All the cards had disappeared.
People who saw it, if they called the phone number, they got a recording of Mrs. Clark saying the coffeehouse, the time and date we should all meet.
Already, in our minds, here in the red-and-yellow fake firelight, we could picture the future: the scene of us telling people how we'd taken this little adventure and a crazy man had kept us trapped in an old theater for three months. Already, we were making matters worse. Exaggerating. We'd say how the place was freezing-cold. There was no running water. We had to ration the food.
None of that was true, but it does make a better story. No, we'd warp the truth. Blow it up. Stretch it out. For effect.
We'd create our own incestuous orgy of people and animals for the world to gossip about.
The little backstage dressing room we each got, talking about it, we'd load it with poisonous spiders. Hungry rats. Not just Director Denial's cat hair sticking everywhere.
A ghost. We'd put a ghost in the old theater to build the story, make room for special effects. Oh, we'd haunt this place ourselves, pack it with lost souls.
We'd turn our lives into a terrible adventure. A true-life horror story with a happy ending. A trial we'd survive to talk about.
Except for Lady Baglady with her handful of dead husband. Miss America with her fetus, snowballing bigger and bigger, cell by cell, inside her. And Miss Sneezy with her mold allergy, the rest of us wanted more. More pain and suffering to dredge up, later, on national talk shows. Those television shows Miss America talked about. Even if we never sparked a good idea, never wrote our masterpiece novel, this three months trapped together could be enough to make a memoir. A movie. A future of not working a regular job. Just being famous.
A story worth selling.
For now, sitting around the glass fireplace, we're ticking off the details we need to remember to create this scene on national television. So we could advise “on the set” in making the movie “authentic.” The story of how we were kidnapped and held hostage and every day Miss Sneezy got more sick and the baby inside Miss America got bigger.
No one will say it, but Miss Sneezy's death would make a perfect third-act climax. Our darkest moment.
The perfect ending would be the landlord stumbling in after the lease has expired, just in time to rescue the fragile Miss America. The demented Lady Baglady. A few of us would come limping out, squinting and weeping, into the sunlight. The rest of us would be carried out on stretchers and slid into ambulances for a siren's trip to the hospital. The movie could jump ahead a little to show us all standing bedside as Miss America gives birth. Then jump again, to show us at the funeral for Miss Sneezy. The ghost of poor Miss Sneezy, sacrificed to juice the plot.
We'd have Agent Tattletale's camera for video support. The Earl of Slander's audiocassettes for voice-over.
Then, as completion, Miss America would name her new child Miss Sneezy, or whatever her first name had been. A sense of the circle mended. Of life going on, renewed. Poor, frail Miss Sneezy.
In the movie–book–T-shirt story, we'd all love Miss Sneezy . . . her deep courage . . . her sunny humor.
Sigh.
No, unless one of us coughs up a new-fangled Frankenstein or Dracula, our own story will have to get a lot more dramatic before it would be worth selling. We need everything to get much, much worse before it's all over.
Screw the idea of creating anything original. It's no use, writing some let's-pretend piece of fiction. That takes so much effort for what little you get in cash money.
Especially split seventeen ways. Royalty-wise. Sixteen ways, if you subtract the doomed Miss Sneezy.
All of us silent, but commanding her: Cough.
Hurry up and die, already.
No, when everyone else walked out of that coffeehouse meeting, we were the smart ones. Yes, it looked like a crackpot venture that would lead to big trouble, but, hey—it looked like a crackpot adventure that could lead to big money.
All of us sitting here silent, but commanding Miss Sneezy: Cough.
All of us, we're aching for her to help make us famous.
That's why the Reverend Godless botched the wiring to all the fire alarms. The very first hour we were inside. At least, that's what he told the Matchmaker. Godless learned wiring in the military, and the Missing Link helped by holding the flashlight. For good measure, they checked all the phone lines. The one line they found still working, the Missing Link with his hairy muscles yanked it out of the wall.
That's why Countess Foresight stuck the tines of plastic forks in every door lock and snapped them off. No way could anyone use a key. Just in case her parole officer could track her by that bracelet. No, none of us wanted to be rescued—not just yet.
Just all of us hedging our bets. Scenes that won't be in the movie. This will all look like Mr. Whittier's doing. Evil, sadistic old Mr. Whittier.
Already, our team is forming up against the team of Mrs. Clark and Mr. Whittier.
Miss America and Miss Sneezy already just plot points. Our sacrifice. Doomed.
In the red and yellow shapes of electric firelight, in the carved wood paneling of the Gothic smoking room, sunk in the cushion of her leather wing chair, Mrs. Clark's chin nods lower and lower, almost settling into her cleavage. She asks, did Sister Vigilante find the bowling ball?
And the Sister shakes her head, No. She taps the face of her wristwatch and says, “Civil twilight comes in forty-five . . . forty-four minutes.”
Miss Sneezy coughs—a long, rumbling, wet-gravel cough—and it's all we
