Movie Palace Cozy Mystery Boxed Set: Books 1-3

by Margaret Dumas

  “Darn it!” She stamped a foot again and screwed up her face in concentration.

  I tried to concentrate on my non-imaginary visitor.

  “What other movies were you thinking of?” I asked.

  “Oh, we hadn’t gotten very far in the planning.” He crossed his legs, looking like he was settling in for a nice cozy chat. It occurred to me that if I wasn’t primarily occupied with ignoring a ticked-off apparition, I might find him attractive. Which was a complicated and terrifying thought.

  But the ticked-off apparition was hard to ignore. She was trying again for the coffee mug, this time using both hands. She compressed her lips and brought her eyebrows together in focused intensity.

  The mug didn’t move. Of course.

  “Maybe we should have lunch some time this week,” Todd suggested. “I know I just barged in here this morning, but I’d love to get your thoughts on the project. And get to know you.” Another friendly smile. Maybe a little more than friendly. There was a gleam both warm and speculative in his eye. At which point my internal alarm system started flashing red lights. My marriage might have been over, but I was in no way ready for some guy to start flirting with me. Even an attractive one. Especially an attractive one.

  “Oh. Ah, look…”

  “Great. It’s a date.”

  Wait. It’s a what?

  Which is when the mug went crashing to the floor.

  Todd jumped to his feet, brushing at the cold coffee that had splashed onto his sweater. “What the—”

  “Hooray!” Trixie yelled triumphantly. “Could a hallucination do that?”

  “No,” I said, staring at her.

  She pantomimed casually buffing her nails. “I expect you’d like to apologize to me now.” Cool as a ghostly cucumber.

  I blinked. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  I was still staring at Trixie, but we both knew I was talking to Todd. He was looking around in confusion, not knowing how he had just wound up with a damp sleeve and a broken mug at his feet.

  “Was that an earthquake?” he asked.

  “Maybe. Look, I’m sorry, but I really do have a lot to do today.” I practically dragged him to the door. “I’m sure you can find your own way out.”

  “Sure, but—”

  “I’ll call you about the…thing,” I said absently, closing the door behind him.

  I stood, my hand still on the knob, until I heard his footsteps retreat down the hallway. I took a very deep breath. And another. Then I turned to Trixie.

  “You’re real,” I said.

  She grinned. “Well, for heaven’s sake. What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you?”

  “You’re a real ghost.”

  She curtsied.

  “How…”

  “I told you how. It was on account of Eddie Wheeler and missing my chance.” She tilted her head. “Are you okay? You don’t look so good.”

  I put a hand to my forehead. “Either I’m not crazy or I’m a lot crazier than I thought I was.”

  “If I were you I’d try ‘not crazy,’” she said encouragingly. “Just see how it feels.”

  I nodded. “It feels like I’ll have to rethink a few basic assumptions about the universe and reality and…everything.” I sat on the couch without realizing I’d walked across the room.

  “You do that, honey.” Now that she’d made her point, Trixie was getting downright solicitous. “How about we go down the hall to get you a cup of tea and then we can have a nice long talk? Would you like that?”

  I looked at her. At the real ghost of a real usherette who had really died in this theater in 1937. I stopped fighting it. I believed. And with that belief came a fizzing rush of energy I hadn’t felt in a while. Energy and a mad curiosity.

  “Yes, I’d like that,” I said.

  But that’s not what happened. Instead, the office door flew open, I shrieked, Trixie vanished in fright, and Callie burst into the room.

  “Nora! Are you all right—Oh!” She screeched to a halt as she saw me on the couch. “Oh. You’re okay. I thought—” She pointed behind her. “I saw some random guy coming down the stairs, and, I mean, after the guy in the basement…” She leaned over, hands on her knees, shaking with unspent adrenalin.

  “I’m fine.” I got up and put an arm around her, guiding her to a chair. “Everything’s fine. Just breathe.” A minute ago I’d been the one on the verge of passing out.

