Page 20 of Welcome to Gothic
“But what’s that on your skirt, dear?” Mabel asked.
Wendy glanced down and realized those brown smears were... blood. Hugh’s blood.
For the second time that day, Wendy was unconscious.
When she came to, Minnie and Mabel knelt beside her.
Minnie placed a cool wet cloth on her forehead.
Mabel patted her wrist.
“You had to ask,” Minnie was saying to Mabel.
In a low, sad voice, Mabel said, “I didn’t realize what...”
“Shh. She’s coming around.” Minnie flipped the cloth to the cooler side and put it back on Wendy’s forehead. “Stay down, dear. If you try to get up now, you’ll faint again.”
Wendy took a quivering breath to argue, and let it out. “Okay.”
Mabel got up and came back with a purple velvet pillow decorated with tassels. She lifted Wendy’s head and placed the pillow, then handed Wendy a paper cone filled with caramel corn. “For the carbs,” she said.
Wendy laughed weakly, took the cone and ate the popcorn one kernel at a time. It must have been magic, because bite by bite, she felt better. “You know I can’t resist your caramel corn,” she said.
Mabel sat back on her heels. “My evil plan is working.”
“I left my leotard back there somewhere. And my shoes.” Wendy waved a hand, indicating aback therethat meant a different era and a different life. “Do you have anything I can wear on the job? I mean, my job? My current job?”Not my job as a stuntwoman in a theater that doesn’t exist.
Minnie gestured toward the back wall of the shop. “Yesterday we got a shipment of last year’s designer workout clothing. I didn’t know what we were going to do with them, but they were made for you.”
Wendy slowly levered herself up. “Where do you come up with the designer labels? And the antique clothing?”
“There’s a magnetism to this place that brings them here.”
“Right.” Wendy got to her feet.
Minnie and Mabel hovered close.
She took a breath. She felt fine. She nodded, reassuring them, and went to the neatly folded piles of spandex. Wendy found a matching aqua outfit with all the right markings, slipped into the Vintage Gothic dressing room, changed, wadded up the cream silk outfit that had seen so much imaginary action and dumped it in the trash behind the checkout stand when she came out.
She found a pair of training shoes that fit like a dream, a solid pair of socks... and just like that, she was back to being the real Bendy Wendy, no stunts, no silk, no heels, no lost loves. She looked like herself again, and she was happy about that.Happy.
Except... she went back to the checkout stand and plucked the cream outfit out of the trash. Without looking at them, she called to Minnie and Mabel, “Have you figured out what to charge me for the props?”
“Bring it all back tomorrow,” Minnie said. “We’ll figure it out then.”
“Actually—” Mabel went to the door and looked toward the ocean “—why don’t you have your party here?”
“Here? You don’t mean backstage?” Because Wendy was never going backstage ever again. “I mean... why?”
“The fog’s coming in again.”
Wendy felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather.
“If you hosted the party in your backyard, that would be a damp and dismal celebration. Why not have it inside? Here, on the other side of the theater? Where we’re putting the bookshop?” Mabel looked at Minnie. “We could rearrange the book boxes so the children would have to jump them. They could run the bookshelves like a maze.”
Wendy felt the tightness in her chest loosen. “They could do somersaults across the floor.”
Minnie was looking at Mabel as if to say,What the hell?
