by Lisa Jackson
“Yeah. You might want to call Laurent. She knows more about this than I do.”
“I will, but in the meantime, I need a favor.”
“Another one?”
“I’ll buy you a beer.”
“You bet your ass, you will.”
“I’ll buy you a six-pack,” Jay amended, hearing Sonny’s affront.
“Shoot.”
“Can you check if anyone who works at All Saints owns a dark-colored van?”
“Anyone at the college?”
“I’ll e-mail you a list of names.”
“You can’t check this out yourself?”
“I need this yesterday. I was hoping you could help me out. And I’ll need to see if any of them has a criminal record. A deep probe.”
“Might take a while.”
“Put a rush on it, we’re looking at a half-rack.”
He laughed hard, a smoker’s laugh that ended in a coughing fit. “For that much beer, I’ll do it. Let you know what I find. Probably tomorrow on the DMV records, the other as soon as I get the info.”
“Thanks.”
“And I want real beer, you hear me? None of that lite shit.”
“Real beer,” Jay promised.
“Gotta go. Another call comin’ in and it is Sunday night. You know, I do have a life.” Crawley clicked off and Jay let his mind catalogue this new information.
A chill slid through his soul. A severed arm with no blood. None whatsoever. Had it been drained and digested by the alligator, or had something else happened to it, something unworldly? As a man of science he didn’t believe for a second that there were vampires walking this earth, but if Kristi was right, there was a cult nearby with true believers and who knew what they were up to.
Of course, the severed arm might belong to someone other than the girls missing from All Saints.
But he doubted it.
Sliding the truck into gear, he dialed Kristi to give her the news, but her phone went directly to voice mail. “Hey, it’s me. Give me a call,” he said, then hung up, a feeling of restlessness overtaking him. He should never have let her out of his sight. Things were happening too fast. He needed to tell Crawley or Laurent or someone what the hell was going on at All Saints.
Kristi would be pissed, but so what?
He ground his teeth together. He should have blown off his meeting with Hollister and gone with Kristi to the damned play. But it was too late now.
Glancing at his phone, he willed it to ring. “Come on, Kris. Call,” he said. But the phone remained silent, and as he drove toward the college his restlessness and worry only increased.
In the women’s room at the student union, Kristi slid the gold necklace around her neck and wondered if she was making the worst mistake of her life. Beneath the harsh fluorescent bulbs the little vial gleamed, its dark contents looking nearly black.
It felt strange.
Outré.
Almost evil.
With a sound of annoyance she stuffed the necklace beneath her sweater so that the tiny glass pressed against her skin. It felt cold, surprisingly so, for its small size.
Adding a bit of gloss to her lips, she walked purposely toward the far side of campus, where she joined a crowd of students and faculty members heading to the brick building housing the English Department and a small auditorium not far from Wagner House. Lights glowed around the south entrance and a white sign painted with black letters proclaimed “Play tonight: Everyman.”
The quintessential morality play, Kristi thought as she spied the girl named Ophelia who called herself “O” and also wore a vial of her own blood.
Perfect.
O was trying to buy a ticket from a girl seated behind a long table. Some kind of medieval-sounding pipe music filled the antechamber, and the ticket taker, dressed all in black, seemed to have trouble making both change and eye contact. Her black hair, scraped back and showing light brown roots, was in stark contrast to the thick white makeup covering her face.
“The play’s already sold out?” O demanded, glaring down at the girl in charge of the till.
“Yes…I mean, I don’t know…. Just a second.”
“This is required for my class!” O wasn’t about to be put off. “I have to get inside.”
“I know! Everyone’s saying the same thing.” The flustered girl caught sight of Father Mathias, who was hovering near the curtained entry to the theater. Clad in a black cassock that was probably all the rage for clerics in the 1400s, he pulled at one sleeve, the one covering a bit of barely visible bandage.
“Father Mathias? Could you help me a second, please?”
