(#39) The Clue of the Dancing Puppet (6 page)

“I think Tammi is perfectly horrid!” Bess burst out. “I don’t see why they keep her in the Footlighters.”

“There’s one very good reason,” Nancy reminded her friend. “Tammi is an excellent actress—she has amateur status, but she performs as if she had had professional training.”

The three girls had just reached the stairway leading to the attic when Tammi Whitlock came hurrying up to the second floor. “Hold it!” she ordered.

The girls turned in surprise.

“Where are you going?” she asked. Nancy and the cousins remained silent. “Oh, don’t act so smug,” she said angrily. “Nancy Drew, I’ve heard you’re a detective. That means there’s a mystery around here, or you wouldn’t be staying at the mansion.”

As Tammi paused, Nancy looked intently at her and said, “Go on.”

For a second Tammi seemed nonplused, but regaining her belligerent attitude, she said, “I have a right to know what the mystery is!”

George looked at Tammi in disgust. “Assuming there is a mystery,” she said, “just what gives you the right to know what it is?”

“Right?” Tammi repeated. “Who has a better right? I’ll have you know I’m the most important person in this amateur group! You and Nancy—and even Bess—are newcomers. And not one of you is an actress!” she added.

Nancy had flushed, but she kept her temper. Bess was too flabbergasted to speak. But George was furious.

“So you think you’re so important?” she almost yelled at Tammi. “Well, you’d better look out or somebody will prick that bubble of conceit! You know how to recite lines and strut around the stage, but that’s about it. You’re a troublemaker with no respect for your elders. I could tell you a lot more, but I don’t even want to talk to you. Better get out of here—and fast!”

Tammi, stunned, glared at George. She started down the hall toward the front stairway. But over her shoulder she called back, “I have influence! I’ll have all three of you put out of the Footlighters!”

The girls dashed into the cousins’ room and looked out the window. They saw Tammi flounce out of the house and drive off in her car. Nancy and George were ready to shrug off Tammi’s threats, but Bess was worried.

“You know Tammi might try to get rid of all of us,” she said. “The Footlighters can’t afford to lose their leading lady, so we three might have to go instead.”

Nancy had not thought of the problem this way. “If I were no longer a member of the Footlighters, I might have to leave the Van Pelt estate,” she thought. “Then I wouldn’t be able to solve the mystery of the dancing puppet!”

Suddenly Bess’s mood changed. “Say,” she said, snapping her fingers, “I have an idea! Nancy, in school you were simply marvelous as the leading lady in plays. Poor Kathy is so scared of Tammi, she can’t remember her lines as an understudy. But you could do it. Why don’t you learn Tammi’s lines in the present play? Then if things come to a showdown, you could take her place!”

Nancy laughed. “I never could take Tammi’s place,” she said. “But I must admit I’m intrigued with the idea of learning her part. Listen, though, this must not be known to a soul but the three of us.” The cousins agreed.

Nancy, who learned lines quickly and easily, began to quote from the love scene in the play between Tammi and Bob Simpson. Using George as the leading man, she overplayed the part, rolling her eyes, and blowing him kisses with sighs loud enough to be heard on the first floor.

Bess, meanwhile, was so convulsed with laughter that she had thrown herself on the bed and was rolling from side to side, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“It’s perfect! Absolutely perfect!” she said, dabbing her eyes.

George, too, was roaring with laughter. Finally she said, “Nancy, if you ever get a chance to play the part and do that to Bob Simpson, I’m telling you, Ned Nickerson will scalp you!”

“He sure would,” Bess laughed. Nancy’s tall, good-looking friend, who attended Emerson College, was now a summer counselor at a camp.

Nancy grinned. “Enough play acting! Let’s get on up to the attic!” she said.

At this moment the girls heard a woman’s loud and terrified scream from the first floor!

CHAPTER VIII

The Alarming Rehearsal

“WHO WAS that?” Bess exclaimed fearfully.

Nancy and George did not wait to answer. The sound seemed to have come from the kitchen, so they raced down the back stairs. The girls found Margo Spencer standing in the middle of the floor, her hands over her face.

“What happened?” Nancy asked her quickly.

The actress looked at her wildly. “I saw a witch!”

