Death's Doorway

by Crin Claxton

  “I don’t know. She’s a novice, you said.” Frankie turned to Deirdre.

  “She’s been around the block. Well, she’s limped off in the direction of the block.” Deirdre looked at Tony doubtfully. Tony felt like a used car. “She’s not bad, considering she only discovered her powers a few months ago.”

  “Isn’t there anybody—”

  “No.” Deirdre cut Frankie off. “Nobody else. Anyway, she’s lesbian. That’s got to be in her favor.”

  “Tell that to the bigots who huddle near gay marches with their ‘not Adam and Steve’ placards,” Tony muttered.

  “You want Rose to let go, don’t you?” Deirdre sounded impatient.

  Frankie nodded.

  “Then quit stalling.” Deirdre turned to Tony. “Frankie needs her girlfriend to move on. She’s been mourning her since 1967.” Deirdre came to sit beside Tony on the sofa.

  “That is a long time.”

  Frankie pulled a comb out of her back pocket and drew it through hair glistening with hair cream. “She still thinks I was murdered.”

  “And were you?”

  “She thinks I was murdered because I told her I was being hassled by a guard.”

  “A guard?”

  Frankie sniffed. “I was inside. In prison. There was a screw who was always on my back.”

  “Screw?” Deirdre looked up from filing her nails.

  “Guard! I just said, didn’t I?” Frankie said. “I told Rose he was roughing me up and that I was worried for my safety. I made out I was more scared of him than I was. Rose was going to break up with me. I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in there without her visits.”

  “How did you die?” Tony asked.

  “Fight with another prisoner.” Frankie squared up. “She got lucky, that’s all. I took a blow to the head. Bled out inside my brain in the night.”

  “Didn’t anyone check on you?” Tony asked.

  “They don’t check on you during lockup, least they didn’t then. They just look through the peephole a couple of times in the night. It would have looked like I was sleeping.”

  “That’s sad.” Tony hated the idea of someone just slipping away.

  Frankie grimaced. “How do you know? You don’t know me. Maybe I was horrible. Maybe it was a good thing.”

  Tony wondered why Frankie was so down on herself. She talked tough but clearly had issues. “What do you need from me?”

  “Can you go see Rose? She’s still campaigning to get justice for me all these years later.”

  Tony nodded. “Of course.”

  Frankie straightened her shoulders and nodded back.

  “So how am I going to convince her you weren’t murdered?”

  “I don’t know. That’s your job, isn’t it?” Frankie pushed the comb through her hair another time, replaced it in her back pocket, and disappeared.

  Deirdre shrugged semi-apologetically and then also vanished, leaving Tony to ponder on the problem.

  *

  Jade Rogers woke in a cold sweat. A lonely voice played at the edge of her consciousness. She patted her fingers across the smooth wood panels surrounding her bed, fumbling for the light switch.

  Not sure if she had heard the voice in her dream or in real life, Jade looked round the familiar things in her houseboat bedroom. She needed to know there was no one hiding in the shadows. Her wardrobe doors and her bedroom door were all firmly shut. The giraffes, elephants, and African women carvings were in their usual places on the thick floating teak shelf opposite the bed. The photo of the Maracas lookout point in Trinidad was hanging on her wall. Her comb and her big, chunky quartz necklace were lying on top of her chest of drawers, in the same places she’d left them.

  Jade lay still, controlling her breathing to slow down her heart rate. Water slurped rhythmically. There was the occasional creak and tap from the rest of the boat, but no unusual sounds, certainly nothing mournful. Jade shivered. She tucked the duvet around her as she tried to remember exactly what it was she’d heard. Dream or not, whatever it was had left Jade anxious and disturbed. Jade felt it in the cold beads of sweat on her forehead and the gnawing feeling in her stomach.

  She sat up in bed, pulling the extra thick duvet with her, and reached for her e-reader. Unwilling to risk slipping back into a horrible dream, Jade was soon engrossed in the comforting, fictional world of Lyremouth.

  *

  Tony walked into the lighting control room of the theater in London’s West End, where she worked. She sat on her black swivel chair and powered up the lighting board.

  Beth, the deputy stage manager, came through the door as Tony was flashing through channels. Jade trotted at her heels.

