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

by Colleen Gleason

  Black smoke leaked from the decades-old oven, and when she opened it, more smoke billowed out, making the screaming alarm even more insistent.

  The inexpensive, soft frozen pizza had folded, somehow sliding between the wires of the rack, cheese melting (and burning) everywhere, tomato sauce sizzling on the bottom, and pepperoni charred to black.

  So much for her dinner.

  A loud pounding jolted Vivien out of a low-level sleep. It took her a few bleary seconds to realize someone was knocking on the front door—Helga—and that it was very light outside. She stumbled out of bed, staggering from the bedroom as she pushed the hair from her eyes. “I’m coming. I’m coming.”

  She flung open the door, and it was Jake, not Helga, who stood there—and she was suddenly awake enough to feel the weight of his attention as it swept over her from tousled head to bare toes…then back up and down once more.

  “Oh, hi,” she said, resisting the desire to hide behind the door. After all, it wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before—although things were a little curvier now than they’d been when she was twenty, and she no longer had a ridiculously concave belly that displayed her hipbones. “Sorry, I overslept. Uh, I was expecting Helga…why are you here?”

  It took Jake a full ten seconds to respond—which didn’t sound like very long, but was an eternity when you were standing in the doorway in a barely-covering-your-bare-ass nightgown of paper-thin blue fabric—and when he did, he sounded like he’d swallowed sandpaper. “Uh…Helga’s feeling a little under the weather, so she asked me to pick you up.”

  This statement prompted a multitude of questions and more than a twinge of something that might have been jealousy—or at least a low-key niggle of something like that.

  “Oh” was all she said.

  “Uh, can I come in? I’m guessing you’re going to want to, uh, put something else on.” Still with the gravelly voice. “Before we go to the theater. She’s going to meet us there, I think.”

  “The theater? Oh, right,” Vivien said, stepping away from the door. “Sure. Come in. Um…don’t mind the mess. I’m still unpacking, as you can see. I really need some coff— Oh. Wow.” She teared up a little when he handed her a to-go cup of something that definitely smelled like coffee. “Thank you, Jake,” she said with great emotion.

  “Still black and three sugars, I hope.” He closed the door behind him.

  “God, yes, thank you.” She took a gulp of the coffee and felt more alert almost immediately, but was aware that the caffeine and sugar were going to wreak havoc on her totally empty, painfully gnawing stomach. She wondered what the chances were of getting Jake to stop somewhere for her to grab a breakfast sandwich or something.

  It didn’t take her more than fifteen minutes to brush her teeth, take a super-quick shower, and anchor her hair in a loose knot at the top of her head. She dressed in a loose tank top, casual shorts, and practical shoes, since she’d be doing manual labor at the theater. When she opened the bedroom door, she thought she smelled toast and hurried to the kitchen.

  “Oh, man, Jake…you have no idea how hungry I am and how good that smells.”

  “Well, considering the mess in the garbage and the smell of burned something lingering in the air, I was able to put two and two together that you didn’t get much to eat last night. Helga warned me your cupboards were bare, and since you don’t have a car…” He spread his hands as if to say obviously. “I brought some bread for you and thought I’d make use of it.”

  The toast—from the sun-dried tomato sourdough—tasted like ambrosia, and she unashamedly ate four pieces with butter, trying not to moan too loudly at the deliciousness.

  “So good,” she said, wiping up the crumbs and putting the plate and knife in the sink. “Thank you again.”

  “I guess you’re ready to go now,” Jake said.

  “Yes. You sound disappointed. Why? Didn’t I primp long enough?”

  He shrugged. “I liked what you were wearing a few minutes ago a lot better.” And then he gave her a sudden, devastating smile—one that made heat rush straight down her body to her toes, then back up again right to her center.

  Vivien didn’t know what to say, so she fumbled for her phone and bag and started for the door. “Well, a nightgown isn’t very practical for digging around an old theater, is it?”

  “You call that a nightgown?” he muttered, following her out the door with the headpiece in hand. “Looked more like a piece of—what did you call it?—scrim to me.”

  It took till they got to the theater before Jake was able to think about anything but the sight that had greeted him when Vivien opened the door to her cottage. She’d been a vision of rumpled bourbon hair, sleepy sloe eyes, and filmy peekaboo negligee that left little to the imagination—and he had one hell of an imagination.

  Hell, how was a guy to concentrate on blows to the back of the head and vandalized cars and theatrical threats with that sort of distraction sitting next to him in the car—and clearly unaware of its potency?

  “So…when did Helga ask you to pick me up?” she asked as they pulled into the parking lot at the theater. She’d been strangely quiet during the seven-minute drive. “And don’t you have to work this morning?”

  “I’m off today—I have a weird schedule—and I was conscripted into being her DD last night,” Jake told her. “I think she knew she wasn’t going to want to get up really early today, so she asked me when I dropped her off last night.”

  When Vivien didn’t reply, something told him it was imperative he elaborate. It was almost as if Mathilda was kicking him under the table. “Uh…so, I should tell you that I was—we were—staking out the parking lot here last night.”

  “You were?” She whipped her head to look at him, but there was still a funny look in her eyes. “You and Helga?”