“What is it, Angel?” he asked, and Kristi wondered if Angel was really the girl’s name. Or did it have something to do with the play? Or, worse yet, was it Father Mathias’s own pet name for the flustered girl?
“Do you know how many seats we have left?”
“A few more,” he said softly. Patiently. Despite the girl’s discomfiture. “We’re setting up some extra folding chairs.” He eyed the gathering crowd. “I was afraid of this,” he said under his breath. Then, in a louder voice announced, “Thank you all for attending. Unfortunately the crowd is greater than we anticipated.”
There was a jostling behind Kristi, and one guy said, “Are you kiddin’ me?”
“The auditorium has a maximum seating capacity according to the fire marshall and we’re at capacity.”
“What?” A girl behind Kristi was beside herself. “I’m supposed to write a paper on this production!”
“Hey, what’s the deal?” another shouted.
Father Mathias lifted his hands and lowered them as he said, “Please, everyone, accept my apologies. We can only sell ten more seats tonight, but we’re planning a repeat performance tomorrow, or possibly Friday, whenever the auditorium is available again and the actors are able to perform, so you’ll be able to see the play.”
“Tomorrow? What the fu—?”
“I work Monday nights,” another voice protested.
“This is bullshit,” an angry boy said.
“Please, please.” Father Mathias was adamant. “I’m sure we can work something out. We’re recording, and if you can’t see the live performance, it will be available in the drama department. The next performance will be posted on the campus Web site as soon as I can get things organized. Thank you, all!”
He slipped away then, leaving the hapless Angel to handle the unhappy throng. O managed to get a ticket and Kristi, too, was one of the last lucky attendees who, for five bucks, received a thin, slick playbill and entrance ticket. She walked into a small anteroom where a person actually went through the contents of her purse, as if she were attending a rock concert and bringing in contraband. “We ask that you leave your cell phone with us,” the attendant said.
“Why?”
“The problems, you wouldn’t believe.” She handed Kristi a colored claim ticket and a pen.
“It’s already turned off.”
“It’s the rules. You have to leave it. Write down your name and a land-line or e-mail address where you can be reached, just in case there’s a mix-up.”
Kristi did not like giving up the phone, but she didn’t have much of a choice if she wanted to get inside. She filled out the information, kept one half of the claim ticket and, surprised that her canister of mace wasn’t confiscated, grabbed her purse and hurried inside, where the temperature seemed to rise twenty degrees. People were jam-packed into the rows of auditorium chairs, but she managed to find a folding chair angled into a side aisle and next to O, who was already positioning her purse near her feet, her eyes fixed on the stage. Faded velvet curtains, once a deep maroon color, were drawn shut, and overhead there were minimal lights trained on the stage. The auditorium held about fifty people at capacity—tonight closer to sixty-five. The heater was working overtime and the damned Renaissance music permeated everything, loud over the whisper and crush of the crowd.
A thirty-something man sitting in
front of Kristi had splashed on too much aftershave, possibly to cover the scent of marijuana that clung to him. The Old Spice trick hadn’t worked; it had only made the cloying odor more noticeable.
Feedback screamed through the auditorium for a second, then suddenly all was quiet. Kristi looked around and saw familiar faces, people who were also in her English block. Near the back of the room Hiram Calloway was studiously reading his program. He was alone, it appeared, and she wondered if he’d sold her out, given someone a key to her place, or if he was the one who had been videotaping her unit. She flushed at the thought and shot daggers at him with her eyes. As if he felt her gaze, he glanced up, caught sight of her, then buried his nose quickly in his playbill again.
She remembered chasing the guy she’d seen at her apartment and Hiram just didn’t seem right. He was a little doughy, like an ex-football player gone to seed, and she was an athlete, had always been fast. If she hadn’t been a swimmer, she’d probably have been a track star, so surely she could have caught him as she chased him into the night.
