Page 36 of Script Swap (The Last Picks #11)

When I got to The Foxworthy, the lobby was dark, and a closed sign hung in the door.

And after forty-five minutes, there was still no sign of Fox.

Not that it was a hardship to wait. The previous night’s storm had cleared out the muggy heat, and Hastings Rock was back to its usual summer perfection: pleasantly warm, with a brisk breeze that kept it from being too hot; blue skies streaked with high, thin clouds; and all the sounds of summer—gulls cawing as they wheeled overhead, the jingle of the ice cream truck, tourists laughing and talking as they walked heedlessly into traffic.

(They all survived, mostly because Hastings Rock locals knew not to go faster than about five miles an hour.)

I spent the time making my usual rounds.

It had been a while since I’d been to Crepe You Very Much, and Mr. Potter, who owned it, came out of the back to pump my hand and tell me he was so glad I was back in town, and he’d start making extra batter again.

(I love personalized service, and I ate two ham-and-Swiss crepes as app-e-teasers.) Let’s Taco Bout Tacos was next.

It’s hands down the best food truck in the entire universe and serves the best tacos in the galaxy.

LaLeesha gave me a five-minute lecture on not scaring people (because apparently, she had assumed the worst when I’d stopped showing up for my weekly taco appointment, which is a real thing and not something I made up).

She was crying a little at the end until this rail-thin middle-aged man in a quarter-zip started complaining that I was holding up the line.

LaLeesha stared at him, wiping tears from her eyes.

The man didn’t burst into flames (miraculously, in my opinion), but he did grab his shopping bags (full of candles!) and scuttle away.

Then Sergei had to come out of the truck, and for about ten minutes, he held me and sobbed.

He also patted me on the head. Like, a lot .

But three Baja fish tacos later (Sergei knows I like extra batter), the world was set to right, and I was trundling—er, is that the right verb?

—off toward Two Girls in a Scoop, which is legitimately the best ice cream in the world.

Alicia and Calista (sisters—can you tell they were born in the ’90s?) made me take about a million selfies with them, and then they showed me three new Dashiell Dawson Dane flavors that were selling like hotcakes.

(They’re called Dash flavors because they’re half-and-half mixes, because yours truly occasionally has trouble deciding what to get, and the three new ones were: peanut butter and honey granola, brownie with white chocolate raspberry, and peach cobbler with classic vanilla. I had to try all three obviously.)

Fox still hadn’t shown up.

And for some reason, I was starting to have a bit of an upset tummy. Nothing serious. Just nausea that grew into cascading waves of sweat and generally pukey-ness. Probably because I’d been doing all that gratuitous exercise, and the negative side effects were finally catching up to me.

I decided I’d had enough fresh sea air and sunlight for a while. (Also a frequent cause of unexpected illnesses.) I made my way back to The Foxworthy. The lobby was still dark. The CLOSED sign still hung in the door.

And then, on the other side of the glass, someone moved through the lobby.

Not Fox, I could tell that much—they were dressed in black, and I was fairly sure they had their face covered. (Not suspicious at all.)

Taking out my phone, I placed a call to Bobby as I made my way around the building.

My call went to voicemail. “Just wanted to let you know that Fox still hasn’t shown up, and I’m heading into the theater.

You know what would be awesome? If we did this every time we went anywhere, and we said things like ‘Over and out’ or ‘Copy.’ Do you copy?

I mean, obviously you don’t because this is a voicemail—”

At that point, the recorded voice cut in and told me I could either save the message or try again. Since I’d pretty much nailed it, I saved the message.

The backstage door was propped open with a bucket of sand, and as I got closer, I caught a whiff of cigarette smoke. The sounds from the street faded. It was dark on the other side of the door, and with the day so bright, I couldn’t make out anything.

Just to be safe, I tried Fox. The call went to voicemail.

Okay, not great. And it didn’t seem like a good idea to break my promise to Bobby especially after we’d so recently patched things up.

But, said a little voice inside me, what if whoever I’d seen in the lobby was doing something nefarious? What if they were destroying evidence? What if it was Nora, and this was my chance to bust her?

I stepped inside and had to stop as my eyes adjusted to the gloom.

For several seconds, I was blind. I strained to hear something—some familiar sound.

Someone cleaning. Sweeping the stage maybe.

