Method Actor Murder


 
 
 
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 METHOD ACTOR MURDER
 a Merry Wrath Mystery
 
 by
 
 LESLIE LANGTRY
 
 
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 Copyright © 2023 by Leslie Langtry
 Cover design by Janet Holmes
 Gemma Halliday
 Publishing
 http://www.gemmahallidaypublishing.com
 
 
 All rights reserved. Without limiting the
 rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication
 may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
 or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic,
 mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the
 prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above
 publisher of this book.
 
 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
 places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the
 author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author
 acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various
 products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used
 without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not
 authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark
 owners.
 
 
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 CHAPTER ONE
 
 "Derek the Sparkly Unicorn Ninja?" I
 read from the flyer.
 Pint-sized child Mayor Ava nodded. "That old
 theater building on Main Street has been totally renovated. The new
 owners have started a community theater, and they're going to have
 tryouts!"
 "Okay…but Derek the Sparkly Unicorn
 Ninja?" I asked again.
 "That's the play." Ava rolled her eyes.
 "Ophelia and Dante are going to produce it."
 "Who are Ophelia and Dante?" Suddenly I felt
 a bit out of touch with the goings-on in Who's There.
 "The new owners!" Ava seemed exasperated. It
 seemed fair to me, since the girl had been exasperating me for six
 or seven years now. "Ophelia is an off-off-off-Broadway director,
 and her husband Dante is a method actor!"
 "Off-Broadway huh? That is impressive." We
 didn't usually get dignitaries like that moving here. Oh sure, we
 once had the guy who voiced Elmo's housecleaner's third cousin come
 to town for the county fair, where there was also a chicken who got
 two callbacks for a role in Field of Dreams (but didn't get
 the part because it's all about who you know, even with chickens),
 but this seemed to be a step up.
 "That's right." Ava smiled, apparently happy
 that I was finally catching on. "Broadway in Peoria. We're lucky to
 have her."
 My brain caught up. "Wait, did you say the
 old theater was renovated?"
 Ye Olde Opera House had at one time been a
 nice movie theater that over the years turned into a crap movie
 theater that shut down sometime in the 90s. Up till now I thought
 it still stood with the marquee frozen in time, perpetually
 offering Rocky V.
 Ava looked at me with deep pity in her eyes.
 "I know you guys start getting demented at age thirty, but you kind
 of seem worse than normal. Ye Olde Opera House was renovated this
 year. You didn't notice?"
 Ignoring the dig, I held up the flyer. "What
 does this have to do with me?"
 "The whole troop is either trying out or
 working on the crew," the diminutive mayor explained. "We need you
 to be the stage manager."
 "But I've never done that before," I
 protested.
 Okay, that wasn't entirely true. I had done
 community theater before, during a brief stint in Estonia. There
 was a little village populated almost exclusively with sheep
 herders. As a spy, I was sent there to watch the place, because
 some idiot informant told the CIA it was a hideout for
 terrorists.
 I didn't find any terrorists, but the
 villagers talked me into helping them put on the musical
 Grease, since I was American. Apparently, being American was
 the only requirement for this particular show. I threw something
 together, and the entire town performed to a room full of sheep. We
 got a standing ovation…I think. It's very hard to tell with
 sheep.
 Ava flipped the flyer over and pointed out a
 specific paragraph. "Be there tonight at 6:30 for a meeting." She
 spun on her heel and went back to her mother, who was parked in her
 car in the driveway.
 My name is Merry Wrath Ferguson, and I'm an
 ex-CIA agent who was accidentally outed by the vice president and
 came home to Who's There, Iowa to feel sorry for myself having to
 quit my chosen career so early. My best friend, Kelly, who could
 convince me of beating up Scotty Warner in kindergarten for
 stealing her Halloween candy, convinced me that running a Girl
 Scout troop would be an appropriate equivalent to chasing down a
 Moldovan nuclear terrorist through a Bangkok alley—and she was kind
 of right about that. While there was plenty of drama in the CIA,
 there's a lot more of that here in the middle of nowhere. Now,
 apparently, it was going to be literal.
 I closed the door to my house. Well, my
 other house. I lived with my husband, Rex, across the street from
 the house I owned when we met. I kept the old house, and it was
 currently home to six elderly Girl Scout hermits we'd liberated
 from a hidden camp. They'd spent fifty years in the woods, and when
 they got out, they became celebrities of a sort.
 I was helping them pack up because they were
 all moving to Florida. I say helping, but actually Kelly and I were
 doing most of the work because all of them were in Florida looking
 at houses. They'd recently binged all of the episodes of The
 Golden Girls and believed that they were meant to be in the
 land of sunshine and