Sinister Stage: A Ghost Story Romance and Mystery (Wicks Hollow Book 5)

by Colleen Gleason

  The wings spread out on either side of the stage, and then gave way into short corridors that led to the dressing rooms, prop room, tech room, and the huge, high-ceilinged workshop that was accessed by the massive roll-up door—all of which sprawled behind the back wall of the stage.

  A team of volunteers had been assigned to come through and replace as many light bulbs as possible, so there was a decent amount of illumination in the corridor and the rooms. But in the wings it was still a dim, shadowy warren of space right now, littered with crates, scaffolding, chairs, tables, and other items that had just been left around after the last show closed quickly and unexpectedly.

  “It was The Nutcracker,” Iva said. “Now I remember! They just closed the place right down. People showed up with tickets for the Christmas Eve Eve performance—”

  “Christmas Eve Eve?” Maxine said, thumping her cane in emphasis. “You got a stutter now, Iva?”

  “I certainly do not. You know what I meant—it was the twenty-third of December, and—”

  “That’s right,” Orbra cut in. “I remember. They were doing a one-week performance—a local woman was playing the pretty ballerina with the traveling group—and then bam! No one really knew why it shut down just like that. Something about a member of the cast getting sick at the last minute. I don’t remember much about it. Christmas is a very busy time at the Tea House. Everyone wants to have high tea with their grandma, aunts, cousins, whatever.”

  “I heard the Sugarplum Fairy ran off with the Nutcracker,” said Juanita, giggling a little. “And that’s why they had to cancel the show.”

  “And the dish ran away with the spoon?” Maxine demanded as if she were cross-examining someone on a witness stand.

  Vivien suddenly realized she had a raging headache.

  Iva rolled her eyes. “Well, I don’t know about that, Maxine, but the holidays were here and everyone was too busy to pay very close attention to what was happening. I don’t even remember who was running the theater at the time…someone local, I’m sure.” She frowned, as if trying to remember.

  “And then it was January,” Orbra said, “and no one really thought about the whole thing, since there were never any shows in the winter back then—we didn’t have any tourists until the end of June back in the eighties and nineties, you know, when all of the Big Three Autos—back then they were the Big Three, anyway—shut down for two weeks in July. Everyone would come over here from the east side of the state.”

  “So the theater never opened again the following summer—I don’t know why—and after that, everyone must’ve given up on the place,” said Juanita, looking around with bright eyes. “So very sad.”

  “I wonder what happened,” said Iva as she trotted along.

  Vivien hardly listened to their chatter, as she was more interested in keeping all of them upright and unscathed as they navigated through. Whoever thought it was a good idea for Maxine and Company to show up today? Surely Helga wouldn’t have suggested it… No. It was probably Maxine’s idea.

  “This is the costume room,” Vivien said, pausing so the Tuesday Ladies could look inside.

  Three long rows of clothing racks were stuffed with hangers holding all types of costumes. They’d once been bright and showy, and now most were dingy and sagging and smelled of must and mildew. Vivien had hoped to be able to save some of the more complicated, show-specific costumes like the Tin Man or Audrey II, but her hopes had begun to fade once she began to look through them. It was a shame, because Cleopatra’s headdress and the ballgown from the “Shall We Dance?” scene in The King and I would have been stunning in their heyday.

  “I see the Cowardly Lion,” said Iva, pushing her way into the room. She began to paw through a row of costumes. “Ooh! And this has to be Titania!”

  “Oh, and here’s Eliza Doolittle’s hat!” said Orbra, perching the wide-brimmed straw bonnet on her blue-white hair. She didn’t seem to mind the cascade of dust wafting down from the faded red ribbon. Or the spider that dangled from the back…

  “And this must be from one of the witches in Macbeth—” said Juanita.

  “Shh!” said Iva, looking around nervously as Vivien automatically winced and hunched her shoulders. Old habits died hard.

  “What?” demanded Juanita.

