Masking for Trouble Read online

  “Don’t worry too much about it. Jerry’ll fix it when he gets back. Go on, get ready for the welcome reception tonight. There’s nothing else you can do. Disguise DeLimit might not be eligible for the costume contest, but that doesn’t mean you can’t represent.” He held his fist up. I made my own fist and bopped it against his. He left me alone in the office.

  Kirby might be right, but this wasn’t my dad’s problem anymore. It was mine. And I didn’t think ignoring it was going to make it go away.

  My hands were still cold from the drive back, so I pulled my red sleeves down over my hands and gripped the fabric into a fist. Soot jumped onto the desk and stood on top of the pile of envelopes.

  “What am I going to do?” I asked my cat. “That guy made me mad. I tried to tell him that today was too late to notify us, but he didn’t want to listen. I got so angry I tore up his paperwork and threw it on his desk. I’ve never done anything like that before.”

  Soot meowed.

  “He said he was going to make an example out of us.” I felt tears well up behind my eyes and I tried to blink them back. One big fat one escaped and ran down my chin. I shook my head and it fell onto my sweater. “I wanted to make things better but I made them worse.”

  Most of my life, I’d preferred to watch others than to take action myself. I’d been through a long string of therapists and counselors to try to get to the root of my issues but none had helped. It all came back to one thing: my mother died in childbirth, and I had a version of survivor guilt. Despite what my dad had told me my whole life, I felt like maybe my mom should have lived and I shouldn’t. I’d grown up shy and tentative, always afraid to upset the apple cart.

  I’d moved to Las Vegas at my dad’s encouragement. He’d all but pushed me out of the nest so I could develop my own life, an act that triggered my feelings of abandonment. Not wanting to feel completely alone, I’d adopted a little gray kitten from the candy store next to my apartment. Over the past several years, Soot and I had had a lot of conversations about my personal growth. I paid him back in gourmet cat food and the occasional catnip mouse.

  We were seven days away from Halloween. Because the holiday was such a production in our town, it took more than a day to set up the party. This year, a pre-party party was taking place at the Alexandria, a chance for those involved in the heavy lifting to don costumes, mingle, and not worry about performing or maintaining special effects. Photos from the pre-party often ended up in the last-minute mailings that went out to everybody on the city’s mailing list, teasers of what they could expect if they joined in.

  I changed from my hobo clothes into a pair of black leggings and a black hooded sweatshirt, and then stepped into a black, zip-front jumpsuit. It had come into the store in a lot of uniforms, and I’d done a couple of adjustments to make it fit closer to the body. I’d also painted a red diamond on the belly of the suit, lest anybody not know that my spider outfit was indeed a black widow. I pulled my hair back into a low ponytail and then pulled the hood of the sweatshirt over my head and knotted the cord below my chin. For the moment, I looked less like a spider and more like a cat burglar.

  I pulled on a pair of pointy-toed black booties that had belonged to my mom in high school. My dad had never parted with her belongings, and I’d discovered them one day while organizing our back stock. Once I learned what they were, I transferred them to my own closet. In a way, I felt like I knew her through her clothes.

  The most important part of my spider costume was the large black cotton cocoon that would fit over my shoulders like a backpack. In fact, after constructing it out of a heavily starched black denim, I had taken apart a backpack and attached the padded straps and waist cord to the cocoon to keep it in place. Legs, constructed from foam pool noodles fed into long black knit tubes of fabric, had been sewn to the cocoon. They were attached to one another with invisible thread, and the top legs had a small loop on the end. I slipped my index finger through the loop and held my arms up. My gestures controlled the top legs, and the invisible thread forced the other six legs to follow along whenever I moved. Our giant black widow spider had been a popular costume for as long as I could remember, but I liked to add something special to my personal costumes. My secret weapons for tonight were the cans of Silly String that were strapped to my wrists inside the sweatshirt. A plastic tube ran the length of my palm. When I flexed my hand down, the tube hit the top of the Silly String and my “web” spewed out. There might be other spiders at the Alexandria Hotel, but I doubted they’d be able to spin a web like mine.

