“Where was that, exactly?” Sally asked, politely curious. “On the bus?”
Why would Sally want to pretend to be interested in where Margalo was when she found out she’d been robbed? This was making no sense to Mikey, but in tennis terms it was a returnable shot so she said, “At the bank. She’d already filled out the deposit slip.” And why not go for a put-away? “Personally? My theory? I think you did it.”
“Me?” asked Richard, and, “Me?” asked Sally. They looked at each other, little private smiles dancing up at the corners of their mouths.
“Who do you think you are—Columbo?” Richard said, mocking.
“No, she’s Jessica Fletcher. You know, Richard, in Murder, She Wrote.”
“You watch that?”
“My grandmother does,” Sally explained.
“If you want an alibi,” Richard told Mikey, smirking, “at the time of the crime me and Sally were in a place we know. A private place. We were together. Do you want to know more?” He raised and lowered his eyebrows at her, and Sally giggled, burying her face against his shoulder, protesting, “Richard! You’re terrible!”
Mikey got up then, but before she went away she leaned towards them to ask—angling the ball over so close to the net nobody could possibly get to it—“Did I say, I think you could have been in it together?”
That was her exit line. Where had Hadrian scurried away to, anyway? She was already going to be in trouble for being late to basketball so she’d have to ask Margalo about it on the way home.
But Margalo derailed that conversation by starting out, “Ms. Hendriks doesn’t want you at any more rehearsals. She said that no nonparticipants should be present, but she really meant you.” After that they had to talk about abuses of power, if this was one, and democratic rights, if the auditorium was a public place, open to everyone, and then if students had any democratic rights. So Mikey just had to act on her own.
She telephoned Hadrian after supper. This, when she thought about it, really served him right, since it was his own phone calls last year that had gotten him into whatever trouble he thought he was in with her. She dialed the number she found in the phone book, the only Klenk listed, and when a woman answered, she asked for Hadrian.
The woman said, but not to her, “It’s for Hadrian.”
“A phone call for Hadrian?” said a man’s voice.
“It’s a girl, I think.”
“A girl’s calling for Hadrian?” the man said.
“You get him,” the woman said. Then, “Hello? He’ll be here in a minute. You hold on.”
Mikey held on.
After a few long seconds the woman said, “Are you there? Did you hold on?”
“Yes,” Mikey told her. Was it possible that Hadrian was the most normal person in his family?
“I couldn’t hear you breathing.”
Mikey waited some more, until finally the woman asked, “Are you still there? Because here he is.”
After muffled conversation—which sounded like, “Give it to me,” and, “I was just holding her on the phone for you”—“Hello?” came Hadrian’s cautious voice.
Mikey had decided to give him a taste of his own medicine. “So I want to talk to you tomorrow morning, before homeroom, in the library. You don’t have to worry. You won’t be alone with me,” she said, and hung up before he could say anything. Hadrian Klenk wasn’t the only person who could ambush people on the phone.
Then Mikey spent a few minutes just sitting there, smiling at the telephone, thinking over her day’s work. She was entirely pleased with herself, until she realized that the one person who would really admire what she’d done was the one person she couldn’t tell about it. Not about all of it, anyway, only about the Hadrian part. But that was something, and she picked up the phone to punch number one on speed dial, Margalo’s number.
– 13 –
Settling Accounts
When Mikey and Margalo got to the library the next morning, Hadrian was waiting for them.
Because the library was supposed to be the symbolic center of the school, the architect who designed the building put it in the geographic center. The librarian worked behind a large, curved countertop, and spreading out around his desk, like rays of a sun in a little kid’s drawing, were the stacks of books and racks of newspapers and magazines. The library had computers, also, and a media room and—wherever they could be fit in—tables, at one of which Hadrian Klenk sat, the prisoner at the defendant’s table in a courtroom, looking nervous, just waiting, his hands folded on the table in front of him.
