The Last Curtain Call

by Juliet Blackwell

Skeet unlocked the actors’ entrance door, and we proceeded down that utilitarian hallway to the spectacular lobby, where Mateo, Dad, and Landon stood stock-still, gazing in wonder at the ornate columns and baroque carvings, the curtain-covered niches, and the intricate moldings.

  It was that kind of place.

  “So,” said Gregory, “what’s first on the agenda?”

  “A thorough cleaning, left to right and top to bottom,” I said. “It sounds awfully basic, but on a job like this one, we can’t really tell what needs what until the place is cleaned and we can inspect the state of the decorative finishes. They’re really what make this old theater a palace.”

  “I’m surprised Avery didn’t already attend to that,” said Dad.

  “Me, too.” To Gregory, I said: “Luckily, cleaning’s not expensive. I mean, this is a huge space, so it will add up, but I’ll get a good crew in here and it won’t take long.”

  “Doesn’t look too bad to me,” Gregory said. “A little sweeping, maybe.”

  “I wish it were that simple. See the top of the column, there?” I asked, pointing to the acanthus leafing out of the Ionic fluted column. Streaks of black had settled in the crevices of the carving, and rust-colored drips ran down the flutes. “That means water damage. Once we get up there and clean, we’ll be able to see if there’s a problem with dry rot or insects, and if so whether the column will need to be replaced or can be repaired with putty and infill. At this height we might be able to fudge it. But of course we also need to address the source of the water intrusion in the first place . . .”

  I realized Gregory was no longer listening. He checked his phone, asked if we were all good here, and said he’d be on his way and “leave it to the professionals to handle.”

  Worked for me. In my line of work, clients frequently ask questions but aren’t actually interested in the minutiae of construction.

  “Oh, Gregory, before you go,” I said. “Did you look into that theater in Oregon? The one that was torn down after being renovated?”

  “I don’t have the whole story, but from what I’ve pieced together, it seems that after the remodel the theater was sold to new owners. They could do whatever they wanted with the land and the buildings, as I’m sure you know only too well. We live in a tear-it-down society, more’s the pity.”

  “Also, I ran into Alan Peterson the other day, the city liaison? He’s supposed to oversee an audit of the financials but said he hasn’t been able to get the paperwork through the city.”

  “As far as I know, there have been several audits done, but I’ll check into that, as well.” He tilted his head and gave me a charming smile. “I wish you wouldn’t worry so much, Mel. Leave that up to me, and you concentrate on bringing this grande old dame back to her beautiful heyday. You’ve got your work cut out for you, but I feel confident she couldn’t be in better hands.”

  I watched him walk away. I was unconvinced. Also, there was nothing quite like telling me not to worry to make me worry.

  After Gregory left, I gave Dad, Landon, and Mateo a brief tour of the whole theater, minus the basement, where I had been trapped with Annette. I added a note to check on those locking mechanisms to my already massive and ever-growing Crockett to-do list.

  Today the theater seemed almost creepily quiet: There was no ghostly usher trying to shoo me into a seat, no jeering audience, not even a graceful Isadora leaping and twirling onstage. Presently the Crockett Theatre was just what most passersby assumed: a gorgeous old building in desperate need of love and attention and money. Lots and lots of money.

  There were still signs of squatters, but it was impossible to know whether they had left and abandoned their “things”—candle stubs and old pillows and blankets—or were simply hiding somewhere or were out for the day.

  Dad was already adding up numbers in his head, making notes, and taking measurements with the newfangled Leica DISTO X3 laser distance meter I had given him for his birthday. He had groused about his good old-fashioned tape measure being perfectly good enough, until he realize just how much easier it was to use the laser on a jobsite.

  Dad and Mateo conferred about supplies and methods and timelines, while Landon trailed me, poking behind curtains and exclaiming about the artwork and the decorative details. He wasn’t content until he tried turning on every faucet he found, intrigued by Alyx piping water in from the basement.

