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.
“And that means?”
“I think it works out roughly to ‘nosey but nice,’” he laughed. “At any rate, that’s what the cleaning women at the train station here called me. I wrote it down phonetically. Sort of fits my idea of you, too, come to think of it. Nyfiken men trevligt. We could put that on a tee-shirt for you.”
“Very funny. I don’t feel all that nosey, personally. I just find answers calming.”
Steve laughed again, and then the picture of him froze, making him look a little maniacal as we continued to talk. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was frozen.
I told him I’d had lunch with Iain, because I figured he already knew and I wasn’t about to appear to be hiding anything from Steve. There was a bit of a break in the transmission at that point, so I wasn’t entirely sure if he said he thought that was a great idea, or not a great idea, but I didn’t know that it would make all that much difference to me to find out. I didn’t get much face time with Steve and I didn’t want to waste it having him repeat himself. The picture component had reanimated itself and he was once more twinkling at me, or rather at my clavicle.
The positioning of the internal cameras on computers always ended up making you look down, since you were focusing on the image beneath the lens on the screen you were watching. I always had a sense that people I spoke with on Skype were being thoughtful and philosophical as a result of entire conversations taking place without their really meeting my eye. There was another concept to fit into the MacLuhan one of the media transmogrifying the message for you.
I pulled myself back into the conversation, hoping my meandering thoughts had been written off as computer freeze.
“So what is up with Denise?” I heard Steve say.
“She’s really worried that she’s going to get arrested for murder. Whenever she talks to Iain or Detective Gladue, she is given the impression that they’re just looking for ways to prove she killed Eleanor, instead of looking for anyone else who may have done it.”
“I don’t think they would be confiding their process to her, especially if they think she is a person of interest,” Steve pointed out. “I am sure they’re following all avenues in the investigation.”
I shrugged, though he may not have seen that. “I know. And that’s what I keep trying to bolster her up with. But this is not a very friendly town to Denise at the moment. Whoever doesn’t have a vested interest in making sure they don’t get caught probably has an interest in not being targeted with suspicion, anyhow. The drama crowd is probably very thankful that the brunt of the investigation is Denise and not them, especially as they gear up for the Fringe.”
“That’s a bit cold, isn’t it? After all, a woman has died. That has to rank higher than a self-produced show in the old bus barns.”
“Those shows make up a large part of some actors’ livelihood, and I know for a fact that businesses on Whyte Avenue count Fringe as their mega-sales time of year, even higher than Christmas.”
“Okay, point taken. Still, do you think there really is a closing of ranks against Denise?”
“Well, I can sure sense it over at the Shakespeare festival. She is persona non grata, and I’m feeling a little byblow frost, being connected to her. Not that I mind that,” I hurried to add. “I’m just worried about her.”
I told him about Sarah Arnold’s cutting of Denise at the Sterling Awards and how Denise was pretty sure Sarah was going to try to worm her way into being the only person sent to New Orleans for the paper on the Romeo and Juliet project the two of them had worked on.
“The thing to ask is, would Sarah have had any sort of motive to kill Eleanor?” queried Steve, effectively cutting my huge conspiracy theory off at the legs. Even I couldn’t make a case for someone being killed so another person would be framed, giving a third person all the minor glory of delivering an academic paper.
We finished off the conversation by discussing things I would far rather deal with, like the details of his return. I dutifully wrote down all the numbers of his flights and times of arrival, and promised to get his car from his parkade where I had returned it after delivering him to the airport and to meet him at the airport in four days’ time.
We reached that awkward point in Skyping where both of us had said all we wanted to say yet couldn’t bear to cut the connection of seeing each other. Finally, Steve said, “Okay, on a count of three…” and we simultaneously hit the disconnect.
In four days he would be home and everything would get worked out. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday; I would count down the days.