Reign (29 page)

“. . . think they like it?" Ann was saying.

"I'm sorry?"

"Ted and Amy Lander, do you think they like the theatre?" The Landers, a husband and wife film production team and one of the biggest investors in
Craddock
, had missed the party in October. This week, however, they had flown to New York from the coast on business, and had made a day trip down to Kirkland to visit Dennis and see the theatre about which they had heard so much.

"I'm sure they do," Robin said, opening the door to the projection booth. "What's not to like? Besides, they love Dennis." She took a beat, hoping that the next line was ominous, but not so obvious that Ann would run back downstairs. "Everyone loves Dennis."

Ann made no response, and Robin led her to the end of the booth, opened another door, and went up a spiral staircase that led into the aerie above the ceiling. "Watch your head," she said.
And your ass
.

They came out onto a small platform, and Robin felt again for the pin, needing to know that it was there, like some magic talisman, a spell that would protect her from harm:

She dropped her pin, officer, it must have come undone, and she stepped off to get it, just stepped off before I could tell her, before I could warn her.

And the pin would be there, wouldn't it? There right beside her body. Because Robin was going to drop it just as she pushed her. She would wipe it free of her fingerprints against the lining of her pocket, hold it by the edges, take it out, push the bitch, drop the pin, and be happy again.

"Can you see all right?" Robin asked. She didn't want her to slip, not until it was time.

"Yes, it's fine."

"Hold on to the girders if you lose your balance. Even if you'd fall off, no harm done. The ceiling's solid." Robin smiled in the semi-darkness at her lie. She didn't want to scare her now. She wanted her to feel safe, so safe that she would be off her guard, so safe that she would be very much surprised when Robin pushed her. "See the bulbs? They're under those little metal plates."

"God," Ann said, "there must be hundreds of them."

"Three hundred and fifty. They're divided between ten and twenty-five watts, so all the stars aren't the same brightness. The stereopticon machine that makes the clouds is right up here. We're almost over the orchestra pit now."

This is where it would happen, because this is where she would fall the farthest. When Ann leaned over for a closer look, that was the time.

"The clouds are on a twenty-inch disc," Robin went on, trying to banish her nervousness by immersing herself in details. "The machine has a thousand-watt bulb."

"It won't go on while we're up here, will it?" Ann asked with a nervous chuckle.

"Oh no," Robin said. "There's no way. Don't worry. We're as safe as can be." The stereopticon was directly ahead of them now. Robin grasped the pin by its edges, took it from her pocket, rubbed it against her slacks. "There's the machine. Here, get ahead of me so you can see it better."

She moved carefully to the side to let the woman edge by her. Ann moved gingerly, but nothing would protect her when Robin made her move.

Robin tensed. Push, drop the pin. Just one little push to make her fall back. Push, drop the pin.

Closer now, nearly next to her . . .

Push. Drop the
goddam
pin . . .

Now, beside her, and she could smell the perfume, the perfume she had smelled in their bedroom, that
bitch
!

Push!

Now!

And as Robin drew back, she heard the grating sound of rusty metal, and the world exploded into light. Blinded, she twisted away from this new and sudden sun, twisted her body, lost her balance, flailed once with her arms, and fell.

Robin's right foot drove a hole through the plaster and the wire of the ceiling, and she felt her leg shoot down, as though she were being swallowed by some enormous, expanding mouth. She had enough presence of mind to slam her body flat against the surface, which stopped her only long enough for her to feel the plaster crumble beneath her body as she slipped further into the abyss. Her hands scrabbled at the chicken wire, trying desperately to gain a hold while her thighs, her waist slid through, and then, finally, her fingers found a grip that slowed but did not stop her.

The wire bit deeply into the pads of her fingers, and she cried in agony as the ceiling continued to crumble like thin ice. The light still burned above, and silhouetted against its fire she saw a figure reaching down for her, and thought for an instant that she had already fallen and was dead and it was her mother drawing her up into heaven.

