by Mary Bowers
“Sorry,” Ed said to Teddy. “But you know it had to be done.”
Teddy shot him a mutinous glare, saying, “I got a bad feeling about this.”
“Interesting,” Ed said, giving the bridge of his glasses a push and looking unconcerned. “A premonition. I’ll make a careful note of it.”
“Where do you want me?” Arielle asked.
Lily turned back to her sketches and notes for the current episode and then told her, “Teddy and Ed will start without you, but eventually you’re going to be here.” She pointed to a sketch. “We’ll call you when it’s time. You’re going to have to do a candid interview that we can splice in later, explaining who you are and how you got involved with the teacup, how you were feeling during the actual investigation – you know the drill; you’ve seen reality shows. But that’ll be after the action sequences. Then we’ll light up the room and have you do a sit-down. You’ll have a chance to adjust your make-up before that,” she added smoothly.
“Is something wrong with my make-up?”
“It’s fine, fine, don’t worry about it. We’ll be shooting in the dark, and,” she said, giving Arielle a doubtful look, “it’s good-to-go for that. Afterwards we’ll adjust the lighting and, you know, fix it.”
“What do you mean?”
But we were on the move, and leaving Arielle with her confidence punctured, Lily gave her notes a quick glance and followed the men into the parlor.
“Coming?” I said to Arielle. We were the last ones out of the kitchen.
“Is something wrong with my make-up, Taylor?”
“You look beautiful,” I said, “come on.”
She really did look beautiful, and I really did try to convey that, but she took a little mirror out of a drawer and gave herself a quick look before she followed me out, looking worried and puzzled.
Chapter 25
We stopped before the parlor entrance as if we’d hit a wall, or in this case, a well. The parlor was effectively darkened to the point that the only light in the room, which was bearing straight down on the lavender teacup, looked almost physically hard. Innocent as ever, the teacup sat bathed in the spotlight, strangely oblivious. Blinding highlights bounced off the china surface and turned the gilding to a yellow neon, and the shadow cast by the saucer on the white bedsheet was like a cut-out, as black as the curtains on the walls.
The area where we stopped was a junction between the guest-room hallway, the kitchen, a tiny dining room and the parlor itself, so there was enough room for the little group of us not directly involved in the Haunt or Hoax? company to hover behind the scenes until we were called for. Porter, understanding that we weren’t far away, gave a hopeful little yip every now and then, but for the most part he had quieted down.
Arielle, having been the last in line, now pushed herself to the front, curious about what the pros were doing in her parlor. When she caught sight of the illuminated teacup, she shivered.
None of us in the hallway junction spoke. Only Lily was speaking in the parlor, and she kept her voice down, as if she were in church.
Then I saw Lily turn in our direction, looking for me. She was about to say something when a horrible, grating, unnaturally loud voice suddenly flooded over her, filling the room. She ducked as if she’d been hit, then angled her head to look around wildly for the source.
The voice seemed to be speaking directly from within the teacup. Everyone in the parlor shuddered away from the table. Michael wrapped his arms around me from behind, surrounding me and letting me feel his head pressed against mine. He whispered, “It’s okay,” close to my ear.
But Arielle, alone and in front of us, shrieked like a banshee.
The grinding voice from the teacup had the top notes of a woman’s timbre overwhelmed by a penetrating bass, and it sounded like something straight out of the depths of hell. At first, I couldn’t even catch what it was saying, but then I realized it was dragging, unnaturally slow. I adjusted my hearing to its pace and began to pick out carefully enunciated obscenities, and occasionally, like a mark of punctuation, the word, “Die.”
Teddy alone managed to keep his cool. “Are you getting this?” I heard him shouting. “Elliott, you’d better be getting this. It’s starting – it knew we were coming. It got the jump on us. Wyatt, fire it up!”
Bewildered, the crew fumbled about, trying to comply. Wyatt, who had been edging cautiously to the back of the table, suddenly recoiled and hit the wall. If his camera hadn’t been set on his shoulder, he would have dropped it.
