The Phantom of Oz Read online

Candy’s Facebook posts were heavy on photos, mostly Southern California sunsets—and food. Heaps of nachos, steak dinners, big plates piled high with pasta. Did Candy actually eat these meals? Or did photographing them somehow serve as a substitute for eating them? I plowed through more photos of ice cream sundaes and Mexican combo plates and even a chocolate cake crowned with MoonPies.

  She had also posted a few new headshots, which actually looked good. The photographer had taken advantage of Candy’s newly defined cheekbones and jawline and done something to make her hair and teeth look okay. Not too many other photos of people—a couple of Candy in costume with the Wizard cast, and a group cast photo that looked like it’d been taken at a cowboy bar.

  Ah, there was the Paris photo. Candy and Arrestadt stood smiling on some plaza, the Eiffel Tower rising behind them. They were a handsome couple: Arrestadt’s longish hair blew charmingly across his forehead and Candy looked like she was modeling the black sweater dress she wore.

  Huh.

  I looked again through Candy’s Facebook photos and then went to her Instagram account. Yeah, she stood exactly the same way in all of the photos she posted: one foot crossed in front of the other, a hand on her hip, like she was posing for photographers on the red carpet. The model-type stance worked for her, shaping her too-skinny figure into an hourglass. Between the headshots and the posed pics, I got an idea how Candy saw herself and her body. The poses and filters and airbrushing hid the bony legs, the lank hair, the cadaverous look to her skull. No wonder she wasn’t convinced she looked unhealthy.

  Ugh. The pictures depressed me, partly because Candy’s recent life had been hidden from me, partly because I could see how tough it would be to persuade Candy she was underweight, and partly because her photos looked pretty good. Maybe you really did need to be a size two (or zero) to get ahead in this business.

  My computer pinged. Yes. Blaine, one of Candy’s roommates, responded to my message. “Haven’t heard from her since she left on tour. Wasn’t around much before that, either. Too busy with her famous director boyfriend. Hope she remembers her friends when she’s famous.”

  Maybe Candy did disappear. I’d be tempted to if my friends behaved like this.

  I thanked Blaine. After all, she did steer me in my next direction. I did a search and was instantly rewarded. Candy’s famous director boyfriend’s professional career was well documented. Arrestadt had a theater degree from Yale and went to the film school at UCLA, where one of his student films, CasaBonkers, made a big splash. He directed a few indie films and then got snapped up by the big boys, where he continued to make films that showed off his quirky sense of humor, like Citizen Plain and The Beer Hunter. Tons of interviews and accolades. Not a lot about his personal life—just where he was born and grew up (Hartford, Connecticut), his education (the aforementioned schools), and where he lived now (split his time between Malibu and Vancouver, British Columbia). Never been married, no kids.

  Ack. My nose began to run like someone had turned on a faucet. I grabbed a Kleenex just in time. Really wished I could take cold medicine. Hey. The cold medicine/Candy thought that had escaped me last night solidified. She had said her accident was the result of an antihistamine overdose. Was there such a thing?

  After a quick search, I knew there was. And yes, some of Candy’s symptoms, like hallucinations and an irregular heart rate, matched what I found online. Even so, it had felt like a lie. I didn’t remember Candy having allergies, she didn’t have a cold when I saw her, and I didn’t find any antihistamines in her room or dressing room. Plus she was awfully upset about those blue pills. It was too early to expect any news from Pink, but I could look up diet pills. I waded through all the promises of fast weight loss to the online medical sites. Yes, Candy’s symptoms fit the signs of a diet pill overdose too. Even more damning was the list of everyday side effects: extra energy, euphoria, a false sense of control in an out-of-control life. One site even mentioned problems with relationships. All the information I found said that diet pills could be become addictive quickly.

  I jumped up and headed to the coffee pot, at loose ends. I now had a little more insight into Candy’s recent past, but still no solid leads. I poured myself another cup of coffee, then pulled out my phone and texted her for the umpteenth time since she’d vanished: “Are you okay? Worried.” Hey, texts. I texted Uncle Bob with my latest brainwave: “Any way to get hold of Candy’s texts or phone records?”

