The Ghost in the Third Row

  Some people were saying it as a joke. But a lot of them really meant it.

  I couldn’t really blame them. After everything that had gone on, to have that material destroyed was just too much. Of course, it might not have bothered people quite so much if we weren’t all aware of how secure Gwendolyn’s office was. But we all remembered the night Lydia’s dress got torn up and what Edgar had said about the street crazies who could get into the theater at any time. The whole situation had prompted Gwendolyn to take extra precautions to keep her office safe.

  So in a way, she had set people up to believe it was the ghost when this happened. I guessed we would be losing a lot more cast members before another twenty-four hours went by.

  Ken Abbott accidentally summed up the way people felt when he said, a little too loudly, “Well, it looks like the Woman in White has struck again.” He meant it as a joke, to break the tension. But from the murmur that swept through the rest of the cast, you could tell a lot of people were taking him seriously.

  That was when Gwendolyn played her trump card. “Smarten up, people,” she shouted. “The Woman in White has nothing to do with this.”

  “How do you know?” asked Marilyn.

  “Somehow I just don’t think ghosts use matches from local restaurants,” snapped Gwendolyn, holding up a half-empty matchbook. “Whoever started the fire in my office dropped this while they were there. And I’ll eat my hat if it was a ghost.”

  I was close enough to Gwendolyn that by squinting I could make out the design on the matchbook. It was from the Brass Elephant, the little bar and restaurant two blocks down from the theater.

  I’d made a lot of mistakes that night. But I made the biggest one right then. The funny thing is, I didn’t even know it at the time.

  What did I do?

  I gasped. That was all. Just a tiny little gasp. What’s even stranger is that I wasn’t even gasping about the matches. I was gasping because it had suddenly hit me who was causing all the trouble. Unfortunately, the reason didn’t make any difference. That gasp, coming when it did, convinced the saboteur that I had figured everything out.

  Actually, that was only half true. I knew who it was. But I still didn’t know why.

  But the mistake had been made. How serious was it? Fatal, as things worked out.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Balcony Scene

  At six-thirty the next evening I stood outside the theater waiting for Chris to show up. She thought I was crazy when I told her who was causing all the trouble. But after I had told her my reasons, she agreed I might be right.

  I opened the fat envelope I was holding and looked inside to make sure the papers were all there. It wasn’t necessary, really. Nothing could have happened to them since the last time I checked. But it made me feel better to look. If I was going to take them to Gwendolyn as proof, I didn’t want to take any chances.

  I walked to the edge of the curb and looked in both directions. No sign of Chris.

  I crossed back to the theater and stood reading the posters for the fifth time.

  What could be keeping her? I wondered. I really wanted her to be with me when I turned my envelope of stuff over to Gwendolyn and told her what I had figured out.

  I went back to the curb. No sign of her.

  I couldn’t stand out there any longer. I had to get someplace where I could sit and think. I wanted to make sure I had all my facts straight before I talked to Gwendolyn.

  Pushing open the door to the lobby, I stepped into the theater. It seemed deserted. I knew that wasn’t the case. I knew there were people working backstage, and at least one person in the box office. Even so, it seemed a little strange not to see anyone.

  I decided to go up into the balcony. It was a good place to sit and think. I climbed the stairs and crossed the mezzanine without seeing anyone. Seconds later I was climbing toward the balcony. I remembered the first time I had gone up there. So much had happened since then!

  Still clutching my envelope, I moved to the front of the balcony and sat down. I looked down at the stage, vaguely hoping I might spot the Woman in White. But she didn’t seem to be around that evening.

  Sighing, I pulled the papers out of the envelope and started going over them again.

  They sure made it clear why Andrew Heron and Edward Parker had looked so familiar when I saw their picture in that old newspaper in Pop’s office.

  It was funny. Even though I had heard Paula mention it once, I hadn’t realized how strong the ties between theater people were until I had called the library to ask for Sam, the hunk at the reference desk. Of course I gave him a powerful motive to help me out when I asked, “How would you like to catch the person who stole your microfilms?” But I had the feeling he would have been glad to do it anyway.

  I spent the rest of the day sitting around, waiting for his call. When it finally came at four o’clock and he told me what he had found out, I let out a shout that should have rattled the windows. The last pieces had fallen into place. Finally, everything made sense.

  I called my dad, then took the next bus downtown, where I hurried-to the library to pick up the copies Sam had made and go over the important points with him. Then, as I had worked out with my father the night before, I called Gwendolyn to ask if I could see her for a few minutes before rehearsal started. She was pretty cranky about it. But I think she was so happy I wasn’t calling to quit that she agreed without too much fuss.

  I looked at my watch. Just a few more minutes.

  Where could Chris be?

  Suddenly I heard footsteps behind me.

  “It’s about time!” I said, turning in my seat.

  But it wasn’t Chris. It was Lydia.

  “Hello, Nine,” she said pleasantly. “What are you doing here?”

  “Just waiting for rehearsal,” I said. “I got here a few minutes early. I like to come up here when I have the time. It’s a good place to think.”