“A witch! Where?” George questioned.

“Out there.” Margo pointed toward the back stoop. “I heard a knock and opened the door. There stood the most horrible-looking witch!”

“What did she say? What did she want?” George queried.

Margo replied that she did not know. “I didn’t give the witch a chance to say anything. I slammed the door and locked it.”

Nancy was across the floor in two seconds. She flung open the door. No one was on the stoop! She turned questioning eyes on Margo Spencer.

“It was there! I saw it!” the actress declared. “I couldn’t make up such a thing!”

By this time her husband had hurried into the kitchen. The drama coach, obviously startled, asked why Margo had screamed. When told, he began to chide her.

“How perfectly ridiculous! You’re seeing things, my dear. Maybe you’ve been working too hard. Suppose you go up and take a nap. I’ll manage the rehearsal alone.”

Margo Spencer turned a withering gaze on him. “I wasn’t seeing things,” she insisted. “Furthermore, you have no right to question my sanity!”

“Now I know you’ve been overworking,” her husband said gently. “I’m not questioning your sanity. We actors and actresses have great imaginations. To us, trees or bushes can take on fantastic shapes.”

Margo Spencer’s eyes were darting fire. Nancy felt very uncomfortable standing there. With a sudden inspiration, she said:

“Mr. Spencer, please let me tell you about something I discovered this morning in the hayloft. It may clarify the situation.”

The Spencers looked at her in astonishment. “How?” Margo asked.

Nancy told how the hay had concealed the witch puppet. “It was well hidden and contained no strings or wires by which one might manipulate it. But it could lean against something. What you saw, Margo, might have been the witch puppet,” she said kindly. “Was it standing by itself, or supported by a post?”

The actress thought a moment. “It was leaning against a post,” she replied. She turned to her husband. “Now do you believe me?”

Mr. Spencer made sincere apologies and gave her a kiss and a hug.

“I must go and look in the hayloft again,” said Nancy. “It’s just possible that the witch you saw, Margo, was not the one I found.”

The whole group trooped to the hay barn. No one was around. Nancy went up the wooden ladder to the loft and rummaged in the hay.

“Our friend the witch is still here,” she said. “Margo, will you come up and identify her?”

Margo climbed the ladder, followed by her husband. By this time Nancy had uncovered the figure.

“That’s it!” Margo cried out. “Oh, she’s so ugly! Hamilton, now do you blame me for screaming?”

Mr. Spencer put an arm around his wife. “No, dear. I probably would have done the same thing.”

Conversation now turned to speculation on the identity of the person who had dared bring the figure to the stoop in broad daylight.

“What do you think, Nancy?” Bess asked.

Nancy laughed. “The only thing I know about him at this point is that he’s fleet-footed,” she replied.

She and the others made a thorough search of the theater and the grounds but failed to find any trace of a suspect. The earth was too dry to show footprints plainly. Moreover, there had been so many people coming and going along the arbor walk that it would be impossible to distinguish the shoe prints of any one person.

By the time the group had finished their hunt, several girl members of the Footlighters began to arrive for the rehearsal. When they had assembled in the front row of seats in the theater, Mr. Spencer came out on the stage.

“Young ladies,” he said, “I don’t have to tell you that rehearsals haven’t been going very well. I hope you took my last warning to heart and studied your lines carefully. I’ll read the men’s parts.”

After taking the roll call, he went on, “The girl who was to play the part of the maid has been called out of town for a few weeks. I am giving that part to someone else—Bess Marvin!”

Bess gave a cry of delight, and Nancy and George congratulated her. Their elation was cut short by Hamilton Spencer, who said, “Everybody on stage!”

The amateur actresses took their stations in the wings, and the rehearsal began. Bess, book in hand, came on, reading her lines as the maid. In a few moments, Margo Spencer clapped her hands. Bess stopped speaking.

“Never turn your face away from the audience!” the actress told her. “And speak your lines distinctly!”

George whispered in Nancy’s ear, “I’ll bet Bess’s knees are shaking.”

Nancy nodded. “Maybe Bess is embarrassed because we’re here. Let’s go outside—where we can hear her but not be seen.”

