Chloe held up her thumb and index finger about a half inch apart. “Very small, but she was very good. I remember because she was working on a script herself then, something to do with some volunteer work she was doing with a program for teen alcoholics. She used to pick Hugh’s brain whenever she got the chance.” She drank the last of her coffee and set the mug on the table. “I’m sorry, Kathleen. That was a very long-winded answer to your question. The festival is going to be wonderful. There’s no jinx, no black cloud over our heads.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “And I’m looking forward to seeing you onstage.”
We finished dessert and Chloe glanced at her watch again. “I really need to get going now,” she said. She reached for her purse and I put out a hand to stop her.
“You’re my guest,” I said.
She hesitated.
“Please,” I said.
She smiled. “All right. Thank you.”
We both got to our feet. “I enjoyed this, Kathleen,” Chloe said. “I hope we can do it again while I’m here. Next time my treat.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
I picked Mom up at the Stratton at the end of the day. Her hair was pulled back in an unkempt knot, her reading glasses, lenses smudged with fingerprints, were perched at the end of her nose, and there were papers poking out of the top of her large woven tote.
She got in the truck, fastened her seat belt and slumped against the seat with a groan.
“Good day?” I asked.
She turned her head and gave me a huge smile. “Wonderful,” she said.
I heated up the remainder of the pea soup for our supper with some of Rebecca’s bread. We sat across from each other at the table, Owen and Hercules parked beside Mom. I figured they thought she was the best possibility for a little ham from the soup.
“Mom, do you know anything about Ben directing the very first staging of the play Yesterday’s Child?” I asked.
“Does this have anything to do with the silly idea that the play is jinxed?” she said.
“Not really, no,” I said. “I just heard that Ben was supposed to direct the original production but he was replaced by Hugh Davis, and there was some animosity between them. I wondered why Ben offered Hugh a job if he couldn’t stand the man.”
Mom dipped a bit of bread in her soup and popped it in her mouth before she answered. “First of all, the theater community is a very small world. If we didn’t work with people we don’t like, we’d never work at all.” She smiled at me. “And second, Ben is not the kind of person to hold on to hard feelings. I’ve known him for years. Whoever told you that got it wrong.”
She broke off another piece of bread and dropped it in the bowl. “I like your detective.”
I held up a finger. “Number one, he’s not my detective.” I put a second finger up with the first one. “And number two, you said two or three sentences to the man. How can you decide you like him just based on that?”
She waited a moment before she spoke. “Is there a number three?”
“No.”
She smiled then. “He’s definitely your detective, Katydid. The way you two look at each other makes that much very clear. And as for how I can tell I like him, well, I’m a very good judge of character.” She scooped a chunk of ham from her dish and ate it while two furry faces followed her every move. “The two of you are lousy actors, by the way.”
“Excuse me?” I said, dribbling soup onto the back of my hand.
“You’re acting like you’re not crazy about him. He’s acting like he’s not crazy about you. But the rest of the world, the audience, can see right through you.”
I wiped my hand with my napkin and frowned at her across the table. “This is the real world, not a production, and Marcus and I aren’t acting.”
“‘Quod fere totus mundus exerceat histrionem,’” she said, waving her spoon for punctuation at the end.
“Did you just quote ‘all the world’s a stage’ to me in Latin?” I asked.
“‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.’” She smiled at me. “No, I didn’t. But you’re close. I quoted Petronius to you. ‘Because almost all the world are actors.’”
“Thank you,” I said dryly. “That was so helpful.”
“It could be if you thought about it.” Mom put her spoon down. “When I’m part of a production, what am I doing?”
I shrugged. “Acting. Directing. Trying to entertain people. Maybe make them think.”
She nodded. “I’m trying to get the audience to look at things a certain way. Just for a little while. I want them to forget that what they’re really looking at is just actors in costume on a stage.” She leaned back in her chair. “Do you remember the first time you saw Peter Pan onstage?”
I nodded.
“Remember the scene when Tinkerbell is dying and Peter yells, ‘Clap if you believe in fairies’?”
I smiled at the memory. The clapping had begun slowly and spread through the theater like a wave of sound. I’d been enchanted when Tinkerbell came to life again and soared over the stage.
“The audience claps every time,” Mom said. “But there’s always someone who doesn’t. There are always one or two people who can’t get past the fact that Tinkerbell is just an actor being pulled through the air in a harness. They can’t stop looking at the wires long enough to see the magic.”
She reached up and took off her earrings. “That’s what you and your detective are doing. You’re too focused on the wires to see the magic.”
She got to her feet and kissed the top of my head. “I have to brush my teeth before I go back to the theater.”
I drove Mom down to the Stratton and told her I’d be back in a couple of hours to get her. There was no sign of either cat when I got home. I wandered into the living room, thinking maybe I’d call and see if Roma was back from her visit to Eddie.
Owen was lying on his back in the middle of the footstool, feet in the air.
“Owen!” I snapped. “What are you doing?”
He rolled over, jumped to his feet, and immediately hung his head. For months I’d suspected Owen was napping on the stool. It was old and I knew the fabric wouldn’t stand up to a cat’s claws, so the only time either cat got anywhere near the footstool was if he was sitting on my lap or sprawled across my legs.
I glared at him. “Get down,” I said.
He jumped to the floor and slunk past me to the kitchen.
Mom had been sitting in the wing chair before she left, talking to my dad on the phone. She’d left her purse behind and it had slipped to the floor, spreading its contents all over the polished hardwood.
I bent down and started picking everything up. Mom’s wallet felt like it had a couple of pounds of change inside. And why did she have a little tin of bacon-flavored mints?
I thought about what she’d said. Was she right? Were Marcus and I focusing on the wrong thing? Were we getting too distracted by our differences?
A clump of gray cat hair floated down from the top of the footstool. Owen was losing his touch. I knew he’d been lounging up there for months, but he’d always managed to be sitting on the floor, the picture of innocence, when I walked into the room.
And then I got it. I looked at the tin of bacon mints in my hand and suddenly I wasn’t trying to push a square peg in a round hole. I’d been had. By a small gray tabby cat, and not for the first time.
I sat back on my heels. Owen let me catch him on the footstool to divert my attention from the greater sin of rummaging through my mother’s purse in search of the almost irresistible smell of bacon. Could a cat really be capable of that much subterfuge and misdirection? I was fairly certain this one could.
Suddenly it was as if everything had shifted just a little to the right and now everything was lined up properly, every peg sliding into the right hole. If Owen could misdirect my attention, why couldn’t someone who’d spent their life creating a fantasy, making people believe in fairies and forget about the wires, do the same thing?