Hex on the Beach by Kelley Armstrong
Chapter Eight
We’re outside the theater complex. On the road, because we can’t get closer. The police and fire department have it blocked off.
Marius strides back to us, using his powers to cut through the crowd.
“It was the tour,” he says when he arrives, after doubtless charming an officer or firefighter into talking to him. “The Lisa Lake tour reached the theater for the big reveal. The guide was walking them through it, and the lights went out. The locals figured that was part of the show—recreating what happened that night. But the lights were only supposed to dim. They went out, and someone spotted a girl in the auditorium. A girl dressed in sixties clothing. Then she disappeared, and the seat where she was standing caught on fire.”
“A ghost that spontaneously combusted?” Hope says.
He shrugs. “There was an alleged ghost, and there was a definite fire. It’s out now, and they’re interviewing the tour folks to figure out what happened.”
Kennedy exhales. “Okay, well, that was some unexpected excitement, and I lost my line, but the night is young and the coffee is hot. We should get back to Ani and Jonathan—”
As if hearing his name, Jonathan appears, his head bobbing over the crowd as he makes his way over.
“Everything okay at the shop?” Kennedy says. “Please tell me you’ve come because we’re flooded with customers and you need help.”
“Sorry, K,” he says. “I came to say they shut us down.”
“What?”
Before he can answer, another siren sounds, this one an alarm. He waits until it shuts off.
“Chief Salazar is shutting down all the businesses along Bishop,” he says. “They’ve had four security alerts so far. No sign of trouble, just alarms and sprinklers going off. She has no idea what’s happening, but she isn’t taking chances. Everyone’s closed for the rest of the night.”
“Maywe ask where you’re taking us?”
It’s past midnight, and Marius is leading Aiden, Kennedy and me through an empty park. We’d been heading off to bed—exhausted from the long day and disappointed by the end of it—when he’d culled us from the herd and snuck us outside. Now we’re being shepherded toward parts unknown.
When I ask the question, Marius ignores me and motions for silence. There are still people out on Bishop Street. The shops may have closed, but the carnival booths have not, and people are enjoying the warm evening.
“You’re kidnapping us, aren’t you?” Kennedy whispers. “Hope mentioned you’ve had some experience at that.”
“Oof,” Marius says. “Low blow. Deserved, but still low. Yes, I am temporarily kidnapping you. I promise to have you home in an hour, none the worse for wear. I am the most gentlemanly of kidnappers. You may have heard that, too.”
Kennedy rolls her eyes but follows him around the block. When I spot a flashing light, I slow.
“Is that the theater?” I say.
“Yes, we’re breaking in.”
“To the theater?”
“For a good and righteous cause.” He motions us across the road. “Satisfying our curiosity.”
“Uh, it’ll be under guard,” Kennedy says. “By the police.”
“O ye of little faith. Would I bring you all this way if I couldn’t get you in?”
“Uh-huh,” I say. “Let me guess. Whoever told you what was going on earlier also slipped you a phone number, invited you to come back anytime you want to . . . chat.” I waggle my brows.
“I’m not sure we have any eligible women on the force right now,” Kennedy says.
“Oh, I didn’t say they had to be eligible. Also didn’t say they had to be female.” I waggle my brows at Marius again.
As Kennedy laughs, Marius rolls his eyes, and Aiden tries valiantly but unsuccessfully to hide a blush.
“No,” Marius says. “Having no intention of following through, I didn’t make any such promises to anyone. That would be wrong. Useful, but wrong. I’m getting us in with my other talent. A sprinkle of luck.”
“I can help,” Aiden says. “Though I doubt you need it.”
Marius claps him on the back. “Thank you. I should be able to handle this, and I will spare you the balancing, which is much worse for you than it is for me.”
If Aiden uses his power of luck, the laws of balance inflict a counter-weight—a period of bad luck. The same as Kennedy needs to curse an object if she uncurses one. The immortals aren’t bound by those restrictions. Marius only needs to regulate his use of luck because he can run out of it, and then he will need to balance, which he’d rather avoid.
We reach the theater complex. We’ve come in along the back road, and Marius takes us through a yard. Earlier I thought he’d gone into the Bennett house while we were having commiserative cocktails in the garden. He’d obviously snuck out to plan this route.
