Murder at St. Winifred's Academy Read online

  BACKSTAGE MURDER

  “Missy could’ve gotten hurt on her way from the Arms hotel or she’s lying unconscious backstage,” Sloan said. “Take your pick.”

  “I don’t like either choice,” Nola said.

  “Neither do I,” Johnny agreed. “Whichever way you look at it, I’m out a leading lady.”

  “There’s only one way to find out if Gram’s right,” Jinx said. “We need to split up and search the theatre.”

  Freddy and Sloan went to the kitchen, Nola and Johnny ran off to the stage left wing, and Jinx and Alberta climbed the stairs to the stage and quickly walked down the hallway off the stage right wing, turning right to continue behind the back wall. Without the working light behind the back scrim turned on, the area was pitch black, and they were about to retreat in order to get a flashlight when Alberta saw a light coming out of the star dressing room. When they stood in the doorway, it was evident that their search had come to an end.

  They found their missing star lying on a settee, wrapped in a lace shawl, and holding a bottle of arsenic.

  Missy Michaels wasn’t lost, she was dead ...

  Books by J.D. Griffo

  MURDER ON MEMORY LAKE

  MURDER IN TRANQUILITY PARK

  MURDER AT ICICLE LODGE

  MURDER AT VERONICA’S DINER

  MURDER AT ST. WINIFRED’S ACADEMY

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corp.

  J. D. GRIFFO

  MURDER AT ST. WINIFRED’S ACADEMY

  THE FERRARA FAMILY MYSTERY SERIES

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  BACKSTAGE MURDER

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER 1 - Una vita molto diversa.

  CHAPTER 2 - Guai in vista.

  CHAPTER 3 - Sono pronto per il mio primo piano.

  CHAPTER 4 - Tutto il mondo è un palcoscenico.

  CHAPTER 5 - Che cast intrigante di personaggi.

  CHAPTER 6 - Una sorpresa prima della sorpresa.

  CHAPTER 7 - Il tempo vola, ma rimane sempre lo stesso.

  CHAPTER 8 - È meglio cadere dalla finestra che dal tetto.

  CHAPTER 9 - Chi è più freddo? L’uomo o il cadavere?

  CHAPTER 10 - Scatta una foto, dura più a lungo.

  CHAPTER 11 - Meglio amico che nemico.

  CHAPTER 12 - Quello che vedi non sempre quello che ottieni.

  CHAPTER 13 - Dohi di hemici non sono doni.

  CHAPTER 14 - Avvocato, bugiardo, soldato, spia.

  CHAPTER 15 - Una stella senza luce.

  CHAPTER 16 - Una voce dal passato.

  CHAPTER 17 - Non tutti i ragazzi crescono per essere uomini.

  CHAPTER 18 - Amor di madre, amore senza limiti.

  CHAPTER 19 - Bella donna O belladonna.

  CHAPTER 20 - Molto lontano da casa.

  CHAPTER 21 - Due omicidi meritano due sospetti.

  CHAPTER 22 - Non si può aver il miele senza la pecchie.

  CHAPTER 23 - Se non è un messaggio di posta elettronica, e l’altra.

  CHAPTER 24 - Tondo e tondo e tondo lei va, dove si ferma, nessuno la sa.

  CHAPTER 25 - I bravi ragazzi non finiscono sempre per ultimi.

  CHAPTER 26 - Alcuni bambini non crescono mai.

  CHAPTER 27 - Onorevoli colleghi, vi prego di dare il benvenuto alla signora dell’ora.

  CHAPTER 28 - La commedia difficile, è un omicidio che è facile.

  CHAPTER 29 - Non è fin ita fino a quando la signora morta parla.

  EPILOGUE - Un uccello non lascia mai veramente il nido.

  Recipes from the Ferrara Family Kitchen

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2021 by Michael Griffo

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the Publisher and neither the Author nor the Publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  The K logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-3095-4

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-3096-1 (ebook)

  ISBN-10: 1-4967-3096-8 (ebook)

  This book is a love letter to the theatre. It’s dedicated to the actors, designers, stagehands, and everyone else involved in bringing magic to the stage. As you read, imagine you’re in a dark theatre, the lights have just dimmed, and the show is about to begin. Hold your breath because in the theatre anything can happen. Especially when that theatre is in St. Winifred’s Academy.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As always, a big ‘thank you’ to my agent, Evan Marshall, my editor, John Scognamiglio, my publicist, Larissa Ackerman, and the entire Kensington Team. And special thanks to all the people in my life who instilled in me a life-long, unshakeable love of the theatre. My mom (who was also my first director!), Mr. Finley, Anna Brown, Miss Judd, Richard Sabellico, Pat DeFerrari, Joan Ka-shuba... the list goes on. They introduced me to the theatre, helped me find my footing in this world, and for that I’m forever grateful.

  CHAPTER 1

  Una vita molto diversa.

  Alberta stared at the postcard. It was meant to bring happiness, but it only brought heartache. Sitting on her couch in her living room, she had never felt more alone in her entire life. And Alberta knew she only had herself to blame.

