Chasing the Understudy

The Bainbridge Island Playhouse opens in seven days. It has no Titania, a frayed rope nobody ordered, and a dead actress in the light grid above the stage. The county calls it a fall. Cass Merrick, who has stage-managed this building for eleven seasons and slept in the booth through two of them, knows the grid was inspected Tuesday. As she rebuilds the show around a new Puck, Cass notices the dead woman had been rewriting the lighting cues — quietly, deliberately, marking the moments when someone was in the back lot who shouldn't have been. Cass knows how to call a show. She's less sure she knows how to survive one. A cozy theatrical murder mystery set on Bainbridge Island, from the booth side of the curtain.