Voices in the Wardrobe

by Marlys Millhiser

  “She talked, Warren. I know who killed Dashiell. You thought she was dead but she talked. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know where he is. I thought you killed him already. Caroline, please stop this. Meet me in our room. But don’t bring the rifle. I swear everything will be okay.”

  She was on the PA. He was yelling from somewhere close. Charlie’s phone vibrated in her pocket again and she pulled up her shirt to talk in it again. “Mom, where are you?”

  “In the office. Where are you?”

  “I’m in the walls with Kenny and Mitch. Have you seen Keegan and Brodie?”

  “Brodie’s with me. I don’t know where Keegan is. How can we get to you? It’s getting dangerous out here.”

  “Mom and Brodie are in the office. What do I tell them?”

  “Charlie?” Mitch took over, “there’s a men’s room right around the corner to the right and across the hall next to it is a janitor’s closet. Jump in the closet quick and the wall behind the utility cart is open. We’ll wait for you. And move fast, sounds like some heavy artillery out there.”

  “Tell me about it.” Another gunshot just as they reached the closet and the door opened by itself and someone yanked Charlie into darkness. “Don’t forget Brodie.”

  Thirty-Seven

  They sat on stacked boxes, under a dim lightbulb stuck in a white socket thing with a chain attached, enough box stacks to seat them all. Brodie had dropped the gun when he was yanked into the closet so they were now disarmed. At least he hadn’t shot off his foot. Mitch and Kenny thought they should all wait it out until the shooting was over and everybody was dead and then they could just walk out of the place.

  Charlie had a few problems with that. “One, the gun battle sounds like it’s winding down to two combatants—the VanZants—both of whom must know of these lost spaces in the architecture, since they oversaw the most recent remodel job, and must have overseen or carried in themselves the furnishings upon which we lounge. Two, I don’t know where Keegan is. Three, if I’m guessing correctly, there are at least four murdered federal investigators on the property and a few sheriff’s deputies awaiting word on what to do when Washington sorts all this out. There’s going to be a lot of bad blood between local and national agencies and we small folks are not going to count for much in the fracas.

  “And nobody is going to want to admit that a pissed-off mother can wipe out such important investigations. It’s either going to be totally hushed up or spun out of control and witnesses will have to be discredited or destroyed. And four, I have not found Maggie yet, dead or alive.”

  “Charlie, this is not Hollywood,” Kenny said. “This is reality. There are lives on the line here—whether Maggie is dead or not.”

  “You bet there are and you’re looking at them. You have any idea of the ‘collateral damage’ to the presently assembled there could be if somebody decides a fire would solve the problem? How is this space vented, do you know? Any loss of life here could be chalked up to the crazy mom up there getting even for the murder of her son. And we sit here inside the walls.”

  After a silence in which everyone stared at Charlie and then sideways-glanced at others to check out how crazy things were getting, Mitch said, “Charlie, you got to stop handling mystery writers.”

  This from the producer of Jane of the Jungle yet. Oh boy.

  This tunnel-like space dead ended around a curve Charlie would bet came about when the circular auditorium was added and it was fitted with the lightbulb because it had already been wired as part of a room and was now used for storage. Kenny had found this one because it had an entrance to it off the men’s room as well and the light had been left on, so he saw it through the crack at the back of a cupboard where toilet tissue and paper towels were stored. He’d stepped into the cupboard when he heard someone approaching.

  It was Mitch. They had both been interrogated by the gentlemen in suits, their conversations recorded by someone and mixed with others in the past to entertain Charlie and company. The suits were called out of the room by someone behind Kenny and Mitch who were warned not to leave their seats. But the inquisitors never returned. The two had gotten into a “spat” and separated. Both being unarmed, they’d hidden in odd places and found other holes in the walls used for storage, some lit, some not. Both were looking for Charlie and her daughter.

  “I saw you guys get captured. Who were those people?” Charlie asked.

  “Sheriff’s guys, apparently. They delivered us to the Feds and I haven’t seen them since. I don’t know what happened to them.” Kenny’s beard was growing out. On him it looked good, even with the dark patches around his eyes and the smudges.

