A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(13)

(“Brat,” Watson said. “Not her, her father. ‘Oh no, can’t believe I had to send my daughter to Oxford.’”)

Mr. Wilkes had threatened to pull his daughter from the program, a move Dr. Larkin thought was a bluff until she received a call from her director. An extracurricular should not be causing this much turmoil, Larkin was told. If this girl was really the best, she should have the best role, regardless of seniority.

“Fix it,” the director said. “Fix it, or else.”

(“Entertaining enough?” I asked him. “I’m attempting to channel you.”

Watson was shaking his head. “This is what I sound like when I talk?”

“You’re much more . . . emphatic.”)

Dr. Larkin capitulated, but on her terms. She called a meeting, told her students that Midsummer was off the table (“I made some excuses about not getting the rights,” Larkin told me, “which was ridiculous, but no one noticed”), and introduced a new play: The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. Auditions were held. The cast list was posted. Matilda was given the lead.

The next week, the accidents started.

Small things, at first. Scripts went missing. A light fell from the grid above the stage in the night; the company arrived in the morning to find it there (“like a robot’s broken heart”). After the first round of costume fittings, the dresses meant for the girl playing Miss Prism had all of their seams let out. When she tried them on again, she was drowning in a sea of lace and ribbons.

All of this was exactly innocuous enough that it could have been ignored. Passed off as a prank, or a mistake. But the day after Harriet Feldstein, the girl playing Lady Bracknell, twisted her ankle dashing out of the dressing room—there had been a tangle of wires just outside that no one could remember leaving there—she came back to find an orchid (an odontoglossums; lovely) waiting for her at the makeup mirrors. Its tag was addressed to her. It said, Watch your step.

Naturally, no one stepped forward to say they’d sent it. Harriet Feldstein wanted to drop out, but Dr. Larkin convinced her to stay by installing a nanny cam in the dressing room for another level of security. The professor told no one except Harriet and the program director that she had done so.

It worked, to a certain extent, in that no further incidents happened there. They happened everywhere else instead.

The backdrops were painted and hoisted up into the fly space above the stage with ropes, and stayed there—until one of those ropes was cut during Algernon’s monologue. He jumped backward just in time to avoid being clobbered by a hand-painted garden. That had been Theo Harding.

During tech rehearsals, the tea the characters “drank” onstage was replaced with motor oil; Matilda Wilkes spit hers out in a long black arc across the stage. The lighting cues were reset, every night, and had to be fixed by hand. The black-painted stairs behind the stage that led down to the dressing rooms—their edges had been marked with glow-in-the-dark tape, since the actors had to thunder up and down them in the dark. During dress rehearsals (tech week, as those in the theater called it), that tape was removed, and Harriet went flying down the steps. She twisted her other ankle and bruised her face.

Harriet was sent a moth orchid the next day. The tag had her name, typed, and below it the words watch your step. Thankfully, it was in character for her to perform her role with a cane.

The orchids, it seemed, were only delivered on occasions that the victim had been successfully injured. No one saw the flowers arrive. No florist in town would claim responsibility.

Fear grew. Students stayed in pairs at all times, cried quietly in corners, dropped out of the smaller parts in droves. (Anwen Ellis, who had been cast as the “manservant” Lane, was the first to go.) All unused rooms were locked and could only be opened by a key that Dr. Larkin held on her person at all times. Parents called vociferously for the play to be canceled, and Dr. Larkin had an all-day meeting with university administrators the day before The Importance of Being Earnest was set to open. She had made up her mind, she told me, to call the show off in her concern for her students’ safety.

That night, Matilda Wilkes had been walking home from a night out with friends. They were cast members from Earnest; they had all gone one way, and Matilda had gone the other. One could follow her path from one CCTV camera to the next—that’s what the police did the next day, poring through the grainy, washed-out footage, trying to put together a timeline. A narrative.

When they found her, though, there was no story. Her bag over her shoulder, her head down, her pace steady, quick, that of a girl eager to collapse into her bed. But not because she was being followed. Not because she was afraid.

And then, at the end of a long block, she had glanced up as though to check the name of the street she was turning onto, and for just a moment she looked directly into the camera’s dark lens. The streetlights had washed her face into a blank. A suggestion of dark eyes, a haughty chin. She had nodded to herself and rounded the corner, out of sight.

That was, of course, the last that anyone had seen of her.

As though she had cut a hole into the night and climbed through it. As though she had erased herself from the bottom up.

(I was familiar with that feeling.)

Her father, who had come down from the city to see her perform the next night, stalked around the police station, shouting at the detectives; her mother had haunted the theater, begging information from students, from teachers. She had known nothing of the orchid attacks. She had called her lawyer. Matilda’s boyfriend, Theo Harding, refused to perform. And without Cecily and Algernon and with the lawsuit the Wilkes family served the precollege program, the play was definitively canceled.