  “You’re not supposed to say that word!” Iva told her.

  “What word?” demanded Maxine, turning from where she’d been digging through a stack of hat boxes.

  “The name of that play,” Vivien said. “It’s a sort of superstition for theater people. So we don’t say it in a theater.”

  Maxine looked at her from beneath Elphaba’s pointy (but semi-crunched) Wicked Witch hat. Her expression spoke volumes: she thought Vivien was the crazy one. “You mean Macb—”

  “Maxine!” Iva lunged toward her friend and put her hands over her mouth. “Don’t say it! It’s bad luck!”

  The hat fell to the floor as Maxine batted her hands away. “Why not? Why does saying the damned word make a difference? It’s a play, ain’t it? How can a play be bad luck in a theater? What happens when they’re actually doing it? You can’t do a play and not say its name—”

  “Miss Savage! Miss Savage, could you come here?”

  Vivien had never been so relieved to hear her name than at that moment. She fairly bolted from the wardrobe, leaving the four ladies arguing at the tops of their lungs about Macbeth. She figured if she didn’t hear the name being spoken (and it continued to be, regularly, by the contrary Maxine), it didn’t count for the bad luck.

  At least, she hoped it didn’t.

  GO OR DIE.

  She couldn’t control a shiver.

  Maybe the bad luck had already begun.

  Chapter Seven

  Despite Vivien’s snarky comments, Jake couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy for her. After all, he could hardly manage his own pushing-eighty father…and here she was trying to herd a stubborn and determined cluster of old ladies through the danger zone of an old building.

  Lots of things could go wrong, and the Tuesday Ladies (as he’d learned they were known, although “ladies” might have been an exaggeration) seemed worse than a group of toddlers on the loose—which he’d experienced the one time he’d been stuck babysitting his nieces and nephew solo. Three of them, ages two, three, and five.

  “Jake’s a doctor—he can handle it,” his older sister Mathilda had said when her husband, Jake’s brother-in-law, protested. She had a malicious gleam in her eye, a sort of He deserves every bit of it look. She’d looked at him that way when she washed his favorite white tee shirt and tighty-whiteys in hot water with a red blouse, back when he was ten. Of course, that was after he’d dumped a jar of spiders into her bed…while she was in it. “He made it through his residency, didn’t he?”

  “They’ll nap most of the time anyway,” agreed his other sister Irene, who was also older than Jake, with her own smirk.

  Which was a lie.

  The nieces and nephew hadn’t napped for more than thirty minutes. And none of them at the same time.

  Still feeling sympathy he didn’t want, Jake turned his attention back to the huge piece of metal that was suspended from somewhere above. Damned good thing no one—Vivien—had been standing on it when it fell.

  He and Pop had just walked into the area where the audience sat when he heard the strange whooshing sound and saw the piece swing down in a wild arc. The fact that it hadn’t crashed to the floor barely registered in his mind as he bolted down the aisle. Only when he saw that the metal piece was swaying madly, unencumbered and yet still fettered, did he stop and swallow his heart back into place.

  He’d gone up on the stage to make certain its harmlessness wasn’t temporary, and after gingerly pulling on the dangling piece, he was convinced it wasn’t going to come tumbling all the way down anytime soon. Still, it should be removed or repaired sooner rather than later.

  “Better go up there and take a look,” said Pops, who’d climbed onto th
e stage with him. Apparently he wasn’t interested in seeing the dressing rooms with the Tuesday Ladies. “I’ll make sure everyone stands clear.”

  Jake barely heard him, as he was already clambering up the nearest ladder—on the opposite side of the stage from where Vivien had been. Once he got to the top, he tested the part of the catwalk still attached on this side. It jolted sharply from the force of his foot kicking at it, and although the squeaks and creaks were wild and alarming, nothing seemed loose or even weak.

