Searching for My Killer

Chapter 1 How do you stop a killer when you’re a ghost? A question I had to answer before anyone else ended up as dead as I am. It would help if I knew who killed me, of course, but I don’t. It all began—or ended—two days ago. All right, it probably began well before the day I was pushed to my death from the lighting bridge above the stage. My name is Antonio Robert Burton. Tonio to my friends. Mom was Italian, thus my first name. Was, because she’s no longer around. Neither is Dad. They were older when I was born and died three months apart, about a year ago. Dad was of English descent, ergo the Robert Burton. I take after both of them, with my mom’s curly, dark hair and Dad’s blue eyes and, in my opinion, a too large nose. David, my roommate—no, my lover, the man I love—disagreed about my nose, but then he was prejudiced. David and I work for the Sixth Avenue Theater. Okay, not to beat a dead horse but I should say I worked there, until my untimely demise. David is a member of the acting company. I was on the lighting crew. The day I died, I was setting lights for the next production. According to the police, I must have stumbled while walking the bridge. I know differently. Someone pushed me. The problem, as I’ve said, is I don’t know who, or why. It wasn’t the first accident recently at the theater, just the first fatal one. Lucky me. Yeah, that’s sarcasm. Three days before I died, during rehearsals, a trapdoor in the stage floor opened when Lydia, one of the actresses, stepped on it. A trapdoor which should have been locked closed as it wasn’t needed for the show. Thankfully, she only suffered a badly twisted ankle and some bruising when she landed in the basement area several feet below the stage. A week prior to that, there had almost been a fire in the costume shop. It would have been a full-out one, and disastrous, if one of the seamstresses hadn’t smelled smoke and grabbed a fire extinguisher to put it out. The cause was put down to material too close to an overhead light fixture above the fabric racks. The head of the costume shop questioned everyone, but of course no one admitted to piling the fabrics so high the heat from the light could have caused the fabric to smolder and begin to burn. Then there was the cracked step on a ladder in the scene shop, which broke when Pat was using it. That was a couple of days before the costume shop incident. He ended up with a sprained wrist as a result. Taken individually, they would have been, and were, put down to the usual things which could happen when people weren’t careful. Together, in the space of only a few weeks, it seemed suspicious. All right, to me it does, given the fact my ‘accident’ was fatal—and not an accident at all. I didn’t know until two days after it happened that I was dead—and a ghost.