by JL Bryan
“The next night, we had some random pull-ins off the highway, a family with two kids. They left in the middle of Princess Bride, hauling out of here like the Fire Swamp had erupted beneath them. Maybe they saw the strange man, too. They didn’t stop to explain.
“The same thing happened the next week. Two couples, college-age kids, came in one car. They hauled out of there after about an hour.”
“Cigar smoke again?” I asked. “Either time?”
“Maybe. It would have been hard to smell over the burning rubber… the smell of customers who couldn’t wait to get out of here. The smell of impending doom for us and our little business, pretty much.”
“Have you personally witnessed anything else?”
“The house behind the fence always gives me the jitters, but it’s falling apart and overgrown, so anybody would probably say that. Callie really hates it. I think the theater’s old owner ended up living in the tower and letting the house rot. Kinda makes sense, if you’re on a budget and have to pick. The tower’s concrete, and that doesn’t rot.”
“What do you know about the previous owners?” I asked.
“Stan Preston built it back in 1955 and ran it until it went out of business. He kept on living here even after it closed, maintaining it as well as he could, which is why it’s all in relatively good shape. I bought it from his daughter, Leah, who is elderly now and lives in Missouri.”
“I’ll probably need to speak with her if you hire us,” I said. “Did Stanley smoke cigars?”
“I don’t, uh…” Benny’s eyebrows shot up. “I did find an old wooden cigar box in the office. Tossed out the last few cigars as part of the clean-up, but actually kept the box itself. It was totally vintage, and just too nice a piece of woodwork to chunk out like trash. I thought it might be good for keeping art supplies or something.”
“Okay, that’s promising,” I said.
“And listen,” he said, “did Callie tell you about, uh, the ghost movies?”
“Have you seen them, too?”
“Yeah, one night, when I was closing up and Callie was already back home with Daisy. I didn’t even have Gumby with me. He usually sticks close to Daisy, anyway.
“I had shut everything down and was heading home for the night, biking across the parking lot toward the tower. Up on the screen, shapes appeared, pale shapes like big faces. I could just barely hear music, sappy string music like an emotional moment in an old movie. The face-shaped glowing spots moved close together on the screen. Then there was a whipping, cracking sound, like back in Maine when a frozen pond breaks in the spring.
“It ended after that. I looked back at the window to the projection booth—” He pointed to the large dark square on the second floor of the Purple Pizza Eater. “—and it was completely dark, nothing happening that I could see, but I was majorly panicked about the idea that someone was up there, messing with the new digital projector. That projector by itself represents literally half our investment here. Buying and rehabbing the place adds up to less than the cost of the projector. So far.”
“Oh, you had to buy a digital cinema projector?” Stacey whistled, looking from the projection booth to the giant screen. “Sounds pricey.”
“Yeah, very very very. I figured somebody was up there. I ran inside and grabbed a knife from the kitchen—okay, no, it was a pizza cutter, I admit I grabbed a pizza cutter—and I ran upstairs.
“I opened the door to the projection booth… and nothing. Nobody was there, and the projector was all shut down like I’d left it. But that was impossible, I thought. I’d definitely seen something getting projected on the big screen. I even checked the old thirty-five millimeter that came with the drive-in—we happily keep it around for the more authentic retro option. Cold, untouched, definitely hadn’t been used recently.”
“It’s cool you kept the old thirty-five millimeter,” Stacey said.
“Technically there’s three generations of projectors here. The digi is the newest, obviously, and it’s amazing. Fully programmable, set it and forget it, 4K resolution, a six thousand to one contrast ratio, and pumps out forty-five thousand lumens of brightness.
“Next oldest is the 1970 thirty-five-millimeter camera. Old Man Preston built the concession stand’s second floor to make a projection booth for it. He ran the thirty-five mill until the place closed around the end of the twentieth century.
“But the oldest projector, the truly original one from 1955, is actually still here, too, down in the original projection house, but those were fire hazards at the best of times.”