  “I do,” Mitch said. “They were ordered to the parking lot, until priorities got untangled.” He didn’t look to have any more bruises than before. Charlie’s life was sure hard on her friends.

  “Kenny, why did you call to tell me to stay away from Jerry Parks?”

  “He’s a lunatic, that’s why. He was moaning—all tied up in a closet and I let him loose. Tried to ram me, sock me. You’d think he’d been grateful but—”

  “You let him loose? He tried to kill me,” Brodie said. “He’s probably going to find his gun and come after us again.”

  “Just because Charlie stuffed his cell phone in the used tampon receptacle in the ladies’ room at the Islandia?”

  “I vote we try to make a run for the parking lot. We’re not that far from it here.” Libby stood up to brush her tight little tush, not one male eye in the room ignoring the gesture, and then bent over to take a closer look at the writing on her box.

  “What if he’s got Keegan? And I have to find Maggie or what happened to her,” Charlie insisted.

  But Libby was too busy examining the contents of the box, pulling out smaller boxes to read labels, lifting the top box off to investigate the box beneath. “Like, you could put together a sweet little meth lab with all this. All you’d need is a chemical or two and a hot plate.”

  “You know how to make meth?” Charlie’s voice gurgled like she’d never known it to do before.

  “I don’t know what the chemicals are or how long to cook it, but I could find out easy enough. Lots of other good ingredients here though.”

  “You could find out? Who are you running with now who’d know that?”

  “Mom, don’t start. We’re in enough trouble without you losing it. You’re driving me crazy.”

  “I’m driving you crazy?” Now Charlie was sputtering. Just like Edwina used to do. “Ohgod, when’s your grandmother’s plane due in?”

  “I don’t know, but she’s a big girl. She could get a van or taxi from the airport. Jacob has a key to let her in.” Libby shook her straggly hair in despair, ran her fingers through it and shook it again into perfect place to cup her face. Must have dried.

  “I vote for Libby’s idea,” Mitch said. “And I think we better move before the shooting starts again.”

  “You got it,” Kenny agreed.

  “I’m in,” Brodie added his blessing. “You’re outnumbered, Charlie. You know it’s best for Libby.”

  She nodded. It’s horrible to have to make choices between those you love.

  The first in line had just entered the broom closet when the light went out behind them. They were stumbling, reaching for each other as they moved around the janitors’ cart and straggled out into the hall, making more noise than they wanted to as they knocked various items off onto the floor on the way.

  Charlie blinked sticky contacts around, trying to focus on the dimmer shadow that was the front glass doors to outside and the parking lot somewhere at the end of the rainbow when she realized she’d lost touch with whoever was in front of her and reached back for whoever was behind. Something slid around her waist and yanked her out of the line, a hand clapped so tight over her mouth that it jerked her head back so she lost what little sight she’d had of her companions and she was lifted back into deeper shadow, unable to call out or even to swallow.r />
  She barely felt the prick in her arm before a spreading weakness enveloped her.

  Thirty-Eight

  It was like sirens, humming a beautiful beckoning melody, lured Charlie from a sleep so deep it left her euphoric. Every cell of her body not only felt no pain but flowed, refreshed, to consciousness—almost like an orgasm and vaguely similar, but not as exhausting. Each intake of breath felt marvelous, renewing.

  “Need help with depression? We all do sometimes. Why be miserable or just plain down when you don’t have to?” a male voice, smooth as good scotch and as comforting, enticed over the sirens’ background purring. “Studies show that Euphoria Four, just out of testing and soon to hit pharmacy shelves near you, makes all other mood medication pale in comparison.” The sirens sighed in three-part harmony and in minor key, made you want to stretch like a cat. Charlie sighed too, too content and cozy to open her eyes.

  “Tell your doctor about this amazing relief for the sadness-afflicted. Tell your doctor it might be right for you. Not suitable for children, pregnant or nursing women, adults with addictions or mental illness, anyone under treatment for cancer or diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, or people over eighty-five. Can cause loss of bladder control, heart palpitations, certain sexual side effects and dry mouth.”

