Page 9 of Script Swap (The Last Picks #11)

“Of course.” Nora folded my hand in hers.

“And I meant what I said: I’d love to pick your brain sometime.

In the meantime, however, I’m going to pack up my dressing room in case things keep escalating.

I remember one time, she carried everything out to her car, and we had to get a locksmith to open the door. ”

As she headed toward the dressing rooms, I said, “Give me some perspective here. Is this normal?”

Fox laughed. “I’d say you have to be more specific, but since we’re talking about theater types, the answer is no, nothing is normal.

” They didn’t wait for me to reply. “That’s pretty much how Nora and Jonni always are, if that’s what you mean.

Betty—the stage manager; you saw her talking to Jonni—is basically unflappable.

And Milton—the only time I’d be worried about Milton would be if he actually started doing some work around here. ”

“I guess I meant, shouldn’t they be rehearsing?”

“After last night’s debacle? Trust me, if my father hadn’t transmogrified into such a fool, he’d have them running lines until their voices dried up.”

Yikes.

“Okay, well, I guess I should take a look at the box office. Unless the sheriff still has the scene secured.”

“No,” Fox said, “she said we could use it tonight. Here we go.”

Fox took me through the house and out into the theater lobby. They produced a key and unlocked an old door near the front of the building. When they caught me considering the door, they said, “Trust me, I’ve told my father he needs to replace it with real security.”

I let that pass without any comment.

The ticket booth itself consisted of two areas.

The main area held a long counter with two service windows, a CLOSED sign propped in each.

Two aging cash registers sat at each station, along with two battered stools.

Overhead fluorescents started buzzing as soon as Fox flicked them to life, and they were so bright that they picked out the dust bunnies on the floor.

Posters on the walls. Betrayal!!! of course, since that was the current performance.

There was also one for Christmas in July at Hastings Rock (clearly meant for the tourists with kids), and that perennial favorite, Our Town —I guess you had to do something during the rest of the year.

The only thing truly of note was an ancient piece of masking tape along the edge of the counter, where it would only be visible to staff.

In black marker, someone had written Al’s ghost was here .

The tape looked old enough that it had fused to the laminate, and unless my oh-so-sexist education was wrong, the handwriting belonged to a boy.

The second part of the box office was behind another of those old wooden doors.

Fox opened it with the same key. This back area was small, and it held only a desk, two chairs, and a safe bolted to the floor.

On top of the desk sat a behemoth of a PC, a bill counter held together with duct tape, and a banker’s lamp.

Overhead, an old fan with a stainless-steel cage hung from one corner of the room.

Opposite it hung a little cube of a CRT television.

Hints of fingerprint powder remained on the bill counter and the safe, which meant the sheriff was taking this seriously—not that I’d expected otherwise.

“Okay,” I said. “Talk me through it.”

“When my father came to collect last night’s cash, the safe was empty.”

“That’s pretty cut-and-dried. So, the obvious suspects would include whoever was working the box office, and whoever had access to the safe.”

“It’s not the boys,” Fox said. “There were two of them—Micah Borichewski and Seth Akiko. They’re teenagers, still in high school.

Nice boys, and not exactly criminal masterminds.

The sheriff put them through their paces, and although I don’t think I’m supposed to know this, it sounds like Micah bawled nonstop during the questioning, and Seth broke down and confessed that one time, he’d tried to put a slice of pizza in the drop safe. ”

“You realize Keme’s almost the same age as those boys, right?”

“This is the same Keme who tied you up with a bath towel and left you that way until Bobby got home?”

“Because you stood there laughing!” I drew a deep breath. “Okay, how does a normal night go?”

“Well, whoever’s working the box office comes in around four.

My father gets the float out of the safe, counts it, and signs it over.

They work until half an hour after the show starts, and then they close the service windows.

They bring the cash back here, verify each other’s count, and drop the money.

