Never Thwart a Thespian: Volume 8 (Leigh Koslow Mystery Series) (7 page)

Leigh followed as her cousin walked slowly around the front corner and up the parking lot side of the building, snapping pictures as she went. “Honestly,” Cara said, frowning at the aluminum and acrylic housing that stuck out of the building’s side to enclose the monstrous wheelchair ramp, “with all that added on and without the steeple and the stained glass the original church was designed to have, it’ll be tough to make this building look anything less than hideous.”

“Quite,” Leigh agreed.

Both women were startled by a sudden movement from above. They looked up to see Ned, the man Leigh had met at the dumpster earlier, standing on the flat roof of the annex and leaning a ladder up against the back wall of the old sanctuary. With a roll of screen wire and a hammer tucked under one arm, he began to ascend the ladder.

“Oh, be careful!” Cara cried. “It’s been raining.”

Ned looked down at them both dubiously, his shaggy gray hair tousling in the breeze. “Ms. Frances says we gotta keep the bats out.”

Right above where Ned had placed the top of the ladder was an attic vent boasting holes the size of fists. “I’m sure neither Frances nor Bess want you to do anything dangerous,” Cara called back. “Maybe you should wait until the roof is dry?”

“Won’t make any difference,” came a husky voice from behind them. “He could fall through just as easily in the sunshine.”

Leigh and Cara turned to see a woman barely five feet tall — and that while wearing four-inch heels — standing behind them in a crisp business suit. She carried a professional camera similar to Cara’s and was wearing a hands-free earpiece so large in comparison to her tiny ear that it dominated the entire left side of her face.

“Excuse me?” Cara remarked. Her tone was superficially polite, but Leigh knew her cousin well enough to know that she had taken an instant dislike to the stranger.

“Sonia Crane, attorney at law,” the woman rasped. Her voice sounded like something one might expect from a retired miner with emphysema, not a woman the size of a fourth grader. “Crane and Associates,” she finished, extending a rigid, perfectly straight hand first to Cara, then to Leigh.

Leigh attempted to shake, but might as well have attempted to engage a slab of granite. The woman was probably around their own age, but her overzealously tanned skin was leathery and her perfectly tailored clothes reeked of cigarette smoke.

Leigh started to introduce herself, but Sonia cut her off. “It’s only a matter of time before someone is seriously injured on these premises,” the attorney pronounced. “And I can assure you that the lawsuits will be
crippling.”

Leigh’s eyes traveled upward again. Ned had reached the top of the ladder and was placidly tacking the screened wire over the attic vent, ignoring all three women.

“Were you planning to injure someone?” Cara asked sweetly.

Leigh fought back a grin. Cara didn’t dislike very many people, particularly on first sight. Leigh knew it was petty, but she had always secretly enjoyed watching her nearly perfect cousin act less than perfectly; and for whatever reason, this tiny woman had Cara’s rarely used claws just itching to be unsheathed.

Sonia’s expression remained bland. “Crane and Associates doesn’t deal with personal injury law,” she stated, as if this answered the question. “We do real estate and property law. And I can assure you, with my over twenty years of experience in the field, that this building as it stands is an accident waiting to happen, ergo, an investor’s worst nightmare.”

Aha,
Leigh thought. No doubt this was the attorney Bess had mentioned earlier — the one who wanted the property herself and who was, even now, trying to buy it back from Gordon Applegate.

“If you’re here because you’ve been hired to do some promotional work for the Thespian Society,” Sonia continued authoritatively, “I would suggest you rethink. This building will never open to the public. It won’t pass inspection.” She snapped a quick picture of Ned on the roof. “You there!” she called. “I wouldn’t trust that ceiling if I were you! It could be rotted clean through!”

Ned granted her only the briefest of glances, frowned, and returned to his work.

Sonia harrumphed, then snapped another picture.

Cara started to say something, but Leigh cut her off. “We were told that the building was declared sound by two building inspectors,” she said, intentionally sounding uncertain. “Is that not true?”

Sonia drew herself up to her full, pixie-like height and leaned closer to Leigh. “Private inspectors can be paid off,” she said heavily. “But the borough has final authority in granting the necessary permit… or not. This place is clearly a firetrap, if nothing else. Regardless, if people don’t feel safe coming here, the venture will fail. And people
won’t
feel safe. Not with this building’s history of… well, you know.
Black magic.”

