Crooked (17 page)

26

HEARSAY

Saturday, after lunch with her father (soup, sandwich, and salad—“all the important food groups,” he'd said of his menu), Clara declined his invitation to ride along on his errands. “I've got homework to do,” she said, not that she intended to do it. “And then I've got play practice at three. Could you pick me up at six?”

After her father had gone out, Clara changed into loosefitting work clothes. What she intended to do was clean up the house for Amos's visit in two phases, deep cleaning this weekend, surface stuff the next. For the following few hours, tapping some strange source of energy, Clara cleaned between the dirty shoulders of faucets, around the little plugs that seemed to screw the toilets to the floor, beneath the kitchen cupboards where bits of cereal had skipped away from her all winter. The only time she stopped was when she screened telephone messages.

Beep:
“Hello, sweetie, are you there? It's your mother, sweetie.” Silence. “These calls are costing me a fortune, Clara—couldn't you just please pick up and say hello?” Long silence.
Click
.

Clara stared at the machine, then sprayed Lemon Pledge into her folded dustrag. Well, why don't you just spend your money on a plane ticket home, then?

Beep:
A light musical laugh. “Thurmond Wilson, it's Lydia Upchurch Elgin with unbelievable news. I've been transferred to Jemison. We're neighbors again! I'd love to get caught up and maybe meet your daughter. Whatsay, Thurmondo? Here's my new number. Call anytime. You won't wake me.”

This was a voice Clara didn't like. This voice was more than friendly. It was flirtatious. Clara sat down in her father's chair. She turned on the desk lamp, and it made a fuzzy circle of light on the leather photo album. It was an old album with square black-and-white photos secured at each corner by slotted black triangles. Names were neatly printed beneath. Clara liked the photographs. Everyone seemed young and happy and carefree, as if they'd just been given good news, and then, suddenly, toward the back of the album, Clara turned a page and found herself staring at the name
Lydia Upchurch.

Clara studied the photograph. Lydia Upchurch wore jeans and a short-sleeved sweater, and she stood smiling from a bridge. The wind blew her blond hair off her neck. Lydia Upchurch was beautiful, more beautiful even than Sands Mandeville. More beautiful than Clara's mother, even when she was young.

Whatsay, Thurmondo.

Clara closed the photo album. To Ham, lying nearby, she said, “I don't think I like Lydia Upchurch Elgin so very much.”

Ham wagged his tail approvingly.

“In fact, I think maybe I want her to have a massive stroke.”

Ham intensified his tail wagging.

Clara went over to the machine and erased Lydia Upchurch Elgin's message. “Whoops,” she said, and once again Ham wagged his tail mightily.

Clara was standing on a chair cleaning the living room chandelier when the phone rang again.

Beep:
“Yo, Clarita, it's me, Gerri. Dial me up. I heard something weird today that might grab you big-time. Are you there? Hello, hello, hello? Testing, one, two, three, four...”

At first Clara thought she must be mistaken. Gerri never called anymore. Still, feeling a pleasant little zing of hope, Clara jumped down from the chair and ran for the receiver. “Gerri, hi. It's me. I just got in.”

“From where?” Gerri said. She sounded exactly the same as she used to, even though they hadn't talked for three weeks, even though she'd avoided Clara in the halls.

“I mean, I just got into this room. Where the machine is. I was downstairs.”

“What's the matter with that phone?”

Clara thought of explaining what had happened with her mother—three weeks ago, Gerri would've been the first person she would've wanted to tell—but now she didn't feel like going into it. “There've been some weirdo calls, so now I screen them,” Clara said.

Gerri didn't seem to be listening. With her mouth away from the receiver, she was whispering to someone and then suddenly yelling at her little brother. “You do, Kendrick, and your ass is grass!” she yelled at him.

Clara waited.

“You there?” Gerri said presently in her normal telephone voice.

“Yeah. Still here.”

