“Now Echo and I have something else in common,” Zara says when she can breathe again.
“What’s that?” Eli asks.
“A love scene.”
Eli laughs, which is a good thing, and then there are more very good things, and a well-earned collapse. They are a pile of sheets and skin, a collection of warmly lit curves and dips of shadow.
Zara turns on her side to look at Eli. She tries to picture them like this after Echo and Ariston closes. When this forever-long winter ends. She touches Eli’s bare shoulder and gets a flash of that same curve lit up by the sun. Of Eli’s eyes half-closed against springtime brightness, her smile flung wider than a screen door. The two of them sitting cross-legged on a scratchy blanket in some park Zara doesn’t even know the name of yet. She can see it — how she’ll fall in love with every tree. Zara can imagine them together, a season from now, and a year, and longer than that, stretching out into the unknowable.
That’s the scariest thing yet. How good it could be.
Preview night is on a Friday, which means that Midtown is even more crowded than usual. There are thousands of people on the sidewalks. There are countless snowflakes spinning above Zara’s head.
She’s supposed to duck into the alley next to the Aurelia. Actors enter the theater through the stage door. That’s part of the magic. Zara should slip in unseen, as if she doesn’t exist until the moment she appears onstage.
Tonight, she breaks the rules. She needs to see the Aurelia, to feel like the theater is on her side. Zara lingers on the sidewalk in front of the wide set of glass doors. The lamps are pricked with points of light, the lobby as red and alive as a beating heart.
She passes through the plush and gilt into the grit and sweat and chaos of backstage. The rush of chorus members and stagehands makes her feel like she’s trapped in a fast-moving stream.
She wades into the dressing room. There are chorus members everywhere, so focused on their reflections that it wouldn’t surprise Zara if they missed a murder happening right behind them. At the far end of the makeup table, Kestrel puts the final touches on her lipstick, a purple shade that makes her look like she belongs in a very glamorous morgue.
Zara stares at Kestrel. She’s lived in close proximity to this girl for nearly two months. Zara wants to believe that if Kestrel was really dangerous, she would know it. But Kestrel is a good actress. Good enough to be Echo.
“Could you come help me with something?” Zara asks.
Kestrel’s head snaps in her direction. “Your hair?” she asks, staring at the hanging mess that should be pinned up by now.
Zara doesn’t answer. She waits for Kestrel to join her in the little dressing room. As soon as the door clicks shut, she thrusts her phone into Kestrel’s hands. Zara takes off her coat as Kestrel studies the picture, squinting her cat-eye makeup into two long, dark lines. “Is that my apartment?” Her voice tilts upward, toward panic. “What’s going on, Zara?”
“That’s what I wanted to ask. I found that when I came home last night.” She takes the phone back and waits to see what Kestrel will say next.
“Do you think I did this?” Kestrel sounds bewildered. “Why would I mess up my apartment? Why would I even go into that room when you’re not there?”
A stray punch of guilt hits Zara. She definitely went in Kestrel’s room without her permission. “Nobody broke into the apartment, so either you did this or it was someone you let in.”
Kestrel crosses her wire-thin arms. Zara takes stock of all the throwable things in the room. “Was it Barrett?”
Kestrel is shaking her bright-red hair. The bones in her chest rise and rise as she inhales. “Zara, I swear on my life. I had nothing to do with this.” She doesn’t deny that Barrett was in the apartment, though.
Kestrel’s breathing goes from bad to worse. Soon she is gasping for air. “Xanax,” she says. “My bag.”
Zara flashes through the outer dressing room and grabs the leather purse from under Kestrel’s makeup station. When she makes it back to the little room, she takes out the prescription vial and spills tiny blue ovals all over the makeup table. She plucks one up between her thumb and forefinger and holds it out to Kestrel, who swallows it with a cough.
They wait for what feels like an endless minute.
That’s when Zara starts to wonder.
