The Night Is Watching (18 page)

This room was different. The light from the main room didn’t seem to reach far enough and she couldn’t find another switch. The one bulb down here illuminated the main room and stretched as far as the second room. By the third room...

The third room was filled with shadows. As she walked toward it, she stopped for a minute.

It was creepy, mostly shadowed—and crowded with mannequins. Some of them were poor, barely more than two-dimensional, and held theatrical billboards. Some of them were excellently crafted and wearing costumes or cloaks from the many decades the theater had been in existence. Some were old movie props, collected fifty-plus years ago.

Some were headless.

And some had heads with faces that offered very real expressions of anger, fear, hope, happiness—and evil. Some were lined up. Some were falling over on one another.

“Ah, Sage, where are you?” she asked.

At first, there was nothing. Her little pencil flashlight was back in her room; she hadn’t thought to stuff that in a pocket with her cell phone.

She wondered if it was better to see—or not see—the mannequins. Coming close to one, she saw that it was a mannequin of a Victorian woman, carved from wood.

The eyes were huge, made of blue glass. The mouth was a circle, as if the woman had witnessed the greatest terror on earth.

A placard hung from the wrist. Jane stooped to read it. Come One, Come All. Come Scream! The Gilded Lily Brings You
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde!

Turning from the mannequin, Jane bumped right into a mannequin of Mr. Hyde.

She almost screamed but managed to swallow down the sound.

Federal agents don’t scream at the sight of mannequins!
she chastised herself.

Something swung toward her—an arm. A gasp escaped her and then she laughed softly. Backing away from Mr. Hyde, she’d pushed a replica of King Lear.

“Sage!” she whispered.

She was stunned when, in response, she heard a groan.

So far, Sage McCormick’s voice had been silent; it was unlikely that the ghost had suddenly decided to groan.

“Jennie! Jennie, is that you? Are you down here? Are you hurt?”

She began to squeeze her way through the mannequins. In the eerie light, some seemed real, as if they could come to life. Among them were chorus girls and cancan dancers, fan dancers, handsome men in tuxes. And wolf men and grisly zombies and vampires....

She heard the groan again.

That wasn’t the ghost, she was sure of it—and definitely not the mannequins.

A deranged-looking figure in a straitjacket held a cleaver high. The cleaver was plastic, although the mannequin was creepy. Out on the street it had probably drawn many to the theater; by day it would be a come-on to those who wanted to be a little scared by their entertainment.

Ignore the mannequins. They aren’t real.

“Jennie?” she called again. The mannequins might not be real, but they made it very hard to find someone who was.

“Go ahead. Try to scare me. I am ignoring you,” Jane said aloud. She laughed at herself and admitted that the mannequins scared the hell out of her. She determinedly wound her way around some shrieking harpy and a man with a fly’s head.

Again, it seemed that one of them, a man in a turn-of-the-century tux, swung around to touch her and knock her in the arm. She almost cried out in surprise, but realized she’d pushed another mannequin into it and the thing had moved.

She heard the groan again.

Another mannequin with a wide-open circular mouth was in front of her, holding up a book. She scooted by it and at last found the flesh-and-blood woman she sought.

Jennie was crumpled on the floor, lying on her back. Her eyes were closed and a trickle of blood had dried on her forehead.

“Oh, Jennie,” Jane cried, digging in the pocket of her skirt for her cell phone as she knelt down by the woman, clasping her wrist to test the strength of her pulse.

It was weak.

“Jennie, stay with me. I’m getting help right away,” she said.

Even as she spoke, she felt as if there was a tap on her shoulder. She looked up. Sage McCormick was with her again, in front of her, between Jennie’s crumpled body and a row of frontier schoolboys.

She had a look of terror on her face and she waved an arm frantically.

It was a warning to turn around.

Jane started to do so. She felt a whoosh of air and briefly saw the twisted face of a madman wearing a pork pie hat, lips pulled back over teeth that were bared and yellow.

It seemed to be coming at her.

She felt the slam of something hard and heavy against her head.

She crashed down on Jennie’s prone body.

