Twenty-one

Angie’s nimble fingers untied the last of the rope and Manny sagged forward. Mel caught him, staggered under his weight, and then Oz and Tate were lifting him off her. Together they draped his arms over their shoulders and they began to drag-carry him across the dark stage.

“He needs to have his head examined,” Mel said.

“Not the first time someone has said that, I’ll wager,” Marty said.

“Focus, people,” Tate said. He was breathing heavily as he and Oz maneuvered Manny through the dark. “We have a man down and Holly is missing.”

“Take Manny out front,” Mel said. “Carlos can call an ambulance. The rest of us should look for Holly.”

“No!” Tate argued. “Whoever did this will not hesitate to hurt any of you. We stay together.”

“We can’t cover the same amount of ground if we stay together,” Mel argued. “If we don’t find Holly quickly, it could be dire.”

They were near the side door to the stage and Mel could see Tate’s face illuminated in the glow of the stage lights. He was straining under Manny’s weight but he also looked like he was wrestling with himself over the situation.

“We’ll be careful,” Angie said. “We’ll leave our phones open with a live call so we can hear whatever is happening if anyone finds anything.”

“Mel.” The voice was slurred but Mel recognized Manny’s low growl immediately.

“Manny, are you all right? What happened? Where’s Holly?”

His head was weaving and he looked like he was trying to raise his face up but his muscles were having none of it.

“Saw her leave the stage and went to follow, but I . . .” His voice trailed off as he fuzzed out.

“Manny, speak, what happened?” Mel demanded. She moved so she was standing right in front of him. She cupped his face so that he could see her eyes.

“Got jumped,” he said. He gave her a wan smile and his eyes rolled back into his head right before he went limp.

“Get him out front for ambulance pickup right away,” Mel said. “If he saw Holly go down the stairs, then she must have gotten snatched on the stairs or below. Let’s go check it out.”

“Use your phones,” Tate ordered. His gaze pierced Angie and he added, “Be careful. Marty, go with the girls. I’ll be down as soon as I can.”

Neither Mel nor Angie felt the need to let him know that their phones didn’t work downstairs. They bolted for the door to the stairs just as Tate and Oz disappeared into the theater, hauling Manny as they went.

They wound down one set of stairs before Marty started puffing. “How many levels are down here?”

“Three,” Mel said. She paused on the landing to catch her breath but also to be sure that they hadn’t missed anything. She did a quick scan of the wall to make sure there were no secret openings or hidden passages.

“What knucklehead thought having the dressing room three floors below was a good idea?” Marty said.

“Try doing it with a thirty-pound headdress,” Mel said. “I can’t believe Holly has lasted as long as she has with this show.”

“She must be very fit,” Angie said. “Which may be the only thing that saves her now.”

With that grim pronouncement, the three of them picked up the pace and wound their way down the remaining stairs.

“Where do we start?” Angie asked. “Her dressing room and the bathroom have been checked.”

“Let’s look for a back exit,” Mel said. “Maybe there is another way out of here and whoever snatched her took that route. We have to ask Fancy.”

“She isn’t going to tell us jack,” Angie said.

“No, but I’m betting she sings like a bird for Elvis,” Mel said.

They both turned to look at Marty. His Elvis wig was askew, he had sweat stains in the armpits of his white jumpsuit, and his aviator glasses with the gold rims hung off the end of his nose as if the earpieces couldn’t latch on to his head quite right.

“What? Fancy who? What are you two cooking up?”

“You know that suave magic you use on the ladies at the bakery?” Mel asked. “Yeah, we’re going to need a little bit of that right now.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, that’s like my superpower,” he said. “You can’t just expect me to flip it on for any old gal that comes along. It could have catastrophic consequences.”

“Fancy has worked here since she was a showgirl fifty-plus years ago. If anyone knows the layout, it’s her,” Mel said. “Now get in there and find out what she knows.”

Angie opened the door to Fancy’s office, saw Fancy pacing back and forth with her desk phone at her ear, and Mel gave Marty a solid shove into the room. Angie shut the door and they pressed their ears up against the gaps in the door frame hoping to hear what was said.

