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“I’ve wanted to do that all evening,” I said.

Goldie drew me down until I could feel her breath against my lips.

“Then you should know I’m going to want more than one.”

Chapter Three

When I arrived at Factory of Screams on Friday morning, Duncan was setting two cups of coffee on a folding table near the entrance. Through the open doors behind me, vendors were arranging pumpkins around their booths, and the smell of frying donuts drifted across the cold grass.

“I didn’t know how you took it, so I brought cream and sugar,” he said, pushing a small paper bag toward me.

“Thank you. You’ve just saved me a walk across the park.”

I set my work bag beneath the table and took the cup nearest me. We’d ended last night’s workshop session so Duncan could get back to Sienna before bedtime, and I’d returned to the cottage alone. Now, standing beside him, I wanted to reach for the front of his shirt and pull him down for another kiss.

Duncan leaned closer as I stirred in the sugar.

“I was hoping you’d get here soon. Come look at what we’ve got.”

He picked up his toolbox while I retrieved my folder. Inside, workers were painting the walls to resemble stained concrete, and someone was carrying an armful of costumes toward the dressing area. We had until nine tonight to turn all this preparation into something worth buying a ticket for.

Duncan led me to the room where guests would watch body parts being assembled into people. The short track we’d tested in his workshop now rested beside the unfinished production line.

“The frame’s sound,” he said. “We can use this. Before I fit it, I need you to walk through the room the way a guest would.”

I handed him my coffee and went back to the doorway, already picturing the performer drawing attention toward the far end of the line.

“Watch where I’m looking,” I told him. “The head needs to turn just after I pass it.”

I started through the room at the pace I expected from a group that had already been startled twice and was beginning to anticipate the third.

The production line looked nothing like it had yesterday. The crew had added battered metal panels around the base and built shallow trays for the heads and limbs that would travel along it. Nothing was finished yet, but the shape of the room had begun to emerge. Guests would enter beside a row of incomplete bodies, follow the line toward the assembly station, and naturally turn toward the performer fitting mismatched pieces together near the far wall.

That was where I looked.

Duncan watched me rather than the track.

I made it several steps past the place where the moving head would sit before glancing back at him.

He nodded slowly. “I see it.”

He came around the frame and stood where I had stopped. From his height, his sightline was different, so he lowered himself slightly and looked toward the performer’s position again before studying the track.

“If I delay the turn until you’re here, the face will come around after most people have already passed it. The person at the back of the group might catch the movement first.”

“Which means they’re the one who tells everybody else to look.”

“And by then the head is already watching them.”

A smile pulled at my mouth. “Exactly.”

Duncan’s expression changed too, not quite a smile but close enough that I recognized it.

He knelt beside the track and opened his toolbox. I stayed long enough to watch him measure the guide beneath the head mount, then left him to the part of the job he understood better than I did.

That was becoming one of my favorite things about working with him.

He didn’t need me to prove I knew more than I did, and he never treated my lack of mechanical expertise as a weakness. I could tell him what I needed the guests to experience, and he could usually find a practical way to make the machinery serve it.