I guess I didn’t tell you about that. It wasn’t anything— Well, yes, I guess it was,” she said, gathering her thoughts. “Twice this weird shadow came out of nowhere and sort of glided over the floor at the theater. And then it was gone—although both times it was accompanied by a cool brush of air. The second time I saw it was down in the pit, right before you got there.”
“And it was definitely not caused by anything around you?”
“No. It was the same shadow, and there was nothing else both times—I was alone in the theater. And here’s the thing—one of the things—I just realized when I was thinking,” she said with another sly smile, “I got up in the middle of the night at home that same night we found the Nutcracker stuff, and when I came out to the kitchen, I saw that same shadow—not gonna lie, I freaked out for a minute—but then I realized that time, it was the Nutcracker headpiece that was giving off the shadow. It was the shape of its hat—a tall military hat with a slanted top.”
“So what you’re saying is, the ghost has something to do with the Nutcracker.”
“Which happened to have been the last show that was ever done at the theater. And they shut it down suddenly and for no reason, and no one ever really found out why. And—oh, I just realized this—when the ghost threw everything around in the workshop, the cast photo-poster from The Nutcracker was right there in the middle of the floor. I didn’t think anything of it until now.”
“But the ghost—according to Iva and Bruce Banner—was female. The Nutcracker is definitely male.”
“Oh, yes, I know. But somehow it’s connected. I just don’t know how.”
He nodded. “All right. That’s really interesting, and it makes sense—as much as a ghost makes sense.” He laughed a little uncomfortably, and Vivien found it adorable that he was still awkward talking about ghosts…especially since he’d acknowledged Liv.
She didn’t say anything because he’d mentioned he had an early shift tomorrow—in only a few hours, she realized—but she fully intended to visit the theater in the morning to check out the orchestra pit and the trunk once more.
Vivien walked to the theater down the hill from Jake’s (she preferred going down rather than up the hill) the next morning.
It was after nine o’clock, and she’d felt more than a little guilty about sleeping in when Jake had to get up for his shift at five a.m.—and on a Sunday.
But the look of pleasure in his eyes when she walked into the kitchen erased any lingering remorse.
“I heard you singing in the shower,” he said, handing her a cup of ambrosia—a.k.a. coffee—as he looked up from his computer.
“Unfortunately, it was a solo, not a duet,” she replied, bending over to give him a sultry kiss with lots of tongue.
Which he returned, turning up the heat and adding a boob cup while he was at it. “And what were you singing this morning?” he asked, arching a brow.
She smirked and bumped her hip against his. “It was a song from Oklahoma! Didn’t you hear me?”
“No, I’ve been working for the last four hours while you were snoring away.”
“I don’t snore,” she said.
“Mmmph,” he said with studied innocence. A pair of dark-framed glasses—a new development—sat next to his laptop on the counter, and she immediately wanted to see him wearing them. Cute guys in glasses were one of her favorite things.
But before she could ask, Jake cast her a curious glance. “So what were you singing?”
She grinned down at him. “‘I Cain’t Say No,’” she said, then twirled away before he could grab her and prove the point.
His eyes were laughing as he looked at her from where he was stranded at his computer screen. “I sang a duet by myself yesterday morning in the shower,” he confessed as his phone beeped with an alert.
She stopped and looked at him. “Really?”
“Yes,” he said, looking at the display on his phone. “Oh, good, that’s not for me. What were we saying?”
“You said you were singing in the shower yesterday.”
He smiled and lifted his mug of coffee to sip, watching her over it with dark, smoky eyes. “Oh, right. A duet, but, alas, I was singing it as a solo. Nevertheless, I struggled through.”
“What was it?” she asked. He had a nice enough voice, true—a decent baritone—but he wasn’t quite as regularly vocal as she was. And certainly not as powerful when it