  “Police can. PIs, not really.” This was Uncle Bob code for “in a legal gray area.”

  “Thanks.”

  What else, what else, what else...I checked all of Candy’s social media accounts again. Tons of posts, but all of them from people congratulating her on becoming Babette’s new It Girl. No responses from Candy. I tried to read between the lines, to see if I could figure out if any of the people posting were actually close friends—hey, a message from Candy’s other roommate, Samantha. I opened the message. “No,” it said in response to my question about seeing Candy. Nothing else. Nice friends.

  I called Arrestadt. “Any news?” he said when he picked up.

  “Not yet, but I feel hopeful.” Did I? Sort of. I couldn’t believe Candy was gone forever, but I suspected that was more about denial than hope. I was great at denial. “The real reason I called, though, is to find out about Candy’s close friends. I’ve been in touch with her roommates, but I hoped you could give me a few more names, maybe even phone numbers?”

  “Sorry,” Arrestadt said. “The only friend she talked about was you.”

  Chapter 28

  At the Bottom of the Lake-Well

  It always seems like colds aren’t as bad in the afternoon as they are in the morning and evening, so my one o’clock Wizard rehearsal was better than last night’s, but not by much. I had Glinda’s few lines down, and the blocking was easy—I just had to know when to get in and out of my bubble spaceship—but the song...well, Toto whined. Really, he did.

  So during our dinner break, I had a choice: work on my song or continue my search for Candy. It may sound like an easy decision, but here’s the thing: the theater community is small, even on a national scale. People from different communities connect while traveling or on tour. Word gets around. If an actor throws a tantrum during a dress rehearsal in Seattle, directors in Chicago will think twice before hiring him. In other words, if I blew this gig, it’d be a while before I got another chance. And as an ingénue type, I didn’t have a lot of time. Not too many roles for women after thirty.

  But Candy needed me, and this was a perfect chance to explore the Grand Phoenician. I could work on my song at home. I changed from Glinda’s miniskirt and boots into the t-shirt and leggings I’d worn to rehearsal, found my way to Logan’s office, and popped my head inside. “You have time to show me the spring room now?”

  He glanced at the clock on his computer screen. “Sure.” He reached into the top drawer of his desk and took out a ring of keys. “Let’s go.” He clipped the bunch of keys to a belt loop on his jeans. “Why so interested?” he asked as we left the office. “You think Candy’s hiding in there or something?”

  “Or something.” To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure why I wanted to see the Lady in White’s well. I just felt...led there. Plus I wanted to see more of these secret passageways. I followed Logan down the stairs and into the broom closet. “Is this the only way to get there?”

  “Pretty much. Someone could get to the spring room from the hotel, just like they could get to the speakeasy.” He pushed open the secret entrance.

  I steeled myself against the cobwebs and the thought of what might be crawling in them and followed him into the dark.

  “You got a flashlight?” Logan asked as he led me through the dank-smelling corridor. “No light in that room.”

  “There’s an app on my phone.”

  We’d reached the arched opening of the speakeasy/Logan’s Nightmare. Logan patt
ed a male dummy as we passed.

  “That’s new,” I said.

  “Always working on my portfolio.”

  I obligingly admired this new addition to Logan’s portfolio. Huh—the figure was so normal-looking...oh. Normal looking from one side. The side facing away from me looked as if it had melted, skin sloughing off in gooey waves.

  “Logan,” I said, “what happened? You used to be such a nice boy.”

  “Nah,” he said. “I’ve always had a dark side. Here we are.” He turned a corner into the short hall we’d been in yesterday. It had a low ceiling that sloped, like maybe there were stairs above us. The door to the speakeasy was to our left, the door to the spring on our right. Logan stopped in front of it and unhooked his key ring from his belt loop. He sorted through the keys until he found a heavy old-fashioned-looking one and unlocked the door.