  “Hey, Hot Stuff, look who’s come to see you,” Beth said, smiling broadly.

  “Hey, Jade. What’s up?” Tony said.

  “I was in the area and thought I’d come check out the show…if that’s okay, Beth?” Jade deferred to the stage manager. Beth was a stickler for rules.

  “Fine by me. Always a pleasure to see you. Jade. You know that.” Beth pulled down her black T-shirt till it stretched over her chest. Jade dipped her eyes. Tony didn’t know if either of them were consciously flirting. They were both such outrageous flirts it was possible they couldn’t help themselves.

  “No visitors in the technical or backstage areas unless by prior arrangement,” Tony muttered under her breath in an imitation of Beth’s posh, often prissy voice.

  Beth glared at Tony. “Jade’s hardly a visitor. Seeing as she’s in the Business, she’s practically a cast member,” she snapped.

  “I wish…” Jade sighed.

  “Not like that quack homeopath Miranda, always popping up in people’s dressing rooms without proper clearance,” Beth said in full prissy mode.

  Tony took a deep breath. “Maya is a herbalist, not a homeopath, and she treats cast members’ injuries in their place of work as a favor,” she said, matching Beth’s prissy and in danger of raising it to stick-up-the-butt priggish.

  Beth narrowed her eyes at Tony and then inexplicably broke into a gracious smile. “Anyway, the LD passed by earlier and left you a note.”

  “Thanks.” Tony took a folded sheet of A4 paper covered in the lighting designer’s illegible scrawl. She wished the LD would email his modifications, but he was old school and liked to scribble notes while watching a run.

  “The director’s in tonight,” Beth went on. “We may have to put in an extra rehearsal tomorrow if he doesn’t like what he sees.”

  “Okay.” A new musical meant lots of tech runs and rehearsals. They were lucky that when Cabaret came off at the end of the previous year and Little Shop of Horrors came in, the company kept most of the stage management and crew. It was tiring, but Tony was used to long hours in production week. When a West End show ran for a long time there wasn’t a lot for the lighting operators to do between shows except re-lamp and change lighting gel. It more than made up for the long days during production week.

  “Don’t forget, if anything comes up with my casting I’m resting right now,” Jade called as Beth headed for the door.

  “Got your digits on speed dial, babe,” Beth said in a voice dripping with honey as the door closed behind her.

  Jade bustled about trying to find a swivel chair she approved of. For some reason the lighting control box seemed to be where everyone dumped old chairs. Most were broken or dirty and should have been sent off to wherever old technical chairs go when they retire.

  “So, you were just ‘in the area,’ huh?” Tony teased her.

  Jade looked sheepish. “Nah. I come to see the show. Thought there might be casting agents in and I could tap them in the bar.” Jade’s day-to-day accent was RP—the standard British accent that most actors adopted. But every so many words, her natural Trinidadian voice broke through like a burst of sunlight.

  Tony shrugged. “Fair enough. Seems you’ve got Beth wrapped round your little finger.”

  Jade pursed her lips. “Yeah, but I ain’t goin
g there again. Leh me tell you. She’s very sweet and all that, but I like meh women a bit more…”

  “Manly,” Tony suggested.

  “I was going to say dykey, but, yeah, butcher than Beth anyway. Though she was hot in bed,” Jade added as an afterthought, dabbing her fingers tentatively at a brown stain on one of the chairs. “What is that?” she asked.

  “How should I know?”

  “Well, it looks like coffee or tea or…” Jade left the third possibility hanging as she pushed the stained chair away from her and swung another round for inspection.

  Tony opened the script marked with all the lighting cues and checked her communication headset was plugged in. The clock above her said five minutes to go to the Half when she should put them on. “Oh, I was going to tell you, Deirdre popped by last night with a 1960s butch.”

  Jade’s head snapped round from sniffing what was hopefully a paint stain on another chair. “Ay, ay! What she look like?”

  “White woman, green eyes, scowly. She combed her hair a lot.”

  “You real hopeless, yes! How can I drool over that description? Anyway, I glad you seeing dead people again. I need a job, I mean, we need a job.” She sat on the chair and the seat crashed down about two foot.

