by Kylie Logan
Jazz couldn’t believe it, either. “Well, she was in Europe with one of our overseas study groups when Dad died,” she told Matt. “So she wasn’t at the funeral. And I guess…” She shook her head. “I guess it just never happened.”
“Well, kiddo, you should have made sure it happened. She’s great!”
“She’s got kids.”
“I like kids.”
“She’s a vegan.”
“I can be ecumenical.”
“You have a lousy track record with women.”
Matt was short and compact. He crossed his arms over his broad chest and pursed his lips. “I do. But she’s the one who will make me change my ways. I can feel it in my bones. That’s why you’re going to give me her phone number.”
“Not until I ask her if it’s all right.”
One corner of his mouth pulled tight. “I knew you were going to say that.”
“So…” Jazz gathered her things and let Matt walk out of the office before her. Eileen was gone for the afternoon, off at a meeting of community leaders, and Jazz locked the door behind her. “What’s up?”
“The usual. You? No. Wait.” They were in the hallway near the freshmen lockers, and Matt stopped. “Florentine Allen. I read about it in the papers.”
“You remember her?”
“From cross-country, sure. We did that first-aid class for them, remember? When I heard the name, it didn’t ring any bells, but then in the newspaper, I read that she was a photographer and they showed her school picture and then I remembered. The news stories, they’re making it sound like she turned into some kind of freak.”
“She was working for a horror film festival.” The thought of how the media twisted a story to make it more interesting didn’t sit well with Jazz. “The clothes and the makeup, they were all part of her costume. I saw some of her recent work. She was as talented as ever. She wasn’t a weirdo.”
“And I didn’t mean to bring up a sore subject.” He offered a one-sided smile. “I gave Hal a call when I read the kid went to school here. He said you’re the one who found her.”
Jazz looked away. “I’m all right.”
“I’m sure you are. Let me guess, your mom brought food.”
She was grateful to him for lightening the mood, and they continued on down the hallway toward the gym. “She made soup. You know my mom!”
“I know finding a body isn’t easy. If you need to talk—”
Jazz pushed through the gym doors and stopped. “Oh my gosh, Matt. I’m sorry. I forgot. I shouldn’t have, but I did. You found Darren. After…”
They both knew the details and they didn’t need to bring them out into the spring sunshine that spilled through the windows high up on the walls of the gym. Darren Marsh was a young firefighter who’d committed suicide three years earlier at the station where both he and Matt worked. When Darren hadn’t shown up for dinner, Matt went looking for him. Even though it was clear there was no hope for Darren, Matt had administered CPR. He’d continued it, desperately, frantically, until his fellow firefighters finally pulled him away.
“I’m sorry.” Heat rushed into Jazz cheeks. “Here I am acting like I’m the only one in the world who’s ever found…”
“A dead person. You can say it. And hey … you aren’t acting like that at all. You’re not whining. But then, you wouldn’t. I asked how you were, you told me you’re doing all right. I believe you. Only…” Matt looked her in the eye. In the weeks after her dad’s death, she’d depended on him to do her thinking for her, to help her dodge the media that always seemed to be waiting outside her parents’ home, and to navigate through the despair and anger and grief that had threatened to swallow her whole. Matt was just far enough outside the circle of the family to listen and offer advice objectively, and just close enough to understand. He was dependable and honest and loyal to a fault.
“After what happened with Darren, I saw this shrink over on the east side,” he said. “Now don’t go brushing me off,” he added quickly, because of course that was exactly what she was going to do. She was going to remind him she was fine. She was going to lie about how she wasn’t having trouble sleeping. She wasn’t going to tell him she’d been asking questions about Florie’s life and Florie’s death because finding the answers was the only thing that was going to bring her peace.
Matt touched his forehead to hers. “When you’re ready, I’ll give you his number.”
“When I’m ready…” She backed away from him. There was no use giving the girls already gathered in the gym something to gossip about. “When I’m ready, I’ll let you know.”
