Iva rolled her eyes. “Well, I don’t know about that, Maxine, but the holidays were here and everyone was too busy to pay very close attention to what was happening. I don’t even remember who was running the theater at the time…someone local, I’m sure.” She frowned, as if trying to remember.
“And then it was January,” Orbra said, “and no one really thought about the whole thing, since there were never any shows in the winter back then—we didn’t haveanytourists until the end of June back in the eighties and nineties, you know, when all of the Big Three Autos—back then they were the Big Three, anyway—shut down for two weeks in July. Everyone would come over here from the east side of the state.”
“So the theater never opened again the following summer—I don’t know why—and after that, everyone must’ve given up on the place,” said Juanita, looking around with bright eyes. “So very sad.”
“I wonder what happened,” said Iva as she trotted along.
Vivien hardly listened to their chatter, as she was more interested in keeping all of them upright and unscathed as they navigated through. Whoever thought it was a good idea for Maxine and Company to show up today? Surely Helga wouldn’t have suggested it… No. It was probably Maxine’s idea.
“This is the costume room,” Vivien said, pausing so the Tuesday Ladies could look inside.
Three long rows of clothing racks were stuffed with hangers holding all types of costumes. They’d once been bright and showy, and now most were dingy and sagging and smelled of must and mildew. Vivien had hoped to be able to save some of the more complicated, show-specific costumes like the Tin Man or Audrey II, but her hopes had begun to fade once she began to look through them. It was a shame, because Cleopatra’s headdress and the ballgown from the “Shall We Dance?” scene inThe King and Iwould have been stunning in their heyday.
“I see the Cowardly Lion,” said Iva, pushing her way into the room. She began to paw through a row of costumes. “Ooh! And this has to be Titania!”
“Oh, and here’s Eliza Doolittle’s hat!” said Orbra, perching the wide-brimmed straw bonnet on her blue-white hair. She didn’t seem to mind the cascade of dust wafting down from the faded red ribbon. Or the spider that dangled from the back…
“And this must be from one of the witches inMacbeth—” said Juanita.
“Shh!” said Iva, looking around nervously as Vivien automatically winced and hunched her shoulders. Old habits died hard.
“What?” demanded Juanita.
“You’re not supposed to say that word!” Iva told her.
“What word?” demanded Maxine, turning from where she’d been digging through a stack of hat boxes.
“The name of that play,” Vivien said. “It’s a sort of superstition for theater people. So we don’t say it in a theater.”
Maxine looked at her from beneath Elphaba’s pointy (but semi-crunched) Wicked Witch hat. Her expression spoke volumes: she thought Vivien was the crazy one. “You meanMacb—”
“Maxine!” Iva lunged toward her friend and put her hands over her mouth. “Don’t say it! It’s bad luck!”
The hat fell to the floor as Maxine batted her hands away. “Why not? Why does saying the damned word make a difference? It’s aplay, ain’t it? How can a play be bad luck in a theater? What happens when they’re actually doing it? You can’t do a play and not say its name—”
“Miss Savage! Miss Savage, could you come here?”
Vivien had never been so relieved to hear her name than at that moment. She fairly bolted from the wardrobe, leaving the four ladies arguing at the tops of their lungs aboutMacbeth. She figured if she didn’t hear the name being spoken (and it continued to be, regularly, by the contrary Maxine), it didn’t count for the bad luck.
At least, she hoped it didn’t.
GO OR DIE.
She couldn’t control a shiver.
Maybe the bad luck had already begun.
Chapter Seven
Despite Vivien’s snarky comments,Jake couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy for her. After all, he could hardly manage his own pushing-eighty father…and here she was trying to herd a stubborn and determined cluster of old ladies through the danger zone of an old building.
Lots of things could go wrong, and the Tuesday Ladies (as he’d learned they were known, although “ladies” might have been an exaggeration) seemed worse than a group of toddlers on the loose—which he’d experienced the one time he’d been stuck babysitting his nieces and nephew solo. Three of them, ages two, three, and five.
“Jake’s a doctor—he can handle it,” his older sister Mathilda had said when her husband, Jake’s brother-in-law, protested. She had a malicious gleam in her eye, a sort ofHe deserves every bit of itlook. She’d looked at him that way when she washed his favorite white tee shirtandtighty-whiteys in hot water with a red blouse, back when he was ten. Of course, that was after he’d dumped a jar of spiders into her bed…while she was in it. “He made it through his residency, didn’t he?”
“They’ll nap most of the time anyway,” agreed his other sister Irene, who was also older than Jake, with her own smirk.
Which was a lie.
