“All good up there?” Luke called to Matt.
Matt gave us the thumbs up.
As much wiring as the place had, getting a clear EMF read was out of the question unless we shut the power down in the theater, which meant that we had about three hours of battery life to confirm any kind of paranormal activity empirically—or, as Matt sometimes said, at least as close to empirical as we could expect to get.
Luke followed me down into the dressing rooms along with Syd and Goog. I took Melanie’s room, they took Joanne’s room. It was pitch black down here except for the dim illumination of the flashlights. Too bright and they got hot, skewed the infra-red sensors that Matt had set up throughout the place. Seconds after Luke and I made our way into Melanie’s dressing room, a thud came from across the hall.
We swung around, and focused both our lights on Goog, who was rubbing the top of his head. These doorways weren’t meant for someone quite as tall as he was. He made a sour face and waved the lights away. “I’m fine,” he grumbled. He didn’t look it. Not because of the bump on his noggin, but because of the pallid caste to his face.
This time, though, it hadn’t started when we settled in for a late night. Goog had been bothered by something since he met up with us at the hotel, but wouldn’t say what and we knew better than to press him about it before the investigation. Best to wait until after, when he was back in his comfort zone.
Luke and I hovered just inside the entrance to the dressing room. After a moment to listen, and watch, I finally spoke. “Martin?” I said into the darkness, my flashlight pointed at the ground. “Martin Lovejoy? If you’re here, darlin, you can let me know. I hear you’ve been a little upset about something lately. I might be able to help if you can let me know you’re here.”
Nothing. That wasn’t unusual, though; sometimes they were shy around strangers which, after you’d been dead close to sixty years, pretty much everyone was. Luke stood close to me, tense. After what he’d seen Martin pull with Melanie on stage before onlookers, he didn’t trust that I was entirely safe.
I waited a bit. Some people mistakenly think that once you become a spirit you get a sort of crash course education in haunting and manifestation. That’s not the case. Sometimes spirits don’t show up for decades after they die, and at other times, like with Grandpa Winky, it was faster than that. It was something I hadn’t realized I’d want to ask when I saw him as a little girl. It wasn’t until I’d stopped seeing him and encountered other earthbound spirits that I realized it was something I cared to know. If I ever saw him again, it would be on a list of questions I had for him.
In the mean time, it was possible Martin Lovejoy was trying to speak, but couldn’t make himself heard even to me. My eyes were drawn to part of the room, though. That picture of Irma Winston was there. I crept through the darkness, keeping my light low and just to be sure I didn’t trip over anything. I heard Luke shuffling along behind me.
“You see something?” He asked.
“Nothing yet,” I whispered. For all Luke knew, Martin Lovejoy was there to me, clear as day. He didn’t often see them the way I did.
I had to move the rack with the costumes on it to get to the picture. Careful not to disturb it too much, I put a hand gently against the glass where a young Irma Winston stood, happily soaking up whatever attention she’d been getting that day so long ago. “Martin,” I asked gently to the air, trying to talk to him as if I knew he were right next to me. “You must have had a thing for this pretty lady, right? Is that why you keep watching out for these pretty blonds? Except, you don’t seem to particularly care for Miss Melanie. If you could try and tell me why, maybe I could help fix whatever has you riled up.”
I waited a beat, looked around both with my eyes and with my instincts, but still got nothing.
“A theater isn’t a bad gig,” I said, “as far as places to reside go. All the changes though, must have you a little confused. Is there something in particular you don’t like about the new look?”
But if it was the style of the decor, or the cut corners that had Martin acting up, he didn’t say it now.
I sighed, and took my hand off the picture. I turned back to Luke. “Suggestions?”
“Martin,” Luke said, “if you’re here with us, and want us to know anything at all, or even if you want us to leave you alone, try to knock on something for us. Just once, just to let us know that you’re here.” He said it with such confidence and urgency that for the moment after he stopped talking I really expected Martin to give us some sort of sign.
It hardly made any sense at all. This was a spirit that had appeared in full view to two people on a different floor of the building almost every night for over a decade. More recently, he’d moved objects, shorted out lights, and even dropped a light from where it was, and that Caroline claimed was securely bolted to the rigging.
But now? Now he was quiet as a mouse. I ticked through the reasons that might be. Maybe it had to do with the fact that neither Sydney nor I were blonds. If he had a type that brought him out, we were missing a piece. Or, maybe it was about energy. During a busy day at the Drugstore, or during a performance there were people present, generating plenty of emotional energy to charge the room. Well, maybe not for this particular show, but possibly the actors put out most of the juice. Certainly Melanie could generate enough emotional energy just on her own. Was that part of it, and why we weren’t getting anything now?
We left the dressing rooms eventually, and repeated out process elsewhere in the theater. Finally we congregated around Matt’s monitor station, where he was busy mixing and picking through audio while there was still battery life to use for it. Syd looked a little disappointed we hadn’t gotten much going on, but Goog looked a little more relaxed. At least for now. Probably it would suit him just fine if this all turned out to be a hoax.
