Mystery

MAIN LINE-BRED director M. Night Shyamalan blasted onto Hollywood's A-list with "The Sixth Sense," but he was also responsible for the treacly Rosie O'Donnell drama "Wide Awake. " With expectations high for his follow-up, would Shyamalan catch lightning in a bottle again? Reuniting with Bruce Willis, Shyamalan revisited the mystery-suspense genre with "Unbreakable" (VHS: priced for rental; DVD: $29.99), and like issue #2 of a serial, the novelty has started to wear off. Willis plays a man who survives a colossal train wreck without a scratch and, searching for answers, finds a brittle, wheelchair-bound Samuel L. Jackson.

"Bedroom Eyes. " A drama starring Dayle Haddon and Kenneth Gilman. Directed by William Fruet from a screenplay by Michael Alan Eddy. Photographed by Miklas Lente. Edited by Tony Larner. Music by John Tucker. Running time: 90 minutes. An RSL production. In area theaters. Canadian filmmaker William Fruet sneaks up on us with "Bedroom Eyes," a sneaky-dirty, new-style sex mystery. It's about passion gone awry, but not in the old-fashioned, Claude Chabrol sense. In this case, the victim of passion is one Harry Ross (Kenneth Gilman)

Father Judge High School reopened today as officials remain in the dark about the cause of the ailment that sent scores of people to hospitals after a weekend cheerleading competition at the school. The decision to reopen came Wednesday after a series of tests by the Fire Department, city Health Department and a private contractor hired by the Archdiocese found no toxic substances in the school building in Holmesburg. The tests, however, shed no light on what might have caused 150 people who attended the cheerleading event Sunday to go to hospitals starting early Monday for treatment of burning eyes and related complaints.

The mysterious telephone call that appears on a phone bill usually is fairly easy to straighten out. Just call the phone company, and that's that. The customer who never placed the call won't be held responsible. But to the phone companies themselves, it's a more potent threat. This week, MCI Communications said such mystery calls were in a small way responsible for a $502.5 million loss in its fourth fiscal quarter. The company said it is suffering from fraud, as sophisticated criminals steal access codes, allowing them to complete a call and improperly charge it to a customer.

"After everything that I have been put through, you owe me an answer," Jack (Matthew Fox) tells one of The Others as ABC's "Lost" returns tonight. It doesn't really matter what Jack's question was - it hardly ever does - his demand for a reply is a statement of frustration that, as one reporter pointed out to the show's producers at a press conference last month, sounds as if it could have been taken almost word for word from one of the message boards where "Lost" fans gather to talk about the conspiracy that's so far held them captive for more than two years.

"Remember to keep your hands at your sides!" "And when you say you don't know who's behind a crime, you must mean it!" The director's admonitions, designed to perfect the actors' performances, resounded last Friday night in the 1796 Burlington County Court House on High Street, Mount Holly, during a final rehearsal of a play the company is excited about. The New Center Stage Theater company will give the South Jersey premiere performance of the play Something to Hide, a British murder-mystery released in this country in 1987, according to Charles West, NCS director.

A mystery of flight That little blue plane parked on someone's roof on Darby Road in downtown Darby was the greatest mystery my brothers and I confronted in our childhood. Forget Santa Claus. Forget the birds and the bees. Here was a true mystery. What was that little blue plane doing on someone's roof, and how did it get there? I am sure the mystery was shared by countless other youngsters leaving Delaware County via Island Avenue in the family station wagon on the way to the Jersey Shore.

You could be the bewitching temptress, or the hard-boiled detective, or - da da da dum - the victim. Mystery-murder parties, whether at a hotel or at home, can take the whodunit buff out of the paperbacks and right smack into the middle of his or her own fantasies. But the success of these parties depends largely on people who won't even be there. They are the people who write the mystery scripts. Two such authors live in the Northeast. Two years ago, Denise Baron and E. G. Green formed Postmortem Inc., a company that creates murder mysteries for parties and other functions.

Just when you think you've got a particular genre safely categorized, along comes the likes of John Lutz, author of the Edgar Award-winning Tropical Heat and his series main man, Fred Carver. His latest in paper has the unpromising title Kiss (Avon, $3.95) with its unfortunate echo of a local radio station and its horrendous TV ads. The case, unusual for the former policeman (now a private eye with a gimpy leg because of a bullet wound in a knee), finds him investigating the Florida Sunhaven Retirement Home where residents are dying.

