The Imposter Read online

  Copyright © 2011 Gary Blackwood

  EPub edition copyright © July 2012 Gary Blackwood

  Published in Canada by Red Deer Press, a Fitzhenry & Whiteside Company, 195 Allstate Parkway, Markham, Ontario L3R 4T8

  Published in the United States by Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 311 Washington Street, Brighton, Massachusetts 02135

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  Fitzhenry & Whiteside acknowledges with thanks the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.

  Cover and text design by Daniel Choi

  Image courtesy of Gettyimages

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Blackwood, Gary

  Imposter/ Gary Blackwood.

  ISBN 978-0-88995-478-6

  eISBN 978-1-55244-306-4

  I. Title.

  PS8603.L29I46 2012 jC813’.6 C2012-901366-8

  Publisher Cataloging-in-Publication Data (U.S)

  Blackwood, Gary.

  Imposter / Gary Blackwood.

  [ 208 ] p. : cm.

  Summary:A shady private investigator hires 14-year-old Ryan Watie to impersonate the long-lost son of a millionaire desperate to reconnect with his son before he dies. But Ryan finds himself performing a part beyond his depth, and must find a graceful and honorable way of making his exit when the moment of discovery arrives.

  ISBN: 978-0-88995-478-6 (pbk.)

  eISBN 978-1-55244-306-4

  1. Detective and mystery stories – Juvenile fiction. I. Title.

  [Fic] dc23 PZ7.B534Im 2012

  For Rita

  And, after all, what is a lie? 'Tis but a truth is masquerade.

  -Lord Byron

  Chapter 1

  He was going to have to throw up, no question about it. He'd known it was coming. It never failed: every time he auditioned for a role, every time a show opened, he could count on losing his lunch. It had happened to him even at Theatre Plus and the YPT, where he knew people and they knew him. And this time it wasn't just some dinky show that nobody outside of Toronto had ever heard of. This was the national touring company of Les Miz. This was The Big Time.

  At least he'd made a point of finding out where the backstage washrooms were, so he'd be ready. The trouble was, he never knew exactly when it was coming. Back in 1988, during a preview of The King and I, he'd come marching solemnly onstage as the Crown Prince, only to turn and bolt into the wings again with a hand clamped over his mouth. After the show, he heard that Christopher Plummer, who was playing the King, had covered for him, and gotten a major laugh in the bargain, by saying, "I told him not to have the oysters."

  Today his timing wasn't quite as bad, but almost. He was just standing in the wings with a couple of other kids, waiting for his name to be called. The young actor—if you could call him that—who was ahead of him, was going into his monologue, some melodramatic speech from Fortune and Men's Eyes that was enough to make a person gag even if they didn't have a nervous stomach. Ryan grimaced and rubbed his belly. If there just weren't so much riding on this audition.

  He had about three minutes, four at the most, and then he'd be out there in the spotlight. He tried calling up mental pictures of all the nauseating things he could think of—pork rinds, bad cases of acne, his math teacher—to speed up the process. Nothing seemed to work.

  And then the kid onstage wound up his act, and a voice from the auditorium called, "Ryan Waite?"

  That did it.

  By the time Ryan came scrambling back to his spot, the director had gotten tired of waiting and called on the next kid in the lineup, a skinny little twerp with glasses who was rattling off his credits and handing the accompanist his sheet music.

  Ryan scowled. They couldn't skip over him like that, as if he didn't even exist. He swiped his sleeve across his wet mouth, hustled onto the stage, and interrupted the skinny kid.

  "Excuse me. I think I'm supposed to be on."

  "But I … they said I …" The kid blinked at him, then out at the dark house. "Should I … should I go ahead, or …?"

  "What's your name?" said a woman's voice from halfway back in the auditorium.

  "It's … it's Daniel, remember?" said the skinny kid. "Daniel Shue?"

  "Shoo, Daniel," Ryan told him. "She means me." He stepped forward, upstaging the kid. "It's Ryan Waite, ma'am." He peered out into the auditorium but, with the bright lights in his eyes, he could see nothing beyond the first row.

  After a considerable pause, the voice said acidly, "You're late, Waite."

  There was a joke there, waiting to be made, but Ryan didn't know whether to risk it. He wished he could see his audience. "I know, ma'am," he said, as abjectly as he could, hanging his head. "And I'm really sorry for making you wait." Another potential joke. What the heck, he couldn't look much worse than he already did. "Because," he said, "if I make you wait, then we've got two Waites, right?" The old black man at the old black upright piano snickered, but there wasn't a sound from out in the house. The accompanist's smile vanished and he cleared his throat.

  "Mr. Shue," said the disembodied voice from out front, "would you mind waiting backstage for a few minutes so Mr. Waite can show us his stuff?"

  The skinny kid shrugged. "Okay. Sure. I don't mind. Should I take my music, or …?"

  "Might as well leave it," said the accompanist.

  The skinny kid backed reluctantly into the wings and Ryan was all alone on the enormous stage of the Royal Alexandra Theatre. If there had been anything left in his stomach, it would have come up now. The instant the word music was mentioned, he realized he'd left his copy of "Where is Love?" on the tile floor of the washroom. "Oh, puke!" he groaned, in a voice only he could hear.

