The Roar of the Crowd Read online

Steve smiled at me for the first time since he got there. “Not bad, Nancy Drew, but you’re forgetting one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The house has been ransacked, so unless we find climbing ropes hanging neatly above a whole shelf of sports shoes, we’re not going to be able to prove your theory. And if the ropes are gone, this break-in will only serve to cloud whoever might have used them last. I’m not totally sure you can determine ownership from a rope, no matter how great your forensic team is.”

  “I think the worst thing here is that someone is watching and following us,” said Denise, as we veered off from what for her was the real topic. “Do you think they are sitting out there right now, listening in to our conversation with one of those spy microphones? Or have they bugged my condo?”

  All the talk of bugs and mice was beginning to make my skin crawl.

  “It could be even easier than that.” Steve shrugged. “They could be monitoring the GPS on your phone and just watching when you made a move.”

  “So I drove down all those back alleys for nothing?”

  “I wouldn’t call it nothing,” Steve said drily. “You did manage to avoid the police drive-through from calling in anything of interest. But yeah, it’s way easier to keep track of someone these days. Everything is potentially programmed to connect and communicate with everything else. Your phone could talk to your fridge to determine whether you need to stop and get milk on your way home. Your GPS that helps you find your destination transforms you into a flashing blip on the great map of the electronic world. It just depends who is keeping track of that map.”

  “Who do you think it is?” I asked.

  “Well, I know we have the capacity. I’m just wondering if someone else does, too.”

  Even with all the coffee we’d been ingesting, I was suddenly wildly sleepy. I gave an enormous yawn and Steve laughed. “Right on time. The adrenalin is wearing off. I predict the two of you are going to need a nap for a few hours right about now. Should I come back later?” Denise, who had been politely hiding her yawns behind her hand, smiled and nodded.

  Steve promised to increase the number of drive-by patrols, then left to report our having been at the crime scene without being involved. We agreed that he would call around 7:00 p.m. to make sure we’d woken up in good time. I didn’t want to lose an entire day or sleep too long and then throw off my rhythms entirely.

  Even with everything going on, I didn’t recall any crazy dreams when I woke up, spot on at 6:00 p.m. All I knew was that I was ravenously hungry. I pulled on the jeans I had left at the end of the bed and shuffled to the guest bathroom to splash water on my face and run my toothbrush over my tongue. I then headed downstairs to her kitchen area.

  Denise was already there, cracking eggs for an omelette. “Breakfast for supper okay?”

  I nodded happily and went to man the toast station. Soon we were digging into a hearty meal. We tried to keep the conversation light until we were smearing jam on our last bits of toast, with general comments on how weird it was to have a long nap in the middle of the day, but a full sleep seemed proper, and how circadian rhythms could affect one’s mental capabilities, and whether we liked apple butter more than ginger marmalade.

  We couldn’t keep off the topic forever, though. It was like when your tongue can’t help going back to explore the sore tooth.

  “Who do you think could be tracking us?”

  “Tracking me, you mean. Randy, I am so sorry I got you into this.”

  “Don’t be. You’re my friend. Of course I am in it.”

  “I wonder if things are ever going to feel ordinary again, once this is all over.”

  “I’m betting they’ll sort themselves out once the killer is caught.”

  “You don’t suppose they’ll get away with it, do you?”

  I shook my head. “Steve and Iain are so committed to their task. They’re like bloodhounds who never give up the trail.”

  “The trouble is the trail keeps leading back to me.” Denise moaned a little.

  This was the closest she’d come to self-pity throughout this whole ordeal, so I knew things were getting to her. Heck, they’d be getting to me by now, too. She really was amazing, sailing through all this with grace and dignity, if you could overlook her scrabbling through a shed in the dark, though even that she had done with a certain decorum.

  It occurred to me that the ordeal really had been hard on Denise, with the police suspecting her and the murderer seeming to frame her deliberately. I stared into the far upper corner of Denise’s kitchen where the ash cupboards met the wall.

  “Randy? What is it?”

  “What is what?”

  “You’ve got that look, where you’re cooking something up.”

  I refocused on her face across the table.

  “I was just thinking, what if we’ve got this all wrong? What if the murders haven’t been about getting the Chautauqua job, except maybe incidentally? What if it’s all been about targeting and discrediting you?”

  Denise stared at me.

  “Think about it. Right from the start, you’ve been set up as the prime suspect. Someone had to be doing that deliberately. It couldn’t be a complete coincidence.”

  “It is hard to believe that someone has a vendetta against me. And I have no idea why someone would hate me that much, either.”

  “Maybe they don’t hate you, but they want you out of the way.”

  “Why not just kill me instead of Eleanor and Christian, then?”

  “I guess because they needed Eleanor and Christian dead anyhow. But a big part of the plan is to destroy your career or get you out of the way for some reason. The trick is to figuring out what the reason would be.”

  “Yes, that would help enormously. Or we could just hope for the police to catch a crazed killer and give me my life back.”

  “We could figure this out by a process of elimination. After all, we have some parameters. It has to be someone who knows you. For something to be this personal, I would say it was a person you knew, too, not just a disgruntled student from a few years back.”