Adrenaline could have spurred him on. Fear of getting caught. If so, it was a wonder he didn’t have a heart attack. Or, maybe it hadn’t been him at all. But the only other person with the key was Irene Calloway, and she was close to using a cane. Surely Kristi could have run her to ground.
Then who?
She stared at Hiram, who didn’t dare send a glance her way. Loser, Kristi thought, and let her gaze drift around the room. She spied Grace near the front of the room. But no Lucretia. No Ariel. She checked her program, thinking Ariel might be in the play, but Ariel was neither listed as a performer nor anyone who worked behind the scenes. A nod was given to Dr. Croft, as head of the English Department, and to Father Mathias, of course, along with Dr. Grotto, who was listed as “an advisor,” whatever the hell that meant. Zena Regent, the next Meryl Streep, was listed as playing the part of Good Deeds, while Robert Manning, an African-American student who was in a few of Kristi’s classes, was the lead. Gertrude Sykes was listed as Death. And at the bottom of the back page mention was given to Mai Kwan, who had designed the playbill and helped with “advertising and press releases.”
Mai had never mentioned that she was connected to the drama department, but then Kristi had never asked too much about her classes or outside interests. Kristi knew little about the girl other than that she was nosy, a journalism student, had been acquainted with Tara Atwater, and dreaded doing laundry in the basement.
Now, Mai, too, was connected to the drama department and therefore Father Mathias and his obsession with morality plays…the plays all the missing girls had attended.
The houselights blinked, and then, within a few minutes, went down altogether. In the ensuing hush, a spotlight appeared and Father Mathias began the introduction.
Kristi had never seen the play before but had read it, or part of it, in high school. The gist of it was that Everyman, symbolizing all men and women on earth, was too caught up in worldly goods and had lost his soul. When called upon by Death, Everyman had nothing. He confronts other characters including Good Deeds, Knowledge, Confession, and more in his quest to take someone with him to the afterlife.
What interested Kristi was not so much the play itself, but the actors who represented the roles. She recognized Lucretia’s friend Trudie, listed as Gertrude in the playbill, as Death. Zena, of course, was emoting all over the stage, and some of the other characters looked familiar, as if she’d seen them in class but couldn’t quite put a finger on their names. One of the characters, Angel, was indeed played, albeit unconvincingly, by the girl who had sold tickets. The audience was also filled with students in some of Kristi’s English classes, and she thought for a fleeting moment that she caught a glimpse of Georgia Clovis lurking in the alcove of a side exit.
What would she be doing here?
Kristi’s eyes narrowed on other attendees. A number of her teachers had shown up as well, a regular Who’s Who of the English Department. Dr. Natalie Croft, head of the department, was seated next to both a man Kristi didn’t recognize and Dr. Preston, who still looked as if he were ready to catch the next big wave. He, in turn, was seated next to Professor Senegal, Kristi’s journalism instructor.
Didn’t these people have lives?
Or was this a command performance?
In the dark, she pulled on the chain around her neck, lifting it upward so that the vial was now on the outside of her sweater. It was still partially hidden by her jacket, but when the houselights went up, she planned to talk to a few people and see if anyone commented or noticed. The play went on, with only minimal flubbing of lines, and the guy in front of her who reeked of musk and weed started to snore. His head was bent forward and the woman next to him jabbed him in the side.
He snorted himself awake, sounding like a ripsaw, and the woman shushed him but good.
Kristi sat on the edge of her seat. Nervously she waited, and when at last the play was over and the cast had come out for a group bow, she was ready. As the applause died down and the lights went up, she stepped around the snorer and caught up with O as she filed out.
“You’re O, right?” Kristi said, as if she’d just seen her that second. “I think we have a class together.”
O rolled one bored eye at her. “Which one?”
“Maybe Shakespeare…or…Grotto’s vampire class.”
“Yeah. Well, maybe.”
“I’m looking for a study partner.”
“I’m not.”
“Do you know anyone who is?”
