Smoke and Mirrors (26 page)

“Maybe Tony woke the house! On purpose! Have any of you morons even considered that?” Kate swept a narrowed gaze around the circle and Tony realized that more than one of their companions
was
thinking of it. Lee's grip tightened slightly. “Tony broke the circle,” she continued, volume rising with every word. “He
wants
one of us to go crazy and kill the rest. That way we won't think it's his fault!” She lunged at him, but Adam caught her.

“I like Tony!” Brianna declared as Kate struggled to free herself from Adam's grip. She took two steps forward and pinched a fold of Kate's stomach.

“OW!”

“She pinches with her fingernails,” Ashley commented from her place inside the curve of Mason's arm.

“You little bitch!” The fury of Kate's attack dragged one arm free of Adam's hold.

Brianna ducked under the swing and wrapped herself around Kate's lower leg.

“OW!”

“And she bites.”

Zev took a blow that knocked his yarmulke half off his head, but he managed to get his hands under Brianna's arms and drag her away.

Eyes narrowed, managing to look dangerous in spite of age, size, a turn-of-the-century pinafore, and the fact she was essentially dangling from Zev's hands, Brianna jabbed a finger toward Kate and snarled, “You say one more mean thing about Tony and my dad will fire your ass!”

“He can't fire me if we're all dead!”

“Wanna bet! My dad fires dead people all the time!”

News to Tony but, given CB, not completely unbelievable.

“Does not!”

“Does, too!”

“Does not!”

“Does, too, infinity!”

“Does . . .”

“Hey!” Ashley moved away from Mason—who looked astonished at being left—to stand with her sister. “She said infinity!”

Kate glared at the two girls for a moment, then turned and growled, “You're hurting my arm.”

Adam smiled tightly. “Seemed preferable to the alternative. Have you calmed down?”

“I'm
fine!
”

After a long moment, Peter nodded and Adam released her.

“We're in this together,” Peter reminded them as Kate rubbed her arm and scowled. “Lynching Tony . . .”

Kate perked up.

“. . . metaphorically speaking,” Peter sighed, “just because he knows things strikes me as cutting off our noses to spite our face.” He frowned. “Faces. I don't believe he's lying to us and I consider myself an excellent judge of character. Shut up Sorge.”

The DP's mouth closed with an audible snap.

“But since you brought it up . . .” He turned to Kate. “The house, the thing in the house . . .”

“In the basement,” Amy added.

“Right, the thing in the basement wants us dead so that it can feed off us . . .”

“According to Tony,” Kate sneered.

“Granted. But why do you think Tony would want one of us to go crazy and kill the rest?”

Nostrils flared, she tossed her head. “Because.”

“Oh, yeah, that's a good reason.”

Mason's dust-dry delivery set off a wave of laughter. It sounded more relieved than amused, but Mason preened at the attention and it was almost back to business as usual.

“He's always going off on his own!” Kate insisted, trying to reclaim her audience.

“And he shouldn't be,” Peter agreed. “None of us should. If we leave the circle—once Amy has resealed the circle,” he added pointedly, “we go in pairs. At least in pairs.”

“Not going anywhere,” Mouse muttered.

Kate ignored him, jerking her chin toward Tony. “Who's going to want to go with him?”

“I will.”

“Oh, yeah.” She curled her lip in Lee's direction. “Big surprise,
you've
been running around with him all night.” Her observation dripped innuendo.

Heads turned. Eyebrows rose.

Tony—and, from the look on her face, Brenda—waited for Lee to release his arm and leap away but the actor only said, “Then he's hardly been going off on his own, has he?”

“That's not . . .”

Lee shook his head, a lock of dark hair sweeping across his forehead. “I can hear the baby, Kate, and the music—and so can you and . . .”

“So can I!” Mason announced.

Heads turned again.

Mason's chin rose and his face stiffened into what Amy had once referred to as his patently portentous expression. After Tony'd looked it up, he'd agreed with the description. “I've always heard the baby,” he said, Raymond Dark's fangs adding a surreal touch. “But I felt I should remain as neutral in this situation as possible.”

Amy snorted and asked what they were all wondering. “Why?”

“Because you thought we'd laugh at you!” Brianna kicked him in the shin.

“Don't you touch him!” Ashley launched herself at her sister just as Karl stopped crying.

Tony froze as the lights came up—gas this time, not electric—and he was standing alone in the entrance hall. He could feel a kind of pressure that had to be Lee's hand on his arm. What would happen if he pulled away? Would Lee hold on? Would he have to let go? Tony didn't want to know the answer enough to try it. The house was absolutely silent and then, very faintly, he heard a series of thuds, some panicked profanity, and one final crash. Then, more silence.

Educated guess, where educated meant “let's attach the sound to the worst case scenario”: someone had been pushed down the kitchen stairs and had landed without Lee Nicholas to cushion the impact. Broken neck, temple slammed down on the corner of the kitchen table, impalement on a rack of salad forks—it didn't much matter; he was more concerned with what was going on with the live people in the house during his absence.

The replay continued to run, but death number two seemed to be happening quietly. And slowly. Tony ran through video production specs as he waited.
SD video is transmitted at SDI rates of 270, 360, or 540 Mbps; HD video is transmitted at the SDI rate of . . . of . . . crap.
He hadn't remembered on his final exam either. When reviewing Wizardry 101 got him no farther than:
In the manipulating of energies the price of intent is often greater than the price of manipulation
—which had made no sense the first time around either—he settled on counting backward from one hundred in French.

At
quarante-deux,
the lights went out. Lee was still beside him but standing now with his arms folded as he, and everyone else, listened to Peter who was clearly coming to the end of some lengthy direction. Kate was scowling, Brianna was sulking, Ashley looked triumphant, and every other face Tony could see wore the default expression common to those who worked in television production and spent most of their professional careers waiting for a thousand and one details to line up so they could do their jobs. No one seemed to have noticed he was gone.

