The Eyes of Darkness

trip. And it had been blank the last time she'd been in this room.
    Belatedly, as she pressed her fingertips to the words on the chalkboard, the possible meaning of them struck her. As a sponge soaked up water, she took a chill from the surface of the slate. Not dead. It was a denial of Danny's death. An angry refusal to accept the awful truth. A challenge to reality.
    In one of her terrible seizures of grief, in a moment of crazy dark despair, had she come into this room and unknowingly printed those words on Danny's chalkboard?
    She didn't remember doing it. If she had left this message, she must be having blackouts, temporary amnesia of which she was totally unaware. Or she was walking in her sleep. Either possibility was unacceptable.
    Dear God, unthinkable.
    Therefore, the words must have been here all along. Danny must have left them before he died. His printing was neat, like everything else about him, not sloppy like this scrawled message. Nevertheless, he must have done it. Must have.
    And the obvious reference that those two words made to the bus accident in which he had perished?
    Coincidence. Danny, of course, had been writing about something else, and the dark interpretation that could be drawn from those two words now, after his death, was just a macabre coincidence.
    She refused to consider any other possibility because the alternatives were too frightening.
    She hugged herself. Her hands were icy; they chilled her sides even through her nightgown.
    Shivering, she thoroughly erased the words on the chalkboard, retrieved her handgun, and left the room, pulling the door shut behind her.
    She was wide awake, but she had to get some sleep. There was so much to do in the morning. Big day.
    In the kitchen, she withdrew a bottle of Wild Turkey from the cupboard by the sink. It was Michael's favorite bourbon. She poured two ounces into a water glass. Although she wasn't much of a drinker, indulging in nothing more than a glass of wine now and then, with no capacity whatsoever for hard liquor, she finished the bourbon in two swallows. Grimacing at the bitterness of the spirits, wondering why Michael had extolled this brand's smoothness, she hesitated, then poured another ounce. She finished it quickly, as though she were a child taking medicine, and then put the bottle away.
    In bed again she snuggled in the covers and closed her eyes and tried not to think about the chalkboard. But an image of it appeared behind her eyes. When she couldn't banish that image, she attempted to alter it, mentally wiping the words away. But in her mind's eye, the seven letters reappeared on the chalkboard: NOT DEAD. Although she repeatedly erased them, they stubbornly returned. She grew dizzy from the bourbon and finally slipped into welcome oblivion.
     
     
     

3
     
    tuesday afternoon tlna watched the final dress rehearsal of Magyck! from a seat in the middle of the Golden Pyramid showroom.
    The theater was shaped like an enormous fan, spreading under a high domed ceiling. The room stepped down toward the stage in alternating wide and narrow galleries. On the wider levels, long dinner tables, covered with white linen, were set at right angles to the stage. Each narrow gallery consisted of a three-foot-wide aisle with a low railing on one side and a curving row of raised, plushly padded booths on the other side. The focus of all the seats was the immense stage, a marvel of the size required for a Las Vegas spectacular, more than half again as large as the largest stage on Broadway. It was so huge that a DC-9 airliner could be rolled onto it without using half the space available—a feat that had been accomplished as part of a production number on a similar stage at a hotel in Reno several years ago. A lavish use of blue velvet, dark leather, crystal chandeliers, and thick blue carpet, plus an excellent sense of dramatic lighting, gave the mammoth chamber some of the feeling of a cozy cabaret in spite of its size.
    Tina sat in one of the third-tier booths, nervously sipping ice water as she watched her show.
    The dress rehearsal ran without a problem. With seven massive production numbers, five major variety acts, forty-two girl dancers, forty-two boy dancers, fifteen showgirls, two boy singers, two girl singers (one temperamental), forty-seven crewmen and technicians, a twenty-piece orchestra, one elephant, one lion, two black panthers, six golden retrievers, and twelve white doves, the logistics were mind-numbingly