that pinballed through her brain. Only her grip on the chair kept her on her feet while her equilibrium righted itself. She heard a loud clank and the protesting squeak of the old hinges as whoever was in here with her scooted out the door to the lobby. Opening her eyes, Katie lifted her blind focus up the sloping aisle. “Tyler? This isn’t a good time to play hide-and-seek.”
Why weren’t the security lights coming on? They ran on a separate power source from the rest of the theater. “Did we have a power outage?”
Why wouldn’t anybody answer her? Panic tried to lock up the air in her chest. The dark wasn’t a safe place to be. She’d been reading those old case files, had lingered over the pregnant teen whose kidnapping and unsolved murder would have been Katie’s story if she hadn’t been lucky—if her aunt and uncle hadn’t moved heaven and earth to find her. Why did it have to be so dark? Maybe that had been Doug or the security guard or some other Good Samaritan rushing out to get upstairs to the tech booth in the balcony. She just needed to be patient.
Only it felt as though several minutes had passed, and the lights still weren’t coming on. Maybe it had only been seconds. But even seconds were too long in a blackout like this. She swayed against the remembered images of hands grabbing her in the night, of her dead friend Whitney and a teenage girl whose life and death had been relegated to a dusty cold case file.
“Stop it.” Rubbing at the bruise forming on her hip, letting the soreness clear her mind, Katie forced her eyes open, willing her vision to focus in the darkness and her memories to blur. Her work took her to the past, but she lived in the here and now. With Tyler. He’d be frightened of the pitch-black, too. She had to find her son. “Think, woman,” she challenged herself. “Tyler?”
But the only change in the shroud of blackness was her brain finally kicking into gear.
“Ugh. You’re an idiot.” Rational thought finally returned and she pulled out her phone, adjusting the screen to flashlight mode to make sure someone could see her before shining it up toward the tech booth in the balcony and shouting again. “Lights, please? Doug?” Her light wasn’t that powerful, but the booth looked dark, too. “Is anybody up there? I’m on my way out. My son’s here, too. Please.”
She waited in silence for several more seconds before she heard a soft click from the stage. She turned and saw the ropes of running lights that marked the edge and wings of the performance space had come on. This way, they beckoned. Really? That was the help she was going to get? Put in place to help the actors find their way offstage during a blackout at the end of a scene, the small red bulbs barely created a glow in the shadows.
“Thanks! For nothing,” she added under her breath, pointing her phone light to the floor to illuminate the stairs she climbed to get onto the stage. Somebody with a twisted sense of humor must be trying to teach her a lesson about her tardiness. Up here, at least, she could follow the dimly lit path the actors did, and she ended up pushing through the side curtains to get to the backstage doors and greenroom and dressing areas beyond.
Her stomach twisted into a knot when she pushed open the heavy firewall door. It was dark back here, too. Her annoyance with Doug turned to trepidation in a heartbeat. “This isn’t funny,” she called out. Where had everybody gone? Where was her son? “Tyler? Sweetie, answer me.”
She kicked the doorstop to the floor to prop the steel door open. Okay. If somebody wanted to spook her, wanted to teach her a lesson about keeping others late at the theater, he or she had succeeded.
But with her son missing, she couldn’t allow either fear or anger to take hold. Katie breathed in deeply, waiting until she could hear the silence over the thumping of her heart before following her light into the greenroom, or cast waiting area. Turning her phone to the wall, she found the light switch and lifted it. Nothing.
Had someone forgotten to pay the light bill? Was the college saving money by turning off the electricity after ten? She glanced back toward the stage. The running lights were still glowing. Even if they were battery-powered, someone had to have turned them on. And she knew she hadn’t imagined those footsteps earlier. She wasn’t alone.
“Tyler, honey, if you’re playing some kind of game, this isn’t funny.” She shouted for the security guard who worked in the building most nights. “Mr. Thompson?”
Was Doug Price playing a trick on her for turning him down again? Did he think she’d be freaked out enough that she’d run to him and expect him to be her hero? If that was what this was about... Her blood heated, chasing away the worried chill. Oh, she was so never going out with that guy. “Tyler? Where are you?”
Why didn’t he answer? Had he fallen asleep? Had something happened to him?
Uh-uh. She wasn’t going there.
Katie shined her light into the men’s dressing room. Lights off. Room empty. She sorted through the costumes hanging on the rack there, peeked beneath the counter. Nothing. She opened the door to the ladies’ dressing room, too, and repeated the search.
“Tyler Rinaldi, you answer—”
A boot dropped to the floor behind the rack of long dresses and ghostly costumes. Katie cried out as the layers of polyester, petticoats, wool and lace toppled over on top of her. Hands pushed through the cascade of clothes, knocking her down with them. “Hey! What are you...? Help! Stop!”
She hit the tile floor on her elbows and bottom, and the impact tingled through her fingers, jarring loose her grip on the phone. Her assailant was little more than a wisp of shadow in the dark room. But there was no mistaking the slamming door or the drumbeat of footsteps running across the concrete floor of the work space and storage area behind the stage.
Katie’s thoughts raced as she clawed her way free through the pile of fallen clothes and felt around in the darkness to retrieve her phone. Had she interrupted a robbery? There were power tools for set construction and sound equipment and some antiques they were using as props. All those things should be locked up, but an outsider might not know that. Was this some kind of college prank by a theater student? Could it be something personal? She wouldn’t have expected Doug to get physical like that. Had she offended someone else?
Her fingers brushed across the protective plastic case of her phone and she snatched it up. She pushed to her feet and smacked into the closed door. “Let me out!” She slapped at the door with her palm until she found the door handle and pulled it open. “Stay away from my son! Tyler!”
But by the time she ran out into the backstage area in pursuit of the shadow, the footsteps had gone silent. The exit door on the far side of the backstage area stood wide open and a slice of light from the sidewalk lamp outside cut clear across the room. After so long in the darkness with just the illumination from her phone, Katie had to avert her eyes from even that dim glow. She saw nothing more than a wraithlike glimpse of a man slipping through the doorway into the winter night outside.
Following the narrowing strip of light, she stumbled forward, dodging prop tables and flats until the door closed with a quiet click and she was plunged into another blackout.
She stopped in her tracks. The one thing she hated more than the darkness was not knowing if her son was safe. And since she couldn’t find him...
She pushed a command on her phone and raised it to her lips. “Call Trent.”
Inching forward without any kind of light now, she counted off each ring of the telephone as she waited for her strong, armed, utterly reliable friend to pick up. She thought she could make out the red letters of the exit sign above
