History was not my strong suit, but that seemed to line up with what we knew. “You know a lot about the history of this place?” I asked.
Caroline glanced around. “It’s my home town. Everyone knows a little bit. Like that it’s haunted, of course, but, so is basically every theater everywhere.”
“So the lights,” Luke said.
“Yeah. I’ve checked the wiring myself. Its all fine. Still, most of these lights are second hand, for no particular reason. Like I said, Stein has been cutting corners. Probably his vaunted investor isn’t as rich as he claims. I looked over all of them but what we really need is a new rig entirely.”
“What have they been doing?” I asked. I couldn’t help glancing up at the stagehands still working on the light.
“Not really they,” Caroline said. She pointed at the one being rigged. “Just that one. It got blown a little out of proportion. It flickered a few times during rehearsals, so I cut it out of the light cues and we had to reblock the whole scene. Then during the opening night, it switched itself on and nearly blinded Melanie, one of our leads, and screwed the rest of the show. Not to mention ruining the whole point of the stage design. Then a couple of days ago it just fell right off the rigging. Think Stein sprang for a new light?” She was about this close to having words with ‘Stein’, who I took to be Mr. Steinbeck.
“We heard something about the actors seeing an apparition in their mirrors,” I said.
“Not all of them,” Caroline replied. She leaned in a bit. “Just Melanie and Joanne, and again just between you and me, they’re both a little… dramatic.”
“Well I guess that’s a good thing,” Luke said, smiling at his own joke. I joined him, but both of our smiles withered when Caroline didn’t react in the slightest. Must be one she’d heard before.
“If you want to talk to them, they should be backstage in the dressing rooms. They each have their own, at the far end, opposite one another.”
“We’re actually hoping to meet with Mr. Steinbeck,” I said. “Romeo… er, Josh there said he should be back soon.”
“Honestly, if Steinbeck shows up I’d be surprised. He’s supposed to be the artistic director, but after rehearsals ended he’s hardly ever here.” Caroline rolled those big green eyes again. “If you ask me, the ‘ghost’ spooked him.” Again with the air quotes. What did it take for some people to see what was right in front of them? I couldn’t fault her though. Not everyone was so inclined to see spirits of any sort. Sometimes I thought I was just lucky to have been more or less born to it.
“Well if you could let him know we’re here, if he does show up,” Luke said. “We’d appreciate it.”
“Will do,” Caroline said. There was a clang above us, and something plummeted to the stage with an even louder boom. All three of us snapped at up the sound, but it was just a wrench.
Caroline’s voice boomed, and she had pipes. “What the heck are you doing up there, Michael! You’ll kill someone like that.”
“It was the ghost,” Michael called, but couldn’t keep the joke out of his voice.
Luke and I left them to the argument that ensued. Michael said that now, but as we climbed up the stairs to the stage and cross behind the curtain to reach the dressing rooms, a feeling of deep, aching dissatisfaction crawled over my shoulders and sank into me and I wondered just how far this entity would go to make itself heard.
There was a spirit here. I hadn’t seen him yet, but I could feel it permeating the bones of this place. I kept it to myself for now, and focused on the bright, glittering gold star on a plain wooden door with the name “Melanie Burk” etched out in clean black lines. Before we even knocked, both of us heard a startled scream from inside the room.
Chapter 5
Luke wasted no time, and neither did I. As a result, we nearly barreled into one another trying to get through the door. Luke stepped back, however, and let me take the lead. Probably best. It was a dressing room, after all.
Melanie was dressed, at least, in a flowing pink night gown number that was opaque. It was completed with a white fur trim all along the hems. She was a petite thing, skinny and blond and made up like she was headed to the red carpet. She looked startled half to death, but not from anything supernatural.
She looked from me to Luke, shocked, and then clutched her pink robe to herself as though to cover up. “Who are you people?” From her tone, she must have suspected we were there to abduct her. Dramatic indeed.
I took this one, and quick, before she fainted or some such. “I’m sorry,” I said, “we heard you scream and… I’m Eden Patterson. This is my husband, Luke. We’re the paranormal investigators that Mr. Steinbeck hired. Is everything alright in here?”
“Paranormal… oh,” Melanie said, relieved. “Of course, because of my little admirer.” She tittered a laugh. “Sorry about before. I get frightened by a spider in act two. Have to make it convincing. So you’re here about Quentin?” She settled into the chair in front of her dressing mirror. It was another classic artifact, some kind of refinished antique number, barely, with a wide, tall square mirror surrounded by clear naked bulbs that put out a soft light just shy of yellow.
“Quentin?” I asked.
“I’m going to check in with Joanne,” Luke whispered.
Melanie looked marginally disappointed to see my husband leave, but I didn’t let it bother me. He knew whose he was. I had no worry on that count. “That’s what Joanne and I call him. It was my name for him. I saw him first.”
“And that doesn’t worry you?” I asked. “Is he your first ghost?”
