Chapter 9

As For You, You Did Not Exist

The next day, I finished my work at Duda Detectives by one o’clock, just in time to make a quick stop before Candy’s rehearsal. Ricardo’s Salon was fifteen minutes away on Indian School Road. I found a spot in the salon’s tiny parking lot, hopped out of my truck, and opened the glass door. “Wow.” The smell of some powerful chemical stung my throat. “Hey, Ricky,” I said, or maybe coughed.

“Ivy!” Ricky came over and kissed me on the cheek. His dark brown hair was cropped short and he wore a slim turquoise button-down that set off his eyes. “I didn’t see you in the book.” He backed up and looked at my hair. “But oh yeah, it is so time for your color.”

“Um…” I ruffled my hair so my roots wouldn’t show as badly. “I think I’m coming in next week.” I looked around at the magenta walls, Indian-printed curtains, and gold tassels. “Hey, you redecorated. Nice.” Ricky was always redoing the salon. He once told me he liked doing hair because he loved transformation. I think he felt the same way about his shop.

“I’m going to project Bollywood films on that wall over there.” He pointed to the one white wall in the place, right next to an old lady snoozing under a hair dryer, her hair wound around lots of little perm rollers. “Cool, right?”

“Very cool.” I loved Bollywood movies. All that happy dancing. “You have a minute to talk? By ourselves?”

Ricky glanced at a filigreed gold clock on the wall. “Probably just a minute. I’ve got a one fifteen, but she’s late.”

The salon really didn’t have a private place, so we hung out near the front door. “It’s about Candy,” I said. “You saw her yesterday?”

Ricky’s smile dropped from his face. “Yeah.”

So Candy was telling the truth about that.

“She’s destroyed her hair.” Ricky shook his head. “And she’s just bones.”

“I know. I’m worried about her.”

“You should be. Her hair fell out in clumps when I washed it.”

I blinked, trying to erase that image from my head. “Uh, what causes that?”

“Lots of things—stress, some drugs, rapid weight loss. It’s probably that last one,” he said.

“Drugs? What kind of drugs?”

“Not sure about all of them, but coke for sure. I don’t think that’s it, though. It’s so eighties.”

“Did she say anything…concerning?”

Ricky chewed on his bottom lip. “No. She didn’t seem like herself, though. Talked way too fast.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Is there anything else you thought—”

“Psst.” A young girl with blue hair and a Ricardo’s Salon apron had come up behind Ricky. “Um, I didn’t want to wake Mrs. Crumpacker…”

Ricky glanced at the gently snoring lady underneath the hair dryer.

“But it’s fifteen minutes past time to wash her—”

“Fifteen minutes?” Ricky yelped loudly enough that the woman woke up with a start. “Gotta go,” he whispered to me. “Have to make sure her hair doesn’t fall out.” Ricky glared at his assistant and rushed over to Mrs. Crumpacker. “Perfect timing,” he said to her. “Let’s get you over to the sink. And Ivy,” he said to me. “Feed that girl a cheeseburger, okay?”

I drove back downtown to the Grand Phoenician Theatre. Well, as close as I could get to it. There was no parking within five blocks.

“Excuse me. Pardon me.” I fought through the crowd milling around the stage door of The Grand Phoenician. “Oof.” Someone’s elbow caught me in the stomach. I turned around to see who. A woman pointed at me. “Is she someone? Is she it?”

“Nah,” said a skinny guy with hipster glasses. “She’s okay, but she’s no beauty.”

“I certainly am. Someone, I mean. And who are you to say I’m not a beauty?” I didn’t think I was one—a beauty, that is—but that was just rude. I was pretty enough, I guessed. Matt and Cody and Uncle Bob told me I was beautiful. I tried to believe it, but I was an actress. Part of my career—more than I cared to admit—depended on my looks. People thought actors were vain, but I suspected our obsession with our physical exteriors was more insecurity than vanity.

“Yeah, but you’re not it, right?” The skinny guy waved a magazine at me.

