The War Against Miss Winter (31 page)

Fielding rested the script in the nook of his arm and aimed the gun at my chest. “Do shut up, Miss Winter. While I’d like to give Peter the satisfaction of killing you both, I’m not against doing it myself.” He nodded at Peter, his previously calm demeanor rippling with impatience. “Have you made your decision, Mr. Sherwood? It shouldn’t be a hard one. Not only will my play make you a star, but the circumstances of your lead actress’s death will fill the papers for months. Peter Sherwood is going to be a household name.”

Peter struggled to his feet and went to Fielding’s side. He held out his hand and Raymond gently placed the gun in his palm. “Move,” Peter told us. He motioned the two of us toward the corner of the room farthest from the door. Jayne gripped my hand and I closed my eyes and prayed that whatever was about to happen happened quickly. Off in the night a whippoorwill sang its sad song, and I tried to list all the plays I knew where a bird was a portent of death. And what the heck was a whippoorwill doing in the city anyway? A shot rang out, so loud my ears grew incapable of recognizing any other sound. I let out a sob and clutched Jayne’s hand more tightly. Metal squirted again and Jayne’s body fell into mine. We tumbled to the ground and I opened my eyes just in time to see Fielding crumple to the floor.

“Everything’s all right, Rosie,” said Al. “They’re both down.”

Peter moaned from the floor, a geyser of blood shooting from his shoulder and staining his dress shirt a startling ruby. Fielding lay motionless by the door, his artificial leg splayed at an angle a showgirl
would’ve killed for. Al straddled the distance between them like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. “Where’s Jayne?” I asked.

“I’m right here, you dope.” She stood above me, offering me her hand. “What took you so long?” she asked Al.

He shrugged and replaced his rod in a shoulder holster concealed by his coat. “The doors were locked. I had to find a hairpin.”

“Did you call the cops?” she asked.

“Tony’s on it,” said Al. “You two scram and let me clean this up.”

“Are you going to kill them?” I asked.

“Naw,” said Al. “I ain’t killing anyone. I’m just going to encourage them to be honest and forthright. I can be very convincing.”

L
ATER THAT NIGHT
, I
GOT
the details of what went down. After Jayne left the theater, she ran into Ruby lurking outside the backstage door. She was mad and had been drinking to boot. Jayne played at being a sympathetic ear, and Ruby raged about how I’d found the script and was plotting with Peter to ruin her. Once Jayne realized this was the reason Ruby had disappeared, she understood something was afoot.

“So you assumed Peter believed I had the play and I was in danger?” I asked.

Jayne shrugged. “The idea wasn’t quite that developed. I assumed Peter would try to get you to tell him where the script was, you’d tell him there was no play, and he’d get angry.”

“Did you share this theory with Ruby?”

Jayne smiled. “Nope. I told her if you did have the play odds were you’d left it back at the Shaw House for safekeeping. I figured the last thing we needed was her hanging around.”

That was good thinking on Jayne’s part. I almost didn’t mind the mess Ruby made while ransacking our room.

After Ruby left, Jayne decided to go back to the theater, but before doing so, she told Tony and Al what she thought was going on. They formed a plan whereby Jayne would track me down and five minutes later Al would go in and verify that everything was silk. If anything seemed wrong, Al was to signal to Tony, who would then ready himself at the nearest pay phone, where he’d buzz the cops as soon as he heard Al’s birdcall.

“Why wouldn’t Tony be part of the action?” I asked. “Calling the coppers doesn’t seem his style.”

“Tony’s reforming,” said Jayne. “I don’t want blood on his hands, real
or imaginary.”

After our rescue, Al stayed back with a bleeding Peter and an unconscious Raymond Fielding.

“What did you say to Peter?” I asked him.

“I explained that if he sang, there was a good chance the cops would view him more favorably. I told him I was able to avoid a three spot at Riker’s Island after turning on someone.”

I frowned. “Really?”

“Of course not, you dumb bunny. I was lying, see?”

I put an arm on Al’s shoulders. “No, you were acting. Welcome to the world of theater.” Al must’ve been a pretty convincing actor, for when Lieutenant Schmidt and his boys arrived, Peter did as Al had instructed: confessing his own crimes while squealing about what the still-unconscious Raymond Fielding had been up to. Rather than congratulating him on his honesty, Schmidt put him in bracelets and loaded him into a meat wagon bound for the prison hospital.

I caught up with Ruby the next morning and thanked her for opening up to Jayne. Like it or not, I owed my life to her big mouth.

“It was nothing really.” She flipped that dark, glossy hair of hers until it whipped me in the face. “I’m just glad nobody got hurt. Aside from your acting career, of course.”

I tried to match her hair toss but instead wrenched my neck. “What do you mean?”

She leaned in close, feigning confidence, though her tone was clearly intended for anyone in a five-mile radius. “I mean if I were you I’d strike
In the Dark
from my résumé and change my name. That show is going to follow you like a bad stink.” She checked her face in the mirror and headed to the foyer. “I’d love to catch up more, but I have a lunch date. Toodles.”

“Toodles.” At the wall of portraits I paused before her picture. A wad of gum was stuck beneath it and I pulled it off and pressed it firmly on her nose. If I had a mark on me, she was going to have one, too.