  After assuring himself that he wasn’t about to go tumbling to the wooden floor below, Jake cautiously stepped out onto the trembling bridge. It shivered a little, but he held on to its chain railing—which was a safety hazard Vivien was going to have to fix pronto.

  On his left were clusters of stage lights, most of them in rows on long metal beams—all hidden by the top overhang of the stage. The, uh, proscenium. That was what it was called. On his right hung rows of what looked like pieces of backdrops—

  “What are you doing?”

  He spun so fast that the narrow platform swayed, and he tightened his hold on the wimpy guard railing—someone definitely needed to replace that death hazard immediately—and saw Vivien nearly to the top of the ladder he’d just stepped away from.

  “Hi,” he said. “I was just checking things—”

  “Get off there right now,” she demanded from between tight jaws.

  “It’s fine,” he told her. “I tested it out first.” Even in the dim light up here, he could see the fire blazing in her golden-brown eyes. There was a smudge of dirt high on her left cheek, and her caramel-blond hair was sagging loose from its ponytail beneath the ball cap she wore. She wore stretchy athletic shorts that ended above her knees and a kind of ratty hot-pink tee that said, I’m not yelling, I’m projecting. Looking at her here, standing so close, he felt an unexpected pang of sorrow…and awareness.

  “Come back over here,” she said, now at the top of the ladder on the small landing. “No one is going out on there until I have it—”

  She’d trailed into silence and was staring into the space toward the back where all of the scenery pieces hung high above the vast stage. “So that was it,” she muttered. Even in the faulty light, he could see her face had gone pale and tense.

  “What? What is it?” He was already back to the landing and she hadn’t responded. “Viv? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said, but there was a hard edge to her voice. And he didn’t think that anger was directed at him this time. But as he stepped onto the small platform next to her, she seemed to regroup, and as she turned to him, the ire in her expression was definitely just for him. “Jake, I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but I don’t need—or want—your help. All right? So just…go away.”

  He might have simply climbed down the ladder at that point and done as she’d ordered if he hadn’t glanced toward whatever had caught her attention. He couldn’t have seen it from his previous position out on the catwalk, but here, now, the view was unencumbered, and he saw what had surely caught her attention.

  GO OR DIE.

  Large words in glowing green emblazoned on a black backdrop, way up high at the top of the stage.

  “I’ve never seen a background that looks like that,” he said casually, although his pulse had sharply spiked. He might not have thought much of it if it hadn’t been for Vivien’s reaction (considering there was a musical called Urinetown, he supposed anything was possible when it came to stage scenery). But the tightness of her mouth, her sudden arrested stillness, as if she’d been jerked to attention, told him there was something else definitely going on here.

  “Jake,” she said in a voice that trembled with warning. “I—”

  He touched her then—touched her for the first time in eleven years—putting a hand on an arm bared by the short-sleeved, snug tee she wore. A strong sense of awareness, a flash of heat at the skin-to-skin contact, zipped through him before she yanked away.

  “Vivvie, tell me what’s going on—”

  “Don’t call me that,” she snapped, her eyes blazing. “You don’t get to call me that anymore. Ever.”

  “All right. All right.” He put some space between them on the small platform, holding up two hands—but he also made sure he was positioned so she couldn’t get past him to the ladder and escape. Not yet. “I won’t touch you. Won’t call you anything but Vivien or VL. Or would you prefer Miss Savage?”

  And that was when it occurred to him it might not be Miss Savage any longer. And something hard and heavy clunked into his gut.

  “Vivien is fine.” Her voice was clipped. “Now, for the last time—”

  “Who put that there?” He decided there would be no more beating around the bush. Direct hits only from now on, because the entirety of their interactions since he’d first seen her again had been a series of dances—circling about, tap-dancing around their past and whatever was going on in the present.

  It seemed to be the right approach, for she wilted a little. “I don’t know.” There was still a bite in her tone, but at least she’d given him an answer.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” he said, and when she stiffened, preparing another runaround, he added, “Look, it’s obviously new—so someone put it there recently. What’s the deal? I have a right to know, since my father’s going to be coming here regularly.” The last bit he threw in there as a Hail Mary play, but it seemed to work.

