Page 43 of Wham Line (The Last Picks #10)

“Did I say something wrong?” I whispered to Bobby.

Bobby patted my hand.

“What was I supposed to say? ‘Off with her head.’”

“I can hear you,” Fox snapped.

Bobby, in his infinite wisdom, handed me my program, and I buried my nose in that.

It wasn’t exactly riveting . I mean, there was the usual stuff.

Lots of advertisements for local businesses—it was nice (but not surprising) to see that the Otter Slide had taken out a full page.

And then there was Terrence’s introduction.

In the program, his title was Creative Director, and the comments were all about the privilege of working with a genius (presumably this referred to Pippi, who had about as much genius as a lunch sack).

(Also, mee-aow; I didn’t mean to sound that, uh, catty.) Terrence repeated his comments about making theater history, which again, seemed unlikely to me. And he wished everyone a great time.

Although I didn’t think the “playwright’s comments” were typically included in theater programs, clearly, they’d made an exception for Pippi.

Terrence’s introduction had been one page, and that had been with a big picture at the top.

Pippi’s ran to eight.

There were lots of pictures. Interestingly enough, though, for a play that was nominally about Vivienne Carver (and her murderous ways), Vivienne only featured in one.

The photo showed Vivienne and Pippi at a book signing.

They were sitting next to each other at a table, and the background was some indistinguishable bookstore setting that could have been anywhere.

The key detail for me, though, was that Vivienne had stacked her books between her and Pippi to make a surprisingly formidable wall.

I didn’t exactly like Vivienne, what with her trying to murder me. But I couldn’t say I blamed her.

The rest of the pictures were of Pippi (for some reason).

Pippi and her family. Pippi and her books.

(She wrote a type of mystery called a cozy , and let me tell you, she’d written a lot of them.

No judgment, but it really tells you something about an author when they can just churn them out like that, don’t you think?) There was even a picture of a very young Pippi in a bikini.

It was…disturbing. Not least because she had the exact same haircut back then that she has now.

(Also because I happened to glance over and see Mr. Ratcliff snipping the photo out of his program with a pair of nail scissors.)

The short version of Pippi’s “playwright’s introduction” was that she had been inspired by her friendship with Vivienne Carver.

Friendship was a generous term, from what I remembered, but that didn’t really matter since the remaining seven pages concentrated on Pippi’s literary achievements—and included a breakdown of the patronage packages she offered on her website, inviting people to become one of Pippi’s Penpals to the tune of twenty-five dollars a month.

My role in solving the murders and putting Vivienne behind bars took up a single sentence, wedged between a description of Pippi’s bathroom remodel and some more exposition on Pippi’s patronage site.

Pippi managed to use the word bumbling twice.

“Deep breaths,” Bobby said as he rubbed my back.

I flipped forward. More ads—God bless Mr. Cheek, he’d taken out a page for Fog Belt Ladies Wear, but it was just a black-and-white headshot of himself, approximately twenty years younger. And then we got to the actor bios.

I’m a human being. I’m not perfect. I’ve got an ego (however fragile it might be). So, I couldn’t help myself: first thing, I looked at the actor they’d cast to play me.

Not terrible.

Second take: actually, not bad at all.

Okay, third take—maybe he was a little too handsome? Like, I didn’t want Bobby getting any ideas about trading up.

He had my coloring: dark hair, skin that could politely be described as porcelain or ivory (or, uh, pale), hazel eyes.

Some similarity to the features—the shape of his head, the nose—but he had more of a leading man look than I did.

A stronger jaw. On my best days (when my hair was willing to play along, and before I had unlimited access to Indira’s cake, and during those three months in Providence when I went to the gym), I was cute. This guy was a hot tamale.

(I couldn’t help the comparison: movie theater candy!!!)

His name was Kyson Swetz, and if I had to guess, I would have said he was twenty years old.

Maybe twenty-one. According to his actor bio, he’d starred in such productions as The Crucible , Hello, Dolly!

, an abridged version of Grease , and The Pajama Game .

Nobody put it in writing, but my guess was that those had been high school productions.

I caught a glimpse of Pippi—she was backstage, poking her head out from behind the curtain, and now she smiled and waved.

Her blissfully happy family smiled and waved back from the audience.

It was cute and endearing, and it made me think of how Mr. Del Real had once told me about how he got rid of moles in his yard by smacking them on the head with a two-by-four.

Dragging my attention back to the program, I went back to the beginning of the actors and read the remaining names.

Nora Day was up next. She was playing the part of Vivienne (who, in this lightly fictionalized retelling, was called Marienne), and she was what us writerly types would call a mature woman, although it was difficult to say exactly how mature.

Some of that was probably makeup. Some of it was the miracle of photography.

And some of it, without a doubt, was the clothes.

She was dressed all in black: a black leather jacket, black leather gloves, an enormous black tulle skirt, black leather jackboots.

And as an accent, she wore about a dozen silver crosses, all different sizes, all artfully arranged on chains around her neck.

Her hair was a severe bob of bleached blond hair, and her eyes were hidden behind sunglasses.

She could have been fifty. She could have been eighty.

She looked like Dolly Parton had fallen in with a biker gang.