“Who’d want to be it?” I wasn’t completely sure what they were talking about, but “it” sounded like the monster in some low-budget horror movie.

“Ooh, why not?” said a young woman with a tape recorder. “Do you have something to tell us?”

“No comment.” Ha. I’d always wanted to say that. I reached the stage door, pushed it open, and walked a few steps to the security guard’s glassed-in office.

“Ivy Meadows.” I signed in on the clipboard that sat on the little counter. “I’m here to see Candace Moon.”

“Wait a second, missie.” The security guard was a different guy than last time, older, with the air of a retired cop. “No one gets in that’s not on my list, and you’re not on it. I got it memorized.”

“Candy—Candace—will vouch for me.”

“Can’t ask her while they’re still rehearsing. You can wait if you want, but—”

“Let her in, George,” said a voice from the hall. “It’s just Ivy Meadows.”

I wasn’t sure I liked the “just,” but I did like getting in. The guard pushed the button and the interior door buzzed as it unlocked. A black-clad guy with a goatee opened the door from the other side and held it open for me. “Hey, Ivy.”

“Logan?”

He gave a mirthless laugh. “Glad to see somebody recognizes me.”

Logan was a techie who’d been working in the Phoenix theater scene since he was in high school. He’d worked on several shows I was in and come to a few of the cast parties. “I almost didn’t. Recognize you, that is. Last time I saw you, you had glasses, no beard, and...”

“Was thirty pounds heavier.”

“Thirty? Really?” Logan had been slightly chubby, but pleasantly so, like an olive-skinned Pooh Bear with a five o’clock shadow. “Well, you look great,” I said, even though I missed the Pooh Bear look.

“Glad someone thinks so.” He turned away and led me down the hall. “They’re still on stage.”

I wondered what—or who—was bothering him but wanted other information first. “What’s up with the crowd outside?”

“Reporters.”

“Because of the ghost?”

“Because of She.”

“She?”

“If you name her, you give her power.”

I suddenly flashed on Logan and a bunch of other techies playing Dungeons & Dragons during long tech rehearsals. “Babette?” I asked. That would explain the “it” —as in It Girl—comments.

“She and her junior she-devil.”

“Should I know what you’re talking about?”

“Only if you read Us magazine. Which I didn’t, by the way, until reporters pushed it in my face.”

“Babette’s in Us?”

“On the cover. She was attacked by the new Phantom of the Opera, you know.”

Wow. Babette was really milking the chandelier accident for all she could. I followed Logan around the corner and down another hall. “Thanks for getting me in, by the way.”

“No problem.” He straightened his shoulders. “They respect me here. I’m the production supervisor.”

“You here full time?” A lot of—maybe most—techies worked freelance gigs at whatever theaters needed help.

“Yeah. Finally finished my degree at ASU, worked gigs here for over a year, then the production supervisor moved to Chicago and he recommended me. It’s a really good job.”

He didn’t have to tell me. Any theater job that promised full-time work was a small miracle. And…“Benefits. Do you get benefits?” I nearly drooled at the thought of healthcare insurance.

“And a 401K,” Logan said. “Yeah. I got a great job. Production manager at the Grand Phoenician. Not that anyone would notice, of course.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll bite. Anyone who?”

“Oh, no one special. And it’s no big deal, really. I would just think that someone you once shared an intimate evening with would remember, possibly even recognize you when she saw you again. I’d think maybe she would thank you for the flowers you sent to her dressing room, or hell, even just say hi when she passed you in the hall, but I guess I’m just old-fashioned. Or just plain stupid.”

Oh no.

When Candy was working in theater in Phoenix pre-Matt, she was somewhat famous (or infamous) for her love life. She wasn’t slutty, but…“I’m a nice girl,” she used to say, “but not always a good girl.”

A big partier, she usually got tipsy at cast parties and often wound up making out with some guy, just for fun. Unfortunately, some of those guys would moon after her for weeks afterward. It happened enough that the phenomenon acquired its own name. “You had a Candy Crush?” I asked.

Logan pushed open a door marked backstage. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Poor guy. He must have had it bad.