The whomp-whir of a Hula-hoop snaked in and out of my peripheral vision. Had I gone back in time, or had someone failed to move with the times?

The scope of the picture didn't matter. I knew one more thing about my visions. I could look behind and around me but I couldn't see around corners. That kept me from seeing who was using the hoop. I a.s.sumed it was a teenager.

I saw Dominique's face exactly as I remembered her from our December lunch as she looked at pictures in a sc.r.a.pbook, mostly of her with a handsome, mature man, arm in arm, smiling at each other and for the camera.

So this was her rather recently and not back in time. However, just to complicate matters, she was wearing the rust-and-gold brocade Victorian gown, but why she'd dress in costume, in a seventies den, during the new millennium, I couldn't imagine.

Unless the den was a set here in the theater. But the biggest oddity was the Hula-hoop. I'd heard there was a resurgence of use for exercise and physical therapy, but it didn't fit the scene, despite the fact that I stood in the midst of it.

"So why did you call me over in the middle of an obsessively unnecessary dress rehearsal?" she asked the person around the corner, the one wielding the green-striped hoop.

"Your director is a nutcase," came a strange raspy voice from the Hula- hoop corner. A voice some might consider a threat.

It reminded me of old Mrs. Thompson after her throat surgery.

"I called you because I had a brilliant idea," Deep Throat said. "I think we should steal the diamonds you wear in the play and run away together. Live life to the full, no holds barred. It's about time we came out of the closet."

Yikes, I thought. Didn't see that coming. The speaker, aka the Hula- hoop user, could have been male or female, young or old, but he/she remained around that corner and out of my line of vision.

Sure, I could look all around the room, even behind me, because I wasn't wearing the dress inciting the vision, but I still couldn't propel myself, nor the object of my vision, into my line of sight. Sc.r.a.p!

"I love you, but you're nuts," Dominique told Deep Throat. Love? Really? "We'd never get away with stealing the diamonds," she declared. "And you know it."

"Sure we would. Who'd suspect us of all people? Now that my throat cancer is gone, we could go anywhere, travel the world," he/she rasped.

"Why bother stealing them?" Dom asked.

"Just for the fun of p.i.s.sing off that greedy phony. He's just like his mother. We'll leave a tell-all note and leave Kyle to run the show. You did a good job with that boy, Dom. I'm proud of him."

"You should be. He's just like you."

Huh? What? They were feeding me puzzle pieces that didn't fit, or they fit a different puzzle than the one I was trying to put together.

Someone grabbed me and pushed me, face- first, against a wall. I thought tobacco voice had caught me invading his seventies den. I mean, Dominique would have known me, so it had to be the room's other occupant.

Then I began to focus from without, rather than from within, and the water stain in the shape of New Hampshire caused by the likewise-seventies air conditioner was replaced by Eve standing in front of me, shaking me until my teeth rattled.

I caught her in a bear hug. "Eve, I'm so glad it's you." Unfortunately, by hugging her, I grasped the dress again and put myself into a different vision surrounding the same dress.

I found myself backstage this time, curtain closed, lights on, and from the conversation around me, this was an after-show party, which is why the cast was still in costume.

The actor dressed like a traveling preacher hit a gong and waited for silence to speak. "Pierpont the younger has something to say," the actor announced, and a handsome man dressed in an uber-expensive suit climbed a set of five stairs to tower over us and rock on his heels, hands behind his back. Wielding power and reveling in it.

Even though the news must be bad, he rode the rising wave until his toadies stirred and shifted, out of patience.

"I'll get right to it," he said. Too late. "You're good at what you do. Talented. You put on a h.e.l.l of a show, but we're not making a profit, and let's face it, we're not in the business to lose money."

The cast groaned. Their expressions of horror told the story. They knew what was coming.

"Tomorrow night will be our last performance," Pierpont the younger said. "We're closing the show."

I guessed that this was a pre-cancel-the-show party. The company broke up while the grumbling in general continued. Pierpont descended the steps, head higher, if that were possible, and disappeared into a dark hall.

