Smoke and Mirrors (14 page)

“Why are they eating?”

“What?”

“They're eating soup in cups. Why are they eating and not leaving? I want my room back. This is
our
space.” Stephen watched his sister pacing, flickering even to his sight as she moved through people and equipment and he added, more to himself than to her, “You'll be fine once they're gone. You'll see.”

“So, I just spoke to your father and he says he can't pick you up for a while, so you can stay and finish the scene if that's what you want to do. Or Tony can drive you back to the studio.”

Ashley, her gaze locked on Mason, nodded.

“You want to stay?”

Brianna spread her arms and whirled up and down the hall, crashing into people and equipment. “I like being a ghost.”

The red splatters were very bright against the hard gloss of the bathroom walls. Cassie touched one finger to the wall and then to the slightly darker splatter on the shoulder of one of the little girls. Faces, clothes, hair, both children were dripping with red. One of them kept licking it off her hand.

Red.

Some kind of syrup.

Red as . . .

She looked down at the crimson moisture on her fingertip. “Stephen, I remember. It's about the blood . . .”

B
RENDA HAD DONE
more than remove the dust from Lee's tux; when Tony found them tucked behind an open door, she seemed to be taking a good shot at removing his fillings with her tongue. There was enough visible movement happening in his cheeks, he looked like he had a pair of gerbils making out in his mouth.

Back in the butler's pantry, Tony jammed dead batteries into the chargers with more force than was strictly necessary. Hey, Lee could play tonsil hockey with whoever he wanted. He was an adult, Brenda was an adult; they had history and so what if Lee had told him earlier that history had been a mistake—nothing like an accidental cuddle with another man to make a straight boy run off and prove his heterosexuality.

He just wished Lee hadn't been so stereotypical.

Oh, no! Gay cooties! Must wash them away with girl spit!

Fuck it.

“Man, what's that battery ever done to you?” Ink-stained fingers with black-and-magenta-tipped nails yanked the battery from his hand and slid it effortlessly into the space. “Aren't men supposed to be better at the whole insert tab A into slot B thing?” Amy demanded as Tony ignored her and moved on to the second charger. “I mean, it's a skill set that comes with the equipment, right? Unless you're having trouble with this because you're having man trouble and we're talking a classic case of displacement.”

He glared at her over the final battery. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Oh, my God, I'm right! ” When he took a step toward her, she held up both hands and grinned. “Okay, okay, it's not like my inbox isn't already full of stories of erectile dysfunction.”

Tony sighed, determined not to get involved in an argument he couldn't win. “I got you a spam filter.”

“What'd be the fun in that? Anyway, I'm here with tomorrow's sides.”

“Where's Wanda?”

“Who?”

“Office PA.”

“I know who, I was being sarcastic. Bitch sold a movie-of-the-week script to an American network and quit this afternoon. She's moving to LA to become a rich-and-famous writer.” Amy's snort carried the wisdom of six years in Canadian television. “Yeah, like that ever happens.” She held up her hands again, this time so that Tony could note the black streaks across both palms. “Left me to deal with a printer jam in the photocopier and this crap doesn't wash off. I'd have asked the boss if he minded dropping the sides off when he picked up the girls,” she added lowering her hands and looking around, “but I wanted to see the inside of the house. It doesn't look haunted.”

Ethereal music drifted in from the front hall. “Sounds haunted.”

“That's Zev. He's distorting Tchaikovsky.”

“Kinky. So, how long have I got to look around?”

Tony glanced at his watch. “Not long. It's 8:40 now, and when I came downstairs at 8:30, they were almost finished. You go take a quick look; I'd better call CB and find out if he wants me to drive the girls back to the studio.”

“Suck-up.”

“Adult of record.”

“Responsible suck-up.”

Cell phone reception in the house still stank and the signal he'd managed to pick up earlier in the breezeway had disappeared. Given the crap radio reception, he didn't think he'd better move too far away from the building in case Adam needed him.
Maybe the front porch
. It was raining again, so he came back into the kitchen, closed the door behind him, and . . .

Was that three quarters of someone's head?