He didn’t look taller, older, or wise that morning. Not a bit of it. He looked like a nervous kid.
Mikey and Margalo marched up to him.
Hadrian had already waited and worried more than he could stand. He started right in talking, before they had even sat down. “I’m sorry,” he said to Mikey. “And I’m sorry to you, too, Margalo. I just made that first phone call, I don’t know why. Because sometimes I just want to go ahead and do what I want to do instead of backing off? So I called, and it was fun, so I called again—and I got better and better at it. But I didn’t mean to . . .” His voice faded off, as if he couldn’t even imagine what it was that would make them feel more kindly towards him if they knew he had never meant to do it.
Mikey and Margalo sat down facing Hadrian, and they looked at each other at the end of this little speech. Mikey spoke first.
“Don’t be a jerk. I liked talking to you.”
“You did?”
“And it was a mystery.”
“You really did?”
Margalo affirmed it. “She did. We called you her secret admirer.”
Hadrian’s cheeks turned bright pink. All he could say was, “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what this time?” asked Mikey, but Margalo cut in, “Having a secret admirer is good for someone’s ego.”
“Even Mikey?” Margalo was the person Hadrian asked about this.
“Yes,” Margalo said. “Even Mikey.”
Mikey had had enough of this subject. “I’ve been evicted from rehearsals,” she told Hadrian.
“But I’ll be fine now,” Hadrian said. “I’ll tell Ms. Hendriks. If you want to come to rehearsals, then I think you should be able to.”
“It wasn’t just disturbing you,” Margalo said. “Mikey was asking questions.”
“About your money. Did you figure out anything?”
The way Hadrian was looking at Mikey, she didn’t know what he was thinking, so she asked him outright, “Are you still my secret admirer? Because whatever Margalo says, I don’t think I want one.”
Hadrian blushed again. “I used to be, in sixth grade, and fifth, too, maybe seventh, but—you know, maybe I could be gay, because a lot of actors are.”
“That’s stupid,” Mikey responded, but Margalo could only gape across the library table at this squirty little ninth-grade wimpoid dork who had just been bold enough to say what he had just said. “Aren’t you scared by having an idea like that?” she finally asked.
“No,” answered Hadrian. “Why should I be afraid of an idea in my own head? It’s the ideas in other people’s heads that are scary.”
“And it’s not as if you’re handsome,” said Mikey, who never noticed when she wasn’t following a conversation.
“I could get handsome,” Hadrian pointed out. “After high school a lot of actors do. Or there’s Dustin Hoffman, he’s not handsome. I think it’s a reasonable ambition.”
The bell rang then, and they stood up to head off for homeroom. “I’m glad we had this talk,” Hadrian said to Mikey first and then to Margalo, in a voice deeper than the one they’d just been hearing come out of him. He reached across the table to shake their hands, as if he were a multimillionaire investor agreeing to back their fledgling company. Without hesitation, they both reached out to shake, and it wasn’t until they were out in the hallway that they realized how Hadrian had stolen their scene away from them, and had the last word, too.
Mikey glared at Margalo, who just said, “I told you he could act.”
Actually, Margalo was relieved that Mikey wasn’t going to be present at these final rehearsals. Ms. Hendriks was right, Mikey did make things even worse, and they couldn’t afford for that to happen. The play had enough problems without adding Mikey to them.
As she entered the auditorium, John Baker and John Lawrence stepped out from the dim shadows behind the last row of seats. “Margalo,” they said, low voiced, motioning her to join them. Then all they did was offer her a business-size envelope, sealed shut, no address, no stamp.
“What is it?” She didn’t take it. Probably it was a petition asking her to drop Drama. If it was, she thought, probably she’d do just that.
John Baker said, “It’s for you.”
John Lawrence said, “It’s from all of us. Well, almost all.”
“We signed it.”
“Because we wish your money hadn’t been stolen.”
“Just take it.”