As the girls hurried past them to finish the show, it was impossible to hear what was being said over the clack of shoes, the rustle of feathers, and the whisper of voices. Mel caught snippets of the conversation, and it sounded as if the theories regarding Holly’s disappearance ranged from she ran away in a romantic elopement, she was abducted by a crazed stalker, and Mel’s favorite, she was snatched by an alien who was disguised as a human.

Of the three, Mel gave the last one the biggest props for creativity, but she also hoped it was the least likely since she barely knew how to deal with human beings, never mind aliens from outer space.

“He’s taking an awful long time in there,” Angie whispered.

“Maybe his charm is working,” Mel said.

“Or maybe he forgot why he is in there?” Angie countered.

A crash sounded from the office. Mel and Angie looked at each other in alarm.

“What do we do?” Angie asked.

“I don’t know, maybe one of them just tripped?” Mel said. Her voice went up on the end, as if she were asking a question instead of offering a hypothesis.

“Tripped over what?” Angie asked. “The wall?”

“I don’t know.”

There was a grunt and the sound of fabric shredding. Mel strained to hear more and she was pretty sure she picked up the sound of a whimper.

“We have to go in,” she said.

“Are you sure?” Angie asked. “We could just walk away and pretend we were never here.”

There was another crash.

“I’m going in,” Mel said.

“All right, all right,” Angie said.

Mel shoved the door open. She opened her mouth to talk but the sight before her rendered her too stupid to speak.

“Oh, jeez,” Angie said and clapped a hand over her eyes. “Marty, zip up your jumpsuit and let’s go. You can swap spit later.”

Mel didn’t think that was going to be as easy as Angie thought since Marty was pinned to the top of Fancy’s desk while she stretched out on top of him, holding him in place while she planted a lip-lock on him that looked like she was trying to suck all the oxygen out of his lungs.

“Marty!” Mel called. She tried to look away, but really, what was the point? She could never unsee this.

Marty ripped his lips from Fancy’s. He was breathing heavy, adding credence to the whole stealing breath theory Mel had going.

He’d lost his glasses and his gaze met Mel’s when he rasped, “There is another exit. At the back of the main dressing room, there’s a door that leads up to the parking garage.”

“Oh, no!” Angie cried. “If they took her through it, they could be long gone.”

“We have to go!” Mel said to Marty.

“Go! I’ll call the police,” he said and waved them away while bracing his forearm against Fancy to keep her at bay.

Mel felt a pang of guilt for leaving him but he was reaching for the phone on Fancy’s desk, and she knew now that he’d broken out of her lip-lock, he’d be able to fight her off.

Angie and Mel broke into a run, charging through the dressing room to the back wall. The room was lined with shelves that housed the elaborate headdresses with racks below holding the matching costumes. If the door was on the back wall, it had to be behind the costumes.

Angie dove into a section of red spangles while Mel cut through the black feathers. They pushed through the outfits until they found the wall. It was dark behind the clothes and Mel had to feel along the concrete for a door.

“Found it!” Angie cried.

Mel hurried to her side. It was a standard door and Mel hoped against hope that it wasn’t locked. Angie grabbed the knob and turned. With a squeak and a squeal, the door opened into another stairwell.

It smelled dank and dirty. Mel felt along the wall for a light switch. The concrete was rough and cold against her fingers.

“I don’t like this,” Angie said. She took her phone out of the front of her outfit and turned on the flashlight app. She shone it on the wall where Mel stood, and sure enough, there was the light switch just beyond Mel’s fingertips. She flipped it on and the entire stairwell lit up.

They took a second to get their bearings. It was just like the other stairwell. Stairs wound up from the floor in a squared spiral of cold concrete.

Mel blew out a breath. She really, really hated stairs. Not for the first time, she promised herself that when she got home, she would eat less of her product and work out more—more, of course, meaning at all.

The clang of a metal door slamming shut echoed from above, breaking the silence and making both Mel and Angie jump. They glanced at each other with the same realization. Someone had just exited the building and it wasn’t Elvis.