Liz Jasper - Underdead 02

by Underdead in Denial

  Into the hushed silence, Ian, dressed as Igor, listed comically through the theater doors for his next group. He halted with a wide-eyed suddenness that might have been funny under different conditions.

  “What’s going on?” Ian asked. His fake Marty Feldman accent was gone, replaced by a faint New Jersey twang.

  Ian’s dropping character jolted the crowd back to life. People turned to each other, and when they didn’t get answers to their questions, shouted them at the police. One of the officers set Ian to the side in a small cocoon of isolation with a sharp admonition to stay put while the other got to work doing the crowd control thing.

  Angelina didn’t seem to realize the officers had deliberately kept Ian and her apart. Crossing to him, she fell upon his shoulder and started crying in loud racking sobs.

  “Tom collapsed! He’s dead!”

  Ian’s shattered countenance showed every emotion. First, confusion and grief as he watched the ambulance turn out of sight. Then disgust, as his gaze flicked to Angelina, racked with heartache in his arms.

  Apparently I wasn’t the only one wondering at her anguish. The few times I’ve seen her in Tom’s company, she’d treated him more like a piece of furniture than a dear friend or lover. Which was the acting?

  Marty hustled through the crowd toward her. His face was as blank as a mask, but I caught the look in his eyes as he passed me. He was furious.

  The officer was looking pained as he tried to remove Angelina from Ian’s person and escort her back to her spot. “Miss, please. The paramedics will take the best possible care of your friend. Now, if you wouldn’t mind…”

  A blast of cool air cut through the stuffy lobby as the outside doors opened. Gavin stepped into the room and strode quickly toward the officers through the gap in the crowd left by the paramedics.

  I tried to blend into the crowd, but my height and hair color make that difficult at the best of times, and tonight I was wearing a bustier and skintight black satin hot pants. And a cape.

  Gavin’s long, athletic stride faltered when he caught sight of me. I thought I saw his lips move in a bitten-off epithet, but I must have imagined it for his face was as impassive as ever as he came abreast of me. His pale gray eyes gave me a quick once over and then locked on my right hand. I was still holding a pair of the fake vampire teeth. In my nervousness, I’d hooked my thumb and fingers through the back and was making the teeth snap together like little castanets.

  I offered up a weak smile, which he didn’t return. He didn’t stop to talk to me either but continued straight to the patrol officers. I was too far away to hear what they were saying, but from their body language and gestures, I gathered the officer was filling Gavin in on what had happened. His expression as he spoke to Gavin was an odd combination of irritation and wariness, and I deduced Gavin was still posing as a visiting detective. I wasn’t sure exactly how long Gavin and the Long Beach Chief of Police had been working that story, but from his reception tonight, I would say it had been a little too long.

  From their perspective, Gavin was either the slowest detective ever sent down for training or some sort of ultra-secret narc. As had been the case last spring, his fellow officers, professional to the last, instantly gave him the backup and support required of their positions, but they were considerably less free with their friendship and respect.

  Marty had gotten Angelina to shut up and was talking in a low voice to Gavin and the officers. After a quiet but impassioned discussion, Marty broke stiffly away, hands clenched at his sides. He managed to smooth his large square face back to good-natured blandness as he pulled the chair out from behind the will-call desk, hefted himself up onto it and waved his arms to get the crowd’s attention.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he boomed. “We regret to inform you that due to the illness of one of our actors, the haunted house is closed for the evening.”

  He raised his voice a notch to be heard over the fussing crowd. “Your tickets are valid through the run of the haunted house or…” A pained expression flitted across his face and was quickly mastered. “You can bring your tickets to the box office for a full refund. Thank you for coming to the Milverne Theater haunted house!”

  He raised his hands like a preacher and smiled beatifically over the crowd. I decided I had misjudged his acting ability.

  As he got down heavily from the chair to hover anxiously on the outskirts of the police activity, I shifted over a few feet until I was by his side.

  “What’s going on?” I asked softly.