And I had to admit, maybe what I felt before hadn’t actually been the ghost of Martin Lovejoy. Maybe I was just projecting my own feelings. Matt might not have turned up any evidence of trickery here, but that didn’t mean someone wasn’t just very good at not leaving any behind. Now, standing in the space at nearly 3 o’clock in the morning, I couldn’t sense a wisp of that same sad, dissatisfied emotion I’d felt before.
Matt looked up suddenly from the monitor, and glanced at us. He looked back, pressed the headphones to his ear, wound back some bit of spiky looking audio that was all just scribbles to me, and then paused it.
He handed me the headphones. “Might have got something,” he said. “Have a listen.”
I put the headphones on and closed my eyes, listening at first to myself talking to nobody. “Martin, you must have had a thing for this pretty lady, right? Is that why you keep watching out for these pretty blonds?” Except…
“Wait, go back again,” I said. I listened more carefully. Right after I said, ‘pretty lady’, I heard it. I heard Martin Lovejoy.
“My Winnie. She’s not my Winnie.”
“My Winnie,” I repeated, instantly certain that this was a nickname for Irma Winston. And not just any nickname—even through the static, it was clearly spoken with a deep longing.
And if that wasn’t enough, the moment I said the name out loud, that light on the stage switched itself on, shining in the darkness with an eerie focus that illuminated none of the rest of the room, just before the batteries died, and the monitors winked off.
Goog made a high pitched squeak as we were plunged into darkness, and then cussed under his breath when a low, off-key melody drifted to us. I couldn’t tell the words, and the song seemed to come from no particular place, but there was no doubt about it in my mind now.
Martin Lovejoy was with us, and he was sad, so very sad, about something to do with Irma Winston.
Chapter 9
“Mrs. Milovichny will see you in her drawing room,” a tall, black haired, middle aged man in a smart, old-style black and white butler’s suit told the five of us from the doorway of Mrs. Milovichny’s waiting parlor whe
re we had languished for almost an hour the following day.
At around ten thirty that morning, after scarfing down some of Mrs. Robbins’ homemade quiche—she really outdid herself in that little kitchen—we got the call from Morris, her bona fide butler. He came with the old plantation house in which, it was revealed, Mrs. Milovichny lived alone with only her staff. She had no children, and consequently no grand children, and had purchased the empty house on the north end of town just twenty minutes away and it was a sight to see.
All white, from end to end and top to bottom, the front porch was practically a stage, with an overhead some twenty feet above us supported with long, grooved iconic columns. Two rows of flowering cherry trees bordered the long driveway up to the circle, in the center of which was a clean but non-functioning fountain with cherubs all wrestling in a pile, their little mouths open where they would, had the thing been working, likely spit water into the wide, deep basin beneath them.
Inside, the place was done up in rich red cherry wood, same as the steps leading up to the theater at the back of the drugstore. The furniture looked old, but polished to a shine and well cared for. If walking into the new Bell’s Opera House was like being transported back to the 1920s, walking up the steps of Mrs. Milovichny’s home was like climbing all the way back to antebellum Virginia. A place like this, like all of Egypt Pike in fact, had real history. It was surprising there weren’t more earthbound spirits here and in fact I wasn’t convinced that there weren’t.
By now, Syd had amassed a small pile of lozenge wrappers. She’d stubbornly continued to pop one after the other into her mouth, maybe to prove to Goog they hadn’t been the cause of her tummy ache. That woman wouldn’t stand for being proved wrong.
As for Goog, he barely spoke at all while the four of us chatted about this, that, and nothing, and what we thought about the case so far. Luke hadn’t spoken up about my accusations against Mr. Steinbeck, and neither had I. Now wasn’t the time to stir the pot. Not yet, at least, but I was weighing whether or not to bring my thoughts to Mrs. Milovichny when we finally spoke.
We rose from our respective chairs, all stretching and adjusting. Probably they hadn’t invented comfortable chairs until much, much later. These were all rock hard and a chore to sit in for five minutes, much less an hour. We’d all taken turns pacing the floor in front of a grand fireplace, and were practically thrilled to finally be summoned. It was like meeting royalty, having to wait in such an opulent, uncomfortable setting.
And, it turned out, we weren’t far off; at least as far as appearances were concerned.
I’d wondered before why we’d had to wait so long, until I saw the grand lady in person. This was a wealthy woman. She was tall and stately, gracefully clad in a shiny black fur-trimmed dress she could have had either made or kept over from the bygone era of her youth. She had aged so well I was almost preemptively jealous of her, with smooth skin barely showing the lines of her incredible 98 years, and she wasn’t the least bit hunched. A single wisp of white hair curled out from under her elaborately wrapped head scarf, but it didn’t look errant or accidental, just part of the overall effect. Her bright blue eyes were still canny and sharp, and I started to doubt my suspicions about Mr. Steinbeck. The part about him stealing money, anyway. Mrs. Milovichny didn’t look like the sort of woman you could pull one over on.
“This is the lady of the house,” Milton announced when we were all in the room. “Mrs. Milovichny.”
