So armed with Michael’s encouragement, I tucked my phone in my pocket and headed upstairs, where the stage and the dressing rooms were, in search of Haver’s agent.
As I stepped out of the stairwell, I saw a tall, stoop-shouldered figure standing in the wings, watching the set crew work and the Cratchits rehearse. Not someone I recognized, so either it was O’Manion—whom I hadn’t yet met in person, though I’d seen his picture on his website—or another tourist come to gawk and needing to be kicked out.
“May I help you, sir?” I called.
The man turned toward me, frowning.
“I certainly hope so. I’m looking for Mr. Michael Waterston, the director. The crew members don’t seem to know where he is.”
Definitely O’Manion. A good twenty years older than the photo on the website, but I could still recognize him.
“He’s in a meeting at the moment,” I said. “Perhaps I can help you. Meg Langslow. Assistant director.”
“Ms. Langslow.” He held out his hand and his face took on an ingratiating expression. “Vince O’Manion. Malcolm has told me how much he enjoys working with you.”
“How nice of him,” I said, in a tone calculated to make it clear that I knew either he was lying or Haver was. “Michael will be back shortly, but in the meantime, he asked me to have a few words with you. Just a moment.”
I walked out onto the stage and stood in the spotlight the light techs had been working on.
“Roger?” I called, looking around.
“Right here.” Our lighting designer stepped out of the shadows.
“Mr. Haver is—in his dressing room?” I glanced at O’Manion, who shrugged. “Now would be a perfect time to let him show you exactly where he wants that spotlight.”
“Won’t do any good,” Roger muttered to me, too low for O’Manion to hear. “Not as long as he keeps showing up too drunk to hit his marks.”
“Just find him and keep him here as long as you can while I have a little chat with his agent,” I said.
Roger nodded and ambled back into the shadows. I rejoined O’Manion.
“This way,” I said.
I led the way through the backstage area to the lobby. Haver was there peering into the finch cage again. O’Manion and I stopped for a moment to watch him.
“‘Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!’” Haver intoned. “‘Bird thou never wert…’”
“Is he reciting Shakespeare to those birds?” O’Manion asked.
“Actually, that’s Shelley.” I pulled out my phone and began texting Haver’s whereabouts to Roger. “Usually it’s Shakespeare, though.”
“‘That from heaven, or near it / Pourest thy full heart…’” Haver continued.
The birds were twittering cheerfully, as if they liked his recitation. Or maybe it was the attention. Rose Noire was watching him with a slight frown on her face.
So was O’Manion.
“They seem particularly fond of ‘Sonnet Eighteen,’” I said. “‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ This way.”
I led him into the wing that housed the classrooms, and we took the elevator up to the faculty office floor. I could see O’Manion was impressed, although he was clearly trying to hide it. He’d better be impressed. Everything about the Dr. J. Montgomery Blake Dramatic Arts Building was first class and state of the art—Grandfather made sure of that when he gave the college the money to build it. I ushered O’Manion into Michael’s office, which was large, comfortable, and right next door to the even larger and more comfortable office of the department chairman—an office that we were guardedly optimistic Michael would be occupying in a few years when the current chairman retired.
I had to move aside part of the mountain of brightly wrapped presents heaped around the foot-high Christmas tree that stood just inside the door. O’Manion glanced at the presents with a small frown—not quite a “bah, humbug,” but definitely in the same neighborhood. So I didn’t bother to explain that Michael and I were hiding the boys’ Christmas presents here—out of the house and thus unavailable for investigation by busy fingers and prying eyes. And since the boys did occasionally visit their dad’s office, especially while rehearsing for A Christmas Carol, all the boxes were camouflaged with tags that made them look as if they were for his various colleagues in the department.
Michael had left his radio on and tuned to the college station’s carol marathon. Much as I loved “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” I clicked the radio off. This wasn’t going to be a very Christmassy conversation.
“I hope they made you comfortable at the Inn,” I said.
“Very,” he said. “It’s a remarkably nice place.”
“You sound surprised.”
“I was, a little.”
