“Oh, I intend to, Marine.”
Classes were already in session when I let myself in through the door of Sampson Hall and wound my way quickly up the stairs and down the corridor that connects Sampson with Mahan. Once inside Mahan, I made a bee-line for the tech room and opened the refrigerator.
Because the show had ended its run, most of the soft drinks had been consumed, but a handful of Cokes, Diet Cokes, and Gatorades remained, some still with labels: BILL G, KAREN-YOU TOUCH-A, YOU DIE. I found none of Adam Monroe’s favorite Dr Peppers.
I closed the fridge and looked around.
In the corner by a television set and a stack of videotapes sat a black plastic garbage bag. I’m not terribly fastidious, but the thought of rooting through several days of adolescent garbage with my bare hands made me gag. I swallowed hard, undid the plastic ties, spread the bag open, held my breath and peered into its depths.
Starting with the pizza boxes, I removed the contents of the bag one item at a time, gingerly, sorting them into neat piles around me. By the time I got to the bottom of the bag, I had collected five pizza boxes, approximately twenty miscellaneous twelve-ounce soda cans, ten sixteen-ounce plastic soda bottles, exactly seven wine cooler bottles in assorted flavors (a dismissal offense, but I’ll never tell), and a single, plastic Dr Pepper bottle with ADAM MONROE, HIS DRINK scrawled in black magic marker across the label.
I also found a surprise: an empty blister pack that had once contained ten tablets of Zofran, Dorothy’s antinausea medication. I sniffed the empty package. It smelled like strawberries. Adam Monroe would never have detected the medicine in his already spicy, fruity Dr Pepper.
As far as I was concerned, it was an open-and-shut case. Dorothy had set a trap for the midshipman playing the Beadle, not knowing the young man had been stricken with mono and that Kevin had already been tapped to sing in his place. But unfortunately, Kevin had drunk the Dr Pepper intended for Adam, with near tragic consequences.
Holding the Dr Pepper bottle by the mouth with my thumb and forefinger, I set it carefully on a shelf along with the empty blister pack, then started shoving the garbage back into the bag. I was making so much noise that I didn’t hear someone come in behind me.
“What are you doing here, Hannah?”
I tucked the pizza box I was holding into the garbage bag and turned around ten times more calmly than I felt. “Good morning, Dorothy. I was so busy picking up in here that I didn’t hear you come in. How’s Kevin this morning?”
Dressed in jeans and a blue and gold Naval Academy jacket, Dorothy glared at me from the top of the stairs. Under the baseball cap she was wearing, her face grew dangerously red, and I realized, too late, that mentioning her son’s name had been a terrible mistake.
“He’s at Bethesda,” she snapped. “His eye is infected. But you wouldn’t care about that!”
“Infected? But I thought the doctor said his eye would be fine.”
“Hah!” Dorothy snorted. “What do they know? I told you Kevin needed a specialist! This morning the whole side of his face was hot and swollen, and his eye was glued shut. Kevin reported to sick bay, and the duty driver rushed him to Bethesda, and they’ve diagnosed-” Dorothy stopped to catch her breath. “He’s got peri something, peri… peri… periorbital cellulitis! That’s what it is.”
She took two steps down, then paused on the third. “They did a CT scan and found orbital involvement. Kevin could go blind, Hannah, and it’s all your fault! If you hadn’t insisted on taking me to that goddamn hospital, Kevin would never have been hurt!”
As irrational as Dorothy seemed, I couldn’t fault her logic on that one. “I guess you’re right about that,” I confessed. “But you were very ill, Dorothy. You wouldn’t be able to stand where you are today, bitching at me like this, if I hadn’t taken you to a doctor for help.”
“If anybody had bothered to tell me that Kevin was going on for Beadle Bamford,” she continued coolly, “I could have retrieved the soda. Kevin would never have drunk it.”
“You put your Zofran into the Dr Pepper, didn’t you, Dorothy? That’s why you didn’t take your medicine. You didn’t have any left. You’d put it all into Adam Monroe’s Dr Pepper.”
Dorothy ignored me. She drifted down the remaining stairs and crossed the room to the wall where members of the cast of Sweeney Todd had painted their names, joining the names of countless other midshipmen who had, over the years, acted in Academy musical productions. “See that,” she said, pointing to a spot about ten feet up the wall where Kevin had printed KEVIN HART, “JONAS,” 2004 in crimson paint.
“Kevin was wonderful in the role,” I gushed. “Better than the guy who did it on Broadway, if you ask me.”
Dorothy turned furious eyes on me. “Don’t you dare patronize me, Hannah Ives.”
I raised both hands in an attitude of surrender, but in the time it took me to say, “Sorry,” Dorothy’s hand dove into her bag and came out holding an object that flashed silver in the light streaming down from the ceiling fixtures. “You couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you, Hannah? I had everything under control, then you came along to screw things up.”
I backed away. “What’s that in your hand?” I asked stupidly. It looked like one of Sweeney’s prop straight-edge razors, it was so large and shiny.
Without warning, Dorothy lunged.
I staggered back. Something pricked my arm, and when I looked down, I saw that Dorothy had sliced open the sleeve of my brand new jogging outfit. I rubbed my arm where it stung, and when I pulled my hand away, I noticed a dark stain creeping along the edges of the cut.
Dorothy’s arm swung up again, and as it began to descend, it suddenly registered that the razor was all too real. Dorothy had attacked me with a box cutter.
I didn’t stay to argue with her. I turned and ran.
Behind me, I heard Dorothy’s bag hit the floor with a plomp as she lightened her load, preparing to take off after me.
I raced up and out of the tech room, crossed the stage and stumbled down the stairs on the opposite side, heading for the door that opened into the hallway near the water fountain. I skidded to a halt in the stairwell. Some damn fool had piled the folding chairs used by the orchestra against the door, blocking the exit.
I turned back to the stage door, but Dorothy was blocking it, box cutter in hand, her face incandescent with rage.
The only way out was up.
I flew up the marble staircase, taking the steps two at a time, with Dorothy hot on my tail. When I reached the first landing, I considered running around the balcony, but I knew I’d have to scramble over theater seats and negotiate the narrow aisles in order to reach the opposite side. It’d slow me down.
Could I hang from the balcony and drop? Not if I ever wanted to use my legs for walking again.
I took a deep breath and continued up, flight after flight.
As I ran, the stairway narrowed. The marble became linoleum. Dorothy was still behind me, but her footsteps seemed to be slowing. Even though I was outpacing her, she and her deadly box cutter still stood between me and the outside world.
At the next landing, I paused and leaned over the banister, gasping for air. Sunlight poured from the skylights over my head, illuminating the stairwell below and Dorothy’s bright green hat, two flights down, moving relentlessly upward.
To my left a tall wooden door, decorated with garlands of grapes in an ornate, nineteenth-century style, stood ajar. I pushed the door open and peeked inside. To my right, a pair of double doors led to a neglected classroom. Ahead, just to the left of a trophy case, was a door identical to the one through which I had just entered. I crossed over to it and jiggled the knob, but the damn door was securely locked.
One way in, no way out. If I didn’t get out of there soon, I’d be trapped.