by Terri Reid
Final Call – A Mary O’Reilly Paranormal Mystery (Book Four)
by
Terri Reid
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
Terri Reid
Final Call – A Mary O’Reilly Paranormal Mystery (Book Four)
Copyright © 2011 by Terri Reid
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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*****
Final Call
Prologue
“Idiots! Nothing but no-talent, pedestrian, second-class thespian wannabes!” Faye McMullen stood center stage, her high-pitched shrieks echoing against the auditorium walls of the historic Winneshiek Theater in downtown Freeport.
The cast of the current play stood transfixed on the stage, all staring at their leading lady.
“You!” she screamed, pointing to an elderly woman near the edge of the stage. “Twice you have walked across stage in front of me when I was delivering my lines. If you do that one more time, I will push you into the orchestra pit.”
“And you,” she continued, turning towards a middle-aged woman sitting in a chair, stage right. “I don’t give a damn about your children and their needs. If you can’t be at a rehearsal on time, with your lines memorized, you have no business trying out for a part in a play.”
She turned to a young man trying to hide his large girth behind the bureau that was stage left. “You, fatty,” she taunted. “Perhaps you could come to rehearsal without the smell of onions and garlic on your breath.
“And,” she paused for a moment. “It would be a real treat for the rest of the cast if you took a shower on occasion, so we don’t have to smell you before we even see you.”
“And you,” she sneered, bearing down on a young woman in her late teens. “I don’t know what misguided fool told you that you could act. But, sweetie, if I were you, I’d think about changing my major. Perhaps you ought to be someone’s secretary. You can make coffee, can’t you?”
The young woman dissolved into tears and ran from the stage, the sounds of her footsteps running up the stairs to the Green Room echoing behind her.
Faye turned back to the rest of the cast and crew. “Get out of my sight,” she screamed. “You all disgust me.”
The dozen or so men and women eagerly left the stage and followed the young woman upstairs.
Faye walked to the center of the stage. “I don’t know why I continuously allow myself to be subjected to such imbeciles.”
“Perhaps it’s her fun-loving, generous spirit,” Carl White whispered to Donald Saxer, standing next to him at the back of the auditorium watching the rehearsal.
Donald forgot himself and laughed aloud.
Wrath-filled eyes turned toward him. “You dare laugh at me?” she seethed, “You think this is funny? Perhaps your wife and three children will think it’s funny when you are dismissed from your job.”
He blanched as an equal feeling of resentment and fear filled his gut. He looked up at the woman on the stage. Nearly skeletal, she was the epitome of the saying, “You can’t be too rich or too thin.” Her bleached blonde hair swirled around her shoulders and looked out of place on the fifty-plus year old woman. She wore a silk caftan and flowing silk pants Donald knew cost more than a month of his paychecks. Her fingers held rings with jewels worth a king’s ransom, her skin was perpetually tanned and her face had been tightened so many times, he was sure that if she sneezed with any gusto it would have split in half. She was one of the wealthiest women in town and used her wealth and position like a yoke around the neck of the entire community.
“No, Faye. I mean Ms. McMullen,” he said. “I wasn’t laughing at you. It was...”
“I don’t care what it was, moron,” she spat, “I will visit your employer on Monday morning.”
“Just a minute, Faye,” Carl interrupted, “you can’t destroy a man’s livelihood over a stupid amateur play.”
“And that’s the problem with you, Carl,” she said, walking to the edge of the stage, “You don’t take this art form seriously. It doesn’t matter where the stage is, the only thing that matters is the art.”
“You can’t ruin a man because he shared a difference of opinion with you,” Carl argued. “Besides, it wasn’t his fault, it was mine.”
“Oh, so you think you can laugh at me too?” she asked, her pencil-thin eyebrows lifting over her sharp, piercing eyes. “What do you think your dear wife would say if she knew about the fling you had with our little rising starlet?”
Carl started forward toward the stage. “You bitch,” he yelled. “There is nothing between Amy and me. It was all in your mind.”
She laughed at him. “Actually, as I recall, she was all in your arms.”
“I never touched her,” he insisted. “I never once touched her.”
Crossing her thin arms in front of her, she lifted one pointy finger to her chin. “But not because you didn’t want to, right Carl?” she purred. “Was it because you were afraid? How does it feel to play the part of the Cowardly Lion your whole life? Too bad you never got a chance to play the part of a real man.”
“You nasty bitch.”
“Careful, Carl, you’re repeating yourself and that is so tiresome,” she lifted a hand to her mouth and patted it several times. “And I hate when you’re tiresome.”
“Listen, Faye,” Carl said, trying to fight the panic and nausea rising in his stomach. “I know this rehearsal didn’t go the way you had planned, but I think we can work things out.”
