Reign

grasped the girl's shoulders to disengage her as gently as possible and hold her at arm's length. 'Are you all right?' she said firmly.

The girl, tears in her eyes and trembling, nodded. 'Oh Grandma,' she said, lowering her head and pointing upward, as though she feared what she might see. 'That lady up there, she turned into something.. . into a witch…'

'What?' Marvella frowned. 'What are you talking about. What lady?'

'The lady! The lady you said was helping you, the lady with the red hair and the glasses, she was here.'

'Who? Terri?'

'I guess, I guess, and I followed her up the stairs, only when I got up there it wasn't her, it was somebody else, like a witch, or like a… a dead person…” The girl broke into a fit of crying then, and it was a moment before Marvella could get anything else out of her. 'She scared me, Grandma, and that's why I fell over!'

'You let me look,' said Marvella grimly, knowing that no one could have gotten into the costume room without her seeing them.

'Don't leave me, Grandma!' The girl grabbed at her sleeve.

'Well, you wanta come with me then?'

'No! No, I don't wanta go up there!'

'Well then, you just have to wait here, don't you? I won't be a minute,' and she started toward the stairway.

'I gotta see you, I gotta see you, Grandma!'

'Well, you're not gonna see me when I'm up there.'

The girl's face puckered in thought, and she wiped her cheeks with balled fists. 'Sing then,' she said. 'You sing, I know you're there.'

'All right, all right, I'll sing.' And she climbed the stairs, singing one of the ballads from A Private Empire that she sang Whitney to sleep with when she was younger:

''I catch a glimpse of you as in elusive dreams,

A girl who could be true, but isn't who she seems…”

Marvella hummed the rest, loudly enough so that Whitney could hear her as she went through a cursory search of the loft. She expected to find nothing. She knew Whitney, and knew how the girl tended to dramatize events, blaming her own rash acts on invisible playmates, or people who were there 'just a minute ago,' but who conveniently disappeared when time came for blame. The woman turning into a witch was just one more, Marvella reasoned, in a long line of Whitney's fictitious scapegoats. Her fear and crying could easily have been caused by her terrifying fall. God knew it had shaken up Marvella as well.

There was no one in the costume loft. The only thing she found out of place from when she had left it just a short time before was one of Dennis Hamilton's costumes from A Private Empire. It was the Emperor Frederick's formal dress uniform. The costume was turned on its wooden hanger so that it lay adjacent to the other costumes, neatly lined up in their row.

'Now what's that doing here?' Marvella whispered to herself, forgetting to continue humming. It should have been downstairs in the locker that held all of Dennis's costumes. She picked it up just as Whitney shouted up to her.

'I'm here, I'm here,' Marvella replied. 'Don't worry.' She began to hum again as she crossed the loft and came down the stairs, the uniform held carefully so that it would not wrinkle.

'Did you find her?' Whitney asked. 'Where is she? Was she there?'

'There's nobody there, Whitney,' Marvella said gruffly. She opened the locker, carefully hung the costume inside, closed the door, then turned back to her granddaughter. 'And there wasn't to begin with. You made that all up, didn't you?'

The child's face went gray. 'No, Grandma, no!'

'You got careless and you fell outta that loft and thank the Lord those costumes were beneath you, and you made up that story to get the blame off yourself. But now you got a whupping coming, girl. You come here.'

Whitney went to Marvella, but not at all reluctantly. She went, her arms outstretched, tears streaming down her face, sobbing as if she were going to die. Marvella hugged the girl, but her trembling would not stop. She decided then not to punish her, that the terror of the fall had been punishment enough. When Whitney sat in her lap, and she felt where the girl had wet herself, she was sure of it. No, Marvella thought, patting her granddaughter's head as she carried her back to their suite, this little one has had quite enough for one night.

Scene 11

The show was titled Craddock, and Robin Hamilton knew it was a good one. It had all the elements she thought a strong musical should – harmonically sophisticated yet memorable tunes, lyrics that managed to disguise their cleverness beneath a cloak of spontaneity, and a powerful, original story, complete with a charming and involving love interest.

The readers in New York had done a good job, narrowing the field down to just five finalists. Robin, Quentin Margolis, and Dex Colangelo read all five shows, listened several times to the scores of each, and interviewed the librettists, lyricists, and composers. The final choice of Craddock was unanimous. She had copies sent to Kirkland, then stayed two more days in the city to rest, see some shows, and visit friends, activities that ultimately drained her far more than her work had.

Now, as her plane landed at the Philadelphia Airport early Friday afternoon, she felt quite weary, anxious only to see Dennis again, to have him put his arms around her in the car so that she could go to sleep as Sid drove them both home. But when she went to the baggage area, she found only Sid, who shook his head sadly, as if he knew what she had expected, and was sorry. 'He said he didn't feel up to the drive,' Sid told her.

'He sounded all right on the phone the other night,' she said, trying to keep the hurt and disappointment out of her voice.

'I don't know, Robin. I mean, the doctors can't find a thing wrong, but…”

“I still think it could be Epstein-Barr.'

Sid shook his head. 'Doc Chandar says it's not the yuppie flu, and he's not the only one.' He reached out and grabbed one of Robin's Banana Republic bags from the carousel. 'I think once we get started with the show, he'll come around. Something to keep him occupied.'

'That's what I thought about the theatre. But he's been holing up in our suite so much… there's the other one.' Sid grabbed the bag at which Robin was pointing, and they started toward the parking lot.

The drive to Kirkland took forty minutes, and Sid had to wake Robin after he parked the car. She stretched and rubbed her eyes, lightly smearing her liner, but did not fix it, thinking that she would have access to a rest room before she saw Dennis again. Indeed, she would be surprised if he was not sitting in the chill air of their balcony, steeped in lethargy.

The thing she did not expect to find was Dennis sitting in the office suite, laughing and talking animatedly with John Steinberg and an older woman she did not recognize. It was the first place she had gone on not finding Dennis in their apartment, and as she entered, Dennis was sitting on the sofa with the stranger, his back to Robin. John was the only one of the three to see her come in, and he wiped tears from his eyes and gave one final chuckle before he acknowledged her presence.

'Robin,' he said, 'welcome back. We're just swapping old war stories.'

When Dennis turned, she knew that something had changed. He looked surprised to see her, but there was something else there, something that she did not immediately recognize because she had never seen it on Dennis's face before. He looked, she slowly realized, guilty. And when Robin looked in turn at the woman on the couch next to him (not touching, but close, yes, close), she thought she saw the same emotion (but less obvious, oh yes, this was a cool one).

'Hello, darling,' Dennis said. He stood up, hugged her, and kissed her, but she was aware of a self- consciousness about his action, as though he wished he did not have to do so. Dennis was a marvelous actor, as she often told him, but she knew him intimately enough to know precisely when he was acting, and now was one of the infrequent times. Nevertheless, she responded to his kiss with more passion than she would have otherwise, pressing herself against him with the wary tension of an animal marking its domain against interlopers.

She broke away then, and looked at the woman. 'I don't think we've met,' Robin said, unable to hide the smugness in her tone, the subtext of See? This is my man.

Too smug, Robin thought as John Steinberg leapt into the conversational breach like a handler separating pit