Liz Jasper - Underdead 02

by Underdead in Denial

  A second volunteer arrived on his tail. “Jesus!”

  Without them out front, the ticketing problem escalated into a raucous bottleneck at the gate. Ian lurched out through the fangs and limped over to my side.

  “Need a hand?” he asked.

  “Actually, if you’d take this group through…” There were only a half dozen people waiting while we reorganized, but they were in the way.

  “No problem.” Hunching over into his Igor posture, he beckoned to the group. “Walk this way.”

  For the next ten minutes we were too busy sorting out a new system to talk much. Which is why I didn’t notice at first that Marty had gone.

  “Can you guys hold the fort for a while? I have to…” I caught sight of Becky coming out of the rehearsal room. She glanced in our direction, hesitated and then hurried into the haunted house. Fine, I thought. Be that way.

  “Nature calls?” The volunteer on my left was dressed as a surfer in long shorts, loose shirt and flip flops. I was pretty sure those were his regular clothes. He was handling ticket sales with a relaxed efficiency that couldn’t be faked. He eyed my costume and grinned. “Always wondered if vampires did normal things like that.”

  “Me too.” You’ve no idea how much. Handing him the ticket basket, I made a beeline for the rehearsal room in case anyone was watching. Once I was in the shadows, I stopped and looked around.

  I caught sight of Marty’s bulky form threading through the shadows along the side of the theater, where no one was supposed to be. The man had practically haunted the place since the LBPD had kicked us out and strung heavy chains through the door handles.

  His desire to reopen the theater as quickly as possible was certainly understandable. Theaters were expensive to run. Even old landmarks that had been in one’s family for generations had costs. There was the usual upkeep and property taxes, but also remodels mandated by new fire codes and accessibility laws. Working in a school, I had become inured to the sight of administrators wringing their hands over finances. What if I’d underestimated how bad things really were?

  What might someone in Marty’s position do to keep his family’s namesake from disappearing? It hadn’t occurred to me to seriously suspect Marty because he’d been in the lobby with me all night. But in truth, once Will and Natasha had showed up, he could have danced naked on the will-call desk and I wouldn’t have noticed.

  I caught another glimpse of Marty’s white dress shirt as he paused by the side door of the theater. With all the craziness of Halloween, everyone would be even more focused than usual on the haunted house. Marty could drive a bulldozer through the theater’s front doors and no one would notice.

  Marty was going to break in tonight. I could feel it in my bones. By the time anyone noticed a tampered lock or a broken window—probably not until morning—it would be easy to blame it on Halloween revelry. On bored teens who had gotten out of hand after being revved up by the haunted house. Who would tie it to Marty?

  Me.

  “Gotcha,” I said softly.

  Pulling my new cell phone out of the pocket I’d made for it in my cape, I started up the path after Marty, taking care to keep to the shadows as best I could.

  Marty was on the move again, heading for the front of the theater. And he was moving fast.

  Too fast.

  I stopped, unsure what to do. After the boisterous noise of the haunted house, the wooded path around the theater seemed awfully quiet. I couldn’t continue following him while I was calling for help or he’d hear me. But if I let him get away, I could lose him.

  My finger hesitated over the call button on my new cell phone. My new phone that had a built in video camera.

  Right. I continued up the path without calling the police. All I was going to do was get a picture of the proverbial smoking gun and hand it over. I’d leave it to the police to figure out what Marty did after he got inside. If he destroyed evidence linking him to Tom’s murder or found where Tom had hidden the manuscript, that was their problem.

  I wasn’t stupid enough to do more. And yet I couldn’t do less. I had a score to settle.

  I had reached the trees at the southern edge of the theater. It was now or never. I started the video recorder, held it in front of me and eased around the corner, careful to try to stay out of sight in the foliage.

  A flash of light blinded me. I reeled back and pressed myself against the side of the building, blinking rapidly to regain sight.

  Marty’s voice rang out. “Our season opens in December with The Underpants, a lighthearted play that will be fun for the whole family.”