Leigh resisted an urge to smile. Though she would be the last one to deny the building’s macabre atmosphere, Sonia’s blatant attempts at undermining Bess’s plans — by any means possible — were really too amusing. “Black magic?” she repeated, trying to sound frightened, even as she tapped her cousin’s foot to warn her to play along.

Sonia’s dark, perfectly plucked eyebrows waggled ominously. “It’s common knowledge,” she said in a low, conspiratorial whisper. “
Human sacrifice.
Practiced
Right.
In.
There.”
She cocked her head over their shoulders toward the building. “It doesn’t get any darker than that. Not even that Marconi fellow could overcome this building’s reputation. Ran him off to Timbuktu it did, and lost him a boatload of money besides. But Gordon Applegate is sharper than that. As soon as he gets a load of the file I’m constructing, he’ll sell off this dump quicker than—”

Sonia suddenly straightened up and lightened her tone. “Well, that’s what I hear, you know. From other people. Gotta go!” In a flash of navy blue — and with another burst of cigarette odor — she whirled away and hopped into a car parked nearby.

“Why were you humoring her like that?” Cara asked with annoyance.

“That sniveling little piranha!” Bess thundered, hurrying out from the door to the annex as Sonia drove out of the lot. “What does she think she’s doing here? On
my
property?!”

Leigh declined to point out that the property did not, technically, belong to Bess. It was more interesting to speculate on why the mere sight of her aunt in the doorway had sent the brassy attorney scuttling away. “Aunt Bess,” Leigh queried. “What exactly did you
do
to that woman at the sheriff’s sale?”

Bess’s lips drew into the subtlest of smirks, even as her eyebrows lifted with false innocence. “Me? Why I’m sure I don’t know
what
you’re talking about. Now, what exactly did she say to you? And what the devil was she doing with that camera?”

“All done, Ms. Bess,” Ned called from the roof. He had finished his task and was standing near the roof’s edge. “You want anything else? There’s some leaves and junk up here that need cleaned out.”

“That would be lovely, Ned, thank you,” Bess replied pleasantly. She turned to the women and lowered her voice. “Not the brightest bulb in the factory, that one, but he’s a good worker. The lady at Community Outreach said—”

“Aunt Bess,” Cara broke in, uncharacteristically exasperated. “How do you know Sonia Crane?”

“Oh, we’ve met,” Bess said dismissively. “What I’d like to know is what on earth she wanted with the two of you?”

“My guess would be to scare us out of doing publicity work for the project,” Leigh offered. “She was probably also hoping we would spread the word that the building is unsafe. Or haunted. Or occupied by squatting devil worshippers. I don’t think she cared which, really.”

“She’s obviously trying to convince Gordon Applegate that the theater can’t possibly succeed,” Cara added bitterly. “And if there’s money in it for her, she’ll stop at nothing to do it. I’d be wary of any photographs she happens to put in that ‘file’ of hers, for sure. She’ll manipulate them to show whatever she wants him to see. Cracks in the foundation, water leaks, mold — I wouldn’t put anything past her.”

Both Leigh and Bess turned to stare at Cara. “You know her already?” Leigh asked.

Cara’s eyes narrowed menacingly. “Oh, I know her all right. We went to college together.”

“But,” Leigh protested, “she didn’t recognize you!”

Cara gave an unladylike snort. “If you knew her like I did, you wouldn’t find that surprising. She’s one of the most self-absorbed individuals I’ve ever had the displeasure to come across. You could walk up to her again two hours from now and she wouldn’t recognize you, either.”

“She certainly knew Aunt Bess,” Leigh remarked.

Bess gave her salon-styled “big hair” a fluff with both hands. “Must be the doo,” she said, her eyes twinkling with mischief. “Never mind. I’ll have the men keep an eye out for her. But if she thinks she can fool a man like Gordon with a bunch of trumped-up nonsense, she’s got another think coming.”

With that, Bess turned with a flourish and hurried back into the building.

Cara looked after Bess quizzically. “She never did answer your question, did she? About why Sonia would get so spooked by the sight of her?”

