Last Puzzle & Testament (43 page)

Parnell Hall is the author of the critically acclaimed Stanley Hastings mystery novels and the Steve Winslow courtroom dramas, as well as seven Puzzle Lady mysteries,
A Clue for the Puzzle Lady; Last Puzzle and Testament; Puzzled to Death; A Puzzle in a Pear Tree; With This Puzzle, I Thee Kill; And a Puzzle to Die On;
and
Stalking the Puzzle Lady.
Nominated for the Edgar, the Shamus, and the Lefty awards, he lives in New York City, where he is working on his eighth Puzzle Lady mystery,
You Have the Right to Remain Puzzled.

If you enjoyed Parnell Hall’s
Last Puzzle &
Testament,
you won’t want to miss any of the
tantalizing Puzzle Lady mysteries!

Look for the next,

A Puzzle in a Pear Tree,
available at your
favorite bookstore.

And turn the page for an enticing preview

“N
O, NO, NO
,” R
UPERT
W
INSTON CRIED, SILENCING THE PIANO,
and vaulting up onto the stage with all the spry grace of a much younger man. Rupert tugged at his turtleneck, a habit he had when not particularly pleased. Which, in Cora Felton’s humble opinion, was almost all the time. In the few rehearsals she’d had, Cora had come to detest the “
innovative and gifted
” director, as the
Bakerhaven Gazette
had termed him, who had left the “
stifling constraints of the Broadway stage
” in order to “
ply his craft in the liberating atmosphere of an enlightened village.
”

Although no linguist, Cora Felton didn’t have to be hit over the head with a condescending remark to recognize one. Rupert Winston had Cora’s back up before she’d even met him. Being tapped to appear in Rupert’s Christmas pageant was the last thing in the world Cora Felton wanted. Had she been able to think of any polite way to get out of it, Cora would have done so.

Had she known what rehearsals would be like, an impolite way would have sufficed.

“
Miss
Felton.” Rupert Winston extracted his hand from his black turtleneck, entwined his long, slender fingers together, and rolled his steel gray eyes to the heavens, as if invoking the deities to witness his tribulations in dealing with mere mortals, and inferior ones at that. “You are a
milkmaid.
A hearty, robust milkmaid, fresh from the fields, sunny and bright and imbued with a lust for life. If you are to sing the solo line, I have to
hear
the solo line. You cannot mumble it into your sleeve.”

Cora Felton set down her wooden milking stool, fixed the director with an evil eye. She was sorely tempted to remind him that she hadn’t
got
a sleeve, this
wasn’t
the dress rehearsal, and her milkmaid costume had
yet
to be sewn.

Instead, Cora glanced around the stage, where the seven other maids-a-milking stood holding their stools. “You’re absolutely right, Rupert,” she said sweetly. “I’m totally wrong for this part. I’m sure any of the other milkmaids could do better. I understand
completely
why you’d wish to replace me.”

Rupert Winston looked shocked. “Miss Felton. Did I say any such thing? Of course not. You’re perfect for the part. It’s just a question of pulling a performance out of you.”

Cora bit back a groan. Were there any way to agree with this fool and get on with it, Cora would have done so, but she knew from experience Rupert loved to pontificate. Under the guise of giving direction, he could run through his entire Broadway résumé at the drop of a hat. Already, she could see the other actors emerging from the wings to listen. They soon filled the stage. Theoad piece was
The Twelve Days of Christmas,
complete with pipers piping, drummers drumming, and so on. Cora could barely calculate how many actors were in the show, let alone the odds of all of them ever doing it right.

“I’m
not
perfect for the part,” she protested. “I’m dead wrong for the part. I’m way too old. Just like the rest of your milkmaids—no offense, ladies—but your maids-a-milking should be rosy-cheeked country girls, in fetching peasant blouses.”

“You’re saying you can’t work without your costume?”

“No, I’m saying someone else should be wearing it. It’s just bad casting.” Cora pointed stage left, where her niece, Sherry Carter, stood in a cluster of nine attractive young women. “Look at your ladies dancing. They’re all young and pretty.
They
should be the lusty milkmaids, and we old biddies should be the refined ladies dancing.”

Rupert didn’t get mad. The director never got mad. Instead, he exhibited, as he always did, a tolerant amusement at the misguided views of the unenlightened.

“Yes, Miss Felton,” he replied. “That is how it is usually cast. Which is precisely why I have
not
done so here. This skit is deliberately ‘miscast,’ as you would characterize it, for, one would hope, humorous effect. Which, as you might have gathered, is the same reason for so many entrances and exits. Which is also why rehearsal time is so crucial. I hope I don’t have to spend too much of it reassuring you that you are ideal for your part.”

“I thought you were the one telling me I
wasn’t
doing it right,” Cora countered.

Rupert Winston chuckled. “Well, there is a huge difference between not doing it right and not being right for it. Trust me, you’re right for it.”