We scale the fence behind the old stables. I don’t complain about that. In truth, I tend to reserve my grumbling about such things for when they serve a purpose. I am very good at playing the princess. It is the role I was cast into even before Hector took me to wife. The beautiful but useless and not terribly bright goddess to be placed on a pedestal and worshipped because, really, that’s all women like her are good for.
I’ll play the part to get out of unpleasant tasks—dear lord, you cannot expect me to lift that dirty box—or to amuse Marius—but what if I break a nail?—when the truth is that I’ve done my share of scaling fences and crawling through trenches and wriggling through tunnels. I’ve been a spymaster’s lover and partner. Sitting on the sidelines is dull. Clean and safe, but dull.
I climb the fence, and I creep through the garden, and I trust Marius when he says, “Okay, go!” and then I sprint across the open ground right behind him, with Aiden and Kennedy following. Marius’s luck ensures that the two officers on guard choose that moment to patrol around the building and don’t return to investigate any noises.
We make it through the rear exit door, which has conveniently been left with the latch not-quite-secured, proving Marius was indeed here earlier. Once we’re inside, he gently closes the door and then turns on a flashlight that casts a diffuse light. Kennedy takes out her phone for a light and Aiden does the same.
We pause to get a look around. It reminds me of many rural American theaters, summer-stock playhouses in small communities. Rows of chairs like one might find in a school auditorium. A stage at the front with the requisite heavy velvet curtains. All very simple and tidy, the sort of place where you expect to pay fifty dollars for a good seat and enjoy a pleasant evening of decent community theater.
Marius motions us farther in before he speaks. While the building is soundproofed, he’s not taking any chances. Once we’re halfway up the center aisle, he waves at the rear door and two flanking the front.
“Three exits,” he says. “According to an old plan of the theater, at the time of Lisa’s disappearance, there were only two. The one to the front left was added in the nineties to bring it up to code.”
“You’ve done your homework,” I murmur.
“One cannot solve a fifty-year old mystery without delving into historical records. The mystery we’re solving right now, though, is much more recent.”
“What happened here tonight,” Kennedy says.
“Yes. Now, according to those on the tour, the guide was taking them through the original tour of that night. Recreating that while superimposing the story of Lisa Lake.”
“A tour within a tour,” Kennedy says.
“Or that was the claim, though we already know the guide didn’t bother speaking to Mrs. Ricci. Ms. Dowling was using only historical records. Comparing recollections from this evening’s tour with Kennedy’s notes from Mrs. Ricci, tonight’s version missed a few of the early stops, added on two others and completely mangled the town legend.”
“In other words, Ms. Dowling is winging it,” Kennedy says.
“I think she realized no one actually cares about the original tour and devoted her research to the disappearance, which she apparently got dead on. I don’t believe any of the deviations were significant, but in a mystery, everything must be accounted for. Up until they reach the theater, there’s not much Ms. Dowling can say about the Lakes. The family wasn’t noticed until the younger daughter’s gastrointestinal complaint began. Now, according to someone on the tour—who has already posted to TikTok—”
“To what?” I say.
“To a video-clip social-media sharing site. I’ll show you sometime. Now, according to the TikTok poster, all the pre-theater content on the Lakes was a rehashing of the trouble they caused before the tour, which of course, may be significant.”
“If, as you theorized, Lisa was so embarrassed by her parents that she prayed for the ground to swallow her and it did,” Kennedy says.
“Or something like that. But on the sixty-nine tour, no one noticed them until the theater.”
“Wait,” Aiden says. “Didn’t they complain about the tour right from the start? They raised a fuss there, yes?”
“They did,” Marius says. “Huh. I wonder if the guide missed that part, too. Or the young woman who posted the video was late joining the tour. Either way, the main event happened . . .” He stops at the front of the auditorium. “Here. Both that night and tonight.”
He crouches and shines his light at the dark red carpet. Someone has painted an X on it, the paint faded almost to illegibility.
“This is supposedly the spot,” he says. “Lisa stood here to listen to the guide, who was over there.” He motions closer to the wall. “The guests clustered around her. Tonight, Ms. Dowling recreated it. She asked the group to stand there and imagine it was 1969. She led them through it. When the lights went off, she gave a little shriek, which made people laugh. It turns out that while the lights were supposed to extinguish, they went out early. That’s why she cried out.”