  She let out a shaky breath. “Nobody was supposed to be here this early,” she said. “I just wanted to play the rough cut of my film on the big screen.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Of course you were startled to see a stranger wandering around.”

  She gave me a look. “Startled? Try freaked AF.” She moaned and closed her eyes. “I hid behind the candy counter until he left. How’s that for being a warrior woman?” Her eyes flew open “You cannot tell anyone I hid.”

  “I don’t have to tell anyone anything,” I assured her. “And, by the way, hiding was the smartest thing you could have done. That guy could have been anyone, and he probably outweighs you by a hundred pounds. Unless you’ve got some pepper spray or the world’s smallest gun in your pocket, you made the right call.”

  Her head flopped back into the cushion. “I have a media stick in my pocket. With my film on it.”

  “Right. Which probably wouldn’t have helped much if he had been a homicidal maniac.”

  “No,” she agreed. “So who was he?”

  “Todd…” I had to fish his card out of my pocket to recall his last name. “Randall. He’s a film blogger. He wants to do a noir festival.”

  She snorted. “Oh, great. Another one.”

  “Have we done one before?”

  “Guys always think film noir is the be-all and end-all of classic movies,” she said, scowling. “I mean, like, how about screwball comedies? How about honoring the great classic film editors, all of whom were women? How about women at war, or women in westerns, or anything other than private dicks and the dangerous dames they fall for?”

  I laughed. Not because what she said was particularly funny, but because I was so surprised to see the ultra-cool student completely fired up by what was clearly her passion.

  She gave me a dark look.

  “Those are all great ideas,” I hastened to tell her. “And we should do every single one of them.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Absolutely,” I told her. “I haven’t even started to think about programming for after the holidays, but I’m going to have to, and soon. I’d love your help.”

  Did that mean I was staying? Staying in the haunted theater?

  “Cool,” Callie said.

  Okay. My heart rate had just about gone back to normal. Trixie hadn’t returned, but I knew she would eventually. Because she was real. A real ghost.

  “Soooo…” Callie gave me a sidelong look. “Do you want to, like, watch my film or something? It’s still really rough, but, like, maybe you could give me notes or something?”

  “I’d love to.” I blinked, surprised that it was true. I did want to see her film, and I did want to get to know her better. And I wanted to crack Marty’s cranky exterior and hear more of Albert’s stories. And maybe even figure out if it was Raul Acosta that Trixie saw Kate take upstairs on the day she died.

  And, most of all, Trixie.

  I wanted to know everything about Trixie.

  Chapter 11

  Trixie didn’t come back all day.

  I kept expecting to see her around every corner, but she stayed “away,” wherever that was. Maybe she had to rest up after her big morning of knocking over a coffee cup and shifting the foundation of everything I thought I knew.

  So I watched Callie’s film with her from the projection booth.

  “I t
hought Marty was the only one who knew how to use the equipment,” I said as we entered his sanctum.

  “He’s the only one who knows how to use the, like, old stuff,” Callie said, moving cautiously past a table with disassembled pieces of equipment arranged in neat rows. “But any idiot can use a new projector. You just turn it on and plug the stick in.” She did so.

  “This is what the multiplexes use, so they can hire one untrained teenager to run everything on twenty screens. Or some of them don’t even do that anymore, they just beam everything in from the mother ship.” She nodded toward a massive carton on a shelf on the far wall. It had a picture of a projector on it, a matte black box with a lens, and text that proclaimed the contents to be a 20,000-lumen 4K RB Laser Projector, which sounded both modern and expensive. “We got that like six months ago. We haven’t used it yet. Marty calls it ‘Hal.’”

  Marty would. I looked at the carton. How the heck did Kate afford new equipment like this when the Palace seemed to be sustaining business on the strength of a handful of elderly regulars? Popcorn and advertisement revenue could only stretch so far. I made up my mind to have a good hard look at the books, and soon.

