Never Thwart a Thespian: Volume 8 (Leigh Koslow Mystery Series) (2 page)

“Yet? You don’t have it already?”

Bess’s expression sobered. “Gordon Applegate has it; the society doesn’t. We’re flat broke, as usual. Gordon has agreed to let us rent it indefinitely, for a pittance,
if
we can turn it into a cultural attraction the North Boros can be proud of. If not, he’s made no bones about the fact that he’s got a second offer waiting in the wings.”

“A second offer?” Leigh exclaimed, flabbergasted. The gnarly deposits on the choir railing were definitely bat guano. Now that her eyes had adjusted to the dimness, she could see at least one of the furry mammals snoozing on an overhead light fixture. “Who on earth else would want the place?”

Bess’s eyes narrowed. “At the sheriff’s sale, nobody. That’s why Gordon got it so cheap. But now some shark of a real estate attorney wants it. She’s already offering more than he paid, and Gordon is champing at the bit.” She sighed. “He doesn’t mind giving money away, but refraining from making an easy buck — now
that
goes against his DNA.”

“Why does the attorney want it?” Leigh asked, deciding to investigate the organ pipe bay.

“She doesn’t want the building,” Bess said disapprovingly. “She wants the lot. She won’t say why, but Gordon thinks she has some inside information about another buyer. A fast food franchise or a drug store, maybe. This place has great visibility and plenty of space for parking, which is hard to find on this stretch of road, you know.”

“So why didn’t she bid at the sheriff’s sale?” Leigh asked, surprised to find the area behind the chancel empty. The whole place was still creeping her out, but she was determined to overcome the feeling. She walked toward one of the rear doors to see where it led.

“Well,” Bess answered, her voice taking on an uncharacteristic sweetness. “She meant to, I suppose. She did show up, but the poor thing met with a little mishap in the ladies’ room, and she
just
missed the bidding.”

Leigh stopped walking. “Aunt Bess!”

Bess’s eyes widened innocently. “Yes?”

Leigh shook her head. “Never mind.” She turned and moved towards the door again.

“Ooh!” Bess cooed, pulling up beside her. “Let’s go see the bathrooms. And the basement, of course. That’s where you and the kids come in!”

Leigh found nothing in that statement to like. “Excuse me?”

“Just come along and see!”

Leigh followed Bess through the doors and into a curved hallway. A set of stairs leading up appeared on her right; a door ahead bore a faded sign that read “Office.” They walked around the curve to the left, past another staircase leading down, and through an open doorway to the annex, which was clearly newer, although not apparently in any better condition. “Oh, ignore all this,” Bess instructed as they walked around a collection of twelve-foot two-by-fours, miscellaneous plastic pipes, and giant rolls of black plastic. “The bathrooms are here. See? Not so bad as you might think!”

Leigh looked through the door Bess held open to observe a dust-caked restroom with three pink metal stalls, one grimy sink, and a mirror that was smeared with what looked like red lipstick. A paper towel dispenser hung half off the wall, its cabinet open and gaping, and a waste can in the corner sat piled to overflowing with brown paper towels. How long the trash had been there was anyone’s guess. For all Leigh knew, the last women in the building had been pole dancers auditioning for the mysterious Marconi. “Charming,” she responded.

“It needs work,” Bess admitted. “But the real problem is, neither of these bathrooms closest to the auditorium are handicapped accessible. The stalls don’t meet the new standards. In order to open to the public, we’ll have to fix up the big unisex bathroom in the basement. The basement
is
accessible, barely, by the ramp coming off the alcove opposite where we came in. It’s just that—” she hesitated a little. “Well, sending people through the basement at all presents just a
teeny
little challenge.”

Leigh waited for it.

Bess’s left eye gave the slightest twitch. Leigh knew the sign well. It meant that her aunt was either nervous or lying through her teeth. Often it meant both. “Follow me!” Bess chirped with false confidence. “And all will become clear!”

They walked back down the corridor, out of the annex, and to the head of the staircase that led down to the space underneath the former sanctuary. “The basement has loads of possibilities for receptions and such,” Bess twittered as they descended the stairs. “It even has a kitchen! But at some point someone decided to store some things down here, and… well… you know how people can be!”