Benny led us to a small, sunken brick building like a World War II pillbox located right in the middle of the parking lot. He raised one of two small metal plates at the sunken building’s front to show me the interior, where the 1955 projector, a hulking mechanical monstrosity taller than I was, sat back in the shadows like a titanic trapdoor spider waiting for curious prey to wander too close. The interior of the building was dark and tomb-like, some of it underground, with no windows other than the two portholes with metal plates at the front.
“Wow, cool,” Stacey said, lifting the other plate to peer inside along with me.
“I mean, to be clear, I wasn’t down here, I was up there.” He pointed to the big window on the second floor of the concession stand. “Once I saw the digi projector was fine, I locked up the concession stand and pedaled like a maniac to the screen tower to check on Callie and Daisy. Usually, it’s nice to be isolated out here, surrounded by farms and woods, miles from town… except when you’re worried about an intruder prowling around the joint.”
At the screen tower, Benny unlocked the metal fire door in the side. A recently mowed lawn, consisting mostly of clover and wildflowers, grew in the open space between the screen tower and the monument sign out by the highway, where a lone UPS truck rumbled past.
With the steep ramp for its rear wall, painted with that long-faded Coke logo, the screen tower resembled a three-story concrete lean-to, propping up the big screen against the hurricane-force storm winds that sometimes blew in from the ocean.
“Gumby was right inside,” Benny continued as we entered the tower. “He was acting nervous, like he knew something was up, and that is not his normal personality. Usually, he’s a real optimist.”
We crossed a mud-room area where jackets were hung and dirty shoes stashed. Rollerblades, another bicycle, and a kid’s scooter hung on nails on the wall, with camping gear stacked below that.
The bottom floor was arranged shotgun-style, one room opening into the next. Past the mud room lay a long, cluttered office wallpapered with years of faded movie posters and promotional fliers for the Nite-Lite Drive-In. A sizable desk was nearly lost under dusty paperwork. Cabinets and boxes everywhere held wires and lightbulbs and loose nails and screws and a heap of changeable letters for the marquee sign. Much of the clutter had been unceremoniously shoved against the side of the room where the steeply slanted ceiling met the floor.
“I know it’s kinda hard to believe this is the ‘after’ picture of the office, but trust me, it was way worse before. Plus, we first had to clear out the second-floor apartment, which had, like, old-man clothes, old-man socks, all of the previous owner’s personal stuff… yeah.
“Anyway, that night I came in here and checked on everything. Everybody was cool but the dog, but even he started to relax after a while.”
“Have you had any similar disturbances since that?”
“No, but Callie thinks something weird is happening here, and I am with her on that. And you guys are supposed to be the local paranormal experts.”
“We do specialize in these kinds of cases,” I said.
“What do you think about this one?” He leaned against the edge of the desk, scattering yellowed paperwork but paying no mind as it spilled onto the floor. “Is this place haunted? Could it be?”
“I don’t like to rush to conclusions. If you want to hire us, we’d set up observation equipment and stay on-site overnight, see
ing what we can find.”
“Sounds good to me, but Callie will want to know what it costs. She’s always worried about that stuff. And granted, we both have student debt, too.”
“That’s reasonable.” While we discussed it, I looked over the movie posters on the walls, including cheesy creature features like The Blob and The Crawling Eye.
The posters and fliers clustered in front of the desk mostly advertised vintage crime and spy movies. The Nightingale Job. The Chicago Hustle. Murder in Morocco. All seemed to feature the same guy in roughly the same fedora, with a mustache big enough to shame Yosemite Sam, a cigar smoldering at the corner of his mouth.
“This guy was a major Chance Chadwick fan, huh?” Stacey said, looking over the same pictures. “And Adaire Fontaine. Ooh, look. A Soldier’s Dame. Ever seen it?”
“Nope. I’m not caught up on the latest films of…” I squinted to read the fine print. “1954.”