  Then an unmistakable sound forced Charlie to open her eyes and her adrenalin to surge—Margaret Mildred Stutzman’s giggle, unmistakable, an epiphany that brought on headache, dizziness, pounding heartbeat, a real urge to pee, and dry mouth.

  “Maggie!” She sat up in a deep, dizzy darkness, a reeling world she couldn’t see, a cramping nausea. “Maggie, help me.”

  A rough hand pushed her back onto a soft surface that warped and buckled and tried to buck her off. There was nothing in her stomach but it tried to come up anyway.

  “How do you like being on the other end of the power struggle this time and in a big way, big-deal Hollywood agent?” Jerry Parks said.

  “Where’s Maggie?”

  “You’ll be with her soon enough. First I just thought you’d like to know you murdered Dr. Grant Howard, Charlie. Know how? You backed up that no-talent Brodie Caulfield’s pitch, that’s how. I didn’t believe it until you said it was true. I asked Howard and he said he didn’t read the submissions but brought people like me and hotshots like you together. Well, you see where that got him. It got him dead. And you were nice enough to bring your friend Maggie to the Islandia and good old Dashiell was good enough to bring a bag of drugs with her name on them and then bring her back here. We’d decided to pin everything on Dashiell, but your friend Maggie offered herself up for sacrifice. You both have been a great help from the beginning.”

  “I heard Maggie. She’s here.”

  “You smartass types like to dump on little people’s dreams. Well, you don’t have that right. This time, this little guy’s gonna bring to an end all of your dreams.” He pulled at Charlie’s clothes. “All I wanted was time and money enough to write screenplays and be a father to my kid. But no, I wasn’t good enough for big-deal Dr. Judy, creepy old hag. She had so much money, she couldn’t have spent it all in a hundred years. But then she didn’t get the chance, did she?”

  “Caroline? Caroline, where are you? You need help, darling. Let me help you,” Warren VanZant’s soothing voice crooned like the sirens, hummed.

  Charlie mustered the strength to knee Parks as he pulled at her underwear, but apparently didn’t get him in the right socket.

  “Your agent, Ridgeway, thought she had the goods on me, all the evidence that I had no rights to my daughter’s money. Well, I got the goods on Dr. Judith Judd and her estate and double dealings and I’m going to write an exposé that will topple her empire and expose the pharmaceutical industry and the IRS and who knows what all? Got it all stashed somewhere safe. Going to make your Kenneth Cooper look like an amateur.”

  “Charlie.” Mitch’s voice. “We’re here, do you have your cell? Let us know where you are.”

  “You don’t have your cell, Charlie, I do. Just relax and enjoy the last chance you’ll have to enjoy anything. You’re soon going to join your friends but first I’m going to make you happier than you’ll ever be again. What difference does it make if you’re dead?”

  An explosion. No, a gunshot. This one very close. Then silence. Then the lights. Charlie couldn’t see Maggie anywhere. But she could see Jerry Parks. He was the one who was dead. She was half off the bed, he was on the floor next to it. She threw up spit and stomach juices on his face or what was left of it.

  “Well, here we are full circle,” Caroline VanZant’s voice came, toneless, flat.

  Charlie didn’t know if the woman was on the PA or in the room. She did know the bereaved mother was dangerous. “Caroline, help me find Maggie and Keegan. We have to get out of here. The whole place is going to blow up and burn.”

  “Get off that bed and put on your clothes. You’re disgusting.”

  Charlie rolled over to find herself in the Victorian room with the dippy chandelier. Caroline VanZant stood swaying in the warped doorway, her rifle leveled at Charlie. How could she level it when she was swaying? Charlie tried to grab a bed post and pull herself up. “No, really. It’s a meth lab and they do that—blow up, I mean. We gotta hurry and find Maggie and Keegan.”

  The crazed part of Charlie’s mind saw the whole room tilt as she fell off the bed again, this time trying to crawl past Jerry Parks’ ruined head to get to the stool in the bathroom, fighting the excruciating cramping in her body’s uncentered center. The partially sane side hoped Caroline wouldn’t shoot her and tried to figure out how many bullets were in that rifle and if there was a refill. The next thing she knew, she was on the floor of the shower, water beating over her and lavender shower gel suds everywhere.