As I watched, within the hard-edged halo of light above the teacup a black figure slowly formed and rose, expanding, levitating, opening two eyes that seemed to stare out of nothingness.
Behind it and to the side, Wyatt seemed to be trying to force himself into the substance of the wall to get away from it.
The grating voice was suddenly silenced, and then, into a world where all sound had been cut off, the figure with the staring eyes spoke.
“It’s a hoax,” it said. And then it grinned.
* * * * *
I couldn’t recognize Dobbs, even though I knew it must be him, until he pulled off the black watch cap and his shiny hair spilled out over his blackened face. He had dressed himself entirely in black, and until the room’s lamps were turned on, he had been invisible against the black-out curtain – all of him except for his eyes.
Even I was furious.
Everyone was screaming at him. He continued to grin, nod, make patting motions onto the air in front of him as if he expected us to pipe down, until Ed, raising his voice above all the others, called for silence.
Angry red faces turned to him, and Lily said, “You were in it, weren’t you! How could you do this to us, Ed?” Remembering Ed’s eccentricities, Lily readjusted her perceptions for a moment and told him, “This isn’t funny, Ed.”
“I agree,” he said. “It’s not funny at all. And it wasn’t set up by Dobbs and myself. It was set up by Teddy.”
Teddy denied it instantly. “Hey, I’m not the one in blackface standing behind the table holding a voice recorder.”
“He’s not holding anything,” Ed pointed out.
“Well, he has to have it somewhere.”
“No,” Ed corrected, “since obviously a voice changing device has been used, I’d have expected you to accuse him of holding one of those. Why a voice recorder, Teddy?”
Blinking and momentarily flummoxed, Teddy regrouped. “Well, it’s the first thing I thought of, naturally. A voice disguiser, then. Hell, what is that he’s holding?”
Dobbs held his hands up innocently and said, “Nothing.”
“Then how did you do it?” Lily asked, somewhat recovered and curious now.
“I didn’t do it,” Dobbs said. “Teddy did it, with this.” He lowered his hand behind the storyboard backdrop, there was a ripping sound, and Dobbs held up a small black device with pieces of black tape still stuck to it.
“There, you see?” Teddy said. “I knew he had to have some kind of device hidden back there.”
Dobbs was studying it. “We were right, Ed. He must have a remote on him. He wouldn’t have been able to activate it any other way; it was set too low, and he wouldn’t have wanted anybody to see him fooling around behind the table while they were shooting. He’d have gotten caught. Before this, I mean.”
“That was not my voice,” Teddy declared.
Dobbs was still turning the little object over. He said, “You know, I may be able to reverse-engineer the recording and get it back to Teddy’s natural voice.”
Teddy was backing up, but Lily went after him aggressively and began to slap all over the pockets of his jumpsuit. The suit was full of zippered compartments, but Lily found the slim remote in one of the front pockets that had no closure.
She held it up to his face, said, “What’s this, Teddy?” and when she didn’t get an answer, she gave it a quick look and pushed a button. Immediately, the device Dobbs was holding began to grind out that voice ag
ain, and Arielle screamed, “Stop it!” Then she ran from the room with her hands flat over her ears.
“Why, Teddy?” Lily asked him.
The voice was still grating throughout the room, and Lily was too fixated on Teddy to care, but Dobbs shut the sound off at his end. Curious, Elliott and Wyatt moved in on him to see what he had.
“Ahem, I believe I know why,” Ed said. Lily swiveled her head to look at him, still aiming the remote at Teddy like a gun. “One: an attempt to draw the show’s focus back from my more scientific angle and return it to Teddy’s original folkloric approach. Two: the perfect opportunity to rescue a damsel in distress; i.e. Arielle, when she offered herself as bait. It gave him a superb opportunity for inter-sexual bravado, the kind that is so well-suited for television entertainment. Three, and probably most important: to be manly in front of Lily, who had shown a certain level of attraction to Dobbs, over there. I think that about covers it.”
