“Amelia was slipping into a back room,” Aubrey whispers. “She came out pretty quickly, making a big deal out of how she thought it was the way to the bathroom, and that she’s so confused by this new stage’s setup. But… I’ve seen a lot of the tech guys go back there. I think it leads to a room with a lot of controls. The heating, pipes…maybe even a fuse box.”

I draw in a breath. A fuse box controls the electrical switches in a building. Including the switch in the room where Vee was doing my makeup. Amelia could have been the one making the lights flicker.

My friends and I all look at each other in surprise. And then I say what we’re all thinking. “Is Amelia our ghost?”

Chapter Nine

The conversation has suddenly become too dangerous to be held around anyone besides us. We ask Austin to drop us off in a little wooded area behind Small Town America. We claim it’s because we want to bird-watch.

“Are you sure?” Austin looks nervously at the trees. “Everyone at Silver Screen Studios calls this place ‘the Woods.’ They’ve filmed horror movies here.”

I climb out of the golf cart and head toward the trees. “We’ll be okay.”

“And I’ve heard there are some really great, um, birds in the Woods,” Aubrey fumbles. I can tell she can’t think of the name of a single bird we might want to be watching.

Austin looks at us suspiciously. “Fine, but if you’re not back at Stage Five by the end of lunch break, I’m coming for you.”

Just to make sure no one will hear us, we head deep into the Woods. I have to admit, it is kind of spooky. The leaves make such a thick canopy, I can’t see the blue sky. I keep hearing things scuttling under the leaves too—bugs? Snakes? Something scarier? And I nearly trip over a huge tree root and go sprawling forward, catching myself on a tree trunk.

When I open my eyes, an eyeball is staring at me. I lurch back and scream.

“It’s okay!” Cody rushes forward. “It’s just a prop, see?” He taps on the eyeball with his nail. It’s made of plastic like something from a Halloween shop. “Must have been left over from one of those horror movies they shot here.”

“Ugh, a movie about trees with eyes?” I shudder.

We find a bunch of tree stumps and settle down. The woods go quiet. We almost can’t hear the traffic noises from the freeway from here. I get a chill.

Then Aubrey lets out a breath. “Could it really be true? Amelia is doing this?”