But reality returned quickly, and she knew that it was Ann, Ann, who had saved herself from falling, and was now lying on the catwalk, her head and shoulders extended, her arms reaching down to save Robin. And she would take that hand, that help. If she could.

The plaster was crumbling more quickly now, and soon she would fall, fall through the ice and drown in the lake of air. If she let go with one hand, let go and reached up for Ann, she might live. But to let go with the abyss beneath her was more than she could bear. Still, she had to. If she wanted to live, she had to.

A whine of terror squeezed up from her throat, and she tightened the grip of her right hand. Then, with a surge of energy she had thought lost, she threw her left arm toward Ann like a swimmer starting a race.

And just as their fingers touched, she saw Dennis's face looming over Ann's shoulder, a face that glowed with its own light, a face that grinned at her in secret knowledge of what she had intended, and in delighted retribution at the result.

Her hand slipped away from Ann's.

"Reach!" Ann said. "You can do it, you
can
!"

But she could not. The strength was gone, driven away by the look on Dennis's face, and she hung there by one arm, by a grip slowly weakening. It was all she could do to hold on long enough to get the words out

"Dennis . . . you bastard . . .” She took a deep breath and screamed as she fell.

"
You royal bastard!
"

~ * ~

Ted and Amy Lander watched her fall. They had watched everything from the moment Robin's foot had come through the plaster, pouring a fiery light from the hole above. They had seen Robin slide through the ever-widening hole, had seen Ann reaching down for her, had seen Robin make one last effort to reach her would-be rescuer, had seen her fall.

They saw her twist in the air, heard her scream of anger and anguish, saw her land in the first row of seats, heard her spine break and her neck snap as she struck the hard metal backs of the seats. She died before they were by her side.

Ted looked upward to where the light blazed down as though from some attic of hell. He could not see the other person. "Are you all right?" he called.

"Yes," came a weak voice from overhead. "Yes . . .”

"Dennis?" Ted called, then louder, "Dennis!" He turned to Amy, who was crying, her hand clasped over her mouth. "He went to the office, can you find the office?"

Ted asked her. She only shook her head. "Hello? Anyone?" Ted cried, and was immeasurably relieved to see someone he took to be a janitor come down the steps from the stage.

"Sweet Jesus," Abe
Kipp
muttered. "Oh my God . . . Mrs. Hamilton."

"Go to the office," Ted said. "Get Dennis. And an ambulance. Hurry up, man!" Abe nodded, then ran up the aisle toward the lobby.

~ * ~

Dennis knew that something was wrong as soon as he saw Abe
Kipp's
face. It was the same gray, ashen color that it had been when Harry
Ruhl
had died. "Mrs. Hamilton," Abe blurted out. "There's an accident."

Dennis heard the intake of breath from Donna Franklin, saw John Steinberg's knuckles whiten. The office seemed ominously still. "Is she dead?" he asked.

Abe swallowed and nodded. "Yes sir. I think so."

Later, Dennis did not remember walking down the stairs and into the auditorium. He only dimly remembered weeping, lifting Robin's broken body off the seats with Ted Lander's help, laying her gently down on the thickly carpeted aisle, sitting there next to her. As he sat and waited for more people to come, he noticed a piece of jewelry under a chair. He picked it up, saw that it was a pin, and thought that it seemed somehow familiar. He held it and sat by Robin's side until a doctor came and gave him an injection of something. He didn't even feel the needle enter his skin. The sedative made him sleepy, but he would not let himself sleep, and he would not leave Robin's side. He rode to the hospital in the ambulance with her. When they arrived, they gave him another injection, and this time, try as he would to remain awake, his eyes closed and he slept without dreaming.

