The Prop Master's Wife

The streetlight outside Greenwood Taxidermy had been flickering since before I got the job, and it was still flickering the night I drove over to fit the murder scene props, buzzing like it was thinking about dying but not in any hurry about it. I'm Mikaela, I'm twenty-eight, and I do props for the Marston players, which mostly means I make fake blood out of corn syrup and convince audiences that a cardboard fireplace is real. My husband Roland is twenty-nine, he runs this shop, and we've been married four years as of June, which is a thing I could tell you without thinking because I count it sometimes when I can't sleep.

I got out of the Corolla with my kit bag and my clipboard and my keys, and of course the key did that thing it always does, scraping around the lock like it was looking for a reason not to go in. Above me the light buzzed, went dark for half a second, came back. Inside the shop it was warm and it smelled like, well, like a taxidermy shop smells, sawdust and tanning salts and that faint sweet chemical edge that I stopped noticing around our second date.

"Back here," Roland called, and I heard him set something down on the workbench, glass on wood, that particular clink.

He came around the partition wiping his hands on his apron and he had two glasses of wine, which was not what I expected on a work night. He's a big quiet man, my husband, hands like slabs from years of this work and three before it as a medic, and he handed me a glass the way he does everything, without a lot of ceremony.

"Long day?" he asked.

"The worst. The director wants blood that dries red, Roland, not brown. Do you know how hard that is? Everything I've ever made goes brown in forty minutes."

"Add more of the red dye and less cocoa."

"I know, but then it's too shiny." I took a sip. It was actually decent wine, which told me he'd planned this evening somehow, because the man drinks beer and thinks anything else is showing off.

He led me to the back room, the staging room, and I stopped in the doorway because there was a mannequin standing in the middle of it under the work lamp, and it was wearing a gown. Not a prop gown, not one of my thrifted things with the seams let out, a real one, dark green velvet, high necked, long skirt pooling on the floor, the kind of dress a woman in nineteen thirty-something would have worn to a dinner where somebody got murdered. Which was the point, since the job was a murder scene for a dinner party, one of those interactive things where the guests solve it.

"When did you get this?" I asked, setting my glass on the bench and circling it. "The fabric is real velvet. Feel that weight. Where did this come from?"

"Sydney. Found it through a dealer," he said, and he said it a little too quickly, and I remember thinking that but not thinking much of it, because my brain was already running through lighting and the fake wound placement and whether velvet photographs as blood-colored or goes black.

"Okay. So the victim wears this, we stage her on the divan, the guests find her at the second course. I need to build a chest wound piece that reads from six feet. I'll need her measurements."

"You have her measurements," Roland said. "I took them."

I looked up at him. He was standing by the lamp with his wine, watching me over the rim, and I could not name what I saw in his face right then.

"The troupe gave me a spec sheet," I said. "I have it on the clipboard."

"I know. I ordered it to your spec." He paused. "But the drape matters, right? You said yourself, velvet photographs different depending on how it hangs. I need to see it hanging on a person before you cut into it for the wound rig."

"So put it on the mannequin differently. Pad her out."

"Mikaela." He set his glass down. "Try it on. I want to see how it moves on a person. You're the right height and you're here."

And there it was, the thing I'd been half noticing all evening, sitting in the room with us like the third guest at the dinner party. See, the troupe had called me about this job six days ago, and the caller had been very specific that the shop owner had requested me by name, and I'd been flattered, because Roland never mixed himself into my work. He respected the line. Four years of marriage and we'd gotten good at lines, him in the shop and me at the theater and our evenings together quiet as a held breath.

"You arranged this," I said. It wasn't really a question.

"I heard about the job through the shop. The troupe buys from me. I told them I knew a prop master." He shrugged, that slow shrug of his. "I also wanted an evening where you'd be here."

"The gown is for the mannequin."

"The gown is for whoever wears it. It fits you. I checked the numbers twice."

I should tell you the part I don't say out loud much, which is that we used to be different with each other. I used to dress up for him. Not for parties, we didn't go to parties, just for him, in our own house, and somewhere across the four years it had gotten away from us, the way it does, quietly, one busy month at a time, until I couldn't remember the last time I'd put on anything for him that wasn't work clothes. He never complained. That was almost the worst part, that he never complained, he just got quieter.

I looked at the gown. I looked at him. The streetlight outside flickered through the front window and threw the whole room uneven for a second, light and dark and light.

"The drape does matter," I said, because prop master logic is the only ladder I had to climb down on. "If I'm cutting a rig into that bodice I need to see where it pulls."