  The accompanist turned to him expectantly. "Did you bring some music, son?"

  There was no way he could ask for more time. He was going to have to fake it. "No," he said, brightly. "No, actually, Mr. Shue—Danny—and I are doing exactly the same piece." He gave a little salute of acknowledgment to the skinny kid, who was gaping at him from the wings. "What are the odds?"

  The accompanist made a skeptical face. "Ohhhkay." He poised his long fingers over the piano keys. "You ready?"

  Ryan sidled over next to him. "I'm just going to look over your shoulder, here." Ryan barely had time, before the old man's fingers hit the keys, to see that his skinny rival had picked "Wells Fargo Wagon," from The Music Man, a show that had been staged at Ryan's school six months before—pretty shabbily, in Ryan's opinion.

  The song wasn't exactly in his range, but he did pretty well with it, considering; he resorted to falsetto only on the very highest notes. It could've been a whole lot worse. It could've been some sappy, stupid song he'd never even heard of. Sight
reading was not his strong point.

  When he wrapped up the song, there was a long silence. Actually, not quite a silence—Ryan could catch a faint undercurrent of whispering from the auditorium, and he knew that the director was discussing him with somebody else, probably the musical director. Even when he shaded his eyes against the lights, all he could make out was two indistinct forms.

  "Very nice, Mr. Waite," the voice said, without a shred of conviction. "Do you have a monologue prepared?"

  Ryan moved downstage, onto the edge of the apron. "Of course," he said—though perhaps "prepared" was stretching it a little. He'd only stumbled upon the audition announcement two days before. "I'm going to do a cutting from Brighton Beach Memoirs." He pasted on a grin to get the director, and himself, in the right mood.

  Once he was well into the monologue, he felt his confidence starting to make a comeback. This had always been a sure-fire piece for him, ever since he took first place with it at the provincial speech and debate tournament a year earlier.

  But about halfway through, he got the uneasy feeling that nobody out there was listening. There was no response at all from the house, not so much as a snicker, and this was a Neil Simon play; Neil Simon always got laughs. If it hadn't been for the occasional polite chuckle from the old man at the piano, he would have sworn he was alone in the building.

  Normally Ryan wouldn't have let it throw him, but so much was at stake here. Lines that he had been sure he could never forget if he tried now flew out of his head like butterflies; unfortunately, the ones in his stomach were still fluttering. Keeping the grin firmly in place, he did what every good actor did in such a situation—he said whatever came into his head, trusting that the real words would return, as the Monarch butterflies returned from Mexico each spring.

  And they did. Ryan gave it a strong finish and then stood there, still stubbornly smiling, and waited for the verdict. "Thank you," said the voice crisply. "Mr. Shue, we'll hear you now."

  Instead of yielding the stage to the skinny kid, Ryan stood planted in place, staring out into the auditorium. "That's it?"

  "Yes, Mr. Waite, that's it."

  "You don't want me to do some improv or anything?" He heard a note of desperation creeping into his voice, along with a hint of anger. He wasn't used to getting this kind of brush-off. It was insulting.

  "I believe you've done enough improvising," said the voice. "Mr. Shue, you're on."

  Ryan strode off the stage with as much dignity as he could manage. While Danny Boy belted out "Wells Fargo Wagon"—it was in his range, the creep—Ryan sank into a seat near the front of the house and took a couple of dozen deep breaths to calm himself down. As soon as the kid was done, Ryan sprang to his feet and hurried up the aisle to where the director sat, legs draped over the seat in the row ahead.

  As the director turned toward him, the house lights came up and Ryan realized for the first time that the person he had repeatedly addressed as "ma'am" was in reality a lanky guy with an unusually high-pitched voice.

  "Did you want something, Mr. Waite?" the director demanded.

  Ryan was so off-balance that he almost fled the theatre. But he held his ground. "I was just wondering why you didn't like—" Realizing how combative that sounded, he paused and softened his tone and his approach. "I mean, I wondered if you could give me some idea of what I did wrong. So I can do better next time."

  The director sighed. "If you're looking for an acting school, I'd be glad to recommend one."

  "No, no. It's just that I worked hard on that monologue, and I've done well with it in competitions. I didn't think I did anything different this time." Except, he added mentally, for making up a couple of lines here and there.

  "Well, perhaps that's your problem, then."

  "What is?"

  The guy sighed again, even more wearily. "All right, look. On the surface, your reading was fine. Very polished. But there's … well, there's nothing underneath. There's no soul, no … empathy."

  "Empathy?" Ryan repeated. "What do you mean?"

  The director rolled his eyes. "Look it up, Mr. Waite." He abruptly turned his attention back to the musical director.

  Ryan knew he'd been dismissed. He shuffled on up the aisle, feeling depressed and defeated. As he neared the exit, he noticed a bulky, broken-nosed man leaning against the back wall of the auditorium. The fellow gave him a curt nod, almost as if they'd met before. Though Ryan was not in a sociable mood, he forced a more or less amiable smile and said, "Hi." The guy looked more like a boxer or a bouncer than he did like a producer or a director, but you never knew.

