The Roar of the Crowd Read online

  I scribbled in events as best I could, realizing I’d have to clue Denise into the exercise and get her over here with her date book.

  I had got the job on May 30, giving me a month to prep prior to the festival and camps getting into full gear. The announcement that Eleanor was cast had come before that, because I recalled Steve saying Denise’d be only three degrees from Kevin Bacon, since Kiefer Sutherland had had a cameo on Gopher Broke and had appeared in A Few Good Men with Bacon.

  I did a quick search through the archives on the Edmonton Journal website and found their full-page spread on Eleanor on April 23. Kieran either wooed her quickly and well, or they had organized it prior to her arrival.

  Oren Gentry died on June 12. His funeral took place on the 15th which, given its complexity, was amazing.

  Eleanor had died on June 21.

  The time frame seemed stretched out and elongated as I sketched in the events across the pages of the year before me. In reality, it felt like they had all taken about fifteen minutes and as if Steve had been in Sweden for months, when in reality he had left only a week before Eleanor died. Mapping things out was a good exercise, but I wasn’t sure it was going to mean anything to Steve beyond my getting things straight in the telling.

  Taryn said that there would be loads of people vying for Oren Gentry’s job. I wondered if it would be possible to get a list of the candidates. Maybe Denise could find out. Who was I kidding? If Steve thought it was worth having, he’d be able to get the list, no problem.

  I wondered if Taryn’s throwaway comment about Eleanor killing Oren held any water. It seemed too pat that one killer would kill another, as if the domino effect could sort itself out that way. But what if someone had killed Oren to get the job at Chautauqua, then realized that Eleanor would have a better chance at getting the position and so had to be got rid of as well? Maybe killing Eleanor hadn’t been the real focus, which would get Denise off the hook admirably.

  And really, that was all that mattered to me. I had read all the theories of closure and heuristics; I knew what Dorothy L. Sayers had said about murder and John Donne had said about death. But Eleanor Durant’s death in no way diminished me. It was Denise Wolff being suspected of the murder that tolled my bell.

  I spent another couple of hours on my timelines before heeding my body clock’s own timeline and heading to bed. Tomorrow was another day amid the teens, and I needed all the rest I could get to keep up with them.

  I made a note to call Denise about helping with the timeline before Steve got home on Wednesday, and then another note to myself to go get Steve’s car on Tuesday night so I could get out to the airport to pick him up the following morning.

  Assured that my life was measured out in sticky notes, I washed my face and went to bed.

  My alarm woke me the next morning, getting a jump on the magpies. I washed my hair and got dressed, sorted through the outfits I’d arranged for camp wear, and checked the temperature predictions on the weather website. I was going to bike down to the park today, so I braided my hair nice and flat down my back in order to wedge on my bike helmet, which was barely large enough to fit over my head before a mound of thick hair got stuck to it.

  I slathered on the sunscreen, clipped my mosquito-away fan to my waistband, and grabbed my satchel, which I bungeed into my bicycle basket. Give or take a headwind on the hill by Emily Murphy Park, I should be at the amphitheatre in fifteen minutes.

  It didn’t even take that long. No matter how long I live here, I’ll probably never get used to how much the traffic lessens around the university in the summertime. I fairly sailed down Saskatchewan Drive, noting that the earth sciences folks had planted even more specimens in their rock garden, a project I found delightful. I recalled small trays of tiny rocks and minerals we’d have to test for hardness streaking. Here, you had a sense of the mineral the way you might actually find it in nature, huge and old and immovable. Students sat on the rocks to eat their lunch, classes of earth science students combed the field in the fall, and passersby like me got to enjoy their unconformity. I supposed the groundskeepers didn’t much care to mow around them, but I wasn’t overly fond of grass anyhow, so my sympathies weren’t entirely with them.

  The slope of Emily Murphy Park Road was enough to make my heart start beating a bit faster. Who needs a roller coaster when you’ve got our river valley? I made it cautiously through the mini-maze of stop signs and turns to get across the roadways to the Hawrelak Park road, which lay along one of the river’s northward meanders before it turned eastward once more. The Mayfair Golf and Country Club was situated at the very expensive bend there, which probably accounted for the mishmash of roadways I’d just manoeuvred. There was a riverside footpath around the back of the club, but I’d never walked it. As beautiful and peaceful as the river valley was, for a woman alone, there were areas where it was just a bit too cut off from the rest of the world for me to feel completely safe.

  I noticed a splat of mud on the corner of our banner at the gateway to the park. I figured I’d tell Micheline about it, if seven other people hadn’t already done so. She could get someone to head out with a bucket and a brush to clean it up. At least no one had tagged graffiti on it. Kieran was particularly proud of it, as it was new this year. The trademarked shadow bust of Shakespeare was in royal blue at one end of the weatherproofed yellow banner, with the Freewill name and dates in matching blue and “plays for a midsummer’s evening” in green italics across the bottom.

  I thought it was a great sign, as signs go. Of course, the minute you put something up, someone did their best to make it ugly. I just hoped it wasn’t one of my campers. This had been too violent a theatre season, with Eleanor’s death, already. Mudslinging could be a gateway weapon.

