by Edie Claire
Leigh thought of Maura and sighed. By now her friend would have heard the whole story from Stroth, and Leigh itched to go see her and hash things out. But she resisted the urge. This situation no longer qualified as the kind of low-stress cold case that Maura and Gerry had agreed was safe fare for an expectant mother on bed rest. If Sonia’s assault had warmed the case up, last night’s bone-hunting expedition had set it on fire, and Leigh was not going to be responsible for raising her friend’s blood pressure any further. If Maura needed anything from her, she would call.
Leigh closed her eyes and tried to concentrate. There were entirely too many pieces of disconnected information floating about in her head. Exactly when had the question of who killed Andrew Marconi and stashed his body in the attic become secondary? Did that event have any relation to the murder — or possibly murders — in 1961? A connection had always seemed unlikely, if for no other reason than the length of time between them. But if someone who was alive and well right now could know about the bones in the coal chute, that pretty much shot the whole time-interval argument to heck. And what of Sonia’s attack, and the threatening note sent to Gordon? Were they related too, or were they just red herrings unrelated even to each other?
Leigh’s jaws clenched. She could not swear that her aunt hadn’t written that note herself. There was no question that Bess didn’t completely trust Gordon when it came to selling the building. He was too wishy-washy, his motives too suspect. Which was why Leigh also couldn’t be sure that Gordon hadn’t written the note himself. Maybe he wanted to unsettle Bess a bit, paint himself as her savior. Stranger mind games had been played between lovers. If, in fact, the two of them—
Leigh gave her head a shake. Some things, she didn’t want to know.
As little as she liked to think that the note had been faked by either Bess or Gordon, that thought was better than the alternative. If someone wanted to prevent Gordon from selling the building badly enough to make threats, that same person could have been responsible for the assault on Sonia. Had the attorney not announced to an entire roomful of people, the very night before she was struck, that she wanted to buy the building from Gordon and sell it to some company that would tear it down?
There it is, Leigh thought grimly. If Gordon sold the building to Sonia, it would be torn down. The bones in the coal chute would be discovered. They had been discovered anyway, but not for lack of somebody’s best efforts to remove them first. Marconi’s body had already been discovered, and if—
Holy crap! She stood up with a start; her stomach heaved. Were there other bodies, too?
How many more could there possibly be?
“Hey, Leigh!” Chaz called pleasantly, strolling in from the annex. “Your aunt said you were around here somewhere, so your mother sent me to find you. She said that as long as you were in the building ‘idling about’ and she was teaching me and Ned how to ‘properly’ polish a floor, you might as well listen in. Your mother has a pretty specific way she likes things done, you know. She’s a real class-A clean freak. My grandma’s like that, too, but my mum, she’s a slob like me, so whenever Grandma comes over, she—”
“Chaz, why on earth are you wearing that thing?” Leigh interrupted, pointing at the banged-up yellow construction worker’s hardhat that obscured the top half of his skull.
His face turned first defensive, then sheepish. “Just a precaution, that’s all.”
“Against what?” Leigh pressed, her heart pounding. She was being paranoid. There were no more bodies. She needed to forget she ever thought that. She took a breath and regrouped. “My mother is a slave driver, yes, but she prefers psychological manipulation.”
Chaz offered a goofy grin. “Well, it’s kind of silly, I know. But I was thinking over lunch about those guys that got whacked here, and how both of them got hit on the head, you know? And then that lawyer woman, she got hit on the head, too. And then I started thinking — we did have some people get hurt during the haunted houses. Nobody died, but one guy did get a concussion. He was standing on a ladder and fell off, and everybody thought he hit his head when he fell, but what if something hit him on the head before he fell? And there was a woman, too, she passed out in the bathroom. Nobody found her for a while, but when they did they called an ambulance, and it turned out she was all right, but we never did find out what was wrong with her. What if something conked her on the head, too? Huh? What if?”
“Something like what?” Leigh asked.