“Does everyone understand me, then?” Peter raised a finger. “We're in this together. I don't want to hear accusations and no one wants to hear how certain people used to have a starring role in a network police drama.”

Mason opened his mouth and closed it again as the finger jabbed toward him.

“Good.” A second finger rose. “Most importantly, no one goes anywhere alone. Not Tony. Not me. No one.” He looked around, gauging reaction, and frowned. “Where's Hartley?”

“LOOK, NO ONE'S
more in favor of all this cultural crap than me, eh, but I thought you wanted to save your friend.”

“The Lambert Theatre is haunted.”

“No shit. Medium with an Internet connection, remember?” Graham slammed the car door and waited for Henry to join him on the sidewalk before he started walking toward the theater. “We got some poltergeist activity—you
don't
want to talk to those little shits—and repeat appearances of dark figure in a long coat suspected to be Alistair McCall, an actor who died during a performance of
Henry V
. The reviews said it wasn't the best death scene he'd ever done.”

In spite of circumstances, Henry grinned. “Harsh.”

“Yeah, well, we weren't there; they might've been right. So do you want me to try and talk to McCall, is that it?”

“If it
is
McCall, he was around at the same time as Creighton Caulfield, and they likely moved in the same social circles—Caulfield was nouveau riche and McCall was a local celebrity.”

“Okay, sure, that's fine if it is McCall, but what if it isn't?”

“Then get what information you can.”

“The dead don't usually like crowds.” Graham nodded at the people milling about under the marquee. “And this lot doesn't look like they're leaving.”

“They're not. There's a late show tonight.”

“Yeah, so . . .”

“So you'll have to concentrate a little harder to ignore any distractions, won't you?” Henry wrapped his hand around the caretaker's elbow, the movement as much threat as restraint.

Graham glanced down at Henry's fingers, pale lines against the dark green fabric, and shrugged. “Okay. So we're what? Just going to walk right on in?”

“Yes.”

“Because you got tickets?”

“Not exactly.”

They slipped past two young women checking their watches as they discussed unlikely methods of revenge, pushed past a clump of slightly younger men who could only be first-year film students from the way they were pontificating, and went around the smokers desperately topping up their nicotine levels before they had to go inside. The clothes of all three groups were such an eclectic mix that neither Henry's white silk shirt and jeans nor Graham's workman's overalls looked out of place.

Muscles, tattoos, and a clipboard blocked the open door.

Henry smiled up at her, carefully keeping it charming. “Henry Fitzroy. Tony Foster.”

The charm slid off without penetrating. She checked her list. Drew two lines. “Go in and sit down if you want. We'll be starting late—camera two's stuck in fucking traffic.”

“Any idea how long it'll be?”

“If I fucking knew that, I'd be doing a fucking dance of joy,” she snarled. “Sit, don't sit. It's all the same to me.”

The Lambert had been built just before the turn of the century when money poured into Vancouver from timber, mining, and fleecing unwary treasure seekers heading north to the Yukon gold rush. A group of the young city's most upstanding and wealthy citizens, stung by a federal study that said Vancouver led the Dominion in consumption of alcohol, vowed to bring culture to the frontier and, with their wallets behind the project, it took only five short months from breaking the ground to the first performance on the Lambert stage.

A hundred years later, a similar group ripped out screens, projection booths, and drop ceilings and restored the theatre to its original glory. In order to sell local wines in the lobby during intermissions, the restored Lambert had a liquor license.

Henry appreciated the irony.

“Jesus.” Graham tipped his head back and stared up at the gilded Graces and cherubs dancing across lobby's ceiling. “That's a bit over the top, eh?”

“Well, when you're spending government money, why not go for Baroque.”

“What?”

“Never mind.” The lights on the stairs leading up to the balconies were off. It therefore seemed reasonable to assume that the balcony wouldn't be used during the performance and would offer them the privacy they'd need. Henry dragged Graham across the lobby. “Come on.”

“We're not supposed to go up there.”

“Then we'd better not get caught.”

Graham didn't seem to find that comforting. Frowning, he stopped at the bottom step. “The lights are off.”

“You talk to the dead and you're afraid of the dark?”

“That's not . . . Oh, never mind.” He threw a nervous glance over his shoulder, pulled his arm from Henry's hand, and sprinted for the second floor, the muffled thud of work boots on carpet drowned out by Radiogram's new CD playing over the sound system.

Henry met him at the top of the stairs.

“Oh, sure . . . beat the old . . . man.” He sagged against the flocked wallpaper and panted.

“You should exercise more.”

“You should . . . mind your own . . . damned business.” Pushing himself upright, Graham headed for the main balcony. “If we're going to . . . do this. I want . . . to sit down.”

The balcony was deserted, but Henry noted the cables leading to the empty spot waiting for the delayed camera two. Down below, half a dozen crew members ran around attending to last minute details. On the stage, a pair of actors Henry didn't recognize—although Tony had assured him they'd been famous in their day—worked on blocking. The seats were about three quarters filled, the audience not yet restless but becoming loud.

Loud was good. Loud would cover the conversation Graham Brummel was about to have with the dead.

“Well?”

The replica turn-of-the-century red plush seat protested as Graham dropped into it. “Well, what?”

“Is he here?”

“Sure. But that's the wrong question. The right question is; does he want to talk. Actually . . .” Graham scratched thoughtfully at his comb-over. “. . . the real question is, will he say anything I can understand. The dead are not usually what you'd call articulate. Now these days I can't get them to shut up, but I still had to work on Cassandra and Stephen for a couple of weeks before I could get anything and I had a blood tie there.”