  I brought a step stool over to a nearby pink hallway and scraped lightly at some of the pink paint on the woodwork just below the ceiling, in an attempt to see what lay underneath. A historic building like the Crockett might well have five or six layers of paint and paper slapped over the original finishes. Ultimately it would be up to the decorative painters to discover the original color scheme, but I was too anxious to wait.

  Landon helped me take measurements for the stub outs for fire sprinklers throughout, two-inch pipes for each room off of the main. It didn’t fit in with the beauty of the theater, but sprinklers saved lives. Air-conditioning and updated heating also needed to go in early.

  I could already see in my mind’s eye the complex web of scaffolding that could reach the hundred feet to the ceilings above. And then we needed skilled workers who would not blink at the thought of climbing those structures and working up there all day long.

  Until developing my fear of heights, I had been one of those scaffolding monkeys. As a kid I had loved to climb them on my dad’s jobsites, like bars at a playground.

  I felt sure I’d get back up there one of these days, with continued therapy and practice. But today was not that day.

  At the moment I was feeling pretty darned fancy for navigating the four-foot stepladder.

  * * *

  * * *

  It was easy to lose track of time in a place like the Crockett Theatre; the scale of the job was breathtaking. Bigger than anything Turner Construction had taken on before, but I felt confident we could handle it. The trick was to break the job down into parts, like any small residential job: structure repair, electrical, plumbing, roof, rot and other wood issues, walls, windows, drywall/plaster, paint and decorative finishes, floor coverings . . . and of course all the specialty items unique to a theater space. Another trick to successful construction jobs was getting materials on order in a timely manner; nothing like bringing a job to a standstill while waiting for items to be delivered.

  After several hours, Dad went home to crunch the numbers and confer with Stan. Landon, not mollified by the apparent lack of ghosts and murderers in the theater, continued to follow me around uncomplainingly, making notes of his own—they probably consisted of trying to figure out a mathematical problem he was working on. At home, I often found little equations of numbers and figures—including an intimidating number of x’s and y’s—near the toothpaste tube, on the grocery list, scrawled in the margins of newspapers. The man’s mind seemed never to stop working.

  I was tinkering with the vintage popcorn popper behind the concession stand, wondering whether it was worth trying to fix, when I remembered what Tierney had said about Isadora finding candy wrappers and other small items in the “thingamajig” under the balcony floor.

  I asked Mateo and Landon to accompany me up to the balcony level.

  The theater remained eerily quiet. I was jumpy with anticipation, wondering if and when the spirits would show themselves—and whether I would have to try to explain it all to Landon and Mateo.

  Up in the balcony, the men used their combined strength to unscrew the cast-iron “mushroom caps” that covered the access to the plenum. It was a tight fit—too tight for either of the men—but I turned my headlamp on and managed to crawl through the access hatch.

  The crawl space was less than three feet high, and the floor was full of trash, as though it had collected for many decades, perhaps as much as a century. Apparently no one had cleaned it out—or even actively swept things in. In older buildings
trash in the ventilation shafts like this one is no big deal, but in modern buildings, plenums are often treated as soffits to run cables for communications and high tech, and since the shafts pull in fresh air and oxygen, they can become a fire hazard.

  And any anthropologist knows that trash heaps are gold mines when it comes to understanding the past. In former gold mining towns people now dug under old outhouses, looking for treasures, just as the shell mounds of ancient peoples gave insight into their lives.

  This plenum was a time capsule of refuse.

  I scooted through old hot dog wrappers, twine and tools, and cigarette packs. I found vintage soda bottles, old coins, and even two hip flasks. There were newspapers dating from the period before the theater opened, meaning they must have been tossed aside by the builders almost a century ago, the paper yellowed and brittle and full of fascinating old ads and articles.

