Final Curtain: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries) Read Online Free

train at Penn Station and traveled to Maplewood, watching Manhattan disappear. Automobile junkyards and filling stations speckled the landscape. As I stepped off the train, I felt a tug of emotion: the small village with its quiet, lazy-afternoon station, lines of automobiles parked in the shadow of the latticed two-story façade, brought me back to Stepney Depot, the train stop in Connecticut where I lived now, having built a massive fourteen-room Georgian stone house atop a thickly covered hill, just over a year ago. From my terrace I could see Long Island Sound. There, perhaps, the caretaker was now debating whether the old white birch had to be axed. There, now, most likely, my imperious mother was battling with Jason the gardener over the blackberry bushes she insisted were doomed to fail. Or she was sitting by the pool, shaded by a monstrous straw bonnet, writing me a cautionary note that reiterated how foolish my behavior was—once again. “Edna, I’m eating here alone with strangers.” Yet I missed that country home because I’d worked for every piece of stone, every positioned fruit tree. Treasure Hill, I called it.
    I glanced down the street. With Myer’s General Store, Gruning’s Ice Cream and Candy Shop, and the clapboard-sided Grange Hall, Maplewood seemed removed from the slick confection of The Royal Family , all that Upper East Side banter and privilege and opulence. Here was Norman Rockwell on a Saturday Evening Post cover. A placard in the train station announced: “Rosalie Gay and her Accordion,” appearing at the Chi Am Chateau, a Chinese restaurant.
    “Miss Ferber?”
    I faced a smiling young man decked out in baggy white linen trousers and a periwinkle-blue tennis shirt, a happy-go-lucky blond kid with an unwieldy cowlick and an eager grin. I nodded as he scooped up my suitcases, half-bowed, and directed me to a cream-colored station wagon with faux-wood side paneling and a discreet lettered sign on the door: Jefferson Village Inn. “This way, please.”
    The inn was steps away—in fact, across from the train station and the grand Maplewood Theater, its welcoming sign visible above a line of Hawthorne trees that dotted the median strip down the center of the street. Very pastoral. The inn was tucked under ancient hemlocks and oaks, with a cobblestone pathway and an intimate gazebo too close to the sidewalk. A lovely three-story house, doubtless an old Victorian homestead with its wraparound porch, cluttered rows of weathered Adirondack chairs, and gingerbread ornamentation decorating the high eaves. Here was a whitewashed edifice that once catered to the Manhattan rich who summered in the town at the turn of the century.
    At the front desk the clerk bowed and gushed and screamed approval of my stay. I learned that Sinclair Lewis had stayed there earlier that summer and had signed a menu, now framed and displayed in the dining room. “You are the second Pulitzer Prize novelist,” he gushed. He directed the young chauffeur to carry my bags up to the second floor, and the boy, still grinning but awash now in sweat, beamed. I also learned that most summer theater folks chose to take the half-hour train ride back into the city each afternoon. The stars of The Royal Family —including Louis Calhern and Irene Purcell—would do so, to my consternation. They would only book rooms during the week’s run. Cheryl Crawford, I learned, had rented a bungalow for the summer, though she scuttled back and forth to her Manhattan pied-à-terre. So, it seemed, for the moment I was the sole and lonesome grande dame from the Maplewood Theater in attendance in the venerable inn.
    Of course, I’d come early on purpose—time to learn my lines, to relax, to walk, to feel the pulse of the town. Here was solitude. After all, this was my stage debut. In my nightmares I stood on the stage and opened my mouth: no sound escaped. And the audience, rolling in hysterics, pointed at me, tears coursing down their shiny