  “Oh yeah, I remember the thing that pumps up the seat is broken on that one.”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” Jade hissed, rubbing her bottom.

  “And I’ve also remembered, that isn’t paint.”

  Jade narrowed her eyes. “What is it?”

  “Strawberry ice cream milkshake. I was seeing if I could swivel round really fast at the same time as drinking a very thick milkshake from a bendy straw that doubled as a pair of glasses.”

  Jade looked unimpressed. She pulled a third chair toward her. Tony put her headset on and depressed the mic button. “Tony on cans,” she announced.

  “Thank you, Tony.” Beth’s crisp stage manager voice confirmed she had received Tony’s comm call. “Ladies and gentlemen of the Little Shop of Horrors company, this is your half hour call,” Beth continued.

  The air in front of the control room window went wavy before materializing into Deirdre in leopard skin leggings, high-heeled ankle boots, and a tight pink, ripped T-shirt, topped with a pink and blond wig.

  “Oh good, Sherlock Groan and Dr. Whatsit.”

  “Watson. Which would be Tony. I would be Sherlock Holmes, seeing as I is the one that actually does any detecting,” Jade said.

  “That’s about right. Anyhoo, I’ve had an idea. We need a letter from Frankie saying she made up that stuff about being in danger from the guard. You’ll have to forge one, and then pretend you found it.” Deirdre twirled a blond ringlet around a finger.

  “Easy for you to say!” Tony muttered.

  “Lighting preset state Go please,” Beth said into Tony’s headset. “Two minutes till we open the house.”

  “Can we discuss this later? The audience are about to take their seats and I have to work.” Tony switched off the overhead light in the control box and turned on the dim show lights directed onto the lighting desk and her script.

  “There’s still a letter from Frankie in her old flat. You should go get that and then you’ll have something to compare with for your forgery,” Deirdre said as loudly as if she were whispering on stage.

  “Great! Got any more impossible instructions to impart before you GO!” Tony said pointedly.

  Deirdre smiled sweetly before melting away.

  Chapter Two

  Unusually warm April sun poured out of a seamless sky. Maya was stretched out on the deck of Jade’s houseboat: a Dutch barge moored in Poplar Marina in the east of London, close to the financial heartland of Canary Wharf. She stretched lazily. A light breeze swept a fresh, river tang under her nostrils. The sparkling glass and chrome skyscrapers of Canary Wharf towered above the lines of barges and narrowboats that nestled quietly in the still, clear, green waters of the marina.

  Maya took a big, happy breath and turned her eyes to Tony, who was propped up against the white boards of the cabin. Tony had her arms tucked up behind her head and had turned her face to the sun. Her tight fitting blue T-shirt and long stone shorts reminded Maya of how Tony had looked in Provincetown the previous summer. Maya had a huge crush on her then. Maya had mixed feelings when she thought about that trip home. She’d gotten together with Tony, but it was also when her uncle had died. Maya’s stomach tightened. She still found it hard to believe her uncle had wanted to kill her. Maya moved closer to Tony, feeling a surge of love for her. Tony had been there at the right moment. As strange as they were to Maya, she was eternally grateful for Tony’s psychic abilities.

  Maya pushed the memories aside. She slipped a hand under Tony’s T-shirt and ran her fingers over her stomach and chest. Tony pulled off her sunglasses and drew Maya in for a long kiss.

  Through a sweet mist of lust, fresh spring air, and the scent of wood toasting in the sun, Maya heard Jade cough politely.

  Reluctantly, she pulled away from Tony’s delicious embrace.

  Jade put a tray laden with croissants and coffee on the deck. Enticed away from Tony by the scent of Jamaican Blue Mountain, Maya stood up. Jade pressed a steaming mug of coffee into her hands.

  “There is a bedroom downstairs, ya know, if allyuh need ya privacy,” Jade joked. Her Trinidad accent was as vibrant in her throat as the laughter was in her eyes. Jade looked gorgeous in a white vest and white denim cutoffs.

  Jade raised a glass of sparkling water. “Here’s to PI,” she said.

  Tony crinkled up her forehead. “Pie? Are we having pie? I’d rather have a croissant.”

  “Paranormal Investigators. That’s what I thought we should call ourselves.” Jade laughed.