“Good enough for me.”
“Only, Matt…” Matt moved the way he did everything else, in rapid, efficient steps that showed the world he didn’t have the time or the patience to mess around. He’d already started toward the group of girls waiting on the other side of the gym when Jazz latched onto his arm.
“You’re right about Florie,” she said. “She was a good kid. So how does it make any sense, Matt? How does a good kid end up dead in an abandoned building?”
CHAPTER 9
To Jazz’s way of thinking, there was something a little off-kilter about the offices of a horror film festival being right next door to a place with a sign that featured a cone topped with a scoop of hot-pink ice cream.
But then maybe that’s why the festival people chose what had been an empty storefront on Professor Avenue to house their offices. Warped sense of humor? Juxtaposition of cheerful and carefree with creepy-crawly? Jazz couldn’t say. She only knew that she had fifty minutes before she had to get back to school and she had to make the most of her lunch break.
Standing across the street, her gaze moved from that pink ice cream outside one building to the larger-than-life poster in the front window of the other, a poster that featured a blue-skinned man dressed in black and silver who had claws for fingernails and pointed teeth. Creepy-crawly, sure, but she crossed the street anyway. The sign taped to the front door, CLEVELAND HORROR FILM FESTIVAL, ENTER IF YOU DARE!, also advised that, if she dared, she had to go around to the back to get in.
She went to the right, down an alley so narrow she needed to sidle along, her back to the tall wooden fence that marked off the boundaries of the outdoor patio of the bar next door. It was Friday and the party crowd had started early. She heard glasses clink, smelled cigarette smoke.
Like so much of Tremont, the film festival building was old and built of red brick. At least on this side of it, there were no windows. Up ahead, where the three-story building ended, there was a little more room to move, a little more space to breathe. She stepped into it, turned to her left, and caught her breath.
The man standing there not six inches from her reminded her of the monster on the poster out front. His eyes were rimmed with black. His cheeks and his nose and his left eyebrow were pierced. His earlobes were plugged with wooden discs the size of pennies. He was dressed in black and, though it was a warm afternoon and Jazz had left her jacket back at St. Catherine’s, he was swaddled in leather—boots, pants, jacket. A tattoo of an octopus crawled from the scooped neckline of his black T-shirt, its tentacles reaching up and around his neck and nearly meeting the tattoo on his left cheek, a hand, inked in black. Like the permanent mark of a punishing slap.
“What do you want?”
She was so mesmerized by the way the sun glinted off his shaved head, it took her a moment to remember.
She poked a thumb over her shoulder toward the street. “The sign up front says to come around to the back.”
If it was a test, she apparently passed.
He took a step back and, instinctively, Jazz let go a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and, with a smile, did her best to chase away the chill that snaked up her back.
“I hoped I could talk to someone from the festival about Florie Allen. I’ve heard she worked here.”
His eyes were nearly as dark as his clothing, his gaze as pointed as the bits of me
tal in his cheek. “What about her?”
She remembered what Nick had told her about the festival. “Are you Parker Paul, the man in charge?”
The man with the tats chuckled, the sound low and rumbling, like thunder. “Yeah, Paul, he can tell you about Florie. He’s inside.”
She stepped around the man, ridiculously relieved when she found the back door open, went into the building, and closed the door behind her.
She did her best to convince herself that she stood still for a minute so she could let her eyes adjust to the lack of light there in the back hallway, but she’d never been a very good liar. She reminded herself that she’d never judged people by their looks, that just because the guy outside looked scary didn’t mean he was. But that didn’t slow the sharp rap of her heart inside her ribs. She took a quick look over her shoulder just to make sure the door behind her stayed shut and went in search of the film festival offices.
The way she remembered it, the building had once been—back when she was a kid and those kinds of things still existed in neighborhoods—a shoe store. Following the sounds of fingers on a keyboard, she ignored the stairway that led to the upper floors and walked through what must have been, then and now, a storage room. No more Keds. No more saddle shoes. These days, the dark, cavernous room was crammed with things like mannequins without heads, stringy phony spiderwebs, and foam gravestones where leering skulls were frozen in eternal, gaping smiles.