"Exactly what I figured," Roland said, and he was smiling a little, and he turned his back like a gentleman and started straightening tools on the bench that didn't need straightening.

I stepped out of my boots and my jeans and pulled my sweater over my head, standing there in my bra and underwear in the cold back room, and I'll admit my hands weren't steady on the gown's little covered buttons. It went on over my head like water. Velvet that heavy doesn't rustle, it just settles, and when it settled it fit everywhere, shoulders, waist, the skirt falling to the floor like it had been poured.

"Okay," I said, and my voice came out odd. "Turn around."

He turned around and he looked at me for a while without saying anything, and then he crossed the room and took my wine glass off the bench where I'd left it and put it in my hand, like I needed something to do with my fingers.

"How does it hang?" he asked.

"Perfect. It's cut for me or someone my exact shape." I turned slowly, letting the skirt move. "Roland, why did you really do this?"

He took a breath. Under the work lamp his face was all planes and honesty.

"Because you stopped dressing up," he said. "And I stopped asking. And I wanted to know if the asking still worked."

The streetlight buzzed and flickered and buzzed again, and I stood in a murdered woman's gown holding a glass of decent wine, looking at my husband of four years, and I will not pretend I didn't know what he was really asking.

"The fabric pulls a little at the hip when I turn," I said, which was true and also not what he was asking. "If I'm going to rig the wound I'd need pins. A mirror would help."

"There's a mirror in the front," he said.

"Then show me the mirror."

* * *

He walked me out front with the lamp off so we went by the streetlight through the window, that stuttery uneven glow, and I caught myself in the big cracked fitting mirror they use for photographing the mounts, and honestly, the gown looked good. I looked good. I'd forgotten I could look like that. I turned, and the velvet caught the light in stripes whenever the lamp outside steadied, and Roland stood behind me in the mirror with his hands in his pockets, watching, and I watched him watching me.

"You're staring," I told him.

"You're wearing a two thousand dollar gown in a room full of glass eyes," he said. "Somebody should stare."

"Where did you really get the money for this? The troupe pays me four hundred."

"The troupe pays you four hundred and I billed them for the staging, so we're square, and the gown came out of savings, which is mine to spend on my wife if I want." He said it plain, no deal in it, money settled before anything else, the way he's always done things. "The gown is a gift, with no strings. The job is yours either way, whatever happens tonight or doesn't. That part is separate."

I laughed, and something loosened in my chest, and I looked at him in the mirror over my own shoulder. "The hem's going to drag in the fake blood," I said. "That's a real concern."

"Then take it off carefully after. Or don't take it off at all for a while yet." He came closer, stopped a polite foot away, and asked, "Can I help you out of it? Or would you rather keep it on and tell me about the wound rig first?"

I looked at him a long time, and the streetlight buzzed, and I thought about four quiet years and one not-quiet one a long time before that. "The wound rig can wait," I said.

He helped me out of the gown the way you'd handle a museum piece, slowly, with both hands, working the little covered buttons down my spine one at a time while the streetlight strobed through the window and made the velvet go green, then black, then green again. I held my arms out like a scarecrow and looked at the ceiling and tried to breathe normally, and failed at the breathing part mostly. When the last button gave he lifted the gown up over my head, careful of the pins already sitting in the shoulder seam, and laid it across the fitting bench like it was a sleeping animal.

"There," he said. "Safe."

I stood there in my plain beige bra and underwear, which, let me tell you, is not the lingerie of a woman who suspected this evening was going anywhere. I'd dressed that morning for a work call. Cotton. Sensible. The kind of underwear you'd wear to a dentist.

"I wasn't expecting to be undressed tonight," I said, "if that isn't obvious."

"I noticed."

"And I'm not putting the gown back on just so you can take it off again, so don't get ideas."

"No ideas," Roland said, and then he spoiled it by grinning, and I threw the nearest thing at him, which happened to be a roll of binding tape, and he caught it one-handed the way he catches everything, calm as anything, and set it back on the bench.

Here is the part I have to explain honestly. I was angry. Not shouting angry, but the low banked kind, the kind that sits under your sternum, because he'd gone behind my back, taken a job I should have gotten on my own merits, spent two thousand dollars of our savings on a dress he didn't ask me about, all to run some test on whether I still wanted him. That was a lot to be angry about and I had every right. And at the same time, standing there half undressed in a cold back room while my husband looked at me like I was the last interesting thing in the world, I could