  Callie was biting her lip. “Um, it’s okay with Marty that I use the brain-dead equipment for my work, but I don’t know how he’d feel about you being in here when he’s, like, not.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll tell him it was all my idea.” I was, after all, his boss. Something I should probably keep in mind when I was around him.

  She looked doubtful. “Just don’t touch anything.”

  Callie’s film was everything you might expect a rough cut of a student’s documentary to be—both incredibly awkward and incredibly heartfelt. I praised what worked and gave her notes on what could be improved. She took it all in and then gave me a rare unguarded smile.

  “Thanks, Nora. It means a lot to have someone of, like, your era get what I’m trying to do.”

  My era? At thirty-nine I was maybe fourteen years older than her. But I was spared a response by the now-familiar bombast of Marty’s arrival music. I was getting more used to it. I only jumped a few inches out of my seat.

  “How does he do that?” I asked. I’d always assumed he played it from the projection booth.

  “He set up his phone to connect to the wireless speaker system,” Callie said, grabbing her media stick and looking around to make sure we hadn’t disturbed anything. “We should probably, like, bounce.”

  I agreed. I had no problem with telling Marty that I’d watched the film with Callie from his booth, but I was no fool. It could wait until he’d had some coffee.

  The rest of the day got away from me, what with running a haunted theater and everything. There were staff schedules to figure out, and vendor orders to review. I lost a good couple of hours just searching for the warrantee on the soft drink machine. Turns out we were no longer covered. So with all that going on it wasn’t until the next day that I got a chance to take a look at the Palace books. On the bright side, it was Monday, and the theater was closed on Mondays, so I figured I’d have the whole place to myself.

  Aside from the ghost of a chatty usherette.

  “Trixie!” I called her name as I carefully made sure the lobby door was locked behind me before turning the alarm off and the stairway lights on.

  “Trixie!” I felt like an idiot, calling to her softly as I went up the stairs. “It’s Nora. Are you here?”

  She wasn’t. At least not on any spiritual plane I could see.

  I fully intended to come up to speed on the Palace’s finances, but after an hour and a half of looking at spreadsheets and QuickBooks files I had a better idea. I’d get a professional to do it. Because what I was seeing simply didn’t add up. Kate had made some massive purchases in the past year. The digital projector I’d seen the day before cost almost a hundred thousand dollars. How could she possibly have paid for that, and why, since it had never even been taken out of the box?

  I thought about it. Had she been planning to change the Palace? To turn it into a modern theater, showing a steady stream of CGI superheroes fighting each other while cities exploded spectacularly around them? That was a depressing thought. But what if she had? Would someone have wanted to stop her? Wanted to enough to kill her?

  And the projector wasn’t her only extravagant expense. There had been a steady stream of smaller but significant equipment purchases. A ten thousand dollar large-format laser printer. A twelve thousand dollar professional-grade espresso maker. And as far as I could tell, none of it had been installed. I didn’t even know where it all was. And why would she have made those sorts of elaborate investments anyway when she had a soft drink machine with a broken icemaker, faulty lighting, and a to-do list for her once-a-month handyman that stretched to three pages?

  No, I wasn’t up to this kind of financial analysis. Income versus outgo I understood. But this kind of thing called for a professional accountant. I sent a text to Robbie.

  Hey you. Call me when you get a chance. I’ve been digging into the Palace books and I’ve got some questions.

  I’d only just gone back to the laptop when my phone pinged with a response.

  If it’s about money, talk to Naveen. He’s the best. How are you doing? Settling in? Feeling better?

  I was, actually. Both settling in and feeling better. Possibly because I had the many puzzles of the Palace to solve, and possibly because, in light of what I’d learned about the existence of ghosts in general and Trixie in particular, the entire world had suddenly taken on new and fascinating dimensions. That strange fizzing sense of renewed energy hadn’t left me. But it would probably be best not to mention that to Robbie. At least, not in a text. And possibly not ever.