  Then skewered images of the tile and shower door and the long mirror in its frame with the trunnions and then the voice in the wardrobe and Jerry Parks’ blood and tissue and yuck all over the floor. He didn’t say anything but the wardrobe said, “Euphoria Four, on your druggist’s shelves this month. Don’t wait for a busy doctor to discover it. You be the first to tell the doctor about it and he or she will be the first to thank you.” Caroline took her out into the hall. It tilted.

  “Charlie, where are you? Answer me.” Mitch on the PA.

  “I’m here. Wherever here is.”

  “Caroline, please,” Warren VanZant’s voice next over the eerie-sounding sound system.

  Charlie’s hair dripped onto the lush terrycloth robe and the soft slip-ons were too big for her feet again. She smelled like lavender shower gel. She felt a little better.

  “Don’t listen to the voices.” Caroline pulled Charlie along by the elbow. “I’m taking you to your Maggie. She’s back where she started.”

  Maggie floated in the second eddy pool from the left, wrapped again in seaweed. But Caroline yanked Charlie on by and into the foliage behind it, through a door in the wall and into the space inside it. “I was going to use her to entice you out of hiding but now I don’t have to. You must be very quiet. I have one bullet left. It is for the one who killed my son and tried to kill your Maggie and Luella too. Don’t make me waste it on you or your friends, Charlie Greene. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

  Charlie didn’t have time to answer—her brain worked way slow and the door that opened in front of her way fast. Here was the back door to the control room she’d known must exist. Mitch pleaded into a microphone for Charlie to answer him, Kenny and Sue Rippon tried to do CPR on Ruth Ann Singer, no longer very snappy, and Warren VanZant turned to face his wife. His skin turned too, turned as gray as his eyebrows and hair fringe.

  Everyone froze but Kenny who rose slowly to his feet.

  “Back on your knees, Mr. Cooper, or your agent is a dead woman. Everyone be very very very still. I want only the one man left who killed my son. The other is dead already.”

  “Caroline, listen to me, please. I can explain about Dashiell.”

  �
��Miss Ridgeway already has.”

  Charlie felt like an accordion deflating as she waffled to the floor to join Ruth Ann and Caroline VanZant used her last bullet.

  “Maggie’s in the eddy pool,” Charlie insisted as Kenny tried to make her lie still on the floor of the auditorium while Caroline slouched exhausted in a front row seat and Mitch tried to contact the outside world on his cell. Sue Rippon cuddled Ruth Ann and rocked her in her arms.

  “The medics say they’ve been ordered not to come in. They’re waiting for word from higher up. Can we get the wounded to the gate?” Mitch said. “Looks like we should gather up the living and make a run for it.”

  Dr. Judy still entranced silently on the screen.

  “Eddy pool,” Charlie insisted and struggled out from under Kenny Cowper. “Must get Maggie too. Can’t leave her. Whole place’s gonna blow up in an earthquake.”

  “Christ, Cowper, can’t you do anything right,” Mitch said behind her and she left the clumsy slippers in the auditorium for Kenny to trip over and ran barefoot into the blood-spattered control room while Kenny informed Mitch where he could go and the sooner the better.

  Charlie was in the dark space inside the walls before he caught up with her and then he snagged the robe instead. She ran out of it. It was dark in here and he had a little trouble finding her and she had a lot of it finding the door out to the deck with the pools. He pleaded with her the whole time, swearing even. He insisted there was no door and they had no time to look for it if there was.

  Charlie found it anyway and kicked it open, struggling against him and slipping out of his grasp because too much shower gel had left her slimy and because he was, when all was said and done, a gentleman by nature, and maybe because she was his agent. Agents aren’t nearly as powerful as writers think, but the delusion is necessary for much-battered egos.

  Hey, welcome back to some sanity, babe, her inner voice kicked in. I thought you were a goner there.

  “Charlie, you are sick, trust me. I don’t want to hurt you but I can’t let you run around demented—everything will be okay.”