Teddy, figuratively stripped naked in front of all of us, tried to protest, still insisting the hoax had been set up by Ed and Dobbs, but nobody was buying it. As he looked around for somebody to believe him, Ed interrupted again.
“I quit,” he said.
Lily whipped around in despair. “Oh, Ed, no!”
“Naturally. I must take a stand, Lily. I’m surprised you’re surprised. Dobbs, in my room, please. Bring the recorder. I want evidence, in case Mr. Force tries to claim that I’m breaking my contract.”
“Oh, you walk out on us and I will definitely sue you for breach of contract,” Teddy thundered.
Ed turned at the junction. “Refer to the ‘In the Event of a Hoax’ clause,” he said. Then he straightened his glasses and proceeded down the hall to his bedroom, followed by Dobbs.
* * * * *
We split up into factions for a while after that. Michael, Dobbs, Ed and I crammed ourselves into Ed’s room, Arielle, presumably, was prostrate again in her own room with Bella for comfort, and the Haunt or Hoax? people stayed in the parlor, doing I-don’t-know what, but it couldn’t have been pretty.
Porter, apparently, had given up on all of us, but with what had just happened I knew it wouldn’t be long before Teddy would need his emotional support animal.
Michael had the voice recorder now, and he turned it over idly, being careful not to switch it on again. We’d all had enough of that voice. “Can you really reverse-engineer this, like you said?” he asked.
Dobbs was as insouciant as ever. “Probably not, but Teddy doesn’t know that. I just wanted to make him stop denying he’d set the whole thing up.”
“Dobbs, will you please get that stuff off your face now?” I said. I’d had enough of his camouflage. “And don’t ruin Arielle’s white towels – use paper towels or something.”
“I got everything all ready to go,” he said, hopping into the bathroom, happy to oblige. He alone seemed energized by the night’s events.
While Dobbs was messing around in the bathroom, I said, “I thought Teddy let us off the leash too easily today, Michael. He wanted as many people as possible out of the B&B so he could arrange this little surprise with nobody getting curious.”
“I still say this was mostly about the direction of the show and influencing the womenfolk,” Ed added, “but Teddy’s discomfort at having Dobbs here probably pushed him over the edge.”
“How did you figure it out?” I asked.
“Simple observation,” Ed said. “Teddy’s changed. His outsized ego has taken a few blows lately. He sees himself as a kind of puppet master to women, and yet Lily, a woman he truly desired, had dumped him. Then the show’s ratings began to slide. Finally, he was faced with the indignity of sharing more of the spotlight with me. All along, he’s viewed me as the show’s comic relief. To have me taken seriously, for me to develop a fan base that rivals his own, was a shock to him. An insult. The hoax was an act of desperation, meant to address all of those problems.
“So for me, waiting for him to perpetrate a hoax was like waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve kept a very close eye on him lately, and when I realized he was lingering in the parlor after the set-up had been finalized, I waited for him to finally leave and slipped in to take a careful look around. That’s when I found the voice recorder behind the storyboard. As long as Dobbs was here, I decided to take advantage of his peculiar skill set to deal with the hoax. We needed very little time to formulate a plan, and only an hour or so to shop for the watch cap, black tee shirt, etc., that we needed to make him disappear in the dark.”
“So that’s why you were the first one to go after Porter when he ran into the parlor,” I said. “You’d been waiting for it. You knew he’d sense it the minute Dobbs went in there. I thought that was strange, you running after him like that. Normally, you leave it to Teddy to handle Porter.”
“Exactly. I couldn’t take the risk that Teddy wouldn’t get the dog out of the room fast enough, before he could give Dobbs away. We all wanted to keep Porter away from the table with the artifact, but Teddy had reason to be suspicious of any activity in the room, and he believes Porter is psychic. He might have actually given him his head and waited to see what the dog would find.”
“Which would have been a disaster.”
“Yes indeed. Porter knows Dobbs and likes him, so he didn’t make a lot of fuss when Dobbs broke into the B&B early this morning, other than to sloppily greet him. But everyone was asleep at the time.”
