Page 30 of Girl, Haunted

‘Heard about that, have you?’

‘Everyone has. Terrible business. We’re all very shaken up,’ Isabella said as though she was reading out a list of ingredients in a shampoo bottle. Ella placed her accent around southern England. Refined at first, but slipped into something rougher when the mask wore thin.

‘You don’t seem too upset about it,’ Luca said.

Isabella clasped her hands together, all business-like. ‘Should I be? Gregory Van Allen was a parasite. A bottom-feeding hack who built his entire business on the backs of others.’

Ella asked, ‘How’d you figure that?’ There was something here, buried beneath the surface. She just had to keep digging.

Isabella's eyes hardened, like chips of green ice. ‘Van Allen was wealthy. Old money. He swooped in, throwing cash around like confetti, poaching talent, undercutting everyone else in the game. He didn't care about the artistry of this business.’

Ella glanced beyond the glass partition out to the skinned faces in the lobby. ‘Artistry? That’s what this is?’

‘Yes. You can’t just slap a few props in a room and hire people to act like lunatics. Some of us take fear seriously. Van Allen was what us Brits would call a grifter. He’d ruin a hundred lives to make a dollar. If the rumors were anything to go by, he used to secretly film his haunts. It gave him a thrill, apparently.’

Ella exchanged a glance with Luca. That explained the hidden cameras.

‘Sounds like you two had quite the rivalry going,’ Ella said. Regardless of Van Allen’s duplicity, this was starting to sound an awful lot like motive. The kind of grudge that could fester and turn murderous.

'Rivalry implies we were on equal footing,' Isabella scoffed. 'Van Allen was a pretender. It's really sad someone finally got to him, but I'm not going to lie to the cops. I won't miss him.'

Ella hung on every word, trying to peer through the cracks. ‘What do you mean –someone got to him?’

‘Ha. You think I’m the only person who hated Van Allen? He pissed off half of the people in this town. Not just in the scare trade either. The man was always swindling.’

Ella subtly processed all of Isabella’s microsignals. No twitchy body parts, no makeshift barriers with her arms and legs. Her eye movements and facial ticks were that of a textbook truth-teller.

And she didn’t like it one bit.

Time to change tacks, see how Isabella reacted to a curveball.

‘And what about Natasha Langston? Was she a pretender too?’

Isabella's expression became a mask of polite confusion. 'I'm sorry, who?'

‘Natasha Langston. Special effects artist. Worked on a lot of haunted attractions in the area, including Shadowland.'

‘Oh, Shadowland. That place looks promising from what I’ve heard. But I’m sorry, I don’t know anyone named Natasha.’

Luca asked, ‘You know Shadowland? Been there?’

‘No. One of my actors was supposed to work there. He told me about it.’

‘Name?’

Isabella spun to her desk, pulled a few sheets of paper out of her drawer. ‘I can give you a whole list of my actors if you want. I’ll star the ones who might have gigs at Shadowland.’

This transparent co-operation was wholly unexpected. A sign of innocence? Or a guilty mind trying to misdirect attention?

‘Yes. We’ll need that.’

‘These actors,’ Luca jumped in. ‘How does it work? Doesn’t every house have exclusive actors?’

Isabella rifled through a stack of papers. ‘No, honey. Far from it. These actors are just that – actors. Freelancers. They might be Macbeth one day and Psycho Clown the next.’

‘Ella stamped down the gut-punch that came with another woman calling her boyfriendhoney.‘So, what if you need an actor but they’re tied up elsewhere?’

‘There are more actors than there are gigs. We’re never short.’

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