“Yes,” Melanie said, “though, you know, I did have a talent for guessing things when I was little… my mother always thought I might be a little psychic, but of course, I don’t believe in that sort of thing.” She sounded like she very much wanted me to, though. I didn’t particularly like the word ‘psychic’. It made me think of crystal balls and palm reading and charlatans making shotgun guesses about people's dead grandparents.
“And what does Quentin look like when you see him?” I asked.
“Well he’s very handsome,” Melanie said, a little smile on her lips. “He just watches me, that’s all. Dressed all in black. I try not to pay him any mind.” Her demeanor cracked, for a moment, just a little.
“We heard that some of the light bulbs blew out,” I told her, pressing that crack to see how she really felt. “Was that in your room, or Joanne’s?”
“I’m not even sure Joanne has really seen Quentin,” Melanie confided in me. “She just doesn’t like to be left out.” She glanced toward the back of the room, where a rack of costumes stood. “It was just the once,” Melanie said quietly. She was struggling to keep smiling. I wondered why? Was she frightened of Quentin? That he would hear? I got the impression she thought of him like an abusive boyfriend and didn’t want him to catch on that she was telling.
“After opening night,” she said, “I was dressing down and… I saw him. His lips were moving, like he was singing but I couldn’t hear. I… I thought maybe I would try to, you know, communicate.”
“What did you say?” I asked.
Melanie’s eyes dropped a bit, and she gave a small, shy shrugged. “It’s silly, really.”
“I won’t think so,” I assured her. “Knowing what set him off might help me put all the puzzle pieces of his circumstances together.”
She nodded quickly, and looked around the room again with that same furtiveness. “Well I asked if he liked the show. If he liked my performance. And… well, perhaps he didn’t. He got agitated, I think, and then the bulbs blew out, and then… he was gone. Like that.” She snapped. Then she turned back to her mirror and reached for an eyeliner pencil. “I haven’t seen him since.”
As I mulled this over, I looked around the room. It was smallish, crammed with costumes, and fabric, and what I assumed were Melanie’s bags and… there was a picture on the wall, I realized, half hidden by the costume rack. Part of a woman’s leg was showing, and th
e photo was black and white. “What’s that?” I asked curiously, and stood to get a better look.
Melanie glanced dismissively at the mostly covered picture. “Oh,” she said. “That’s Irma Winston. One time doll of Egypt Pike. She was the last woman to sing in this place, so Caroline says.”
I moved the costume rack carefully aside to get a better look. There on the wall was a black and white picture of a beautiful, curvy, blond haired woman in an elaborate black gown and even more elaborate wide brimmed hat done over with white flowers and shoots, smiling at the world, a cigarette in one hand and a dainty wave to someone behind the camera in the other.
Blond, I noted, just like Melanie. Just like Laura Robbins?
“Well, thank you for speaking with me, Melanie,” I said as I left. I turned at the door. “Good luck tonight!”
Melanie shot me a patiently pained look.
“Or, break a leg, I mean,” I revised.
She gave me a nod, and went back to her makeup.
I met Luke back in the hallway. He looked exasperated, but before he said a word I took him back toward the stage. We whispered there in the shadow of the big curtain. “Was she as bad as Melanie?” I asked.
“Maybe worse,” Luke said. “She said she saw Quentin, but her details are different. She said he’s tall, for one thing, and had long hair, and a list of other details that don’t match up. Lots of them. She’s put some thought into it.”
“She’s not blond, is she?” I asked, though it was more of a statement.
“Are you really worried about—”
“Honey, I’m asking because of the case,” I sighed. “Of course I’m not worried.” I pecked him on the lips just to drive the point home. “Joanne wasn’t blond.”
“She wasn’t,” he confirmed. “Why do you say that?”
“Because I think young Quentin has a thing for blond haired beauties.”
Luke took a breath before he spoke.
I raised an eyebrow.
“Well,” he said, “there’s no accounting for taste.”
I winked, and let him pull me into a warm hug. He made a sound like he was blowing out a candle. “Dodged that one.”
“Uh huh,” I said, and ribbed him gently. We parted, and I checked the time on my phone. Six o’clock; we didn’t have long before the show started. “Let’s see what Matt’s got to say.”
We met him on stage, rubbing his jaw and looking the place over. “Any signs of sabotage, inspector?” I asked.
Matt smirked, and shook his head. “Not so far. I did find out this place is basically wired from end to end, though. EMF is going to be useless in here unless we shut off the power.”
“So, we’re on battery power then,” Luke muttered. “That doesn’t give us a very big window. Three hours at the most.”
“After midnight then?” I asked. “Give us the best quiet time we can get?”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Luke agreed, nodding slowly. He scrunched his lips up thoughtfully as he looked over the massive room. “Think we can cover all this?” He asked Matt.
Matt nodded. “I’ve got all the key spots mapped out for maximum coverage,” he said. “There won’t be much overlap, but the blind spots will be too small to matter.”
