“They look really good. Are you going to print up extra for us to sell?”
“I’m worried about liability,” he said. “Plus if people wear them around, other people might ask where they got them. Which would be great publicity, but also increases the chances that the festival finds out what we’re doing and tells us to stop.”
“I still don’t see why they would care.”
“We’re using their grounds for part of the tour,” Leo said. “And whenever you want to do something and you’re not an adult, people tell you to stop. Even when there’s no real reason.”
That was true.
I sat down on the couch. It felt funny to not be watching Times of Our Seasons. “So,” I said, “The Tempest.”
“Yeah,” Leo said. He cued up the film.
“I haven’t read it before. Will I still know what’s going on?”
“Yeah. If you don’t, ask me. I’ve watched it a bunch of times.”
“I’m sure you have,” I said.
Leo shot me a look then, one that I hadn’t seen before. It was a look that seemed hurt. I felt bad.
So I didn’t say anything when the play started and it was kind of funny and old. I didn’t crack a single joke about the outfits the people in the audience wore or the actors running around onstage, pretending they were on a ship that was sinking. The seats surrounded the stage on three sides, so the actors were right in the middle of their audience.
And then a woman came onstage, wearing a cream-colored dress, tattered but beautiful. You couldn’t yet see her face but the dress stood out against the dark beams, under the dim lights, like a butterfly at night, a white fish in a deep ocean.
I bet Meg made that dress, I thought.
The camera went right to Lisette Chamberlain and a light bloomed around her on the stage as she spoke. Over her white dress she wore a military coat that was too big, like it had been her dad’s and he’d given it to her to keep her warm. The coat was frayed and made of blue-gray velvet. She had bare feet, long red hair, beautiful eyes.
She was alive again, for now.
You could tell right away how good she was. The other actors were good too—how they’d memorized those long complicated lines, how they projected their voices out and moved their bodies—but it seemed like they were talking to us all, speaking out to the audience at large. Lisette seemed like she was talking to you. And you. And you. It felt like she spoke to everyone individually, even though she couldn’t possibly look each person in the eye.
The old man playing her father, Prospero, looked familiar too. I realized it was the guy from the King Lear portrait. The way he and Lisette interacted made me think They could really be a father and his daughter even though I didn’t understand everything they were saying. I got most of it though. Somehow, he had the power to create a storm, and she wanted him to stop it because she worried about the people on the boat.
Lisette’s character might be trapped on an island, but at least she had her dad, and he was magic.
Leo stopped the play right as a dark-haired man came onto the scene, a handsome guy staggering around as more fake wind and rain sounds hammered the stage.
“What are you doing?” I asked. I’d been getting into it.
“So the interesting thing about this play,” Leo said, “besides the fact that it’s Lisette Chamberlain’s final performance, is this guy. The actor playing Ferdinand, who’s the love interest for Miranda.”
I leaned in to look at the man on the stage.
“Roger Marin,” Leo said.
“Whoa,” I said. “Roger Marin.” I knew the name from the tour. “The guy who was her second husband?”
“Yes.”
“And this is after they broke up?”
“Yeah, one year later,” Leo said. “Roger Marin never got as famous as Lisette did. He worked at Summerlost every summer, for the whole season. And that last year, when she came back, she starred opposite him one more time. In this performance. On the stage where they’d met years before.”
“Wow,” I said. “So she saw her ex-husband onstage the night she died.”
“Yeah,” Leo said. “And he visited her at the hotel that night too.”
“What?”
Leo nodded. “The police report says that two people visited her that night after the performance. The person with the room next to Lisette’s told the police that she heard knocking and the door open and close and then voices. Twice. She admitted peeking out to see who the second person was.”
“And it was . . .”