  “Baxter and I. I mean, I was, and then I asked Bax if he wanted to hang out too. And Helga caught us with a case of B-Cubed in the car, and she confiscated it under the guise of it being official police business, but it turned out she was off-duty at the time, and so what really happened was that she got to drink several of my beers and I had to drive her—and Bax, who also got to drink some—home while getting to drink none of it myself.”

  Now Vivien was looking at him as if he’d sprouted another head. She narrowed her eyes and said carefully, “So…you and Baxter were hanging out here and Helga managed to swipe an entire case of your beer? And get a ride home?”

  “That about sums it up. See, there’s her cop car still parked back there. She threatened to arrest us for having open containers in the car—”

  Vivien burst out laughing. “She is such a badass. I’ve told her a hundred times I want to be her when I grow up.” Her face was all lit up and her eyes glowed with pleasure.

  Jake’s chest felt tight, and he hid the discomfort by climbing out of the car. Too soon.

  He grabbed the ugly Nutcracker mask from the back seat and followed her. She was still chuckling a little as she led the way to the theater’s side door.

  “So while we were here last night, someone drove into the parking lot without their lights on and then sped away when they saw us and the cop car,” he told her.

  That got her attention, and she stopped suddenly. “Did you see who it was?”

  He had to shake his head. “Helga went after them, but it was too late and they got away. But Baxter said the brake lights were unusual, so he was drawing a picture of them. And there was only one person in the car that I could see.”

  “You think it was them—whoever’s been breaking in.”

  “No headlights, then taking off as soon as they saw us—yeah, I’d say so.”

  “They didn’t come back?”

  “We were here till two, two thirty. I drove Bax and Helga home—by the way, is there something going on with them?”

  “Going on like how? Dating?”

  “Yeah. Or something. I think I got a vibe…”

  She shook her head as she fit the k
ey into the lock. “Not a chance. Baxter is hung up on Emily Delton, and Helga’s very happily single and unencumbered. I mean, she likes guys, but she’s not interested in all the hassle.” Then she looked directly at him. “Why? You afraid you’re going to step on his toes?”

  Jake was rendered speechless. Surely she wasn’t that clueless… “I’d only be stepping on his toes if he was moving in on you, VL. I thought that was pretty obvious.”

  “Oh. No…well, maybe. Ugh. I… Jake, we have a history. I can’t help it if that’s the lens I look through when I—with you.”

  What could he say to that?

  Nothing. So he followed her into the theater and put down the eerie, caved-in headpiece on a table.

  “The scaffolding is back here,” she said, leading the way into a spacious workshop with a thirty-foot ceiling and a massive garage door. There were walls lined with worktables and hung with tools, including an old table saw, piles of ratty paint cloths and sawhorses, trash cans, and acres of scrap wood. It was a lot cleaner than it had been yesterday, though.

  “If you help me wheel it out, we can look up at the flies and see how they’re attached, and maybe how they were manipulated. And at the very least, take them down for evidence.”

  “Flies? You mean the backdrops?”

  “Right.”

  They muscled the scaffolding out and wheeled it onto the stage with little trouble but some godawful wheel squeaking. It was metal and had been tucked behind a bunch of old set pieces, so Jake was reasonably sure it hadn’t been tampered with. Nonetheless, he insisted that they check every step and bar before putting any weight on them, even though he was certain Vivien would have done so anyway.

  “So, I was thinking about timing,” she said as they worked their way slowly up the steps, one on either side of the scaffolding. “When and how those events happened…either someone was watching and knew when to set the creepy effects off, or there was some other sort of trigger that launched the, uh, shows.

  “When it happened the first time, I was here alone. I had just come into the building by myself, and no one knew I was going to come here; I didn’t even know it myself. I’d just gotten the keys, and the news that the bank approved my loan for the improvements, and I was so excited that I came right here. So that first little display had to have been set up and ready well before I arrived. Heck, maybe even the second one had been set up at the same time—how would I know? I wasn’t looking for scrims up in the house ceiling—probably wouldn’t have realized what they were even if I saw it up there—and as you saw, there are a bunch of flies, backdrops, still hanging up there above the stage.”

  “So you’d literally just gotten the loan to buy the place and the first thing happened right away?” He looked at her from between the bars of the scaffolding.

  “No, I closed on the actual building a month ago. The loan was for the improvements and renovation.” She pursed her lips. “So whoever it was had a month to set it up, I guess. I had to move from New York and everything. I just got the keys on Tuesday.”

  “All right. So you came here unexpectedly—right after you got the keys—and walked in…”

  “Right. I was walking down the main aisle in the house toward the stage, thinking about all of the energy and memories contained in this space, and how I wanted to— Well, anyway, I was walking down the aisle, and all of a sudden, there was this bright blue light on the stage.”

  She’d been clambering up the ladder a little too fast for his comfort, then suddenly stopped. “Wait a sec. I remember something…I remember walking down the aisle and feeling something sort of give under my foot, like a soft spot in the floor, and I was thinking, oh crap, it’s going to be another repair—and then the lights came on.”

  “So you’re thinking it might have been a sort of tripwire—or trip pad—that you stepped on that set it off?”

