Reign (53 page)

He led the three women into the inner lobby, fumbled about at the wall switch, and turned on the house lights. The interior of the Venetian Theatre was just as they had left it. They walked down the aisle onto the stage, and Dennis noticed that Ally looked overhead nervously, as if expecting the curtain to come crashing down on them the way it had on poor Tommy
Werton
.

"It's here," Dennis said. "I think it's here that
it's
strongest."

Bebe
Gonsalves's
face seemed to shimmer in the dim light, as though possessed of an infinity of unpleasant emotions. "It is very bad here. Not from the presence you seek, but from the act, from the man who died, the one last fall. His pain and shock, the horror of those who watched — I feel it all. It makes things muddy." She put a long-nailed hand to her forehead and closed her eyes. "It will take a moment to dispel these thoughts. They must go before I can seek the entity you dread. Please, be quiet for a time."

The four of them stood, all of them believing, and trembling. After three long minutes,
Bebe
Gonsalves
gave a quick intake of breath, and whispered, "There is something." Her eyelids fluttered. "Something that wishes . . . or wished . . . to start a . . . a dynasty, or rather . . . an empire. A dark, dreadful empire. But it is very weak,
very
weak. Near death. It suffers. It is being drained away. It lives in fear . . ."

She shook her head. "It is gone," she said, turning to Dennis. "It may still be here, but I can sense it no longer. I would advise you to have no fear, Mr. Hamilton."

"Then you think . . . it's harmless?"

"If what I felt is the entity of which you spoke, I think it is indeed harmless." She shrugged. "Pitifully so. It will not live long, and while it does, it is impotent. Ignore it," she said, and smiled for the first time. "And it'll go away."

Ally and
Bebe
Gonsalves
declined Dennis's offer of lunch, and drove away in their rented car, but not before Ally had kissed Dennis on the cheek and whispered to him, "Hang in there, buster. You got over me, you can get over this," which made him smile, but not laugh.

When they were gone, Dennis stood with Ann on the sidewalk under the marquee. "Do you believe her?" Ann asked, putting her arms around him. "Do you think she has those . . . powers?"

He held her. "After what's happened to me, I don't disbelieve in anyone's powers anymore. As for what she said, I think she might have felt something. Something that had dreams, something that's weak, that's dying. Something that won't be here for long."

"But isn't that good?"

"I don't know," he said. "It depends on who it was that she was sensing. The Emperor?" He looked down at her. "Or me?"

He felt her muscles stiffen. "Don't say things like that."

"I've got to face the facts. I don't have much left in me."

"It'll change now. You're back on a stage again.
Your
stage."

"Mine?" He turned and looked back through the glass doors into the shadows of the lobby. "Is it?"

"Yes. It's your building, your theatre, your stage. It's your
character
."

"No, Ann. They'll be mine when I take them back again, back from him. Not before."

"Then do it, Dennis. Reach down inside you and do it."

He did not answer. He had nothing to say. He felt horribly old, unbearably weary, as though the battle had already been fought and he had lost. "Let's go back to the hotel," he finally said. "I'm tired. I'd like to rest."

~ * ~

At one o'clock that afternoon, the techies went in. Curt Wynn supervised as two assistant stage managers taped the stage, the props people prepared the tables stage right and left, and the crew set furniture for the first scene to be rehearsed the next morning. The set itself, the original road show design by the late Kinsey
Holworth
, was still being reconstructed in New York scene shops under Mack
Redcay's
demanding eye, and would be transported to Kirkland on Wednesday. The designer had been disappointed at the delay of
Craddock
, but the money that John Steinberg offered did much to assuage his regret at having to supervise the rebuilding of another man's design. Still, there was no time for a new one.

Thorne Wilson's lighting design was also to be repeated, and Wilson, a big, hearty man with a penchant for using as many lighting instruments as his budget would allow (and often more), was delighted to recreate his former triumph, even if only for one performance. He scurried about the theatre, using the lighting board in the rear of the theatre as his home base, always on his
walkie
talkie to his minions above, those on the tall platform ladders called
cherrypickers
, and those in the ceiling, who were hanging and focusing the instruments.

Though Thorne Wilson was happy to be back with
A Private Empire
,
Marvella
Johnson did not share his enthusiasm. She had remained in New York, working in the costume shops and rental houses to recreate as closely as possible the show's costumes, many of them now sold, scattered, or rebuilt. Terri Deems had done most of the legwork, and
Marvella
rewarded her with the title of Costume Coordinator, and she would appear as such in the playbill directly under
Marvella's
name. That Sunday afternoon Terri worked in the fourth floor costume shop with three female seamstresses and one male, a flighty gay who got on her nerves, but who was a master of organization and could stitch a seam as quickly as the best of them.

Some of those who had never before been in the Venetian Theatre were wary at first of the place's reputation, and for the first hour or so were constantly glancing overhead or over their shoulders. But hardly any of them had never worked in a theatre that did not have some dark history of a violent death or a ghost or two, and when no one was strangled by a roll of adhesive tape, smashed by a falling counterweight, or skewered by a stage brace in the first hour of work, they began to relax, and brought to their jobs the attention and professionalism that had gotten them hired in the first place.

But neither Curt Wynn nor Terri Deems were quite so cavalier as their blissfully ignorant charges and co-workers. Although Curt had seen only the eerie and possibly hallucinatory revenant in the cellar, he firmly believed that a killer was stalking Dennis and Dennis's theatre, and had told everyone that if they saw any person in the theatre building they could not identify, to come to him immediately and tell him about it.