Peter Maxwell Davies' tense mystery opera, The Lighthouse, could well be a beacon for composers seeking the way to comfortably join operatic tradition and contemporary consciousness. Davies, the Britisher who lives in the Orkneys, has made his brief ghost play a setting where musical styles crash together, juxtaposing unabashed tone painting and taut psychological representation. Music hall, hymns and folk ballads batter against the dense orchestral textures that seem to have the very soul of the sea in them.

ROME - Forensic police swarmed the crypt of a Roman basilica Monday to exhume the body of a reputed mobster as part of an investigation into one of the Vatican's most enduring mysteries: the 1983 disappearance of the teenage daughter of one of its employees. Medical experts took samples from the remains of Enrico De Pedis and also took boxes of old bones from the nearby ossuary, according to a De Pedis family lawyer, as part of the investigation into whether Emanuela Orlandi may have been buried alongside him. Orlandi was 15 when she disappeared in 1983 after leaving her family's Vatican apartment to go to a Rome music lesson.

You think a romantic relationship between two people is hard? Try polyamory. A panel of experts at the American Psychiatric Association meeting in Philadelphia last week said that open relationships between more than two people can work, but it requires a lot of talk about rules, boundaries, and time spent with various lovers. William Slaughter, a psychiatrist in Cambridge, Mass., who has been treating polyamorous patients for about five years, said they need to have very good communication skills and be especially good at "mentalizing" or understanding others' emotional reactions.

Friday was Jeremy Maclin's 24th birthday. It didn't have to include anything special to mark a huge improvement over his 23rd. May 11, 2011, was when Maclin learned the results of tests done after the Eagles wideout couldn't quite shake an undetermined illness earlier in the spring. The tests showed inflamed lymph nodes. Doctors thought Maclin might have lymphoma. He had been unable to eat, just wanted to sleep, he said. It took more than 3 months from Maclin's birthday for everything to look normal again and for everyone to conclude that whatever illness Maclin had suffered, he had come out of it OK, didn't have any kind of cancer.

When I was 9 years old, I would watch my mother softly sway to the sound of the old RCA radio that sat atop the refrigerator. It was big and brown, with a lit amber dial and a gold needle that marked the stations. The speaker boomed deep and rich, and she would sometimes sing along. My mother had two favorite songs that year, and they told tales as different as could be. One was Dinah Washington's R&B rendition of "What a Diff'rence a Day Made," which tells a story of blissful newfound love.

Editor's note: This story has been updated from an earlier version JESSICA PERRONE was watching TV early Sunday when she heard a banging noise, then four or five gunshots outside her Lansdowne home. She rushed to her window and saw the first clue to what would become a murder mystery: a vehicle "driving all crazy" on the back lawn of the house across the alley, she said. "It was like it was going wild," said Perrone, 25. She ran outside and saw the vehicle slam into the attached garage of the other house, then burst into flames.

LONDON - Even after a coroner's verdict, it remains a mystery: A naked spy found dead in a locked bag, lurid details of a kinky sex life and allegations that someone in Britain's spy agencies may have been involved in his death. A British coroner ruled Wednesday that another person was likely involved in Gareth Williams' death - a finding that puts more pressure police to uncover the cyberwarfare expert's killer and continue to investigate possibilities that include whether he could have died in a sex game gone awry or in a more sinister scenario that involved his counterterrorism work.

The bald eagle was lying on its back in a pool of blood in, of all places, a Broomall parking lot. Joe Simmonds, the maintenance man at Congregation Beth El-Ner Tamid, spotted its dark form as he emptied trash into a Dumpster. He put a traffic cone by the huge bird so no one would run over it, and he called 911. The bird was breathing. It was alive, just barely. Wildlife officials trying to coax it back to health now think the male eagle was beset by a triple dose of misfortune.

HALF A DOZEN caskets rested next to freshly dug graves in a potter's field full of clover and buttercups in Camden County Thursday morning, filled with the bodies of the unclaimed homeless, the destitute and the otherwise forgotten. But about 50 yards away, up a steep wooded hill that overlooked the field on county property in the Lakeland section of Gloucester Township, someone else already had been buried beneath a large elm tree, a female child or infant, authorities believe, who hadn't been forgotten.

The wonder of Brian Dickerson's recent rugged 3-D paintings on wood in his solo "Constructed Paintings and Drawings from Ballinglen" at Seraphin Gallery is the immediate sense of quiet and mystery they impart. While he was, of course, informed by the remote, artist-friendly locale in northwest County Mayo, Ireland, which he expects to visit again next fall, Dickerson's original inspiration was the excavation of an Owasco Indian settlement he watched at age 13 near his childhood home in upstate New York - the colors of the layered soil, the wooden grids, the hidden artifacts.