  And there were candy wrappers. Baby Ruths, Dots, Milk Duds, Red Hots, Good & Plenty, alongside a number of vintage brands I didn’t recognize. They were all there. Apparently the packaging for a Butterfinger has barely changed in all this time.

  From outside, I heard a mechanism whirring, and then the strains of the Mighty Wurlitzer. From within the crawl space, I heard a rustling and feared a rat.

  But when I looked up, I squeaked in surprise.

  The usher was right there in the plenum with me, on his hands and knees; his cap would have bumped the ceiling if he weren’t a ghost.

  “Ma’am, you shouldn’t be in this restricted area.”

  My heart pounded; my breath caught. Again, I tried to formulate my thoughts to ask him something, anything that might be helpful. I racked my brain for his name from the article Trish had shown me.

  “Y- . . . you’re Harold, right?” I stammered. “Harold Hancock?”

  “Could I see your ticket stub, please?”

  “Harold, was there something down here? Did Isadora find something valuable?”

  “The show will commence when everyone has taken their seat.”

  Olivier had said residual ghosts repeated themselves over and over. Was it possible Harold the usher could only speak in sentences he’d said repeatedly through the years? But unlike what Olivier had told us about residual energy, Harold appeared to be plenty interactive. What could he be trying to tell me?

  “Harold,” I said, crawling closer to him, crunching a small compact that lay open, its mirror broken but intact. “I—”

  But he was gone.

  I twisted around to see if he was behind me, but nothing remained, save the detritus of a century of theater patrons.

  When I turned back, a bunch of papers flew past me as though tossed by a gust of wind. I squeezed my eyes shut against the dust. When I opened them, I saw a handwritten note: “Balcony reserved September 26 for Mr. Delucci and guest.”

  I picked it up, caught a glance of my face in the cracked mirror of the little compact, and suddenly . . .

  I was there.

  * * *

  * * *

  I was wearing Hildy’s green dress.

  In front of me, two men were arguing. One had a mustache; both were clad in fine suits. The mustachioed man punched the other in the face, knocking him down, and then he pulled out a knife.

  Without hesitation, the mustachioed man stood over the other and stabbed him once in the gut. The injured man knocked the knife out of his assailant’s hand. It skittered along the floor toward me.

  “Jimmy!” I cried out, picking up the bloody knife.

  “Kill him, Hildy,” said the stabbed man, his voice raspy and desperate as he pressed a hand over his bloody belly. “Kill him or he’ll never let you have it. He’ll never let you . . .”

  The other man stomped him in the gut, and he spoke no more.

  “Jimmy!” I cried out.

  The other man turned his attention to me.

  I backed up, the knife held in front of me defensively.

  “You don’t have to do this, Mr. Delucci. I swear . . .”

  “Where’s the will?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about! Jimmy said he had something to show me, but he dropped it somewheres right on the floor, easy as that, and it rolled away. He said he was gonna have to rewrite it, make a new one.”

  “Sure,” he sneered, still coming toward me, excruciatingly slowly. “He dropped it ‘somewheres.’ You two had your fancy date at the Crockett tonight. Am I right? It’s there somewhere, isn’t it?”

  “I dunno . . . I dunno what you’re talking ab-bout,” I said, stammering as I continued to back up, coming up against the wall behind me. “Mr. Delucci, please, we gotta get Jimmy to the doctor! He’s gonna bleed to death!”

  “Tell me!”

  “It’s in the ladies’ lounge!” I said, but I was lying. I could feel it. I started to weep. “Right there, in the ladies’ lounge at the Crockett. I’ll go there and get it for you. You can destroy it. I won’t tell anybody, Mr. Delucci. I promise. You pay off the lawyer who wrote it, and he won’t say nothin’ either.”

  He snorted, his face twisted in rage, coming so close to me I could smell the whiskey and cigar smoke on his breath.

  “Why does your precious Jimmy have all the luck, huh? He’s got the Midas touch. I’ll tell you that much. Who knew there was so much money to be made in motion pictures?”