Leigh followed Bess down the last steps and looked out into the room. It was all she could do not to turn around immediately and go back up. “What the—”

“Yes,” Bess interrupted. “It is rather impressive, isn’t it?”

Leigh gaped. The space was as big as the sanctuary above it, but its ceiling was low — at least those sections of ceiling that were visible. The entire space, from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, was completely crammed full of
stuff.
It didn’t look like a storage room, with orderly piles and rows and aisles. It looked like a charity donation clearinghouse that had gotten hit by a tornado, pulled up into the funnel, shaken like a martini, and sat back down again.

“Where did it all—”

“Well, the building has served a lot of different purposes, like I said,” Bess interrupted again. “Churches, the two fraternal orders, and a couple times it was a banquet hall. See the chairs?”

Leigh did see folding chairs. Some folded, some unfolded. Some broken in half. One was hanging off a crooked hat rack, another was partly buried underneath a clear plastic bag filled with Styrofoam packing peanuts. All of them were thoroughly entangled in a web of other items under, around, and on top of them. The vast sea of accumulated objects before Leigh’s eyes looked like a child’s “find this” puzzle book on steroids.

“I… do see chairs,” she conceded.

“We just have to get them out, you see,” Bess continued. “And… er… all this other stuff, too.”

Leigh turned toward her aunt. “We? All this? Out?”

Bess offered her best fake smile. “Of course. Our patrons will need to get to the accessible bathroom, you see.” She pointed across the room.

Leigh looked. “I don’t see any bathroom.”

“Yes, well,” Bess replied, her smile starting to droop a little. “You would if you walked back upstairs and came down on the other side. But it’s… um… kind of hard to get there from here at the moment.”

“You don’t say,” Leigh deadpanned, moving past a wet/dry vacuum with no hose to get a closer look at a long, smooth pole that hung off a stand on one end and dragged the floor on the other. “Isn’t this a ballet barre?”

Bess stepped forward with her. “I do believe it is! This place was a dance studio for a while, too. Didn’t I mention that? Back in the nineties.”

Leigh’s better judgment still urged her to run screaming back up the steps. But the bizarre nature of the cornucopia of accumulated crap before her couldn’t help but spark her curiosity. She picked up a shaggy piece of brown fur from off one end of the ballet barre. It was shaped like a hood and sported a stub of paper mache from which the tip had obviously broken off.

“Narwhal horn,” Bess explained.

“Since when do whales have fur?”

“Since the men of the order got hat envy over the Moose and the Elk.”

“Gotcha.” Leigh dug deeper into the pile. She opened a small cardboard box, then shut it quickly. New ballet slippers might look pretty, but apparently used ones could reek of foot odor indefinitely. “Any chance there’s anything of actual value in here?”

“Oh, absolutely!” Bess cried. “Seems like every occupant left it in a hurry. No one’s used the basement or the old kitchen in ages… even when the place was a banquet hall, all the food was catered and they used the newer kitchen in the annex for reheating and dishwashing and such. The basement’s only been used for storage.”

Leigh pulled a folded section of newspaper from the bottom of a ceramic planter decorated with pink flamingos. She checked the date. “May 17th, 1974!”

“You see?” Bess said proudly. “This place is practically a museum! The Pack will love it!”

“The Pack?” Leigh questioned. She knew perfectly well that Bess was referring to Cara’s two children and Leigh’s own twins, whose nickname was well earned. Not only had the foursome roamed their North Hills neighborhood as one ever since Leigh and Warren moved in next door to Cara and Gil, but when the kids combined their brainpower, any unsuspecting adult prey were in serious, serious trouble.

“Yes, I’ve been meaning to speak to you and Cara about that,” Bess began, her voice suddenly demure. “I know the kids are off on spring break next week, and I heard that none of you are going anywhere, what with Allison’s surgery and Gil’s conference in Nuremberg. So I thought, what could be more perfect than their dear young aunt finding them a fun and exciting job to do?”

Leigh’s head filled with visions of her precocious eleven-year-old year daughter climbing around on shaky scaffolding trying to live-capture a sleeping bat. “Aunt Bess, I don’t—”

“Under constant supervision,” Bess cajoled. “And with pay?”

