Rox laid the items on the prop table in the pre-determined spots: two silver candlesticks, on one side, marked Act 1, and a revolver and knife, marked Act 2. They were all props for a traveling production of Les Mis that was coming through her small Canadian town.
She was 17; an orphaned high school drop out. It wasn’t that she was slow; it was that she just hadn’t figured out how to fit into the awfully big adventure of life.
So, an acquaintance of an acquaintance had given her the lead of how to get on the stage crew. She brought her own cordless drill to the interview, and changed the bit on the spot. She pulled out her own wrench and shimmied up a ladder to adjust a lighting instrument hanging from a lead pipe. The crew chief was impressed, and hired her on the spot.
Also, Rox was beautiful, in a wistful, skinny way, with long blond hair and an aquiline face. This was part of her trouble, and partly why she wanted to be backstage. She wasn’t comfortable being looked at. She felt too deeply the little dance of the sexes, and it made her hideously uncomfortable… but at the same time, insatiably curious.
The fellow playing Valjean, the lead role, a baritone, was a second-rate Equity actor from New York City named Todd Swanson. He was handsome and talented enough, but with a certain weakness of character that tainted his performances. The fellow was thrilled to get the third bus-and-truck tour through the Northeast and Ontario. He was bankrolling a graphic artist with a six-month-old child back in Brooklyn (whom he hadn’t yet admitted to himself was his). “Thank god for per diem,” said Todd, as he cashed his check at a supermarket and sent a money order back home.
But Todd had a wondering eye, and the young prop girl they called Rox was too tempting for him to ignore.
What neither of them knew was that the theatre, The Grand, a 1200 seat proscenium concert hall with ornate ceiling and crystal chandeliers, had once been the artistic home of a great Quebecois opera star. It was haunted by the ghost of the star’s private dresser, a young deaf-mute who had hung himself from the lighting grid sometime in the 1920’s. No one knew why he had done it; but it was rumored that after the singer’s death, the theatre had been taken over by an actor/manager who was a pedophile and a sadist, who was forcing the dresser to participate in his evil activities. A case of suicide for escape, not despair.
So it was, after the first night of the two-day run, that Todd Swanson began his plan for seducing the young woman, Rox. She was like a moist croissant; what a shame it would be to pass her over. All it took was a kindly glance here and there, as she passed off the loaf of bread to him before the prologue (actually, a Styrofoam brick covered with papier–mâchéand oil paint). He could almost see her heart begin to open, her arms float with the grace of being attended with male affection. He thanked her for her “professionalism” and remarked on her “potential.”
Later that night, they stood in the rain, after the closing of the bar; her eyes shining, begging for a kiss — and he told her, “Sorry; I’ve got some business to attend to first thing in the morning. Have to call it a night,” knowing this would make her passion for him only burn more brightly.
And that night, as Rox slept in her little flat above the bakery that she managed to secure to keep herself out of foster care, she had a dream about Jean Valjean, played by Todd Swanson, where she played the role of Cosette. She so wanted a taste of love.
In the morning, the stagehands reached across each other for coffee and the morning papers in the crew break room. Rox overheard the chief talking about a phone call they had gotten from New York, looking for Todd Swanson. The message said his son was ill and in the hospital. “Just a baby, they said, only six-months-old, or something.” Rox’s heart closed up.
Someone else was listening: The ghost, whose name was Wimberley. He had been observing the actor’s shenanigans, even following them to the Irish Pub after the performance (oh, how he loved that place!). He took pity on the young girl Rox, and vowed to protect her honor.
After the final curtain of the final show, Todd/Valjean wove his way through the towering platforms and darkly painted flats representing revolution-era France, still in make up, until he could find the prop girl, Rox.
When he did, he grabbed her by the shoulders.
Her lips parted, startled and surprised.
“I cannot bear the thought of leaving you — without a kiss.”
He leaned down, relishing the foreplay. But before he could indulge himself, a short rope fell, as if from the lighting grid above (although maybe it was from thin air), with a slipknot of a noose tied in. It nailed him like a steer, and hung limply round Swanson’s neck. He was too startled to move.
Rox’s two hands, still loose, reached up and grabbed the rope and pulled. The rope grew tight around the philandering actor’s neck.
“I may be poor and nobody, and never been to New York City — but I’m not easy!” She said, dropping the rope and flouncing away, leaving him there, noose still around his neck, un-kissed.
The rope was still tight enough to make him choke and gag, fully spooked. For the first time in a long while, he thought fondly of his future wife and child.
Wimberley, the ghost, watched from the fly rail, chuckling to himself.
“I’m going to like working with that kid,” he uttered, in the ephemeral speech of ghost-think.
(Response to Rita Bourland’s prompt: Write a story using all the weapons in the original Clue game: a knife, a wrench, a lead pipe, a candlestick, a revolver and a rope. Picture from wikipedia)