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“Was waiting for you to get here before I did.”
Andy pulled out his phone and began recording. “Do it.”
Ryan pulled on a work glove then squeezed the carabiner in the middle.
There was a loud snap of metal on metal, and then the rope hissed away from us. The bundle of sandbags dropped like a cartoon anvil to the stage.
BANG.
The sound of them slamming into the stage was a lot louder than I expected. It kicked up a cloud of dust and sand particles. The three of us stared in silence, then climbed down to take a closer look.
Four ten-pound sandbags lay on the stage, with the rope strewn across the floor. They weren’t as heavy as the spotlight; the stage appeared undamaged. But if those had hit a person…
“Don’t touch,” Ryan said as I reached for one. He held up his gloved hand. “I may have been teasing you about a dancer being nimble enough to set this, but if they find your fingerprints on the bags then you will become a suspect.”
Andy was walking around the stage, but instead of staring at the bags he was looking up at the ceiling. “It’s off-center,” he said softly. “Compared to the spotlight.”
He was right: the discolored section of repaired stage where the spotlight had smashed was over to the left. The sandbags were farther right, and deeper into the stage.
“Got a theory as to why?” Ryan asked.
“No. But it’s interesting.”
A light bulb went off in my head. “Which songs are we rehearsing tonight? More Than Money, and Through The Window, right?”
“Director Atkins had me prep the lighting routine for More Than Money,” Andy confirmed.
I walked across to the prop bed, looking for the marking tape on the stage. I stood there, trying to visualize how things went…”
“Play the song,” I said. “The full music.”
Andy seemed to realize what I was hinting at. He jumped off stage and jogged back to the lighting booth at the back of the theater. His tall frame appeared behind the booth glass, and he bent to the electronics I couldn’t see. Ryan watched me curiously.
Suddenly there was a flare of instrumental music for the beginning of the song. I sat on the edge of the bed with my feet on the marked tape, waiting for the chorus to kick in.
Braden’s character will be on the other side of the stage, with the backups in the back…
The musical The Proposition had a gloomy second half. As the character Jane continued juggling her relationship with her husband and her affair with her neighbor, she grew more paranoid and obsessed with being caught. The song More Than Money was Jane’s solo, a gut-wrenching ballad from a woman whose sanity was slowly unraveling. It had a tempo and beat similar to Yesterday by The Beatles, which picked up pace near the end until she was practically screaming her notes. It was one of the few gems of the entire musical.
I rose from the bed at the right time in the song, then began mumbling the words to myself. “There’s more than just money to the world…” While singing, I focused intensely on my track around the stage. A few steps toward the center as I got into the beginning of the song, then a rapid skip over to stage right. I’d been practicing the song when I was alone and studying the track, and it felt natural to be combining them together on the stage.
I moved back and forth through the song, singing a little louder with each step. Ryan watched from the edge, muscular arms crossed over his chest and a curious look in his eyes that seemed like admiration, but surely couldn’t have been. A minute into the song and I was singing at full theater volume, belting the note out from my diaphragm as if the seats were filled with paying customers hanging on my every word.
“There’s moooooore than just money, to our liiiiiiiiiiiiiiives! As there’s more than just honey, to the hiiiiiiiiiiive!”
I strode around stage with confidence and purpose. A pause here, a twist there. I stretched the notes and made them more ragged as I neared the end of the song, channeling my own frustration and confusion about my personal life into the words. It wasn’t hard—it came naturally as I glanced at Ryan on the side of the stage and Andy in the back, and imagined Braden and Dorian watching from the seats.
I reached the climactic verse, setting my feet on the right side of the stage close to the bed. I squared my feet and hit the final note, holding it long while walking toward the front of the stage…
And right before reaching the final standing point, I bumped into the sandbags.
The music cut off, leaving just my voice belting out the climactic note in the empty theater. I let it trail off, savoring the acoustics in that moment.
I kicked one of the sandbags gently and shared a look with Ryan. “It’s official. Those were meant for Tatiana.”
36
Ryan