  A crackle made me jump. “Logan,” a female voice said over his walkie-talkie, “we have a problem with the follow spot. Can you come take a look?”

  “Sure,” he replied. Then to me, “Will you be okay here by yourself?”

  In a spooky theater at the well where the ghost who haunted the place drowned herself? “Of course.” I put on a brave face. I would be okay.

  “You know your way back?”

  “Sure. Past your Nightmare”—Logan smiled at that—“then follow the main corridor to the back of the broom closet.” I turned on my phone flashlight. “And I’ve got plenty of battery.”

  “Okay,” he said. “See you above ground.”

  He left. I took a deep breath and stepped through the door into the dank darkness.

  The room was small, maybe twenty-five feet long and twenty feet wide, with walls of rough wet stone. Its low ceiling was crisscrossed with wooden beams, like an unfinished attic, and a concrete pathway about three feet wide wound around the perimeter of the room, edging a black rectangle of water that lapped at the sides of its concrete pool like a tiny lake.

  I used to be deathly afraid of water, had been ever since Cody’s accident. A recent incident had cured me, but this night-colored pool stirred up these old feelings. I saw Cody sinking, devoured by the blackness, the water closing over his head, pulling him down...

  Ivy. You are over that, I told myself. And you are down here to look for your friend. Now look for her.

  Candy obviously wasn’t in this small bare room. I shone the light into the well. I couldn’t see the bottom. She couldn’t possibly be in there, could she? I crept closer and knelt down by the edge of the well. Taking a deep breath, I dipped my hand into the pool of water. It was warm and viscous. Like blood.

  I grabbed my hand back, somehow afraid the dark water might swallow it down. “Stop being stupid, Ivy,” I said out loud. “Stupid” bounced off the walls and echoed.

  Gritting my teeth, I lay flat on the concrete floor, set my phone down next to me, and reached into the water. The side of the pool was slippery underneath the water line, but I could feel the irregularity of stone underneath the slickness. I stretched my arm further into the pool, as far down as I could. I couldn’t feel the bottom, but that wasn’t surprising. The well had to be deep enough for the Lady to have drowned herself.

  I pulled my arm out of the pool, flicked water off my hand, and sat up. A small wooden bench stood tucked up against the wall opposite the door. Uncle Bob had said the Lady liked to watch the water. I grabbed my phone, walked over to the bench, and sat down. The wooden seat underneath me was worn smooth. Was this where she had contemplated eternity? Why here? How in the world had this black melancholy place given her comfort? Water and dust and time had washed the walls and floor the color of storm clouds and the cloudy pool looked like the portal to a different, darker world. There was nothing of light or goodness about the space, and I suddenly wanted to be out of there more than anything. I stood up. I could come back later with a stronger light, maybe something I could use to sweep the bottom of the spring, just to make sure Candy wasn’t—

  A clammy hand touched my face. I jumped and dropped my cell. It skittered dangerously close to the edge of the spring. I lunged after it and grabbed it just in time to see a flicker in the water, a glimmer of light in the darkness. A piece of pale cloth, drifting downward. I grabbed my phone, knelt by the side of the pool, and shone the flashlight into its depths. Empty blackness. I played the light around the room. No one there. All in my mind. Except that touch felt so real, the light pressure of damp fingers against my cheek...

  Time to go. I stood up and something crackled under my foot. I carefully picked up my shoe. Underneath it was a scrap of a wrapper. I picked up the tiny piece of cellophane and flattened it out against the palm of my hand. A bit of a yellow graphic, a sliver of a moon.

  From a MoonPie.

  Chapter 29

  All Alone, In the Dark, With the Dark Water

  Candy had been here. But why? And how did she get in? Wasn’t the door always lock—

  Snick.

  The room was darker. I looked behind me. Yes, the door had closed. The door that I had left open.

  I walked towards the door, my heart beating loudly in my ears. The age-blackened brass knob was cool to the touch, and it wouldn’t turn. The door was locked. As I knew it would be.

