Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,78

the kitchen table, looking out of place here. Perry bends down for a closer look: candles, a glass skull full of clear liquid, round tarot cards, old photos, bits of fur, scraps of paper with names and phrases written on them, and something that looks like a narwhal tusk. He reaches out to touch it but Alex says, “Don’t touch that.”

She’s standing right behind him, dressed in the black pants and shirt that will disappear beneath the Untoward Specter costume.

“Are you some kind of witch?” he asks.

“Yes.”

He can’t tell if she’s serious.

“I’m working on a spell,” she says. “That’s the real reason I’m here. It’ll make me forget everyone and everything I never want to think about again.”

“Well, I hope you’ll let me know if it works.”

“Oh, you’ll know,” she says.

14.

“My husband died because he ate too much,” says the first of the three Widows of North Varnish. “Too much poison, that is.”

“And my husband died because he hit his head,” says the second widow, “against the skillet I was holding.”

“As for my husband,” says the third widow, “he died of natural causes.”

“Is that so?” asks the first widow.

“We were standing together on the edge of a very high cliff, just admiring nature, and then he fell right into it.”

The three widows huddle close, giggling.

Ted leaps from his seat and onto the stage. “Stop! Stop!”

Carl lifts the skirt of the middle widow off his sweaty face. Final dress rehearsal, and he’s never seen Ted looking so distressed.

“This isn’t working,” Ted says, rings clinking as he waves his hands. “We’ll have to strike this scene.”

“But—” Carl starts to say, his voice cracking because it’s still half widow. He coughs. “But Ted, it’s the funniest bit in the whole damn piece.”

“It is an incontestable disaster. We’ll have to go from the Devil Costume Mix-Up straight to the waltz of the Untoward Specter. Alexandra. Alexandra! Kiddo, can you manage this?”

The wrinkled black figure shuffles out from behind the set. “Yes,” Alex says, fixing the folds of her costume. “Yes, sure, that’s fine.”

“Carl,” Ted says, “do stay onstage, please. The specter can push the widows aside as it enters. That should get a laugh.”

Carl blinks; the salt of his sweat is burning his eyes.

“Here,” Alex says to him, “let me help you,” and she pulls the skirt down over his face.

15.

Aggie loads the finished cabinets onto the bed of her pickup and drives to Ted’s place in Yarmouth. The house is covered with vines on one side, and the other side is partially devoured by an overgrown rhododendron. She climbs the sunken porch steps and knocks on the door, which is sorely in need of paint.

There’s some quiet shuffling within, and Aggie knows she’s being scrutinized from one window or another. Then the door opens, and Ted’s pale, bald, bearded face looms into view. His eyes are dark and unhappy—no trace there of the diligent whimsy she’s come to know at the theater.

“Agatha, you’re early,” he says, and from the dimness beyond comes the quiet plunk of a cat landing on the floor.

“Wrapped up sooner than I thought.”

He lets her in, and even tries to help her carry the cabinets, though she manages fine on her own. Inside the house, piled on tables and shelves, and scattered over the floor, is all the outrageous clutter of a thousand odd pursuits. Old glass bottles, blue telephone pole insulators, dolls, clothing irons, ancient-looking cheese graters, piles of CDs, skulls, stuffed animals. A shriveled thing she knows to be a real mummy’s hand. Bowls of marbles. Stray amulets and rings. Marionettes, newspapers, books everywhere, and everywhere the cats, four or five or six of them, coming and going, dozing in high places. The couches and chairs are devastated by their attentions.

Once she sets to work mounting the cabinets in his studio, Ted appears cheerier. He makes tea and brings two cups upstairs, talks to her about the play while she works. His drafting table is here, and it’s hard not to steal glances at the little book he’s working on. One illustration depicts three willowy figures, a man and two women. One of the women has just knocked the other over the head with what looks like a doorknob. On another page, a man in a fur coat is about to be crushed by an enormous urn.

Ted sees her looking and says, “All those tiny murders we think about but never make happen. I don’t know where I’d be without them.”

The cabinets are ready. “What will you