No.

A flash of bloodstained shirt sleeve?

He was imagining things.

He grabbed a handful of marshmallow strawberries out of the bowl on the kitchen table as he passed. Karen had started to move most of the food back out to the craft services truck, but the marshmallows remained. He wasn't having any problems a hit of sugar couldn't cure.

“Why can't he see us? He saw us before.”

“There's more happening now; we can't get enough energy to break through his denial.”

“What denial?” Stephen snorted, waving his hand back and forth to no effect. “He already saw us twice, once in the drawing room and once in the bathroom.”

“He saw us in mirrors!”

“Okay, but then he just saw us.”

“After the mirrors.” Cassie closed her fingers around their quarry's arm, but he merely shivered and continued walking. “We need a mirror!”

“There's one on the wall by the kitchen door.”

“Stephen! He's walking away from the kitchen door!”

“Hey, no need to get frosted; I'm just trying to help.”

“The glass doors in the butler's pantry; you can see yourself in them!” She sped past their quarry and grabbed the pull on the last cabinet by the dining room door. “Help me get this open! It won't do us any good if he doesn't actually look.”

“It's not going to make any difference to us.”

“Fine. It won't do
him
any good. Now get over here!”

The glass door on one of the upper cabinets flew open with enough force that the glass rattled as it slammed back on its hinges. Tony jumped, recovered, and instinctively reached out to close it. His brain came on-line about half a second behind his hand, but by then it was too late. He could see himself reflected in the glass and, standing behind him, he could see the dead teenagers as clearly as he had in the drawing room. Okay,
not
his imagination. It was suddenly very, very cold in the butler's pantry.

He tossed the last marshmallow strawberry into his mouth, chewed slowly, and sighed. “What?”

The girl—What had Lee called her? Cassie?—made a spinning motion with one finger.

“You want me to turn around?” They were standing behind him. If he turned around . . .

Her motion became a little more frantic.

If he turned around, he'd be able to see it coming. Whatever it was. Which wasn't particularly comforting.

What the hell.

And with any luck,
he thought as he turned,
not literally hell.
After all, Lee had spoken to them earlier and nothing metaphysical had happened to him.

They were standing right where their reflections had suggested they would be. Large as life and twice as dead. Or dead twice anyway.

“So?” His voice sounded remarkably steady; given that his feelings about his current situation ranged between terror and barely suppressed annoyance, he was impressed. “Why'd I need to turn around?”

“Reflections have no voice.”

“As a general rule—just FYI—neither do dead people.”

Cassie rolled her eye, looking remarkably like Amy considering she was missing a quarter of her face. “Look, I don't make the rules.”

“Hey!” He raised a placating hand. “I hear you. You wouldn't believe . . .” A moment's pause. “Actually,
you
might.”

“It doesn't matter. You've got to get out of here!”

“What?”

“You've got to get everyone out of the house by sunset!”

Sunset? It was 8:47. Sunset was at 8:53. All those years with Henry had made sunset a hard habit to break. Six minutes.
Oh, crap . . .

The ghosts kept up as he sprinted through the dining room, fumbling for his radio.

“You believe us?” the boy demanded. “Just like that?”

“I've had some experience with sunsets and things going bump in the dark.” And speaking of bump, his battery was dead.
And one more time, oh, crap . . .

“I'd worry more about splat than bump.”

“You're not helping, Stephen!”

“Can anyone else see you?” he asked as he skidded into the foyer.

Zev looked up from his mini disk recorder and frowned. “Pretty much everyone, why?”

Cassie shook her head. “No, just you.”

“Great.” And to Zev: “We've got to get out of here.”

“Well,
I'm
almost done, but you can't just bail on the job.”

“Hey, job's almost done.” He grabbed the music director's arm and gave him a little shove toward the door. “Why don't I meet you outside?”

“Why don't you switch to decaf?” Zev suggested, twisting free. “It's raining, I'll wait here.”

“That ballroom is incredible,” Amy announced emerging from the hall that led past the library and toward the back of the house. “It's bigger than my whole Goddamned apartment!”