  The postcard came as a surprise. Why was someone dressed in a Mickey Mouse costume waving at her underneath the entrance to Disneyland? When she turned the card over, she understood. Her son, Rocco, was spending the day at the world-famous theme park with his youngest child, Gregory, and he meant to share the event. He accomplished that and much more. His missive reminded Alberta of the distance—both geographically and emotionally—that had grown between them over the years. It also reminded Alberta of just how much she missed her family.

  Living in Tranquility, surrounded by friends and relatives, Alberta Ferrara Scaglione was hardly alone. But her children were thousands of miles away and not part of her daily life. She was estranged from her daughter, Lisa Marie, and Rocco was focused on raising his own family and not maintaining ties with those he left behind.

  After Rocco’s first marriage to Annmarie ended in divorce, his former high school sweetheart moved to Los Angeles with their two daughters, Alessandra and Rocky. Unable and unwilling to be a long-distance father, Rocco soon followed his ex-wife so he could live close to his girls. Logically, Alberta understood the reason for his relocation—a good father based all his decisions on what was best for his family—but in her heart, she felt he had ulterior motives.

  She could never quite understand why he didn’t force Annmarie to remain in New Jersey with their children. It was where the estranged couple both had roots, it was where their families lived, it was where Rocco worked. Moving to th
e other side of the country didn’t make sense for either of them. Alberta even consulted a lawyer and knew that Rocco could legally prohibit Annmarie from moving so far away because they had joint custody of their children, but Rocco claimed that his ex had wanted a fresh start and he didn’t want to turn an already contentious divorce into an even more hostile environment.

  Her power to control her son long gone, Alberta was forced to watch silently from the sidelines as Rocco made plans to change his life. He sold his home, got a transfer to work at his company’s Los Angeles office, and said his good-byes, all to be closer to his daughters. Or, as Alberta felt, to get farther away from her.

  She never voiced her beliefs because she knew how petty they would sound. She knew she would be labeled a controlling, unsympathetic, and selfish mother. And she was being selfish. But the main reason she didn’t give her fears a voice was because she didn’t want confirmation that they were true. What if she was right and her son had relocated to the other side of the country to get away from her? Was that something she really wanted to know? Alberta had already lost one child when Lisa Marie packed up and moved her family to Florida in a desperate attempt to end the constant fighting that had become an ugly war between mother and daughter; she didn’t want to know that she had lost another child for similar reasons. She and Rocco did not have a volatile relationship like the one she had with Lisa Marie, but ever since he was a little boy there had always been a distance between them.

  Rocco wasn’t the typical Italian son; he wasn’t a mama’s boy; he took after his father in every way. Looks, mannerisms, thoughts, and, especially, how he treated Alberta. He was never abusive—not overtly—but he could be dismissive and disinterested and, as a result, their relationship was disappointing.

  Sitting on her couch, the postcard clutched tightly in one hand, Alberta traced her gold crucifix necklace with the other. She looked up and saw Rocco’s class photograph from third grade, and despite the sadness that filled her heart, she smiled because it was her favorite. His hair was disheveled, his tie crooked, his smile mischievous. Sammy hated the photo because he couldn’t believe Alberta had let Rocco out of the house looking like a tep-pista, a roughneck, but Alberta loved it because in her mind, her son was so full of life it couldn’t be contained. She knew this forza di energia, this little boy with the devilish smile, would do great things with the life God had given him. She still felt that way, even though Rocco had proven, ever since that photograph was taken, that he was ordinary. It was one thing he had in common with his mother.

  He was remarried to a woman named Cecilia, who Alberta hardly knew, and had another child, his first boy, Gregory, who Alberta had only seen twice. She knew Rocco was a car salesman but knew little more about his career. She couldn’t remember his address without looking it up, and she didn’t know if he still needed to take his blood pressure medication or if he still squeezed a lemon over his steak before he ate it like he used to. Her son’s life was a mystery to her. Then again, Alberta’s life was a mystery to her son.

  A first-generation Italian American, Alberta Ferrara Scaglione was the middle child of her family and grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey. She obeyed her parents, got along with her sister, Helen, and her brother, Anthony, and was what was known as a good girl. She never caused any trouble, never gave anyone cause for worry. She wasn’t invisible, only largely unnoticed, and, most definitely, ordinary.

  Like most of the young women of her generation, she only left her family when she got married. She didn’t want to become Sammy Scaglione’s wife, but she couldn’t think of a good reason not to, so despite misgivings, she went ahead with the ceremony. After a brief honeymoon down the Jersey Shore, she moved out of her family’s home and into an apartment with Sammy to create one of her own. Because that’s what all the good girls did.