“Was someone operating the lights?” Kennedy asks.
“Excellent question, and the answer is yes. A high school AV student had been hired to dim the lights and run the old milkmaid shadow play. She was up in the rafters waiting for her cue. Instead, the lights turned off without her. She was afraid she’d done it, and tried to turn them back on, but nothing happened.”
“The lights were cut from another source,” Aiden says. “Perhaps the breaker was flipped. That would overrule her switch.”
“We will investigate that. For now, we can only say they went off early, and it was not—it seems—the AV girl. The early darkness caught the guide by surprise. She presumed the AV student got ahead of herself, and so after her initial surprise, she waited for the milkmaid shadow play. But there’s something twenty-first-century tour attendees have that they didn’t in the sixties.”
Marius turns off his flashlight. Then he points at Kennedy’s and Aiden’s phones, shining into the darkness.
Kennedy nods. “So when the power goes off, even if people think it’s part of the show, someone will turn on their phone light to be a jerk.”
“Yep. So the lights go out. The tour guide yelps. And within seconds, there are multiple cell phone lights shining. That’s when they see Lisa.”
He turns on the flashlight and aims it toward the auditorium. The beam lands on a row of seats near the back. “She appears there. A light-haired girl in a plaid dress, like the one Lisa was reported to be wearing. She’s walking along the row. Then there’s a bright light and a loud bang, similar to a police flash-bang. When it clears, that seat”—He points at one with a black mark—”is on fire.”
“And Lisa is gone,” I say.
Kennedy’s already walking down the aisle, Aiden on her heels. They head along the row. Kennedy pauses at the charred seat and then leans over and inhales. She waves for Aiden to do the same and he murmurs something we don’t catch. Kennedy nods.
Kennedy turns to Marius. “Someone must have taken a picture of her.”
“They tried. Several people got blurry shots of seats, not able to focus in time. Two had their flashes go off, which left an overexposed picture of what was described—girl with light brown hair, wearing plaid dress. Someone without an automatic flash got a dark photograph of the same.”
“How long did she appear?” Aiden asks.
“Maybe five seconds.”
Aiden bends to check the floor as Kennedy taps something in on her phone.
“Okay, I have a photo,” she calls after a second. “I found one on Instagram. It’s been Photoshopped to make it as clear as possible. The girl’s face is turned away. Light brown hair, worn long and straight. Plaid dress. But I also have a photo I saved earlier today from the old news articles on Lisa. It’s not the same dress. Yes, I doubt any of us thought ‘ghost’ was the answer, but in case there’s any doubt, here’s the proof. Similar cut and color for the dress, but not identical.”
Aiden straightens. “I presume the police removed anything they found here, but I suspect there’s evidence that the device was indeed some form of flash-bang. There’s the smell of fuel on the chair. Some sort of accelerant. The person playing Lisa sets off the device and causes the fire, and then . . .”
He looks around.
Kennedy says, “She could have made a run for it, if the device was blinding enough. Out the exit. Or hid in another row and escaped during the confusion afterward.”
“Two actors, then,” I say. “One cuts off the lights at the source and the other plays the part of Lisa Lake.”
“But to what purpose?” Aiden says as he and Kennedy rejoin us.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” Kennedy says. “The flash-bang and the accelerant suggest this wasn’t a last-minute prank. Too elaborate. Yet, at the same time, not elaborate enough. The police will easily find the traces of accelerant, and armchair detectives will easily see the differences between the dresses.”
“If the goal,” I say, “was to start a new legend, then they did a haphazard job. Which suggests that is not the intention.”
“So what is it?” Kennedy says. “I’d blame the tour guide, adding in theatrics, but she was obviously startled and, if anything, this could mean her next two tours are canceled.”
“Unless that is the goal,” Marius says. We all look at him. “Someone may have wanted the tours canceled. May also have wanted to stop anyone from trying to solve this mystery.”
“Wouldn’t this increase interest?” Kennedy says.
“Not when it’s proven fake. Anniversary weekend tours could be canceled. The site of the original crime is already sealed off. Tales of a vengeful ghost would work in Unstable, but by next week, everyone will know it’s a hoax. Interest will die out, and people will move on.”
“Leaving the disappearance of Lisa Lake unsolved.”
“Exactly.”