If Fried Chicken Could Fly (22 page)

“Something like that. In the tombstone and now in the desk drawer. We found them both within just a few hours. Where else should we look? If we find another one, I might think we’re being set up.”

I got what Jerome was saying. It was strange to find two of the same thing, two pieces of paper with the same word in such different places. Were they metaphorical bread crumbs? Was someone leading us a certain direction? Was it the right direction or was someone trying to throw us off?

I stared at the piece of paper and hoped my brain would grab onto something that told me what I’d found.

My brain got nothing.

Finally I did exactly what I’d done with the first Jasper I’d found; I put it in my pocket.

“Yeah, if we find one on my porch, I’ll wonder, too. For now, we’ll keep them both and compare,” I said.

All I knew was at the moment the small pieces of paper meant absolutely nothing.

“Anything good?” Cliff peered into the office.

“Not a thing,” I said.

“Want to look around some more?”

“Actually, I’d like to go onto the roof.”

“Uh, well…”

“Is it easy to get to?”

“Not bad. Why do you want to go up there?”

“Jake and I were shot at from someone up there.” I pointed. “I’d like to look around.”

Cliff thought a moment and then said, “Sure. It’s not too precarious. This way.”

Cliff led the way down the back hallway, past the old empty dressing rooms.

“Hang on tight. The stairs aren’t bad, but they’re a little wobbly,” he said as we approached a set of thin, short steel stairs. They were steep and seemed more precarious to me than they were to Cliff, but I was curious enough to make the climb.

“Careful there, Isabelle,” Jerome said from behind me.

I nodded.

“A little wobbly” was an understatement, but we made it to the top of the twenty (I counted) steps and Cliff opened a door which took us directly to the roof.

The view from the roof was great. I could see all the way past Bunny’s and to the RV park where traffic was still building. I could also see that the hanging platform was beginning to be assembled.

The roof’s floor was made of rocky asphalt and was warm enough that I felt a little heat through my shoes. There was a large HVAC unit to one side of the space, but nothing else anywhere.

Jerome stood in the corner he spoke about and said, “It’s still here, Isabelle.”

I nodded. “Well, there’s not much to see up here, is there?” I said to Cliff.

“Nice view,” he said.

“Maybe I’ll just walk up and down the back ledge.” My words sounded too forced.

I started in the opposite corner from Jerome. “Interesting view from this side, too.”

The alley, with props, Dumpsters, and storage sheds backed up to Missouri woods. I could see trees that seemed to go on forever, but there wasn’t time to enjoy all the greenery. I turned my attention to the banister around the ledge. As I made my way toward Jerome, he kept saying, “Right here, right here.” I looked up quickly to let him know that I knew, but he didn’t get the hint and kept repeating himself.

Cliff followed behind me. He looked at the ledge, too. Finally, I reached Jerome and studied his discovery.

There was something on the ledge that looked like a couple drips of something. The spots were more brown than red and blended in with all the other pocks in the concrete banister, even though a close look showed they were different. Jerome must have good eyes.

“Cliff, what do you think this is?” I asked as I pointed.

“Good job,” Jerome said.

Cliff crouched and looked at the spots. “Huh.” He pulled out what looked like a pocketknife and extended a small magnifying glass and held it over the spots. “I’m not sure, but it might be blood.”

“That could be important, right?”

Jerome nodded.

“Sure. It could be very important. The shooter could have cut him- or herself. I don’t remember seeing it before, but maybe I missed it. I need to process it, but I didn’t bring the equipment in.”

Cliff’s phone buzzed again. He folded the magnifying glass into the case and put it in his pocket.

“Gotta take this, too. Sorry, Betts.” He walked to the other side of the roof and talked quietly into the phone.

“I took my time because I thought it might be kind of fishy to walk directly to the blood,” I said to Jerome.

“I just didn’t want you to miss it.” He smiled.

Were ghosts capable of teasing?

“No chance of that.”

Jerome smiled again.

“Betts, we gotta go,” Cliff said as he hurried to the door to the stairs.

“What’s going on?” I asked as I joined him.

“Just police stuff.”

Jerome didn’t walk behind me but popped himself down to the stage while we took the wobbly steps.

“I’ll get the drops processed quickly, but I have to get somewhere else first. Good catch, Betts,” Cliff said when we reached the stage.

Fortunately it didn’t look like it was going to rain. I hoped the spots stayed where they were until Cliff could get back to them.

“The breaker board is back here. I’m going to switch off the lights, and we’ll use my flashlight to guide us out,” Cliff said.

Cliff turned on the flashlight and flipped some switches on a breaker board that was on the stage left wall, next to a podium. The theater fell into thick darkness, dotted only by the flashlight.

If I thought Jerome looked lifelike before, the deeper darkness caused him to reach a whole new level of reality.

He wore a ratty cowboy hat that suddenly seemed rattier with worn spots and tears here and there. I thought his eyes were dark, but now that they were clear, I saw they were a deep blue. I could see the laugh lines that framed them. I could see some hair on his chest peek out from the collar of his shirt. I hadn’t noticed any hair before. My eyes were drawn to his hands that were defined by calluses and straight, rough fingernails. As a ghost, I’d already decided he must have been a handsome man, but with the lack of light I could see how he was not only handsome but handsome in a rugged-I-could-maybe-pull-down-a-big-tree-with-just-my-thumb way. I couldn’t stop staring.

“Betts?” Cliff said as he extended a hand to me. “You okay?” He looked in the direction of Jerome.

“Miss, you’re making me blush,” Jerome said as he did exactly that.

I shook my head slightly but didn’t take my eyes off of him as I gave Cliff my hand.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” I muttered.

“Like what?” they both said.