“How can you not have seen A Soldier’s Dame?” Benny seemed genuinely shocked, like I’d told him I hated rainbows and puppies.
“Seriously.” Stacey looked similarly offended on behalf of weather phenomena and juvenile canines. “Adaire Fontaine almost won an Oscar for it.”
“Who?” I looked at the poster for A Soldier’s Dame. A woman in a nurse’s uniform embraced a strapping, handsome soldier while he gazed past her into the distance. Rows of crosses behind them indicated a graveyard.
“Adaire Fontaine?” Stacey gaped.
“Famous movie star from Tifton, Georgia? Starred in a little epic called, I don’t know, Legend of the South?”
“Okay, yeah. She’s the one with the big red hair, right? And big gray eyes?”
“She only had the big red hair for that movie. But the eyes, yeah, that’s what everyone thinks of.”
“Great, glad you have so much background on this,” I said, looking at the faded image of Adaire’s large, captivating eyes as she agonized over her fallen soldier. “As old as this poster is, Stanley never pinned anything over it, not even slightly overlapping.”
“It’s the same with the Chance Chadwick posters.” Stacey nodded at the detective-or-secret-agent posters. “Maybe these were his favorites.”
“Maybe. Benny, we can come back anytime after you and Callie decide. We don’t have an active case right now, but that could change.” That was my best attempt at being salesy. Not one of my top skills.
“Yeah, sounds good,” he said. He picked up a loose pair of tiny sneakers from the office floor and tossed them into the next room, which was brightly painted, its walls decorated with giraffes and bunnies. Toys, books, and craft supplies were crammed onto a kid-size tabletop. “Thanks for coming out. It was good to meet you. Real paranormal investigators, huh? I bet you guys have some wild stories.”
“Most of them have to kept confidential,” I said.
“Oh, yeah, sure, makes sense.”
“The theater’s totally great,” Stacey told him. “I’m definitely spreading the word and coming back as a customer, regardless.”
“Thanks. We’re planning our grand opening in a couple of weeks, and it would be nice if the drive-in would stop running off guests before that.” He led us out and locked the screen tower door behind us, then returned to the concession stand while we returned to our van.
Chapter Four
“I hope they call back,” Stacey said as we exited the drive-in for the highway. “I really want to hang around there for a while, see the old place hopping with guests and popping with corn at night. Like when they have the grand opening.”
We drove to our office, a fairly bleak cinderblock building where Calvin Eckhart, the founder of our tiny detective agency, had originally set up his shop and home. He spent most of his time in Florida these days, leaving me to manage the agency along with Stacey.
I parked the van in the ground level workshop that took up most of the floor. There was a shabby reception spot with an empty desk and chairs out front, but we kept that area locked if we weren’t expecting anybody. Our clients came through recommendations or found us on the internet. Nobody just walked in through the front door out here in this rundown industrial area, with the dulcet sounds of the car crusher at work in the junkyard next door. It was probably best that clients rarely saw our offices, actually, or they’d probably think twice about hiring us.
“I’ll just upload today’s pictures.” Stacey set her handheld camera down next to the server. “Want to grab a bite?”
“No, thanks. I’ll head home in a minute.” I dropped in front of a desktop, ready to add my notes into a client file in case they hired us. “No point spending too much time on this unless they hire us.”
“It would be nice having a case that isn’t wildly far out of town this time. See ya.” Stacey gave me a hug where I sat in my chair, which she sometimes does at random times, and I returned it awkwardly, reaching back with one arm.
I watched her leave, then let out a breath when she was gone. I’m more of an introvert, and she’s not, and sometimes that’s a little much.
I hung around, typing up my notes to this case in detail, playing some Claude Debussey. I must have been in a plinking-piano mood.
Writing my notes led me into some preliminary research, looking up what I could find on the Nite-Lite Drive-In, and on the famous Golden Age actress Adaire Fontaine, since I was apparently a drooling barbarian for not knowing more about her. I’d surely heard of her, but I wasn’t into classic movies like film-school graduate Stacey, or her bad-movie fanatic boyfriend Jacob. I had to catch up.