* * *

Jane didn’t answer her cell phone when Sloan called. That worried him instantly; someone like Jane would
always
have her phone handy, ready for any emergency. He called Chet, who was working Main Street, and asked him to find her.

“I don’t see her right now,” Chet said, “but, boy, did I see her earlier! She got into the action on the street. She was great! She was funny, and she switched the whole scene. They didn’t have the shoot-out. She turned it into a totally different scene, with the girls from the show and the guys hamming it up. She’s a natural!”

“Chet, I’m glad to hear that, but I need to speak with her
now.
”

“Sure. I’ll look for her. Want me to call you back?”

“No, I want you to stay on the line until you find her.”

Sloan sat on a chunk of rock that had fallen to the floor when they’d caved in the shaft entrance. He glanced over at the body beneath the tarp, his mind racing. He’d already called Liam Newsome; he and his crime team and the medical examiner were on their way. Sloan rued the fact that there were no real roads back here and nothing was easy once you were this far into the desert.

“What’s happening now?” Johnny asked him as time ticked by.

“Chet asked Henri Coque where Jane went. Henri said she’s looking for Jennie and he hasn’t seen either of them since.”

Sloan turned his attention back to Chet. “Where’s she looking?”

“In the theater.”

“Well, get in there and find her!” Sloan said.

He waited; Chet eventually came back on the line. “I’ve been to her room, I’ve been in the theater, behind the stage, back of the bar, in the kitchen. She’s not here, Sloan.”

Sloan cursed and stood. “I’m on my way in,” he said. “Get everyone looking for her, Chet. I mean
everyone.
Tear the town apart.”

“We’re needed here,” Chet argued. “We’ve got a town full of people and some of them are getting drunk and a little rowdy—”

“Find her,” he broke in. “Everyone on it. We’ve just come across another victim.”

“Who—”

“Just find her, Chet. Now,” Sloan ordered.

He hung up, feeling so frantic he was ready to crash through the rock walls.

“I will deal with Newsome,” Johnny said. “I will tell him that the boulder was loose, and that you suspected there might be mischief going on in here, like you said when you called him.”

“Thanks.” Sloan had already pocketed his bug.

He cursed himself. He
had
known there was illicit activity in the mine, and he’d wanted to catch someone doing something.

He hadn’t expected this.

He paused, glancing down at the body they’d discovered. It was that of Caleb Hough, the big-shot, bigmouthed rancher who thought his son should get away with everything. Sloan hadn’t liked the man. But he wasn’t happy to see him come to this.

He lay in a pool of blood. He hadn’t been shot execution-style. It appeared that he’d taken a knife wound to the gut, and when he’d doubled over, stunned by the attack, a second person had gotten him from behind, slashing his throat with such force that he’d almost been decapitated.

“Go,” Johnny told him.

Sloan nodded, backing out the way he’d come in. He whistled and Roo trotted over; he told Kanga that she had to wait for Johnny. People said horses didn’t really understand commands, that they responded to a tone of voice, but Sloan thought that his animals did understand him. Kanga whinnied and stayed as he had commanded. She went back to eating grass and, for a moment, Sloan wished he was a horse.

The trail back seemed long, even though he kept up a mental argument with himself—would it be faster to ride to Main Street or get his patrol car?

He opted for the car.

When he reached the theater, he found that whether Chet agreed with his command or not, he’d carried it out. The cast, crew, waiters, waitresses and everyone involved with the theater seemed to be combing it inch by inch. He’d met up with one of the county men outside who’d assured him that his people were searching the campsites, settler tents, saloon and stores.

Sloan went back to Jane’s room, trying to discern if she’d been there recently and if she’d left anything that might give him a clue as to her whereabouts.

Her room was empty. Nothing seemed to indicate that she’d been there since her stint as Sage, standing by the window.

He left the room and went down the stairs, almost crashing into Henri. “You checked all the dressing rooms, the stage—”

“Everywhere,” Henri swore. “As you know, Jane volunteered to come in and search for Jennie, since we haven’t seen her all day. The last time I saw Jane, she was walking into the theater. But she could’ve come back out. We could’ve been distracted. There’s a lot going on.”

