Master of the Opera

by Jeffe Kennedy

  “How’s Roman Sanclaro? Nice bruise you got on your cheek there—I’ve seen his work before.”

  Self-consciously, she fingered the tender spot. She’d layered on a load of foundation—enough that her father hadn’t seen it. “What if I told you I wanted to press assault charges?”

  Sanchez tipped his hat with one finger. “I wouldn’t be surprised. He seems to think you’re unstable and might do that very thing.”

  Nice.

  “Get in the car. And put on your seat belt—I shouldn’t have to tell you.”

  “Yes, Mom.” She smiled to herself at his sour look. “Where are we going?”

  “Carla Donovan wants to talk to you. I want to be there to hear what she has to say.”

  2

  Charlie and Carla lived outside of town in the unincorporated community of Eldorado. Houses dotted the landscape, turning up in various hollows and on hilltops, amid a winding maze of dirt roads.

  The Donovan house was big by East Coast standards but nothing like Roman’s place. A pretty, adobe-style place, it enjoyed sweeping views of the mountains and an eclectic interior. Opera posters and other memorabilia decorated the walls. Santa Fe’s version of suburbia, she supposed—with the exception of the uniformed cops standing guard.

  “I’m surprised you’re letting her stay at home,” she remarked to Sanchez. “Wouldn’t somewhere else be safer?”

  “Refuses to budge, and Donovan backs her all the way. I don’t like it, but nobody’s doing me any favors these days, are they?” He slanted her an accusing look and she smiled sweetly.

  Carla sat propped up in bed, looking out into a patio garden. She still looked like hell—a mass of healing cuts over purple and yellow bruises worthy of a harlequin’s motley. Turning her head when Sanchez called out a hello, she looked Christine up and down, unfriendly as ever. She burned with curiosity over why Carla wanted to see her—especially since Carla might know where the other ring was. Charlie was nowhere in sight.

  “I’m really sorry for what happened to you,” Christine said in a rush. The lawyers would never have let her say anything along those lines. It implied guilt, they said.

  Carla nodded slowly, acknowledging. “Have things gone to hell without me? Please say yes.”

  “Pretty much, yes. But the opening night’s a few days away. I imagine they’ll pull it out.”

  “They?” Her face sharpened. “You’re not helping? You bailed after all.”

  “I did not bail!” Christine’s irritation with the woman rose, superseding any sympathy. “I’m banned.”

  “Not anymore,” Charlie said from the doorway. He looked considerably older. It didn’t help that he wore gray sweats that sagged like limp rags on his skinny frame. “I just got off the phone with Carlton Davis, who insisted I either present convincing evidence that Christy is a danger or let her back in.”

  Carla looked at Sanchez, who stuck his hands in his front jeans pockets and shrugged. “If the boss says let her in, I have no dog in that fight.”

  “And that sure ain’t me,” Charlie grumbled. “I better get dressed and get up there. We’ll be expecting you shortly, Christy.”

  She watched him go, sorry he seemed to think so little of her. It looked bad that Daddy had pulled strings. And yet, just this once, she was glad for her father’s interference. The knot of worry over how she’d get back to the Master had dissolved a little.

  “I need to speak to Christy alone,” Carla announced.

  “Now, Ms. Donovan—it would really help the case if you’d share your information with me also and—”

  “This is still my private residence, right? I want to talk to her alone.”

  With a heavy sigh, Sanchez shook his head and walked to the door. “I’ll be right outside. Just shout if you need me.”

  “Which one of us are you worried about?” Carla shot back.

  He shut the door. Carla turned her somewhat feverish gaze on Christine. Carla’s cheekbones were still swollen enough that her eyes watered behind the puffiness. Her own minor bruise throbbed in sympathy, and Christine wondered if the same fist had caused both.

  “Have you found the Angel’s Hand yet?”

  The bluntness of the question took Christine aback. “I’m not even sure what it is.”