“A pleasure to meet you, ma’am,” Luke said politely as we closed the distance. He extended a hand to shake, and the classy lady offered him hers palm-down, like he should give it a kiss. He didn’t; just took it briefly.
Mrs. Milovichny greeted us each in turn. “The pleasure is all mine.” Her voice was clear, and strong. If I had to guess, I’d say she had a lot of life left ahead of her. I wondered what her secret was.
For all her glamour and charm, however, she quickly proved to be a kindly, humble sort of woman who just happened to enjoy the spectacle of it all. Not surprising for a woman who bankrolled an old opera house.
“You have an absolutely lovely home,” I told her.
“Why thank you,” She said graciously, smiling from the compliment like I’d told her she was lovely. “I always admired this place. Living here was a dream. When you’re my age, you stop waiting on dreams to come true and start doing it yourself.”
“You’re local, then?” Matt asked.
Mrs. Milovichny nodded, “Born and raised. I was abroad for sometime, but decided to come back here to live out whatever years I have left.”
She seemed remarkably comfortable with her mortality, and it seemed somehow admirable and comforting rather than morbid or sad.
“I must admit to you,” Mrs. Milovichny said after we were all introduced and sitting, “that I was unaware of Jeremiah’s hiring you all. Or that our theater was quite as haunted as you make it out to be.”
“But you did suspect it was haunted?” Syd asked.
“We’re not convinced that it is,” Matt commented.
“Oh, I certainly believe it,” Mrs. Milovichny said. “It doesn’t surprise me in the least. I know the history of the place, and I’ve heard the Robbins’ story about it before. It’s sort of grand, isn’t it? Right out of Andrew Lloyd Weber. Our very own Phantom of the Opera.”
“We’re hoping it doesn’t end up going quite that far,” I said. “But the activity at last night’s show was disturbing. Melanie Burk could have been hurt, and she still might if this continues to escalate.”
“Of course I want nothing of the sort,” the old dame assured us. “Have you a proposal, then, to resolve this unfortunate circumstance?”
“Almost,” Luke said. “We have a few questions that you might be able to answer, if you were around when the opera house was in its prime.”
“Certainly. What do you wish to know?” Even sitting down she seemed tall. What was it that was so familiar about her?
“Well,” Luke said, “we understand there was an accident in 1944. A stage hand fell from the rigging? Martin Lovejoy. Were you living in Egypt Pike when that happened?”
A shadow passed over Mrs. Milovichny’s face, one of old, old loss that momentarily revealed a woman older and more tired than she made herself appear. It passed in a flash, and she was nodding, and reaching for a little silver box on the marble topped side table near her high backed, carved wooden chair. “Oh, yes. I remember quite well. It was the talk of the town for months. So sad; such a promising young man, and so sweet.” She flipped the lid on the box, and pulled a cigarette out.
Before she let Milton light it for her, she glanced at the five of us. “Begging your pardon, of course, do you mind? I quit for years, but at this point I can’t justify denying myself the little pleasures.”
All of us assented. The smell of smoke quickly filled the space between us all, but it wasn’t the acrid stench of cheap cigarettes. Instead, it was vaguely sweet, like pipe tobacco. Mrs. Milovichny took a long, slow drag from it and then blew out a thin, curling stream of smoke into the atmosphere above us. She sighed as she did, as though it really was a pleasure for her though I couldn’t imagine why.
And then it hit me. That long neck, those curves that were still there though they were weathered away by time and age. The way she held her cigarette, and now that I was seeing it even the angles of her jaw and face were still as strong and handsome as they were when she was just a young actress posing for a photograph.
She met my eyes, and must have seen something there. The corner of her lip turned up just a bit in the slightest, sad little smile.
“You’re Winnie,” I said softly.
Maybe she expected me to call her Irma, or Ms. Winston, or some combination, but it was clear she didn’t expect me to call her by Martin’s nickname for her. Her demeanor cracked once more, and though she recovered it quickly—still the actress all these decades later—she looked pained. “Oh. Oh, my. Now, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a
long, long time.”
Chapter 10
“Irma Winston?” Syd asked, catching on fast. Luke looked blown away, and even Goog’s somber expression cleared up.
“Irma Milovichny these days,” Irma said. She puffed her cigarette again. “But yes. Back then, I was Irma Winston.”
“Then you knew Martin Lovejoy,” I said.
She nodded. “I did. More than knew him, in fact. For a short time I thought we might… but nothing came of it. Perhaps I realized a little too late.”
“You were there the night he died,” Matt said. “When he fell off the rigging. In the story from the papers, it said the part that fell nearly hit you.”
“I could feel the wind of it rushing past me,” she confirmed. “I still remember it very clearly. And I remember… poor Martin…” she steadied herself with another long drag from her smoke, and was quiet for some time when she’d released another cloud of sweet smoke into the air. We were quiet as well, waiting to hear what she had to say next.
The Mystery of the Ominous Opera House: A Cozy Mystery (Eden Patterson: Ghost Whisperer Book 4) Page 5