Faye crossed to stage left and stood beneath a spot light. Turning to a mirrored bureau on the set, she preened for a moment and then spoke to him, watching her own reflection as she enunciated each word. “You’re right, Carl, it didn’t go well,” she replied calmly, smiling gently. “And as the director of this production, I hold you entirely responsible. The cast does not respect you and they certainly are not inspired by you. We have three weeks until we open and most of your so-called actors are still on book.”
“I’m aware of that,” Carl replied. “They have promised...”
“Promised! Promised,” she spat, turning back to him. “Their promises mean nothing. They have missed their blocking and their cues, stumbled over their lines and have made a farce of this entire drama. They don’t take this production seriously, because you don’t take it seriously.”
“I assure you, Faye, I do take this seriously.”
She cocked her head slightly. “Oh, do you?” she asked. “Well, then, if you’re serious, I want you to replace Amy. We b
oth know she can’t act her way out of a paper bag.”
“She’s got a lot of potential, Faye, she’s just young,” he argued. “Besides, she needs to be in this play in order to keep her scholarship.”
Shrugging, she strolled across the stage, glancing at her manicured nails. “Well, I suppose that’s her problem, isn’t it?”
“You can’t do this.”
Turning and sinking gracefully into a chair, she smiled. “You’re right,” she said gaily. “I can’t, but you can and you will. We don’t want me to talk about your little secret, do we?”
Carl looked anxiously around the room. Donald had already left the theater through the lobby door. “You promised,” he whispered.
“But I’m getting so old, Carl,” she said with a pout. “I often forget what I promise.”
She laughed lightly. “Oh Carl, I just love being me.”
“Faye, please, you can’t...”
“She’s upstairs in the Green Room,” she interrupted. “I’ll give you ten minutes. If you haven’t done it by then, I’ll come up to share a few interesting facts with the cast and crew.”
She heard his heavy footsteps on the wooden stairs that led up to the Green Room and took a deep breath of contentment. She loved it when things went her way.
She walked across the stage to gather her props and put them in place for the next day’s rehearsal. She, at least, was going to be a professional.
She laid her purse and scarf on the shelf backstage right, next to the large panel that held the electronics for the staging and lights. On the wall next to the panel was a line of curtain riggings with thick hemp rope tied down securely. Each line controlled the movement of one of the curtains or backdrops.
Faye stopped to look closer at the ropes. There was something wrong. The end of one of the ropes lay loosely against the wall. Didn’t those amateurs understand that was a safety infraction?
“Idiots,” she muttered, storming over to the thick hemp rope to tie it down.
The stage went dark and Faye froze. She counted to ten and waited for them to turn back on. She tapped her foot impatiently against the wood boards. Really? Did they forget she was still on stage? Another head would roll.
“Hello! I’m still on stage.”
She heard a noise behind her.
“It’s about time...” she began.
She gasped when she felt the rope against her neck. “Stop,” she cried, reaching up to pull it away.
Her hands were pulled behind her and bound. “Who are you?” she cried. “What are you doing to me?”
She heard the sound of the electric winch motor starting up and felt the rope tighten on her throat. “No, wait, please,” she cried. “I can pay you. I can give you things. Please don’t...”
Chapter One
“Just quit,” Stanley growled, as he maneuvered Betsey, his turquoise blue 1961 Chevy Impala 4-door sedan, through the narrow lanes of the snow covered side streets of Freeport, Illinois. With four foot high drifts on either side of the road, it wasn’t an easy task.
Stanley Wagner was the fifth generation owner of Wagner Office Supplies in downtown Freeport. And although the sixth generation was now running the store, Stanley still arrived early every day to greet the customers and make sure his children, now in their forties and fifties, were doing an acceptable job.
“I can’t quit,” Rosie explained, “I made a commitment and I’m not going to let some bully scare me off.”
Rosie Pettigrew was a real estate broker in her early sixties who also worked in downtown Freeport. She had been through about as many husbands as careers. She had been devoted and faithful, but now she was really enjoying being single and dating as many eligible men as possible. She was also part of a small group of friends, who shared some interesting experiences together. Mary O’Reilly, Police Chief Bradley Alden and Stanley had brought quite a bit of excitement into her life.
“She ain’t just any bully,” he replied. “She’s Faye McMullen and she can make your life pretty miserable iffen she takes a mind to.”
She turned in her seat and looked at him.
“Would you let her run you off?” she asked.
“Hell, no,” Stanley replied. “No one runs me off.”
“So, why should I let her scare me?”
“Well, because I ain’t trying to sell real estate to some of her highfalutin friends,” he responded. “I ain’t trying to sell her nothing.”
“Well, really, I can’t believe that her friends wouldn’t buy a house from me just because she tells them,” Rosie said.
