Wishing in the Wings Read Free

Dean?”
    “Not since… Wow, Monday, I guess.” Day before yesterday. Not good. “Um, Becca—”
    I ignored her, glancing toward the large conference room where Hal was holed up. The door was closed and the shades were down, covering the floor-to-ceiling windows. That was strange—meetings around here were always open. “Any chance he’s in there?” I nodded toward the room.
    Jennifer shrugged apologetically. “I don’t know. It’s a board meeting.”
    “A board meeting? Hal didn’t mention one yesterday.”
    “I don’t think he knew about it yesterday. Everyone was grumbling as they came in—I think it’s some sort of emergency.”
    Emergency. The word shot another arrow of adrenaline into my heart. Something must have happened to Dean. Hal must have been working late last night, too, must have been here when Dean got sick. Seriously sick, if the board was already in an emergency session to figure out what they were going to do without a functioning director of finance.
    But where was Dean? Was he in the hospital? And why hadn’t Hal called me? Why had he called in the board, but not reached out to me? It wasn’t like Dean and I had kept our relationship a secret. I folded my arms around my waist, trying to hold in a rising tide of nausea.
    “Um, Becca,” Jenn said again. When I surfaced momentarily from my self-recriminations, she nodded toward the corner, toward one of the intern desks.
    I followed her movement, only to find that a stranger was sitting in the intern’s chair. His winter coat, a ratty beige ski parka that had seen better days, was collapsed across the desk in front of him. The laces on one of his Chuck Taylors were working loose, and the tails of his shirt peeked out from beneath his moss-colored sweater. His dark curls still bore the marks from a comb, although they were struggling to break free.
    Before I could say anything, Jenn said pointedly, “Becca, can I talk to you for a second?” She stalked across the Bullpen, trusting me to follow her into Hal’s office. I longed to refuse—I needed to get to the clandestine board meeting—but a tiny part of my mind gibbered that I didn’t want to know what was going on behind that closed door. I didn’t want to know about the emergency. I followed Jenn because she represented the path of least resistance.
    “Don’t be angry with me,” she said as soon as the door was closed.
    “Why would I be angry with you?” I heard the tension in my voice, but I didn’t bother to repeat my question, to sound less annoyed.
    Jenn started toying with her wedding band, flicking her fingers across the celtic knotwork. We’d been working together for six months. I knew that fidget meant she was trying to sneak something past me. With her voice pitched half an octave higher than normal, she said, “Oh, forget it. You’ve obviously got more important things to worry about. I just had a stupid idea. I’ll take care of it.”
    “Take care of what?” My nerves made the last word come out a lot louder than I’d intended.
    “Shhh!” She glanced toward the closed door.
    “Jenn, what is going on? Who is that guy?”
    “One of the stalking list guys who came by to drop off a script after I told him that he needed to give it to you personally.”
    “What?” She’d spoken so quickly that I barely caught the gist of what she’d said. “I could have sworn you just said that guy is on the stalking list.”
    The stalking list. The short list of up and coming new playwrights that Jenn and I admired, the authors whose work we thought we might some day produce here at the Mercer. Jenn and I kept an eye on their Web sites, on their blogs, on ShowTalk, the social networking Web site for New York theater professionals. Basically, we tracked any place they might post online to share their creative process or their personal angst or what they’d eaten for dinner the night before. The important stuff, in other words. The stuff that would let us know when