  * * *

  I arrived about half an hour later and parked in a corner space of the lot. I locked my helmet to the scooter and zipped my keys into one of the pockets on the jumpsuit. Already a crowd stood outside the building, showing off costumes and laughing among themselves. Costumes were the great equalizer, I thought to myself. When you were in a costume, it didn’t matter who you were by day. The two Batmen standing to the left of the entranceway spoke to each other as if it were perfectly normal to hang around outside an abandoned building, talking about football while wearing tights and a cape.

  I stood back from the crowd and glanced up at the building. The Alexandria Hotel was one of the few buildings that had been in Proper City during Pete Proper’s time. Constructed in the early 1900s, it had the hallmarks of the Victorian era, but after a couple of earthquakes and at least one fire, the bricks were dingy and discolored. After Pete died, it was rumored that the hotel had been used by gun runners who needed a safe haven outside of the California state lines. When the city planners had taken control of Proper City’s future, the windows and doors had been boarded up so vagrants couldn’t gain access. Word spread that scofflaws would have to find another hideaway. The building had stood like that, self-contained and falling into disrepair, for the next sixty years. If Pete Proper had left his ghost behind, this would have been the location for him to take up residency.

  As angered as I was by the conditions that the new owner, Paul Haverford, had placed on the costume contest tonight, I had to admit, the spooky hotel was the perfect backdrop for our city-wide party. The boards had been removed from the windows, and tattered sheer curtains floated in and out of them. The effect was otherworldly. Six floors up, I thought I saw the shadow of a figure move past one of the windows. Odd, I thought. Nobody had mentioned anything about the upstairs being open for tonight. I leaned closer and tried to make out details of the person, but he was gone.

  Chapter 3

  FAINT SOUNDS OF a pipe organ floated from inside the building. I stood rooted to the ground, searching not just one, but all of the open windows for signs that a person had been there. Must have been my imagination. It was particularly active on nights like this.

  I hadn’t bothered with theatrical makeup for my costume because I knew there was too much of a chance of it getting smudged while under my helmet. Instead, I’d applied fake lashes on both the top and bottom of my eyes to mimic the spidery theme. A few of the lashes had stuck together at the outer corners of my eyes, and every time I moved my hands to my face, the legs of the spider costume waved about, drawing attention to me. I blinked repeatedly to unstick them—the lashes, not the spider legs—finally opening them as wide as I could. The lashes pulled apart like two sides of Velcro. I looked left and right to make sure they were fine, and then straight ahead.

  Into the eyes of a giant voodoo doll.

  The figure was dressed in gray fleece, including her hands, head, and feet. Pins, easily a foot long, jutted out from various parts of her body as if they’d been jabbed in by an angry person out to exact pain. Her body was sectioned off and labeled: heart, brain, stomach, various internal organs. I laughed when I saw that.

  “Not bad, Bobbie, not bad.”

  The voodoo doll reached up and lifted her hood—crafted much like an executioner’s hood—up from the hem, exposing the face of my longest-running friend, Bobbie Kay. “How�
�d you know it was me?” she asked.

  “Your walk,” I said. “You have to be a real costume expert to know how to change your movements if you don’t want people to recognize you.”

  “How do you think a voodoo doll walks?” she asked.

  I smiled. “Very carefully.” Before she had a chance to make a comment about my own costume, I flexed my wrists and shot a spray of Silly String at her. She jumped away, startled, and then laughed.

  “I see I’m not the only person with an interactive feature to their costume.”

  “Yours is interactive? How?”

  She reached around to her back and plucked an oversized pin from a long narrow receptacle. “Go ahead, stab me. Anywhere you want.”

  I took the pin and tapped the sharp end against her heart. The tip met with little resistance. I put more pressure on it and it popped into the fabric and took hold.

  She looked at it, now directly out in front of her. “The heart? That’s so predictable, Margo.”

  “You should have known. I am a black widow spider, after all.”