Dom-or, I, in Dom's body-headed for her dressing room, but she stopped when she saw her ex-husband close himself in her leading man's dressing room.

"Ma-dei-ra!" She shook me and I went limp, my focus returning to the present.

"Eve! You hit me."

"You wigged out again, and we're no longer alone in the theater. Get me out of this thing. It's like the dress that ate Chicago. No, I'm a nutcase, you'll sail off to la-la land if you do. Don't touch it. I'll get out of it on my own. If you leave me, again, I might have to beat you."

"Good start," I said, rubbing my cheek. Then I heard footsteps and voices. "I wonder what happened to Kyle."

"d.a.m.n, there's no time to find out or change. Let's just get the h.e.l.l out of Oz." Still wearing the dress, Eve pried open the door and peeked out while panic shivered through me and I grabbed a black trench coat off a door hook to conceal my red suit and make myself less conspicuous.

I barely took a step before I knew that I should never act in panic, especially when it came to donning a piece of unknown clothing. Dumb, dumb, dumb. My head ached like a shimmer of rising desert heat, and I no longer stood in Dom's dressing room. Instead, I stood just outside said room, carefully opening the door a silent crack.

Dom paced while the unaddressed box that came to me carrying the seafoam gown sat on the floor beside her purse. She glanced at the door, and I leaned back, so not even my shadow could cross her threshold. Then she looked furtively around her dressing room before she glanced back at the door. The theater seemed as dark and deserted on that occasion as it had upon our arrival.

After seeming certain she was alone, she took a small gla.s.s jar of clear gel-type liquid from her purse and switched it with the one already on her dressing table.

Satisfied that I'd witnessed the switch, though not sure why, I shut Dom's dressing room door as silently and successfully as I'd opened it, and I came back to myself. It happened so fast, I felt like the door changed places with me.

"Mad!" Eve pulled on my arm. "Are you coming? The voices are getting closer."

I shed the trench coat like it was made of spiders.

Succ.u.mbing to desperate times, I grabbed a black opera cloak from the costume rack, long enough to hide my red shoes, aware this time that it might be a vision maker.

I raised the hood to hide the cinnamon highlights in my hair and found myself wishing for a certain wizard's invisibility cloak. Fiction aside, this was as close as I could get to blending with the unlit theater.

G.o.d forbid the cloak had something to say; it should speak fast, because our time alone was coming to an end.

I turned off the light, pushed Eve from the dressing room, and urged her away from the approaching footsteps. Problem: We didn't know where the h.e.l.l we were going, and not so much as a glimmer lit the end of this tunnel.

We did, however, find a ladder. "Climb," I said.

Eve whimpered.

We ended up crawling along a wide paint-stained plank walkway above a bottomless black well that might be a stage or a crocodile pit. Note to me: cloaks, not made for crawling; cloaks made for idiots. After catching myself up short with it, I grabbed the two bottom corners, one in each fist, and continued across the plank.

"Madeira Cutler," Eve whispered right behind me, her whisper shaky though she meant to be strong. "You get me into the stupidest trouble."

I turned to her. "Really? Like crawling the peak of your father's garage at age seven to catch a baby squirrel?"

"Shut up!"

"I love you, too. Now shush."

Sometime later, I was going down a safer ladder than I had climbed at the beginning of this crazy trek. I found myself behind a curtain, Eve no longer behind me. Had she not followed me down?

When had we parted ways?

I squeaked when a man in a clean but tattered Victorian suit took my arm and led me to the center of a seemingly empty room, shadows dancing, light to dark and back, again, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. "Who are you?" I asked. A dead actor was my guess.

"Your husband, of course."

So . . . my leading man, perhaps, once upon a time?

"There," he said, pointing to the outline of a body on the floor. "That's where you lost your beauty and died." He gave me a double take. "But you have your beauty back."

Ah, Dom would like that, keeping her beauty for eternity and not having to age in the public eye. But I was losing track of my purpose. I'd never conversed with a vision before, so I should make the best of it.

"I might still have my beauty," I told this phantom husband of mine, "but I lost the diamonds." Yes, I was baiting him, trying to draw him out.

"So everyone thinks," said he, "but you still have them, don't you?"