  “Someone I know. You need me to make a list of all the people I know? Hell, Randy, I teach more than a hundred students a term. Where do we start?”

  “We start with the people here in town, the ones who want something you have.”

  “What do I have that anyone would want?”

  “Well, you have this gorgeous condo, and you have a great job, and you had a cool boyfriend.”

  “Who is now conveniently Sarah’s boyfriend.”

  “Think about that.”

  “Sarah? You think Sarah killed everyone just so that she would break up Kieran and me? Why didn’t she just go after him right away, when we were at that party last spring?”

  “I don’t know! I’m not a psychologist, sorting out the impulses that impel people to do what they do. I am just trying to figure out the patterns that make sense and come to a logical conclusion. Sarah is a contender, you have to admit.”

  “So if we think Sarah wanted to deliberately frame me, what about everyone else we’ve been suspecting? Like Kieran himself? And Taryn; you can’t tell me you haven’t been suspecting her. I could tell when we ran into her at the Safeway.”

  “Well you have to admit, she’d be a great director for Chautauqua.”

  “That doesn’t mean she’d kill to get there.”

  “No, but you have to consider the possibilities.”

  “Okay, so we have people who hate me, people who climb for sport, people who know their way around a backstage, and people who dislike actors. Who else should we put on the list?”

  “I think there is someone who is on all those lists, or most of them, and when we figure out who that is, we’ll know who our killer is.”

  42.

  By the time Steve called we had cleared the dishes and got out pencils, pads of paper, and our laptops. It was back to planning central, and we couldn’t have been more serious. If they’d
had us at Bletchley Park in the ’40s, with the concentration we were focusing on the task, they’d have cracked the Enigma Code in a week.

  We didn’t have a week. We had no idea when the killer was going to strike again, if the target was someone unsuspecting, or if it was us. I was hoping we’d raised the stakes enough for whoever was out there to take another crack at us, since we were on edge enough to be up for a fight. Not that I wanted a knife at my throat. My innards did a cold little shimmy when I thought of that.

  Denise was playing with Taryn and Kieran on her list. I had Micheline and Louise and Sarah on mine, but I kept getting the feeling I was missing something. Or someone. There was somebody I’d been talking with this summer who fit all our criteria. If only I could figure out who it was, tell the police, and get them removed from wherever they were skulking in the shadows, driving me out of my mind with fear.

  I tried to visualize the overlying logic. Eleanor was killed and Denise was implicated because they had met previously on running trails and because Denise was thought to be jealous of Eleanor having an affair with Kieran, whom Denise was seeing. The only way for the killer to deliberately implicate Denise would be to know Denise and Eleanor had met while running. Either that, or the killer would have to know that Denise ran, and somehow compel Eleanor to running some of Denise’s chosen routes in order to create a “chance” meeting. Now I was getting really convoluted. Surely it was a matter of opportunity. The killer saw that they had met and used that as a convenient blind for his or her own actions. That explanation seemed most likely.

  Kieran would have known they had met, since either woman might have talked about the other to him. Micheline might have known about the affair, but would she have known that Denise and Eleanor had met? Maybe Eleanor had mentioned a running partner to her? The same would be true of Louise; it could have come up as greenroom chat—where she ran and wasn’t she nervous of running alone, and who she ran with. Eyebrows would be raised, and Eleanor might even enjoy the cachet of running with her lover’s girlfriend. Maybe that was what Eleanor had sought, the danger of being found out on various levels.

  It made me think less of Eleanor, even though I had been raised to try not to pile resentments on dead people who could no longer defend themselves or make things right. In affairs where a third party is involved, I have a worse time with the woman who cheats, knowing she is hurting another woman in the process. I am not sure why I believe there should be a universal sisterhood, wherein every woman keeps an eye out for every other woman. Goodness knows I’d been disabused of that concept more than enough times. Women were no more and no less collegial or supportive to each other than men were. And some, I had to admit, seemed to want to see other women fail in pathways where they themselves had succeeded, perhaps to make their own journey appear to be that much more amazing.

  So, yes, Eleanor may well have bragged subtly that she was cuckolding the woman she was running with. It was a very Shakespearian thing to do, all in all.

  Which left me with Kieran, Micheline, and Louise all likely aware of the connections between Eleanor and Denise. I wasn’t sure whether I could make the same case for Taryn, but she was on Denise’s list, anyhow.

  When I moved the parameters to Christian’s murder, things got murkier. For one thing, there was no connection between Christian and Denise that I could think of. The only links I could make took me back to who knew that Denise and I would be Fringing that evening. If they wanted to implicate Denise, murdering him at a time she might be conveniently wandering by was icing on the cake. As far as I could tell, everyone could have known about it. We had run into Louise and Sarah just after buying our tickets. We had seen other people in the beer tent who might have spoken with the suspects.

  I looked at my paper, which had lines drawn to Denise and to each other all over, till it looked like some macabre spider web with my best friend in the middle of it. The pattern had to be there somewhere.

  Or it could be someone else entirely, whom we weren’t factoring in as important. Someone who was always there, whom we didn’t see.