  “Shit.” Carla shook her head and then appeared to regret the sudden movement, pressing her fingers to her temple. “I figured Sanclaro would have had you in there looking for it as soon as I was incapacitated. Then they came after me again, so I knew they must be looking still.”

  “Roman did this to you?” She imagined them, Roman and Domingo, beating Carla in their snarling anger. Christine felt the need to sit, lowering herself onto a buckskin director’s chair.

  “I don’t know.” Carla sank into herself, her fire gone as she remembered. “They wore masks and apparently gave me some kind of Ketamine derivative. It keeps you paralyzed, but you’re awake and . . .” A tear ran down her uneven cheek. “They kept threatening to rape me if I didn’t tell them where the hand is, but they kept pummeling. You have no idea.”

  “I do, a little.” Christine wanted to take the older woman’s hand but knew Carla wouldn’t like it. “Did you tell the cops about it?”

  “No, I didn’t tell the stupid police!” Carla snapped. Clearly the pain meds hadn’t sweetened her personality. “I know who has the power around here even if you don’t.”

  “Then why did you say I did it?”

  “You’re wearing the ring, aren’t you? I wanted to make it hard for you to have the other one, too. They should have been mine—and now I’m trapped here.” She plucked at the blankets, drug-hazed eyes bright with fever.

  She was like a rabid animal—wounded and out of her mind.

  “Why do you want the rings?” Christine asked in a soothing tone.

  “I’ve worked at the opera house since I was a little girl. You’ve heard him. Those songs that wrap around your heart and squeeze. Sometimes, late at night, you hear it. Christine. He wants the rings. I could have been her. That would be real power. But he wouldn’t give me the flute. They saved their roses for you. It’s not fair.”

  “What do the rings do?”

  Carla rolled her head on the pillow, her face creased in despair. “Now they’ll never be mine.” Her lips curled back in a vicious sneer. “But you won’t have it either. I’ll never tell where it is. You tell them that. Tell them to leave me alone. I’ll die before I tell.”

  “Carla—I don’t want the Sanclaros to have it either. Tell me where it is and I’ll bring it to you. What does it look like?”

  “Just give Sanclaro the message. Is it time for my Oxycontin yet? Nurse!”

  Sanchez popped the door open, followed by a hefty home health care nurse carrying a paper cup, who shooed them out with much fussing and clucking.

  Sanchez drove Christine back into town. His cowboy hat sat on the seat between them. “You going to give me anything here?”

  “She seems pretty whacked out. I’m not sure exactly why she wanted to talk to me.”

  “Pain meds will do that.” But he tapped the steering wheel thoughtfully.

  “She thinks the Sanclaros did it to her.”

  He nodded. Said nothing.

  “Aha. And so do you.”

  “No comment, ma’am,” Sanchez said in an exaggerated western drawl and grinned at her. “What do you think?”

  “Was Tara raped?”

  Sanchez got very serious very fast. “Now why would you ask me that?”

  “I just want to know. I thought since I told you something, you’d tell me something.”

  “Doesn’t work that way.”

  “I think she was killed for some other reason. Not part of a rape and all.”

  “No comment.”

  “That means yes.”

  “That means no comment.”

  * * *

  Sanchez dropped her off at her apartment, where she collected her things and her uniformed escort. She put the t
op down on her convertible to let out the hot air, though the midday sun shone down with fierce intensity on her head.

  The sight of the copper peaks of the opera house rising on the hillside filled her with a happy sense of homecoming. When he saw her, Matt literally jumped up and down.

  “She’s back! She’s back!” Then he clutched his hands to his chest. “You’re not going to kill me, are you?”

  “Oh stop.”

  “Seriously,” he dropped his voice to a stage whisper, which still projected nicely, “things have gotten creepy around here.”

  “Like what?” She waved to her companion cops, pulled Matt into her office—Tara’s old office, bleh—and shut the door. A lush red rose on the desk gave her pause, but she pretended it was no big deal. “Spill.”

