“Smart,” Syd said, and smiled encouragingly at the girl. Syd’s confidence and cool could be infectious at times. I guess it was now; Selena shrugged a shoulder, but let her arms drop.
“Well, that’s when I saw him the first time,” she said, a little steadier than before. “At least I think. But, he wasn’t like Dad described.”
Okay, now I was really intrigued. I wasn’t the only one as everyone but John leaned in to listen to Selena’s story.
“Where did you see him? How was he different?” Luke asked.
“He was up on the rigging. At first I thought it was one of the regular stage hands. I know most of them though, they come in and eat lunch before they get to work sometimes.” At this she paused, just for a heartbeat or two, and the corner of her lips twitched up a hair. “But it wasn’t any of the regulars. Thing is, he looked like he was just standing there. And then…” She swallowed, and some of that nervousness seeped back into her. “Well, that was when the light fell. It just dropped from the rig, and made an awful racket and there were sparks and glass everywhere. Thank goodness no one was under it.”
I looked over at Goog. His face blanched. I knew he didn’t want to hear this.
Luke glanced at me, and I gave him just a bit of a nod. This was part of the story we’d already heard, plus a little. It didn’t stop there, though.
“Of course I was distracted by all that,” she said, partially an admission it sounded like, “and it was dark up there but… when I looked back I didn’t see him up there. And I don’t see how he could have gotten down so fast without a ladder. He certainly didn’t jump.”
John shook his head sadly and looked around the table at us. “Some people have said that they’ve heard him singing, that same sad, beautiful song. If not for that, I wouldn’t believe it was the same spirit, but… I can’t imagine our sweet ghost doing these things. Something must have gone terribly wrong for him to act out like this now.”
Something terribly wrong indeed. A good ghost gone bad? It made me wonder. Sometimes, you heard about spirits that lost their way, lost some of who they were in life the longer they stuck around. Was that the case here? Or had some new element entered the scene to rouse his anger?
The Robbins’ had only a little more to say, mostly things they’d heard, and when we were through we thanked them and left to check into our hotel room and figure out a plan of action.
Chapter 3
“You can’t discount that John Robbins might have a reason to see that the opera house fails,” Matt was saying as we gathered in mine and Luke’s hotel room. It was a dinky little place, compared to a bigger town with more than one hotel, but it had that same old world charm that the rest of the town did, as though it had been frozen in the ‘30s or ‘40s. Old, slightly yellowed floral wall paper decked the whole room, except for one wall that was light wood paneling, some kind of mid century attempt at a remodel, perhaps. The bed frame wasn’t even a regular hotel bed; it had an old carved wooden head and foot board, with spiraled posts at the corners that ended in floral points. It seemed perfectly mismatched, like the rest of the town. Patchwork.
“After what you’ve seen with your own eyes,” Syd complained, “I can’t believe you’re still on that.” She’d taken personal offense to Matt’s accusation, however tentative it had been. Maybe because the Robbins’ reminded her of her own people in Appalachia, just struggling to be a part of the community and get by on next to nothing. “Selena saw the ghost herself.”
Matt sighed. “Even if I did accept that we’ve seen genuine haunting before, by earthly spirits of any description,” he said, resolute in his conviction to remain an unbeliever, “that wouldn’t mean that every single supposed haunting was, in fact, actually the real deal. The existence of ghosts wouldn’t negate the existence of criminals or selfishness.”
“You can look into it when we go back and look over the theater,” I said, eager to take this conversation off the burner before it started boiling, “but for now let’s just lay off the Robbins’ themselves until you have some evidence of foul play.” I sighed, and sank onto the edge of the bed. It felt like it must have been in the room since the rest of the decor. That was going to be a treat when we did eventually sleep. “Now we need to dig up the history of this place, local history,” I said as Goog pointed to his laptop, Google already on the screen. “But whatever else you can find, too. And what about Mr. Steinbeck?”
“He’s out of town,” Matt said. “I called him when I got to the drugstore, he was supposed to have met us there. He has some meeting with his investor.”
“Probably regretting investing in a haunted theater,” Goog muttered. “I’d pull out.”
“You’d pull out of a haunted bathroom if you were about to wet your britches,” Syd chuckled. Goog nodded in agreement as Syd pursed her lips and considered. “Really, though, haunting and theaters go hand in hand, don’t they? I mean, seems like all of them from the old days had ghost stories. Isn’t that how you know you made it?”
Goog agreed, and started listing theaters on his fingers. “The New Amsterdam and Palace in New York,” he said, “the other Palace Theater in Los Angeles, The Oriental in the Ford Center in Chicago, Dock Street in Charleston.” He grunted. “That’s just in the US. But none of them have turned up anything like what we’ve seen.”
“So there’s something romantic about a haunted theater,” I said. “Dramatic… it makes sense.”
“And the most haunted theaters,” Matt said, “or the ones people think are the most haunted, tend to be the most famous.”