“Nope,” Leigh agreed. “And something tells me she’s not going to. Which, knowing Aunt Bess, means you and I are almost certainly better off not knowing.”

Cara murmured something unintelligible under her breath, then raised her camera and snapped another picture. Scattered raindrops began to pelt down again.

“You know,’” Leigh asked, her voice thoughtful. “It isn’t all just ‘trumped up nonsense.’ A lot of bad stuff really did happen here, and the building’s hardly in mint condition. What if this is one hare-brained scheme of Aunt Bess’s that really
doesn’t
turn out for the best?”

Cara’s gaze whipped from the LED screen on her camera to the portion of the building she’d just photographed. “Where the—”

“What is it?” Leigh asked.

Cara tilted the camera screen her direction, shielding it from the rain with an outstretched arm. “Look. See him there?”

Leigh squinted at the image. Just visible at the edge of the flat roof, not far from where they stood, was a pale, disembodied head with wild gray hair. “Don’t show me crap like that!” she protested, recoiling from the camera. “Like I need something else to creep me out today?”

“It’s just a trick of the angle,” Cara explained, studying the photograph more closely. “But still, it’s odd. He must have been lying perfectly flat on the roof with his head stretched out. Yet when I looked up just a few seconds later, he was gone.”

“Most people clean out gutters with their hands, not their chins,” Leigh said darkly. “I think he’s just plain weird, Cara. Which makes him fit right in around here.” She gave an exaggerated shudder. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back downstairs to hover over the Pack like a worried hen for the rest of the day.”

“Sounds good,” Cara said distractedly, still staring at her camera. “I’ll see you later.”

Leigh turned and walked toward the door with a grumble. Not that she was paranoid. Or superstitious. Or anything. It was just that, all things considered, there were places she would rather be right now than inside this particular building.

Like, say, inside a barrel at the top of Niagara Falls.

With six cats and a Rottweiler.

Chapter 5

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how one looked at it, the Pack did not share Leigh’s uneasiness with their employment venue. Rather, they were enjoying themselves immensely. They were also making concrete progress on the assigned task.

Leigh looked around the basement to see a good portion of the menagerie pulled from the jumble in the center of the room and sorted into neat piles by the stairs to the annex. The contents of the trash pile were being continuously gathered and hauled up the stairs to the dumpster by Gerardo, while Chaz whittled away at the props pile, commenting at length on various items in it and — occasionally — taking a handful of them off into the annex for placement in one of Bess’s designated storage closets.

There was also, Leigh noted with chagrin, a pile for “keepers,” which consisted of items the Pack wished to permanently adopt, and which Bess assured them they could, pending the almost-certain approval of Gordon Applegate. These included a dirty blender (which definitely would
not
be coming to Leigh’s house), a dog bed (which her father’s clinic probably could use), a fake horse harness covered with sleigh bells (say what?), a giant framed painting of a man with holes where his eyes should be (also hopefully bound for Cara’s house), and an oversized plastic machete painted with fake blood (ditto).

“Why did the Young Businessmen’s Chamber leave so much of their haunted house stuff here?” Leigh asked, frowning with disgust at a collection of fake rats with bloody fangs that Mathias was in the process of moving to the “keepers” pile.

“We always left everything here,” Chaz piped in cheerfully. “We didn’t know from year to year if the building would be available again, and we didn’t have anyplace else to store it anyway. When the borough finally got ready to sell, they gave the President notice to come and get it, but he was a do-nothing jerk and it all just got left. And that was before
last
Halloween — the organization’s disbanded now so there’s nobody to do anything with it anyway.”

“Very intriguing,” Bess chirped, examining a leather case presented to her by Ethan that appeared to hold dental instruments. Instruments that were — like a disturbingly high proportion of items in the room — coated with some sort of fake blood. “We might be able to use this. I’ve always had a hankering to produce
Little Shop of Horrors.”
She zipped up the instrument case and handed it back to Ethan. “Props pile, please!”

“Mom?” came Allison’s small voice. “I think you should see this.”

Leigh looked down to find her daughter standing quietly at her elbow, her nose twitching as she adjusted her heavy eyeglasses. The twitching was a subconscious gesture Allison shared with her grandfather Randall. But it was also a tell. They both twitched more when they were excited or alarmed, and it was often the only sign they gave of such emotion.