  Slowly we made our way to the entrance. A woman dressed in a cheap plastic witches costume stepped away from the building and blocked my path. Even with her hair hidden under a pointed hat and a widow’s peak drawn onto her forehead, I recognized Gina Cassavogli, the manager of Candy Girls.

  “Gina,” I said. “Nice outfit, but it’s Halloween. I’m surprised you didn’t want to wear a costume.” Beside me, Bobbie snorted a laugh.

  “You have a lot of nerve coming here,” she said. “You know your costumes aren’t eligible to win the grand prize this year.”

  “That doesn’t mean we’re not welcome. We are the preeminent costume shop in Proper City. We were here before Candy Girls ever opened and we’ll be here after you close.”

  “We’re not closing. Didn’t you hear? We’ve just been purchased by the developer who plans to redo all of Proper City. Our logo will be on every tourist brochure, not yours. We’re part of the future.” She stepped back and looked at my costume from head to toe. “Spider. How original.”

  I would have sprayed her with my web, but she wasn’t worth the Silly String.

  “Let’s go inside,” I said to Bobbie.

  Large plastic cauldrons filled with dry ice had been positioned around the lawn, and several men dressed as grim reapers wandered around, dumping pitchers of water into them. The resulting fog flooded over the top and then snaked around the ground. Here and there, fake tombstones decorated with creepy sayings jutted above the fog. Vines of ivy had been scattered about too, making the act of walking across the ground somewhat akin to navigating a labyrinth.

  Inside the hotel, a ghostly blue figure floated a few inches above a piano. The keys moved in time with the music, giving the appearance that the blue phantom was playing the song. I looked above the figure for wires but saw nothing.

  “This is incredible,” I said to Bobbie. “How’d they do that? It’s just floating there.”

  Bobbie moved closer to the ghost. A man in a black suit, white shirt, and narrow black tie stepped out from the shadows. “Step away from the ghost, ma’am,” he said. His hands were clasped together behind his back, and he had dark sunglasses on. A curly white cord ran from the collar of his shirt to his ear. “Displays are not interactive.” He reached up and touched his earpiece and looked down. A few seconds later he looked back up. “Refreshments are behind you.” He held both hands out to usher us in the other direction.

  “Now, he knows how to play a role,” Bobbie said. “The earpiece and the monotone voice? Brilliant. I bet he’s in community theater.” I turned back but the man in black had backed into the shadows again.

  “Creepy,” I added.

  We stood off to the side of the party, pointing out costumes and guessing identities. Despite the last-minute news about our costumes’ eligibility, I picked out several that had come from our store. My dad had been particularly proud of the Universal Monsters he’d made for the local Elks Lodge. They stood by the bartender, looking like a Famous Monsters of Filmland cover.

  Something green caught my attention. I turned away from the Elks and faced the Incredible Hulk.

  “Hey, Dig. Nice costume.”

  “How’d you know it was me?” he asked.

  I could see it was going to be an oft-asked question. “I can see your Tweety Bird tattoo underneath the green makeup.”

  He held one of his arms out and flexed his bicep a few times. “Hard to hide these guns,” he said.

  Dig Allen was a black hipster trapped in the body of a five-foot-ten, fifty-year-old mechanic. He had an anchor tattooed on the other forearm, and in cooler, non-costume-appropriate situations, favored bowling shirts with the sleeves torn off. He owned a towing company a few miles from the costume shop and carried a torch for Ebony even though she was a decade older than he was.

  He held two plastic cups filled with punch. “Are you here with Ebony?”

  “Ebony is convinced that Halloween parties are an invitation to the undead to join us. She’s probably at home on her sofa with Ivory watching a James Brown concert on Blu-ray.”

  “Should have figured.” He extended a cup toward me and I waved it off.

  “Sure you don’t want it? It’s good. Ghostly Grog,” he said.

  “No thanks,” I said. “There’s got to be some water around here somewhere.”

  Dig took a drink from one of the cups. “You think maybe she wants some company with James Brown?”