Harvey Beerbaum stuck his oar in, as the annoying, pedantic cruciverbalist was wont to do. “Come on, Cora,” he chided. “If I can be a lord-a-leaping, surely you can be a maid-a-milking.”

That was hard to argue with. The sight of bald, portly Harvey leaping about the stage was so ridiculous, if he was willing to make a fool of himself, how could anyone else object?

“Can we get on with it?” Becky Baldwin griped. “I’m meeting a client in half an hour.”

“Did you hear that?” Rupert Winston said. “Becky has only half an hour. So this is hardly time to be worried about
our
motivation.”

Cora Felton bit her lip. She hadn’t said a damn thing about her motivation, but she couldn’t point that out to Rupert without starting another argument, which would seem boorishly insensitive and inconsiderate, since Becky had to go.

Cora resented that too. Becky Baldwin—young, attractive, and as fashionable as ever in a scoop-neck sweater and pale blue skirt and vest—might have actually had a client, but as far as Cora was concerned, Becky’s pointing it out sere aved only to remind everyone that she was a lawyer on the one hand, and a Star on the other.

Which, in the pageant, she was. Becky had been cast as the young woman in the song, the one who receives all the season’s bounty. In Rupert Winston’s version of the piece, Becky started each verse alone onstage, singing “
On the whatever day of Christmas, my true love gave to me,
” and then reacting to the stampede of gifts that surrounded her. A plum role, one that Cora felt should by rights have gone to her niece. But, as always happened between Sherry and Cora, Cora was the one pushed out front.

Rupert turned to the piano, where Mr. Hodges, the high school music teacher, was dutifully waiting to play. “
You
don’t have to go anywhere, do you?”

“I have a chorus rehearsal at four-thirty.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sakes!”

Mr. Hodges, a thin-faced, sallow man with a hawk nose, did not take kindly to the suggestion that
he
would be responsible for breaking up rehearsal. “The
Twelve Days of Christmas
is
not
the only piece in the pageant, you know,” he retorted huffily. “The bulk of the show still happens to be the school choir.”

“Yes,” Rupert snorted. “Standing and singing. They don’t
move.
What’s to rehearse?”

Mr. Hodges had no desire to get into
that
argument. “We lose the gym at four-fifteen anyway for varsity practice,” he pointed out acidly.

The Christmas pageant was being performed on the stage in the Bakerhaven High gymnasium, where it shared the space with the basketball team. It also shared the stage with the upcoming high school production of Anton Chekhov’s
The Seagull,
so the English village square Becky Baldwin was performing in looked suspiciously like a Russian country manor. In a corner of the gym, the Bakerhaven High tech director, a wiry young man in splattered overalls and work shirt, was diligently if somewhat messily painting scenery flats to transform one into the other.

“Then we can’t be wasting time now,” Rupert declared virtuously, as if he hadn’t been the one prolonging the squabble. “Let’s take it from the twelfth day, get a look at everyone. Aaron Grant? Where’s Aaron Grant?”

The young
Bakerhaven Gazette
reporter, who was standing onstage beside Sherry Carter, put up his hand, and said, “Here, Rupert.”

“Aaron, we’re going to take it from your line, the twelve drummers drumming. Do you have your drummers ready?”

“I’ve got nine of them.”

“Only nine?”

“That’s the trouble with afternoon rehearsals,” Aaron said. “People have to work.”

“Well then,” Rupert said with heavy irony, “are your
nine
drummers drummin1D;

“Yes, except we haven’t got the drums yet.”

“I
know
you haven’t got the drums yet. This is for choreography.” Having made that pronouncement, Rupert instantly contradicted it by demanding, “What props
do
we have? I know we don’t have the swans and the geese, but at least we have the pear tree.”

Rupert looked around and spotted Jimmy Potter, the librarian’s son, sitting on the apron of the stage, listening attentively. Jimmy, a tall, gawky boy of college age, who had always been a little slow, was just thrilled to death to be part of the pageant, and he had, as usual, a goofy grin on his face. However, he had nothing in his hands.

“Jimmy!” Rupert cried. “Where’s your pear tree? How can you play your part without your pear tree?”

Edith Potter, the librarian, and one of the maids-a-milking, pushed out of the pack to defend her boy, but Jimmy wasn’t upset.

“It’s offstage, Mr. Rupert.” Jimmy pointed stage left. “You want me to get it?”

“No, Jimmy. I just want you to have your tree for the run-through. I want you to come on carrying it, so you get used to carrying it. Okay, places please, people. Let’s take it from the top of the last verse, starting with Becky’s line.”

The actors took their positions in the wings.

Rupert called. “And, Miss Felton. Project, project,
project!
”

Cora, in the wings, raised her prop and muttered to Sherry, “I’d like to
pro-ject
this milking stool. Can you guess where?”

“Cora! Think of your image.”

“I’m thinking of
his
image. And how I could change it with this damn stool.”