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

cheeks. Some nights I startled myself awake, panicked, and I cringed.
    Settled in, at leisure, I gazed down onto the avenue from my window, a gigantic tree nearby shimmering in the late-afternoon breeze. A rain shower was coming because the leaves of the sugar maple turned upright, and dust swirled in pocket eddies on the sidewalk.
    I glimpsed a man hurrying by, then stepping behind a car and waiting. Then he ran, hunched over. Something about his posture…something familiar…but how would I know him? But something about the bowed head…
    I shut the window and sat in a blue wing chair, my marked-up Samuel French copy of The Royal Family in my lap. Fanny Cavendish’s lines. Too many of them, I realized. I had to memorize them now, and that stressed me. I practiced a line out loud, my voice sounding artificial and dull in the small room. Words echoed in my mind: pace, projection, cues. Disaster. Reading the script, I remembered—yes, George wrote that line. I wrote this one. We fought over that speech. I insisted…George glowering…me fiery.
    The beginning of a slight headache. This was not going to end well, I realized—George had tried to warn me. Certainly his riotous laughter when I mentioned Cheryl’s offer of the part should have tipped me off. Others had warned me. Neysa McMein’s nervous titter. My sister Fannie’s phlegmatic dismissal. My innate stubbornness, to be sure, bred in the blood. A vice I joyfully cultivated. And sheer Midwestern orneriness, hard-fought and decently come by.
    The rains came, the drumbeat of heavy splatter against the panes.
    At suppertime I strolled downstairs into the dining room where the waitress seated me at a small table by the back window. I could watch the rain splatter on the cobblestones as twilight settled in. The smallish room was sparsely populated. Two portly businessmen in wrinkled seersucker suits were laughing like schoolboys over some whispered joke; a moody mother eyed her squirming daughter of perhaps ten; three old women who could be sisters all talked over one another.
    Quietly I ordered a simple sirloin steak with onions and mushrooms, expecting disaster, and a martini. The waitress, a chubby girl with her hair in Mary Pickford ringlets, winced at my order of a drink, her pencil frozen in the air. “Is Maplewood a dry county?” I babbled, but she had no idea what that meant. I gathered that a single middle-aged woman in a light rose-colored dress with three strands of sensible pearls should not be ordering firewater unless she was the local madam who’d taken a wrong turn from Newark.
    The room featured heavy, ornate Edwardian curtains that festooned the floor-to-ceiling windows, dark burgundy with dusty gold tassels. Clumsy tables with legs the size of elephant trunks looked permanently in place—you’d need a waterfront crew to shift that furniture. Old faded white damask tablecloths reminded me of an ancient relative in Chicago—the persistent finery of those who insist anything one hundred years old is religiously worthy. A mausoleum, this petrified chamber, though the gum-clacking young waitress had been dropped, willy nilly, from a time capsule.
    I expected drab, uneventful food, and was not disappointed. A steak so tough and fatty I judiciously ignored it, potatoes so gray I flattened them into a corner of the dish but they refused to disappear. I ate bread and butter, surprisingly tasty and crusty, obviously an accident of the kitchen, and managed to savor the martini, which was decent. I had two, in fact. The waitress wasn’t happy. Perhaps she thought I’d arrived in town to star in Ten Nights in a Barroom . But, of course, I doubted she’d heard of that venerable melodrama.
    “Everything all right?” the waitress asked, staring at my untouched meal.
    “Do you really expect an answer?”
    She blinked wildly and turned away, disappearing into the kitchen. I expected an irate chef, cleaver wielded above a blood-red face, to sail through