that looked fancier than my own, flooded back. We had found the domino masks I needed for the scenework the kids would be doing, and I’d also picked up a few of the silly hats that might help them create a character. It had been a good time.

  And now, forever more, it was going to be tinged with the knowledge that while we had been out enjoying ourselves, Kieran had been enjoying Eleanor.

  Grimly, I put a large asterisk next to the date on my June calendar page. I just hoped this all was going to be useful to Steve, because it was hardly painfree.

  We drank green tea and talked in circles for a bit, but nothing else jumped out as important dates to record. I looked at our timeline. It didn’t amount to terribly much, but at least I now had a sense of when Eleanor had appeared on the scene, where Denise had intersected with her, and how quickly things had escalated once the rehearsals had begun.

  “You know, we should probably put Oren’s funeral down on the timeline,” I mused, looking at the calendar before me.

  “How come?”

  “Well, everyone was there, including us. In fact, if Steve and Iain want to know who all the players are in this, all they need to do is to get their hands on the condolence book everyone signed.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” said Denise, and I made a note for Steve. As I was writing a thought hit me and I stopped, mid-scrawl.

  “But you know, if we look at Eleanor’s death from a lens of getting her out of the way to get Oren’s job, what is to stop us from seeing Oren’s death as a way to get Oren’s job?”

  “Randy, are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  I nodded. “Yep. I think Oren Gentry may ha
ve been murdered.”

  26.

  After another cup of tea, Denise excused herself and went home. I cleared things up and called it a night myself. I was still aching a bit through the shoulders from pushing the bike uphill, and there was just something about spending so much time outdoors through the day that made me tired. I supposed that was why mothers pushed their babies out for walks in the open air; it helped them sleep soundly.

  I tossed and turned through the night, though. I might as well have stayed up and done something useful like solving a murder or writing the great Canadian novel. I looked like a sad raccoon the next morning, and even a shower and under-eye concealer couldn’t do miracles. I decided to walk to the park, since the simple mechanics of a bicycle seemed like a little too much heavy machinery for me to be handling.

  This morning Micheline had beat me to the park with plenty of time. She had coffee brewing in the trailer and was typing away furiously when I popped my head in. I tucked my meagre lunch into the mini-fridge and sat on the couch behind her till she finished her task. There is nothing I hate worse than being interrupted in mid-flow of a thought. I had no desire to inflict that pain on someone else.

  Finally, she swivelled around and smiled. “Morning, sunshine! You look like you went a few rounds in a cage match.”

  “I cannot sleep very well when it’s hot, that’s all,” I shrugged. It hadn’t been stifling last night, but it had been muggy and close. We’d likely see rain later tonight. I just hoped it wouldn’t keep people away from the play.

  “I know what you mean. I had fans running all over my place, trying to make the air move a bit even if it wouldn’t cool down. Still, it beats February weather, right?”

  I nodded and smiled, though I wasn’t all that sure about it. At least with February weather you could put on another sweater or woollier socks. In the summer, there was only so much you could peel. I couldn’t imagine how people in sultrier climes did it, especially before the advent of air conditioning.