She turns back to the pills. They’re all roughly the same color, the same shape. Zara holds up one pill and matches it to another. The word Xanax is on both, but only one is carved with machine-like precision. It’s like looking at a shadow that doesn’t match the person casting it.
“The night of the gala,” Zara says as if she’s watching a scene being lit one set piece at a time. Soon she’ll be able to see all of it — nothing left in the shadows. “That pill didn’t work, did it?”
Kestrel shrugs.
“Someone put fakes in here. Good fakes.” She tries to hand Kestrel a real pill, but Kestrel shakes her head.
And then the shaking spreads — to her shoulders, her hands, her entire body. “Who would do that?”
“Who would be able to?” Zara asks. The answer is right there between them, unspoken.
Someone who makes props.
Zara is worried that Kestrel will start screaming. But she does the opposite. She goes perfectly still and takes one long, careful breath. She closes her eyes and lightly places her thumb and one finger on the lids. It’s the kind of adult gesture that backfires and makes Kestrel look even younger than she is. “Barrett loves me.”
But she can’t say it with her eyes open.
“He comes on to every girl in a mile radius,” Zara says. “You must be able to see that.”
“He flirts. We both do,” she says, but she does it with the kind of delivery that Leopold hates. Flat. Lifeless. Memorized. “Barrett just wants people to like him.”
“He’s a dangerous person, Kestrel,” Zara says. The little dressing room has long been scrubbed clean, but Zara can still feel the words around her — the words that Barrett wrote on the walls.
Zara sat in here with Enna once upon a time, talking with her, listening to how she felt. Enna might have thought terrible things about herself. Maybe everyone does. But she wasn’t a ruined victim. She was imperfect and screwed up and brave. She was still fighting. She told Zara to keep fighting.
“Barrett hurt people,” Zara says.
Kestrel opens her eyes calmly, sucking in her cheeks as if she’s biting them on the inside. “You’re wrong, and he can explain this.”
And then Kestrel is moving, out of the little dressing room, flashing through the larger one and into the hallway. Zara follows. She can’t stop herself — she can’t let Kestrel accuse him alone.
She might get hurt.
They both might.
“Come back!” Zara yells, but Kestrel is quick, and she knows how to dart around the racks of costumes and the stagehands. And maybe it’s stupid or innocent, but as Zara runs, she gets a wild flash of hope. The future plays out in Zara’s head, scene by scene: Kestrel confronts Barrett, he confesses, and the curtain rises, only a few minutes late, on a triumphant Echo and Ariston.
With so much going on backstage, no one notices Zara and Kestrel moving against the tide, slipping into Storage Room Two. The huge door clicks into place behind Zara. Kestrel is only a few steps ahead of her, wading into the catastrophe of props. The space that used to feel like a sort of cathedral now just seems dusty and gray and overstuffed. There are rustling noises toward the back of the room. At first Zara thinks there must be mice.
Then the groaning starts.
“Are you all right back there?” Zara asks, thinking someone must be hurt. These things come in threes. She hears one low groan, a man’s voice, over and over. Then another joins it — higher and louder, like breathy punctuation.
Zara can feel Kestrel’s full-body flinch.
“I know you’re here,” Kestrel says, projecting so that her voice fills the space. “I know what you’r
e doing.” Her tone is sharp enough to draw blood. “You brought me here, too. Remember?”
Barrett rises up, naked, surrounded by antique umbrella stands. A crew girl with dark hair stands up next to him, tugging down her shirt, quickly urging her pants up over her hips.
“Hello, girls,” Barrett says, not trying to hide what he’s done. Not even bothering to act like he feels guilty.
Kestrel starts hurling things — pillows, old records, insults. She pitches an ashtray. It falls short, smashing on the floor. Zara pins Kestrel’s arms behind her back, as gently as she can.
“Are you kidding me?” asks the dark-haired girl, taking in Kestrel with sad eyes. “She’s a child.”
Kestrel shrieks.