  I was crying, tears running down my face, dripping onto the hand that still held the bloody knife. He was close enough now, I could plunge it into his big gut. I should plunge it in. I pulled in a shaky breath, trying to steel myself.

  It was as though he could read my mind.

  “Go ahead, girlie. Go ahead and kill me, and get your Jimmy to the doctor, and you and he and your little girl can live happily ever after, right? Maybe you’ll have to slip a little arsenic into his wifey’s tea, though, just to make room.”

  I was shaking my head. Go ahead, Hildy, go ahead. You have to.

  “Hildy . . . ,” I heard Jimmy moan. “Do it!”

  I looked over to where he was lying on the floor, and in that moment, Mr. Delucci grabbed my hands, still holding the knife, turned the blade toward me, and plunged it into my own belly.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Mel!” I heard someone calling my name. “Mel! Are you all right?”

  Landon.

  “Mel?” came another voice. “What’s going on? Can you speak to us?”

  Mateo.

  “There’s got to be another way in there,” I heard Landon saying from afar.

  “There are probably access panels down in the ceiling of the mezzanine,” said Mateo. “But we’d have to locate a ladder.”

  “I don’t want to wait. She’s not responding; something’s wrong. What about ripping up these floorboards?”

  “Good idea. I’ll get the crowbar,” said Mateo. “We’ll have this floor up in a hot minute.”

  “No!” I called out, finally rousing from my fugue state. “No, I’m okay, guys. Sorry. I’m coming out.”

  “What happened?” Landon demanded as I squeezed back through the access port. He enveloped me in a hug, paying no heed to the grimy state of my coveralls. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. It didn’t seem the time and place to mention that I had just experienced being stabbed in the abdomen. “I . . . uh . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to check out like that. I got kind of far in there. It needs cleaning out in the worst way.”

  “Sure,” said Mateo. “We’ll get on that right away, no big deal. Right away.”

  “Thanks, Mateo,” I said. “But I just wanted you here today for your thoughts. I’d appreciate it if you could stay on our house in Oakland until it’s done. I’ll be in charge here.”

  “Of course, whatever you say, jefa,” Mateo said with a nod, using the Spanish word for “boss.”


  Landon was looking at me with a worried expression. “Maybe we could wrap up for the day? It’s getting late.”

  “Sure,” I said, though part of me felt like one of the squatters, wanting to move in. It was hard to leave this theater. Maybe that was why so many spirits remained lurking within the structure.

  As Landon drove us over the Bay Bridge, the rhythmic thump of the wheels over the seams of the bridge sections lulled me. I couldn’t keep my eyes open, even though it wasn’t late. If I thought the ghost-busting thing was exhausting, this psychic-time-traveling deal was even worse.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about what I saw, much less what I had experienced. I was going to have to ask Olivier and Lily if they had any insights as to why I was experiencing visions while looking into mirrors. Not every mirror, thank goodness, but enough to put me on edge. What was I seeing and why? And most important, what did I do about it?

  For now I was certain of one thing: There was a last will and testament, a document Mr. William Delucci was willing to kill to get his hands on.

  But William had inherited his brother’s fortune, and the theaters had then passed down to William’s son, Cal, so I had to assume William had found and destroyed the will or it had never been found at all.

  I—as Hildy—had been lying when I said the will was hidden in the ladies’ lounge at the Crockett. But I—she?—was telling the truth when she said it had rolled away “somewheres.”

  Could it have fallen into the plenum opening or been swept in there by a lazy usher? But in all the trash I had looked through, I certainly hadn’t found a last will and testament.

  Time for a little excavation, anthropology-style.

  * * *

  * * *

  As we pulled off the freeway in Oakland, I roused myself and turned to Landon.

  “Please don’t mention that last incident to my dad. He’ll worry.”

  “I’m worried, Mel. You haven’t even told me what happened, so how could I mention it to your father?”