“Like I don’t know!” Chaz defended. “Like maybe this building really is haunted, did you ever think of that? And maybe stuff just kind of falls on people and kills them sometimes. How cool a movie would that make?”
Leigh groaned. “Chaz,” she said with all the patience she could muster. “Would you please go tell my mother that I am otherwise occupied?”
He studied her with skepticism. “Okay. But just between you and me, I don’t think she’s going to buy it. When I told my grandma I wasn’t cleaning out the mouse cages because I was working too many hours and besides, the smell would help keep the boas downstairs so they wouldn’t want to crawl up into the bathroom again, she said—”
“Chaz,” Leigh said more firmly. “If you wait any longer, my mother is going to think that you’re the one ‘idling about,’ and seeing as how you’re going to be spending the rest of the afternoon at her mercy—”
Chaz grimaced and took off toward the basement.
Leigh’s fingers found her keys again. She could leave whenever she wanted to. Unfortunately, whether she was in the building or out of it, the macabre nature of her thoughts was not going to improve. Something was very, very wrong around here, and whatever it was, Bess had not only landed right smack in the middle of it, she was wholly committed to ignoring it. No matter what.
The show must go on.
Leigh let out a mirthless laugh. How many million times had thespians the world over said exactly the same thing in relation to their own troubled opening nights? She frowned. It was rather disturbing, if one thought about it, that theatrical events attracted so much mayhem they rated their own cliché.
Still undecided about what, if anything, she could do to keep her Aunt Bess out of harm’s way, she postponed the decision of staying or going by heading for the bathroom. Once in the annex, she took a short detour halfway down the basement steps to see how the hired men were faring. Chaz had mentioned only himself and Ned — did that mean that Gerardo had not returned? A quick glance around the basement indicated that he had not.
Leigh crept silently back up the stairs and into the women’s restroom. Gerardo had been irregular with his hours all along — an issue easily explained by the fact that he was also in Gordon’s full-time employ. But why would he skip out now? Perhaps Gordon felt that with the new security guard sticking to Bess like glue, Gerardo’s spying was no longer necessary.
Leigh took her time in the quiet, still-spotless bathroom, musing over Gordon Applegate and his potential motivations and getting nowhere. He was as difficult to read as her Aunt Bess, and at least as much of a schemer. As Leigh washed her hands at the sink she noticed a fresh coat of paint around the windowsill, and remembered her Aunt Lydie saying that a spot around the window needed to be smoothed over after an ice damage repair.
Leigh stared at her aunt’s paint job, mildly bothered and uncertain as to why. After a moment, she realized that what seemed odd was not that the building had some weather damage, but that it didn’t have more damage. Marconi’s disappearance had left the place abandoned for nearly a decade, used only by a bunch of rowdy twenty-somethings for nefarious purposes at Halloween. Yet all that time, the borough had somehow managed not only to keep it structurally sound, but — with the exception of some peeling paint and accumulated dust and grime — in pretty darn good shape.
Why bother?
Maybe the ghouls were protecting their own.
“Shut up!” Leigh told herself out loud, drying her hands and hastening out of the bathroom. Her overa
ctive imagination — which had now endowed the building with dead bodies wedged behind every sheet of drywall and under every floorboard, complete with a legion of devil-worshipping ghouls who fixed ice damage and scared off threatening real estate attorneys — had to be stopped.
It was just a building. And there had never been any devil worshippers in it. Period.
By day, they take the form of bats…
“All right, that’s it!” Leigh ordered herself. “You’re getting out of here and going for a walk in the park. Maybe you’ll catch Aunt Lydie with her mystery man.”
She headed out into the hall and turned the corner toward the exit, resolute. But she didn’t make it far. Frances caught her at the door to the parking lot.
“Leigh Eleanor!” Frances spouted. “Don’t you dare leave this building until you’ve explained to me who that hulking man is who’s been following your Aunt Bess about. She says he’s a private security guard hired by Gordon.”
“He’s a private security guard hired by Gordon.”
