Final Call (10 page)

Chapter Eighteen

“Dan Stevens,” the voice on the other
end of the line announced. “Who loves
ya
baby?”

“Hi Dan,” Mary said. “It’s Mary
O’Reilly.”

There was a pause on the other end of
the line.

“Yeah, Mary O’Reilly, I remember, the private
investigator with something extra,” he said slowly, although he knew exactly
who Mary was. “You wouldn’t let me write an article about you.”

“Yes, that’s right,” she acknowledged,
with a chuckle. “I was just a little concerned it might bring me some unwanted
attention.”

The return laughter was warm and
engaging. “I think your exact quote was, ‘It would bring the crazies out of the
woodwork.”

“Something
like
that,” she giggled.

“But it would have made a hell of a
story,” he replied. “So, what can I do for you, Mary?”

Mary glanced out the window before
answering. The snow had stopped falling that morning and now, at two o’clock in
the afternoon, it was bright and sunny and most of the roads had been plowed.

“I was wondering if you were planning
on being in Freeport today?” she asked, knowing Dan’s paper and his offices
were located in the small town of Lena, about fifteen miles away.

“Yeah, I had a couple people I needed
to meet,” he replied. “Why?”

“Well, I’d like you to meet me at
Winneshiek Theater,” she answered. “It’s regarding a case I’m working on.”

“Sure, I can be there at three-thirty,
that work for you?”

“Perfect. See you then.”

“He’s a lying bastard.”

Faye’s voice came from right over
Mary’s shoulder and she jumped. “Faye, it’s not polite to listen to private
phone conversations,” Mary said, breathing deeply to help slow her heart.

“I’m a ghost, I don’t give a damn about
polite,” she sneered, rolling her eyes. “As a matter of fact, when I was alive
I didn’t give a damn about polite.”

“Well, there’s a surprise.”

Faye walked around and faced Mary. Her
head was still hung in the angle caused by her death. It made Mary want to cock
her head too, to look into Faye’s eyes, but she resisted the temptation.

“You don’t like me very much,” Faye
accused.

Shrugging, Mary leaned back in her
chair. “I don’t have to like
you,
I just have to help
you.”

“Why in the world don’t you like me?
I’m rich, I’m popular, I’m intelligent, I’m well-dressed and I know people who
can help you move up in the world.”

“You’re a bully,” Mary said simply. “I
just don’t like bullies.”

“I’m not a bully,” Faye protested.

Mary stood and walked up to Faye. “Sure
you are. You use all of those things you just mentioned
–
money,
intelligence, and power
–
to intimidate the people around you,” she said. “You were blessed with so
many gifts and instead of using them to help
people,
you use them to help yourself.”

“Well, I didn’t do that all the time,”
she blustered. “There are some people who love me.”

“Name one.”

Faye stopped and thought for a moment.
Several times she started to speak and thought better of it, and closed her
mouth. “This is like a bad rendition of
A
Christmas Carol
, isn’t it?” she finally said.

Mary nodded sadly.
“Except,
in this version, the redemption is not going to come in this life.”

Faye sat down limply on the couch.
“Well, damn, this is not what I planned for my life.”

She looked over at Mary. “I really did
want people to like me,” she confessed. “But it was much easier to have them
fear me. I really made a mess of things.”

Sighing, Mary sat down next to Faye.
“Well, it’s not cast in stone yet. You still have some time here on the earth
to alter some things you did while you were alive.”

“Rewrite my last scene?”

“Something
like
that.”

Faye stood and floated across the room,
her arms outstretched. “I’ll do it! I’ll change my life! I’ll make amends! I’ll
change the world! People will love me.”

“Faye, you don’t have a lot of time.
Perhaps you ought to just start with trying to undo some of the damage you’ve
caused.”

Faye stopped floating and looked over
at Mary, glaring. “You really know how to take the joy out of a final scene,”
she said and quickly disappeared.

Shaking her head, Mary went back to her
computer. She had a list of things she still needed to do. Tapping her fingers
against the table, she realized she really ought to let Bradley know that she
was going to be meeting with a suspect, even though she doubted Dan had
anything to do with the murder.