O turned to face Kristi as they reached the doorway to the anteroom. “Do I look like a fuckin’ counselor?” she demanded. Then her gaze landed on the vial at Kristi’s neck. “What the hell are you doing?” she said, blanching. “Hide that thing.”
“Why?”
“Why?” O repeated. Her eyes narrowed. “You are part of…” At that moment Father Mathias began heading their way and O widened her eyes in silent appeal.
Kristi quickly tucked the vial under her shirt again.
“Enjoy tonight’s performance?” the priest asked.
“Immensely,” O said, though it was an obvious act.
“Good, good!”
“Father Mathias, congratulations!” Natalie Croft made her way through the crowd. She was beaming at the priest. “Job well done,” she said, though Kristi disagreed. No one in the cast of tonight’s performance was going to make any Academy Award thank you speeches anytime soon, or probably in Dr. Croft’s lifetime.
“Everyman is my favorite of all the morality plays, though I’m looking forward to exploring others as well as the mysteries and miracles. I hope you return. Oh, and for those of you who want another viewing, we’ll be adding another performance tomorrow night. Thank you.”
Father Mathias exited the back of the theater as the houselights went up and everyone began picking up their belongings. O was out the door in a flash and Kristi tried to follow her, but got caught in the crush and held up retrieving her cell phone, which was, as promised, ready and waiting for her. She handed another attendant, a girl who had played Knowledge in the play, her claim ticket and was given her phone without any eye contact. Kristi then made her way out the door and into the night, hoping for a glimpse of O. But the girl was gone. As were the others she’d recognized in the audience.
Great, she thought, slinging the strap of her purse over her shoulder. All the girls who had been abducted had attended Father Mathias’s plays, so she’d hoped she’d find some connection, but she was at a loss. Standing in the dark, buffeted by the cold wind, she watched as other attendees left the theater, some heading to the parking lot, others toward the heart of campus. The professors who had shown up had all left, beelining out of the theater as if they couldn’t escape fast enough.
The few stragglers who’d stopped to talk or smoke or just hang out weren’t people she knew. So what about the people in the play? Didn’t she suspect they might all somehow be connected?
Face it,
she thought, discouraged, you should leave being a detective to your father.
On the way back to her car, she walked past Wagner House. Dark, angular and looming, it looked even more forbidding at night, with only the faintest of light coming from the windows. She checked the gate again, and of course it was locked. Then she noticed a flicker, just the tiniest bit of light, coming from a basement window.
Was she imagining it?
When she looked again, the glimmer of light was gone.
Had it been a reflection? A figment of her imagination?
Flash!
She saw another bluish light through the dirty glass. It too disappeared quickly.
Storage area, my ass, she thought. Who would be sorting through old crates at night? And why had Father Mathias been down there the other day? He really hadn’t explained himself, except to say that he’d seen evidence of rats, but maybe that was just an excuse to make her stay away. Well, it damned well wasn’t working. She’d been beaten and chained, dealt with snarling, vicious dogs, demented psychos, lost her mother and her biological father, and nearly died. A few rats were nothing.
Skirting the building, she tested the back gate and found it locked as well. Screw it. She was going inside. Climbing the wrought iron fence was a simple matter and she knew there were no cameras. Hadn’t Georgia Clovis admitted as much?
Though the fence itself was comprised of black wrought iron spikes, the top of the gate was decorated in scrollwork. Kristi pulled herself to the top of it and vaulted over, landing in a crouch on the inside brick walk. Glancing around to make sure she wasn’t noticed, she hurried up the steps of the porch and tried the back door.
Locked solid.
Damn. She’d never had any luck with the credit card trick that seemed to work so effectively in the movies, and she had nothing with which to pick a lock.
So now what?
A window?
She tried all of the windows on the porch but they didn’t budge, nor could she reach any from the ground. Maybe she could somehow squeeze through a basement window? She walked around the huge Gothic house, but not one window she reached, nor the front door, would budge. Unless she came back with a crowbar, she was effectively locked out.