  There were some clicking noises and more flashes of light. Cameras and flashbulbs, I thought. Marty was talking to a journalist, using the press’s interest in the haunted house to drum up some publicity for the theater.

  I sank against the wall behind me, feeling like an idiot. My Nancy Drew-like enthusiasm for single-handedly running Tom’s murderer to the ground had evaporated.

  Realizing the interview was winding up, I pulled myself together and started to creep away. I had an odd feeling of being watched. I whipped around to make sure no one was behind me and my foot crushed a dry branch.

  “Who’s there?” Marty demanded.

  I remained motionless in the shadows, unable to lift my foot off the branch, lest it make more noise. After what seemed like an eternity, they finished the interview and the journalist went on his way with promises to e-mail a copy of the article when it went to print.

  Marty, whistling cheerfully, passed within a couple of feet of me as he hurried back down to the front of the haunted house via the staircase. I waited until he reached the giant snake head before I followed.

  I had one foot on the stairs when I realized I wasn’t alone.

  Chapter Seventeen

  There was no way I could make it back down to the haunted house. Natasha’s vampire arm candy was standing on the hillside below me, about twenty feet away. He stood perfectly still. Waiting.

  I turned and ran. Any lingering thoughts that I was overreacting disappeared as he plunged into the ivy and crashed up the hillside after me.

  Oh God. I picked up my pace, fighting the burning in my legs and lungs. If I could just make it around the front of the theater, I could pop onto the sidewalk, where about two hundred people waited in line for the haunted house.

  I was fast, but Lenny was faster. As I sprinted toward the front of the theater, his footfalls rang hard and fast on the pavement behind me. I knew better than to look back to see how close he was. I knew it would slow me down. I knew I couldn’t afford it.

  I looked. He was angling toward the street, closing off my escape route.

  A noise between a scream and a sob wrenched from my chest. He was trapping me. I doubled back a few times, in ever-decreasing arcs and found myself in front of the theater. The locked theater.

  Lenny slowed and walked toward me, arms stretched wide, ready to grab me if I tried to get past him. The outside lights bathed him in a golden glow. I heard my own breathing, harsh in my ears. I knew it was over.

  “Don’t panic, just let me—”

  I panicked. My fingers pushed past the sagging yellow police tape to close over the old-fashioned door handle. I depressed the latch and tugged hard.

  The door opened so easily I swung off balance and fell to my knees. Lenny cried out. I didn’t stop to ask why the long-barricaded door was unlatched. He was nearly upon me. I pulled myself back to my feet and careened over the threshold.

  I smacked right into someone. A strong arm reached out and steadied me.

  “Whoa. Easy there, Jo.”

  I shoved the arm aside. Reaching back with both hands, I yanked the door shut and slid the old-fashioned bar. With a howl, Lenny slammed against the door so hard it strained against its moorings. The bar held.

  Relief turned my legs to rubber. I slumped back against the lobby wall and closed my eyes. Safe. I was safe. I nearly laughed aloud.

  “You okay?”r />
  I swiped at the tears puddling under my lashes and looked up. Ian, wearing his voluminous black Igor costume, regarded me with a curious smile. I realized I must have looked ridiculous, running away from good ol’ Lenny as if he were the devil incarnate.

  As I tried to think of a possible lie, the heavy old doors rattled and shook as Lenny grabbed hold of the handles and tried to pull them open. For a heart-stopping moment I thought he might succeed.

  All of a sudden he stopped trying to break down the doors. His voice carried through the narrow gap between them, sweetly pleading. “Jo? Let me in.”

  He didn’t sound as if he wanted to kill me. He sounded…worried. As if he were trying to help me. Such deception was probably covered on the first day of their training. If there was one thing I’d noticed about vampires, it was that they were all damn good at telling their victims what they needed to hear.

  “Jo? Let me in, now!”

  I curled my fingers around Ian’s arm and tugged him into the lobby. Explanations could wait. “C’mon. We can go out the side door.”

