“What made you think it was such a bad idea?”
“At first, I was just thinking about the backdrops. They’ll catch fire in a flash. But then I remembered the pulley.”
“Pulley?” The way Ritchie says the word, like a question, makes it clear that this is the first time he’s hearing about it.
“Up on the tie beam. It was loose or something. The chandelier would go up fine, but sometimes, on the way back down, the rope would pop off the wheel.”
Ritchie peppers him with questions. Where, precisely, was the pulley installed? How long had it been broken? Whose job was it to fix it? Jack tells him everything he knows, and Ritchie writes it all down in his little book. “Did Green know?” he asks finally, when he has lifted his pencil from the page. “About the pulley?”
Jack nods slowly.
Ritchie leans forward. “And he ordered you to raise it anyway?”
“He wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“Surely, he knew that getting the chandelier down would prove difficult?”
“He must have,” Jack agrees. “But with enough time, we could have come up with a plan.”
“Why was there no time?”
Jack starts to tell Ritchie about how Twaits ordered Roy to bring the chandelier down, and the next thing he knows, a quarter of an hour has passed and Ritchie has filled a half-dozen sheets of notebook paper.
“What happens now?” asks Jack. He assumes he is headed straight for the birdcage, or maybe the gallows.
Ritchie doesn’t say anything, just closes his notebook and slides it back into his satchel.
“I will accept my punishment—whatever it is.”
“I need some time,” says Ritchie. “A few hours, at least. I’ve got to talk to the committee, and figure out where we go from here.”
“What do I do until then?”
“Go up to bed. Get some sleep. The most important thing to do is act like everything’s normal.”
Jack hates the idea of spending another night on that cot in Anderson’s room, but what choice does he have?
“One last question,” says Ritchie. “Who, precisely, witnessed you raise the chandelier?”
Jack thinks for a minute. “It was just me and Mr. Green and—Mrs. Green.”
Ritchie’s lip curls up at one corner. “She’s who went to Skelton.”
It’s like Ritchie’s just knocked the air out of him. “You know it for a fact?” he asks. “That it was her?”
“No,” he admits, “but it’s what makes the most sense.”
“Because you think she wanted to hold the troupe accountable for Nancy’s death?” says Jack slowly.
“Exactly.”
“But what about Mr. Green? And me? She didn’t out us, and she could have.”
Ritchie rolls his shoulders, like it’s been a very long day. “Mr. Green’s easy to explain.”
Jack waits with baited breath.
“She loves him,” he says.