Call her a coward, but she really didn’t
want to talk to him. As a matter of fact, she decided, if she never spoke with
him again she felt her life would be much better. Weighing her options, she
went over to her computer and accessed her e-mail. She typed Dorothy a brief
note.

Dorothy
– I’m meeting with Dan Stevens at Winneshiek this afternoon for a follow-up on
the Faye
McMullen case.
Just FYI.
Mary O’Reilly.

There,
she nodded at the e-mail before
she pressed “Send,”
now no one can say I
didn’t tell anyone what I was doing.

An hour later, the tow truck still hadn’t delivered the
Roadster yet, and, she decided, she really didn’t want to take it out in the
snow again. She dressed in layers and prepared for the two mile trek to
Winneshiek. She stuffed a notebook into her oversized purse, slipped on woolen
mittens and left her house.

She hadn’t gotten further than two steps off her porch when
she heard the cry of warning. “Duck, Miss O’Reilly!”

She dropped back, the snowball missing her head by inches,
and turned in the direction of the cautionary voice.

“Gosh, I’m sorry, Miss O’Reilly,” Andy said, his cheeks even
brighter red than usual. “I was aiming for my brother, promise.”

Mary smiled. “Well, from where I was standing, it looked
like a great snowball,” she said. “Thanks for the warning.”

“No problem, cause it would have been my fault,” he said.
“And my mom would have been really mad. I’m not supposed to cream our
neighbors.”

Mary couldn’t help it; she grinned. “Well, that’s always a
good rule to live by.”

He considered her reply and nodded. “Yeah, you’re probably
right,” he said earnestly,
then
his eyes lit up. “Hey,
you want to go sledding with us?
Krape
Park has the
best sledding hill.”

“When are you going?” she asked.

“In a few minutes, cause we have to be back ‘
fore
dinner.”

Mary sighed. “I have to work, so I can’t go.”

She was genuinely disappointed.
“How about
tomorrow?”

He shook his head. “
Naw
, tomorrow
we can’t, ‘
cause
it’s gonna be a school day. Mom
says.”

“Well, I will never disagree with your mom about weather.”

“Yeah,” Andy said, seriously considering her words. “Dad
says she’s a psycho about the weather.”

Mary’s smile nearly cracked her frozen cheeks. “Perhaps you
meant psychic?”

Andy nodded, “Yeah, that’s what I meant.
Psychic.”

“Well, thanks for the invitation,” she said. “Have fun.”

“I’ll ask you another time, okay?”

“I will look forward to it.”

Mary continued down the street, in a much better mood than
before.

Chapter Nineteen

Winneshiek Theater was not very impressive from the outside.
The boxy architecture and soft grey siding did not advertise the true beauty of
the small auditorium and its history in Freeport. Before arriving, Mary had
made a call to Deb Deutsch, Ashley’s mom, who volunteered as the building
manager. Deb not only provided her with the security code for the door, but
also shared the secrets to staying warm in the drafty old building.

Mary fixed the door, so the lock wouldn’t catch and Dan
could get it without the code. Then she climbed the stairs to the stage level
and immediately turned up the thermostat. The furnace sprang to life. The late
winter afternoon only cast shadows through the few windows available, so Mary
went to the wall of lights and switched on enough to illuminate the backstage
area as well as the auditorium.

She slipped through the plain wooden door that separated
backstage from the audience, reality from fantasy, and picked a seat in the
second row. Making herself comfortable, she enjoyed the relative quiet while
she waited for Dan. The snow surrounding the building muffled the noises from
the occasional traffic outside, and Mary enjoyed casually listening to the sounds
and footsteps coming from upstairs in the Green Room. She had often heard
theaters were places that drew ghosts because of the creative energies the
actors produced, but it was only in the last few years she had found it to be
true. She had met ghosts in all of the Freeport theaters, from the high school
to the Masonic Temple, and all were fairly harmless spirits who loved dropping
in for a good show.

She started when she heard the door open and laughed at
herself.
Yeah, humans scare you.

“Hey, Mary, are you in here?” Dan’s voice called out from
backstage.

“I’m in the theater,” she called back, not bothering to move
from her vantage point. She had discovered you learn a lot about a possible
suspect by the way they reenter a crime scene.