  The lobby had a sour, musty smell from being shut up so long. My eyes slid to the place where Tom had fallen to the ground, dead. I looked away.

  “Who was that guy?” Ian opened the connecting door to the theater and chivalrously motioned me through. The minimum of lights had been turned on and there was no heat. To our immediate left, the abandoned entrance to the original haunted house yawned large and black. I shivered and pulled my cape around my shoulders.

  “Crazy old boyfriend,” I explained.

  “Old relationships can be a problem.” The bitterness in his voice made me look at him. His face was twisted, his eyes cold, appearing as hard as pebbles. “You start out good, looking out for each other, and then people change. They sell out.”

  For the first time since I’d stepped into the theater, I stopped worrying about escaping from Lenny and thought to wonder why Ian was inside.

  And why he was carrying a crowbar.

  He followed my gaze to the long metal tool in his right hand and held it up a little, for my inspection.

  “Is that a prop?” I asked hopefully.

  “No.”

  Time to bolt for the side door. I didn’t get more than a couple of feet before Ian’s fingers fastened around my arm like a vise. I struggled and he hit me on the shoulder with the crowbar.

  “Don’t make me hurt you.”

  Pain throbbed down my arm. I stopped struggling. He pried my new cell phone out of my hands, tossed it into a dark corner and shoved me along in front of him, into the haunted house. I blinked, trying to get my eyes to adjust to the darkness. There was barely enough light coming through the gaps to see where we were going, but that didn’t slow Ian down.

  Ian moved quickly, half pushing, half dragging me. My legs refused to function properly. There were no knife-welding maniacs, homicidal mummies, or headless bodies rising from caskets, and yet every dark curve of the place terrified me. One good crack on the head from that crowbar and the detectives would find me dead in a pool of my own blood in a dusty corner.

  We were rounding the middle of the haunted house’s U-shaped path when he abruptly turned and headed straight for a wall. I let out a scream as he rammed me into it. I braced myself and my scream rose to a shriek as a black sheet whispered across my face. He laughed softly, cruelly.

  Ian’s grip tightened painfully on my arm as he pushed me ahead of him up the stairs into the men’s locker area. He shoved me hard, through the doorway. I stumbled into the room and fell to my knees.

  “Sit.” He pointed to a bench at the rear of the room. I sat.

  Ian positioned himself between me and the door, fit the crowbar into the seam of a locker door and gave a sharp downward tug. The door swung open with a wrench of metal.

  I looked around for something—anything—to use as a weapon but the room was clean, as if a giant vacuum had sucked out everything that wasn’t nailed down.

  Reaching inside the locker, Ian pulled out handful after handful of stale-smelling clothes and well-worn sneakers, discarding them with increasingly frustrated grunts of irritation. I recognized the polo shirt Tom had worn the night of our “date” as it fluttered to the ground.

  Eventually, Ian ran out of crap to toss. He also ran out of patience. He slid his hand along every seam in the locker and came up empty.

  “It’s not here!”

  He started prying open lockers at random, hurling people’s belongings across the room. Panting with anger, he rounded on me. And I was reminded I wasn’t entirely weaponless.

  “Where is it?” he demanded.

  “Where is what?” I tried to make eye contact, but Ian’s gaze was everywhere but on me.

  “Don’t play stupid with me. I know Tom told you about the Solaire play.”

  Will had been the one with the information. Tom hadn’t really told me squat, but I didn’t think now was the time to quibble over details.

  “We’ve been acting together since we were kids. Did he tell you?”

  I shook my head. Keep him talking. Eventually he will look at you.

  “We planned to be great. Take the world by storm. He was going to be the next Laurence Olivier, I was going to be another Gene Wilder or Marty Feldman. A king of comedy. Only didn’t quite work out that way. Never does, does it? Doesn’t matter how talented you are if there’s no luck.”

  Ian reached into a locker, swept another person’s belongings onto the floor and cursed when he found no papers hidden in the clothing.