“You're
extremely
lucky you don't have a retardate brother,” Gerri said. Then, “So what've you been doing, reading your horse books?” Before Clara could answer, Gerri said, “Anyway, I heard the weirdest thing today about Amos MacKenzie and I went, Isn't Clarita hanging with him? so I thought I'd go straight to, you know, the horse's mouth and check it out with you.”

“Check what out with me?” Clara said.

A pause. “It's probably not true,” Gerri said.

“What's probably not true?”

“Well, I heard that Amos and Dave Pearse and Sophie Whitaker were over at Sands's having one of their brandy parties when her parents were out of town.”

Clara almost laughed. Amos at Sands Mandeville's? “I doubt it.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, I do. Very much.”

“So to this rumor you'd say nay?” Gerri said this in a strange voice, almost coy.

“Yeah, I would,” Clara said.

A moment or two passed. Then Gerri said, “There was other stuff, too.” Pause. “Really weird stuff.” Pause. “Some of it was about you.”

Suddenly and with absolute clarity, Clara thought,
Gerri
Erickson is not my friend anymore.

“You want to hear the rest of it?” Gerri was saying.

“No,” Clara said, “I really don't.”

“To that question you'd also say nay?”

From the other end of the line, from somewhere near Gerri, but not from Gerri herself, came the muffled sounds of suppressed female laughter.

“Bye, Gerri,” Clara said, and hung up the phone.

Clara had thought about skipping play practice. Except for her one line, she was just the prop person—they could get along without her. But in the end, Clara went to practice for a surprising reason. She wanted to see Sands Mandeville and Sophie Whitaker, to look at them in this new light, as possible friends of Amos MacKenzie. She wanted to see if it could feel true to her.

Only a week of rehearsals remained before the opening night of
The Smiling Gumshoe,
and the closer the play got, the more irritable Mrs. Van Riper, the faculty director, had become. When Clara had let herself in through the back door last night, she'd heard Mrs. Van Riper telling Bill Spender in a sharp voice to put more duct tape on the microphone wire. This afternoon, as Clara arrived, she saw Mrs. Van Riper briskly leading two of the stage-hands off to the main building, turning once to say, “C'mon, c'mon. Light a little fire!”

Just inside the door, Clara took off her shoes. They weren't supposed to track mud on the stage, and socks kept the noise down behind the curtains. The flaps of black velvet were parted enough to reveal a slice of the stage, where much of the cast was crowded around Sands Mandeville and Sophie Whitaker, who were looking at themselves in handheld mirrors while Candi Allen, the makeup person, fussed with their moll outfits. Being a moll meant stockings with seams, peignoirs with matching boas (aqua in Sophie's case and apricot in Sands's), and little satin mules that Sands and Sophie had bought at Victoria's Secret. What was awful about the moll costumes, as far as Clara was concerned, was that Sands and Sophie looked great in boas and mules, and knew it.

As Clara set her bag down under the prop table, voices slid through the nearby curtain. “Then what?” said Jason Jackson, who played the smiling gumshoe and was already dressed in his trench coat and felt porkpie hat.

Sands laughed. “Well, by now Amos thinks he's going to get somewhere. He isn't, of course, but he doesn't know that. He's been lamely defending his little horse friend, so I go, ‘Before further exploration, you need to admit she's a dink.'”

“And?”

“He did. Once in a whisper, and once, upon request, at higher volume.”

The smiling gumshoe laughed. So did the others.

Clara wanted to slip away from the curtain, to step back to some point where she couldn't see them and couldn't hear them. But she was frozen. She couldn't move. On the other side of the curtain, Sophie leaned forward to examine the colors in Candi Allen's makeup box. Clara could see the peculiar glitter of face powder on Sophie's illuminated, high forehead. “Where's the black stuff?” Sophie asked. “My eyes don't feel mollish yet. That's not the best part of the story anyway,” she said. “Tell them what happened when Gerri Erickson called Clara to tell her about it.”

