with a meat fork.
“I don’t think I’ll ask what you’re doing,” Renie
called from the back porch, “but I thought you’d ordered food from a caterer.”
Startled, Judith turned toward her cousin. “Somebody burned something in here. I’m trying to figure
out what it was.”
“Wienie Wizards?” Renie inquired, coming down
the walk to the patio.
“Nothing so edible,” Judith said. “It looks like a
script.”
“It does for a fact,” Renie agreed, picking up a
pair of steel tongs. “It’s pretty well fried.” She
flipped through the ashes until she got to the last
few pages, which were only charred. “If I touch
them, they may burst into flame again, but it looks
like a script all right. See—it’s mostly dialogue on this
top page with some directions in between.”
“Can you see what any of it says?” Judith asked,
shivering slightly as the fog began to drift among the
trees and shrubs.
“Not really,” Renie admitted, after putting on her
much marred and thoroughly smudged reading
glasses. Judith could never figure out how her cousin
could see anything through the abused lenses. “Wait—
here are a couple of lines I can make out:
word is
named Tz’u-hsi, who replies,
to read.”
“A Chinese name,” Judith murmured. “Ellie’s role
in the script written by her mother,
“Maybe,” Renie allowed. “So who’d burn the
script? And why?”
Judith started to stir the ashes again, thought better
of it, and replaced the lid to the barbecue. Heading
back into the house, she paused with her hand on the
doorknob. “It was in Dirk and Ben’s room,” she said.
“Room Four. The script was all marked up. There were
even some obscenities, as if whoever was reading it
didn’t like it much.”
“But which of the two actors?” Renie asked. “Ben
or Dirk?”
“Ben, of course,” Judith said. “He’s supposed to
costar, remember? Besides,” she added, “I read a clipping, also in Room Four, about how Dirk had lost the
