The Hanging Hill (2 page)

2

Reginald Grimes sat alone in the kitchen of his sparsely furnished apartment, sipping a mug of bitter tepid coffee and flipping through the pages of his dog-eared script for
Curiosity Cat
.

Grimes was the artistic director of the Hanging Hill Playhouse. Had been for years. He was famous for his magnificently mounted musicals. Infamous for his rants against anyone who didn’t work as tirelessly as he thought they should.

“Cut this,” he muttered, scratching a red line through a sentence. “This, too.” Another red line. “Fix this.” A looping red circle.

Rehearsals for the new musical would start first thing tomorrow morning. The author, Judy Magruder Jennings, would be arriving at the theater tonight.

She’d have work to do.

The show was good as written. Nearly great.

But it would be absolutely perfect when Grimes had finished working his theatrical magic.

He flipped forward through the pages and came to a scene in the second act. Curiosity Cat had gone missing. The two children who love him—a boy and a girl—are out in the dark alleys of a scary city, searching for their beloved pet. They fear he might be hurt or trapped.

Or worse.

Grimes read the lyrics to the children’s emotional duet:
We’ll never find another cat like that
.

“Just like Jinx,” he muttered, remembering the sleek gray cat with the amber eyes who used to howl out in the alley just below his bedroom window when he was a child living in that horribly dark, dank place.

The Saint Ignatius Home for Boys.

The orphanage.

Grimes would sometimes sneak food from the cafeteria and smuggle it back to his room for Jinx. Perhaps a pinch of tuna fish, if there was any to be found in the nauseatingly crusted-over noodle casserole so often served for supper. Maybe an almost-empty carton of milk retrieved from the big rubber barrel where the boys dumped the scraps and trash from their trays.

He’d slink with his treasure back to his bedchamber, wait for the other boys to fall asleep, then creep over to the window, pry it open, and place Jinx’s dinner outside on its filthy sill. Grimes would even try to fashion the waxy box into something resembling a bowl—even though this was extremely difficult, given his unusual deformity. Then he’d lie on his bed, the one nearest the window, and sleep with one eye open, waiting for Jinx to spring up to the ledge, tightrope-walk over to the milk, and lap up his feast, which, of course, he always did.

Until the day he didn’t.

The last carton of milk stayed outside the window for two full weeks. The sun soured it. Maggots writhed in the curdling slime. Still, Grimes would not remove the milk—hoping against hope that Jinx would return, knowing the cat would be ravenously famished, and therefore not very finicky, when it did.

Soon the rancid milk began to smell. The nuns who ran Saint Ignatius scoured the building, searching for the source of the foul odor, and found it perched outside the window near young Reginald Grimes’s bed.

“It was for my friend, Jinx the cat,” he told them after a prolonged interrogation. “I was attempting to feed the hungry.”

Grimes hoped the nuns might forgive him, perhaps even praise him. After all, wasn’t that what the Bible said to do, feed the hungry?

“Young man,” Sister Beatrice, the sternest of the stern lot, had snapped at him, “that commandment does not apply to stray dogs, pigeons, or alley cats!”

Grimes was severely punished. For stealing food. For endangering the health and hygiene of everyone in the building. For misinterpreting Scripture.

Grimes pushed the
Curiosity Cat
script aside.

“Bah!” he said, rubbing his watery eyes. “Silly, emotional sap. Going all weepy for a flea-infested feline?” He
tsked
and sounded just like Sister Beatrice.

Good.

He didn’t have time for silly saccharine-soaked sentimentality.

There was a new show to put on.

He needed to: Concentrate. On. His. Work.

Still. That song. It haunted him.

We’ll never find another cat like that
.

It had been thirty-five years since he had last seen Jinx. The cat had been dead for three decades and more.

Still.

Reginald Grimes wished he could see Jinx again.

Wished he could hear his throaty, contented purr.

He wished he could bring that yellow-eyed cat back from the dead, because it might be nice to have at least one friend.

There was a noise at the window over the kitchen sink.

A low rumble.

A purr?

“Meow.”

For an instant, maybe half an instant, Reginald Grimes saw his childhood companion. Sleek and gray. Glowing amber eyes. Jinx was perched right outside his kitchen window!