“Except for me, but I was back in Arielle’s bedroom, and as long as Porter didn’t want me to let him out to go potty, I wouldn’t have worried about him moving around the B&B. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even hear him.”
“But in this case he might have led Teddy straight to Dobbs, which would have been a catastrophe. Other than that wild card, which I was prepared to deal with, our plan of attack was in motion. Ostensibly, Dobbs went to my room to stay out of the way during the shoot, but in fact, he was assuming his disguise. So far, so good, but we couldn’t risk having him walk straight from my bedroom to the parlor, no matter how stealthily. He might have been seen, and even if he wasn’t, Porter would have run to him, drawing attention. So I made sure the front door was unlocked before I went into the kitchen for the meeting.
“The plan was for Dobbs to go out my bedroom window and come in through the front door, locking it behind him. Then, knowing Porter would understand we were about to do another episode and be hyper-alert, I watched him carefully until he heard Dobbs coming in and made sure I was the first one to run after him. I got to him fast, then dragged him back to the kitchen and suggested he be excluded from this investigation, since the object under study was fragile. Of course, the real reason was he would have gone straight behind the table to Dobbs and given him away.”
“How did Teddy hope to get away with the hoax?” Michael asked.
Dobbs was back with us now, still kind of gray but perky as ever. “Oh, he would have gotten away with it. It took a pretty sharp eye to see the device even during the daytime, the way Teddy attached it.”
“I walked behind that table myself,” I said suddenly. “Remember, Michael? It was when we came in from our walk to Darrien’s house. Teddy must have already had it set up by then. Granted, I was concentrating on the teacup, but I walked all around the table and never noticed the recorder.”
“Nobody who wasn’t actually looking for it would have seen it,” Dobbs said. “The room had been blackened, the back of the storyboard had been painted black, he used black electrical tape and the recorder is black. He placed it low, in the space between the back of the table and the wall, so it would be directly behind the teacup, in a place where nobody would notice it in a darkened room. That’s why I realized he must have a remote on him. The recorder was taped to a spot where he wouldn’t have been able to reach it. Naturally, it would have been better if he was nowhere near the table when the voice suddenly came out of the teacup. After they’d had a successful shoot, he would have pocketed the recorder quietly, taking the elect
rical tape with it, erased the recording and nobody would have been the wiser. It was actually pretty clever. For Teddy.”
“And when the voice started up all by itself, prematurely,” Michael said, “Teddy probably figured he’d accidentally pressed the button on the remote somehow and went straight into his act. Only when Dobbs began to rise up out of the ether would he have begun to suspect he’d been busted.”
Lily suddenly came into the room as if propelled by flames, shut the door behind her and leaned back against it.
She began to use unladylike language, just sort of letting it out, using interesting, male-oriented adjectives.
When she finally stopped, I said, “Feel better now?”
She went across the room and flounced down on top of the steamer trunk. “No, dammit! And I was actually starting to fall for him again. I can’t believe it! Talk about needing a wake-up call.”
“Well, you got it the hard way,” I said. “I’m sorry it had to happen like that.”
“If it means anything to you,” Ed told her. “I never thought you were part of this.”
“Me neither,” Dobbs said.
“Thanks, guys, but it’s going to be a while before I manage to get over this. Even having separate bedrooms worked to his advantage. He must have brought his ‘toy box’ along – his collection of little electronic gadgets he likes to play around with. Things like that,” she added, indicating the voice recorder. “And his voice disguiser. He was driving us all crazy with it when he first got it, but that was last year. I’d forgotten all about it.”
“You don’t think that shows premeditation?” I asked cautiously.
She considered. “Not necessarily. Anyway, what difference does it make now? We’re finished. Haunt or Hoax? is finished. Teddy is out there trying to convince anybody who’ll listen that the show will be just as good – better – without Ed, but he’s dreaming. I need to forget about Teddy and get out there and look for another job.” She lifted her troubled face and looked at Ed. “Are you going to expose him? Post this on the Internet?”