With his clothes halfway on, Barrett runs through the maze of old gramophones and decorative screens. Even if she wasn’t holding Kestrel, Zara wouldn’t be able to stop him. Barrett knows every path through this room. There is the sound of a door yawning open — it bangs shut.
The dark-haired girl passes them with one hand up, shielding her face.
Kestrel melts down to her knees. Her face is lacquered, a layer of tears over the dark eyeliner and purple lipstick.
Zara kneels in front of Kestrel. They have something as good as evidence now. If Kestrel tells the truth, maybe all of this will wash clean. “Tell me everything,” Zara says. “Whatever Barrett told you. Even if it’s small.”
“How about this?” Kestrel asks with a harsh little smile that does nothing to hold back her tears. “Barrett is Leopold’s son.”
Meg sees the two girls coming out of Storage Room Two, Zara’s arm around Kestrel’s heaving shoulders. Meg sees everything in the theater.
She follows them to the dressing room, where the acrid bite of hair singed by curling irons fills the air. Meg waits as the girls dither; unlike the hair and makeup artists, who hover impatiently, Meg knows how to make herself unseen in a room. She waits patiently for Kestrel to go back to her chair, for the hair and makeup artists to do what they can with the mess that is Zara. When they emerge from Zara’s little dressing room, Meg moves quickly toward the closing door. She knocks.
“Come in!” Zara yells at top volume. It’s an amateur mistake. Shouting only showcases the tremble at the center of her voice.
Meg opens the door, putting on her best director’s personal assistant face. She is concerned, capable, here to help. Zara looks up. “Oh,” she says with relief. “I thought it would be Leopold.”
And just like that, Meg is not the director’s personal assistant. She’s an actress, a young one with an improbable starring role, waiting for Leopold to make his rounds before a performance. Meg used to live for those moments. The butterfly of her pulse, Leopold’s beautiful words. He gave her so few that when they came, it felt like the return of the sun after a long, cold season.
“The director is indisposed,” Meg says.
She left him lying in a heap on the floor of his office. There were animal sounds rising from his throat. Meg shook out a dose of Oxycontin, pressed a cool cloth to the back of his neck, and told him to count to one thousand. Sometimes, when his visions are already raging, there’s nothing else she can do.
Meg closes the door behind her, sealing them in.
Zara turns back to her little compacts of paint and powder, pretending to be focused. “Is everything all right?” Meg asks, her voice as cool as a compress. “I saw you and Kestrel coming out of the storage room. You looked upset.”
“Oh, it was nothing,” Zara says, smudging a spot of pancake at her neckline that hasn’t quite blended. “I mean, not nothing. Barrett and Kestrel were dating, and . . . she caught him cheating. I went because she wanted to confront him.”
If this is all about Kestrel, Zara shouldn’t look so pale under her makeup. So cold inside her skin. As though she’s caught at the center of a snow globe that has been violently shaken and won’t stop swirling.
“Is that all?” Meg asks. Zara cuts a look toward Meg, sharp with distrust. Meg takes a deep, supported breath, the kind that actors draw on for their performances. “I know you saw me onstage last night. It must have given you all sorts of ideas. Give me a chance to explain.” Meg doesn’t want to say these words out loud, but there’s no real way around it. Barrett has caused trouble, she can sense it, and she needs to regain Zara’s confidence. So she takes this one sentence at a time, treating her life like a story that happened to someone else. “When I was a girl, not much older than you, I left the place where I grew up, a small town in Louisiana. I came to New York and auditioned for shows. I met a charming director.”
Zara’s eyes, darkly outlined, meet Meg’s in the mirror.
“He made me believe that I was the most talented, perfect creature,” she says. The bitterness has been inside her for so long; it has grown so intense that it feels like poison. “He told me I was the most worthless girl he’d ever seen. While Leopold was building me up, he was also tearing me down. Slowly. Methodically. I didn’t see that until it was too late.”
Zara holds her arms tight across her middle. Fear is making its way through her, finding a proper home.
Good. Meg was never afraid enough.