Claws out, Jinx hissed and swatted at the glass.

And then, before Grimes was even certain what he had seen, the cat was once again gone.

3

“Sorry we’re so behind schedule,” said Zack’s step-mom, Judy.

“That’s okay,” said Zack. He was just glad no ghosts had shown up in the hotel suite to help them pack their bags for the three-week trip to Chatham. It was almost seven p.m. and getting dark outside. He dumped an armload of socks into his open suitcase. All the fuzzy balls were mismatched: red socks with blue, white with sort-of-white, ankle-striped athletic with ankle-logo sport.

“What’s up with the socks?” Judy asked.

“I think I lost some in the laundry room.”

“Maybe the sock gremlins got ’em!”

Zack, not really in the mood to joke about supernatural stuff, faked a pretty good chuckle anyhow.

Judy’s big brown eyes lit up with a fanciful idea. She got a lot of them. In fact, she got more than anyone Zack had ever met except maybe himself. “You know, Zack, this hotel is brand-new,” Judy said in her hushed storyteller voice. “So, maybe … just maybe … they built it on top of a fairy kingdom where all the wee people slumber inside stolen socks instead of sleeping bags!”

Zack played along—even though he knew there used to be a bank on this plot of ground, not a fairy kingdom. He Googled it. Mad Dog Murphy had, indeed, robbed the North Chester branch of the Connecticut Building and Loan back on August 3, 1959—the happiest day of his life.

“Of course,” said Judy, “there might be a more logical explanation.”

“Like what?”

“Well, they are socks, Zack. They could’ve grown feet and walked away.”

“True,” said Zack.

“They could’ve
run
away and joined a sock puppet circus.”

Now Zack laughed for real. Judy was the only adult he knew with an imagination even crazier than his. It was probably why she was a writer. And why they got along so well.

“Maybe it was another ghost,” suggested Zack, testing the waters. “A sock-lifter spirit.”

Judy closed her suitcase. Studied his face. “Have you seen something, hon?”

“Nah,” he lied. “Not, you know, recently. I’m just goofing around.”

“You can tell me if you do.”

“Okay.”

“No matter what. You know that, right?”

“Yeah.” He smiled, so she did, too. Zack knew he could talk to Judy about ghosts and gremlins and sock-swiping nymphs, because they both understood that the supernatural world was very, very real. In fact, they had spent some quality time there together. However, Zack didn’t think this was such a hot time to let Judy know that one of Connecticut’s most notorious criminals had shown up downstairs just in time for the breakfast buffet.

She had enough to worry about.
Curiosity Cat
was the first show Judy Magruder had ever written, and since it was about to be produced, live onstage, at one of the biggest, most famous summer stock theaters in all of America, she was, well, to put it mildly,
freaking out!

Therefore, Mr. Mad Dog Murphy and his traveling companions, Old Sparky (according to the Internet, that was what people had called Connecticut’s electric chair) and the curly-haired lady he called Doll Face, would remain Zack’s secret.

Besides, they were about to get into a car and drive far, far away. Murphy, his chair, and his ghostly girlfriend would soon be nothing more than a distant memory, a bad dream forgotten just like the dragon-sized bee who’d been chasing you with an earsplitting buzz that was really your alarm clock telling you it was time to wake up.

“Hey! Easy, boy!”

Zipper, Zack’s feisty little Jack Russell terrier, hopped up on the bed and started nuzzling his muzzle inside the suitcase, rooting around in the crannies between stacks of Zack’s clothes.

“You sure those socks are clean?” Judy asked, cocking a quizzical eyebrow.

“Yep. Completely stink free.”

Zipper kept digging, pawing a tunnel between some T-shirts and jeans.

“Did you pack any dog treats?” Judy asked with a laugh. “Peanut butter biscuits? Liver snaps?
Bones?”

“Nope. Just this ball!” Zack dug out Zipper’s favorite toy: a spongy ball with half its outside color chipped off. “Go get it, Zip!”

He tossed the ball across the hotel room. The dog leapt off the bed and flew after it. Zack saw his chance and slammed his suitcase shut.

It was time to hit the road.

They had a show to put on.