  “Do we have to talk in here? It kind of has a weird vibe.” Matt fiddled with some of the figurines on Tara’s bookshelf. “Kind of morbid that she’s dead and her stuff is still here.”

  “That’s not her stuff—it was probably here before she was. I’m sure her parents took all her belongings.”

  Matt was shaking his head, his lips pressed together and his eyes huge. “That’s not what I heard. Steve told me that Charlie locked up her office before anyone even knew Tara was gone. In fact—that’s how most of them found out, ’cuz her office was suddenly closed up. And then, after the, you know, body, the cops sealed it. Steve was going to come in, get her things to send to her folks, but Charlie said it would just upset them.”

  “Weird.”

  “See?”

  Christine studied the room. “So I wonder which things were hers and what was here.”

  Matt curled his lip. “I don’t want to know. The whole thing is too creepy. Like the roses.”

  “Roses?”

  He pointed at the one on her desk. “What I was telling you. Turning up in odd places. The talent are getting all superstitious about it. And stuff is moved. Props we had ready for the rehearsal are missing or exchanged for the wrong versions. Can you believe that stupid magic flute has gone missing again? It’s a good thing Carla the Valkyrie isn’t here, because she’d be having a total shit-fit about it.”

  “Or is that a handy coincidence that she’s not here?”

  “What do you mean?” Matt looked both horrified and reluctantly intrigued.

  “I need your help. There’s something I need to find.”

  “In the old inventory?” He made dubious noise but grabbed the enormous notebook on the shelf. “You know as well as I do that the BNoD is practically worthless. I take it you already checked the searchable portion?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “An Angel’s Hand.”

  “What the fuck is an Angel’s Hand?”

  “No idea—that’s part of the problem.”

  “I can see how it would be. Okay—which opera is it related to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Fabulous. How are we supposed to find this thing when you don’t know what it is, it’s not in the searchable inventory, and we don’t know what it would be with?”

  Christine gave him a sweet smile and pointed at the notebook in his hands.

  “No. No and no. I am not reading this . . . tome looking for one phrase.”

  “It’s important, Matt. Or you can go through the storerooms looking for it and I’ll read the BNoD, but I might recognize it when I see it.”

  “How, when you don’t know what it is?”

  Self-consciously, she fingered the lump of opal ring in her coin pocket. Probably mentioning an antique jeweled ring might be involved would be a bad idea. She sighed. “Hard to explain.”

  “Yeah.” Matt drew out the word. “This might be too much crazy for me. And I have twenty million other things to do.”

  “I think this thing has to do with Tara’s death.”

  Matt dropped the notebook on her desk as if it had bitten him. “Absolutely not, then!”

  “Please. I can’t do this alone.”

  “I don’t want to die!”

  “I’ll make sure you get a year-round position here.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Yes.” Yes, she could. She’d make sure of it. Her dad owed her at least one more favor.

  “Deal.”

  3

  Matt went off to read in a “less freaky location.” Before she did anything else, Christine examined everything in the office. She even asked Steve to come in and point out which things had been Tara’s, but he refused, saying he wasn’t going to cross Charlie.

  So she did it herself. The usual opera posters hung on the walls, along with black-and-white shots of famous patrons and opera divas, signed with black Sharpie marker to people who weren’t Tara. The desk held an assortment of pens, some sticky notes with phone numbers and obscure reminders that must have meant something to her. The cops would have taken anything that seemed to be a clue, she supposed, so these must be detritus. Though the drawer held empty file folders, there were no actual papers, so the police must have taken some stuff.

  Tara had likely had a laptop, too. Christine’s fingers itched to get into that.

  Sanchez would tell her to go to hell.

  No, anything useful in the desk the cops would already have. Methodically, she went through the bookcase, checking the texts on musical theater, the history of costume design, Georgia O’Keeffe’s biography, landscapes of New Mexico.

  Maybe Tara had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, worth killing just to bring Christine to the opera house. But the fact that Tara, too, had been working on the inventory just seemed too coincidental. Especially if Carla had really hidden the Angel’s Hand.