  “I think she might not want the Incredible Hulk sitting on her white suede sofa. Just a thought. But I admire how you just don’t give up.”

  “Give up on my Ebony? Never. She’ll come around.”

  Dig headed toward the complimentary cheese and crackers, and I went in search of something I trusted more than Ghostly Grog. I’d never been much of a drinker, and whatever inclinations I had toward alcohol had all but vanished after working in Vegas. I saw my share of drunken bachelor and bachelorette parties. Maybe whatever happened in Vegas did stay in Vegas, but I hadn’t wanted to test the theory.

  The air in the hotel was musty, and my throat felt raw from inhaling dust and dry ice. I interrupted a group of monsters and asked the Wolf Man if he knew where I could get a bottle of water.

  “Is that you, Margo? It’s me, Sol Girard. Nice costume.”

  “Sol, that’s right, I forgot you’re an Elk. You guys look great. Did Kirby call you earlier tonight?”

  Sol grumbled. “Everybody knows the best costumes here came from your store. If somebody wants to make a bogus rule that we’re not eligible, that’s their problem.”

  “I’m glad you understand. We had a couple of last-minute cancellations because of it.”

  “Yeah, that’s why there’s so many witches and wizards here. That’s the only thing Candy Girls had left on their shelves.” He took a drink and glanced at my empty hands. I kept them by my side. The rest of the monsters were close enough that every time I moved my arms, a spider leg popped one on the tush. I didn’t want to send any mixed signals.

  “You want some Ghostly Grog?”

  “Actually, I’m looking for a bottle of water. Do you know where they put that?”

  “Not sure. I’d help you look but my wife sent me here with a Crock-Pot full of Swedish meatballs. New recipe. If I bring any home, she’ll think they weren’t any good. You want some?”

  “Sure.”

  Sol handed me a plate of meatballs. Cross-sectioned green olives had been recessed into the meatball, making each look like an eyeball. They were small enough to pop a whole one into my mouth, and I finished the serving in a couple of minutes.

  “Want more?”

  “Better save some for the rest of the crowd. Tell her she outdid herself.”

  I coughed a couple of times, the dry ice getting to me. Sol filled a plast
ic cup with ginger ale to tide me over until I found the water. I complimented the rest of the monsters and went into the next room.

  Fewer people were in here: a couple of wizards, a man in a black sweat suit that had been printed with a skeleton that glowed in the dark, and the requisite number of scantily clad witches. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the number of them. Candy Girls carried mass-produced, preassembled costumes, so the only variety was what color wig they bought to wear under their pointy hats.

  If the front section of the hotel was the reception hall; this area included the hotel lobby. In front of the long marble desk was a row of wooden barrels filled with water. Signs had been attached to each. BOBBING FOR APPLES, WHICH WITCH IS WHICH?, and DANGEROUS WATERS. Children in colorful costumes inspired by cartoons and superheroes ran about, taking turns with each of the games.

  Cobwebs had been strewn across the front desk, and a couple of skeletons in suits and bellboy costumes were positioned around as if they’d continued to perform their duties from the afterlife. I stopped two people and asked about water and they pointed me farther inside. When I reached the back, another man in a black suit with sunglasses and a white cord by his ear stepped away from the shadows.

  “Stay in the party areas, miss,” he said in a flat monotone much like the man by the pipe organ. He too had an ID badge clipped onto his suit pocket. It said Agent Smith.

  “I just want a bottle of water,” I said. “I heard they were back here.”

  He put his fingers to his earpiece like the first guy had done, looked down for a second, and then looked back up at me. “Food and beverage is being staged on the second floor,” he said. He raised his hand toward me as if he were about to grab my throat. I pulled back. His hand stopped a few inches in front of me. “Wait here. I’ll get it for you.”

  He moved a heavy velvet curtain from the wall and pressed an elevator call button. He stepped toward me and put his hand on my bicep. I swung my arm in a backward circle and the spider legs jumped to attention. The room was dark, and he seemed caught by surprise. The elevator doors opened.