“Oh,” Sands said. “Gerri calls and she goes, ‘Hi, Clara, reading your horse books?' and of course she denies it, and then when Gerri tells her about Amos, she won't believe it, and Gerri goes, ‘So to this rumor you would say
naaaaaaay?
'” Sands stretched this into the long and prolonged cry of a comic horse, and the others broke into laughter.

Suddenly Mrs. Van Riper's voice, aided by the popping microphone, snapped everyone to attention. “Okay, ladies, this is a dress rehearsal, not a coffee klatch. Get to your places and let's go through the first scene.”

Clara receded. She put her finger over the tape recorder that would play first a doorbell and then a ringing phone. When someone passed by, she pretended to examine the tape recorder buttons.

“Clara, are you back there?” Mrs. Van Riper called out.

Clara poked her head out and made a small wave.

“Excellent! And don't forget the gun now.”

Part of Clara's responsibility as prop person was to take the stage gun from a safe in Mrs. Van Riper's office before practice and return it to the safe when practice was over. The stage gun was used for her own stage murder. It was perfectly harmless, but it didn't
look
harmless, so Mrs. Van Riper had entrusted it to Clara and the safe.

Onstage, the lights went up. Clara started the tape—dingdong—then slipped out the side door and, circling to the back of the auditorium, approached Mrs. Van Riper from behind. “Key,” Clara whispered.

While staring intently at the stage and actors before her, Mrs. Van Riper picked through the contents of her purse. She found the key and handed it to Clara. She turned quickly. “Thanks, sweetie,” she said, smiling, then turned back to the stage. The fact that Mrs. Van Riper called a lot of her students
sweetie
was one of the reasons Clara liked her. It reminded Clara of her mother.

She went to the safe, which operated with both a combination and a key. As she spun the dial—left 33, right two to 41, left to 25—Clara thought it was a funny word. Safe. Because who was? Nobody.

When it was Clara's turn to go onstage, she had to say her line over and over again while she practiced falling. First Sean Brickman, holding the stage gun in his hand, said, “What now, dollface?” and then Clara said, “I guess you know I can't keep this to myself.” Then the shot was fired and she fell. She'd fallen four, five, six times, and still Mrs. Van Riper wasn't satisfied. “And again,” she would say, and they would do it again, ending with Clara crumpling to the floor, dead.

It was nearly six. The cast was tired. Everyone wanted to go.

“And again,” Mrs. Van Riper said.

But this time, just before Clara was to fall dead to the floor, someone from behind the curtain issued a long, low reverberant
naaaaay
. First one, then another of the cast broke into laughter. It was like an epidemic. Soon everyone everywhere seemed to be laughing, except Clara and Mrs. Van Riper, who came marching up to the stage. The laughter quieted.

“I have no idea what's going on here,” Mrs. Van Riper said in a sharp, serious voice. “But I can tell you two things. One, cruelty is not funny. It's a weakness, possibly the worst. And two, if you people don't get focused, it will be
you
up onstage making asses of yourselves.
You.
Not me, and not Mr. Ed back there.
You.
” She slowly scanned the whole cast, then turned and left without another word.

Clara bolted for the back door. It was cold outside, cold enough to refreeze the snowbanks and puddles of snow melt. Her father wasn't there yet. Clara rushed around the corner and stood in the deep shadow of a street tree. Every now and then, the clang of the auditorium door echoed across the dark quad. Voices carried.

“Where'd she go?”

“She's gone. She must've gotten a ride.”

“Naaaaay.”

Laughter in the dark, male at first, but girls, too.

Clara stood in the shadow thinking. When she got home, she would tear Amos's picture into tiny pieces and flush them down the toilet. She would take her horse camp money to a doctor who would pity her and straighten her nose with a complicated operation at reduced prices. The operation would leave her pale but beautiful. Still, she would begin to waste away. The doctor would fall in love with her, her mother would have to come back from Spain, and she would marry the doctor in a secret ceremony to which her mother and Amos MacKenzie and Gerri Erickson would not be invited.