Frances sniffed. “So, it’s true then. About the threatening note mailed to him?”
Leigh nodded. Evidently Bess had come clean with her sister… at least partly. “It is rather worrying.”
Frances’ lips pursed. “I find it more suspicious, myself. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it came from one of the actors trying to preserve the theater — they’re such a dramatic lot, you know. Or for that matter, Gordon might have written it himself, just to give another of his men an excuse to keep an eye on Bess. I told her she shouldn’t trust that man’s minions any more than she trusts him. Lord only knows what he’s after this time around!”
Leigh blinked. “This time around?”
“Well, of course!” Frances responded. “He and Bess have done this dance before. I distinctly remember his serving as ‘rebound man’ after husband number three, but there have been other equally debaucherous episodes. Never mind that Gordon is a confirmed bachelor and Bess herself has sworn never to marry again. The two of them have no respect for the institution of marriage, for the commitment that is necessary to forge morally acceptable liaisons—”
“But, Mom,” Leigh broke in, feeling left in the dark, “if Bess has known Gordon that long, shouldn’t she know by now if he’s trustworthy?”
Frances frowned. “Your Aunt Bess sees what she wants to see, as you well know. What’s different this time is that she has been foolish enough to allow herself to become indebted to him. She needed him to make this theater happen, and now she’s made her bed. So to speak.”
Leigh’s stomach did a flip-flop. Was Bess tolerating Gordon’s overbearing behavior — and his goons — because deep down, she trusted him? Or did she want the theater so badly she was taking a calculated risk?
Chaz’s voice drifted up from the stairwell. “Um… Ms. Frances? I think my mop’s broken. The squishy part fell off.”
Frances’s eyes rolled. She turned toward the basement, but spoke to Leigh over her shoulder. “If you have nothing constructive to do here, perhaps you should get home and start that spring cleaning.”
“Never mind!” Chaz called again. “Ned fixed it!”
“Small miracles,” Frances drawled. “Bess is lucky that at least one of these three has some cleaning sense. Ned can sweep a floor and disinfect a bathroom, at least. But you mark my words, she won’t find any minimum-wage worker who will take it upon himself to keep the ductwork in that furnace room shining!”
“Seems unlikely,” Leigh agreed. Frances was obviously still unaware of the bone in the coal chute. Bess had been adamant that there was no point in worrying anyone else until — and unless — the bone was found to be human. And as much as the grim discovery was currently messing with Leigh’s own mind, she was inclined to agree.
“I should think so,” Frances huffed. “Now, off you go. Those curtains in your living room won’t wash themselves.”
Leigh pulled her keys out of her pocket. “I’m going.”
Frances headed back down the stairs, but almost immediately Bess popped out into the hallway, the silent guard following two paces behind her. “Oh, there you are, kiddo! I’m so glad you’re still here. Would you mind running upstairs and opening the front door for Camille? She texted that she’s waiting up there, but I’m positively buried getting ready to open the box office, and Lurch here” — she smiled flirtatiously in the guard’s direction — “refuses to go anywhere without me. Isn’t that sweet?”
“I can do that,” Leigh agreed, stealing a glance at the guard, whose face remained stony. Now that Bess mentioned it, he did look a great deal like the spooky butler on The Addams Family. If Pittsburgh ever held a cartoon celebrity look-alike contest, he and Ned should definitely enter.
“Aunt Bess,” Leigh added, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Do you want me to stick around? At least until the rest of the theater people start coming?”
“No need, kiddo,” Bess said cheerfully. “Gordon has promised to let us press on, everything is on schedule, and really — what else could possibly happen, anyway?”
Leigh promptly envisioned a ceiling tile falling out and two corpses spilling into the hallway.
Stop that!
“Aunt Bess,” Leigh tried again, her voice still low. “You are going to watch your back, aren’t you? You’re not going to pretend that nothing’s happened today? That there’s no possible chance of a threat here?”
Bess blinked at her innocently.
Leigh sighed, long and slow.
