Mystery novel excerpts | Anna Marie Laforest

Excerpt from Mystery at Janus Street:

MYSTERY AT JANUS STREET

by Anna Marie Laforest

Prologue:

For two days Jon di Vine and his students have clambered over the petrified bluffs and lava-bloated rocks of sacred Arapahoe ground in Wyoming, where aspens turn topaz like no postcard they have ever seen, and where they have practiced communing with the eagle and the hawk as the evenings darkened into night. He is on a working vacation near Laramie where he has presented a workshop on “Shape-Shifting” at a drumming conference. The conference is over and Jon is satisfied with the progress of his “little shamans.”

Now he has the final evening to himself, before driving back to the east coast on Sunday. He leaves his car on the other side of the cattle guards and, carrying an insulated sleeping bag, hot dogs, and a thermos of black coffee, he hikes past some piton-pounding climbers, past a few radios of loud tourists who do not know about the sacred nature of the rocks here, and proceeds higher into the angling twilight, along ledges of sun-blanched sage and dead bitter root, until he is by himself. Just Jon and the long-ago worshipped rock.

He gathers sticks and spruce cones and builds a fire. He holds his hands, his long thin psychic’s fingers, for warmth over the fire, which roars without coaxing. He examines the plaid wrists of his flannel jacket until the fire simmers down, then he cooks and eats all the hot dogs, drinks the coffee. He sits against a boulder, wooly lichens at his back, one boot on top the other.

It is too dark to see the Indian paintbrush, the falling dead trees, or the elk, other than in his mind’s eye. A goshawk calls and some stray thing answers with a brief yelp. Jon rolls a cigarette and smokes. He looks up at the thousands of stars visible in the clear Wyoming night, identifies some of them, and leans back to enjoy the lavish beauty.

The stars seem to pour from the sky. A moving kaleidoscope of proof that there is a Creator, he thinks. He takes a cold breath and thinks also of Van Gogh. He would call his friends - Joyce again, or perhaps Renée - to share his excitement, but right now he feels too lazy to dig in his pockets for his phone.

Suddenly it starts to snow, big flat flakes that seem at first to be a continuance of the pouring stars. Jon feels himself melting into the scene -- then, flash! A salvo of snow sparks and leaps into the fire and pulls him back into focus. Something is wrong.

He rubs his forehead with his wrists and sends his long fingers, rising tentacles, into the sky -- what is it? It is not here. It is something back home. The snow changes from lacey flats to little splinters of ice and Jon feels Renée’s spirit moving through. Renée!

He is silent for a minute, then gets up and dumps the hot dog grease from his plate into the fire, as new colors spatter up and bruise his plaid cuffs. One finger gets singed; he raises it to his lips. A prayer.

Miles later, after mincing over cow-pied paths to the interstate, Jon is driving back without waiting for the morning light. I should have shape-shifted into an eagle and been there. I might have stopped it. Oh, Renée!

But he knows it is too late.

1. Mitch Frond, Sr., made his rounds backstage and through the house on opening night with a wide smile on his old square face, a genuine smile that brightened his eyes and smoothed the managerial lines around his mouth. This smile revealed immaculately kept teeth that matched the white of his bushy hair, and both were the envy of a score of men at his firm and at his church.

He made his way across the lobby of the Janus Street Theatre, its oak floor laden with so many excited ticket-holders he could not hear its usual creakiness. He stopped a half dozen times to shake hands with patrons, smiling, smiling, and finally went through a door and down some narrow stairs to a small area that was break room, changing room, and antiquated furnace room all in one.

Along one wall under a window was a seam-bursting sofa, with costumes piled onto one end and two actor-dancers stretching at the other. In a corner was an ink-stained wooden desk, perhaps donated from the principal’s office of an ancient grade school, now with papers pushed aside to make room for a peanut can and a cracked coffee cup, both overflowing with cigarette butts. An actual ashtray, made of heavy glass and jaggedly broken on one end, was holding paper clips and long straight pins. The concrete walls of the room were draped in old black theatre curtains shot through with more straight pins. Some held up notes, others skewered gauzy skirts or lightweight props waiting for repair.