They had just reached the front of the theater when Bess walked off stage. George grinned.
“That was a small
part,” she said. “If we’d closed our eyes we would have missed her. I wonder if my aspiring actress cousin will come on again!”

She and Nancy went out the front door and circled around to the rear of the building, directly off the wing of the stage. There they collected the scenery still to be painted, and went to work.
From what the girls
could hear through the open stage door, it was evident that the rehearsal was progressing badly. The young actresses could not remember their lines and were being prompted constantly. When they did remember them, Margo or Hamilton Spencer would tell them that they were putting no spirit into the parts.

The only person on stage who seemed to be doing well was Tammi Whitlock. Nancy and George, despite their dislike of the girl personally, were spellbound by her performance.

“Tammi’s good. No doubt about it,” said George. “Say,” she added, as a sudden thought came to her, “do you think Tammi could have had anything to do with the witch scare?”

Nancy
became thoughtful.
“She could have, I suppose, but I don’t see any particular motive.”

“I wouldn’t put anything past her,” George declared. “Why, she might even be back of the dancing puppet business!”

Nancy stared into space. George had a point! Yet Nancy felt that there was nothing to go on, so far, but a hunch. She smiled and said aloud, “My dad has always reminded me of the legal tradition, ‘A man is presumed to be innocent until proved guilty.’”

The conversation of the two girls was suddenly drowned out by a tirade from Hamilton Spencer aimed at the amateur actresses.

“I’m about ready to give up,” he exclaimed in exasperation.

Then Margo began to talk also. “It’s hopeless, absolutely hopeless,” she declared. “I’d be ashamed to have the townspeople come to such a performance!”

“The show will have to be postponed!” Hamilton Spencer announced.

At this, Tammi flew into a rage. “You mean you’ll close this theater for a couple of weeks? No, you won’t! I’ll see to it that you’re out of here before that happens!”

“Quiet!” Mr. Spencer ordered her. “You have an idea that the Footlighters cannot get along without you as leading lady in the play. Well, Tammi, you’re greatly mistaken.”

By this time Nancy and George were peering through the doorway at the scene inside the theater. Most of the young performers looked as if they were ready to cry.

Tammi stood on stage, her feet planted wide apart and her face red with anger. “You get rid of me and the whole show will fall apart!” she exclaimed. “If you’re inferring that Kathy Cromwell can ever take my place, you’re talking like a madman!”

At this, Kathy, now seated again in the front row, began to sob. “Tammi is right,” she said. “Oh, please, all of you, please stop the argument. I’m sure we can all do better. We promise to work hard. But Tammi must remain as our leading lady. I know I’m no good as an understudy. We’ll just have to pray that nothing happens to Tammi, and then I’ll never have to play her part.”

Kathy’s pleading struck home. Her friends rallied around her. Tammi stood smug, but smiling.

Finally Mr. Spencer said perhaps he had been too hard on the girls. “I get carried away sometimes, forgetting you’re not professionals.” He begged everyone to go home and concentrate on learning the lines and gestures as he had directed.

The incident had whetted Nancy’s appetite to learn Tammi’s part, not for the forthcoming play, but for the one being currently produced several evenings a week. “Something
could
happen to Tammi, and if Kathy can’t take her place—well, I could try.”

When Bess left the theater, Nancy asked her to get a copy of the Civil War play. Nancy closeted herself in her bedroom, and by suppertime had mastered Tammi’s lines in Act One.

Coming from her room, she went across the hall to speak to George and Bess. “Let’s drive back to my house to dinner,” she said. “I want to hear what Dad has found out about the people here.”

Bess giggled. “You mean there’s a chance we might have one of Hannah’s marvelous dinners?” Bess loved to eat.

Nancy chuckled. “We could, of course, but there’s a certain young lady who’s been asked to play a part in the new show. If she gained too many pounds, she might lose her chance.”

Bess considered this. Finally she said, “I won’t eat dessert.”

Nancy telephoned Hannah Gruen. “How nice to have you girls come to dinner!” Hannah said enthusiastically.

By the time they arrived, there was a delicious aroma of broiling steak, and macaroni and cheese coming from the kitchen.

As the group ate, Mr. Drew reported that he had found the Spencers above suspicion. “They have a very fine reputation in the theatrical world.”