Chapter 11

Perplexed Me Most Terribly

The EMTs shooed me away too. After what seemed like forever, they deemed Candy stable enough be transported to Good Sam. “Don’t worry,” one of them said as they took her away on a stretcher. “We’ll take good care of her.”

Was Candy doing drugs? Ricky was right, coke seemed like a stretch, but maybe something else? Arghh. I wanted to do something, anything to help her. But what?

Maybe I could figure out what happened. “Does anything look different than usual?” I asked the stage manager, who had poked her head inside the bubbleship. “Or smell different than usual?” Maybe toxic fumes were the cause of Candy’s distress.

The stage manager sniffed the air. “No smell, and everything looks fine.”

I joined her at the spaceship’s door. Inside, the structure of the ship was obvious: a network of PVC pipes in the shape of a globe, like a round jungle gym covered with stretchy fabric. “How does Candy’s entrance work?” I asked. “What’s supposed to happen?”

“Candace crawls inside the ship while it’s in the fly space,” said the stage manager. “She hangs onto the inside of the structure—hands and feet on the piping—then pushes open this panel when she lands, and walks out as Glinda. It’s a pretty dynamic entrance. And—”

Whatever she was going to say next was drowned out by a babble of voices from the backstage door entrance. The sound rushed toward us like some freak high tide, Babette’s voice on the crest of the wave. “I thought it was me that the Lady in White was after,” she said, “but a few seconds after I made sure the munchkins were safe”—nice rewrite of history there—“I realized that the falling set piece was just a distraction.”

“Is it true you saw the ghost right beforehand?” asked the man with the hipster glasses I’d seen outside.

Babette frowned at the reporter who had interrupted her story—which I realized sounded a bit rehearsed. I also realized that the ghost light was off again. Huh. It had turned on right before Candy’s accident. Was it a signal? From who?

“Yes, several people including myself saw a white figure”—they did?—“And we heard footsteps, right before the house fell. In fact, that girl”—she pointed at me—“has photos of the ghost.”

I was suddenly surrounded by a throng of people.

“Let’s see.”

“Is the picture clear?”

“Can you really see the ghost?”

But Babette was not about to let anyone steal her thunder. “As I said,” she said loudly, drawing attention back to herself, “that first accident was a distraction, disguising the ghost’s real intentions. Now I understand that the ghost isn’t after me. After all, why would she be?”

Everyone in the room could have answered that question, but no one wanted to do it in front of the national press.

“No, I believe the ghost is jealous,” Babette continued. “She was an actress after all, one who never made it big before killing herself.”

“The Lady in White,” said a reporter.

“Now I know for certain that I’ve got a sure winner, because the ghost is jealous. She just tried to kill my newest It Girl.”

What? She couldn’t mean...

“Candace Moon.”