Free Oliver Twisted (An Ivy Meadows Mystery Book 3) by Cindy Brown Page B

investigator-ish.
    Jonas waved me over to take my place underneath my silk. “Okay. Time to learn some dance moves.” He held the silk out to me.
    “Tie yourself in, using your left foot,” Ada said from above me. I gripped the silk, pulled myself a few feet above the stage and wrapped the silk around my foot, securing my position with a footlock. My arms, still shaky from yesterday’s rehearsal, burned with the effort, and my foot felt bruised from my former attempt at climbing. “Now separate the two pieces with your arms, keeping your elbows at head level.” The fabric was attached in the middle to a beam above me so that its two tails hung down. I separated them. “Now lean forward through the silk.”
    “Whoa.” I flailed in the air. Must have leaned too far.
    “Like this.” Ada did exactly what she told me, but leaned forward in a fluid motion, ending up in a position that looked like a figurehead on a ship. I was never going to be able to do that. Never. But I was an actor and dancer and a stubborn one, so I smiled and persevered. I tried the move again. “Ohhh.” I actually got it. Nowhere near performance quality, but a start. “Cool.”
    “Now bring your right leg up to your knee in a jazz passé.”
    I did. Now I looked like a figurehead about to leap off the prow of the ship.
    “It’s called The Ship’s Lady,” said Jonas.
    I performed the move again, more gracefully this time.
    “Bravo,” Timothy said from the audience.
    “Nice,” Jonas agreed.
    “Please.” Ada rolled her eyes.
    She whipped through a few more moves. Jonas clapped his hands together, not in applause. “That’s great, Ada. Now slow down into teaching mode, all right?”
    The look on Ada’s face did not say it was all right, but she did stop showing off. She taught me several more moves, mostly dance poses done in mid-air. They took a lot of strength, especially arm strength, but they were familiar moves I’d performed for years, just not in the air. Maybe I could do this.
    “Good work,” said Jonas as I touched down on the mat. “Just one more piece of business. Let’s go up to the catwalk.”
    Ada began climbing the steel rungs set into the side wall of the theater. I followed. Jonas climbed the ladder behind me. Good thing I had a delicious ass.
    I reached the catwalk and walked out on it, the metal grating cool beneath my bare feet. “I’m not going to have to get on the silks from here, am I?” Being hauled up into the air by a pulley was bad enough. Stepping off a catwalk forty feet in the air would feel like walking off a cliff.
    “Oh no,” said Jonas. “That would be much too dangerous. We’re up here so you can see how the silks are rigged. We have certified riggers, like Ada here,” he nodded at my roommate, “but you need to check your own equipment too.”
    “Each silk is secured to a beam by a span set,” said Ada, pointing to a black band that wrapped around a metal beam in the fly space. “Then you’ve got several pieces of hardware connected by carabiners.” Those were the little metal hook thingies that climbers used. “First of all, check that all carabiners are locked. There are three. One that connects the span set to the pulley.” She pointed at the carabiner and looked to me for confirmation that I understood. I nodded.
    “A second one that connects the pulley to the swivel.” She indicated a figure-eight-shaped piece of hardware that swiveled in the middle of the eight. “And a third one that connects the swivel to the Rescue Eight.” This piece of equipment, the Rescue Eight, was about the same size as the others, but was nearly covered by the silk knotted around it so I couldn’t see it well.
    “Check your equipment carefully every time you use the silks,” Jonas said. “You really don’t want to fall from this height.”

CHAPTER 15
    A Notable Plan

      
    “Thanks so much for doing this,” I said to David as I followed him down the hall to the crew cabins. “And