Stanley shook his head slowly. “It’s obvious that you haven’t been paying attention,” he said with disgust. “That woman farts and her friends rush over to tell her how wonderful she smells.”
Rosie laughed. “Oh, Stanley, I can’t believe it’s that bad.”
“If I ain’t disremembering, a while back the fashion was for ladies to wear those shorts all around town, like they was at the beach,” he said. “She comes into town wearing this pair of little shorts with a matching suit coat, all fancy and fine. With her skinny little bird legs she looked like one of those Sandhill Cranes we got out by the river.”
Rosie scrunched her nose and shook her head. “That was probably not a good look for her,” she acknowledged.
Stanley nodded. “Yeah,” he agreed. “But the worst was yet to come. Once she wore those shortie shorts, all of the other ladies in town who wanted to be “in” started to wear them too. Made me wonder if all the mirrors in town had broke. Some of those ladies looked like five pounds of sausage stuffed into two pounds of casings. It weren’t pretty. It weren’t pretty at all.”
Rosie giggled. “Poor Stanley, I bet it was awful.”
“‘Bout poked my eyes out for the pain of it,” he replied. “But then those floppy shirts and bell-bottomed pants were the newest thing and my eyesight was saved.”
“Well, thank goodness for short-lived fashion trends,” she laughed.
“Point is, she made a bunch of normally sensible women behave foolishly because they wanted to be like her,” he said. “Things haven’t changed much since then. If you’re on her bad side, you might as well leave town.”
“There’s got to be a way to get around this, Stanley. There just has to be.”
“The only way she’s going to release her hold on the folks of Freeport is when they pry us out of her cold, dead hands.”
They pulled up across the street from Winneshiek and parked the car in one of the few cleared spots. “Looks like her majesty is already here,” Stanley said, motioning his head in the direction of her silver-grey Mercedes CL 500 coupe parked in front of the theater.
“Well, darn. I didn’t think she had to be here until later,” Rosie sighed. “She’s probably going to sit in the front seat and criticize us while we practice.”
“We could go over to Mary’s house instead,” he suggested.
“No, we can’t. Besides, you promised that you would help paint the back drop and you’re not getting out of that.”
Stanley shrugged. “Don’t mind painting,” he said. “Just hate being around uppity people who think their poop don’t stink.”
Rosie nodded. “Yeah, me too.”
They walked across the street and Rosie entered the new combination of security numbers into the keyless entry lock. Stanley peaked over her shoulder. “What’s the number?”
She covered the key pad with her hand. “I can’t tell you,” she said. “We sign a contract that says we won’t share the number with anyone. I guess they’ve had some problems with some of the costumes and equipment walking away.”
“Well, how the hell am I supposed to be doing the painting if I can’t get in?” he growled.
“I’m sure Carl will give you the number,” she apologized. “I just can’t do it.”
“Silly if you ask me,” he muttered.
The lock buzzed open and Rosie pushed on the door. The interior of the theater was only lit by the
small security light on the stairwell.
“I wonder why she didn’t turn on the lights,” Rosie commented.
“She’s probably a vampire and the lights hurt her eyes,” Stanley retorted.
“Shhhh,” she whispered to him. “She might be standing nearby.”
Rosie climbed up the stairs, walked beyond the small pool of light and flicked the switch that illuminated a portion of the backstage. Stanley followed behind her, turning and looking around the area.
“Ain’t real fancy back here, is it?” he said.
The walls were either red brick or had bare drywall nailed over 2 x 4s. The open steps up to the Green Room, Dressing Rooms and Control Room were constructed of bare wood and nails. Against one wall was a rough countertop filled with hardware used for constructing sets and the bare boards on the floor was smeared with remnants of different colors of paint.
Rosie glanced around, trying to see it through Stanley’s eyes. “Yep, this is the glamour of show biz,” she teased.
She walked over to the heavy curtain that separated them from the stage. “The lights for the rest of the building are across the stage on the far wall,” she explained. “I might as well turn them on, because we are going to need them.”
“I’ll go with you. Might as well get the whole tour.”
The curtain cut off much of the light and the stage area was dark. “This is creepy,” Stanley whispered. “Think this place is haunted?”
“They say that all theaters are haunted,” Rosie whispered. “They say the spirits are drawn to the creative energy of the actors.”
“You could have waited to share that with me.”
Rosie giggled. “Ghosts are not the scariest thing in this theater lately.”
They reached the opposite side of the stage and Rosie felt her way to the light box. She flipped the switch for the house and stage lights and soon the area was brightly illuminated.
Stanley walked over to the line of riggings. “What are these for?” he asked.
“Each line controls either a curtain or a backdrop,” Rosie explained. “They use pulleys and sandbags to counter balance them. The bar at the very top – like the curtain rod is called the batten.”
