Lights Out Tonight

by Mary Jane Clark

  LIGHTS OUT. FINAL CURTAIN.

  Yes, Langley was certainly inspiring, thought Keith as he watched the actors take their bows.

  C H A P T E R

  132

  Meg heard her cell phone ringing again. The calls had been coming more and more frequently, and she was all but certain that it was Caroline, trying to find her. When she thought of all the times she had ignored or avoided Caroline’s calls in the past months, Meg felt tears come to her eyes. She tried to get ahold of herself. If she let herself really cry, the gag would make her choke.

  In the darkness, Meg heard the door opening. A shaft of light seeped into the storeroom. She watched the silhouette approach and reach over to pull the gag out of her mouth.

  “Are you ready to talk yet?”

  “I don’t have anything to tell you,” Meg said.

  “I think you should reconsider, Meg. Your friends Amy and Tommy found out the hard way what happens when someone crosses me.”

  Meg finally broke down and began sobbing.

  “All right, that’s a good girl. Now take your cell phone and call your stepmother and tell her to bring the script. Tell her you’ll meet her in the laundry room.”

  Meg hated herself for revealing that she’d left the script in her tote bag and given it to Caroline. She wasn’t going to compound things by luring Caroline into a trap.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not calling her.”

  The killer laughed, snatching the cell phone. “All right, Meg. Have it your way.”

  C H A P T E R

  133

  It was dark, but the outdoor lights provided illumination as Caroline watched the Devil in the Details audience leaving the theater. She studied the faces in the crowd, hoping that, by some chance, Meg’s would be among them. It wasn’t.

  Caroline knew she should be on her way back to the inn for some sleep, but she also knew she wouldn’t be able to rest. Where was Meg?

  She took out her cell phone and dialed Nick’s number. Disappointed at getting his recorded message, she left one of her own. “Nick, it’s Caroline. Will you please call me, honey? It’s important.”

  Not relishing the idea of coming face-to-face with Langley again, but thinking it was worth one more trip to the dressing room, Caroline went back into the building. The halls were quiet, and she passed only an occasional person on the way out for the night.

  Langley, her face scrubbed clean, was still in the dressing room.

  “Did Meg show up?” asked Caroline.

  “No,” said Langley, clearly annoyed. “And I hope she has a good excuse, otherwise, I’m going to be requesting someone more responsible to help me tomorrow.”

  “I’m sure there is going to be reasonable explanation,” said Caroline. “This isn’t like Meg.”

  “I better not find out that she’s been out there somewhere, stoned, at my expense,” said Langley.

  Caroline didn’t say anything.

  “Yeah, I know she smokes pot,” said Langley. “I recognize the signs. I’ve been there myself.”

  “Well then, I hope you’ll give Meg a break,” said Caroline.

  “She’s been through a lot recently.” I should be on top of this, thought Caroline. Pay attention, get some professional advice on how to handle this with Meg, find out about getting her some help before the problem gets bigger. She wanted to be there for her stepdaughter, and now, it seemed, Meg might finally be letting her in a little bit. But where was she?

  Langley shrugged and rose from behind the dressing table, turning to leave the room. “Oh, I almost forgot.” She opened the drawer and took out the golden chain. “I found this outside the door. I’ve seen Meg wearing it. You can give it to her when she turns up.”

  Caroline took the bracelet from Langley, thinking it must have fallen off Meg’s wrist just as it had at Belinda’s party. But as she studied it, Caroline realized that the faulty clasp was still holding the bracelet together. Instead, the chain had been severed in the middle, as if it had been yanked off.

  Caroline called the police and explained her concerns. She felt her chest tighten, sensing she was being politely dismissed.

  “Sorry, ma’am. We can’t go charging out looking for every college kid who’s been missing for a couple of hours.”

  Trying not to panic, but with a feeling of dread, Caroline started to walk toward the inn. She was at the threshold of the building when her cell phone rang.

  “Thank God, it’s you,” she said.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” asked Nick.

  “It’s Meg. I’m worried something has happened to her.” Caroline explained how Meg hadn’t shown up for her play duties and told him about the torn bracelet.

  “I don’t think we should get hysterical, Sunshine.”

  “I’m not hysterical, Nick. I’m telling you. I really think something is wrong. I just feel it.”

  The sound on the phone dropped out, and Caroline heard the familiar noise that signaled her battery was running low. Then the connection went dead.

  Nick hung up the phone and paced the room. What if Caroline was right in her suspicions? What if Meg was in danger? Or worse yet, what if something had already happened?

  If his daughter was really in trouble, he had a duty to do anything it took to protect her. Should he tell Caroline his secret and risk ruining their marriage?

  This was what they meant, he thought, about being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

  Caroline turned on the television in her room and connected her cell phone to the charger. Not wanting to undress, she went into the bathroom to splash some water on her face. Then she heard her phone beep twice instead of ringing. Caroline held up the screen, which confirmed she was getting a text message from Meg.

  IM OK. NEED U @ COSTUME SHOP. BRING TOTE.

  That’s doable, thought Caroline with relief at finally hearing from her stepdaughter. She grabbed Meg’s tote bag and headed back to the theater.