  He didn’t look at me when he answered. His gaze roved from the police, across the lobby, to the box office, and back again in a constant cycle. “They took Tom to the hospital, but more for form’s sake than anything. They’ll probably pronounce him dead on arrival. These gentlemen,” he tipped his head toward the police, “are deciding whether or not to close us down.”

  “I thought they already had.” By now, the police had completely cleared the theater end of the lobby where Tom had lain.

  One of the officers stepped through the open theater doors and flipped on the house lights. The haunted house had that shabby disillusioning look of a swank velvet-papered hotel in the daytime. It was hard to believe anyone had been scared by a bunch of actors in a horseshoe-shaped tunnel of plywood sets and black bedroom sheets.

  Marty spared me a glance. “I mean shut down for good. It depends on whether they want to carry on as if foul play happened here tonight or accept that Tom died of a heart attack. The way his father did at that age.”

  The second officer had a notebook in hand and was asking Angelina gently probing questions along the lines of “Did Tom do drugs? Was he acting strangely tonight?”

  Marty followed my gaze. “Damn fools.” The words came out in a low, angry hiss.

  The policemen turned and looked sharply in our direction, as if we were colluding about how we’d killed off Tom. Marty moved immediately to his side, smiling like a man only too eager to please. “Officer, if there’s anything we can do to assist you…”

  Taking out a notebook, Gavin broke away and headed toward the front of the lobby where looky-loo visitors foolish enough to have stayed were huddled in groups of two and three.

  I reached out and touched Gavin’s arm as he passed. He drew to a halt and raised sun-bleached brows in a look of bored curiosity. I swallowed hard against the golf ball of guilt and fear that remained lodged in my throat.

  “Is it…” I looked around to make sure no one was in eavesdropping range and lowered my voice to the barest whisper. “Vampire-related?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “You’re here.”

  Impatience flicked briefly across Gavin’s face and was gone. “I don’t see anything out of the ordinary. Unless…”

  “What? I finally crossed over to the dark side and celebrated with a rampage?” I held out my wrists to be cuffed. “Yeah. That’s it. Detective, look no further. I’m turning myself in.”

  Gavin grabbed my wrists with one hand and pushed them down out of sight. His voice was low and hushed. “Jesus, Jo. Do you always have to be so melodramatic?”

  We glared at each other for a moment and then I pointedly dropped my gaze to my wrists, which he still held. He let go.

  I rubbed my wrists. “Will was here,” I said curtly. “With Natasha.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I don’t have my phone.”

  He looked at me as if I were the most irresponsible person on the planet. I yanked open my cape to display my satin bustier and skintight black pants.

  “Well where was I supposed to put it?”

  Gavin crossed his arms as if he had to do it to keep from strangling me. His voice, when he spoke, was rigidly controlled. “When was Will here?”

  “He and Natasha showed up around eight-thirty.”

  “And?”

  “They bought tickets and were welcomed in like everyone else. Actually, I don’t know if they bought tickets. I never s
aw them. Will stayed out here but Natasha went inside.”

  “You let her go in?”

  “Of course I didn’t let her go in. She just went! You don’t seem to understand how she works. She’s like Obi-Wan Kenobi with the Stormtroopers. Every male in the place was stumbling over himself trying to let her get to the front of the line. Our own house manager, Marty, opened the door for her and the tour guide—Tom—hadn’t even shown up yet.”

  The memory of Tom being carried away by paramedics doused my anger like a bucket of ice water.

  “And then?” Gavin asked.

  My gaze went to the spot where Tom had fallen. I wrenched it back up to look at Gavin. “The left double door was stuck. Marty pulled it hard and when it opened, Tom came with it.” I turned my palms up as the feeling of helpless frustration returned. “I couldn’t follow her, not after that.”

  “What about Will?”

  “I already told you. He stayed out here.”

  “And did what?”

  “He was just talking to me. Until Tom…” I swallowed. “Then Will left.”