He awoke in darkness, the feel of an unfamiliar bed and stiff sheets beneath him. Only semi-conscious, he made his way to the line of light that marked the bottom of a door, pushed it open, and pressed his eyes closed against the fluorescent glare of a hospital corridor. He realized that he was dressed only in his underwear, then remembered why he was there — that Robin was dead, and he had most likely been in shock.

Dennis stumbled back into the room and let the door drift shut behind him. As the light left him, he thought of the light that had left his life, thought of Robin. He did not think of her anger, of her jealousy. He remembered only her goodness, her kindness, the help she had been to him, the joy she had brought, and he wept again, but not in shock. He wept from her loss and for her pain.

When he finished, he found the light switch and flipped it on, got dressed, and left the room. A nurse at her station looked at him wide-eyed. When he said, "I'm Dennis Hamilton. I'm all right now. Where is my wife?" her eyes got even wider.

"Just . . . wait here a minute," she said, and picked up a telephone.

Dennis did not wait to learn who she was calling. He walked down the corridor until he found an elevator, rode to the ground floor, and went outside, where he confirmed that he was indeed in the Kirkland Medical Center, a slab of steel and glass that sat on the site of David Kirk's long dried up spring. It was a mile from the heart of Kirkland, and he decided to walk. Along with inconsolable grief, he felt an overwhelming desire for activity, to shake off the effect of the sedative, to lessen his sorrow by moving.

He was exhausted before he had walked two hundred yards. At a phone booth on a corner he dialed Sid's number, and asked him to come and pick him up. Sid was there in ten minutes.

"How did it happen, Sid?" Dennis asked him in a thick voice.

"She fell off the catwalk when the light went on," said Sid, his eyes on the road.

"What was she
doing
up there?"

"Showing Ann the star set-up."

“. . . Ann? She and Ann were up there together?"

Sid nodded. "Ann was still up there when Munro and the police went up to look around. She was lying down, holding on to the catwalk for dear life. They finally talked her into coming down. She's all right now. Terri took her home." He sighed, and his voice grew softer. "Ted and Amy saw the whole thing. Robin slipped through, Ann tried to save her, but . . . the ceiling just fell away beneath her, section of wire came apart, and . . . I'm sorry, Dennis. She was a wonderful girl."

They rode in silence until Sid drove the car down the ramp and into the garage beneath the theatre. When the motor stopped, Dennis said, "How did the light come on?"

"Nobody knows. That's the thing of it. Nobody knows."

~ * ~

Goddammit
, somebody knew
, thought Dan Munro savagely. It was after two o'clock in the morning and still he could not sleep. He prowled around his basement
rec
room like a caged tiger, bound by the limits of his imagination. There had to be an answer somewhere, had to be a pattern. There had been just too damn many "accidents" to be coincidental — first the
Werton
kid, then Harry
Ruhl
carving himself open, and now Hamilton's wife taking a high dive.

He picked up the clipboard on which he had scrawled his notes. At the time that hot light had gone on, everybody had an alibi except for two people — Dennis Hamilton and Ann Deems. Hamilton because he was supposedly on his way to the offices to get some paperwork to show the Landers, and Ann Deems because the only other person she was with was now dead. Besides, she couldn't have turned on the light from the front of the ceiling. The only switch was in the projection booth. Even assuming that there was some collusion between Hamilton and Ann Deems, there seemed to be no way that he could have left the Landers, gotten up to the booth, turned on the light at just the right time, and then scurried back down to the offices to be there at the time Donna Franklin and John Steinberg said he was.

Besides, the Landers had sworn that the Deems woman had tried to save Mrs. Hamilton. "She was leaning over so far she almost fell herself," Ted Lander had said, and his semi-hysterical little wife had backed him up.

But what bothered Munro most was the pin that they removed from Hamilton's hand when they took him to the hospital. Both Steinberg and Donna Franklin had said they saw him pick it up near Robin Hamilton's body. Ann Deems had identified it as hers, but said that she had lost it the day before, and had no idea how it had gotten where Hamilton had found it.