  Tara had known something. “Come on, Tara,” she muttered under her breath, “If death is just a doorway into another world, would you peek back in here and give me a stinking clue?”

  “Who are you talking to?”

  She shrieked and jumped a foot, her heart slamming into her throat. Charlie stood in the doorway, a strange look on his weathered face. She gazed pointedly at the keys in his hand. He tucked them in his pocket.

  “Sorry—didn’t know anyone was in here,” he said, not sounding sorry at all.

  So he opens the door as quietly as he can?

  “Did you need something, Charlie?”

  “Yeah, the inventory.”

  “Matt has it. I’m not sure where he got to, though.”

  Charlie gave a half nod, his bushy brows lowering. “What about you—looking for a book?”

  She shrugged. “Doing a little research.”

  “Well, the props guys could sure use some help if you’re done collecting pay for doing nothing.”

  There was a time that dig would have stung. Now it just made her mad. Charlie knew full well that being kept away from her job wasn’t her idea. So she made herself smile, mentally giving him the finger. “Sure enough! I’ll be out there in a few.”

  “Sooner rather than later would be nice.”

  “Uh-huh. You might look for Matt and the notebook out on the loading dock.”

  He hovered in the doorway, clearly not wanting to leave her in there. She stood in front of the bookcase, unwilling to back down.

  “Fine,” he finally muttered.

  “Close the door, would you?” She flinched when he slammed it. A loose heating vent screen over the door rattled, a screw falling to the floor and rolling across to her feet. In the ensuing silence, she heard her own accelerating breathing. And music, echoing through the opera house. Human voices merging with that unearthly golden melody and the scent of roses.

  She pulled over her rolling chair and climbed up. Not able to see in, she felt around the dusty space, trying not to picture spiders. Her fingertips brushed something. Paper? Stretching up, she got a grip on it and slid it out. A little spiral notebook, with a neatly printed TARA SMITH on the cover.

  “Thank you, Tara,” she breathed.

  Just then the door swooped open, hitting th
e chair, which spun away on its oiled wheels. The notebook flew out of her hands and she grabbed at the vent and the top of the door, her stomach dropping as her feet went with the chair and she fell, the stabbing terror of her dreams catching up with her.

  Strong hands grabbed her—but they were the wrong ones.

  “What the hell are you doing, Christy?” Roman’s angry face filled her vision and she wrenched herself away from him.

  “Me? What the hell are you doing here?”

  Roman grinned viciously, and a chill of terror shot down her spine. “Looking for you. I hear your father’s in town. I hope you can explain why you so rudely vanished from the Compound last night. We were frantic about you. Not very considerate of you at all.”

  “Yes, well—my father called and said he was on his way. I didn’t want to wake anyone, so I left as quietly as I could and called a, um, cab.”

  “And here I thought I had your phone in my pocket. I forgot to give it back to you.” His eyes had gone that flat black. The Sanclaros are insane.

  “It was in my room.” She shrugged in nonchalance. “I figured you left it there for me.”

  She would not give up Angie. Hopefully she’d escaped the punishment she’d feared.

  “What were you doing up on that chair, sweet girl?” Roman switched subjects rapidly, as if hoping to catch her off guard, his gaze swinging up to the open vent and speculatively back to her.

  Where had Tara’s notepad landed?

  “The vent cover was loose.”

  The red cover of the notepad peeked out from under her desk. She swooped down and snagged it.

  “What do you have there?” Roman looked predatory, and she shoved it in her back jeans pocket.

  “Notes. I need to get to work here.” She ducked past him into the hallway.

  “I’d be interested to see your notes—get to know my fiancée better. Maybe I’ll discover why she leaves my home in the middle of the night and then avoids my calls and texts.”

  She wanted to fling the awful ring at him and shout that she wasn’t, would never be his fiancée, much less his wife. Damn that she needed the ring still. So she did her best to smile, if only for the benefit of her uniformed escort, watching their exchange with great interest.