  “Did Will say what he wanted? Why he was here?”

  I shook my head and shrugged. “No, nothing.”

  The inadequacy of my response irritated me and yet I don’t know that I could have learned more, no matter how hard I tried. I never seemed to have control of things when I was with Will. Being with him was like driving too fast down a dark mountain road in the rain—you just hung on and hoped you made it around the next turn.

  Gavin’s mouth drew tight. Whatever was clicking through his head, he didn’t share it with me. One of the officers looked in our direction.

  Gavin pitched his voice a little louder. “Thank you, Miss. You’re free to go.”

  “That’s it? You’re not going to ask me any more questions?”

  “Not unless you saw or heard something pertaining to Tom Langley’s collapse.”

  “Do you really think he had a heart attack?”

  The patrol officer, slogging his way through the onlookers with his own pen and notebook, shot Gavin an irritated look.

  “Go home,” Gavin told me. Clicking his pen open, he made his way to the group at the front of the lobby.

  *

  When I got back to my apartment, I tried to get Fluffy out of the kitty condo, thinking a little purring comfort would be nice, but she was having none of it. I was learning, at the cost of several bandaged fingers, that the cat and I had an unwritten contract. I would feed her and clean her litter box and in exchange she would sleep a lot and look cute—from a distance. Petting, much less picking her up or any form of cuddling, was a clear violation of the “no touch” rule.

  I went to bed alone and tried not to be disheartened by the fact that a cat in the next room might be the closest thing to nighttime company that I would ever have. As soon as the self-pitying thought entered my head, I chased it away in disgust. What kind of person was I to worry about my social life when Tom was in the intensive care unit in the hospital?

  I punched my pillow into a more comfortable rectangle and let out a frustrated sigh when sleep still was not forthcoming. Deep down, I knew my focus on petty things and my self-flagellating responses were merely my way of distracting myself from thinking about unpleasant things. Such as why had Will and Natasha been at the haunted house tonight? And had they done something to Tom?

  A million possible answers to those questions kept my mind spinning until the wee hours of the morning and when my alarm went off at dawn, one thing was clear. I needed to get off Will’s radar.

  There was a perfectly logical explanation for why he never seemed to run into me by chance. He could simply follow my car. Or, as was the case last night, Becky’s car. And yet, he seemed to be able to find me as easily as if I wore some sort of homing beacon.

  And if that were the case, there was only one place to go for help.

  I skipped my usual morning run and went straight to the shower. Fifteen minutes later—clean, dressed and SPF’d, hair towel-dried and twisted into its usual knot—I made my way through the morning twilight to my car. The traffic was light and in no time at all, I was standing in front of my church.

  The church was locked, the adjacent vestry dark. I checked my watch. Daily crack-of-dawn Mass wouldn’t be said for another hour and a half. Trotting quickly up the well-worn marble stairs, I ducked into the shadowy archway and made a beeline for the statue of Mary that watched over the right side of the building. I said a quick, silent prayer for forgiveness for stealing and pulled a small test tube out of my windbreaker. In one swift motion, I dipped it into the dish of holy water at Mary’s side, corked it, and shoved it back in my pocket.

  Everyone has seen a movie where someone flings holy water at a vampire, who then skitters away, skin smoking, howling with pain. My experience with holy water was a little different. It stung, but only for a moment, and it was really no worse than drinking orange juice with chapped lips. It had healed the sun damage to my skin and eventually, the bite marks on my neck. More importantly, it had, for a while, kept Will from being able to find me with his usual intuitive ease. Or so I believed.

  I was giddy with relief and halfway down the steps, going back to my car, when behind me I heard the faint but unmistakable swish of clothing.

  “Josephine?”

  I whirled on a gasp of air to find old Father Stevens standing under the shadow of the archway. His thick glasses glinted opaque in the pale morning light.

  “It is you!” He held out a blue-veined hand and I trotted back up the stairs to clasp it.

  “Good morning, Father.”

