Free Admit One by Lisa Clark O'Neill Page B

odd image. Apparently the thought patterns of the eighteenth century man he’d most recently portrayed hadn’t entirely left him.
    And that was the question, wasn’t it? Where did the character end, and Mason Armitage begin?
    Mason snorted. “What a load of rubbish,” he said aloud. He swung his legs over the side of the bed again, planted his feet firmly on the ground.
    He had a performance to get ready for tonight.
     
    ALLIE asked herself what exactly she thought she was doing, even as she walked through the cemetery gates. They’d closed The Dust Jacket early in anticipation of opening night at The Playhouse, and normally Allie would have been at the theater by now, running errands, helping to put out the last minute fires that inevitably cropped up on the first night of a new play, and yet here she was. Visiting the centuries old grave of a distant cousin.
    She would like to think that she was driven strictly by courtesy – and curiosity – rather than the desire to avoid bumping into Mason backstage, or seeing him in his element. But if there was anything she’d learned over the course of the past year, it was that lying to herself did her no favors. Better to face the truth and deal with it. And the truth was that she was afraid that in watching Mason in action – rather than simply reading reviews and blog posts from rapturous fans – she might come to view him differently. As someone larger than life. And given how hard she’d worked to re-build her own self-esteem, to see herself as just as worthwhile as the next person, including Mason, well…
    It was certainly cowardly of her, but if there’d been a suitable excuse to miss the play tonight without it being glaringly obvious as to why she was missing, she probably would have made it.
    Pushing all that from her mind, Allie stepped carefully across the pine straw-and-cone covered ground, trying to avoid treading on graves or tripping over markers. The age of this cemetery being what it was, there wasn’t a distinct path for visitors to follow, let alone a paved road.  The most recent burials had taken place in the nineteen-thirties, before the church had been struck by lightning for the second time – and subsequently abandoned. But there were graves dating back to the early eighteen hundreds. The oak trees which stretched their gnarled, moss-draped limbs over the headstones, like a mother hen protecting her chicks, had probably been mere saplings when Eugene Hawbaker was interred here.
    Heading back toward the far corner where he was buried, Allie frowned at the sight of the yellow crime scene tape stirring in the evening breeze. Will said the department had gathered all the evidence they needed, but she guessed they’d left the tape up as a deterrent. Curiosity often drove people to do weird and unpredictable things.
    Allie glanced down at the bright, cheerful spring flowers she held in her hand. She’d cut them from The Dust Jacket’s garden, intending to give them to the play’s cast, but at the last moment had gathered a bunch for Cousin Eugene as well. It seemed appropriate. A sort of apology for… snogging , as Mason would say, on his grave.
    Walking cautiously, she wound around the maze of drunkenly tilted, eroding headstones. She could lay the tribute outside the tape, she guessed.
    Allie eyed the gravesite, visible now in the fading daylight, and sighed a little at its appearance. The headstone was lichen-covered marble, and had probably been quite lovely at one time, taking the shape of a tree trunk with a scroll nailed to it. The words etched into the scroll had faded, but Eugene’s name and his dates of birth and of death were still faintly visible.
      The ground surrounding the headstone was a mess. A significant quantity of dirt had been displaced, piled to the side, and numerous shoeprints marred the freshly turned over soil. Allie frowned at the pile of soil. It was entirely too large to suggest a single rootworker borrowing