Author/Uploaded by Leslie Langtry
* * * * * FREE EBOOK OFFER Sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know about our new releases, special bargains, and giveaways, and as a bonus receive a FREE ebook! Sign up for the Gemma Halliday newsletter! * * * * * * * * * * METHOD ACTOR MURDER a Merry Wrath Mystery &#...
* * * * * FREE EBOOK OFFER Sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know about our new releases, special bargains, and giveaways, and as a bonus receive a FREE ebook! Sign up for the Gemma Halliday newsletter! * * * * * * * * * * METHOD ACTOR MURDER a Merry Wrath Mystery by LESLIE LANGTRY * * * * * 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. * * * * * 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