Teag rolled his eyes and sighed. “I can find the fridge. Go sit down. I’ll get something for both of us.”
Relieved, I collapsed onto the couch, and Baxter pranced beside me until I picked him up. He settled on my lap, and I leaned back against the cushions and closed my eyes. A few moments later, Teag returned with two sodas.
“Mind if I switch on your laptop?” he asked. “Go ahead. You’re just lucky I brought it back from the store.”
Teag powered up the computer. “All right, let’s see what we can find,” he said. He actually sounded excited about tracking down what I had seen. “Let’s start with famous theater fires,” he mused, typing the information into the search bar.
I stroked Baxter’s silky fur and tried to relax, but every time I closed my eyes, I saw flashes of the vision. Although I knew it was only my imagination, the smell of smoke lingered, not the pleasant smell of a campfire, but the acrid smoke of burning fabric, and a faint scent of burning meat. I tried hard not to think about that. My stomach twisted.
“Anything?” I asked to get my mind off the memories.
“There’s a pretty long list,” Teag replied, “but if you’re right about the time period, that narrows it down some.”
“Just because it was snowing doesn’t mean it was in the United States,” I said. “It could have been somewhere else, like London, Toronto –”
“Chicago,” Teag supplied. “How about Chicago?”
I opened my eyes, but I couldn’t see past him to the computer screen. “Maybe. They get snow in Chicago. What did you find?”
“December 30, 1903. The Iroquois Theater caught on fire. Over six hundred people died.”
I caught my breath. “What else does it say?”
“There are a lot of articles,” Teag mused, and I saw him clicking on links and scanning down through the information. “The theater had only been open for a few weeks. They did a special holiday performance on December 30, and had a standing room only crowd. It was so full, people were sitting in the aisles.” “Children,” I murmured. “There were children in the aisles,” I said, remembering the vision.
“Here’s why you thought of a pirate,” Teag said grimly. “The play was called Mr. Bluebeard. It seems to have been a mish-mash of rather forgettable songs and scenery including a castle, and partway through, a spark from one of the spotlights caught the scenery and curtains on fire.”
“People couldn’t get out,” I said, reliving the horror of what the opera glasses had shown me.
“Says here that’s because some of the doors were locked to keep out gate-crashers, and other doors were hidden behind curtains,” Teag said, reading down through the articles. “They had even put locked gates at the bottom of the stairs to the upper levels, I guess to keep people from switching to more expensive seats than what they paid for.”
“They locked them in?”
Teag nodded. “The theater was supposed to be fire-proof –”
“Yeah, and the Titanic was supposed to be unsinkable,” I muttered.
“But apparently, the owners skimped on fire extinguishers, and some of the fire escapes weren’t even finished,” he said. He paused long enough that I looked at him, worried.
“What?”
“The fire broke out while the orchestra was playing a waltz,” Teag said quietly. “One of the actors, Eddie Foy, Sr., tried to keep the people from panicking so they could make an orderly exit, but it didn’t work.”
“Eddie Foy, Sr.” I repeated. “Trinket said her great-grandmother had seen most of the famous actors and actresses of her time. He was one of the names she mentioned. I’d never heard of him before.”
“He survived,” Teag said. “And everyone hailed him as a hero. They even made a movie about him, and it included the fire.” He drew a deep breath and leaned back in his chair, staring at the screen. “It says here that some of the cast were dressed in holiday costumes,” he added. “And here’s a picture of what the Iroquois Theater looked like before the fire.”
He scooted the chair aside so I could see. The grand facade of the doomed theater had pillars in front, a Victorian version of a Greek temple, just like I had seen in the vision.
“Wow,” I said. I took a sip of my soda. My heart was racing. Baxter seemed to sense that I was uneasy, because he gave me a curious look with those little black button eyes and snuggled closer.
“You’re good, Cassidy,” Teag said, shaking his head. “Sometimes a little too good.”
I stared at the old photo on the screen in silence for a moment. “What I want to know is why Trinket was able to see the images,” I said. “I didn’t get the feeling that she had any clairvoyant abilities. She seemed too freaked out for that.” I was quiet again, mulling things over.
“The fire was certainly horrific,” I said slowly, working it out as I went. “That kind of trauma can leave a residue that even people without a ‘gift’ can sense – that’s why normal people see ghosts.”
“The opera glasses have been passed down for several generations,” Teag said, turning his chair to look at me. “You’d think if they were so blatantly haunted, someone would have gotten rid of them by now.”
I nodded, having had the same thought. “I think we need to talk to Trinket again. Maybe she’s heard stories about her ancestor and the fire. She might not have mentioned that the glasses had a tragic past if she thought that would hurt the sale. She really wanted to get rid of them.”
Teag leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Which makes me wonder – if they freaked out the people who owned them, why hang onto them?”
“And if they didn’t cause a problem before, what changed?” I said, my thoughts racing. “Did something... activate them... somehow?”
Teag met my gaze. “We’d better find out. It’s bad enough if the glasses were always that powerful.
That makes them definite spookies and something Sorren will want to deal with.”
“But if something charged up their hauntedness, then we’re dealing with more than just the opera glasses,” I said. “Because whatever – or whoever – it was could juice up something else.”
“And in this city, with all its haunts, that would be a real problem.”
Chapter Three
BY THE NEXT morning, I had recovered from the trauma if not the embarrassment. Fortunately, being Sunday, we didn’t open until noon, which meant that I could spend the morning in the back going through some of the more benign pieces. Teag handled the mundanes. Right now, we didn’t have any spookies in stock except for the opera glasses, and I was grateful. Still, the tragedy of the fire stuck with me. I hadn’t slept well. My dreams had been dark, lit only by flames, and once I had woken with my heart pounding and my palms sweaty.
I was mostly recovered by the time Monday morning rolled around, although I hoped that none of our customers had attended the play on Saturday.
“You doing okay, Cassidy?” Teag stuck his head in the back room.
“A little tired, but that’s all. The coffee is definitely helping. Thank you.” Teag had come in early and had the coffee pot in the shop’s small kitchen already chugging out liquid wakefulness before we opened for the day. It was exceptionally thoughtful of him, since he didn’t drink the stuff, but he probably figured I’d need it more than usual today. Teag had a large mug of tea, his beverage of choice.
“I put in a call to Trinket,” Teag said, standing where he could keep an eye on the front of the store. “I got her voice mail, and I asked her to give me a call.”
“Maybe she caught wind of what happened at the play and decided to high tail it out of town for a while,” I said with a lopsided grin.