“Sounds good to me,” Luke said. “Any word from Mr. Steinbeck?” He was getting as irritated as Matt was, and Matt’s irritation was evident. Maybe it was Matt’s fondness for technology, but he preferred when people acted every bit as predictably as his gear, up to and including arriving on time.
“No, and word is he may not even show. How he got a job like this I can’t even—”
“Ah,” A grand, booming voice came from the entrance to the house, “these must be my intrepid investigateurs paranormale.” He gave the words an overdone mock-french twist before he approached us.
The man was a tall, as tall as Luke and maybe even had an inch or two on my husband. He had a thick mustache with, I kid you not, curls at the ends like a genuine vaudevillian villain out to tie some poor girl to a railroad track. His eyes were bright in the house light, even though they were brown, behind round spectacles and his suit looked antique. In a way, he matched the inside of the opera house, except where the theater had been only made to look expensively bedecked, this gentleman truly was. A thick gold ring was on the middle finger of his right hand, and everything about his look said he’d had his clothes custom made. They didn’t do very much to hide his pudge, but they did look sharp. Tails on his coat and everything.
“I’m pleased to me meet you all,” the man said as he closed the distance, “I am Jeremiah Steinbeck, artistic director and, frankly, architect of the resurrected, grand old lady of Egypt Pike, the Bell’s Opera House. Now,” he said, leaning forward with a conspiratorial grin, “tell me that you’ve taken care of my little ghost problem.”
Chapter 6
“I actually assumed this position precisely because of the storied history of Bell’s Opera House,” Mr. Steinbeck was saying half an hour later, when Goog and Syd had contacted us to reconvene. We’d gathered downstairs again around one of the tables in the Emporium Drugstore. Syd took the opportunity to get herself another float, and I couldn’t quite help myself from joining her. We sipped and listened intently to Mr. Steinbeck’s story, which had all the markings in my opinion of a tall tale.
“A haunted theater!” He barked. “It’s a director's dream come true.” He enunciated all the vowels long-ways. Dye-rec-tore. He rolled the last ‘r’. “But, to tell the truth, I hadn’t expected it to be quite so haunted.”
“It’s no surprise that it is,” Syd said.
“Allegedly,” Matt muttered.
“Right, legibly.” Syd snorted, and went on. “Seems there have been a number of deaths in the place. All accidents, as far as anyone knows, but, at least six that we could find in the papers, all the way back to the first year the place opened. Could be a whole mess of earthbound spirits in this place.”
“I don’t think it’s a mess of them,” I said. “Just one. And I got the sense he is not pleased with the changes to his home.”
“Oh?” Luke asked.
I nodded. “It was up there, when we headed across the stage. This sense of… irritation, maybe. How have the renovations been going?” I asked the last to Mr. Steinbeck, who didn’t look pleased about the question.
“There haven’t been any problems with the renovations. I think it more likely our spirit is perhaps simply an obstinate critic of our opening performance.” He waved a hand as though this were the most common thing in the world. “Critics,” he said with some disgust, “you can’t escape their judgment, even in death.”
“We could explore that,” Luke said diplomatically, “but let’s start with what we have.”
“What do you know about this place?” I asked him.
“Well,” Mr. Steinbeck said, “as much as I told Mr. Patterson on the phone. Bell’s Opera House was the jewel of the region, in her day, and beset by some of the brightest jewels of Virginia, as well. A true crown of a theater. When the Depression struck our nation, she carried on, offering succor to the masses even as they gradually abandoned her and this charming hamlet of Egypt’s Pike.” I got the impression that Mr. Steinbeck, like his young actress Melanie, was perpetually in a state of stage performance. It was at least entertaining.
“She had three performances a week, right up until the end,” he went on, as though speaking of a dearly departed friend. “Even in those days there were stories of ghostly sightings and strange noises and odd occurrences. As early as 1905, after a portion of the stage caught fire and one of the actors of that day perished tragically.”
“Carter Quaid,” Goog supplied. “I read about this. He was young, only 21. It was during Rusalka, a Czech play. He was the prince.”
“A Czechoslovakian opera,” Mr. Steinbeck corrected. “A lyrical fairy tale about a water sprite who falls in love with a handsome prince and sings the song of her love to the moon, asking that it
relay her affections to him, and must give up her voice in order to become human and be his bride. A tale of loss and betrayal, in the end, I’m afraid, and love unrequited.”
“Like the little mermaid,” I mused.
Mr. Steinbeck made a delighted note of surprise. “Why, yes! The very same, in fact, all tangled up with the original Anderson tale.”
“It fits, almost,” Luke murmured, almost to himself. “Tragic accident, he must have loved to sing, and this was the theater he performed in, right?”
The Mystery of the Ominous Opera House: A Cozy Mystery (Eden Patterson: Ghost Whisperer Book 4) Page 3