  “I’m afraid you think too much,” said Lydia softly.

  Her voice was perfectly sweet. But I knew from the look in her eyes that I was in trouble.

  “I was hoping that when I locked you and your nosy little friend in that room underneath the stage, the two of you would get the message that so much snooping around could be bad for your health. If you had, we might not be having this unpleasant little meeting right now.”

  Yep. There was no doubt about it. I was in big trouble!

  “But then, maybe it was already too late,” said Lydia, sliding into the seat next to me. “Tell me—what was it about that matchbook that tipped you off? Most of the cast hangs out at the Brass Elephant. I can’t figure out why you connected it to me.”

  “I didn’t,” I said truthfully.

  “Don’t lie to me!” said Lydia, her eyes blazing. “I heard you gasp. I saw the look on your face.”

  “But that didn’t have anything to do with the matchbook,” I said. “I just happened to figure things out right then.”

  What a mouth! I might have gotten away with it if I had just stuck with my story that seeing the matchbook hadn’t tipped me off to anything. Which was true, almost: the matchbook made me think of Lydia, because of seeing her and Alan at the Brass Elephant earlier that day. But it certainly wasn’t what solved the mystery for me.

  Of course, with what Lydia had already said by this point, keeping quiet probably wouldn’t have made any difference. I knew, and she knew that I knew, and so on.

  I was getting pretty nervous.

  “Well, what was it?” she asked persistently. “How did you figure out it was me?”

  “Gwendolyn’s office,” I said tersely.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You tried to blame the ghost one time too many. Since I knew it wasn’t the ghost causing the trouble, it had to be someone human. So I asked myself who could have gotten into Gwendolyn’s office besides her or Pop. It seemed that it was impossible—until I remembered the night your dress got ripped up. Or should I say the night y
ou tore up your dress, and blamed it on the ghost?”

  “Say whatever you want,” said Lydia. “Just get on with it.”

  “Well, I remembered that Gwendolyn had asked Ken Abbott to take you to her office so you could lie down. No matter what else I think of you, I have to admit you’re a pretty good actress. You had to be, to pull off all that screaming hysteria and make it seem real. Anyway, you were in there alone for a long time—plenty of time to get a key out of Gwendolyn’s desk drawer.”

  “Very clever,” Lydia said. “But that’s not evidence. Someone else might have been in there that you didn’t know about.”

  “True,” I said. “But it all just fell into place after that. I might not have figured it out if I hadn’t seen the ghost myself—”

  “You didn’t!” said Lydia sharply.

  “Oh, but I did. Several times. So I knew what she was like. That was why I couldn’t buy your story about all the trouble she was causing. Then I realized that all we had to go on was your word. You were the one who was disrupting things, with your claims that the ghost was after you. Who had a better chance to rip up that dress than you yourself? Once I figured out the bit about the key, it all fell into place.

  “Except I still couldn’t figure out why—until I thought about your name. Suddenly the coincidence seemed too much. Andrew Heron was convicted of the murder of Lily Larkin. Lydia Crane is starring in a play about that murder. Crane and Heron, Heron and Crane. The names went round and round in my mind, until I remembered that heron and crane are two different names for the same bird. But then, I’m sure you already know that, don’t you—Lydia Heron?”

  Lydia stood up. I thought she was going to hit me. Instead she reached for the envelope.

  “No!” I said, without thinking how dangerous it might be to try to stop her. “You can’t have it.”

  “Oh, but I most certainly can,” Lydia said. She grabbed me by the arms and pushed me against the edge of the balcony.

  “Let go!” I screamed. “Let go of me!”

  She continued pushing me sideways over the balcony. I struggled, but I was afraid that even if I managed to break free I would lose my balance and fall over.

  “Let the child be!” said a gruff voice from behind Lydia.

  It was Pop. Chris was standing next to him, out of breath and looking terrified.

  “You stay out of this, old man!” screeched Lydia.

  “I said let the child be!” roared Pop as he came charging down the aisle.

  Lydia pushed me aside and turned to face him. “Get away from me,” she screamed. “Get away from me, you murderer!”

  Pop stopped in his tracks.

  “It wasn’t me, Lydia,” he said. “It wasn’t me, and you know it wasn’t. Your father was the man who killed Lily Larkin. He killed her and left me here to wait for her.”

  “He didn’t!” screamed Lydia. “He didn’t! He didn’t! You did it, and they blamed him! You ruined his life, and I’m not going to let this show stir all that up again.”

  And with that she threw herself at Pop, scratching and clawing and hitting as if she had gone out of her mind.

  They fought for a moment at the edge of the balcony. Then Lydia took a wild swing at Pop, missed, and lost her balance. She fell against the railing. He reached out to help her, she grabbed his hand, and they went over the edge together.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Curtain Call

  With the mystery of who was trying to sabotage the show solved, The Woman in White went on to become a smashing success. We replaced Lydia with Marilyn. The cast pulled together to make up for the time we lost. And the publicity brought us a full house on opening night. “There’s lots of bad news,” said Gwendolyn smugly. “But very little bad publicity.”

