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“That’s a nice son. I smell incense. Got to be Grauman’s. Real class. No chop-s
uey name.”
“Here goes, Henry. Let me hold the door.”
“Hey, it’s dark in there. You bring a flashlight? Always feels good to wave a flashlight and look like we know what we’re doing.”
“Here’s the flashlight, Henry.”
“Ghosts, you said?”
“Séances four times a day for thirty years.”
“Don’t hold my elbow, makes me feel useless. If I fall, shoot me!”
And he was off, hardly ricocheting down the aisle toward the orchestra pit and the great spaces beyond and below.
“It getting darker?” he said. “Let me turn on the flashlight.”
He switched it on.
“There.” He smiled. “That’s better!”
Chapter Thirty
In the dark unlit basement, there were rooms and rooms and rooms, all with mirrors lining their walls, the reflections reflecting and re-reflecting, emptiness facing emptiness, corridors of lifeless sea.
We went into the first, biggest one. Henry circled the flashlight like a lighthouse beam.
“Plenty of ghosts down here.”
The light hit and sank in the ocean deeps.
“Not the same as the ghosts upstairs. Spookier. I always wondered about mirrors and that thing called reflection. Another you, right? Four or five feet off, sunk under ice?” Henry reached out to touch the glass. “Someone under there?”
“You, Henry, and me.”
“Hot damn. I sure wish I could know that.”
We moved on along the cold line of mirrors.
And there they were. More than ghosts. Graffiti on glass. I must have sucked in my breath, for Henry swung his flashlight to my face.
“You see something I don’t?”
“My God, yes!”
I reached out to the first cold Window on Time.
My finger came away smudged with a faint trace of ancient lipstick.
“Well?” Henry bent as if to squint at my discovery. “What?”
“Margot Lawrence. R.I.P. October 1923.”
“Someone stash her here under glass?”
“Not quite. And over about three feet, another mirror: Juanita Lopez. Summer ’24.”
