Chief Stone had muttered, “Don’t you worry, sir. Appleton will be the same old town by then.”
But at that moment I knew in my heart that Appleton would never be the same town again. The awful blemish of such a crime had stolen some of our soul.
I suspected Houdini’s revelations might have fueled Matthias Boon’s intoxication because, back in the city room, he wrote his copy in a white heat-and hummed as he did it. Somehow he’d convert that prosaic discovery into sensational headline. At my own desk, I had trouble focusing on the nonsense I was typing.
Despite the discovery, Frana Lempke’s murder still remained a mystery.
Suddenly I thought of Jake Smuddie. High school footballers lingered after school in the auditorium, running in the hallways, up and down the stairs. We all did. I sat on those very steps leading up to August Schmidt’s storeroom when I worked on my part in A Scrap of Paper. Students often drifted up there for paintbrushes, for brooms, for…I stopped. Anyone could have spotted that panel, that latched door. But most would pay it no mind. There was no reason to. No one would think it a convenient hiding place. Again, my mind flashed to Jake Smuddie, an image of the brawny, tough boy with his amazing hands around Frana’s neck. God no! I recoiled. Who else? What former student, now grown into a man, inheritor of that secret knowledge of that panel, came back to use it to lure the hapless Frana? Or…a present student. Or…who?
Even before I turned onto North Street, I heard my father’s rich laughter. He was sitting with Gustave Timm who was telling him some anecdote, his hands flapping like wild birds. My father leaned in, enjoying it. I was happy. So many afternoons I dropped back home to check on my father, only to find Gustave Timm and Jacob Ferber sitting next to each other in the parlor or on the porch, the two men huddled together, Gustave puffing on a Golden Night cigarette. He’d met my father last spring when I brought my family to the theater, my desperate attempt to connect him to something. How deeply he’d once loved the theater! But he sat stiffly throughout the evening. Unable to view the actors onstage, baffled by the laughter from the audience, he got rattled. We left at intermission, and Gustave Timm, standing in front of his theater, had offered to escort my father home. The afternoon visits began, the two men yammering on and on about politics and Appleton and even, as I once overheard, the outlandish price of coffee. Gustave confided his dislike-his nagging fear-of Cyrus P. Powell, who owned the Lyceum and was thus his boss. Once I’d heard him say, “I was brought up to respect authority, especially one’s employer, but the man always seems to find fault with me. He’s always checking on me. I turn around and he’s there.” He sounded like a whiny child, freshly reprimanded. “I fear Homer speaks against me.”
Gustave Tim spotted me. “Your reportorial daughter has returned home.” He waved a welcome.
“Hey, Bill.”
“Hey, Pete.”
I drew up a chair and told them about Houdini at the high school, filling the account with enough drama to impress Gustave as well as entertain my father.
Listening, my father shook his head. “The sad tale continues.”
Gustave joined in. “Tragic. She was just a child, such a misguided young girl.”
“You knew her?” I asked.
Gustave shook his head. “No. But she wandered into the theater some afternoons with one of her friends, another girl. I thought that they were sisters but…”
“Kathe Schmidt?”
“I don’t remember her name, the other one. She fidgeted, but kept her mouth shut. Frana did all the talking. She’d show up during rehearsals after school was dismissed and announce that she wanted to be an actress. She plagued the visiting artists till they ran from her or complained to me. She’d ask for an autograph, then beg to be in the show.” He shrugged. “Over and over, the same pleading, yet grandly, like she was already on the stage.” His smile was wistful. “It was sad.”
“Why?”
“She thought prettiness made you an actress.”
Sharply, from me, “It certainly helps.”
Gustave disagreed. “Only in vaudeville revues. One time I asked her what she knew about being an actress, and she had nothing to say. It was the idea of fame and money, the allure of Broadway, that propelled her. She wanted to hear stories about Broadway. I told her I’d never been there. She found that strange. Like, how can you manage a theater and not have been to New York? Lord, when she went on and on, her friend rolled her eyes and grimaced. She thought it was funny.”
“What did you tell her?” my father asked.
Gustave considered. “She wanted to act at the Lyceum. I told her that we mount shows with traveling companies of professional players who bring their shows to us. We don’t put on local shows. I’m not a director-I’m a theater manager. I know the business, not the plays. We get Joseph Jefferson and Lillian Russell and the Weber Brothers, popular acts that people want to see.”
“How did she take that?”
“Not well. The last time she was there, just before a dress rehearsal-the two of them, that is-I told her to stop pestering us. Quit loitering outside, approaching the actors, bothering them. She followed William McCreary, and he was not happy. He told me she trailed him to the Sherman House, went on about joining his company when they went to New York. He wanted to call the police on her, and he expressed his concern to Cyrus P. Powell, who spoke to me about it. Harshly, I might add, warning me to shoo such pests away. I gather Powell wrote a letter to Frana’s father, but I heard that from Homer. What good did it do? She drove Mary Allibone crazy, and I was ready to call the police. But in the lobby I put my foot down. She got angry. What did I know about theater, she yelled. I was a mediocre backwater manager. She’d leave and come back to Appleton a star, she said. It was a little tiresome, but she was young, naive and, well…”
“Pretty?” I suggested.
He looked at me, squinted his eyes. “I was going to say…sad.”
“That, too.” My father turned toward me. Disapproving.
“But then I said the wrong thing. I said she could be hired, summers, as an usherette. We use three or four young people each summer. Ryan High school girls. Most like it, but…”
“The wrong thing?”
“She burst into tears. It was a little scary, frankly, and her friend had to take her by the arm. ‘I’m not an usherette,’ she yelled. ‘I’m an actress. Look at me. I’m beautiful.’”
In the quiet, my father said, “Was she beautiful?”
Both Gustave and I looked at the blind man. A rasp thickened Gustave’s voice. “Yes, she was pretty. There are thousands like her. But she didn’t have that…well, spark. A Lillian Russell steps on stage, beautiful, but there’s something else. A Mary Allibone. A Sophie Toomer. An electric charge that shoots over the orchestra and audience.”
My father spoke. “She was a little girl. Maybe she’d acquire it.”
Gustave weighed his words carefully. “I think no. You need to be born with it. The sad little girl was pretty. That’s all. That’s not enough.” His eyes darkened. “Her friend kept saying ‘Let’s leave’ in a snippy voice. Frana babbled about a friend who had a place in New York, across the street from a theater-but that made no sense. Luckily, Mildred stopped in with her mother, and the two women calmed her down, even drove the girls home in their carriage. Mildred has little patience with such nonsense. An iron will, Mildred has. Comes from being in charge of so many books, I guess.” He beamed.
“Miss Dunne knew Frana from the high school.”
“She never liked her, she told me. I guess she talked in the library.” He flashed that winning smile. “A crime against nature. Mildred complained that Frana would step into the library, her laughter already covering the room. Frana needed to be…seen. Admired. Mildred thought her desperately lonely but, well, Mildred has little patience with lost souls.” He smiled. ”She believes you set your sights on a future and that’s where you’ll end up.”