The rhythm of a hammer as someone fixed one of the sets.

A human voice as one of the remaining actors rehearsed a line.

Nothing.

Nothing except a staticky hiss that got louder and louder in the darkness.

Slowly, the shadows resolved themselves into shapes, and I started moving down one of the cast-and-crew hallways.

My sneakers scuffed the high-traffic carpet squares as I passed framed posters from previous years—I still have no idea what Dames at Sea is about, but the amount of cleavage was PG-13 at least. Lit by emergency lights and an EXIT sign, the hallway seemed to exist only in patches—solid and real and here, and then dissolving into shadow until I reached the next light.

It was hard to believe it was a bright summer day outside, and although I’d wanted somewhere cool, I found myself shivering in the theater’s air—too damp, too chill.

The whispery sound of my steps. The clank of the crash bar as I pressed through a pair of fire doors. The metallic rattle as the door fell shut behind me.

God help me, if someone was sneaking around in here, waiting for an innocent little gay boy to do something incredibly stupid, I was making their job way too easy for them.

When I got to the lobby, I paused. Daylight filtered in from the street, pushing back the shadows, and the air still held the faintest scent of popcorn.

Then the squeak of hinges, and a soft noise that was definitely human—somewhere between a grunt and a mutter—came from the box office.

The box office itself was empty, with shutters lowered over the service windows, the air gray and dusty and too warm.

But the door to the back room was open, and someone was crouched in front of the safe.

A woman, although it was hard to be sure because she was wearing a black trench coat, with a black scarf tied over her head. There was a hint of Audrey Hepburn.

Smart, sane, sensible Dash froze. And then that same smart, sane, sensible Dash tried to take a step back.

But I must have made some kind of noise, because she glanced over her shoulder.

Tinny scowled. Then, twisting at the waist, she produced a small gun and pointed it at me. “You!”

I couldn’t help sounding a bit stunned as I echoed, “You.”

“What are you doing here?” The dreamy mystic who had seen a shadow on the glass—or whatever she’d been blathering about—was gone, and now she sounded like she was working her way up the scales, trying to get to Weeping Heroine, when she added, “Why do you have to ruin everything?”

“I’m not here,” I said. (Don’t judge me; I was in full panic mode.) “I’m a figment of your imagination. I’m going to dissolve back into the ether—”

“Oh no you don’t,” Tinny snapped. She made a peremptory gesture with the gun. “Get in here.”

I might be able to outrun her.

But I might not.

Fox was coming, I told myself. And Bobby knew I was here. (A fat lot of good that would do me if she decided to shoot, although Bobby would undoubtedly avenge me in the most responsible way possible.)

I slunk into the inner office.

As I did, Tinny got to her feet, careful to keep the gun trained on me.

She wore disposable gloves, and in her other hand, she held a sanitizing wipe; bleach vapors stung my nose.

The safe stood open behind her, its shelves empty.

And the office itself appeared to have been ransacked: the TV that had hung in one corner was gone, and the desk’s drawers were open, and papers spilled out of the filing cabinets.

Part of the paneling on the rear wall had been peeled back to expose what looked like an ancient pine veneer, and around the base of the safe, skirting had been pulled back to reveal matted orange shag carpeting underneath—original presumably, and never removed because of the safe.

Something moved at the back of my brain.

“I can’t believe this,” Tinny said. “This is so unfair. I’m almost done and then you show up. Why does everything have to go wrong for me?”

She directed a watery look at me, so apparently this was a real question. I said, “You stole the cash from the box office opening night.”

In answer, Tinny made a disgusted, scoffing sound that sounded like a guilty teenager’s attempt not to give themselves away.

“Okay,” I said. That something, whatever it was, was still moving around in the back of my skull.

“You stole the money. That changes things. You knew where the key was. Terrence would have told you, or you found out on your own. You were free to go wherever you wanted in the theater; it wouldn’t have been difficult for you to figure out that security was basically nonexistent.

You had access to the control booth, so you could program the lights to go out.

” I could hear myself talking, but the sensation was like I kept running into the same dead end over and over again.

“I don’t understand. Why did you kill Kyson? ”

Her mouth made a perfect O. “I didn’t!”

“You didn’t?”

“No! Oh my God, I can’t believe you thought I killed him!”