“The basement—you looked in the basement?”

“Of course.” Henri nodded. “I’ve been down there. So have Cy and Brian.”

“I’ll try again, anyway. That place is a mass of crates and boxes and clothing. Anyone who was hurt down there might not be easily seen,” Sloan said.

“I went down there,” Henri repeated. “But...I’ll go down again with you.”

“I’ll go. Keep looking around up here,” Sloan told him.

He headed through the door and down to the basement. As Henri had said, when he reached the landing and the main room, he didn’t see a thing. He shoved aside boxes and crates, costumes, even the wig stands. Frustrated, he moved into the first room, then the second, and finally he went into the third. Mannequins stood and stared at him from the shadows. They looked like an army of the ridiculous, assembled to protect the interior of the room.

He almost jumped when his cell phone rang. He was surprised that he had service in the basement. The shadows were so deep that he couldn’t read caller ID. He answered quickly. “Sheriff Trent.”

“Sloan,” a voice said. For a moment it sounded as if his name was being spoken by the killer in a slasher movie, the tone was so distorted.

“Yes, it’s Sloan Trent. Who the hell is this?”

“Jane. It’s Jane.”

There seemed to be an echo, and he realized it was because he was hearing her speak in the room at the same time as he heard her speak over the phone.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Probably about fifteen feet in front of you, since I heard your phone ring,” she said “I’m getting up.”

He started, jumping back, as theatrically clad mannequins began to topple over and fall against one another.

“Jane!”

He slid the phone in his pocket and began to crawl over the mannequins. One seemed to rise before him; seconds later, he saw that it was Jane.

“What the hell?” he demanded as he reached her.

In the dim light, she might truly have been part of the theater’s history. Her hair was coming loose from the chignon she’d been wearing and she seemed very pale in her blue period dress. She wavered as she stood, and he pushed past the creature in the pork pie hat to steady her.

She brought her hand to her head. “Something...someone knocked me out,” she told him. “I’m all right, but Jennie...” She stepped back, and he saw Jennie lying on the floor, and his heart leaped to his throat.

“She’s alive, unconscious,” Jane said. “I don’t think anything’s broken. Can you get her out of here? I don’t have the strength right now.”

“It’s not ideal to move an injured person but I’ll definitely get Jennie out. Help can’t even reach her in here.” He paused long enough to hit speed dial and tell Chet to call for paramedics immediately.

He ducked down and lifted the slender woman in his arms.

“You’re sure you can manage?” he asked Jane gruffly. He was frightened, and his fear was making him angry, but he wanted to get Jennie to a hospital and have Jane checked out before he let emotion rule his actions.

“Yes,” she told him. “And I don’t believe Jennie has any broken bones. Someone knocked her on the head, too. Her pulse is decent.”

“Go up the stairs ahead of me.”

He heard activity at the door to the basement.

“I can hear them! He’s found her!” Henri Coque shouted to someone at the top of the stairs.

Sloan was heedless of what he knocked over as he carefully made his way back to the main room and toward the stairs, following Jane. Her first steps were clumsy, but she recovered her balance, and Henri was there to help her up the stairs. When Sloan got to the landing, he saw a group awaiting them, all wide-eyed and worried. He noticed Henri first, and then Valerie, Alice, Cy and two of the night restaurant staff.

“Back off, please,” Sloan said. “Let’s make sure she has air!”

“Oh, Jennie!” Valerie Mystro cried in dismay.

They moved back, a stricken expression on every face.

“What happened?” Henri asked, sounding lost.

Yes, what the hell had happened?
Sloan wondered. As he walked slowly through the bar to the center of the restaurant, Liz, the waitress, rushed ahead, clearing one of the longer dinner tables. Sloan came forward to lay Jennie down. As he did, the swinging doors to the Gilded Lily swung open, and Chet hurried through, leading two paramedics in uniform and bearing black medical bags. They immediately began to work over the prone Jennie, while asking questions regarding her injury.

Sloan listened while Jane replied that no one had known where Jennie was, so she’d gone down to the basement and heard her groaning and finally found her, only to be knocked on the head herself.