  Ryan emerged on King Street and turned to gaze up at the sign above the theater entrance. It looked slightly shabby in the late afternoon sun. Usually when he came this way, it was night, and he was on his way home from filming some embarrassingly bad commercial or acting his heart out to an audience of ten, and the marquee would be alive with lights, and he'd pause for a minute to imagine what it would be like to be inside, performing on the stage of the Royal Alex.

  Well, the way things were going, he'd probably never know. He scanned the familiar words on the marquee and gave an ironic half-smile. Les Miserables. If you didn't know better, you might think it was a show about a bunch of struggling teenage actors in 1980s Toronto.

  He was two blocks away from the theater before he remembered his sheet music, which was still lying back there on the washroom floor. He grimaced and gave a dismissive, disgusted wave of his hand. Let it stay there. It was a lousy song, anyway.

  Chapter 2

  It was a good five kilometers from the Royal Alex to the apartment. Ordinarily, Ryan would have hopped on a bus, but he was in no hurry to get home. He wasn't particularly anxious to tell his mom that he'd blown the audition. Besides, he couldn't really spare the bus fare. It wasn't much, but it was enough to buy a loaf of bread or a box of macaroni and cheese.

  The very thought of mac and cheese sent his stomach into gyrations again, and he swallowed hard. They'd had the ghastly orange, no-name brand nearly every night for the past week. Ryan had done his best not to gripe about it. He knew how badly off they were. The thing he couldn't understand was why they never had the money to get something appetizing and halfway nutritious to eat, but there was always enough for his mother to buy herself a bottle.

  By the time he'd gone five blocks, he was sweating. There were a lot of things he liked about Toronto, but the weather wasn't one of them. This August had been even hotter and more humid than usual, and it was starting to wear him down, especially since the air conditioner in the apartment had started acting up. Maybe he wouldn't mind the mac and cheese so much if he could eat it on a beach somewhere.

  He passed an unoccupied bus shelter that had a poster for My Secret Identity pasted on the back wall, with Jerry O'Connell, the show's young star, looking all smug—and a lot more than fourteen, which was the age the character was supposed to be. Taking out his ballpoint pen, Ryan swiftly drew a dialogue balloon next to the boy's mouth that read: My superpowers do not include acting.

  If he could just get a gig like that on a tv series, their troubles would be over. They might even manage to move to a less dismal apartment, one that had fewer roaches and mice, and more things that worked. He was tired of taking showers in lukewarm, rusty water. He was tired of doing his homework with a winter coat on. He was tired of smuggling light bulbs from theater dressing rooms to replace the ones that had burned out in the apartment.

  He was just plain tired. Sometimes he wanted to protest, to tell his mom that it was just too much to expect from a fourteen-year-old kid, to go to school all day and try to keep a reasonably good academic average, and then spend most of his evenings and weekends either rehearsing or performing.

  There ought to be some kind of work his mom could do that didn't require her to leave the apartment—telephone soliciting, or addressing envelopes or something. For that matter, there was really no good reason why she couldn't go out in public. He'd seen plenty of people hol
ding down jobs who were in a lot worse shape than she was. A clerk at the A&P had a huge purple blotch of a birthmark. Angie of Angie's Books was totally bald from chemotherapy or something. Deke, the sound man at Theatre Direct, was a paraplegic; he zipped around the place in a wheelchair and nobody thought anything about it. It wasn't like his mom was the Phantom of the Opera or something, and needed a mask to cover her ruined face.

  No matter how slowly he walked or how many store windows he looked into, eventually he was bound to get home. By the time he did, his stomach had quit trying to come up and had started hinting that it wouldn't mind having a bite or two, maybe even a whole meal, as long as it wasn't macaroni and cheese.

  Ryan closed the entry door as softly as he could—considering that one of the hinges was ready to fall off—slipped off his shoes, and went sock-footed past the superintendent's door. He made it safely to the stairs but, before he was halfway up them, Mr. Bondi stuck his fat head into the hallway and called out, "Hey, you!"

  Ryan halted and took a second to think about how he was going to play this. Offensive, he thought. Not defensive. Take the offensive. First, he took a deep breath. Then he turned and started back down the steps. "Mr. Bondi! I've been looking for a chance to talk to you!"

  Mr. Bondi's close-set eyes narrowed suspiciously. "What for?"

  "Well, you see, it's about the air conditioner."

  "What about it?"

  "It doesn't work. Do you know it was thirty degrees in our place yesterday? If you don't, I can hum a few bars for you." The super stared at him dumbly, as if he were speaking Swahili.

  "That's a joke, Mr. Bondi," Ryan said.

  "Yeah, yeah. From you, always a joke. You don't see me laughing, do you? You know why I'm not laughing?"

  "Because you didn't get the joke?"

  "Because it wasn't funny. You know what else is not funny?"

  "A dog getting run over by a truck?" Ryan suggested.

  "What else is not funny is that I've been getting complaints from Mrs. McElhinney downstairs from you. She says you knock plaster off her ceiling, you stomp around so hard."