“To find such a nice hotel in a small town like Caerphilly? Or had Mr. Haver given you the impression that we’d put him up in a place a cut or two below a Motel 6?”
He opened his mouth—no doubt to protest that no, of course his client hadn’t complained. And then he chuckled and nodded.
“Actually, from the way he’s been carrying on, I expected the kind of dump that rents rooms by the hour. You’d think after forty years, I’d have learned to take Malcolm’s complaints with a grain of salt. He gets a little hyper when he’s working on a role, that’s all. Bouncing back and forth between elation and despair—you know the creative temperament. That’s why I thought I’d drop in a few days before the opening. Provide a little moral support.”
Actually, he’d dropped in because Michael had called and left a message threatening to can Haver, and had then dodged his calls for two days—a tactic deliberately calculated to bring O’Manion running to town to wave the impossible contract at us.
I decided to be blunt.
“Any chance you could also help us keep him sober enough to go onstage under his own steam on opening night?”
He froze for a moment.
“According to Malcolm’s contract—” he began.
“I’ve read his contract, thank you. You put a good one over on the college legal department. As long as he can stumble out onstage and utter some reasonable facsimile of human speech, we can’t fire him. But the way he’s going, he won’t even be able to do that before long. Maybe even by opening night.”
O’Manion didn’t say anything. Didn’t nod or shake his head. Just sat, looking at me, braced as if expecting me to whack him with a two-by-four.
“We don’t want him to fail,” I went on. “Neither do you. This was supposed to be the start of his big comeback, right?”
O’Manion gave a barely perceptible nod.
“So work with us. Help us turn this around.”
He let out a long breath.
“I thought he’d be okay here,” he said. “It’s such a small town. I thought there wouldn’t be very many temptations.”
“There aren’t that many,” I said. “But he’s awfully good at finding the ones there are.”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “A pity this isn’t a dry county. I was really hoping it might be.”
“Unfortunately, it isn’t.” I refrained from pointing out that he could have learned as much from a few minutes of online research. “But we are doing our best to dry up whatever part of it he happens to be in at any given moment.”
“What do you mean by that?” O’Manion looked puzzled.
“Mayor Shiffley has sent out the word that no one’s to sell or serve him any alcohol.”
“Can he do that?”
“Why not? There’s no law that says they have to serve him. In fact, the Code of Virginia specifically prohibits selling alcohol to someone if you have reason to believe he’s intoxicated, which lately has been pretty much Haver’s normal state.”
“I mean, how can you expect people to just follow this Shiffley guy’s orders? He’s just the mayor, not the King of Caerphilly.”
“He’s a Shiffley,” I said. “And not just any Shiffley, but the de facto head of the Shiffley clan. That may not mean much out in Los Angeles, but here in Caerphilly it matters.”
“So what happens if he figures out who’s been selling booze to Malcolm? Can he toss him in jail?”
“No. But whoever did the selling will suddenly start finding life very, very trying.”
O’Manion shook his head as if he wasn’t very impressed with our efforts.
“Look, it’s a small town,” I explained. “There aren’t a lot of businesses. And a lot of them are run by Shiffleys. Especially every kind of skilled blue-collar business. Your toilet breaks and you want a plumber? We’ve got four of them—three of them are Shiffleys and the fourth is married to one. Same with electricians or carpenters. You want gas? Need your car repaired? Want your driveway plowed? Need hardware? Most of the businesses you’d turn to for any of that are run by Shiffleys, either by birth or marriage. And it’s not just the Shiffleys—most of the rest of the town is also very committed to having the play succeed. You want to eat at Muriel’s Diner? Buy fodder for your livestock at the feed store? Have your Sunday suit dry-cleaned? Then don’t help Haver get drunk.”
“I get the picture,” he said. “And people wonder why some of us flee small towns for the freedom of the big city. So if your mayor has the whole town sewed up so tight, how come my client’s still managing to get soused?”
“We’ve made it hard for him, but we can’t possibly stop every leak,” I said. “We haven’t yet found the bootlegger.”
“Bootlegger?” O’Manion sounded startled. “You mean he’s drinking some kind of hillbilly moonshine? Is that even safe?”