  My pencil broke in my hand, causing Denise to look up. She raised her eyebrows slightly.

  “You’re cut off the coffee.”

  “I don’t care, I want a glass of water, anyhow.” I pushed away from the table and walked around the kitchen island to help myself. I rinsed my coffee cup in the water I was running to get it cold and then stuck one of Denise’s heavy crystal tumblers under the stream. I opened the dishwasher just enough to pull out the upper tray and slide the coffee cup in. Denise was right. I didn’t need anything more in the way of stimulants at the moment.

  I drank my water leaning against the counter, looking toward the dining and living area of Denise’s condo and out the window to the balcony and the trees beyond. Denise sat at the table, scribbling something on her legal pad from material she was dredging up on the Internet, like a Chekovian character as the curtains open, working away prior to the scene’s action.

  And that’s when it all shifted for me. Denise sitting in her living area, as if she was on a stage, with the audience sitting somewhere out beyond the windows made me rethink the whole concept and the timing of things.

  “Denise?”

  She looked up, distracted. Deep into her research, and this work being so vital to her own livelihood, my interruption better be worth it, her look told me. I thought it was.

  “Can you tell me again what Kieran’s annual schedule is like?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I remember you telling me about how organized he has to be when we were talking about how freakishly neat he is. So, what is his schedule like?”

  She sat back in her chair. “Well, he is the artistic director of a summer festival, and he directs two plays within that context. He also directs at least two other productions here in town or in Calgary over the winter season, and sometimes he takes on teaching duties for a directing class at the university, though not so much these days. They tend to dole those out pretty sparingly.”

  “Okay, so he is obviously busy in rehearsal from the end of May for the Shakespeare in the park plays.”

  “That’s right. He rehearses the comedy first for three weeks and gets it up on its feet, and then starts the tragedy for the next three weeks, with a weekly run-through of the comedy. Then for the month of July, he is running the festival, being on site for notes and polish, there to help with any sound problems, interviews with the press, that sort of thing. They do a post-mortem for the board of directors in early August, and then he usually takes a break, unless he has an early fall production with the Mayfield or the Vertigo in Calgary or somewhere else. Usually though, if he directs, it’s the January production for one of those theatres.” She frowned, trying to sort things out chronologically. “He has to be at a monthly board meeting for the Festival, and I think he sits on the Edmonton Arts Council, which is a two-year commitment. Those are each one evening a month.”

  “So he wouldn’t go out of town in, say, February or March?”

  “No way. That would be when he was working with the set designer to create a dual-purpose set for the plays chosen, and he’d be auditioning and casting.”

  “And when did you two meet and start dating?”

  “We met at a party for the first English/Drama Romeo and Juliet reading, the one that kicked off the spring session project, which was March 15.”

  “Beware the Ides of March,” I muttered.

  Denise laughed. “Indeed. I remember it for that reason. We were joking that we should have been performing Julius Caesar.”

  “And you hit it off immediately and started dating right away.”

  “Pretty much. Kieran is a force to be reckoned with. Well, you know. He can be very charming.”

  “So, when you met, Kieran had already cast both plays for the following summer’s plays.”

  “Yes, he would have had to.”

  “So, he had already hired Eleanor Durant before he met
you.”

  “What are you implying?”

  “I’m thinking that maybe he started seeing Eleanor back in February, then decided he was going to frame her for his murder of Oren Gentry, under the idea she was aiming for his job as well. So, back in February, he had to find someone to be framed for her murder, as well.”

  “So you are saying he deliberately chatted me up and began dating me just to frame me for murder? Wow, can you be a little more demoralizing? Was my being hired in the English department just some weird affirmative action ploy? Do you think I’m adopted?”

  “I don’t mean to imply that you have to worry about people falling for you legitimately, silly. But think about the timing of things. And the way all of this has been crafted, like some weird version of Othello mixed with Macbeth, where everyone is jealous, and everyone assumes someone else is plotting, and the focus is on the wrong person at all times. We don’t argue that you were set up, right?”

  “I guess.” I could tell she was still smarting from the thought of being dated strategically.

  “And someone has known every minute of the day where you were, what you do, what running routes you take. I’ll bet he even hired me in order to pump me for information about you and your whereabouts.”

  “Did he?”

  “Did he what?”

  “Did he pump you for information about my whereabouts?” Denise was being deliberately obstreperous, probably in order to prove she couldn’t have been set up so blatantly without her knowledge. I tried to think about what she was asking. Had Kieran asked anything that smacked of probing?

  I couldn’t think of anything, but then again I was sort of inured to Denise’s paramours asking me questions about her on occasion in order to come up with the perfect Christmas gift or the most romantic outing. Maybe Kieran had done a bit of that, back in the spring. We’d talked a lot over the course of working the Shakespeare festival.

  “You know, if you’re going to be hurt about being wooed in order to be framed, just think about me. I was supposedly hired for my expertise and creativity. If I’m right about this tack, then all that was hooey and I was hired just so he could keep a better eye on you.” I frowned. That did hurt. I guessed I should cut Denise some slack.