4

At seven-thirty p.m., Kelly Fagan was sitting in front of her makeup mirror in a dressing room backstage at the Hanging Hill Playhouse, getting ready for the Saturday-evening performance of
Bats in Her Belfry
, a Broadway musical from the 1950s about Dracula and the women who loved him.

The summer stock revival was a smash hit—just like all of Reginald Grimes’s productions at the Hanging Hill.

The man was a genius. Dark, brooding, mysterious.

Kelly couldn’t wait to introduce her famous director to her parents, who had driven all the way from Canton, Ohio, to Chatham, Connecticut, just to see her sing and dance in her first big show. She was one of the dancing bats. All the chorus girls were bats. The guys were werewolves.

She leaned in closer to the mirror. Becoming a bat involved applying a great deal of black and red greasepaint to her face, especially around the eyes.

She dabbed on a dollop of makeup and felt a chill tingle down her spine.

Goose bumps sprouted on both arms.

The pretty face smiling back at her from the mirror wasn’t her own.

Kelly gasped.

The face disappeared.

“Everything okay, Kelly?”

It was Vickie, another chorus girl, who had just stepped into the dressing room.

“Yeah.”

Vickie was carrying an old record album.

“What’s that?” Kelly asked.

“Bats in Her Belfry
. Original 1955 cast recording. Vinyl. Thought it might be cool to listen to it later, if, you know, we can dig up an old-fashioned record player.”

“Who’s she?” Kelly asked, pointing at the woman swooning in Dracula’s arms on the cover.

“Kathleen Williams. She played Lucy. Sang ‘Bitten and Smitten.’”

Kelly nodded.

Now she had a name to go with the face.

Kathleen Williams had been the pretty woman staring at her from inside the mirror.

5

At dusk, the Riverstream Hospital for the Criminally Insane loomed like a dark castle set against angry red clouds in the lowering sky.

Two olive-skinned men, both sporting bushy mustaches and tasseled red hats, ascended the steep stone steps to the main entrance of the dilapidated building.

“Tell me, Hakeem,” asked one of the men, “why do we need him?”

“He is of the royal bloodline.”

“We could do it ourselves!”

“No, Habib. We could not.” Hakeem peered up at the weather-beaten six-story structure. In a small dormer jutting up through the crumbling slate roof, faint candlelight danced across the barred glass of a window. “Come. He waits for us.”

“He knows we are coming?”

“Of course. Do you think we would be here had he not summoned us? Hurry. His time draws near.”

“He is dying?”

Hakeem nodded solemnly.

“Then we
must
raise the army on our own!”

“No,” said Hakeem. “There is another. An heir we have secretly supported for many years.”

“Who?”

“Come. You ask far too many questions. All shall be revealed. Come.”

They clambered up the final steps and passed underneath a grand fieldstone arch shrouded by the veined web of long-dead ivy.

A guard was stationed in the cavernous lobby. “State your business.”

Hakeem did not recognize the young man. Typically, he dealt with a senile old sentry named Bob.

“Where is Bob?”

“Retired. State your business.”

“I am Hakeem. This is my associate Habib. We are here to visit the professor.”

The guard hiked up his gun belt, jangling an enormous ring of keys. “You’ve visited before?”

“Yes. Many times.”

“You know the rules?”

“Yes.”

The guard picked up a clipboard. “Go straight to his cell. Don’t talk to any of the others. Stay six feet away from him at all times.”

Hakeem nodded. “As I said, we know the rules.”

The guard eyed him suspiciously.

“You family?”

“No.”

“Friend?”

“Yes.”

“Known him a long time?”

“Yes.”

“So how old is he, anyway? Somebody told me he’s a hundred.”

“One hundred and five.”

“I hear he used to be in show business. A magician.”

“That is correct.”

“Did he do birthday parties? That where he killed the kid?”

“Please, sir. We are in a hurry. Time is of the essence.”

“Why? Your friend isn’t goin’ anywhere any time soon. He’s chained and shackled to his wheelchair. Has been ever since 1939 when he went berserk and murdered that little girl.”

“Please, sir. May we kindly proceed upstairs?”

“Sign here.” He handed Hakeem the clipboard. “Be careful up there. Stick to the middle of the corridors. Stay away from the bars on the cell doors. You never know when one of these psychos might try to reach out and kill somebody new.”