  “Or some sort of alarm that signaled the, uh, what do I call him—the vandalizer?—to set it off, maybe remotely. Because it was right after that, almost immediately, that the light came on.”

  Jake liked that theory, and he told her so as they reached the top of the scaffolding at the same time. “Good. So we can probably find evidence of that if you can remember where you were standing when it happened.”

  “Right. And then I ran—I mean, I left the building because I was freaked out—”

  “Understandably so.”

  “And when I came back in—maybe ten minutes later—what I thought was painted words on the wall but was just a backdrop—a scrim, probably,” she added with a sly look that made his stomach bottom out then bounce up, “was gone. At the time, I thought it had just disappeared.”

  “Which is probably what you were supposed to think. You were being fooled into thinking that the place is haunted by some horrible specter or gruesome phantom, but it was all a fake. Someone’s just messing with—”

  Crash!

  The sound of many large items colliding or falling somewhere in the building—backstage?—was sudden, loud, and ominous, and the metallic echo reverberated through the empty space.

  Vivien’s mouth was open to either exclaim or scream; Jake couldn’t tell—and then his brain couldn’t even pursue that thought, because all at once, he felt the violent rush of cold.

  It was like an actual Arctic front that enveloped him, as if he’d been plunged into a room of dry ice. The frigid air was accompanied by a dark, dank, unpleasant smell that he’d only experienced once before—when he got a whiff of something that turned out to be necrotic diabetic foot with wet gangrene during a stint in the ER. This was nearly as bad—and worse, he didn’t know what was causing it.

  Vivien made a noise that sounded as if she were in distress—probably gagging—and it came out in a distinct puff of white in the freezing air.

  The metallic cacophony ended as abruptly as it had begun, but the scaffolding, the catwalk, the rows of light pots above suddenly began to shake wildly. The lamps themselves began to flash erratically in blinding reds, greens, blues, and golds.

  Jake didn’t need to shout for her to climb down from the rattling scaffolding; she was already halfway to the ground. He jumped most of the way, his own breath following in a trail of white as his fingers and the tip of his nose burned with cold. He grabbed Vivien by the hand with stiff fingers, and they half stumbled, half ran off the stage, away from the clattering, jangling mess, down the aisle past the rows of chairs.

  They weren’t even down the aisle when the chaos stopped just as suddenly as it had begun: the lights, the violent rattling, the stench, the cold.

  They staggered to a halt and turned around to look back at the stage. Then Vivien gaped up at him, her eyes so wide that he could see white all around her irises.

  “Holy shit.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Vivien’s teeth wouldn’t stop chattering, and it wasn’t because of the furious cold that had suddenly surrounded them.

  What the hell was that?

  She realized she was still gripping Jake’s hand, but she wasn’t quite ready to let go.

  “That was…” he started, then simply squeezed her fingers as they stared into the theater at the silent stage.

  The scaffolding was still intact, and nothing had fallen from above. The colored pot lights were all dark now, and the only illumination was that which she’d turned on when they came in.

  “I don’t think it was…human,” Vivien finally said. Something rippled through him—she felt it because his arm was touching hers—and he gave a short bark of laughter.

  “I don’t know what it was,” he said. “But whoever or whatever it was, it’s not happy.”

  She reluctantly pulled her fingers from his and started to walk down the aisle back to the stage. Everything was so still and silent and normal that she could almost believe she’d imagined it.

  But now what did she do?

  “I’m afraid to look in the back,” she said when she felt Jake come up alongside her. “It sounded like
a tornado back there…”

  “First, show me where you were standing when the weird light came on the first time,” he said, brushing her hand with his fingers in a fleeting gesture.

  Surprised by his change of subject—didn’t he want to see what had made those awful crashing, falling noises?—Vivien nonetheless paused on her path to the stage.

  “Here…right about here,” she said, slightly relieved to be focusing on something more easily explained than what had just happened. Her fingers were still trembling. “And look, feel it—the floor gives a little.”

  She’d stepped on it, felt the give, and now crouched to examine the strip of carpet that ran down the center aisle. Digging out the multitool she always carried in her pocket, she carefully began to cut into the rug several inches away from the “soft” part of the floor.

  “Oh…Jake, look…”

  But he was already next to her and saw what she saw when she flipped back the piece of carpet.

  “You were right. It looks like some sort of trigger pad—there’s even a wire coming from it.” He began to follow the slender black wire that trailed into a row of seats.

  “I wouldn’t have noticed it because it’s pretty dark in here, and they camouflaged it very well, right up against the bottom of the chairs along the floor. The bastard,” she said as she pulled to her feet. “What an absolute bastard.”

  Whatever shock had lingered after the events on the stage a moment ago disintegrated and was replaced by deep fury toward the absolute, definite human who’d been harassing her.

  “It ends here, under this seat,” Jake said, holding up the wire at the fourth chair in from the aisle. “And it’s connected to a little transmitter.” With an angry jerk, Jake pulled the device out from beneath the seat. He said something under his breath, then stood and held the transmitter so it dangled by the wire. “Who’s got it in for you, VL? Who’s gone to all this trouble?”