Violet had rolled up his pant leg and was about to put the ice pack on his leg. When Lindsey glanced down at the knot forming on Robbie’s shin, she didn’t have the heart to be too mad at him. He could have been seriously injured.

Lindsey left Robbie to Violet’s ministrations and went back to her donkey to see how the drying process was going. When she got back to the table, she found the mask crushed as if someone had hit it repeatedly with a fist.

Beth and Mary joined her at the table as she picked up what was left of the mask and turned it over in her hands.

“What happened?” Beth gasped.

“At a guess, I’d say someone beat the hell out of it,” Lindsey said. “Probably, I should be grateful that it isn’t my face.”

“But who—?” Mary began and then she broke off. “Oh.”

“Oh?” Beth asked.

Mary looked at Lindsey and asked, “Wife or girlfriend?”

“Could be either, but I think Ian took Kitty out this way, so my guess would be that Ian left her and Kitty came back in and exorcised some misguided rage on Nick Bottom’s donkey head,” Lindsey said.

She glanced at the stage, where Violet was directing Robbie, who was still sitting, Ms. Cole and Milton through their parts in Act IV. She didn’t have a good feeling about what had happened with Robbie. And she really didn’t have a good feeling about what someone had done to her mask. Was it a warning? Were both incidents warnings? Or was she just being paranoid?

A movement in the shadows of the entrance of the theater caught her attention. Whoever was back there was carefully making their way to the door. If this was Kitty and she thought she was going to slip out after destroying Lindsey’s work, she had another think coming.

“Hey!” Lindsey shouted and she ran across the theater. “Stop!”

• • •

The person in the shadows jumped and broke into a run. He was running flat out toward the emergency exit when he ran in front of a light that illuminated his particular body type: short and droopy. It was theater critic Harvey Wargus.

He slammed through the emergency exit before Lindsey could reach him. When she shoved through the door out into the cold night air, the alley was empty and she had no idea which direction he had run.

“Damn it!” she said.

“Who was that?” Beth asked as she pushed through the door after Lindsey.

“Harvey Wargus, the critic,” Lindsey said.

“But what’s he doing here during rehearsals?” Mary asked.

“I don’t know, but I doubt that it bodes well for Violet,” she said.

There was a reason that Harvey had been skulking around the theater. She knew he hated Violet and Robbie. Could he hate them enough to try to shut down the production by hurting Robbie?