The Phantom of Oz, Installment #1
Plus a new Best Place to Hide the Body
Hello! Welcome to my weekly serialization of The Phantom of Oz. We’ll start the book in a minute, but first…
A couple of posts ago, I wrote that Microsoft had been tempting me with digital wallpaper that featured landscapes that cried out to be Best Places to Hide the Body. Now the Nature Conservancy has joined the game. How else do you explain them sending me this calendar photo of a cypress swamp in Texas?
Okay, so I added the bodies, but still.
On to the book:
THE PHANTOM OF OZ (Ivy Meadows Mystery #5)
A Kings River Life Magazine Best Book of 2018
Creepy Munchkins. A Mysterious Phantom. And a Real Wicked Witch.
Who dropped a chandelier on the Wicked Witch of the East? Was it the ghost who haunts the Grand Phoenician Theatre? A “wicked witch” among the cast of The Wizard: A Space OZpera? Or was it someone—or something—more sinister? Actress and part-time PI Ivy Meadows has been hired to uncover the cause of the creepy accidents that plague the roadshow.
It’s Ivy’s most personal case so far. Her best friend Candy, who’s touring with the show, is caught in a downward spiral of self-destruction, and is in more danger than she knows. To save her friend and the show, Ivy must answer some tough questions: Do spirits really exist? What is real beauty? What does friendship mean? Ivy needs to learn the answers, and fast—before Candy reaches the point of no return.
“An extraordinarily in-depth and timely exploration of how social media and the entertainment industry can affect a woman’s body image...Ivy only becomes more likable as she acknowledges her own vulnerabilities, jealousy, and insecurities, ensuring for the success of this original and satisfying series.” Kings River Life Magazine
Chapter 1
A Series of Incidents so Curious and So Inexplicable
“I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do, I do, I do,” said the Scarecrow.
“Shouldn’t that be the Cowardly Lion’s line?” I whispered to the Wicked Witch of the East, who sat beside me in the darkened dressing room.
“He couldn’t make it,” she said. “Hot date with the Tin Man.”
“But...The Phantom of the Opera is here,” sang the man with the skull for a face, loudly enough that the candles on the counter flickered.
“This is not an opera house,” said the munchkin. “It’s a theater. The ghost’s proper name should be The Phantom of the Grand Phoenician Theatre.”
“Or maybe she’s The Phantom of the Oprah,” said the Scarecrow. “After all, we have been dealing with reality TV.”
“You all know the ghost has a name,” said the Witch. “She’s the Lady in White. Now, are we having a séance or not?”
We all assented.
“Then shhh,” she said.
Silence. Then the munchkin’s hands trembled on the Ouija board’s planchette. “Hey, I felt something!”
“Me too,” I said.
We all kept our fingers on the planchette as it traveled across the wooden board to “hello.”
“She’s here,” whispered the Scarecrow.
“Thank you for joining us,” the Witch said to the air. “We suspect all the accidents we’ve had lately are your way of trying to tell us something.So please, what do you want?”
The planchette moved.
“H...” We all breathed. “A...M.”
“Ham?” said the skull-faced man. “She wants a sandwich?”
The planchette continued to skim the board. “I...L…T...O...N.”
“Hamilton. The ghost wants to see Hamilton!” the Scarecrow said.
The Witch whacked him on the arm. “Stop it. That was obviously you.” The Scarecrow played the musical’s soundtrack every night in his dressing room before the show. “We need to be serious here,” said the Witch. “If we’re not, the ghost will never appear to—”
Suddenly Toto barked loudly. A cold wind that smelled like violets swept through the windowless dressing room and blew out the candles.
And from the darkness came the tinkling of a music box.
A freeze spread through me from my feet up. It glued me to my chair, like in those dreams when you need to run away but can’t move. Everyone in the room must have felt it too. No one stirred. Even Toto was still.
The music continued, the only sound in the room except for my castmates’ breathing. I scanned the now pitch-black room in my memory but didn’t remember a music box. Besides, the tune being played was not the traditional “Edelweiss” or “You Are My Sunshine.”
“Does anyone recognize that music?” I asked.
“I think it’s an eighties song,” said the skull-faced man.
“An eighties song from a 1920s-era ghost?” I said.
“It’s not an eighties song,” said the munchkin. “It was recorded in 1990.”
“How do you know that?” asked the Scarecrow. “You’re, like, eleven.”
“I’m an Iggy Pop fan,” she said.
“You are a strange little girl,” said the Scarecrow.
“It’s called ‘Candy,’” she said. “It’s a duet with that singer from the B-52s.”
“Wait,” I said. “I think I remember it. Doesn’t he say something about not letting her go?”
“That’s the one,” she said.
The ghostly music box stopped abruptly. The Lady had given us our clue.
And it didn’t bode well for my best friend.
#
I suppose I should explain.