  I forgot about the mud as I neared the amphitheatre. Three of my students were already here, sitting with their backs to the fence next to the gateway, which was still locked. I smiled at them and proceeded to get awkwardly off my bike, as one does when teenagers are watching, aware that I looked like a flowerpot person in my bike helmet.

  “Is the gate not open yet?” I asked in an overly cheery voice, to mask the obvious fact that while I was nominally in charge of them, I had no control over the present situation.

  “I guess we’re early,” offered Diana, who was wedged between two gangly boys, Nathan and Ethan, whom I regularly mixed up in my mind. I had to consciously determine what one of them was wearing each day, because both had sloppy brown hair in their eyes and the slouchy way of walking that made one wonder if they’d been reanimated in a mad scientist’s laboratory after having been constructed with vacuum hoses.

  It turned out that Nathan had the use of his mother’s car and had picked the other two up on the way. Likely, because of the freedom it afforded, they had left earlier than usual. Still, it didn’t explain why Micheline hadn’t been here ahead of everyone, as she usually was, to open the gate and set things up.

  I knew the combination to the key safe, of course, and proceeded to get myself and the kids into the enclosure. I returned the key and pulled the gate closed so that it looked locked to the casual observer. The kids seemed amenable, so I set them to work unrolling newsprint onto the picnic tables and stapling it under the table lips. We brought three of the heavy tables together to form one of banquet-hall length and placed the small bins at either end for me.

  All the other kids eventually trooped in. I quelled my discomfort at being the only adult around and explained the rules to the Shakespeare families game. Each team was allowed a copy of the complete works, three of which were mine and two others I’d picked up at secondhand stores. I’m not sure why people think a complete works of anyone is the way to an English major’s heart, but two of the copies I handed out to the teenage teams before me had been gifts, one from a great-aunt and the other from a fellow who thought it would be more inventive than flowers and chocolates. Inventive, maybe, but not quite as satisfyingly romantic.

  The kids groaned a b
it when I started to explain the game, but after a sample round they realized it wasn’t quite as easy as they first had thought. They had to strategize on how to collect a full set from a play while at the same time recognizing and remembering who was in what play with whom. This was where the collected works came in. Soon they were shouting out their claims (“Do you have anyone from As You Like It?”), shuffling through the cast lists to recognize characters in their own dealt hands (“Quickly, Quickly, where is someone named Quickly?”), and trying to outfox their opponents by bluffing what they might be collecting themselves.

  They had started into their second solid game by the time Micheline showed up, a good hour later than usual. She nodded me over to her, away from the kids, who probably didn’t notice me anyhow. I had unleashed a crew of Elizabethan card sharks on the world.

  “Randy! You made it in okay. Thank goodness. I was pretty sure you had the key safe combo, so I wasn’t too worried.”

  “Heck, I was worried about you. Where have you been?”

  She pursed her lips and sighed.

  “Where haven’t I been? I’ve been to seven stores looking for Mylar balloons shaped like dragons. You would think, given the hoopla over the Game of Thrones on TV and the Hobbit movies, that dragons would be everywhere, wouldn’t you? I even figured by the end of the search that I would settle for a dinosaur, but nothing!”

  It turned out Micheline was designing and stage-managing a Fringe show, which was, from a preparation and production standpoint, just around the corner. She and the various actors in the Shakespeare plays who were involved in the Fringe would have barely two weeks after the Festival ended before the Fringe began in earnest. Some people had been working on their shows since they’d been given the green light the previous November. Others seemed to nervously throw something together the weekend before, or so it would seem.

  That wasn’t totally fair. In the beginning, maybe, but over the last thirty-odd years, the Edmonton Fringe Festival had grown up and developed into a sure-fire form of entertainment delivery. There were several playwrights and companies one could depend on to deliver a satisfying hour or two of pleasure. It was just as well, too, since ticket prices were now uniformly high. With the Fringe tax, each play cost $15 a ticket. While that was still a far cry from the price of a ticket to a Citadel play, or for that matter a ticket to a hockey game, it added up. And most Fringe plays didn’t last longer than about an hour or seventy-five minutes.

  I knew people who organized their vacations for the Fringe and counted coup by the number of plays they managed to squeeze in. Others seemed to just congregate in the beer tents, happy to get soaked while watching the passing crowd. Some of them probably didn’t even know that there were more than 200 plays being performed in venues all around them.

  I wondered if Micheline was going to mention to Kieran that she had spent the morning on Freewill time doing chores for her Fringe project, for which she would also be getting paid, although it would come later as a percentage of the final take. If I knew Micheline, she’d have negotiated a set fee from the actors.

  She looked at me with arched eyebrows, silently requesting my collusion. I shrugged and smiled at her. It wasn’t my budget. If Kieran wanted company loyalty, he could be around a little more often to run things. Micheline smiled back at me, then bustled off to the trailer to boot up the computer, tally the previous evening’s results, and do whatever else she did to keep things ticking over seamlessly.