What looked like a body laid out on a board turned out to be a dressmaker’s dummy wearing a black cloak. Eager to get away from it and the way it made her think of Florie, Jazz stepped through a curtained doorway and from the gloom into the light that spilled from the front display windows. There, the same poster of the same monster that glared at passersby outside glared fiercely at her from the wall on her left. Directly in front of it, a woman with a gray bouffant and blue jeweled glasses, pointed at the top corners, tapped frantically at her keyboard.
“Hi!”
The woman looked up, but only long enough to frown. “I don’t suppose you’re from the Geek Squad, are you?”
Jazz stepped closer to the woman, whose computer sat on a red card table that tilted slightly to the left. There was a plastic axe on the floor at her feet, its blade coated in fake blood, and there was a life-sized pressboard coffin behind her. “Sorry. Having problems?”
The woman pounded the keys another time. “Our mailing list is stuck inside this damned thing and I can’t get it out. It’s frozen.” Just for good measure, she thumped the keyboard a few more times.
“Maybe if you just let it…” Jazz swallowed the advice. It was clear the woman wasn’t going to listen. Instead, she said, “I’m looking for Parker Paul.”
The woman leaned forward, the better to scowl at her computer screen, at the same time she raised one hand long enough to wave in the general direction Jazz had just come from. “Upstairs. First door on the right.”
Jazz didn’t bother thanking her, but went through the back storage room, her footsteps in counterpoint to the clacking from up front. In another minute, she was upstairs and outside a closed door with a piece of paper taped to it. This one did not instruct her to enter if she dared. Instead, it simply said EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR.
She knocked, and heard a hurried “Come on in” before the same voice said something else, lower and quieter.
She found Parker Paul behind a desk, his cell phone in one hand. He raised a finger to tell her “Just a minute,” and continued on with his conversation.
“It’s like I told you, Veronica. Publicity, publicity, publicity.”
Whatever Veronica said in reply, Paul’s bushy eyebrows lowered over his eyes like woolly bear caterpillars settling in for a long winter nap. “It’s too good an opportunity to pass up.” His voice was sweeter now, more melodic. “I’ve got the passes for you, and I promised you an exclusive interview with Ralph Remington, didn’t I? Heck, Veronica, he’s the scariest dude to come out of Hollywood since that It clown. We’re lucky he’s going to be here for opening night. The interview will make a great feature.”
Paul listened for another moment. “You’ll run with the story I sent over this morning?” A smile cut across his wide, unremarkable face. “You’re a doll! I knew you’d see it my way.”
Still grinning, he ended the call and sat back, satisfied, in a chair that squeaked. “Let me guess, you’re a reporter.”
“Publicity, publicity, publicity.” She echoed what he’d said to Veronica. “I know how important that can be. It can’t be easy getting a film festival off the ground.”
“You got that right.” He sat up and his chair protested. “What can I do for you? No! Wait! You want to know all about Florentine Allen, right? About her association with all that is dark and macabre.”
Jazz’s stomach went cold. “That’s what you were talking about? On the phone just now? You’re using Florie’s murder to launch some sort of PR campaign?”
Paul was a man of fifty or so, short and stocky. He stood and smoothed a hand over a beige shirt, a rounded stomach, and a gray tie dotted with tiny black bats. “What do you want to know about her? I mean other than about her work with us here at the festival and all that is monstrous and terrible?”
It was a shame there was no guest chair in Paul’s office. Jazz’s knees were suddenly weak. Her stomach bunched and she was just as glad she hadn’t had a chance to eat lunch. “You’re the one who gave the newspapers that picture of Florie in her goth makeup.”