“We’ve started using the term ‘bootlegger’ because it’s a lot quicker to say than ‘the low-down, sneaky, underhanded son-of-a-gun who’s helping Haver get drunk,’” I explained. “Caerphilly isn’t quite that backward.” Of course, neighboring Clay County certainly was, but I was optimistic that their moonshiners would be far too suspicious to sell to outsiders. “We confiscate any liquor he gets as soon as we find it—”
“Confiscate it? He lets you do that?”
“He can’t very well stop us,” I said. “Hotel staff members search his room while he’s out and confiscate whatever alcohol they find, and here at the theater the crew do the same with any that turns up in his dressing room. And when he takes a shower—”
O’Manion suddenly slumped in Michael’s guest chair, put his hands over his eyes, and started laughing. I waited until he pulled himself together.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You people really have gone above and beyond. I don’t know what I can do that you haven’t already.”
“Get him to agree to a minder,” I said. “Someone to stay with him twenty-four hours a day from now until the end of the run. He can start drinking himself into a coma five minutes after the last curtain call on closing night for all we care. But until then, he’ll have someone with him day and night to keep him sober.”
O’Manion looked as if he was giving it serious consideration.
“I’m not sure even I could get him to agree to that,” he said. “And even if I did, it might not work. You have no idea how … how…”
“How sneaky he is? How determined? How abrasive and combative? Yeah, we have a good idea. But this is the best plan we’ve come up with. Do you have any better ideas?”
He shook his head.
“So talk him into it. Because if you don’t, we’ll stop all our own efforts to keep him sober and let the chips fall where they may.”
“You can’t do that.” His voice had a note of panic in it.
“We can and will,” I said. “He’d have crashed and burned long ago if we hadn’t been doing everything we could to keep him going. But if he won’t accept a minder, it stops now.”
He sat there looking at me for several long minutes. Did he need quite this much time to think about it? Or was he trying to play that game of making the other person break and speak first? If that was his angle, he was going to lose. I stared coolly back at him while contemplating the contents of my notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe, mentally crossing off a few completed items, adding a few others, and deciding what to tackle next, an occupation that always calmed me and improved my mood. And would help me win a staring contest, if that’s what we were doing. I was in the middle of a mental inventory of what the boys’ Christmas stockings would contain when O’Manion finally spoke.
“I’ll try,” he said at last. “But it’s up to you people to find the minder.”
“I can take care of that.” Actually, I was sure Mother could, which for practical purposes amounted to the same thing.
“I need some time to work myself up to this,” he said.
“We don’t have a lot of time to spare,” I pointed out.
“Maybe I could collect him at the end of rehearsal tonight and tackle him then. That will give me a few hours to figure out how I’m going to position it.”
I was tempted to suggest positioning it as “do this, or find another agent.”
“It would help if you gave him a little encouragement now,” I suggested. “Do whatever you can do to keep him on his best behavior for rehearsal.”
“Yeah, I guess.” He didn’t look happy. “Show me the way back through this maze to his dressing room, will you?”
I followed him out of Michael’s office, locking the door behind me, and we walked in silence back to the elevator. From the look on his face, O’Manion was bracing himself for the promised talk with his client. I was busy strategizing our next step. When Mother came back from her meeting at the church, I’d task her with finding someone to serve as minder. Some burly but good-natured cousin who owed her a favor, perhaps.
And even if O’Manion couldn’t talk Haver into the minder, we could pretend he’d said yes and sic one on him anyway.
The thought made me smile. O’Manion seemed to find my smile unnerving.
When the elevator reached the lobby level, we parted without speaking. Haver was no longer crooning verse to the birds. O’Manion trudged toward his dressing room with an expression of stoic determination on his face.
I counted the finches. Still thirty-three, so neither Grandfather nor Haver had pulled a fast one while I’d been talking to O’Manion. I took out my notebook, crossed off “talk to O’Manion,” and glanced at the other theater-related tasks. The prop shop was probably the most urgent.
But when I turned into the hallway that would take me to the prop shop, I spotted Haver sneaking away.