  Her marriage to Sammy was also ordinary. It wasn’t entirely good, it wasn’t entirely bad, it simply was. As a reluctant newlywed, Alberta didn’t succumb to the belief that the fairy tales she read as a child had any bearing on the real world. She knew Prince Charmings didn’t exist, she knew endings weren’t always happy, and, most of all, she knew the worst enemy a person could have wasn’t a witch with a tempting yet poisonous apple, it was their reflection in the mirror. Most women looked at themselves and saw a fantasy version of who they wanted to be smiling back at them. When Alberta looked at herself in the mirror, she saw the truth.

  With only a high school education and little job experience, Alberta had few choices for her future other than marriage. It was her only option, she believed, despite the fact that she knew other young women had defied the odds and created lives for themselves that ignored traditions and stereotypes. They became surgeons, lawyers, actresses, authors, athletes. They became something other than a wife and mother. But those women were extraordinary, and Alberta was not.

  Part of her wanted to flee from her inevitable future, to escape the predictable next chapters of her life, but in order to do that she would have had to fight. Maybe that was what Rocco had done, she thought. Maybe he fled what he thought was an unlivable future of not being a part of his daughters’ daily lives. If so, he was much stronger than Alberta. She had been unable to find the inner strength needed to battle her parents, her fiance, society, and, toughest of all, her own fears and doubts. She didn’t run from a future she didn’t want; she accepted it. The irony was that, deep down, the strength Alberta needed was there for her, impatiently waiting to be roused, but she didn’t believe she possessed what it would take to forge into unknown territory. Like so many others, she chose the familiar.

  Rocco’s smile looked down upon Alberta from his photograph, and she averted her eyes to escape his stare and found herself looking at Lisa Marie on her wedding day. Alberta had always thought she would become one of the women she used to see growing up, the grandmothers dressed in head-to-toe black mourning for their dead husbands, walking a few steps behind their children, and yelling at their grandchildren. She never thought she’d be living by herself in a house on a lake in a beautiful town like Tranquility, New Jersey. Wasn’t she supposed to be living in the basement of her daughter’s house? Wasn’t she supposed to be adapting her schedule to the needs and whims of her children and grandchildren? Wasn’t she supposed to be living in their shadow instead of casting shadows of her own?

  She slumped back into the couch and let the cushions soothe some of the pain she was feeling. Maybe she was being too harsh. Maybe she was just feeling sorry for herself. She always knew memories were dangerous things; they distorted the past and manipulated the future. It was all the postcard’s fault. How could she read her son’s handwriting and not remember what had come before and imagine what could come next if only their lives had taken a different shape? She had forgotten what her mother used to say about walking down memory lane, that it was like entrare in guerra, walking into war. You put yourself right into the line of fire, except there were no bullets to wound you, only guilt and shame. And Alberta had plenty of both.

  She could live with not being the perfect daughter, she long ago forgave herself for not being the perfect wife, but the one thing that still filled her with regret was that she’d failed as a mother.

  Again, this wasn’t a unique quality that Alberta possessed, as she was hardly the only mother in the world to display shortcomings, nor the first mother to disappoint her children. It was a rather ordinary feeling for a woman to believe she wasn’t the perfect mother. Still, it was a source of constant pain for Alberta; there was always the doubt that she had truly done the best she could and the suspicion that she could have tried harder.

  “Ah, Madon!” she cried.

  Alberta rose from the couch with such passion, it made her cat, Lola, wake up from her third nap that morning with a loud meow. And because Lola hated to be woken up from her naps so abruptly, the meow did not sound pretty.

  “I know exactly how you feel, Lola,” Alberta said.

  Unconvinced, Lola stretched out
on the couch on her back, her legs pointing to the left, her head turned to the right. Her right eye was closed, but her left eye was wide open, her black pupil surrounded by a larger circle of white. Her expression made the white streak of fur over her left eye look like an exclamation point. It was as if Lola was saying to Alberta, Oh really?

  Smiling, Alberta scooped Lola up in her arms. She cradled her like a baby as she always did, rocking her side to side as her eyes moved from photo to photo on the wall, and she watched the generations of the Ferrara family come to life before her eyes. Her parents, her grandparents, cousins, pets, her Gumpa Tony, her mother’s godmother who wasn’t a blood relative but was beloved by everyone, her children, her sister Helen, her sister-in-law Joyce, her granddaughter Jinx, and all the friends she had made since moving here.

  Slowly, memory faded and the past, in all its fictional glory and factual heartache, gave way to the present. Rocco was still thousands of miles away living with his new wife and raising a son Alberta barely knew. Lisa Marie was living almost as far away, still refusing to bridge the gap that kept them apart. There was nothing Alberta could do to change what had come before, but she could stop wasting time dwelling on it, wondering where she had gone wrong, if she should have acted differently, or why she made certain choices. Why focus on the past when the present was filled with hope and promise?

  Alberta laughed out loud because for most of her life she was not the kind of woman who grasped on to hope or believed tomorrow held the promise of a better day. But ever since her Aunt Carmela left her millions of dollars and the house on Memory Lake, she had changed. She no longer strived to be perfect, she only wanted to be the best version of herself that she could possibly be. She took charge instead of waiting to be told what to do, she discovered she had skills she never thought she possessed, and she took chances.