“So you think this could all be some big conspiracy to attract tourists,” Syd said, wiggling her fingers at the unseen bogeyman behind Matt’s proposed curtain, her eyes large. She snorted, and dropped the dramatics after a second. “All those places have stories of peaceful, rare ghost sightings of… Frank Sinatra walking up a set of stairs or some crap. That man gets around just as much in the afterlife as he before he died. But not like this; not actual damage being done.”
“She’s got a point,” Luke said. “It would be an expensive conspiracy.”
“Not to mention dangerous,” I threw in. “They won’t attract tourists with a danger of real harm.”
“In any case,” Luke said, steering us back on course. “Mr. Steinbeck...we need to talk with him.”
“He’ll be back this evening from his meeting,” Matt said, checking his phone. “The show, as they say, must go on, so he’ll be ‘in the house’.”
“Seriously?” Goog said. “They plan on putting on a show with all this happening? Are they crazy?”
Luke chuckled. “Of course they are. They’re actors.”
“And we’ll be setting up in the theater after they’re done,” I sighed. “Which means it's going to be a very late night. Luckily, that gives us some time to do a little research. And, more importantly, eat. I’m starving!”
*****
Aside from being a soda bar and a creamery, the Drugstore had a pretty decent kitchen to boot. “It was a late addition,” John said as we ate quietly; I wasn’t the only one that was famished after the drive. “We hardly ever used half the storage room in back, so we had it converted a bit at a time. Back in the day, most drugstores had a little kitchen like ours, but we couldn’t afford it when we first opened up.”
And Mrs. Robbins and her son knew their way around it. Luke was in the process of going to town on some fried chicken legs, which he was careful to quietly assure me weren’t better than my fried chicken when I saw how quickly he dug into them and raised an eyebrow, while I couldn’t pass up a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup; not when the sandwich was a three cheese blend with a thick slice of smoked ham on homemade sourdough bread, and the soup was spiced with some apparently secret blend of pepper and spices that gave it a savory, smoky air. Smoked paprika, I thought, was the key to it, and I logged that away to try out myself. There’s no ‘secret’ recipe that makes it past this nose.
Syd watched
with sheer, unself-concious glee, like a little girl, as Selena mixed her up a soda, custom-made to her specifications, and plopped a scoop of homemade vanilla ice cream into it when it was done. She spun on the stool as she sipped it through a straw, grinning and momentarily unworried about the night ahead of us.
Not Goog. He ate a plate of chicken and waffles like it was cardboard, his eyes flicking back and forth between his food, the mirror behind the bar, and the stairs leading up to the theater floor, nodding or grunting quietly in response to the patter of quiet conversation. As ever, being this close to another active earthly spirit unsettled him, reminded him of something from his past he’d recently seemed this close to talking about before he backed away from it again. Whatever it was, it was difficult to recount, I supposed. But we were wearing on him, I think. A bit at a time.
Luke gave me a nudge, and pointed to the end of the bar where Selena was delivering a soda to a young man with long black hair tucked behind his ears, dressed all in black. He had some kind of headset around his neck, and was leaning on the counter like he owned the place, all swagger and trouble if I ever laid eyes on it. And I had. I appraised the young man, and then my husband, and remembered the first time he’d tried to put his swagger move on me.
“You were just like that,” I whispered to him. “When we first met.”
Luke scoffed, and poked me playfully in the side. “I think all this ghost business messes with your memory.”
“I’m sharp as a tack, mister,” I assured him. “You had better hair, though.” It had been at one of the first few meetings of the Paranormal Society in college, and Luke had spent the whole meeting hardly paying any attention to the discussions around him. He nearly burned a hole in my back with his eyes. After, he’d played it cool, like he hadn’t noticed I was there, and leaned against the door frame of the lecture room we met in.
Or tried to, at least. He missed by a few inches and nearly fell on his ass. When he laughed it off and blamed a ghost, I think that’s when I first started the long fall. A fall I was still in, it sometimes felt like, deeper and deeper in love.
Our young Romeo at the bar was making the same gamble, his body language all casual and dismissive but I knew better. Maybe it would work on a girl like Selena, but she seemed put off by it. Can’t you read the room, Romeo?
We couldn’t hear what they were talking about clearly, but after a moment she turned toward us and pointed, said something to him, and he gave her a halting mix between a wave and a shrug before he stuck his hands in his pockets and wandered toward us.
“You guys are the… ghost hunters?” He asked, maybe part curious and part confused.
“Paranormal Investigators,” Luke corrected gently, “yes, that’s us. We hear you’ve got a bit of a ghost problem.”
Romeo shrugged. This boy needed confidence and bad, I decided. “That’s the rumor, at least,” he said quietly, as though it were a secret.
Syd sidled up to us, and gave Romeo the old once-over. “Just the man we need,” she said.
“Goog and me are gonna go hit the library; John says they’ve got a microfiche collection from the turn of the twentieth century up to the sixties before the local paper puttered out. Might find something there.”
“Great,” Luke said. He smiled at Romeo. “What’s your name?”
“Josh Walker,” Romeo said. It was hard not to think of him as Romeo now, but I did my best. “I’m a stagehand.”
