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Chapter 1

“This is too amazingly great,” Cleo Oliver said to her best friend, Robbi Richards. “I can’t believe we’re actually going to see your mother in a Broadway show.”

“Tell me about it,” replied Robbi. “This is a dream come true for her. The rest of the family’s pretty happy, too.” She grinned at her friend. “Now we don’t have to listen to Mom moaning about being unemployed like she always does.”

The two thirteen-year-olds were climbing onto a bus with the rest of their eighth-grade classmates from The Walton School. It was just after lunch and the noise was deafening with the sounds of excited students as they got ready to attend a Wednesday matinee performance of Murder in Park Hill. Field trips were always special, but this one even more so since Robbi’s mother had recently taken over one of the leading roles in the murder mystery. Mrs. Richards had not only arranged for the class to see the show, but had also organized a backstage tour for immediately following the performance.

Looking around the bus, Cleo noticed another of her friends, Jason Garrett, smiling and waving in her direction. At the beginning of the year when the dark-haired boy had transferred to Walton from a school in England, Cleo had developed a monstrous crush on him, and not long ago, she had helped Jason win the office of student body president when she had thwarted plans of three other boys to rig the election. Cleo and Jason had become close during that caper and even dated a few times, but mutually decided they were more comfortable as friends.

“Hey, Jason,” she called. She waved back at the handsome boy before sitting down next to Robbi.

Without thinking, Cleo tugged down her sweater sleeve, something she seemed to be doing a lot over the last year since she went through a particularly awful growth spurt. At five feet nine inches, Cleo had become an expert in slouching, leaning, and anything else that could be done to lessen the embarrassing difference in height between her and the other girls (not to mention most of the boys) in her class.

She thought she looked pretty much like a stick figure—long skinny arms and legs jutting out from her too-short pants and sleeves. With her bushy black hair and exaggeratedly large eyes and mouth, the teenager was rarely happy with what she saw in the mirror. Cleo would have done anything to fit in with the rest of her classmates.

Robbi Richards, in contrast, made a career out of being quirky. The exotic-looking, half-Japanese girl was a perfectly petite four feet ten inches and loved anything out of the ordinary, whether it was music, movies, clothes or food. Robbi had become a Walton student three years earlier when the Richards family had moved from Los Angeles to New York City. Though the two teenagers made an odd-looking pair, they were the best of friends and shared practically everything.

The Walton School, a private institution for grades one through twelve, was on the Upper West Side of Manhattan about thirty blocks from the Broadway area in midtown. During business hours it was always faster to get around New York by subway, but because of the number of students, the school had decided a bus would be both easier and safer. As usual, traffic was heavy, and the bus driver used up more than the allotted half hour to get from Walton to the theater. By the time the group finally pulled up in front of the Erwin Nicholson Theatre on West 45th Street, the teachers who had chaperoned were nervously checking their watches.

Feeling the definite chill of fall in the air, Cleo pulled her sweater around herself a little tighter as she stepped off the bus. She looked up to see poster-sized photographs hanging outside the theater and was impressed to see Robbi’s mother in a number of the pictures. The immense marquee over the entrance read MURDER IN PARK HILL STARRING ADAM BILLINGS AND SACHI RICHARDS. Cleo knew that many of the girls in her class were interested not so much in attending a Broadway show, nor even in seeing one of their classmates’ mother onstage. What the female population of Walton’s eighth grade had come for was to see and hopefully meet in person, the charismatic Adam Billings, a popular soap opera actor who was making his Broadway debut.

“Let’s go in,” said Robbi, heading straight for the theater lobby. “‘The air bites shrewdly.’“ On seeing Cleo’s blank look, Robbi explained. “Hamlet. That means, it’s freezing out here.” The girls had just started studying Shakespeare in English class and Robbi had jumped in wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, she had also developed an annoying habit of quoting from “the Bard” at every possible opportunity.

Cleo rolled her eyes, but Robbi didn’t notice because she was now too busy running back and forth in a misguided effort to help organize tickets and students. Ms. Manning, the young but very conservative English teacher from Walton, wrinkled her brow as she attempted to get all forty kids into the ticket line.

Cleo let herself be nudged into place and while she waited for her classmates to follow suit, she engaged in one of her favorite pastimes—people-watching. She and her father liked to observe ordinary people they saw on the street and create stories about who they were, where they came from, and what they did, all based on what Cleo and her dad noticed about their dress and mannerisms.

As usual, the Times Square area was teeming with all sorts of people including plenty of groups of tourists pointing and gawking at the huge billboards and neon lights. There were dozens of street performers dancing to boomboxes or playing various instruments from violins to empty plastic paint buckets. Men and women in thousand-dollar business suits rushed past people picking through garbage. There was even one man who was dressed head to toe in suit of soda cans, riding a unicycle. Cleo was zeroing in on an old woman with a bandaged knee limping past when the teenager was yanked away from her observations by Robbi.

“Hell-o?! Everyone else is going in. Do you think we might join them?” Robbi said as she dragged her friend into the theater. A slow-moving group of people blocked the stairs, but that was no problem for Cleo’s friend. “Excuse me, everyone, star’s daughter coming through.”

After racing up past the expensive mezzanine seats to the first balcony section, where the group from Walton took up two full rows, the two girls grabbed their seats and settled in. Robbi immediately started flipping through her program, but Cleo took a moment to look around first. “Wow, can you believe how gorgeous this place is?” she said, staring up at the vaulting ceiling.

The magnificent Erwin Nicholson Theatre, built in 1877, had a mural painted on the domed ceiling of cupids firing arrows at a young man on horseback. The mural and ceiling were lit by a huge and intricate chandelier and the light from its shimmering crystals made the mischievous little angels seem both very alive and otherworldly. Cleo would have been content just to lie back and gaze upward, but instead she let her eyes roam over the stunning architecture of the rest of the house. According to Mrs. Richards, the “house” of a theater included the area where the audience sat as well as the lobby.

Red velvet curtains, so dark they were almost black, hung down from a stunning arch over the stage that gleamed with gold leaf. Tiers of box seats rose on both sides of the stage. Cleo half expected to see the gloved arm of a princess emerge from one of these seats to wave to the rest of the audience. “I feel like we’ve gone back in time,” said Cleo.

“Yeah, yeah, me, too,” said Robbi, not bothering to look up. The elfin girl was much too busy making sure everyone noticed her name was mentioned in her mother’s bio. Robbi was reaching over her classmates and thrusting her program in front of them. “See this? ‘Thanks to,’ blah blah blah, ‘my daughter Robbi.’“

The girl was bobbing up and down so much and leaning out so far beyond the row ahead of her that Cleo was worried her friend might topple over the edge of the balcony to the main floor below. Sure enough, Robbi, in her exuberance, lost her footing and Cleo saved her by grabbing the back of her friend’s shirt just as the chandelier lights dimmed and the heavy curtains slowly rose upward. The performance was about to begin.

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