           
Dan
pushed through the door, a cell phone pressed against his ear and, after a
quick glance around to find her, nodded at Mary. He was a large man, looking
more like a professional football player than someone who made their living
sitting behind a desk and tapping on a keyboard. And even though some of the
muscle had grown a little soft, he was still an intimidating figure.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he said. “But if you want the ad to
run in next week’s paper, I need you to be paid up by the end of the week.”

           
Mary
really admired Dan. He was a newspaper man, in the best sense of the title. He
understood the importance of the fourth estate, telling the story and letting
the reader decide without letting opinion enter in. Dan was the editor,
publisher, salesman and reporter for a very successful paper that was
distributed throughout the small towns surrounding Freeport. He was up on all
the county news, village news and school board news. If you wanted information,
call Dan Stevens.

           
Of
course, even though he didn’t let it show in his news articles, Dan had a
definite opinion and let it run rampant in his editorial column. With a quick
wit and small town perspective, Dan’s
Points
to Ponder
had not only won national recognition, it was the must read at
most of the small diners throughout the region.

           
But
the reason Dan was walking down the theater stairs to meet Mary had little to
do with any of those traits. After college, Dan had decided to follow his heart
and try for a career on Broadway. Mary tried to visualize the big man in
A Chorus Line
and shook her head, “Nope,
can’t do it,” she said aloud.

           
She
peeked up to be sure Dan hadn’t heard her. He was still on the phone. He really
did look at home up on that stage. But, for whatever reason, Dan decided
treading the floorboards wasn’t for him and turned to journalism. He never
forgot his love for theater. Dan’s paper was the only paper in the area that
reviewed local performances and paid as much attention to the high school
dramatics and speech teams as most papers paid to high school sports. He was a
hero to many aspiring teenaged thespians.

           
Of
course, not everyone loved a critic.

“So, Mary O’Reilly, what can I do you for?” he asked,
shoving his cell phone in his pocket and walking down the stairs to the
theater.

“I wanted to talk to you about Faye McMullen,” she replied.

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, please,” he responded. “She talks
enough about herself that no one needs to say a word.”

“She’s dead.”

Dan sat down. “Well, damn, I hadn’t heard,” he said. “She’d
died so many times on stage, I guess it was inevitable. How’d it happen?”

“She was murdered.”

“No joke?”

Mary shook her head. “No, she was found hanging from the
curtains.”

Dan wiped his hand over his face. “Oh, wow,” he said. “I’ve
been out of town; the storm kept me away a day longer than I wanted to be gone.
I haven’t caught up yet…”

“Can you prove that you’ve been out of town?”

His eyes widened. “I’m a suspect?” his voice raised. “I’m a
suspect. Who the hell would consider me a suspect?”

Mary shrugged.

“Wait, wait,” he said. “I know how you work. Faye? Faye! She
said I killed her?”

Mary shook her head. “No, she said you hated her.”

Dan stood up and started pacing in front of the stage. “I
hated every part she ever played. I hated all the dialogue that came out of her
mouth. I hated the way she tried to hog the spotlight from the other cast
members,” he explained. “But did I hate her personally? Hell, I didn’t even
know the woman.”

“So, do you have any idea who would hate her enough to want
to see her dead?”

Pausing, he turned back to her. “You don’t think I killed
her, do you?” he said, certainty in his voice.

Mary shook her head and smiled. “No, it was too clichéd,”
she said. “You would have been much more original.”

He ran his hand through his hair. “Well, that’s a relief.
I’ve been accused of a lot of things, but never murder.”

“You know the theater community,” Mary said. “If you think
of anything, anything at all,
give
me a call. Okay?”

She got out of her chair and started toward the stairs.

“Hey, Mary,” Dan’s voice stopped her.

“Yes?”

“Okay, I don’t want to sound melodramatic,” he said. “But
make sure you watch yourself, okay?”

“Why should I worry?” she asked.

“You’ve done enough stuff around town that most people
realize you’re the real thing,” he said. “If people don’t already know, they’re
going to find out you’re helping the police with this case. Whoever did this
might get a little nervous and want to cover all their bases.”

Mary felt a cold chill run up her back. “Thanks Dan, I’ll
keep that in mind.”