  As she walked briskly down the deserted sidewalk, she thought of calling Nick to tell him that Meg was all right, but she remembered she had left her phone in the charger. Besides, he hadn’t seemed all that concerned. That had annoyed Caroline, though now it appeared that he’d been right.

  No, the call to Nick could wait until she and Meg were together. His daughter could call him herself.

  “Please, don’t pull my stepmother into this,” Meg pleaded. “She’s no threat to you. She doesn’t suspect you of anything. There’s no reason to get her involved. You just want the script. You don’t want her.”

  The killer considered the young woman’s words. Meg could be right. At this point, Caroline Enright wasn’t really a danger. And though, as a personal matter, it was inconsequential if Caroline lived or died, from a practical point of view, it would better to avoid another murder. There had been too many this week, none of them planned in advance. All of them were decided on in minutes; all of them were executed with the instruments available. A car, a letter opener, a silk tie. The killer was proud of the ability to act on impulse and to do, decisively, what needed to be done.

  Of course, Daniel’s death two years ago was a different matter altogether. That one had taken real deceit and manipulation. The exhilaration of getting away with that had lasted a long, long time.

  But Meg must have realized that she herself was going to have to be eliminated because she knew too much. That meant she might try something desperate.

  “Tell you what,” said the killer. “We’ll both go to meet Caroline. You get the script from her and then send her packing. I’m going to be right there listening to both of you. If you don’t do exactly as I tell you, Caroline is going to die.”

  “Meg?” called Caroline as she came to the door of the darkened costume shop. She felt for the switch on the wall. The light revealed mannequins, professional irons, and cutting tables, but no Meg.

  Caroline placed Meg’s tote bag on top of one of the tables. In the few moments she waited for her
stepdaughter, she looked at the script again.

  The killer stood at the back of the partially opened closet, holding a pair of scissors grabbed from the sewing supplies, listening to every word.

  “There you are.” Caroline walked over to Meg and put her arms around her stepdaughter as she entered the room. “Where have you been?”

  “I was with a friend,” Meg answered dully, pulling herself from Caroline’s embrace.

  “But you didn’t show up for your job tonight, Meg.”

  “That’s not the end of the world,” said Meg.

  “That’s not how Langley sees it. She’s pretty irate.”

  “That’s not the end of the world, either,” said Meg.

  Caroline studied Meg’s face. Something wasn’t right. Was she stoned? “Langley thinks you might have been getting high.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “You don’t want to ruin your apprenticeship, Meg.”

  “I know, Caroline. I know.” Meg sighed with exasperation. “I’m tired now. Just give me my bag and I’ll talk to you tomorrow, all right?”

  As she handed over the tote bag, Caroline felt hurt and disappointed by Meg’s attitude. They were right back where they’d started from.

  “Well, will you please call your father and let him know you’re okay?” she asked.

  “I’ll call Dad later, Caroline. When I get back to my room.”

  “I’ll walk you back,” Caroline offered.

  “No, thanks. I’m going to see if I can at least clean up the dressing room before I leave.”

  “All right, Meg, if that’s the way you want it.” Caroline began to walk away. She stopped and turned at the door. “Oh, did you realize your bracelet was missing again? Langley found it lying in the hallway outside the dressing room.”

  “No big deal,” said Meg. “It’s just a bracelet.”

  Caroline walked out, shaking her head.

  The cell phone rang in Caroline’s room at the inn, finally switching to voice mail.

  “Hi. It’s me. Maybe it’s better I’m not getting you, so you can listen to this message and have some time to digest what I’m going to tell you, Sunshine. I might be making a big mistake telling you this, because the mistake I made was two years ago. I’m not proud of it, and I’ve kept quiet about it for many reasons.”

  Nick’s voice trembled. “But if Meg could be in danger, I have to tell you what I know, what I saw.

  “You’ve been asking me about the party the night that Daniel Sterling died. I’ve evaded your questions, telling you it was because I didn’t want to be reminded of the summer before Maggie died. That was true. But there was more to it, Sunshine. I knew more than I ever told the police. I never told them because I didn’t want to hurt anyone—not Maggie, then; or you or Meg, now.”

  His voice broke.

  “The night Daniel Sterling died, I was at Curtains Up, not just at the party but later, after everyone went to bed. I was leaving in the middle of the night when I saw Victoria walking up from the road, back to the house. Obviously, she hadn’t been in bed all night, alone, while Daniel went for that ride to cool off that she told the police about.

  “I’ve always suspected that she had something to do with Daniel’s death, but I couldn’t say anything because then I would have had to explain what I was doing leaving Belinda’s in the middle of the night.

  “I know it’s a lot to digest, Caroline. And I promise I’ll try to explain it to you.

  “But now, with all that’s been happening, I just can’t keep this to myself anymore, especially if Victoria Sterling could have something to do with Belinda’s disappearance and now that you tell me Meg is missing, too.”

  Nick hung up the phone, knowing there was no going back now. In a way, it was a relief, unburdening himself of the shameful secret he had lived with for the past two years.

