I paused, looking at my fellow actresses, who were taking their positions and adjusting their props—glasses of iced tea and records—in their hands. A singer onstage began lilting Doris Day’s “A Guy Is a Guy.” I flipped through the next two pages of the script and, as I expected, it didn’t get any better with Robert teetering on the brink of abuse charges.
“Can we make some changes to the script?” I asked, walking up to Jemma. “Perhaps take out Robert wanting his girlfriend to be a size four? We could focus more on Mildred’s desire to learn the art of baking.”
Jemma narrowed her eyes as if she’d expected as much from me. “Mr. Finch approved this himself. Think of the skit as a tribute to him.”
“It’s about a nonexistent perfect pageant girl and some jackass named Robert being upset because his ‘girl’ burned his dessert and actually ate calories.” I flipped to the third page. “And she’s terrified of being an old maid if she doesn’t win this year?”
“This is about stepping back into another era and experiencing life as these ladies did,” Jemma said, a hand on her hip.
My Rural Women’s Studies course at Cornell had never painted women in this light. “Okay, then where’s the 1950s fight against segregation and the petition to President Eisenhower for cabinet positions for women?”
A pause.
“Listen, Gloria Steinem, I can’t deal with this today,” Jemma spouted. “I’m sure this isn’t what all women talked about, but it’s what we’re working with. Got it?”
Nope. I didn’t have it, but I also wasn’t going to stand a chance at the prize by being difficult.
Jemma called for us to take our places, and I made it through the entire script. Then, I ran it again, trying my best to take Jemma’s unsolicited advice about my tone and mannerisms.
“Let’s do it one more time,” Jemma said, almost as soon as we’d finished.
“Fine,” I said, my heart rate accelerating. The combination of my money worries, my aunt behind bars, and the general safety concerns of this pageant were mounting. This ridiculous production might be the thing to break me. “Let’s run it again.” I stomped into the kitchen and hurled my first line, long and loud and flat, every word plodding and monotone.
“Gosh darn it. I can’t believe my soufflé fell again.”
I began opening and slamming cupboards with nothing inside, not even shelves. “Robert will tan my hide if I can’t learn how to cook. And fast.” I yanked on the drawers, but they were all just fronts, so I moved to the bottom cabinets. “How did you catch your husband?”
The final word stuck in my mouth. Because there, in the bottom cabinet, on display for lovers of all things 1950s, was a body, dressed in a suit with a crumbling dead rose in the lapel.
I backed away from the cabinet and barreled into the kitchen counter behind me. Pain spread across my hip as the body fell head first out of the cabinet, landing with a thud.
I stared in horror at the dead man, his muscles rigid and his arms folded on his chest. His right eye was no longer in the socket, and a stream of blood had dried down his face, along his right pants leg, all the way to the toe of his brown loafer.
I’d found Mr. Finch, and he was still wearing his pinky ring.
TWENTY-ONE
I couldn’t walk or turn or call for help. When Jemma, flustered and frustrated, entered the kitchen, ready to scold me again, she instead let out a blood-curdling scream. After that, the word got out. Gina and Nina and Summer came running, and soon contestants poured in from other decades while staff members rushed to and fro in golf carts.
Summer pulled me away as the sheriff appeared, calling for his officers to cordon off the area. “Come with me,” she whispered, taking my arm and leading me outside the canopy and to a park bench set up between the 1970s and 1980s.
My hands were shaking, and I could only stare into nothing. Birds in the trees continued to sing, and the summer sun still beat down, but this day had irrevocably changed for me. Even the mountains now hid behind gray-tinged clouds.
“Mr. Finch was…” I swallowed, trying to speak. “His eye… his blood was…”
“I know. It’s okay,” Summer said, her small hand on my back, anchoring me as the sheriff approached us.
He crouched down to my level and spoke with the kindest tone that I’d yet heard from him. “Miss Green, I know that you’re in shock.” His voice was steady, the resonance oddly comforting,but his next words unmoored me again. “Do you think you can tell me in your own words what you found?”
“I found…” I couldn’t finish, and I didn’t meet his eyes.
Summer put her arm protectively over my shoulder. “It’s all right, Dakota. You found Mr. Finch’s body, right?”
I think I nodded.
“And where was it located?” the sheriff asked.
We were standing yards away from where the man’s lifeless body had fallen from the kitchen cabinet. Couldn’t the sheriff walk over and see it for himself? I tried to recall Aunt DeeDee’s claims that I should trust him, but this new wrinkle didn’t help matters, particularly if I had to give a vivid description of what he could discern on his own. I did not want to relive another death.
