Cigarettes.
They were always out to get him.
Cigarettes were what killed his real mother. Gave her cancer. Of course, she said she only smoked so much because Zack drove her crazy and ruined her life just by being born.
He felt the turbocharger kick in as they eased past the rumbling truck. Zack looked up to give the trucker a wave—just to let the guy behind the wheel know how not afraid of flying butts he was.
Only the truck driver wasn’t a guy.
It was a woman, a fresh cigarette already jammed between her lips.
She flicked her lighter and Zack saw her face, illuminated by the candling flame.
She looked angry. Furious at the whole world. She looked exactly like his real mother had looked right before she’d gotten sick and died.
9
Reginald Grimes lurked in the shadows at the back of the auditorium, watching the cast of Bats in Her Belfry take their curtain calls.
Near one of the exit alcoves, Grimes noticed a terrified usher. She was staring at him.
So Grimes glared at her.
She scurried away.
They always did.
The audience was on its feet now, giving Grimes’s staging of the beloved Broadway musical comedy a standing ovation. As the show’s director, Grimes did not attend every performance after opening night. But tomorrow he was scheduled to begin rehearsals for Curiosity Cat. A perfectionist, Grimes wanted to make certain Bats was in the best shape possible before he moved on to his next project.
It was not.
He would need to go backstage. Have a word with the cast.
Heads would roll. Well, at least one very pretty head.
As the audience continued to applaud and thunder “Bravo!,” Thurston Powell, the actor playing Dracula, came to center stage to twirl his cape and take his solo bow.
Grimes wondered once again how that must feel.
To savor the limelight. To bask in the glory of a triumphant performance. To soak up the love and adulation of a thousand total strangers.
Yes, there had been a time when Reginald Grimes had dreamed of being a world-renowned actor, but his physical deformity prevented it from ever becoming a reality. As a small child, barely two, he had been left alone in the orphanage laundry with a gas-powered wringer washer. He had, or so he had always been told by the nurse who witnessed the mangling of his left arm, been mesmerized by the machine’s rolling cylinders, engineered to squeeze the wash water out of soaked bedsheets. Little Reggie placed his fingertips into the rollers and the ravenous machine had done its job: it had pulled him forward like a limp rag, mashing and crushing his arm up to the elbow.
Forty years and several crude surgeries later, his left arm remained bent and locked at a severe angle. It looked as if it were frozen inside a permanent plaster cast without the need of a sling. Ever since he was a child, fearing the taunts of his classmates, Grimes had worn long-sleeved shirts and sweaters, even in the summer, hoping to forever hide the patchwork of quilted flesh grafted to his ruined arm.
Of course there was no way he could act in Shakespearean tragedies or Broadway comedies without the ability to move his left arm. No way could he become a movie star when the bare skin of his forearm resembled a mound of white cheese slices melted on top of each other.
“Bravo!”
The whole cast was onstage, standing in a line. They locked hands and took one last group bow. When they rose out of it, they beamed.
Grimes grinned.
He knew that at least one of those bright, shiny faces would soon be filled with tears.
10
“Excuse me Pardon me.”
Grimes pushed his way through the standing-room-only crowd to the curtained exit closest to the stage. The house was, of course, packed. The show, completely sold out. Reginald Grimes musicals always were, long before they opened. He had been the Hanging Hill’s artistic director for nearly twenty years. Fresh out of drama school (which he had only been able to attend thanks to a scholarship provided by an anonymous donor), he was awarded a generous grant (given by another anonymous donor), to become artistic director of the Pandemonium Players—the acting company in residence at the Hanging Hill Playhouse throughout its repertory season.
He pulled open a door labeled “To Stage,” and headed up the cinder block hallway toward the greenroom, the lounge where the cast typically assembled following a performance to meet and greet their friends and adoring fans.
“Good evening, Mr. Grimes!” said the stage manager. “Wasn’t the show terrific tonight?”
He narrowed his eyes. “No. It was not. Tell the cast I wish to speak to them. Now.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Lock the door. No one is to be allowed into this room until I am finished giving my notes.”
“Yes, sir!”
As the stage manager assembled all the actors, Grimes stood silently in a dark corner, hidden in the shadows behind a funnel of dusty light cascading down from a dim ceiling fixture. Dressed in a black turtleneck and black slacks, he all but disappeared, although there was no mistaking the sheen from his gleaming coal black eyes. He stroked his pencil-thin mustache. Smoothed his eyebrows with the middle finger of his one good hand.
He waited.
Soon the entire company was standing in a hushed half circle in front of him: Thurston Powell in cape and fangs; Amy Jo and Laura Joy Tiedeman, the actresses playing the tap-dancing Transylvania Twins; the chorus boys and chorus girls decked out in their werewolf and bat costumes.
Grimes didn’t say a word. Not at first. He let his stillness fill the terrified thespians with dread. An actor’s life was a hard one. Paying jobs were few and far between and it was the director who determined which actors worked and which went back to the unemployment line. Grimes had the power to crush each and every one of their dreams as surely as that horribly antique wringer washer had crushed his.
Finally, he spoke.
“I saw the show tonight.” He let his words hang like icicles in the air. “I have a few notes.”
Thurston Powell, the dashing leading man, nodded eagerly, pretending to be delighted to hear an honest critique of his performance. The man was a complete suck-up. No wonder he played such a convincing vampire.
“Kelly?” said Grimes.
A nervous young showgirl in black tights and sparkling bat wings stepped forward half an inch. The beautiful and talented Kelly Fagan was trembling so much her sequins were shimmering. Her frightened little toes tappity-taptapped against the hard tile floor.
Well, well, well.
Hadn’t it been just last weekend that this same young woman had refused Reginald Grimes’s invitation to dinner? Oh, yes, she had smiled when, quite politely, she said, “I’m already dating someone,” but Grimes was certain he had registered the slightest hint of revulsion crossing her pretty face as she contemplated the prospect of being seen in public with a gimp.
Fine. Tonight he would extend her another invitation: to kindly go home.
“You were late for your entrance, Miss Fagan.”
“I know,” she said, her voice a frightened bird twitter. “We had some trouble making the costume change.”
“You were late.”
“Right. The bat wings wouldn’t…”
“You. Were. Late.”
“I just missed my entrance by a beat or two …”
“No, Ms. Fagan. You missed it by a full measure. Four counts.” He tapped his right hand against his stiff left arm. “Five, six, seven, eight! You see, Ms. Fagan, unlike some members of my cast, I pay very strict attention to the conductor waving his baton up and down in the orchestra pit.”