  Yep, you were right. Keeping busy is the best medicine. That, and not looking at the gossip blogs.

  Her reply told me she’d bought it.

  So glad. I’ll call tonight.

  xxoo

  I clicked the link to Naveen, recalling him as Robbie’s longtime financial manager. I’d met him at the housewarming party for her first place, a bungalow in Hancock Park that she’d since traded up for her Hollywood Hills mansion. I wasn’t sure Naveen would remember me, but a basic doctrine of the Hollywood religion is that you never admit to not knowing someone, so I figured I’d at least get a response to a text.

  I sent it and quickly closed my app before I caved in and looked at the seventeen texts Ted had sent. Whatever he had to say, I didn’t want to hear it.

  Okay, that much was done. And I was alone in Kate’s office, so it was arguably the perfect time to ransack it looking for her email password. Not only did I still want to see if there were any clues about Raul Acosta, I now also wanted to make sure Todd Randall’s story about the film festival checked out.

  I stood and surveyed the room. Where would I hide a Post-it, or a pad of paper, or a notebook that I used to write down my passwords?

  The room’s clutter seemed to mock me. And then I had an idea. What if someone had seen Kate stash a password somewhere? Or, better yet, what if someone had stood over her shoulder when she typed her password in? Someone who had been hovering around her for years trying to be noticed? A lonesome ghost, perhaps?

  “Trixie?” I tried again. “Are you there?”

  Nope. She was real, but I had the feeling she wasn’t going to be predictable.

  I decided to mentally section off the office and search it in pieces, the way my granny had taught me to clean my room when I was a kid. First, the desk. No, first clean up the broken mug that still lay in pieces on the floor. I grabbed a pamphlet and used it to brush the ceramic shards into a wastebasket. When I stood I bumped into the blackboard, getting chalk dust on my shoulder and smudging the writing for the September lineup.

  The September lineup. Wastebasket in one hand and pamphlet in the other, I stared at the programming Kate ha
d organized for the month before October’s Halloween horror movies began. September had begun with two weeks of back-to-school features, starting with the silent classic The Freshman (1925, Harold Lloyd), before moving chronologically through everything from Good News (1947, June Allyson and Peter Lawford) to Teacher’s Pet (1958, Doris Day and Clark Gable), and ending, of course, with The Graduate (1967, Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft). The next week was screwball comedies, and the month ended with a “Falling in love with Fall” theme. And there, on the last weekend of the month, was Random Harvest (1942, Greer Garson and Ronald Colman), the movie Trixie had watched with Rivka’s great-granddaughter on the day she’d seen Kate go upstairs with a strange man.

  It had opened on the day Kate died.

  Blog Post: Random Harvest

  1942

  You guys…Random Harvest. I mean, I know it’s preposterous and completely impossible, but come on! It’s so good! You may see it listed as a “drama” or maybe a “romance,” but this, my friends, is a tearjerker. A good old-fashioned two-hankie affair that will break your heart in a million places and then fill it back up again.

  We begin in a mental hospital at the end of World War I. Ronald Colman, whose gently mussed hair and slight stammer tell us he’s in Great Emotional Pain, is a patient named “Smith” who suffered a head injury in the trenches and has lost his memory.

  In the nearby town, Greer Garson is a singer/showgirl who wears the most adorable little shorty kilt onstage and has a knack for making wayward amnesiacs feel good about themselves. She meets Colman in the street during the armistice celebration, calls him Smithy, and takes him in when he collapses with fever. When he recovers she leaves her troupe and the two of them head to a storybook cottage in the countryside, “the end of the world, lonely and lovely” so he can regain his strength.

  A modern viewer will undoubtedly raise an eyebrow at her willingness to give up her entire career and way of life for a guy she’s known five minutes. Maybe that was expected of a woman in 1918? Or, more importantly, in 1942 when the film was made? Never mind. She gives up her whole life for him. It will not be the last time.