She put her keys back into her pocket.
Chapter 18
If there were safety in numbers, Leigh’s angst over her aunt’s well-being should have been put to rest a half hour ago. Three women from the Thespian Society had arrived to help set up the box office, the lighting guy and his assistant were buzzing about the back of the theater switching switches, two more security guards had been installed at the doors, two men in black tee shirts rearranged things on the stage, ushers in bright red vests settled into “the house,” and half-dressed actors and actresses continually flitted about the annex between the dressing rooms and the makeup tables. Ned and Chaz had finished polishing the basement floor and left, visibly excited about returning later to see the show. Camille had carried two huge plastic bins into one of the spare annex classrooms and closed the door behind her. The locksmith had come and gone. A catered meal for cast and crew had been delivered to the annex kitchen, and Frances had gone home to feed her husband and granddaughter. Neither Gordon nor Gerardo had reappeared, but “Lurch” refused to stir from Bess’s side. The only person in the building with no clear function was Leigh.
She had considered going home and then returning with Warren and Ethan, but it was too late now and her house too far away to do much except turn around and drive right back. Besides, despite her lingering qualms about the building, the current atmosphere of anticipation and excitement was pleasantly contagious. Deciding to partake of a little food herself — her aunt had offered, after all — she left the vestibule where Bess had stationed the “box office” and headed for the annex kitchen. She walked past the make-up room, which emitted the distinctive smell of hot curling irons and hair spray, and watched as one actress swore at a fake eyelash while an actor insisted he did not need eyeliner. The room rocked with laughter, and Leigh felt a pang of jealousy at the cast’s easy camaraderie. Maybe she could get back into acting herself… someday.
The next two classrooms had their glass windows covered over and bore paper signs that read — in Bess’s neatly flowery script — Men’s Dressing Room and Women’s Dressing Room. The signs had been up since the afternoon before the dress rehearsal, when the Pack had helped to hang them. But the pink sign on the third door down was new, and Leigh stopped to examine it.
The Blessing Room.
Her eyebrows rose. No one else in the hallway seemed to have noticed the sign yet. But she recognized this as the room into which Camille and her mysterious bins had disappeared earlier. Te
ntatively, she knocked.
“Who’s there?” came a sing-song soprano voice.
“It’s Leigh,” she answered. “Can I come in?”
“Yes, you may,” the voice sang back.
Leigh slowly pushed open the door, then sucked in a breath. On a card table in front of her sat a single candle, a china bowl full of water, a dish of chocolates, and a rose. Behind the table stood Camille, radiant in a full-length cobalt blue gown, her silver hair shining and her face beaming. All around her, posed in a semicircle, was a veritable forest of stuffed animals, including a reclining tiger and a four-foot giraffe.
Camille giggled at Leigh’s reaction and clapped her hands. “It’s adorable, isn’t it? My own idea! The time before a show can be so stressful, you know. So I thought, what better to calm one’s nerves than cute, fluffy toys and the well wishes of a loving friend and compatriot? And of course, chocolate is good for everything. I have herbal tea brewing over in the corner, too!”
Leigh struggled for words. “It’s very… creative.”
“I know!” Camille agreed. “Can I practice on you? I’m just about to invite the actors in!”
“Um…” Though Leigh’s first instinct was to turn and run, she had to admit she was curious. “Sure.”
Camille giggled again. “All right. First I welcome you, then the blessing of peace!” She picked up the rose, dipped it in the water, and touched it to Leigh’s forehead. “This is water from the Ohio River. Very pure and natural.”
Leigh fought back a chuckle. She couldn’t remember ever hearing the words “pure and natural” in the same sentence as “Ohio River” before.
“Now at this point,” Camille explained, “I’ll tell the actors how special they all are to me, and what a great job they’re doing. But of course I don’t know you, so we’ll just skip that part, okay? Then I offer you a chocolate and tea and we spend some time chatting, and then I do an exit blessing and the next person comes in. What do you think?”