“Perfect,” Luke said companionably. “If it’s not too busy up there, maybe you could show us around? We’ll stay out of the way.”
“Sure,” Josh said. “We’re just checking equipment. Can’t be too careful, apparently.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Goog muttered behind us. “You all have fun. I’ll be on the other end of town.”
“Don’t let the phantom steal your girl,” Syd said to Luke, winking. “We’ll let you know what we find.”
And with that, they left, leaving me, Luke, and Matt to follow Josh up the long stairs and right into 1920.
Chapter 4
The place looked like the sort of room that you always imagine fancy Italian operas to take place in, with high, vaulted ceilings and walls draped with heavy white and gold cloth that glittered in the light of four massive chandeliers decked out with glass or crystal icicle shaped droplets that caught the light and scattered it prismatically around the room. I couldn’t help a moment of worry about what might happen if our earthly spirit trouble-maker decided to drop more than a stage light.
The rest of the theater space was just as elegant, or something like it. There were places where it seemed more like a mask of opulence than the real thing. Like the seats, which looked like the originals that had been reupholstered, but seemed secretly rickety. The aisle was red-carpeted, but there were still a few barely visible stains on it from years of gathering dust and mildew; cleaned instead of replaced. At first glance, the whole of it looked almost regal but up close, not so much.
It was still beautiful, but I put the attempted reconstruction away as a little fact. If the spirit we were dealing with remembered this place in its prime, maybe there was a starting point for helping it move on.
“Mr. Steinbeck isn’t here yet, but he should be soon,” Josh told us as he led us down the aisle toward the stage. “We’re doing Enchanted April. Mr. Steinbeck thought it would be appropriate, since Bell’s Opera House really had it’s heyday in the twenties.”
“I don’t know it,” Luke said, as though he were surprised. I stifled a snort.
Josh shrugged, “It’s a romcom about four women who go to Italy for a month and get into trouble. Four leads, and all of them… a delight to work with.” He smiled blankly at us before he leaned on the stage. “Caroline, these are the ghost hunters Mr. Steinbeck mentioned.”
A woman who looked remarkably similar to Syd turned large eyes on us and blinked a few times, and then rolled her eyes before she looked back up at something. Above her, a pair of black-clad stagehands were apparently re-installing a light. They were dressed just like Josh. I supposed all stage hands probably did, for moving around in the dark behind the curtains. There was something to that, but it didn’t strike me right away.
Luke held a hand out toward the put upon young lady who looked like she might be fresh out of college. She brushed a whisp of strawberry blond hair behind her ear and squatted briefly at the edge of the stage to shake our hands, business-like. “Caroline Hartney,” she gruffed. She had muscle. Her and Syd were practically soul mates.
“New lights?” Matt asked, jerking his chin at the procedure above. Caroline was right under them. Brave.
She nodded, obviously irritated at it. “If it’s not the bulb, it’s the frickin’ thing itself,” she complained. “We’re already over budget for this. I had to salvage the light. Did a pretty good job, though; you can hardly tell it’s banged up.”
“Is that safe?” Matt asked.
Caroline gave him the stink eye, and I swear I’d never seen Matt really cringe like that from a look, but he did. I couldn’t wait for Syd to meet this woman. “This is my job. It’s safe.” She said flatly. “Barring intervention from some ghost.” She didn’t sound convinced.
“Any way I could get up there to check the wiring?” Matt asked.
Another baleful look. “The wiring is fine, Mr…?”
“Matt,” Matt said, scooting up to the stage to take a handshake. “Matt Hayward. I’m the technician.” Caroline didn’t offer a hand, so Matt tried to make friends the old fashioned way, with shared interests. “Is that a Chauvet one fifty watt?” He asked, pointing at the light.
Caroline appraised him briefly, and maybe her estimation rose a bit. “Just the casing. I had to rewire the inside with parts from the older lights. Luckily I had a spare bulb, and the older ones were power houses to begin with.” She sighed, and glanced around. “Get one of the grips to take you up. They’ve all got green tags on their shirts. It all passed inspection, but you’re welcome
to do whatever it is you do as long as you stay out of the way of the techies.”
Matt saluted, and spotted one of the grips. For a small town production, there were an awful lot of people here. I’d almost expected something like a rinky-dink community theater but there was serious money behind this. What for, I wondered.
“Mr. Steinbeck said you’d had some problems with the lights,” Luke said to Caroline when she seemed satisfied her eyes were not needed on the install above her. “You must be the best person to ask about it.”
Caroline sighed. “There have been some challenges, yes,” she said, frowning. She glanced around at the people, and then nimbly hopped off the stage, a four foot drop at least, without a blink. She flicked a switch on her headset. “But honestly, I’m not entirely surprised. Between you and me, Stein has been cutting corners. I don’t know why. His ‘benefactor’” she put the word in air quotes, “is loaded. He had a blank check to do this place up. Why, I have no idea. This place hasn’t seen a show since Irma Winston did Karmen about a week before World War 2 ended.”
The Mystery of the Ominous Opera House: A Cozy Mystery (Eden Patterson: Ghost Whisperer Book 4) Page 2