  He’d held himself back from confessing to Maggie before she died, knowing that, while it might have made him feel lighter, he’d only have been hurting her. He’d strayed. Just once. But the effect of that one night was far-reaching.

  He could have explained that he’d been celebrating how well the reading of his screenplay had gone, that he’d ended up drinking too much, how radiant Belinda was that night. But Maggie didn’t need to hear all that. She was already experiencing searing physical pain and dealing with the knowledge that she wasn’t going to get better. How could he add the emotional pain of betrayal and infidelity to that?

  As he went to his computer to check airline schedules for a possible flight back to the East Coast, Nick was well aware he had made a mistake. He wished he could take it back, but he couldn’t change what had happened with Belinda. Still, if having been at Belinda’s that night, and having seen Victoria, enabled him to save his daughter tonight, maybe some good would have come out of something bad.

  He prayed that would be the case, and that his future with Caroline wouldn’t be ruined by his past.

  C H A P T E R

  134

  It was eleven o’clock when Caroline walked back into the lobby of the Warrenstown Inn. With disappointment, she saw Constance Young standing at the front desk. Well, that takes care of that, thought Caroline. She knew she was losing her chance to report the story—her story—now that Constance was here.

  “How was your ride up?” asked Caroline.

  “I’m exhausted.” Constance frowned. “I should have been in bed, asleep, three hours ago.”

  Caroline waited while Constance finished signing in and then walked with the KEY to America cohost to the elevator.

  “So what’s going on up here?” Constance asked. “Any news on Belinda Winthrop?”

  Caroline shook her head. “They still haven’t found her, but I heard they’re bringing in a canine unit tomorrow.”

  Belinda strained to read the luminescent numbers on the face of her watch. Was it eleven o’clock in the morning or night?

  It must be night, she thought. The mother bobcat was still scratching somewhere above her.

  Caroline took her cell phone from the charger to call Meg again. She didn’t care if her stepdaughter was going to be exasperated with her. She just wanted to know that Meg was safely in her dorm room.

  As she glanced at the tiny screen, Caroline could see that she had a message waiting. She called her voice mail and played it back, concerned at first, as she listened to the upset in Nick’s voice. Then, as she digested what his words meant, she closed her eyes as if that would shut out the pain as they played back in her mind.

  “The mistake I made was two years ago….

  “I’ve evaded your questions….

  “I couldn’t say anything because then I would have had to explain what I was doing leaving Belinda’s in the middle of the night.”

  Caroline thought back to two nights before, and Nick’s crestfallen look when Belinda had said she hadn’t connected Meg as his daughter despite the McGregor name. Later, at the party, Belinda had been momentarily flustered when Nick had commented that he was having almost as much fun as the last time he’d been at Curtains Up—two years before.

  The night he’d slept with Belinda Winthrop.

  Caroline sat on the edge of the bed, trying to focus her thoughts. Nick had been unfaithful to Maggie. He could be unfaithful to her. He had lied to his first wife. He could be lying to her. But even as disillusionment, hurt, and anger gripped her, Caroline knew this wasn’t the time to analyze their relationship or even begin to decide what she was going to do with this gut-wrenching information. Unless Nick actually wanted to try to destroy their marriage, he would have no reason to make up this story about Victoria Sterling.

  Nick had seen Victoria walking up the driveway at Curtains Up on the night Daniel Sterling was thought to have been by himself when he suffered a fatal accident. Victoria had lied to the police about that.

  The two apprentices had died in another car accident. At least, it looked like an accident. What if it wasn’t?

  Could Victoria
Sterling actually have had something to do with that? She was a renowned playwright at the top of her game. She was a likely candidate for a Pulitzer Prize.

  Caroline’s thoughts turned to the script she’d been looking at in the costume shop just a little while ago. Everything had been reversed. Valerie’s lines were marked for Davis, Davis’s lines for Valerie. Caroline had written the confusion off to typographical errors. But what if it wasn’t? What if there had been another version of Devil in the Details? What if the play that was being acted out on the Warrenstown Summer Playhouse stage was not the one that had been written originally?

  Caroline’s mind sped back to the night of the party at Curtains Up, when Belinda had asked Meg to take the script from her. She had just come from Remington’s carriage house. Was that why Remington’s portrait of Belinda was so disturbing and so different from the role she seemed to be playing on the stage? Had he worked from the wrong copy of the play? An earlier version perhaps, a version in which the wife was the sociopath and the husband the victim? A version that Victoria Sterling had not written?

  If Belinda had figured out that there was another version of the play, would Victoria have felt she had to get rid of her?

  And why would Meg have just said that losing her bracelet was no big deal? She treasured that bracelet. Was she saying something so outrageous as a way of signaling something was wrong?

  Suddenly, it was crucial that she get in touch with Meg. Caroline pushed the buttons, but no one answered Meg’s cell phone.

  Her mouth was cotton dry; the gag pushed against the back of her throat. As she tried not to cough, Meg wished she had shouted out in the costume shop. She should have called to Caroline. They could have taken their chances against the deranged, chain-smoking woman who stared at her now. Meg could feel a bead of perspiration dripping down her side as she listened to the latest declaration.