So she did and they went down together to join the others, who were sitting in the front rows waiting to be called to perform. Ms. Hendriks was asking, “Margalo? Has anyone seen Margalo?” so Margalo just jammed the envelope into the pocket of her skirt and ran up the side steps onto the stage, dreading the day’s rehearsal.
But the rehearsal went well—went really well, in fact. Actors got their lines right and moved comfortably around the stage. When Ms. Hendriks stopped a scene to do it again and better, they listened to her, tried the changes, and did better. Every now and then Ms. Hendriks looked at Margalo with raised, inquiring eyebrows, but Margalo just shook her head. She had no idea. At the end Ms. Hendriks said only, “Good work, people. I knew you could do it. You’re going to be something by Friday.”
“Yeah, yeah,” was the mumble. “So you say.” But all at once they were feeling pretty good about their chances.
It wasn’t until after rehearsal, when people had picked up the knapsacks and sweaters that had been piled at the front of the auditorium and gone off home, that Margalo remembered the envelope in her pocket. She pulled it out and looked at it.
“Do you know what this is?” she asked Hadrian, who had waited with her.
“If it came from John and John I do,” he said. “Open it.”
Margalo ripped the envelope open as they walked up the main aisle and out through the big doors into the broad hallway. Inside the envelope were thick sheets of paper, folded up. She unfolded them.
But it wasn’t sheets of paper. It was one sheet of paper folded around ten bills, ten twenty-dollar bills.
There was no message on the paper, just signatures. And the signatures weren’t even real people, except probably each actor had signed for his or her own role. Margalo counted, twenty-three signatures.
Odd because there were twenty-four parts in the play.
But one of the signatures was Ms. Jeanette Hendriks.
Margalo just stood still where she was, right outside the auditorium doors, right in the hallway. She had the money in one hand and the signed paper in the other. She stared at the paper.
“What’s the matter?” Hadrian asked. “We didn’t think you’d mind.”
“I don’t,” Margalo said. “Not a bit. The opposite, in fact,” she realized. In fact, it was suddenly almost as if no one had ever stolen any money from her at all.
Not that she didn’t know they had. And not that she wasn’t still nineteen dollars short. But somehow, if everybody cared enough to all chip in something to get her money back to her, even though twenty-three of them hadn’t been responsible, twenty-four counting Ms. Hendriks, then Margalo didn’t feel so bad. Not about being robbed and not about what people were like.
“This is . . . ,” she said to Hadrian, but she was smiling too broadly to say more.
He backed away, probably afraid she might hug him.
And maybe that wasn’t so stupid, because Margalo certainly felt like hugging someone. She wanted some outlet for this energy of gladness, and relief. “Let’s tell Mikey. Come on. I wonder who didn’t sign,” Margalo said as they headed for the school entrance.
“People who didn’t chip in.”
“That, I figured out for myself. What I don’t know is who that is.”
“Richard and Sally,” Hadrian told her. At first he didn’t notice that she had stopped dead in her tracks again. He didn’t notice until he had gone about twelve paces and she wasn’t right behind him. He turned around to look for her.
“Margalo?”
“Richard and Sally?”
“Come on,” Hadrian urged her, then reported, “They said since they hadn’t done it they weren’t about to pay for it. Which makes sense but nobody paid any attention to them.”
Now Margalo hurried to catch up to him. “Richard and Sally,” she announced with satisfaction.
“I told you. Twice.”
They were seated on the bus, Mikey beside the window, before Margalo showed her the envelope. “What’s that?” Mikey asked, not reaching for it, since Margalo so obviously wanted her to.
“Money,” Margalo said, deliberately and, she hoped, irritatingly minimalist.
“How much?”
“Two hundred dollars.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“In this envelope.”
“Where’d you get the envelope?”
“At rehearsal.”
Watching Mikey be patient and calm, when what she really wanted to do was take you by the throat and squeeze information out of you like toothpaste from a tube, was more fun than telling her straightaway what she’d learn in the end. Margalo watched Mikey take a deep breath and press her lips tight.