The building grew quieter in the evening, as the car crusher went into its nightly slumber and, I assumed, the junkyard boys punched out for the day.
It startled me when my phone rattled. Michael.
Got fresh blue crab, he said. You should come over tonight. I’m cooking stew. And I make it very spicy.
I smiled. I don’t know. I was hoping for a peanut butter sandwich and a quiet night at home.
You need to have a festive and loud night with me.
Sounds exhausting. The festive and loud part.
Quiet and unfestive, then. I can be completely boring. I’ll start now.
Give me time to swing home. I’m still at the office.
I wrapped up my work and headed home to my studio loft in a long-defunct glass factory. Cramped but convenient, and cheaper than average due to the landlord’s poor maintenance and overall crummy customer service.
My mostly black cat Bandit greeted me at the door, crying like he was starving.
“You poor little guy,” I said as I entered the kitchen nook to find his bowl of food only one-third full. “How did you survive in these conditions?”
He meowed plaintively. I ripped open a bag of food and poured it into the storage column jutting up above the bowl. I used pet dishes that refilled as the cat ate and drank, but the feeder had run out.
The bowl refilled, and Bandit began snacking contentedly, dismissing me with a flick of his tail.
I could have gone as I was, in my professional black meeting-a-new-client suit, but we were having a night in, not out… a night involving stew that could seriously damage my good suit. I switched to jeans and a light t-shirt. Much more comfortable, much better for dealing with shrimp peels and crab shells. I unleashed my hair from my ponytail, watched it fall into an unflattering rumple, and tied it back again.
“Later, gator,” I said to Bandit when I finally left. He was lying on the couch by then. He flicked the tip of his tail at me once again, perhaps in response.
At Michael’s house, a three-story, nineteenth-century Queen Anne divided into apartments, I stepped up onto the big wraparound porch on the first floor. The unoccupied porch swing creaked, pushed by a gentle evening breeze. Or maybe a ghost was swinging there. The house had been haunted by a monstrous entity when I’d first visited it, and while I’d dealt with that problem, this was still Savannah. If a ghost had been passing on the sidewalk and decided to step up and sit for a
spell, I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.
I pressed the call button next to a side door trimmed in panes of colored glass. “Anchovy’s Pizza.”
“Right on time,” Michael’s voice replied, not that we’d set a time. The door buzzed to let me in.
I ascended the wide, dark stairs, rounded the second-floor landing, and continued up to the third.
When he opened the door, it reminded me of the first time I’d met him—right here, at his door. A particularly nasty ghost had been menacing Alicia Rogers, a client who lived in another apartment in the house, and I’d met Michael while canvassing the neighbors, seeing whether others in the building had witnessed paranormal activity.
Here he was again, tall and strapping in his plain white t-shirt and jeans, green eyes taking me in, a cocky smile on his lips. The smell of spicy broth bubbled out, along with some scratchy Delta blues album singing about the “heavy water” of the Mississippi. The whole scene was soothing and welcoming.
“Not many would dare make a crab boil in a white shirt with no apron. Bold move.” I entered his place, a former attic full of irregular ceilings and little nooks, rugs on the hardwood floor, sea critters in a gurgling saltwater aquarium. The lighting was soft and inviting, because it was only candles.
“We’re going to crack shells by candlelight?” I followed him into the brick nook of the kitchen, which smelled like sea salt and bay seasoning.
“It’s more romantic,” he informed me.
“Aw.”
“Because you don’t see as many crab guts.”
“Maybe I’ll just have a salad.”
“There is no salad, only slaw.” He stirred the gigantic steel pot on his stove. The crabs floated among ears of corn and fat chunks of Vidalia onion.
I leaned against the counter. Most of the room had been restored by Michael himself, over a few years, in exchange for lower rent. The cabinets and drawers had antique knobs and pulls that looked like they’d fallen out of a Gilded Age penthouse.