” Fox indicated the safe; it wasn’t like any I’d seen before, because it had a narrow chute projecting off the side of it.

“At that point, they’re done. My father comes in after the show, counts the money, and takes it to the night deposit at Hastings Rock Savings and Loan. That’s about it.”

“What if there’s only one person on the shift? Who verifies their count?”

Fox shook their head. “Nobody.”

“And how do they check the actual cash take against ticket sales? Like, couldn’t they lie about how many tickets they sold and pocket the money?”

“Oh yes. And it’s happened. But not as often as you’d think.

My father has been doing this for a long time.

He’s an excellent judge of character.” Fox’s face screwed up, as though in acknowledgment of a current exception.

“He’s seen about everything you can imagine—the ticket trick, like you said, or kids giving tickets to their friends and not charging them, or the ones who steal office supplies.

We even had a guy who ran off with the take, although that was years and years ago. For the most part, it’s been fine.”

“Well, if Micah and Seth mysteriously go missing, I guess we’ll know what happened.

” I looked around. “Did something different happen last night? The drop on the safe wasn’t working, so they had to store the money somewhere else?

Or somebody hung around too long making small talk? Anything out of the ordinary.”

“This is a community theater,” Fox said. “Literally all our patrons stand around too long making small talk. But no, the boys didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. They did their count, dropped the money, and went home.”

I moved over to the safe. “So, the idea here is that they put the money in this chute-thingy—”

“The drop.”

“And it slides down into the belly of the safe, where nobody can get to it.”

“Leaving aside your decision to say ‘the belly of the safe,’ yes, that’s how it works.”

I ran my hand over the safe. The door had plenty of scratches it had acquired over God only knew how many years, but none of them were fresh, and they didn’t seem to be concentrated at a seam or around the lock.

The lock itself was one of those combinations with a keyhole set in the center, giving you two ways of opening it.

I tried to slide my hand in the drop, but I could only get my fingers slightly past the metal flap at the bottom.

“If you get your hand stuck in there,” Fox said, “they’re going to have to cut it off.”

I rolled my eyes. Noticeably. (But I did pull my hand out pretty fast because one time, I’d had an unfortunate experience with a vending machine that tried to hold on to my Kit Kat, and let me tell you: I was not eager to repeat that .)

I tried rocking the safe, but it was solidly secured.

I dropped down onto the floor to see if someone had cut their way up from the basement and gotten into the safe from the bottom.

(Although you’d think the sheriff might have noticed something like that.) The bolts holding the safe in place weren’t even visible—they were hidden behind a piece of metal skirting so that an enterprising young chap like me couldn’t saw through them and carry the safe away.

Finally, I got to my feet. “What am I missing?”

Pulling a surprisingly pained face, Fox opened the center desk drawer. They plucked a key from the little tray meant to hold pencils and pens and let it hang from one finger.

I said some words that Bill Shakespeare never put in any of his plays. “You have got to be kidding me?”

“I’m afraid not.”

The key fit easily into the safe’s lock. The door was heavier than I expected, but it swung smoothly on its hinges. There was nothing inside, of course, except two empty tills where Terrence must have normally kept the float.

“This isn’t a crime,” I said. “This is an open invitation.”

“Yes, well, it’s worked perfectly fine until now.”

“I thought somebody walked off with the take one night!”

“And it had nothing to do with the safe, darling.”

I opened my mouth; I felt the powerful need to expound on how stupid this setup was. But somehow, I managed to convert the words into “Who else knew about the key?”

“In theory? Only my father and I.”

“And not in theory?”

“It’s hard to say. My father claims he never told anyone. But my father is…sensitive.”

If you ever wanted proof of moral growth and, uh, fiber (that sounds way more scatological than I intended), I didn’t even say, The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree .

All I said was “I’m going to have to ask him about that. What about keys to the door?”

“In theory?” Fox said with a note of wry amusement. “My father, Milton, and Betty.”

“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.)