Page 22 of Script Swap
“Not whoever is working the registers?”
“No.One of the others lets them in.”
“What’s their deal?”
“Milton and Betty?”Fox wrinkled their brow.“Dash, they weren’t involved.”
“That’s usually something people say shortly before they experience a tremendous disappointment.”
“They weren’t.I take your point, I promise I do, but they’ve worked at The Foxworthy for—God, I don’t even know.Longer than I’ve been alive.And that’s not an exaggeration.”
I raised my eyebrows, which is a trick they teach you in amateur sleuthing school.
(There’s no school.It’s a correspondence course.)
(There’s not even a correspondence course, actually.I made that up.But I did make myself a certificate one time and print it out at home, and because Bobby honestly doesn’t know what to do with me sometimes, he went out and bought me a frame for it.)
“They’ve both been here going on atleastforty years,” Fox said.“Betty won’t retire.Ever.She’s going to die in this theater, like my father.And Milton would retire in a heartbeat, but why should he when he’s got the easiest job in the universe?He spends half the day hiding in his cubby, looking at—” Fox delicately coughed.“—art on his phone.”
“Gross.In acubby?Double gross.”
“Dash.”
“Right, right.Okay.Does anybody else work here?”
“A couple of high school kids, Joey and Audrey.Stagehands.”
“I don’t suppose they’re also criminal masterminds?”
“One time, Keme stopped by the theater to pick up something I needed to give to Indira.Joey saw him, turned around, andran.”
“God, I bet he was unbearable after that.”
“For two weeks,” Fox said glumly.
As they were locking up the box office, I said, “I know this is switching tracks, but can we talk to Kyson?I still don’t know what’s going on with this script thingy, but I want to ask him what happened.”
Fox nodded and led the way.We followed the same hallway off the lobby that we’d taken to get backstage, but this time, we kept going until we reached the theater’s workspaces: costumes, props, even a workshop where old power tools and sawdust suggested a lot of loud, dirty things happened.
Then the hallway turned, and there was a large room that was being used, from the looks of it, as extra storage space—rolling racks of costumes, cardboard boxes, folding chairs—although the presence of lighted vanities suggested this had originally been intended for hair and makeup, or something like that.Several doors stood along one wall, and two were open.
“Father’s moving everything out of storage upstairs,” Fox said, gesturing at the boxes.
“The renovation, right.”
At the sound of our voices, a shadow moved inside one of the rooms, and then Jonni poked her head out.“Hello there,” she called with a big stage-girl smile that made me think of fake teeth.“What are you doing poking around back here?”And then she did this deep, throaty giggle like she’d made a dirty joke.
“Excuse us,” Fox said.“We want to talk to Kyson.”
“He’s not in his dressing room,” Jonni said, trailing after us.“He’s too important to be here unless we’re rehearsing.What do you think about that?”
If Fox had any thoughts, they didn’t share them.Instead, they rapped on the door to Kyson’s room and called out, “Kyson, are you in there?”
“I told you, he’s not here.”Jonni pushed past us, opened the door, and strode into the room.It was dark, and then lights bloomed, and she did a little twirl.“See?”
Fox was making a sound in their throat that cats make sometimes.
The dressing room looked fairly standard to me.The walls were painted black.The lights were fluorescents.There was a chair and a sofa, both of which appeared, uh, well-used in a way that meant I didn’t want to touch them in anything less than a full hazmat suit.Clothes lay on the floor, presumably Kyson’s.A long counter with a Hollywood vanity showed more disorder: three different kinds of cologne (cue the incipient headache), a bouquet of drying flowers, prescription antiperspirant.There was a little black block of wood that might have been a minimalist jewelry box.The ceiling was discoloredfrom water damage, and it sagged ominously as though it might give at any minute.But that didn’t matter because the real star of the show, as far as yours truly was concerned, was the mini-fridge.I’d been on a quest for a mini-fridge.Bobby didn’t understand the limitless potential of having soda and nicely chilled snacks at your literal fingertips.(Did you know that chocolate chip cookies reach 110% deliciousness—we’re talking critical-mass deliciousness—if you chill them in the fridge?)