  She wilted a little more, but responded firmly, “All right, you’ve got a point, but there’s no reason to think anyone’s in any sort of danger. It’s just—I don’t know, some sort of practical joke, I guess.”

  “That piece of bridge fell—”

  “Catwalk.”

  “Catwalk, then, fine—it fell, and if someone had been walking on it, that might have been a tragedy—”

  “No one would have been walking on it without testing it out first, like I did,” she said flatly. “If you’re suggesting that it was sabotaged—”

  “I don’t know whether it was—or at least I didn’t even think it might have been sabotaged until I saw that over there.” He jerked his thumb toward the GO OR DIE backdrop. “But that sort of puts things into a whole different light, doesn’t it?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” She shook her head and rubbed her temples with one hand—a strikingly familiar gesture of frustration and likely an encroaching headache.

  “I want to examine it to see whether it was, well, sabotaged,” he said.

  “So, what, you’re a detective now, Dr. DeRiccio? Wasn’t med school enough of a career for you?”

  Caught by surprise at her use of his title, he couldn’t hold back a grin. “You know how much I liked to watch Criminal Minds and CSI.”

  She folded her arms over her middle, which happened to draw his eyes to the pair of very fine breasts that he remembered far too well. “That doesn’t make you qualified to examine anything.”

  His heart bumped a little when he noticed the tiniest tug at the corner of her mouth, like she was almost going to smile. That was the first time she’d looked at him with anything other than contempt or dislike.

  “Still. I’d like to take a gander, all right? Look, Vivien, obviously something’s going on here, and it’s not pleasant. Even aside from the fact that my pop’s going to be here—along with a slew of other people—it worries me because…well, I mean, it’s you—your thing.”

  That little tug at her mouth disappeared. “If only you’d cared that much about me and my thing eleven years ago.”

  “That’s not fair,” he said, his voice tight. “You know that’s not fair. I did care about you—”

  She snorted. “Yeah, until you decided you wanted to bang Lissa Kirkland. How’s she doing, by the way?”

  He gritted his teeth. Of course she would go there. “I have no idea.”

  Before he could formulate any more words, there was a shout from below. “Miss Savage? Miss Savage! Could you take a look at something?�
��

  “That’s my cue,” she said, and pushed past him to the ladder. “I’ll be right there. Stay off the stage, please,” she called down.

  As she went down the ladder, just as her eyes were about to disappear, she looked up at him. “Please go away, Jake. It’ll be a lot easier for both of us if you just leave me alone.”

  It would be a lot easier if he did.

  He just wasn’t sure he could.

  Vivien hadn’t meant to leave the Tuesday Ladies to their own devices back in the area where all the dressing rooms were, but catching Jake poking around up in the catwalk area had been distracting and delayed her from returning to them.

  He simply didn’t have any business poking around here. Stubborn jerk. She could handle things herself. She just wished he would stop being here. Didn’t he have a job?

  Ricky DeRiccio had taken it upon himself to pass out some of the scones, sandwiches, and bottles of water brought from Orbra’s Tea House, and a small cluster of teens surrounded him in the first three rows of seats in the house. There would be crumbs galore, but that was no worse than the current situation of dust and debris, so Vivien hardly winced when she noticed.

  She answered several questions from a couple of the teams of volunteers (whether she wanted to save any of the old playbills—no—and where to find more garbage bags and a broom). Vivien was just about to head backstage and search out the Tuesday Ladies when her realtor showed up, walking down the main aisle.

  Bella Pohlson was wearing a huge, congratulatory smile and a smart powder-blue summer suit. Her hands flashed with a large diamond, and her wrists were decorated with a glittering diamond bracelet and several thick silver bangles, and she looked far slicker and more put together than Vivien felt at the moment. Which was to be expected.