Something Wicked Read Online Free Page A

little as though she was intruding in a death scene, Annie slipped into the third row. She cringed as her chair squeaked. Max quietly joined her.
    But every eye was focused on Hugo and Burt.
    Standing in the center of the stage, the president of the Broward’s Rock Players and stage manager of
Arsenic and Old Lace
pleated his hands nervously against the trousers of his pale blue leisure suit, but his reedy voice was firm. “I am surprised at you, Hugo,” he chided. “You are experienced enough to know that the director makes all casting decisions and—”
    “I’m experienced enough to know this play’s a disaster.” Hugo’s gravelly baritone carried from the first seat to the last.Everyone watched, mesmerized, because there was no mistaking the icy fury in his voice.
    Serving as president of the players, despite the customary internecine squabbles among its members, hadn’t prepared Burt Conroy for this confrontation. Nor had his years as a successful owner and manager of Stuff ’N Such, a knick-knack shop on the waterfront that carried everything from memorabilia to quite old and valuable wooden duck decoys. Burt’s normally grayish face flushed a dull saffron and he took a deep breath, but Hugo plowed right ahead, his deep voice and superb diction flooding the auditorium.
    He had an audience, all right. Of course, not all the cast members were there. Only Act II was on this afternoon’s schedule and several of the characters didn’t appear in it. But those present hung on every word.
    Carla Fontaine, the set designer and chief carpenter, rocked back on her heels and looked up tensely. Her shining long black hair shadowed her patrician face, but her hands gripped a hammer so tightly that her knuckles blanched. Normally, she was remote and aloof, immersed in her work on the set, not even accepting graciously the compliments that had been showered over her superb creation: the Victorian stairs that dominated upstage right and were so essential to a successful production of
Arsenic and Old Lace.
Now her worried eyes showed just how much the production meant to her.
    Arthur Killeen, the local druggist who played Dr. Einstein with raffish charm, stood at stage left, waggling his hands in helpless dismay. Brushing back a strand of thin black hair, he tried to break in, “Now, Hugo, it’s too late to make changes.” Hugo ignored him, increasing his volume just a little.
    Henny Brawley bounced on her sneakered feet at the top of the downstage left steps. Her bright black eyes darted from face to face and her fox-sharp nose quivered with interest. In her brilliant crimson warm-up and with a calico headband holding down her salt-and-pepper hair, Henny looked like a bony geriatric jock, but she could pick up and discard personalities faster than Sherlock Holmes could fashion a disguise. She was a superb Abby. At this moment, she looked torn between being a theater stalwart and jumping ship to join Hugo’s insurrection.
    The Horton family stood in a clump at downstage right. Although they were near each other physically, their familial bonds, were, as usual, stretched to the breaking point. Cindy, the nubile teenage daughter who fancied herself the eighties’ answer to Marilyn Monroe, so far forgot her lacquered persona as to permit a scowl to crease her normally unsullied brow and twist a mouth generously fashioned by the wettest-looking lipstick the local drugstore could provide. As a stagehand, she hovered backstage at all hours, but her thoughts were seldom on the play. She was wildly infatuated with Shane Petree, which everyone except her mother recognized.
    Her mother, Janet, was no prize in the brains department. At the moment, she was registering ladylike disapproval, with several sad little headshakes at Hugo’s ungentlemanly behavior. A somewhat limp but moderately attractive midforties, Janet played Martha surprisingly well indeed and was an accomplished enough actress to recognize the truth in Hugo’s