Though séances in theaters are unusual, spooky occurrences are not. Any theater worth its salt has a ghost. There are famous ghosts, like “The Man in Gray,” who’s made his home in London’s Theatre Royal since the eighteenth century; “The Most Beautiful Girl in New York City,” a Ziegfield Follies showgirl who haunts NYCs New Amsterdam Theatre; and even Judy Garland, who’s said to appear at the Palace Theatre onBroadway. But in general, the ghosts are known only to those of us who work in the theater, who are there when the lights are off and the stage is dark and the dressing room doors creak open by themselves.
You’d think that Phoenix, being a comparatively young city, would be relatively ghost-free. After all, most of our theaters had only been around a few decades. But no. Every theater I’d worked in had at least one ghost story. And the Grand Phoenician, the Art Deco Grande Dame of Valley theaters, had the most famous ghost in town: the Lady in White.
But on the February morning when this story began—just over a week before that crazy séance—I wasn’t thinking of ghosts. I wasn’t thinking of theaters, either, even though I was wrapping up a successful run as Viola in Twelfth Night. And even though I was driving to work, I wasn’t thinking about my job at Duda Detectives or what my uncle/boss would say when I got in, this being the third time this month I’d been late. No, I was just trying to figure out who was calling me.
I didn’t recognize the number, which gave me pause. I was in a fix, phone-wise. As an actor, I needed to give out my number to pretty much anyone who wanted it. You never knew whose cousin might be filming in Phoenix and needed a twenty-something blonde. On the other hand, as a part-time almost private investigator (I was this close to getting to my license), I needed to be circumspect about giving out contact info, since PIs didn’t usually work on cases involving nice people. I typically erred on the side of optimism, which meant I needed to be careful with unknown numbers. I picked up on speakerphone. “Hello?” I shouted. My Nissan pickup was great for back roads, but boy, it was noisy on the highway.
“Whuifgfai Ivy?”
Dang. The caller must be using speakerphone too. But it must be about acting work. Ivy Meadows was my stage name. I used my real name, Olive Ziegwart, at the detective agency.
“Sorry, I can’t hear you,” I shouted. “Who’s calling?
“Gadjkfsah Andi,” crackled a female voice. “Andi Oo tie.”
“Andi Uti?” Maybe an indigenous woman named Andi? Cool. Maybe I’d get to film something on the res.
“Annie oo pie, or fest friend? I ear in town.”
“Candy!” Candy MoonPie was my best friend. She moved out to LA almost two years ago, hoping for film or TV work. But I had her number. Or at least I thought I did. I suddenly realized she hadn’t returned any of my calls for a month or so. “You’re in town? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
“Codpkaated.”
Cod-caked? “What?” I grabbed my phone and took it off speaker.
Hooooonk!
“What was that?” Candy said into my ear.
“Just an unexpected lane change.” I waved an apology at the semi driver I’d cut off. “So you’re in town? For how long? And where have you been?”
“Like I said before, it’s complicated.”
Ah, “complicated,” not “cod-caked.” Much better. Maybe. “When can I see you?”
“That’s what I’m calling about. Can you come to rehearsal tonight? We’re at the Grand Phoenician.”
“Omigod, did you get a touring gig?” The aforementioned theater hosted only touring shows and celebrities. Though Candy hadn’t been in contact for a while, I was pretty sure she hadn’t become famous overnight.
“Yeah. Can you come?”
“Sure. No show tonight.” Twelfth Night didn’t run on Wednesdays. “Thanks. I’d really like to see you.” Now that I could hear Candy better, I also heard something in her voice, or rather a lack of something. Candy always sounded like she was having fun, or just about to go have fun, or maybe a little tired from having fun. But now, the soft Southern lilt in her voice was gone, replaced by something hard and fast, like her Louisiana accent had up and moved to Brooklyn.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Fine and dandy.” Well, that sounded more like her. “Come by the stage door tonight and give them my name, and they’ll let you in. Just remember my name’s Candace Moon now.”
“Since when?”
“Since I needed to register with the unions.” As actors, we had to register our names with the unions, sort of like businesses had to do with corporation commissions. “I couldn’t use my real one. It sounds like a stripper.”
Candy was known in Phoenix as Candy MoonPie partly because she loved the marshmallow-y treats, and partly because she never liked to use her real name: Candy Treat. Her parents had some sense of humor.
“So I’ll see you tonight?” she said.
“Of course.” I pulled into a parking spot just a block away from my uncle’s office building. “Hey, I forgot to ask. What show are you—”
But Candy had already hung up.
I got out of my truck, slower than I should have for someone who was late to work. My stomach felt funny, and I didn’t think it was thediscounted sausage I’d had for breakfast. It was Candy. She wasn’t herself, and that wasn’t good.
Watch for Installment #2 of The Phantom of Oz next Friday (Halloween)!
In the meantime, you can enjoy this bonus:
Iggy Pop and his manager were exceptionally kind and cool when I wrote them about including lyrics from “Candy” in Phantom. Unfortunately, the rights had been sold and I never heard back from the company who now owns the lyrics, which is why I skirt around them in the first chapter. But you can hear the words and music right here:
See you next week!