times I want to be her when I grow up.” Her face was all lit up and her eyes glowed with pleasure.
Jake’s chest felt tight, and he hid the discomfort by climbing out of the car. Too soon.
He grabbed the ugly Nutcracker mask from the back seat and followed her. She was still chuckling a little as she led the way to the theater’s side door.
“So while we were here last night, someone drove into the parking lot without their lights on and then sped away when they saw us and the cop car,” he told her.
That got her attention, and she stopped suddenly. “Did you see who it was?”
He had to shake his head. “Helga went after them, but it was too late and they got away. But Baxter said the brake lights were unusual, so he was drawing a picture of them. And there was only one person in the car that I could see.”
“You think it was them—whoever’s been breaking in.”
“No headlights, then taking off as soon as they saw us—yeah, I’d say so.”
“They didn’t come back?”
“We were here till two, two thirty. I drove Bax and Helga home—by the way, is there something going on with them?”
“Going on like how? Dating?”
“Yeah. Or something. I think I got a vibe…”
She shook her head as she fit the key into the lock. “Not a chance. Baxter is hung up on Emily Delton, and Helga’s very happily single and unencumbered. I mean, she likes guys, but she’s not interested in all the hassle.” Then she looked directly at him. “Why? You afraid you’re going to step on his toes?”
Jake was rendered speechless. Surely she wasn’t that clueless… “I’d only be stepping on his toes if he was moving in on you, VL. I thought that was pretty obvious.”
“Oh. No…well, maybe. Ugh. I… Jake, we have a history. I can’t help it if that’s the lens I look through when I—with you.”
What could he say to that?
Nothing. So he followed her into the theater and put down the eerie, caved-in headpiece on a table.
“The scaffolding is back here,” she said, leading the way into a spacious workshop with a thirty-foot ceiling and a massive garage door. There were walls lined with worktables and hung with tools, including an old table saw, piles of ratty paint cloths and sawhorses, trash cans, and acres of scrap wood. It was a lot cleaner than it had been yesterday, though.
“If you help me wheel it out, we can look up at the flies and see how they’re attached, and maybe how they were manipulated. And at the very least, take them down for evidence.”
“Flies? You mean the backdrops?”
“Right.”
They muscled the scaffolding out and wheeled it onto the stage with little trouble but some godawful wheel squeaking. It was metal and had been tucked behind a bunch of old set pieces, so Jake was reasonably sure it hadn’t been tampered with. Nonetheless, he insisted that they check every step and bar before putting any weight on them, even though he was certain Vivien would have done so anyway.
“So, I was thinking about timing,” she said as they worked their way slowly up the steps, one on either side of the scaffolding. “When and how those events happened…either someone was watching and knew when to set the creepy effects off, or there was some other sort of trigger that launched the, uh, shows.
“When it happened the first time, I was here alone. I had just come into the building by myself, and no one knew I was going to come here; I didn’t even know it myself. I’d just gotten the keys, and the news that the bank approved my loan for the improvements, and I was so excited that I came right here. So that first little display had to have been set up and ready well before I arrived. Heck, maybe even the second one had been set up at the same time—how would I know? I wasn’t looking for scrims up in the house ceiling—probably wouldn’t have realized what they were even if I saw it up there—and as you saw, there are a bunch of flies, backdrops, still hanging up there above the stage.”
“So you’d literally just gotten the loan to buy the place and the first thing happened right away?” He looked at her from between the bars of the scaffolding.
“No, I closed on the actual building a month ago. The loan was for the improvements and renovation.” She pursed her