“So real, so real.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Cliff said as he guided me off the stage and into the theater’s side aisle. Jerome followed.

Once we were outside in the bright sun, Jerome took on his previous less-than-stellar ambience as he tipped his hat and told me he’d see me later. And then he disappeared.

Cliff, with a confused look and without many words of good-bye, left, too.

I stood in front of the theater, alone but for a young couple walking directly to me with a camera and big smiles. They would want their picture taken. I was happy to oblige.

As I snapped the picture I thought about the two men who’d just departed. One I’d suspended in my mind as the picture of perfection for almost fifteen years.

And the other one was a ghost.

And there was something about both of them that caused something to stir in my chest, something that hadn’t stirred in a long time. It had been so long, in fact, that I wasn’t sure what it was right away, but it didn’t take too long to remember.

All the years that had passed since Cliff and I broke up, I’d been waiting for something that made me feel the way I’d felt with him. Here he was again, and here
it
was again. I just wasn’t sure if it was stronger for him or the ghost.

I was worse off than I’d previously thought.

“That really doesn’t look good at all,” I said when Jake opened the door. His eye was swollen all the way shut and black puffy skin surrounded it. It looked less fresh but worse.

“It only hurts when I touch it, or hold my head up, or walk, though, so no big deal.” Jake smiled. “Oh, and when I smile, too, so I won’t be doing any of that either.”

“Maybe you should have stayed home today.”

“Not a chance. Tomorrow’s the big day. I’m not allowing anyone to scare me away from missing all the fun.”

“I didn’t think you were scared. You could use the rest.”

“I’m fine. How are you?”

“I have some archival questions.”

“You’ve come to the right place. Come in. I’m locking the door and Patches will hang with us. I’m not scared, though, just being cautious.” Jake held up the stick horse.

I petted its head. “Patches, thank you for saving Jake yesterday. I hope we don’t need your brute strength again.”

“What’s your archival issue?” Jake asked as he and Patches escorted me to the back room.

I’d run home for a couple of small plastic sandwich bags to hold the small pieces of paper. I reached into my pocket and pulled them out. I explained where I’d found them and under what circumstances.

“Fascinating. You found the first piece of paper in the tombstone and only hours later found something almost identical in the office?”

“Sounds like a setup, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know, Betts, let’s think about it. Who would have known you would look inside a hole in a tombstone, of all places? And then of that group, who would know you would be looking in the desk in the theater. To me it sounds like more a coincidence than a setup. Weird, sure, but planted ‘bread crumbs’—I think that would be hard to pull off.”

He had a point. “What do you think they are?”

“I’m pretty sure they’re both copies, of what, I’m not sure. The thief took my Jerome stuff, but I can probably still round up some Jasper stuff.”

“What makes you think they’re copies?”

“The paper. Both of these are in pretty good shape. Paper from that time would be more disintegrated. I do think someone made copies of something and placed these pieces of paper where you found them, but I have my doubts that they were for you to find.”

“Who should have found them?”

“It seems pretty clear to me that Everett was searching
for the treasure. Perhaps they were bread crumbs for him or even for Miz. They were at the tombstone and this was in Everett’s desk. Maybe he found it somewhere. You need to show them to Miz and see what she says. Does she know about the coins in the tombstone?”

“If she didn’t already know, I didn’t tell her. Everything was too crazy today.”

“Well, you’re looking at an authentic Broken Rope treasure.”

“The papers are a treasure?”

“No, I’m the treasure.”

“Of course.”

Jake set Patches against the table and reached for a file on the end of the shelves.

“These are some old flyers from the Jasper, back in the day of live performances. Let’s take a gander and see if anything matches.”

Jake flung the large plastic folder onto the table and pulled out a stack of its contents. There were mostly papers, each piece also individually wrapped in plastic. He spread them on the table. There were notices of shows, even a couple wanted posters, neither of which had Jerome’s face. One talked about Elsa and her fanning feathers. And the last one, the one that Jake pulled from the pile and examined more closely, began with “Tonight!”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Lookee here,” Jake said as he slowly and dramatically took the two small pieces of paper and held them to the bottom of an advertisement to compare. The very last line, written with letters the same size and the same kind as my finds said:
Jasper Theater, Broken Rope, Missouri, Proprietor
Belinda Jasper, daughter of recently murdered Homer Jasper.
“The ‘Jaspers’ are an exact match.”

“They sure are. What a strange thing to put on an ad, though. And I thought they were handwritten.”

“Not too odd. The original proprietor was a man. If his daughter, a woman, took over, the public would want some explanation. Plus don’t forget, we’re Broken Rope, and we make a big part of our living based upon strange or horrible deaths. As for the handwriting, you were just fooled by the fancy letters. The original was most definitely made using a printing press, but remember, letters for presses were just individual blocks and weren’t lined up all the time and sometimes ink didn’t cover them completely.”

I looked closely at the picture. The woman was the same woman with dark hair and dark eyes who’d been forever immortalized in a picture on the Jasper’s wall. Belinda Jasper was the contortionist and the woman Jerome felt certain he had somehow been close to.

“She’s the contortionist from the picture in the Jasper,” I said.

“Oh. Yes, she is. I hadn’t thought much about it, but you’re right.”

“How did you find this so quickly?”

“I’ve spent the entire morning looking through these archives. I know that Everett spent time looking at the Jerome and Jasper stuff, so I spent a lot of time memorizing it. When I saw your pieces of paper, I thought I might have a match. Everett must have made many copies of many things, Betts. I bet that what you found today are parts of the copies he made. One in his office would be normal. Maybe he planted one in the tombstone. Remember, we
didn’t know the man that well. Do you suppose he was trying to set Miz up for something, maybe taking her on a wild-goose chase instead of a treasure hunt?”