that?” she asked. “I mean, is there a charity set up that you work for, or … ?”
“I’m paid out of school overflow funds,” Beulah said. “Whatever the school manages to raise through donations or other outside sources, beyond their annual budget, gets put into a separate account. That’s divided among several programs, and mine is the largest one. So technically I am a school employee, but I administer my own program.”
Must be nice, Chess thought. Laurie seemed to agree; she watched Beulah with a look of such open hostility that Chess almost expected her to start hitting her.
Something to think about later, because hadn’t Beulah just given her a very important piece of information? So any extra cash in the school coffers went to Beulah—well, Beulah and whoever ran these other programs. She’d need to see those records. Aros hadn’t included those, or even mentioned them, in his file.
But for now … she stood up. “Maybe one of you could take me around? And if you could show me where entities have been seen, or anyone experienced anything unusual, that would be great.”
Chapter Six
Death simply means the opportunity to live on in eternity. And that is Fact, which makes it Truth.
—The Church and You, a pamphlet by Elder Barrett
Horrible Plaid’s name—surprise!—wasn’t Horrible Plaid. It was Monica—Monica Freeman—and she was the secretary to Master Elder Conrad, the school’s headmaster. She told Chess this with self-deprecating pride, as though she expected Chess to be impressed but wanted to seem like she didn’t, as though she thought it was silly to expect it.
Which of course it was. Chess tried not to mistrust the woman—mistrust all of them—on general principles, but she couldn’t help it. Even if she hadn’t been there investigating a possible haunting she would have mistrusted them. They might claim to be Church—at least the Elders did, and the teaching Goodys did—but they weren’t, not really. They didn’t give a fuck about any of the students, about anyone but themselves.
“In here is the theater.” Monica leaned against the thick door, its wood stained a horrible orangey color. Who the hell had picked that color? Almost every school she’d ever seen had it, and it looked awful in every one of them. “The first sighting was in here.”
Now they were getting somewhere. “Okay. Can we go in? And you can tell me what happened?”
“No one’s been in here since then.”
Chess raised her eyebrows. Okay. Monica didn’t seem to understand direct questions. “Can we go in, and you can tell me what happened?”
“I can unlock it.” Beulah pulled a set of keys from somewhere. Where she had room to hide them in that skirt Chess had no idea, although she had to admit the skirt was gorgeous. Either “community outreach” paid awfully well, or Beulah had a sugar daddy. Or simply lived beyond her means. Checking her financials would probably be a good idea.
Monica moved out of Beulah’s way a little too fast, as if she was afraid Beulah would mow her down. Funny. They’d all seemed perfectly friendly when Chess walked into the office.
The door opened with a creak right out of a horror film. For fuck’s sake, was the school budget really so tight they couldn’t afford a can of fucking WD-40? Chess had never seen a building so creaky in her life. Another note to make.
Through the open door she saw only darkness; the air breathing out at her smelled stale and felt cold against her skin. An air conditioner still hummed somewhere inside.
“No one’s been in here? Why? And for how long?”
Monica answered, standing right behind her. “It’s been about three weeks, I guess. Well, Aros might have been in here without telling us, but three weeks since any of us have been inside.”
If Aros had entered the theater without even bothering to lubricate that hinge, then something was seriously wrong with the man. Oh well. “Because of the haunting?”
“Of course.” Beulah pushed past both of them. For a moment her head and lower body disappeared, her white blouse just a faint glow in the gloom, before something slammed like metal against metal and the lights came on.
Not that it made much difference. Shadows still lurked along the walls and between the rows of seats, which rose stadium-style from the sunken stage at the front to a small booth in the center at the back. It wasn’t a large room, really, but then it wasn’t a large school. Maybe a hundred seats, a hundred and fifty? Drama didn’t seem to be a popular activity at Mercy Lewis. It hadn’t been at any school Chess had ever attended.
Beulah walked toward the stage, her slim figure appearing and reappearing between the rows like a lion through tall grass. “A few students were in here after school, about three weeks ago.”
“Where they shouldn’t have been,” Monica muttered.
“They were hanging out on the stage,” Beulah continued, ignoring Monica. Ignoring, too, Monica’s next snide interruption, which was the word “Drinking.”
Beulah glared at Monica. “Talking. According to Vernal.”
“This is the person you mentioned before? The one Aros was afraid of?” Chess asked.
“Yes. Good memory. Anyway. They were in here talking, Vernal and three of his friends, when the ghost appeared. They said it came through the curtains there”—she pointed to the right—“and started moving along that wall. Then it apparently noticed them and came toward them, which is when they ran.”
“Did it follow them out of the theater? What did it look like, did they say?”
“It didn’t follow them,” Monica said. “And they said it looked like Lucy McShane.”
Chess looked at her blankly. It was always so cool when people expected her to know things there was no possible way she could know. Of course she was familiar with all of the famous ghosts and hauntings; the special team that still lived in the Tower of London, for example, just to contain them all. Edward DeWitt, the ghost of a murder victim who was so hell-bent on revenge it took them four weeks to track him down and Banish him. And of course the Fallow Creek Five, and the suburb they’d turned into a literal ghost town back in 2007.
But nowhere on that list, and it was quite an extensive list, did anyone named Lucy McShane appear.
Either Beulah saw her blank look and sympathized, or Beulah saw her blank look and patronized. Whatever her motive, at least she told the fucking story. “She was a suicide from just after this building was converted into a school, maybe 1999, 2000? According to the story, she was in the school play and fell in love with the director. He seduced her, and then when she got pregnant he dumped her. So she flung herself from the lighting platform up there.”
Chess glanced up. Above her head a rack of lights hung in a gentle arc, white cone-shaped fixtures aimed at the stage. “She jumped off of that? How would she get up there?”
“There’s a catwalk,” Monica said. “Want to go up and look?”
Ugh, not really. Chess wasn’t afraid of heights, but the thought of depending on the rickety-looking metal walkway she could just make out near the ceiling didn’t appeal. But it was her job, so … “Yeah, sure.”
The theater looked smaller from up there. So did Monica and Beulah, both of whom had used their skirts as an excuse for why they couldn’t accompany her. Not that she cared. Without them watching her quite so closely she could be more thorough.
They couldn’t watch her closely if they tried, in fact. When she stopped and looked down at them, the floor almost seemed to spin so far below. A girl had jumped from that catwalk, thrown herself from it. Had her body cracked open on the seats down there, on the edge of the orchestra pit? Had she died instantly? How must it have felt for her, watching