  I put my ear against it, but no footsteps, no one breathing on the other side of the door, no one cackling maniacally as they filled the spring room with deadly gas. And no one in here with me, except a ghost with clammy hands who lured me to the deep dark well...

  Get a grip, Ivy. The knob was old and the wooden door probably swelled with age and damp. I tried again, shoving my weight against the door. No. I was locked in.

  Luckily I had my trusty cellphone. I pulled up Logan’s number. He might have been the one to lock me in, but he might not be. And if he was, I was about to leave an incriminating message on his phone, one that the police might be able to hear once someone realized I had disappeared. I congratulated myself for thinking like a PI even when locked in the basement near a haunted spring.

  I waited for the call to go through. And waited. Then I looked at my phone, and took back the pat on the back I gave myself earlier. No cell reception. Too far down in the basement, I guessed. Too many layers, of rock and brick wall between me and daylight and...

  Oh no.

  Breathe, Ivy. Just breathe. You are in no danger here. What could happen to you here anyway?

  “You could drown,” my old fear whispered. “Like Cody. Like the Lady...”

  The Lady in White. The white scrap of fabric floated in front of my mind’s eye. I welcomed the distraction from my fear. Had it been a trick of the light? The ghost? Or...Candy’s costume was white. No. This room might have been a way station for my friend, but I couldn’t believe it was her final destination. The Candy I knew, the one I believed was still inside that cadaverous body, was full of light and love and laughter. She wasn’t drawn to darkness. She couldn’t be in the well.

  Could she?

  I knelt down again by the pool, my fear for my friend somehow making me brave. I stretched out and leaned forward, getting my flashlight as close as I could to the surface of the water, and...

  Light poured into the room. “Aah!” I tipped forward, the hand clutching the cell phone dipping into the tepid water, the rest of me tumbling toward the darkness.

  “Gotcha.” Someone grabbed me under the arms. “Sorry to scare you,” said Logan. “How in the world did you lock yourself in here?”

  “That’s what I want to know.” I scrambled to my feet and pushed past him out the door, so I couldn’t get locked in again.

  “I didn’t shut the door, if that’s what you mean. Though it does lock on its own once it shuts. Some sort of safety measure, I guess. Probably should’ve warned you.”

  “Yeah, you should have.” I shook the water off my phone and tested it by turning on the flashlight. Still worked. �
��Why are you down here?”

  “Thank you very much, Logan,” he said in a girly voice, “for rescuing me from the scary dark place.”

  “I thought you were helping out with a follow spot problem.” I started down the hallway, past Logan’s Nightmare.

  Logan followed. “The lamp just overheated. They figured out the problem before I even got up to the booth. When no one saw you upstairs, I thought I’d come down and check on you.”

  “Good thing you did.”

  “Thank you ever so much,” he said in the same girly voice.

  “All right, all right, thank you. But how could this door have shut?”

  “The ghost, maybe?”

  I turned around to face him. “Do you believe in the ghost?”

  “I don’t know. A lot of unexplained things happen around here. And, this may sound sort of strange, but I don’t really want to say that I don’t believe. Like it might make the ghost mad if she does exist?”

  I got it, being a somewhat superstitious sort. I started back down the hallway, Logan by my side. “So that door—the one to the spring room—it stays locked, right?”

  “It’s supposed to,” he said. “But every so often I find it cracked open.”

  “How? Who has keys?”

  “A bunch of people: janitors, a couple of docents. There are probably keys floating around all over the place. That lock hasn’t been changed in years.”

  I pressed open the door that led into the broom closet and stepped through, happy to be somewhere that felt semi-normal.

  “You see anything interesting down there?” Logan followed me out and shut the shelves behind us.

  “Oh!” I’d left Candy’s MoonPie wrapper in the spring room.

  “What? What did you see?”

  “Nothing, just...do you think I could bring my Uncle Bob to see the pool? He’d get a big kick out of it, seeing as how he loves that Ghost Hunt TV show.” Uncle Bob could also help me look for my lost clue, shine a light into the depths of that dark pool, and keep me company. In case we found something.