She didn’t know what woke her; she only knew that she opened her eyes and saw a woman standing over her.
It was Sage. She knew her face now. She had drawn it, and she’d seen the similarities between her drawing and the painting over the bar.
“Hello,” she said softly.
The woman straightened without speaking. She beckoned to Jane. Jane stood. Sage McCormick moved to the door.
Jane was dressed in a long cotton T-shirt gown. She wasn’t sure whether she should dress quickly. She decided against it. She didn’t want to lose the ghost, so she’d venture out barefoot and in a long T-shirt.
There was a chill in the air, and Jane shivered. It was about 4:00 a.m., she thought—just that time when the bartenders had finished cleaning and setting up for the next day. They’d left and the housekeepers had yet to arrive. She wished she’d grabbed a sweater.
The ghost sailed along the upper level hallway, heading for the stairs. Jane followed her down the steps and then into the theater.
Sage McCormick walked down to the dimly lit stage, stepped onto it, then turned and waited. Jane continued to follow her.
Sage led her back to the stage wings and the dressing rooms beyond. Here, it was even darker, as there were only a few emergency lights left on during the night. She could barely see Sage, but the ghost was still leading her forward.
Jane hadn’t been back here before; she had no idea where she was or where the ghost was trying to take her.
The apparition seemed to be upset, looking grim and agitated as she stood at a door. She floated through it and then reappeared, waiting for Jane.
Jane opened the door. It was one of the dressing rooms.
The ghost walked to the rear of the small, crowded room.
Jane wished her nightly specter had told her it was going to be so dark and that she’d need a flashlight. She couldn’t understand what Sage was doing. There was a table covered with jars and tubes of makeup and several hanging racks filled with costumes. She had to push back the costumes to reach the place where Sage was standing. As she made her way through, her hair caught on a button and she had to untangle it.
She stopped where Sage was, almost on top of the dressing table. Because the ghost was insistent, she went down on her knees and inspected the floor.
At first, she saw nothing. Just old wood, so weathered that the planks seemed to blend into one another. Looking more closely, she realized that beneath the dressing table, there was something that wasn’t quite right. She ran her fingers over the floor and under the table. What had appeared to be a dark spot shielded by the costume rack and the dressing table was a metal ring.
Made of tarnished bronze, it had probably been long hidden by the position of the rack and the dressing table. The latter had no doubt stood in place for decades; the feet had worn small indentations in the floor. She gave the table a shove, moving it just a couple of inches but revealing the brass ring more clearly—and an area that, when carefully traced, proved not to be a stretch of wood planking.
Jane looked up at the ghost, who nodded gravely, and then back down at the loop. She slid her fingers over the flooring around it and saw that it had to be a knob or a pull and that it opened a trapdoor of some kind. She tugged at the metal ring but couldn’t get it to give.
As she worked at it, she heard a noise from the bar area of the theater. She wasn’t sure why it disturbed her; there were a number of other people in the building. The scraping sound had an odd, surreptitious quality. As she looked up at the ghost, the apparition of Sage McCormick faded away.
Jane didn’t like being where she was. She hadn’t dressed—and she hadn’t brought her gun.
She held still for several more minutes and listened. Nothing. Then she was sure she heard a faint noise—as if something was being dragged across the floor.
Jane crept silently from the dressing room and tiptoed back to the wings, across the stage and down the side aisle until she reached the point where the red velvet curtains were drawn back. She stayed there, glad that her eyes had adjusted to the darkness and the pale glow of the emergency lights. She used the curtain as a shield and looked out to the dining room. No one was there.
Had she imagined it? All of it? The ghost who’d come to her room and the sound from the dining area?
No, she’d heard something.
Certain that whoever or whatever it was had gone, she stepped out. She moved quietly through the room, telling herself that perhaps someone had merely needed a glass of water. Or someone who couldn’t sleep had come down to get a snack from the refrigerator behind the bar. She still felt uneasy. But a quick run through the bar and the dining room showed her that she was right. No one was there—not then, at any rate.