She wants to take a sip of her coffee from the foam cup he has placed in front of her, but she knows that her hand will shake. That’s the tip-off. She might look calm on the outside, but the way she handles a coffee cup will reveal the opposite. Hers would slosh back and forth. She’d spill it.

“I need to know how she died,” Caroline says again, her eyes flicking to a file lying on the table between them, wondering why the cause of death is so important to her.

After all, dead is dead.

“Blows to the back of the head,” Matt says. “With a blunt instrument.”

Visions of a raised hammer, a clenched fist, the descent.

Why did I even ask?

He opens the file, withdraws what is obviously a stack of photographs, holds them so she can see only the back side, like a folded hand of cards in a poker game.

“I’d like to see the doll again,” Caroline says, stalling for time. She sees Matt shudder and says quickly, “A picture, I meant. You must have one.”

Not much gets through this tough detective’s steely coat of manly armor, but Caroline knows Matt’s embarrassing secret: he suffers from a condition known as pediophobia. In layman’s terms, he is afraid of dolls. Caroline has witnessed the panic attacks, seen him work up an unnatural sweat, watched him struggle to breathe normally whenever he came into viewing range of any kind of doll.

He sorts through the file and hands a photo to her.

Caroline stares at the fairy doll, even more sure of her suspicions.

Matt busies himself by placing another picture on the table, facedown. Selects another. He returns the others to the file folder and picks up the remaining ones. “Ready?” he says.

Caroline doesn’t answer immediately.

Then she nods.

9

“A ghost?” Bonnie said, sitting on the edge of the stage and fussing with her handlebar mustache. “What that woman won’t think of next.”

“She’s off to the historical society to go through records,” Gretchen said. “She’s hoping something will turn up in the history of the house to explain its ghostly activity.”

April, surrounded by yards of billowing pink material, paused in the act of threading a needle. She glanced over the top of her reading glasses. “She wants all of us to stay away from the museum.”

“That’s not going to happen.” Gretchen watched the amateur seamstress sew a ball gown for the six-foot Barbie mannequin. April spent more time ripping out and redoing than moving forward.

“Hope Nina’s close encounter doesn’t come back to ‘haunt’ us,” April said, giggling.

Bonnie put on the man’s wig over her own red one. “Nina should hire a ghost hunter to track it down and eliminate it,” she said.

Gretchen’s cell phone rang.

Finally!

“I’m out of jail,” Daisy said from the other end of the line. “They got around to questioning me early this morning. I’m free, but I need a place to stay tonight. They won’t release my things to me yet.”

The homeless woman could live without shelter, but take her shopping cart filled with junk and she didn’t know what to do.

“Of course, you’re always welcome at our house.” More than she knew. One of these days, Gretchen hoped to permanently convert the homeless woman. So far, though, Daisy hadn’t stayed more than a night or two. Then she’d vanished, only to reappear back on the street. Maybe this would be the time she stayed and turned her life around. “Where’s Nacho?” Gretchen asked.

“I haven’t seen him or any of the other men yet, but he’ll come around sooner or later. I’m not worried about him.” Daisy, usually in a delusional state, sounded amazingly lucid.

“What happened in the cemetery, Daisy?”

“We don’t get involved. You know that. All I can say is that we’d have been long gone if we suspected that kind of trouble.”

“You didn’t see anything? Hear anything?”

“I don’t get involved,” the homeless woman insisted. “Catch you later.”

And Daisy disconnected.

“Five minutes,” Gretchen called out to the cast. “And we’ll take it from the top.”

“Get the pistol,” she heard Bonnie say. “We’re going to do us some shooting.”

Gretchen worked with the cast all afternoon, going over the second act, the act when Doris was about to find out that all the women in the room had dallied with her husband. Bonnie flubbed one line after another. Julie ran interference, displaying a level of peacekeeping skills that Gretchen wished she had.

In the corner of the room, April busied herself with her sewing project. The rat-a-tat of the sewing machine caused a brief flare-up among the doll club members that was extinguished when April agreed to wait until rehearsal was over to run it again. Instead, she fitted her creation on the enormous doll, sticking pins here and there. Gretchen noticed that one sleeve was much shorter than the other.

Halfway through the second act, Gretchen remembered an important detail. “When is Karen coming to work on the lighting? Isn’t she the one who offered?”

“She was going to do it,” April said through a mouthful of pins, “but she’s babysitting for her granddaughter the weekend of the performance. She can’t help.”

“When were you going to tell me?”

“I forgot.”

“Can you work them?” Gretchen didn’t have much choice. She’d take anybody she could get.

“I’m way too busy with the museum and my sewing project.”

“But you have to.”

“I don’t know anything about lights, and I refuse to be bullied into it.”

From the look on April’s face, she wasn’t going to budge from her position behind the sewing machine.

One more thing for Gretchen to take care of.

The afternoon went quickly, not exactly without hitches, but at least Julie fired the murder weapon at the right moment and Bonnie’s mustache stayed attached to her face when she hit the floor. It was a statement about the cast that Gretchen was thankful for such small things. At four o’clock Nina hustled in, led by Tutu, who pranced along on her pink leash.

“Find out anything about the ghost?” Gretchen asked.

“I’m pointed in the right direction. Where is he?”

“Uh… where’s who?”

“Brandon’s picking me up here. I absolutely love that man, hair the color of wheat and green brooding eyes that speak of depth and danger.”

“Oh, brother,” April said.

Nina had been casually dating a Scottsdale detective, Brandon Kline, who was a good friend of Matt’s. Brandon and Nina were made from the same cloth. He encouraged her when she went off on one of her New Age tangents.

“I haven’t seen him,” Gretchen said.

“I’ll help you direct until he arrives.” Nina swept toward the stage. The cast members saw her charging and were more nimble than usual in their race for the break room.

Gretchen had to think of a distraction quickly to keep Nina busy until her man arrived. “What’s the story with the ghost? You didn’t tell me what you found out.”

April tee-heed.

“Are you smirking?” Nina confronted April.

“Nope,” said April, bending over the sewing machine, making it roar to life.

Nina took a seat in Gretchen’s director’s chair. “I found a picture of the family that lived in the house in the early 1920s. Spanish Colonial Revival architecture dates back to around that time, so the family must have built the home. The owner’s name was John Swilling, and, get this, he had a daughter.”

April stopped the machine. “Well, that’s it then,” she said. “Either John or his daughter is the ghost.”

Gretchen couldn’t tell whether April was seriously considering the problem or subtly mocking the idea. Nina suspected hidden sarcasm and scowled at her.

“Go on,” Gretchen said.

“Flora was the girl’s name,” Nina continued. “I found a sepia photograph of her. Flora must have been about ten years old at the time the picture was taken-it shows her holding a doll in her arms. And there’s more.”