  They were discussing Tony and Jade’s detective agency. They’d formed an official company to cope with the requests from ghosts. Jade was especially keen on making the business work as she was out of an acting job.

  “I thought we’d agreed on the Supernatural Detective Agency,” Tony said.

  “Yeah, but that’s so boring, mon. If we’re Paranormal Investigators, you can call yourself ‘Tony Carson P.I.’”

  “And why would I want to do that?”

  “Because it’s cool. And the ladies go love it.” Jade winked.

  “Really?” Tony raised an eyebrow.

  Maya shot her a warning look.

  “I have a lady,” Tony said quickly. “You’re very hot when you’re stern,” Tony muttered, grinning at Maya.

  “Remind me about that later,” Maya said, “when I can do something about it.”

  “Well, how about Paranormal Investigation Agency—PIA?” Jade said.

  “Pee-er, Jade, really, are you having a laugh?” Tony said.

  “How about the Unusual Detective Agency—UDA?” Maya suggested.

  “Oh God!” Tony groaned. “Maya, please don’t help Jade create a name out of pronounceable initials. Especially as neither of you seem to care how ridiculous the name sounds.”

  Jade laughed. “Okay, we’ll stick with the Supernatural Detective Agency for now. But you have to remember we’re both in the agency. No more running into burning buildings to save babies on your own.”

  Tony looked sad. Pelin’s neighbor had dropped a note through Tony’s letter box saying Pelin had died. “It wasn’t a burning building. More of a smoking pan on the stove. But what am I supposed to do if someone needs my help, Jade? I have to go straight away, don’t I?”

  Jade looked at her thoughtfully. “I guess it was an emergency. All the same, we need to think about some ground rules. I worry about you.”

  “Ground rules are a sensible idea,” Maya said diplomatically. She didn’t like the idea of Tony taking high risks either.

  Tony smiled over at Jade. “Okay, if it makes you happy.” She bit off a hunk of chocolate croissant and took a gulp of coffee “Now. We need to think about how we’re going to get into Frankie’s old flat. Rose still lives there. Can you believe that?” />
  Maya smiled affectionately. Tony had jumped to talking about their new case.

  “I could play the part of someone calling on her, like a salesperson,” Jade said thoughtfully.

  “That’s a great idea.” Tony sat up. “Deirdre said that Rose loves anything to do with catalogs and household goods. What if you were one of those people that sell door to door?”

  “But how could I distract her long enough to get the letter? You said it’s tucked away behind a drawer in an old desk?” Jade asked.

  “Hmm. I don’t know. I don’t want to be anywhere near the place, not if I’m going to go back and see her. I’ll have a think about that later. Meantime, shall we go over your Spotlight details? That’s why we came over.” Tony shoved the last of her croissant into her mouth, and squinted at an A4 printout of the details Jade was sending to Spotlight, the online casting catalog for actors. “My God, are you really using that photograph again?”

  Jade narrowed her eyes. “Yes, I was going to. Why?”

  Maya looked over Tony’s shoulder. The heavily contrasted black-and-white picture of Jade looked like a film noir shot. Her face was lifted from the hard shadows behind by soft backlighting.

  “Because it’s over five years old and it’s not doing you any favors. Unless you were going up for femme fatale,” Tony said.

  Jade chewed her croissant thoughtfully. “It don’t matter how old it is. I have a young face,” she said through a mouthful of crumbs. Maya was astounded by how both Jade and Tony talked with their mouths full. It didn’t seem to bother them at all that they displayed the half-chewed contents of their mouths to the rest of the world.

  “But last week when you were going up for someone late forties you said you had an old face,” Tony said.

  “I said I could play older! Jesus Christ, Tony!” Jade snapped. “And I could play femme fatale.”

  “I didn’t say you couldn’t. Incidentally, you could so play femme fatale.” Tony smiled.

  “Thank you, Tony,” Jade purred, her previous annoyance forgotten. Maya loved their relationship. Tony and Jade were tight. They’d known each other for years and had an easy, playful familiarity. They’d met on a show. Tony was a lighting technician, and Jade a musical theater actress. Tony said they were like family. Jade’s last show had finished its run early, though, so she was looking hard for a new job.