Leigh gritted her teeth and considered. She
was
wondering how she could keep the kids safely occupied with school being out all next week. Pittsburgh in March was still wet and cold, most of their friends were headed out of town, and the eye muscle surgery Allison was scheduled for — while not restricting her physical activity per se — was expected to leave her eye red and puffy for a few days. The girl wouldn’t be feeling very social, nor would she be able to spend her usual hours reading or staring at a computer screen. As for Ethan, he still owed twenty bucks for the window he and his cousin Mathias had busted out playing disc golf. “Keep talking,” Leigh replied.

Bess’s eyes twinkled. “I need their brains as much as their brawn. There are bound to be some real gems in here for the theater group — it’s a veritable treasure trove of props! But the room has to be completely cleared out by opening night, and I can’t possibly sort through it all myself and whip the rest of the building into shape besides. I’ve already hired a crew of men through the Community Outreach Center to help with the heavy lifting and cleaning and such, but I can’t trust them to tell the wheat from the chaff — yesterday I caught one of them throwing out a perfectly good walking cane topped with a carved fish head!”

Leigh reserved comment. “So you want the Pack to help you sort through all this and decide what to keep and what to pitch?”

“Exactly!” Bess beamed. “I’ll give them my criteria and they can take it from there. They’ve got a good eye for treasure, all of them. They just need to catalog the ‘keeper’ stuff and get it squirreled away in the annex, then stack the trash for the crew to haul out. They can earn a little money and it would be such a tremendous help to the society. What do you say?”

Leigh took another long look around the cluttered, musty-smelling basement. She didn’t need to wonder what the kids would think of their great aunt’s proposal. Hunting treasure was already one of their specialties — getting paid to do it would be nirvana. But what if, buried amidst the broken chairs and the smelly shoes, there was anything… dangerous?

“You have no idea what’s in here, do you?” Leigh asked, wading deeper into the clutter and shifting aside a metal shelving unit stocked with bags of silk flowers. She had spied the corner of what looked like a steamer trunk, and she couldn’t resist checking it out. Antique steamer trunks could indeed be valuable.

“Well, what I’ve seen so far has been pretty predictable,” Bess assured. “The churches left hymnbooks and Christmas decorations and candles and such. The banquet facilities left chairs and dishes and some sound equipment. There are all sorts of things from the dance studio — apparently that owner skipped out in the middle of the night and left everything. But as for the fraternal orders…” her voice trailed off as she held up a giant orange plastic toilet seat. “I daresay we might be in for a few surprises.”

“As long as there’s nothing… toxic,” Leigh offered, pushing a mound of wadded up black fabric off the top of the trunk. It
was
a steamer. And an antique. It seemed to be in reasonable condition, too, except that the latch was missing. She smiled as she reached down to open it. Perhaps a little treasure hunting could be fun, even if the building itself did give her the creeps.

“Does that mean you’ll let me hire the Pack?” Bess asked hopefully.

“I’m sure they’d be delighted,” Leigh answered, lifting the heavy lid.

“Oh, goody!” Aunt Bess crowed. “I’ll come over and see them after school, then. I’ll have to speak with Cara too, of course—”

Leigh didn’t hear anymore. Her ears had shut off the instant her eyes saw human bone. Tattered cloth. Gaping, empty eye sockets.

She let the trunk lid fall shut with a bang. She stepped backward, tripped over a plastic topiary, and tumbled sideways over a patio grill.

“What on earth?” Bess questioned, scrambling forward to offer Leigh a hand.

Leigh pulled herself upright, then pointed a shaking finger toward the trunk. She made a strangled sound in her throat, but no words came out.

Bess turned toward the steamer. Leigh reached out to catch her aunt’s arm, but was too late. Bess was already opening the lid.
No! Stop!

Bess smiled and reached down. She pulled out a length of twine, then hoisted her arm high to lift out the remainder of the plastic skeleton. Her merry voice cackled with laughter. “Well, that’s a stitch, isn’t it? Almost looks real! What with the clothes and decaying flesh and all. I guess I forgot to mention… the last couple years, when the borough had possession, they let the Young Businessmen’s Chamber use the building for their haunted houses at Halloween.” She looked deeper into the trunk. “Oh, and look here… rubber brains! And fake vomit!”

Leigh sank back down on the grill and tried to rein in her racing heartbeat. “Aunt Bess,” she said weakly as her aunt inadvertently dangled the skeleton’s rib cage inches from her face. “Please put that thing away.”