Then Margalo watched Mikey’s expression change to her Gotcha! smile. “They paid you back,” Mikey announced.
Watching Margalo figure out that somebody had gotten ahead of her, then try to figure out a way to get herself up on top of the situation again, always made Mikey feel better. She knew that she’d never—not for years, anyway—be able to tell Margalo all about it, but at least she would take a little of the wind out of Margalo’s sails right now.
“I’m beginning to think you’re right about Richard and Sally,” Margalo said then.
That one Mikey couldn’t work out for herself. “Why?”
Margalo explained what had led her to her conclusion. “They’re probably getting a good laugh out of everyone else repaying the money and them saying it’s not fair so they won’t do it.”
“I was right!” crowed Mikey.
“Probably,” cautioned Margalo.
“They won’t get away with it,” Mikey assured her.
Margalo disagreed. “They have. They are.”
“But now we know.”
“Now we think we know.”
“Now is the time to start accusing people,” Mikey decided.
Margalo shook her head. “You keep forgetting the play. Today’s rehearsal went really well, probably because this money . . . When almost everybody pitches in to do something,” Margalo explained, “it’s like a team. The cast in a play is like a team. Now they feel like they’ve done something good together, which is good for the play. I better figure out some kind of thank-you,” she concluded, rising as the bus came to her stop.
“Just remember who figured the whole thing out right from the start,” Mikey told her.
Margalo spent the first minutes of the Wednesday rehearsal checking on the costumes, making a note of any that needed buttons or hems sewed by the volunteer mothers. Thursday was dress rehearsal and everything should be ready for that, since Friday was the first performance, when everything had to be ready. That done, she went out front to watch what Ms. Hendriks was doing onstage. She made a point of thanking everyone she met for contributing to the envelope of money—except, of course, Richard and Sally.
That day’s rehearsal went over, and over, the last act of Our Town, the graveyard scene, with most of the cast onstage, many seated in chai
rs that had been set out over half the stage in rows to look like cemetery tombstones. Two of the cast members not onstage when Margalo went out front were Richard and Sally, Sally being the dead character who was going to be left off after her funeral, and Richard playing her widowed young husband. They were sitting together on a side aisle, waiting for their cues. He had his arm around her. She looked up as Margalo passed in front of them, on her way to the side steps onto the stage. “Hey, Margalo,” Sally called in a voice so quiet it wouldn’t disturb the actors or the director.
Margalo stopped, turned back, approached the two of them. Prime suspects. She wanted to hear what they would say, so she just waited in front of them. Let them end the silence.
After a while, “So you got your money back,” Sally said.
“Most of it.”
Margalo waited some more to see where Sally wanted this conversation to go.
“Nineteen dollars is nothing,” Sally eventually told her.
Margalo shrugged.
“So why do you think they did it? Took up the collection, I mean,” Sally asked. “I already know why we didn’t contribute,” she said, and now she was the one waiting.
Richard was looking intently at the stage, as if he was seeing the play for the first time and couldn’t wait to find out how it ended, as if he had no interest in whatever it was those two girls were talking about, probably boring gossip.
“I think I know that too,” Margalo said. “But it doesn’t matter,” she added quickly, waiting a couple of beats before she said, “I mean, why people contributed or not doesn’t matter.”
Sally gave her a sharp look. “I’ll tell you anyway. It’s because I always hate group guilt. Don’t we, Richard?”
“Yeah,” mumbled Richard. “We’re glad you got it back.”
“Speak for yourself,” Sally said, but she smiled to identify it as a joke.
Which Margalo didn’t for one minute believe. But she had told the truth. It didn’t matter. She didn’t care all that much anymore, now that she was pretty sure she knew who had done it—these two—and now that everybody else had cared enough to try to make it up to her, which meant they had really agreed it shouldn’t happen. And they were right about that, Margalo thought.