Now, as he walked about the stage, in the wings, in the dressing rooms, he could not banish the feeling that he was being watched. It was not, however, the sensation of being observed secretly, but rather of being watched quite openly and appraisingly. Every time he turned around, he expected to see the nemesis standing there unconcerned. But he saw nothing, not even from the corner of his eye.

Terri, on the other hand, had a more realistic knowledge of what stalked the Venetian Theatre. She had, after all, been with the imposter, spoken with him, touched him and more. If he had not actually raped her, the bastard had at least pushed her past the point of consensual sex. Still, when she thought of what he might have done, and what he had done to the others, she shuddered with the horror that such a man had had her. She felt unclean, and horribly used, and wished that she might see him again, captured and bound. She would spit on him then.

But now, surrounded by other women and one ineffectual male, she wanted nothing less than for the monster to come through the costume shop door. Still, she did not think he would come among so many, and she did not intend to be alone in the theatre, or be alone anywhere, for that matter.

She and Evan had adjoining rooms in the Kirkland Hotel. They had slept in each other's arms last night, and would, by mutual consent, continue to do so. Though she had grown to like him before, it was when they were together in New York that she thought she had begun to love him. He was the only boy she had ever known who made no demands on her, and although he had not gone to college, an omission that he was now planning to correct, he was one of the brightest people she had ever met. But more than that, they had fun together, and the last time Terri could remember having fun with a boy had been long before she had discovered sex and the power she was able to wield with it.

She missed him as she worked in the shop, and wished that he were nearby, down on the stage with Curt. But he would not come back to the theatre, and after he had told her what he had seen the day of his attack, she could not blame him. That it had been an hallucination she had no doubt, for such a vision as he had seen could only have come from the imagination of someone who, like Evan, seemed terrified at the mere thought of standing in front of an audience. "I might go in," he told her, "but not now, not yet. My gut cramps when I think about it."

"But if you weren't alone," she told him. "If you were with people . . .”

"I know. I will. I think I will. Maybe later this week. But not now. Not yet."

So he remained in the hotel, looking through the college catalogues he had obtained in New York. She hoped he would choose Columbia or N.Y.U. That way they could stay close to each other, even stay together.

Stay together. God, that was just too good to be believed. Something would have to go wrong, she thought with the fearful pessimism of the jaded young. She had no right to be that happy.

~ * ~

The following morning at nine-thirty, John Steinberg was once again in his office at the Venetian Theatre when Robert
Leibowitz
called and told him that Sid Harper's trial date had been set for the last week in May. There was no new evidence, and the lawyer was not at all certain that he could persuade a jury to free Sid.

If
Leibowitz
used the "mystery man" defense, claiming that one individual had been responsible for most if not all of the deaths that had taken place in the theatre building, the jury might rationally assume that if circumstantial evidence indicated that Sid was responsible for Donna Franklin's murder, he might just as well have been responsible for the others, except for Whitney's, of course.

"Doesn't the fact that Whitney was murdered," Steinberg said, "indicate that this `mystery man' exists?"

"Possibly,"
Leibowitz
answered. "But the prosecuting attorney might be able to make those wounds on the girl's lips and the broken nose look self-inflicted —struggling to escape suffocation. I'd feel a lot better if it was a more obvious murder. But if we
ignore
the mystery man, the jury might just as rationally decide that it was Harper and no one else who had murdered Miss Franklin and Miss Franklin only. Our only hope is that something comes up before the trial begins."

"Like what?" Steinberg asked.

There was a long pause. "Like another murder,"
Leibowitz
said. "A murder that couldn't be anything else."

Now it was Steinberg's turn to pause. "Well," he finally said to
Leibowitz
, "I'll see what I can turn up."

He hung up just as Ann came in. "
Leibowitz
needs another murder to free Sid," he told her. "Would you please canvass for volunteers among the cast and crew?"

Ann ignored the comment. "What shall I do, John? Do you have letters?”

“Of course. But before we get to business, how's Dennis?"

"Dennis is . . . very much the same."

"Your psychic did nothing to allay his concerns?"

"I don't know, John."

"No one seems to know much of anything. I assume the purpose of this . . . alleged psychic was to try and visualize our house terrorist?"

Ann paused just a moment too long. "Yes."

"And did he have any visions?"

"She. It was a she. Her name is
Bebe
Gonsalves
."

"Ah. And does she predict with fruit on her head?" He waved a hand. "I take it back. A racial slur. Was the money well spent?"

"You mean did she find anything? No. She didn't."

Steinberg eyed her long and hard. "I think you're lying to me, Ann. I think that you know more than you're telling. Is that right?"

"No."

"You are a kind and lovely woman, but a very bad liar. If you don't want to tell me the truth, I assume you must have a reason. I merely hope that you will put the safety of Dennis and yourself and everyone else in this building first. Will you do that?"

"Yes, John. And that's the truth."

"All right." His face soured, and he snorted petulantly. "It used to be that I was told everything, and what I wasn't told I found out anyway. Those were the halcyon days of the past, and I trust once all this foolishness is over that they will return again." He passed Ann a sheaf of papers. "These are the contracts for the security team I'm hiring. Please look over them and work out a final budget."

"Security team?"

"I'm a bit concerned too, Ann," he said, as though explaining to a child. "Concerned enough to bring in some muscle starting tomorrow to ensure that our stalker or whoever the hell he is has no further access to the theatre or its staff. There will be two men here at all times, guarding both front and rear entrances. There will also be a man at the hotel. If anyone wants to do any more killings, he's going to find that he's got to dispose of a few armed guards first." Then Steinberg smiled. "I may be ignorant, Ann, but I'm not senile. If anyone's going to get into this theatre unseen in the next two weeks, he's going to have to be a shadow. Or a ghost."