  “And then we had it. Finally, we got our break. Tom found that lost play at a garage sale. A garage sale, can you believe it? It’s brilliant—a masterpiece.”

  His face shone with that inner fire that swept through him whenever he talked about acting. “It had roles that would send an actor straight to the top. Everyone would come see it. Would come see us. It was our luck. Our big break.”

  The inner passion disappeared, replaced by a look of bewilderment. “And he wanted to sell out. Auction it off to the highest bidder. Trade the chance of a lifetime for money.” He spit out the word. “After everything we’ve worked for.”

  His gaze swept over me too quickly for me to try anything. His attention returned to the lockers.

  “I should have found it by now,” he muttered, flipping through someone’s dog-eared books, one by one, before hurling them to the floor. “But it’s not in Tom’s apartment or his car. I thought maybe he gave it to you.” His voice rose.

  “No, I swear, I barely—”

  “I’ve tried to get you alone every way I know how. I tried being your friend, I tried hitting on you.”

  That caught me by surprise. I had thought him an early victim of my vampire allure.

  “I tried getting you into my car to take you to the hospital after the set fell on you. Nothing worked. You wouldn’t even step five feet into the haunted house with me, would you?”

  The room rang suddenly with his laughter. “And then I realized you didn’t know where it was either. If you had, you and your boyfriend wouldn’t have gone to Tom’s apartment looking for it. Did you tell Mr. Moneybags the truth or did you spin him some sob story so you could keep it for yourself? Not as if he needs the cash, is it?”

  I had a vision of Ian going after Will with a crowbar and thought it was a shame I wouldn’t be alive to see it.

  Abruptly, I stood.

  As I’d hoped, Ian looked at me. But only just long enough to take a powerful swipe at my shoulder with the crowbar.

  “What are you doing? Sit back down!”

  I sat, rubbing my shoulder, trying to stanch the pain shooting down my arm. Ian fit the crowbar into a gap between the lockers and the wall and yanked down hard. He got a tiny glimpse of drywall for his pains.

  “Where is it? Where is it?”

  Ian’s thoughts were swinging around so rapidly that I could almost see his head rocking with it. “The way you two came out all confident, I thought maybe you had b
etter luck finding his hiding place. Did you? It wasn’t in your apartment. I looked in every inch of that place. I thought it must be here, the one place I couldn’t look, but it’s not!

  “It’s not anywhere! Why can’t I find it?” He pried open another locker with a vicious twist of the crowbar. It was empty. “You gave it to moneybags, didn’t you?”

  He rounded on me so fast the crowbar came within millimeters of my right eye.

  “No.” I swallowed. I desperately wanted to dive under the bench but I clasped my hands so he wouldn’t see them shaking and made myself stay where I was. “We didn’t find it.” I slowed my voice, giving our gazes time to lock.

  If ever there were a good time for my vampire glare to kick in, this was it. For a second, I thought I was getting somewhere. He stared into my eyes and his gaze grew hazy. Relief flooded through me. With a little luck, I would be able to talk him into letting me go.

  All at once, Ian turned away and kicked savagely at the pile of people’s belongings he’d thrown on the floor. “If you and moneybags don’t have it, it must be here. It must be!”

  It hadn’t worked. Oh God, why hadn’t it worked? I should have practiced.

  “Where is it?” He was getting more hysterical by the second.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tom must have told you where he kept it!” he grabbed hold of my shoulders and shook me so hard my head snapped back on my neck. “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know! I swear!”

  All at once, the anger ebbed, and he gave a keening moan and fell back onto one of the benches, clutching his head in his hands. “He’s dead, he’s dead and I have nothing!” Great racking sobs tore through his body.

  I bolted for the door.

  He swore, reached for me and tripped on the pile of clothes.

  I flew down the stairs and shot into the haunted house. It was black as night. I stretched my arms out in front of me and ran in what I hoped was the right direction.

  I made it about twenty feet before I caught Becky’s Frankenstein gurney in the gut and pitched to the side. I landed hard on my abused shoulder and slid through the wall.