"Do I?" In my experience with Dante, I had concluded that ghosts had no reason to lie. But maybe this specter was delusional.

I realized that Dominique had died in this very spot, and I got dizzy again, my world seeming to tilt and flip entirely, my viewpoint coming from somewhere near the ceiling, the stage below me.

I tried not to look but, despite myself, I stared down at the outline of Dominique's body in the center of the stage floor.

Grief overwhelmed me.

Someone held me while I cried and stood me upright again. Above me, the ceiling. Below me, that terrible stage floor with the chalk outline of Dom's body.

"Nick!" I said when I realized those were his arms around me, him consoling me, or maybe I knew all along.

As we stood there, he grabbed a cord with a switch at the end, and the curtains parted with a "whoosh" of sweeping purple velvet, thick silk red and gold ta.s.sels bobbing with the movement.

Eve stood on the audience side of the open curtain still wearing the gold Victorian gown. Beside her, Kyle looked dapper in torn jeans and a black V-neck T-shirt, the two of them handcuffed together.

Fourteen.

He who would travel happily must travel light.

-ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPeRY "Are you all right?" Nick asked looking me over like I was a prized porcelain figurine.

I pushed back the cloak's hood to reveal my face and hair. "I'm fine."

"Good," Nick said. "Now I can beat you."

I shook out my hair. "How did you find us?"

"I called Higgins to pick me up, and he told me where he was waiting for three idiots-my words, not his. I had one of the guys from the New York office drop me in front of the theater, and after he left, I came after you by myself."

"Thank G.o.d."

"No, thank Nick," Nick said. "Come here, you two putzes," he told Eve and Kyle. "Do you know how much trouble Mad can get you into?"

"Hey?"

Eve opened her mouth and Nick gave her a warning look.

"Let me rephrase that," Nick said. "Kyle, do you know how much trouble Eve and Mad can get you into?"

Kyle winked at Eve, but he was wise enough not to tick off Nick, as he, our so- called rescuer, unlocked the cuffs.

When Kyle and Eve were free, Nick rubbed his nose, his eyes bright with amus.e.m.e.nt. "Go find your own clothes and leave the stolen costumes where they were. No more nosing around on your own." He narrowed his eyes my way. "This is a murder investigation."

Eve and Kyle left, but Nick didn't let me go. As a matter of fact, he held on tighter, making me feel cherished, important. We rarely did that in this relationship, held tight. Too dangerous, clinging.

"You've been trying to read vintage clothes again," he said.

"I think I've been hallucinating, instead. Not much I saw made sense. And I've never had a historical character, or a ghost, in a vision, converse with me. It was like Hogwarts set in Oz narrated by Doctor Who."

"Serves you right. Go put that cloak away and let's get you out of here. Kyle has a schedule to keep, even if he's too polite to say so."

We were a quiet group getting back into the limo, but I managed to smuggle a black trench coat with a nefarious past in one of Dom's big old Marc Jacobs purses, my own purse also stuffed inside, and pa.s.s it off as mine. The coat had been worn by someone spying on Dominique, and I needed to find out what else it could tell me.

Nick didn't even notice.

To my surprise, Higgins took us to a forensics morgue. "I thought we were supposed to go straight to Dominique's," I said.

"I'm sorry, Mad," Kyle said, guilt skewing his "I'm okay" expression. "I couldn't do this alone," he admitted.

"Do what alone?" I asked, dreading the answer.

"Identify Mom's body."

Higgins turned in his seat, his face a mask of concern. "Young Mr. DeLong needs a friend. Everybody else in his life right now wants something. He needs someone willing to give rather than take."

"I'm here for you, Kyle," I said, squeezing his arm.

"Let's go inside," Nick said. "Higgins, thanks for putting Kyle's situation into perspective for us."

"Thank you," Kyle said, speaking to everyone but no one.

One by one, we were given IDs in a sterile, nondescript lobby, and when the elevator doors closed us in, Nick took me in his arms. "Prepare yourself, ladybug. You, too, Kyle."

"What's a forensics morgue?" I asked, never having heard the distinction.