Both Fielding and Sherwood recovered from their gunshot wounds. Schmidt arrested Fielding for fraud for impersonating Detmire and
faking his own death but wasn’t able to charge him with anything else. Eloise got the wrap for conspiracy to murder. Peter was brought up on first-degree murder charges for the deaths of Jim McCain and Edgar Fielding. The story immediately supplanted any mention of
In the Dark
’s opening night success. Instead, the papers tracked Fielding’s bizarre attempt at experimental theater, Eloise McCain’s obsession with a play that didn’t exist, Peter Sherwood’s desperation to follow wherever his mentor led him, and, of course, Lieutenant Schmidt’s clever unraveling of the whole sordid affair. I was mentioned once, though my name was misspelled and my role was reduced to the “lucky understudy whose big break came about because of murder.” The AP picked up the story and for weeks the developments flooded the papers and radios, guaranteeing that anyone else who might have been embroiled in Fielding’s play knew the truth about the piece. Then some folks in Warsaw decided they weren’t content with ghetto life and public interest in the case faded.

People’s Theatre opted to discontinue
In the Dark
and instead ran a series of short films about conditions in Japanese relocation camps. The production’s halt meant Ruby’s schedule was once again freed up. Since Lawrence had committed to using Jayne as his romantic lead, he rewrote his script to include a Polish nurse who comes to America on the eve of Jayne’s wedding and engages in a two-page monologue describing how miserable her life had been since her GI boyfriend left her to marry another woman. Although Jayne’s character got the guy in the end, Ruby’s eight minutes onstage, convincing Polish accent, and tour de force performance led many critics to declare that she deserved a Drama League Award.

Two weeks after opening night my life was back to normal. I’d been to four auditions, I was contemplating a war plant job to get me through the lean times, and I’d written nine letters to Jack, none of which I’d mailed.

“Hiya,” said Jayne from her post on the bed. She and Churchill lounged before a box of chocolates that still bore the card Tony had sent with them. Jayne had restricted her dining to the left side of the box,
letting Churchill do what he pleased with the right. “How’s tricks?”

“Fine,” I said. Her casualness seemed forced, her question an attempt to stall. “Why?”

“No reason. By the way, you have mail.” She raised an eyebrow. “V-mail.”

I snatched the letter from her bed and nicked a chocolate from her side of the box. It was filled with coconut. Yuck.

“Aren’t you going to read it?”

“I’m thinking about it.” I held the letter to the light and tried to guess at its contents.

Jayne grabbed my arm. “If you don’t open it, I will.”

“Hold your horses already.” I sat on my bed and delicately tore the fold. With a dramatic huff, I unfurled the page and showed Jayne my back.

“Well?”

I peered at the unfamiliar scrawl reduced to fit on the tiny page. “It’s not from him. It’s from someone in his platoon, an M. Harrington.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to do—breaking up with a girl and then passing around her picture.” She tried to take the letter from me, but I waved her off.

He made me promise that if something were to happen to him, I would contact you.
“He’s MIA.”

“Missing in action?” asked Jayne. I couldn’t answer. I let go of the letter and let it flutter to my lap. She snatched it up and read the words I’d already committed to memory. “Jack?”

I nodded.
If something were to happen to him
. “It’s a joke, right? Some kind of cruel gag he’s pulling to teach me a lesson?” Jayne put her hand on mine and squeezed. “Missing’s not dead, right? It’s not even wounded. It’s just…not there.”

“Sure,” said Jayne. “Absolutely. He’ll come back.”

Jayne was right: Jack was fine. He had to be. Nothing bad could ever happen to him. And yet an ache in my bones told me otherwise. I collapsed against my best pal and held her tight. Churchill pressed close against the other side of me as though he too wanted to participate in
the embrace. I longed to cry, but for once the tears wouldn’t come. I’d left them onstage.

Fake plays and egotistical directors were unbelievable and strange, but there was a war on, much as I hated to admit it, and that aced everything. Jack had become a phantom to me, a memory that faded the longer he stayed away. I might not have known what I wanted from him anymore, but I still loved him. And I knew that if something were missing, I would have to look for it even if it had never been there in the first place.

R
OSIE WOULD NEVER HAVE SEEN
the light of day without the work, research, support, and input of a number of fabulous people, among them: my wonderful agent, Paul Fedorko, who knows just what to say and when to say it; Erin Brown, the editor who first ushered this project into HarperCollins; and Sarah Durand, who did a wonderful job taking over the project after Erin moved on.

If you want to learn how to write, you surround yourself with talented writers. I did just that when I found the inestimable members of SPEC, and the Fiction Critique Group Without a Name (we really should call it something, guys), especially Paula Martinac and Ralph Scherder, who were never afraid to tell me that just because I could call it jawing, chinning, and bumping gums doesn’t mean I should.

I am forever indebted to my dear friend and first reader, David L. White, who has never told me he was too busy to read just one more draft of anything, and his wife, Allison Trimarco, who was happy to apply her status as a lifelong New Yorker to whatever bizarre trivia question I hurled her way.

I am also grateful for the support of my sister, Pamela Nicholson, who cheered me on from across an ocean.

And of course, I must acknowledge my canine companions Mr. Rizzo, Chonka, and Violet. I could write without dogs, but why would I want to?