It was very hot in the room. There were about twenty water bottles scattered about; some empty, some half full. “Not enough if the furnace explodes, Mitchell,” his worried wife Betty had exclaimed more than once, but she was not here tonight to spoil his good mood.

In another corner of the room was a massage table, and a kind-looking, calm woman on trial-hire was busy working a knot out of a dancer’s leg. Next to them another actor waited, rubbing his right shoulder and practicing knee-bends at the same time. His leg muscles bulged through tinted tights that looked better under stage lighting than here in the semi-dark.

This was a company of movement actors who were somewhere on the spectrum between ballet and mime, their choreography calibrated to the rhythm of words more than to music, although occasionally a keyboardist or drummer was called in to accompany them. Tonight they faced the latest challenge that Big Mitch, as they called him, had set for them -- Romeo and Juliet, which meant moving to the fluidity of iambic pentameter. Da-DUM times five.

Mitch nodded and waved to the therapist, Joyce he thought her name was, whose good work so far had lowered the troupe’s collective blood pressure by at least twenty points. Moods had improved and confidence had soared as the actors realized their overworked muscles now had a care-giver. Thanks to Joyce, they had begun to take some risks in their rehearsals, and Mitch hoped the press would notice the new moves tonight.

“Hot in here,” the actor who played Tybalt said, peeling off his shirt, lighting a cigarette, and propping the small window above the sofa open, in one seamless movement. Mitch noticed Joyce’s eyes going to the man’s shoulder muscles, and wondered if she routinely watched everyone’s muscles or if she might perhaps be interested in him. Well, let her, if she is, he thought. She’s not my type -- too self-confident, big boned. He continued his rounds, smiling and wishing the players good luck.

For Mitch, despite his white hair and his worried wife, had a keen interest in a sweetly hesitant fine-boned young woman from his church named Renée. Oh, not to “cross any lines” with, he told himself, but to perhaps sit and have coffee with, and help her out a bit. Mitch was always on the lookout for a defenseless person to champion, and he had noticed Renée’s reddened eyes and tears during hymns on the past couple of Sundays. He knew, via the church ladies, that her fiancé had gone to Europe for some reason and not returned. Now his sense of drama, indeed his sense of himself as a church elder/chevalier demanded that he rescue the young woman.

While he had never appeared on stage himself, Mitch had a high regard for his own persona, which propelled him to play a key part in the lives of those to whom he became attracted. It had started with managing the financial affairs of the at-first hapless Janus Street Theatre which he found he could remedy by soothing the emotional needs of particular women patrons, then it extended to certain older women at his church, and now, hopefully, the young and tearfully beautiful Renée.

Because he never considered himself an actual cheater, he was oblivious to the fact that his wife knew about these ‘emotional affairs.’ Both were oblivious to the fact that Renée was not in the least interested in having Mitch as confidant, savior, or anything else.

“Break a leg,” he said to Romeo, to Juliet, to Mercutio, Tybalt, the Friar, and the Nurse. “Don’t worry about yesterday,” he called over his shoulder to everyone as he went back up the creaky stairs. “Bad rehearsal means good opening night, you know,” as though they had never heard the saying before.

He would shake a few more hands as he went through the lobby again, wave to his teenage son who was tending box office, and scan the crowd for the churchgoers he had invited. He had had his son send Renée a free ticket, and he planned to gallantly offer his services; perhaps she would like to stop at La Dolce Vita after the show for a crème de menthe and a chat. She might tell him what happened with her fiancé and begin to cry. He would know just what to do for la belle Renée. She needed him! Such a petite confection. Not like Joyce the wide-wristed therapist who could probably hold up the Eiffel tower with one hand if she had to.

Mitch widened his smile in anticipation, but only a scant handful of church people had arrived, and no Renée. Well, it was an open ticket, and she would come another night, he thought.

But she would not. What Mitch did not know was that Renée had suffered a blow to the head at five o’clock that afternoon, and was even now slipping away at city hospital, two close friends praying, in dread and panic, at her side.