Chet Williamson - Reign

Dennis heard the intake of breath from Donna Franklin, saw John Steinberg's knuckles whiten. The office seemed ominously still. "Is she dead?" he asked.

Abe swallowed and nodded. "Yes sir. I think so."

Later, Dennis did not remember walking down the stairs and into the auditorium. He only dimly remembered weeping, lifting Robin's broken body off the seats with Ted Lander's help, laying her gently down on the thickly carpeted aisle, sitting there next to her. As he sat and waited for more people to come, he noticed a piece of jewelry under a chair. He picked it up, saw that it was a pin, and thought that it seemed somehow familiar. He held it and sat by Robin's side until a doctor came and gave him an injection of something. He didn't even feel the needle enter his skin. The sedative made him sleepy, but he would not let himself sleep, and he would not leave Robin's side. He rode to the hospital in the ambulance with her. When they arrived, they gave him another injection, and this time, try as he would to remain awake, his eyes closed and he slept without dreaming.

He awoke in darkness, the feel of an unfamiliar bed and stiff sheets beneath him. Only semi-conscious, he made his way to the line of light that marked the bottom of a door, pushed it open, and pressed his eyes closed against the fluorescent glare of a hospital corridor. He realized that he was dressed only in his underwear, then remembered why he was there – that Robin was dead, and he had most likely been in shock.

Dennis stumbled back into the room and let the door drift shut behind him. As the light left him, he thought of the light that had left his life, thought of Robin. He did not think of her anger, of her jealousy. He remembered only her goodness, her kindness, the help she had been to him, the joy she had brought, and he wept again, but not in shock. He wept from her loss and for her pain.

When he finished, he found the light switch and flipped it on, got dressed, and left the room. A nurse at her station looked at him wide-eyed. When he said, "I'm Dennis Hamilton. I'm all right now. Where is my wife?" her eyes got even wider.

"Just… wait here a minute," she said, and picked up a telephone.

Dennis did not wait to learn who she was calling. He walked down the corridor until he found an elevator, rode to the ground floor, and went outside, where he confirmed that he was indeed in the Kirkland Medical Center, a slab of steel and glass that sat on the site of David Kirk's long dried up spring. It was a mile from the heart of Kirkland, and he decided to walk. Along with inconsolable grief, he felt an overwhelming desire for activity, to shake off the effect of the sedative, to lessen his sorrow by moving.

He was exhausted before he had walked two hundred yards. At a phone booth on a corner he dialed Sid's number, and asked him to come and pick him up. Sid was there in ten minutes.

"How did it happen, Sid?" Dennis asked him in a thick voice.

"She fell off the catwalk when the light went on," said Sid, his eyes on the road.

"What was she doing up there?"

"Showing Ann the star set-up."

“… Ann? She and Ann were up there together?"

Sid nodded. "Ann was still up there when Munro and the police went up to look around. She was lying down, holding on to the catwalk for dear life. They finally talked her into coming down. She's all right now. Terri took her home." He sighed, and his voice grew softer. "Ted and Amy saw the whole thing. Robin slipped through, Ann tried to save her, but… the ceiling just fell away beneath her, section of wire came apart, and… I'm sorry, Dennis. She was a wonderful girl."

They rode in silence until Sid drove the car down the ramp and into the garage beneath the theatre. When the motor stopped, Dennis said, "How did the light come on?"

"Nobody knows. That's the thing of it. Nobody knows."

Goddammit, somebody knew, thought Dan Munro savagely. It was after two o'clock in the morning and still he could not sleep. He prowled around his basement rec room like a caged tiger, bound by the limits of his imagination. There had to be an answer somewhere, had to be a pattern. There had been just too damn many "accidents" to be coincidental – first the Werton kid, then Harry Ruhl carving himself open, and now Hamilton's wife taking a high dive.

He picked up the clipboard on which he had scrawled his notes. At the time that hot light had gone on, everybody had an alibi except for two people – Dennis Hamilton and Ann Deems. Hamilton because he was supposedly on his way to the offices to get some paperwork to show the Landers, and Ann Deems because the only other person she was with was now dead. Besides, she couldn't have turned on the light from the front of the ceiling. The only switch was in the projection booth. Even assuming that there was some collusion between Hamilton and Ann Deems, there seemed to be no way that he could have left the Landers, gotten up to the booth, turned on the light at just the right time, and then scurried back down to the offices to be there at the time Donna Franklin and John Steinberg said he was.

Besides, the Landers had sworn that the Deems woman had tried to save Mrs. Hamilton. "She was leaning over so far she almost fell herself," Ted Lander had said, and his semi-hysterical little wife had backed him up.

But what bothered Munro most was the pin that they removed from Hamilton's hand when they took him to the hospital. Both Steinberg and Donna Franklin had said they saw him pick it up near Robin Hamilton's body. Ann Deems had identified it as hers, but said that she had lost it the day before, and had no idea how it had gotten where Hamilton had found it.

Neither did Munro, and that fact was driving him crazy.

He looked at his list of possibilities again. Maybe Ann Deems had pushed Robin Hamilton, then changed her mind and tried to save her. But then who had turned the light on, and why? The sudden blaze of light would have blinded Ann Deems as well as Mrs. Hamilton. Then maybe a third person was up there, turned on the light and pushed the victim? Physically impossible. Besides, everyone except Hamilton had a firm alibi.

It always came back to Hamilton, though he could have had nothing to do with it and keep on the time schedule that had been established. Ted Landers said that less than a minute had passed between the time Hamilton left them and when Robin Hamilton shot through the ceiling. Munro himself had tried sprinting from the inner lobby up the flights of stairs to the projection booth, and his best time had been two minutes.

But if Dennis Hamilton had had nothing to do with it, then why had Robin Hamilton called her husband's name before she fell? A cry for help? Maybe. But both the Landers and Ann Deems said that she had cried out something else, though none of them had been able to make out the words.

What the hell had she said? And where had the pin come from? Munro was convinced that if he knew the answer to those two questions, he'd feel a lot less stupid than he did.

What the hell, he wondered for the hundredth time that long, cold night, had she said?

You royal bastard!

Dennis shuddered into wakefulness as the cry reverberated within his mind. He sat up in the darkness, hearing its echoes die away. Robin's voice. Had he been dreaming? The words had seemed so real.

He turned on the bedside lamp. The space beside him was empty, and with a terrible ache he realized that it would remain so. Robin was dead, and he was filled with grief.

But why had he heard her voice?

The glowing numerals of the clock read 3:17 A.M. He had been sleeping for only an hour. When Sid had helped him onto the bed, it had seemed to embrace him, drown him in its softness, and he fell asleep so quickly he did not remember Sid leaving the room.

Dennis stood up, slipped on a dressing gown, and walked down the hall into the living room, where Sid, snoring softly, was lying on the larger of the two couches. Dennis tiptoed past him and went out the entrance to the suite, then made his way to the balcony level of the theatre.