“How did the guest react?” I asked.
Drea chuckled. “She felt like she got a bonus, and left a big tip.”
“How’s Valerie?”
“Once she got over the jitters, she called that spook hunting group she goes out with and told them all about it. They were all excited, so she’s right as rain.” Drea glanced at her cell phone. “Oops! I need to get back to the office.”
We said goodbye, after promising to get together for lunch later in the week. I was about to go back to my workroom when the sleigh bells rang and Trinket Ellison walked in. She looked a little nervous, and glanced around for Teag. “Did someone from the shop call my house this morning?”
“I did,” Teag said, turning from where he was dusting the shelves. “Thanks for dropping by.”
“Your opera glasses are lovely,” I said. “We were hoping you might share a few more details about the family member who first owned them.” I paused. “Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?”
Trinket looked like she wanted to turn around and leave, but after a few seconds, she took a deep breath and seemed to gather her resolve. “Tea would be lovely. Thank you.”
Teag showed her to the small table and chairs in the back.
“You took the opera glasses to the play on Saturday.”
I was busted. I felt my cheeks flush.
“If it’s any consolation,” Trinket went on, “I discovered their ability at a Broadway play.” Her face reddened at the memory.
“Oops,” I said, realizing that her experience was probably even worse than mine. I leaned forward, hoping to inspire her to confide. “I’d really like to know what you saw. To make sure we got the same impressions.”
A range of emotions flickered across Trinket’s features: fear, sadness, and regret. Teag and I listened in silence as she told us what she had seen and how she had reacted. When she finished, I told my tale, and we compared details. The stories were remarkably similar.
“Teag thinks what we saw was the Iroquois Theater fire from 1903 in Chicago,” I said. “Do you know if your great-grandmother was a survivor of that event?”
Trinket took a sip of her tea, and nodded. “It wasn’t something she liked to talk about, for obvious reasons, but the stories that have been handed down through the family have enough details to confirm that somehow, what we saw through those damned glasses was what she experienced when she and her son almost died.”
“What do the family stories say?” I asked.
Trinket sat back in her chair, staring down into the tea. “Great-granny Eugenia came from a very wealthy Chicago family. She met my great grandpa Daniel when he went north to college.” She sighed. “I know there was a lot of bitterness between the north and south in those years not long after the War, but not everyone down here thought the War was a good idea, even if they didn’t say it out loud, and that included Daniel and his family. Afterwards, they saw that there was money to be made serving a reunited country, and so Daniel went to Chicago to school.”
She paused. “They moved back to Charleston when Daniel finished school and they married. Daniel’s parents were so much a force in the city at that time, no one dared say anything about Daniel’s Yankee bride, at least not to their faces. Everyone ‘made nice’ and life went on.”
“Until 1903,” Teag added.
“Eugenia and Daniel took their three children up to visit her parents during the holidays. The children wanted to see real snow,” Trinket said, with a faint smile. “But the younger two caught cold. Eugenia had already bought tickets to a show at the Iroquois Theater for the whole family as a holiday treat. It has just opened, and it was supposed to be quite the place. Daniel stayed home with the younger children, while Eugenia took Todd to the play.”
She paused, remembering the story. “At the time, Eugenia was a bit put out that they couldn’t be in the Grand Tier for the view, but they bought the only tickets they could get – in the very back of the Orchestra section, on the first floor.” She gave a sad smile. “Ironically, those bad seats saved their lives.”
This time, she paused again, so Teag jumped in.
“There were over two-thousand people in the audience that day,” Teag supplied from his research. “Most of the ones who survived were on the main floor.”
“That’s awful,” I murmured.
“It was awful,” Teag agreed. “Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. And when someone in the backstage area opened the big loading doors to get the actors and crew out, the gust of wind sent a fireball out over the heads of the people in the Orchestra section and incinerated the folks in the upper balconies.” He made a face. “There was so much outrage about the fire that it changed safety regulations for public buildings to this very day.”
“Yikes.”
“Eugenia and Todd were lucky. They got out. In the chaos, they wandered around in the cold, until a policeman found them,” Trinket said quietly. “You can imagine, they were both in shock although they weren’t injured. Eugenia was never quite right afterwards – they called it ‘nerves’ back then. Todd was young enough that he outgrew the nightmares and seemed to be fine. Oddly enough, the opera glasses were passed down through the family as a lucky charm, since they had been a Christmas gift from Daniel to Eugenia that year.”
“Were the glasses always haunted?” I asked, leaning forward.
Trinket frowned. “No. That’s what’s so odd. Eugenia left them to Todd, and they came down through his family along with the story. I remember seeing them at my grandmother’s house, and when she died, she left them to my mom. Mom kept them on a shelf for years, until we had to box up her stuff when she went into the nursing home.”
“Last year, I moved mom’s boxes out of storage and into my garage, so I could go through them more easily. I found the opera glasses and thought it would be cool to take them on a trip to New York City when my husband and I went a few months ago.” Trinket sighed. “That was a mistake.”
“Do you know if anyone else tried to use the glasses at a play since the tragedy?” Teag asked.
Trinket nodded. “That’s what makes this so strange. Eugenia was a strong woman. Even though she never completely got over the tragedy, she refused to let it take away her love of the theater. She willed herself to go back to plays after a year or two, and was a patron of the theater for the rest of her life.”
Trinket’s expression showed that she was just as baffled as we were. “Todd kept up the patronage, and down through the years, it’s been a family tradition to support local theater groups. My mother and grandmother used to dress up to go out to the theater, and I remember seeing them take the opera glasses with them.
“I always thought they were so beautiful. That’s why I wanted to take them to New York, once I found them again in Mom’s things.”
Teag and I shared a look. “Did anything happen to the glasses between when your mother used them and when you inherited them?”
Trinket shook her head. “There was no chance for anything to happen. We boxed everything up when we sold her house, and I’m just unboxing things now.”
I wasn’t any closer to figuring out why the glasses had suddenly become a menace, but I felt a little better about what had happened to me at the play. I managed a smile. “Thanks for telling us, Trinket.
We’ll make sure no one else has a bad experience with the glasses.”
After Trinket left, I stayed at the table for a few moments, finishing my coffee and going back over the tale Trinket had told. What would make the opera glasses suddenly get haunted? I wondered.