“What can I say?” His shrug was nonchalant. “It was one of the shots we’re using on the brochure.” There was a stack of them on his desk, and he handed one to Jazz. “You know the old saying, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
The front of the festival brochure featured the poster she’d seen downstairs. The inside listed the movies (Creature from the Black Lagoon, Scream, The Exorcist, and others) and the times and theaters where they’d be shown. The back …
She flipped the brochure over and caught her breath at the sight of Florie’s picture staring up at her. Yeah, she was in costume. And she was wearing makeup. And there was purple lipstick on her lips and purple eye shadow smeared over both her eyes. But …
“She was just a kid.”
Even to her own ears, Jazz’s voice sounded small and wounded.
Maybe Paul noticed. He squeezed out from behind the desk and went over to the windows that looked out at the street, and he refused to meet her eyes. “Did you tell me who you are and why you are here?”
“You didn’t ask. You were too busy gloating about your PR coup.”
He turned and leaned against the windowsill, his arms crossed over his chest. “It’s a tough world out there. For any business. It’s even harder for anything that has to do with the arts.”
Jazz thought about the phony axe and coffin downstairs, the mannequins whose heads had been lopped off. “Are horror movies art?”
“The good ones are.” Paul wiggled those caterpillar eyebrows. “They get our blood racing and our pulses pounding. They heighten our senses. You know how it is, you’re watching a scary movie and suddenly you’re listening a little more closely for every sound around you. You’re straining your eyes to see through the dark. Hey!” He cocked his head and studied her. “Aren’t you writing any of this down?”
“I’m not a journalist, Mr. Paul. I’m a friend … I was a friend of Florie’s.” Sure, she was a lousy liar. That didn’t mean she couldn’t give it a try. “Her parents asked me to stop in.” Lie number one. “They knew she was working for the festival.” Lie number two, because Larry and Renee seemed oblivious to the details of their daughter’s life. “And they’re anxious to get a more complete picture of what she might have been doing that last day. That’s why they sent me.” Lie number three, and it was a biggie. Jazz swallowed around the realization and went right on. “I was hoping you might be able to help.”
That, at least, was the truth, and buoyed by it, she looked Parker Paul in
the eye. “Can you?”
He pushed off from the windowsill and crossed the room to where there was a Keurig machine set up on a table that didn’t match his desk. “Coffee?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “Florie did work for the festival that afternoon. She handed out brochures on Public Square. That was before she went to Tremont, where her body was found.”
“Yeah, lucky for us, huh? Otherwise she wouldn’t have been wearing her costume. Hey. Hey!” When Jazz stepped forward, her arms at her sides and the brochure in her right hand crumbled in her fist, Paul automatically took a step back. “I don’t mean to sound callous.”
“But you do. You are.”
“I’m just trying to make some good out of a bad situation, you know?”
“Tell that to Florie’s parents.”
He rubbed a finger alongside his nose. “I guess…” His coffee was ready, and he grabbed his mug and took it back to his desk and sat down. Maybe he felt more comfortable with the width of the desk between him and Jazz, because while he sipped the coffee, he raised his brown eyes to hers.
“I never thought of it that way,” he admitted. “I mean, I never thought about how there are people like Florentine’s parents, people like you who—”
“Care?”
“It’s not like I don’t,” he insisted. “But you’ve got to see it from my point of view. I’ve got people depending on me. Laverne—”
“The woman downstairs?”
He nodded. “And Billy DeSantos. You might have met him. He likes to hang around out back when we’re not busy.” Just thinking about Billy made Jazz feel uneasy. She lectured herself. About tolerance. About not judging people by their looks. But even that wasn’t enough to make her skin stop crawling.
“They’re all I’ve got in the way of staff right now,” Paul explained. “At least until I hire somebody else to do what Florentine was doing. They’re handling a lot of the grunt work, and heck, if it wasn’t for me, if it wasn’t for the festival, Laverne, she wouldn’t be paying her rent, and Billy…” Maybe Jazz wasn’t the only one unsettled by Billy’s black leather and studs. Paul jiggled his shoulders. “That guy loves horror like no one I’ve ever met.”