Her step was quicker as she walked away from the pay phone. This small intrigue had made her young again, though the bank window threw back the crawl-pace reflection of an old woman with a hump on her back and white hair.
Mallory arrived at the campus theater just behind Gaynor. She stood on the top step and casually perused the playbill set in glass to one side of the entrance. Again, she read the words she knew by heart and gave him three minutes through the door before she followed him.
She knew this building well from student days when she had attended Barnard College productions in its small theater. That had been another life, and when she thought back on it, it was almost as though it had happened to someone else. Some other girl had sat alone in the crowd while the babble went on around her in another language belonging to a different species of animals with bubbling mouths and the softer eyes of prey.
She entered the shoe-box lobby as Gaynor was disappearing through the door which led into the theater. A young woman stepped between Mallory and this door. Hands on hips, the woman tossed back her long frizz of brown hair, which might have passed for long waves of rusted steel wool.
"You can't go in there," said the woman, in the attitude of a combative poodle which had no idea how ridiculous it looked.
This woman might be all of twenty years old, and Mallory could not miss that fact that the frizzy brunette was smaller, lighter in the framework, and had no gun. She moved past her.
"One more step and I call campus security."
Incredulous, Mallory paused and faced the poodle down. "So? You and I both know the response time for campus security is forty minutes or never."
A snicker came from the side, and the salvo was meant for the poodle. A baby-faced boy in a denim shirt and dungarees leaned one arm on the ticket counter. He stared at Mallory as he lit a cigarette and dangled it from his lip. He tipped the wide brim of an old felt hat to her, and then lowered the brim to a rakish angle. She approved both hat and boy with a slight inclination of her head.
"We're in dress rehearsal," said the poodle, still glaring up at Mallory. "No one but cast." She sniffed the air and, catching the scent of the smoke, her head whipped around, followed out of sync by her body as she turned on the boy. "Put that cigarette out immediately!" Her eyebrows smashed together. "It's against the law to smoke in this building."
"But, Boo, I don't actually mind breaking the law," said the boy. His smile was charming, a child's smile.
"Put it out, this minute!"
The boy bent down to stub his cigarette out on the worn sole of his shoe, but he continued to hold onto it. The unwillingness to waste the cigarette told Mallory this was a fellow scholarship child, here on merit, and not family money.
"I'm ushering tonight," said Mallory to the poodle who was called Boo.
"Why didn't you say so? Here," she snapped, "you can start folding the programs." She pulled a cardboard box from the ticket counter and thrust it into Mallory's hands. When the younger woman had made her stiff exit through the stage door, Mallory turned to the boy.
"Boo? That's a name?"
"No, we call her that to jerk her chain. Bending Boo out of shape is an art form around here. You weren't half bad yourself." He relit his cigarette and smiled. "So, since when do ushers attend dress rehearsals?"
"I'm the over-zealous type."
"Or crazy for punishment. I wouldn't go through it again if I wasn't in the cast." He sat down on the wooden bench and motioned her to join him. "Is it me, or does it seem a little nuts to use radio scripts in a visual medium? Does this work for you?"
"Well, it won't work for the Shadow script. You can only see the Shadow on the radio." She settled the box on her lap and checked her watch. "Did I see Professor Gaynor go in there?"
"Yeah, a few minutes ago."
"What's he doing here?" She already knew. His name was on the playbill which had been posted on the cork wall in her den.
"Old Boo snagged him for the role of the radio announcer."
Mallory set the box of programs to one side, and stared at the double doors on the opposite wall. This, as she remembered, was the route to the balcony. There should be a staircase beyond those doors. During the daylight hours, she had never lost track of Gaynor for more than ten minutes, and she was bordering on that now. How many exits were there?
Boo came back to the lobby. She was in a foul mood, judging by the ugly line of her mouth. When her eyes lit on the hapless smoking boy, she was reborn.
"You put that cigarette out, this minute!"
Boo turned on Mallory who slowly picked up one program and folded it in half with great concentration.
"Here," Boo held a roll of red tickets entirely too close to Mallory's face. "You can number the comp tickets, too."
The red roll and Boo's hand hung in the air, ignored by Mallory who showed no enthusiasm for numbering tickets. Boo opened her mouth to say something as Mallory looked up at her with narrowed eyes. Boo shut her mouth quickly, as though she had been told to do it, and sat down on the far end of the bench and began to number the tickets herself. Always better to do it yourself if there's even the remote possibility of having your authority challenged. Or possibly she had just remembered that she was only twenty and had no authority.
Mallory checked the pocket watch again. He'd been out of her sight for ten minutes, hardly time enough to kill an old lady and make it back for the dress rehearsal, but she didn't like it.
The boy took the tickets from Boo's hand. "I'll do it."
The boy was relighting his very battered cigarette as Boo was passing through the lobby door to the theater. Mallory stood up quickly, and crossed the room towards the double doors on the other side of the lobby, missing the expression on the boy's face as he looked up suddenly in the belief that she had disappeared.
She ran up the wide staircase, long legs spanning three steps at a time. She had only been this way once before. As she recalled, it was tricky without a flashlight. The stairs wound up and around for two flights, and then a small passage led her down five steps of total blackness and into the second-tier balcony. She settled into the covering dark while Boo was commanding the lights from center stage down below. Two young women were seated in the front row, ten feet from the stage, consulting over a clipboard. They were dressed like Boo in the Barnard uniform of jeans and cowboy boots. A very un-Barnard redhead was standing stage left in a dress that hemmed mid-calf above stiletto heels. A young man with slicked-back hair and a Forties-period suit sat on the edge of the stage, dangling his out-of-period running shoes. Boo, legs akimbo, hands on hips, screamed for the light cues, and with each call a different part of the stage was illuminated until number twenty-two blew the fuse and the theater went black.
Samantha Siddon consulted her wristwatch. In one hand she grasped the silver lion's head of her cane. She was aware of the person behind her before she heard the footfalls. All this day, she had had the sense of something momentous looming, an invisible behemoth. Now it was approaching, the moment was almost here. It was death.
The pain of her arthritis made her slow to turn around, and she was even slower to focus through the thick lenses of her glasses. Confusion added to the obscuring clouds in her faded brown eyes.
"So it's you," she said. "How odd, how very odd." She stared at the knife. It occurred to her to scream, but it was a listless thought, and she had no real heart for it. Her cane was rising feebly to block the first strike, and she had a bit of time to realize this was only the reflex of life itself, which was stubborn even when its vessel was not so set on its continuing.