“Whatever is happening, whatever is troubling you, I can help. That’s what I’m here for. To help the actors. That’s why I keep coming back. Not for him. We’re about to start previews, Zara, and I don’t want you to go on like this. Leopold will notice, for one thing.”
“All I wanted was to be Echo,” Zara says, wooden and scraped.
“I know,” Meg says. A bit more poison leaks out. “Echo is your dream. Our dreams have another side to them, though. We wake up. Sometimes more roughly than others.”
Zara turns around to face Meg fully. “Barrett is Leopold’s son. Did you know that? Maybe that explains why he is . . . like he is.” She holds out her phone, and Meg takes in the picture on the screen. “He did this. Last night.”
Meg is going to kill Barrett. It’s that simple. The stage manager’s hard knock sounds. “Places!” Meg opens the door just a crack; the actresses are lining up. “I need a minute,” Meg tells the stage manager. “Hold the curtain if you have to.”
The stage manager looks like she wants to dismember Meg, but that sort of anger doesn’t touch her. People who need to hurt you don’t always make a show of it. They find quiet ways.
This time when Meg closes the door, she locks it. “You know about Leopold’s visions.”
“They show him how to stage his plays,” Zara says. But the shiver in her voice makes it clear she’s not sure about anything, including the ground she’s standing on.
A strand of Zara’s light-brown hair has broken away from the rest. Meg captures it and gently tucks it back in, adding a pin from the lineup on the table. “He’s been having visions of the deaths before they happen.”
Zara blinks. “Roscoe and Enna? He saw them?”
“Leopold told me that the Aurelia’s curse made a home for itself in his mind,” Meg says dryly. “It took over his visions. They’re not just about the show anymore.” It feels good to let out a small measure of truth. Meg has been holding back so much for so long. That’s how she ends up throwing glasses at the wall.
Zara stares at their shared reflection in the mirror. “Who else did Leopold see?”
“He won’t tell me.”
When Zara speaks again, her pretty voice is in pieces. “Eli told me that people saw someone who looks like Leopold coming out of the Aurelia on the day Roscoe died. But she also said he wasn’t in the city that day. He was with Toby.”
Meg sighs. “After talking to you at the Dragon and Bottle, Toby confided in me. Leopold didn’t go on that trip to his cabin upstate. He asked Toby to lie for him. You know how . . . persuasive Leopold can be.”
Zara falls silent in a permanent sort of way.
Meg sticks a final pin in the girl’s hair and sends her to take her place.
It has to be Leopold.
Zara can’t believe she eve
r thought it was Barrett. The motivation that was missing is suddenly clear. Leopold trusts his visions. He believes in what they show him. It has to be Leopold. This version of the story finally connects Roscoe and Enna. And it doesn’t rule out Barrett’s role. Leopold could have asked him to steal the pills for Enna’s murder, replace them with fakes so Kestrel wouldn’t notice the missing ones, threaten Zara when she refused to stop asking questions.
It has to be Leopold. Zara’s whole body pulses with the knowledge. Which is a problem, because she’s onstage.
There are people out there in the dark, watching her, waiting for her to show them something glorious, but this doesn’t feel like a performance. It feels like a dream gone wrong.
She floats into the scene with Echo’s father and mother. When Carl scolds her, it feels like he’s scolding her, not Echo. She remembers Leopold giving him permission to trap her with his body, a moment that keeps coming back to trouble her. Enna’s understudy blinks at her with soft blue eyes, naive. She has no idea what’s going on in this theater.
Zara stands upstage while Echo’s parents argue. She spreads her fingers wide to keep them from shaking. When her first monologue comes, her voice starts out small, a series of nervous steps.
“I would touch without feeling,
Kiss without taste.”
When Zara leaves the stage, Leopold is there, waiting. He grabs her away from the spot by the curtains where she is supposed to wait for her next entrance. “What was that?” he asks, his accent flattened.
In that moment, trapped between the curtains and his body, she finds another key.
Echo After Echo Page 21