“Oh my God,” I said as I scanned her bio. “She was in Women and Friends ? I love that movie.”

Fox sniffed. “Of course you do. You’re a gay man born in the—” The pause was just long enough to be insulting. “—nineties?”

“Ha ha,” I said. “Wait, she was in Phantom’s Playground ? And One Last Job was so good—all those great actors pulling off a heist. Oh my God, The Last Starflower ? That’s insane. Remember Robert Downey, Jr.’s mascara? That movie was a trip.”

To judge by Bobby’s expression, he did not remember—probably because he’d been busy being an Outdoor Kid (patent pending). But because he was my one true love, he made a sound like he was very impressed.

Fox sniffed again. Loudly. “Bit parts. Don’t worry, though; her head’s big enough I’m surprised she can get through the door.”

There was a pot-kettle situation brewing (I couldn’t help myself), but I let it go.

Next up was Jonni. No last name—kind of like Prince, I guess.

She was playing the part of Pippi, who was now called Penny (for legal reasons).

She was also a mature woman, although in her case, it was easier to see the, uh, ravages of time.

(Nope. Scratch that. I meant the graceful changes of an aging body .) She had a cap of brassy curls, penciled-on eyebrows, and an abundance of what my grandmother would have called rouge .

In the photo, she wore a feather boa (kind of like Bliss’s) and a beaded skirt, and she looked kind of like if Madame Tussaud’s made a wax figure of a flapper.

Remember how I said I wasn’t a good person?

I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. Grinning, in fact.

“Oh yes,” Fox said, and their voice echoed my amusement. “Pippi was furious.”

“But it’s her play,” I said.

“She’s the playwright,” Fox said. “Not the director.”

I couldn’t help wondering, though, why Terrence had cast Jonni—God, what an awful name—as Pippi or Penny or whatever we were calling her.

She was too old, for one thing. Older than the real Pippi.

And maybe that had been an effort to make her look of an age with Nora, but…

I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why, but I doubted it.

It certainly hadn’t been her acting chops. Unlike Nora’s films, which had been a string of critical and box-office successes, Jonni’s work tended toward the, uh, B-list.

“ Life in the End was good,” I said, and weirdly enough, I felt like I was defending her.

“It was fine,” Fox said. And with a hint of evil glee, they added, “She played a sanitation worker.”

Mousewife , on the other hand, had been…

less good. (It was one of those ideas that probably should never have been made into a film, about a housewife who gets turned into a mouse.

There was probably some social commentary in there, but it felt like the unholy child of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Ratatouille .) And Losing My Boyfriend II: Losers Take All was a guilty pleasure (you’re officially required to watch it after every breakup, or when you’re just sad because Life, and Bobby knows you need lots of kisses and one of those three-layer chocolate cakes from the Cakery).

“She played the grandmother,” Fox said, reading my mind again. “The one who rediscovers a love of life through the power of stripping.”

I did kind of remember her now. And I wished I didn’t.

Fortunately, the house lights dimmed, and I was able to pull myself away from that image. The curtain went up, and Vivienne Carver—er, Marienne—came out.

The play actually wasn’t all that bad.

I mean, it wasn’t great. It had Pippi’s trademark manner of exposition, which came from the “bonk-them-over-the-head” school of writing. For heaven’s sake, Vivienne had two separate soliloquys about why she was going to murder someone for fame and fortune.

But there were some good lines in there, too.

And the story was nothing if not compelling—you could see it in the audience.

Sure, some of that probably had to do with the fact that this play was about people they knew, and yes, lots of people kept glancing over at me.

(“Daniel” made his dramatic entrance by tripping over his own feet.

He lost his glasses. Then his pants fell down, and he farted.

Which JUST FOR THE RECORD, NEVER HAPPENED.)

Really, though, what kept everyone glued to the stage—even me—was that the actors were so dang good.

All of them. Even Kyson. Pippi had clearly written him the part of a buffoon, but he made it into something more—something self-aware and playful and fun.

And when he did have serious lines, he delivered them in a way that made you sit up and take note.

Jonni clearly knew her role as a character actor, and she managed to bring out the humor in Pippi/Penny’s character without turning the show into a farce.

But the real star was Nora. There wasn’t any question.

There wasn’t any doubt. She was good—and not playing-in-the-sticks good.

Good good. She must have studied Vivienne, because everything about her—the way she moved, the way she stood, the way she talked—was perfect.

It was creepy, actually. And not only because, you know, of all that stuff with Vivienne trying to kill me.

The only reason I knew something went wrong was because Pippi had to poke her head out again.

She was staring out onto the stage, her mouth hanging open.

Something triggered in my brain, and I glanced over at where Terrence was sitting. He was staring up at the stage as well, his expression strained.

The seat next to him was empty.

Kyson was speaking. I’d been so caught up in the shock of seeing those reactions that I’d missed the first part of what he’d said. “—know what you did.” He was speaking to Vivienne, but now he turned, his arm moving in a wide arc to take in the audience. “And you won’t get away with it!”

Pippi was clutching the curtain.

Even in the dim lighting, Terrence looked like he’d gone pale.

And then the lights went out, and someone screamed.