  I turned back to the camp crew, who were still engrossed in the game, but as I had hoped, in a different way. One group was still playing furiously, but two others had segued into examining the cast groupings and determining what each play was about. One girl was even guessing who in a repertory cast would play each character, and making some interesting connections. I’d have to mention her to Denise, who would love to hear about that sort of insight into how Shakespeare had written with specific actors in mind and how that had shaped his storyline.

  Since Janine was coming in early, I made them break for lunch so they’d be fed and watered and settled prior to a vigorous hour-and-a-half of stage fighting. They shuffled the decks back into their colour codes and put things away. I was beginning to like these kids a lot. I didn’t think any of them could have muddied the sign.

  That made me remember to tell Micheline about the dirty banner. As the kids were now all hauling their lunches out of their backpacks and bags, I left them to go find her in the trailer. I was passing under the trailer window, which Micheline must have opened to catch a breeze, because I could hear her on the phone speaking furiously to someone. I knew she could have a temper on her; like most people in the theatre world, she kept her emotions in her shirt pocket so they’d be handy. But I was glad she’d never spoken to me in the tone she was using now.

  I slowed down, mostly because I didn’t want to interrupt her and inadvertently become the brunt of her present mood. But, since she couldn’t see me under the window, she continued to rant into the receiver.

  “I don’t care what you thought you saw. No one is going to believe you, so just try spreading that rumour. What I want you to think about is who is going to hire you in the future if you open your mouth and poison things now. Just think about that for a bit before you do anything!”

  I stood there, not sure how long to wait before opening the door. Aware that I could be seen by the teens if they happened to be looking this way, I counted five hippopotamuses and then stomped a bit as I walked toward the door. By the time I had hoisted myself up the step and into the trailer, Micheline was composed and working at the computer. She turned toward me with a quizzical smile. You’d have never known she had been spitting venom down the phone line seconds earlier. Who knew that Micheline could be just as effective on stage as behind the scenes?

  “Yes?”

  “I meant to mention to you that there was a splat of mud on the sign by the gate. I noticed it on my way in. You might want to get someone down there with a mop and some paper towels.”

  Micheline winced. “Eww. Okay, thanks, Randy. I’ll see if I can get Marco or one of his boys to see to it on their way in.” Just then the phone rang. Micheline glanced quickly at the caller ID and then held her hand up to me quickly. “Marco? Speak of the devil! Are you still at home? Great. Could you pop a scrub brush and some spray cleaner or something in your car, and clean the banner on your way into the park? Someone tossed some mud on one corner, Randy noticed it on the way in. No, I didn’t see it. I’m not sure how thick. Just a roll of paper towels and some water might do it, sure. Whatever, just trying to save you a trip back out to the gate once you’re here. Yep. See you.”

  She turned back to me. “Thanks for letting me know. Was there anything else?”

  “Nope. I’m letting the kids eat early because their stage fighting time is moved up this afternoon, so they’re on the loose, but aside from that, everything is under control.” I smiled at her, and it was probably due more to her distraction than my acting that she didn’t notice how uncomfortable I felt.

  “Well, you’re welcome to sit in here for a while if you like. I have to go to the bathroom, but I think I’ll head down to the actors’ bathrooms if your kids are on the rampage.”

  She headed for the door and I made room for her to pass me.

  “Thanks. If you don’t mind, I’ll use the phone and then get back out to monitor the kids.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Man, if I hadn’t actually heard her myself, I would never have believed that she had been fighting on the phone minutes earlier. I wondered who she’d been speaking with as I dialled Denise’s number.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me, Randy. I’m down at the park, but I’m through at three this afternoon and I was wondering if you wanted to come by my place for supper around five? I’ve been working on a timeline of sorts and would like your input on when and where various things took place.”

  “Sure, I guess so,” said Denise. “I’ll be ju
st finishing up with Belinda around three-thirty. She wanted some help streamlining the template for the Fringe Sterling judges, and since she’s probably the only person in the theatre community still talking to me, I couldn’t say no.”

  “She seems like a nice person.”

  “She’s lovely. I’d probably do it even if she wasn’t talking to me. Or if everyone was still talking to me. Oh, you know what I mean.”

  I laughed in spite of the semi-pathetic tinge to Denise’s voice.

  “Yes, I know what you mean.”

  “Did you need me to pick up anything for you? Did you need me to pick you up?”

  “Nope, I brought my bike, so though I will probably end up pushing it part of the way up the hill, I am mobile.”

  “Push it up the stairs over in the south corner of the park where no one has to see you grunting,” suggested Denise.

  “Good idea. Well, I’d better go before my teenagers either stab themselves with sporks or impregnate each other.”

  Denise rang off and I clicked the stop button without having to fumble for it, as the festival’s landline was the same sort of phone I had at home. As I held the handset, it occurred to me that I might be able to figure out who Micheline had been talking to.

  I clicked the phone history arrow, and M Katz and his number appeared, Marco the stage crew member who was supposedly coming to wash the sign on his way in. I clicked the arrow one more time and saw C Norgaard.

  Micheline had been fighting with Christian Norgaard.

  From hearing one side of that very harsh conversation, it sounded like Christian Norgaard had seen something he shouldn’t have, or something he figured he could leverage into power. Whatever it was, it didn’t sound like he was angling to go directly to the police.