  “Josephine Gartner.” Father Stevens was one of the few people who knew and used my given name. I’d been too young to protest when he’d baptized me, and it had stuck. “What a delight to see you.”

  “I…uh…”

  His faded blue eyes twinkled behind the heavy lenses. “It’s been a while since you’ve joined us for Mass.”

  I felt the heat go to my cheeks. “Yes, Father.”

  “It’s a little early for daily Mass. But if you’d like, I can let you into the church. The kneeling pads are a little more comfortable than the cold cement out here.” He inclined his head toward the flat bit of cement in front of the statue of Mary that some people used as a place to kneel and pray.

  As I had done, moments ago. I felt the heat drain from my face as quickly as it had arrived. How long had Father Stevens been here, watching me? Had he seen me take the holy water?

  He didn’t seem to notice my distraction, just prattled cheerfully away. “Or if you have time, you can join me for a cup of tea in the vestry? A nice cup of Earl Gray wouldn’t go amiss.” He leaned toward me and said confidentially, “I make a very good cup of tea, if I say so myself.”

  I relaxed, realizing he wanted company, nothing more. “Thank you, Father, but I’m afraid I need to get to work.”

  “Yes, yes, of course. Still teaching, are you? Schools start so early these days. Another time then.” He held out his hands and gave mine a squeeze.

  On impulse, I kissed him on the cheek before jogging down the steps and hurrying to my car before the sun got any higher. The vial of holy water weighed heavily in my pocket. And the reason I needed it weighed heavier still.

  Chapter Five

  “When do we get our labs back?” Danielle Gamble demanded without first raising her hand.

  I didn’t bother to utter a reprimand. I’d learned if I gave my students a few minutes of anarchy at the beginning of the class, when I was doing maintenance stuff like checking homework and passing back papers, they tended to behave better when I needed them to focus. And today I needed all the good behavior I could get. Running into Father Stevens at my early morning holy water raid had left me with the energy of a wet noodle and it wasn’t even half past seven. It was true. There was no situation exempt from Catholic guilt.

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  The room rang with theatrical groans. “But you pro
mised!”

  “Something came up,” I said shortly. “John, why don’t you draw the answer to number two on the board.”

  I made a mark in my grade book that Lisa Wilcox had done her homework. As I moved on to the next row, she stopped me with a question.

  “Ms. Gartner, did you see that guy get axed at the haunted house last night?”

  There was a chorus of hushed, indrawn breaths and the room went so silent I could hear Alan lecturing about physics across the hall.

  Carefully modulating my voice to something between boredom and a verbal eye roll, I said, “No one got axed,” and motioned for the two troublemakers in the back row to show me their homework. Only one of them had done it. “I want to see this done tomorrow,” I told the slacker softly.

  Behind me, Lisa Wilcox shifted impatiently in her seat. “But, Ms. Gartner—”

  “A man had a heart attack. Now, if you’ll turn to page one hundred twenty-five in your texts…”

  Someone, I couldn’t tell who, for he dropped his voice low enough that I could hear the words but not the characterizing features, whispered, “He died. My mom was working the ER last night and I heard her telling my dad this morning.”

  My step faltered as I progressed back up the aisle. Dead? Tom was dead?

  I shouldn’t have been so surprised. I knew Tom was in bad shape when the EMTs took him to the hospital. A hot rush of tears clouded my vision. Breathing in through my nose, I ruthlessly blinked them back. The chain of whispers went silent as I regained the front of the room and turned to face my class. Nineteen pairs of eyes waited for me to say something.

  Normally I would have made an attempt to soothe to the class, but if anyone in that classroom needed the comfort of a reassuring natter about Tom’s death, it was me. Moreover I didn’t even know if it was true. Until I had confirmation, I intended to brazen it out.

  “Texts. Page one twenty-five. Now. Or would you prefer to get out a pen and a piece of paper for a pop quiz worth twenty-five percent of a test grade? Actually, that sounds pretty good. See how much chemistry you really know before the exam.”