  I guess she was right, because tickets started going like crazy as soon as the story hit the papers.

  Opening night was incredible. I suppose it might have had something to do with what we had all been through together. Whatever the reason, the cast seemed to catch fire that night, and the show came to life in a way I had never thought possible. It was as though we were all actually living the story. I’ll never forget standing in front of that audience at the end and feeling the love from all those hundreds of shouting, stamping, applauding people who were thanking us for making them laugh, for making them cry.

  It was an incredible experience.

  But one other experience in the old Grand Theater that summer burned even more deeply into my heart. It happened the night after Pop died trying to save my life.

  I had sneaked into the balcony again, to be alone, to think about what had happened to him, and to me. I thought about all the years of sorrow and anger that had ended that night, years I had figured out through the research Sam the librarian did for me the day of that final disaster.

  Sam explained his techniques to me later—how he used the names and information I had given him to comb through old newspapers and county records to put together the picture that finally made sense of it all.

  It was Sam who gave me the big picture. But the details came from Lydia herself. She had survived the fall from the balcony, although not without several broken bones. When the police came to the hospital to question her about the accident, she broke down and confessed everything.

  It was fairly simple, really. In 1935 Andrew Heron was convicted of the murder of Lily Larkin. Twenty-six years later, in 1961, he was released from prison on parole. A year later he married a younger woman whom he had convinced of his innocence. Together they had a baby: Lydia Heron.

  Lydia and her father were similar in both temperament and appearance. Which was why Andrew looked so familiar to me when I saw his picture that time; he was like a male version of his daughter. Lydia had also inherited Andrew’s talent, and he taught her everything he knew about theater and acting. But at the same time he was filling her with stories about the great injustice that he felt had been done to him. He gave her both his talent, and his enormous bitterness toward Edward Parker, the man who had won Lily Larkin’s affections.

  Mistakenly believing her father was innocent, it became Lydia’s goal to clear his name. She wanted to eliminate anything that connected him to the crime—which was why she stole the microfilm from the library. Unfortunately for her, she didn’t think of that until after the announcement had gone out that the Grand Theater was mounting a play based on the Lily Larkin story.

  When Lydia heard about the play, she knew she had to stop it. With her theatrical training, it was easy enough to get a part, although she had been somewhat surprised when she landed the lead. Once she was in the play, her plan to force it to a halt by making it look like the ghost was disrupting things just seemed to come naturally, and she went at it from every angle she could think of. The day Chris and I spotted her going into the Brass Elephant with Alan, she had been trying to convince the poor guy that he should give up on his script because the Woman in White was so opposed to the show.

  What Lydia hadn’t counted on was that the Woman in White herself would take over.

  And Pop? On the night Lily Larkin died in his arms, Edward Parker vowed to give up his acting career and stay at the Grand Theater until he and Lily were reunited. In time people forgot who he was, and why he was there, and just started calling him “Pop.” Occasionally a famous performer who remembered Edward Parker from his acting days would come to town with a show and go down to Pop’s little office to share a few beers and some memories. That was where all those autographed pictures had come from.

  For fifty years Pop stayed at the Grand, waiting to be reunited with Lily. I thought about the night we had seen him sitting in the third row, crying. I wondered if it was because we could see the ghost and he couldn’t.

  Now, as I sat there staring at the stage, I heard a familiar strain of music—a waltz filled with sweetness and unbearable longing. It was the song the Woman in White always danced to: “The Heart That Stays True.”

  Looking down on the sta
ge, I saw her for the last time. She was dancing in slow, sweeping circles, her empty arms held out before her. Again that feeling of sadness swept over me, and I could feel the tears start to run down my cheeks.

  But a moment later everything changed. The music picked up speed, becoming livelier and sweeter.

  And then a man stepped onto the stage, tall and handsome and filled with life, even though he was obviously a ghost, too.

  It was a man I had seen before, in a picture in a newspaper fifty years old.

  It was Pop—Edward Parker—the way he had looked on the day Lily died.

  Crossing to the Woman in White, he took her in his arms, and they began to dance together. He whirled her around the floor, and her dress swept out behind her. The music began to swell, louder and faster and sweeter than ever. It seemed their feet were barely touching the floor.

  I thought I was going to go out of my skin with the joy of it all.

  And then, almost before it had begun, it was over. Still whirling around and around the stage, they began to fade slowly from my sight. A moment later they were gone. Only one note of music was left, a sweet pure note that hung in the air after they had vanished.

  And then it, too, was gone, and there was nothing but an empty stage.

  I sat there with tears streaming down my face, happier than I had ever thought possible.

  Turn the page to continue reading from The Nina Tanleven Mysteries

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Quackadoodle

  “Sigh.”

  That was me, Nina Tanleven.

  “I know. Double sigh.”

  That was my best friend, Chris Gurley. We were lying on the floor of Chris’s bedroom, looking at magazines and being depressed.

  “Does everyone feel like this when a play ends?” I asked. Chris and I had been acting in a show being done at one of the local theaters that summer. Now that it was over, life seemed incredibly boring.