by JL Bryan
“Let’s check the footage,” I told her. “Maybe we caught a visual of whatever chased that family away.”
We clambered into the back of the van. Stacey pulled up the video recording from the moment before the van had fired up and roared away.
“Here it is!” Stacey said, momentarily triumphant, but then frowned. “There’s not much, though.”
She turned her tablet toward me. Our van was in the foreground, the shapes of ourselves visible inside.
Farther back sat the family van, the shapes and faces less identifiable behind their more distant windshield.
“Here it comes,” Stacey whispered.
A shadowy form appeared several paces away from the van. It approached, moving with a jerkiness, blinking in and out of sight.
It appeared at each of the van’s windows, as though it wanted to look in at every individual person inside the van.
The van’s headlights flared, blinding our night vision.
“Can you grab the subsequent moments—”
“From the conventional? Yes, obviously.” Stacey went to work. I waited impatiently, looking among the live feeds on the little monitors mounted in the back of our cargo van, our handy mobile nerve center for paranormal investigations. “Yep. Here we go. Again, not much, but…”
The regular camera showed the family van starting up and peeling out. On the video, Stacey and I climbed out of the van. The lady in the passenger seat shouted at me in Spanish as they drove away. Trying to warn me, maybe.
“There’s nothing there after they drive away,” Stacey said. “But we know that, because we were there.”
“Reverse it to the exact moment the headlights come on,” I said. When she did, I pointed at the area where we’d seen the shape on camera. “Enhance.”
“Enhancing.” Stacey zoomed in close to the driver’s side of the van. She cropped the glowing headlight out of the frame and monkeyed around with the light levels a bit.
“There it is,” I whispered.
“You’re right,” she whispered back. “It’s barely there, but… it’s there.”
What we saw in that frame, in the first flare of the van’s headlight, was even less substantial than the shadow on the night vision camera. It looked like a few filmy brown blobs, barely suggesting the shape of a person next to the van.
“Re-enhance,” I said.
“Ooh, so technical.” Stacey zoomed on the face. It was too blurry to have any clear features, even with Stacey’s enhancements, but we could discern a rough blob of a head.
“It’s like it’s looking back at us,” Stacey whispered, shivering. “I wonder what that family saw when it walked up to them—”
Something pounded on the side of our van, making us jump. I nearly screamed, honestly, after staring closely at the dead thing we’d caught on camera, trying to make out its face, its eyes.
Footsteps sounded outside.
I grabbed my tactical flashlight and slipped up to the driver’s area. A hand knocked on the window.
“Hello? Ya there?” Benny looked into the van, straddling his bike, which had enabled him to approach us swiftly and silently.
Relaxing, I opened the door. I wanted to complain about him startling us, but being a jumpy scaredy-cat is not a good look for a paranormal investigator. “Hiya,” I said, swinging for casual and calm.
“I’m closing down for the night. Callie should be home soon.”
“Where’s Daisy?” I asked.
“Zonked out.” Benny pulled a video monitor the size of a cell phone from his pocket, with a night vision view of the little girl asleep. “I can keep an eye on her from anywhere around the theater. There’s an intercom so I can talk to her if she wakes up.” He touched a button to show me, but lightly and carefully, as if it were a detonator on a bomb.
“Well, we caught something. Want to see it?” I asked.
“Definitely, yeah.”
We climbed out, and Stacey showed the video of the filmy shape approaching the vehicle. After a quarter of a second, the shape disappeared like a soap bubble, or like a brittle filmstrip breaking on the projector.
“That… is freaky,” he said, looking at the still frame of the blurry shape. “I knew it. There’s something wild happening at the drive-in.”
“It came from the direction of the original projection booth, where we smelled the cigar.” I nodded at the sunken brick pillbox structure. “That could be Cigar Man’s lair.”
“Seems like a natural ghost habitat,” Stacey said. “Silent and untouched for years, full of memories. Partly underground, even.”
“In the olden days, that booth would have been a real center of action,” Benny said. He lifted one of the metal plates at the front, revealing a dark porthole. “Those early projectors needed constant attention. You had to watch the movies for that changeover signal. And they were a fire hazard. Around 1970, Old Man Preston left this one to rot and installed a more modern thirty-five-millimeter projector up in the concession stand.”
“Looks like we’ll need to put some eyes and ears down there,” I said.
“I left the concession stand unlocked for the night, so you guys can access the drinks cooler, you know, the facilities. Just make yourself at home. There’s a bag of leftover popcorn, too.”
“Thanks so much,” I told him. “Go get plenty of rest. We’ll keep watch.”
He smiled and touched the brim of his hat before pedaling off behind the screen tower.
“Wow, it sure gets dark out here at night.” Stacey turned slowly. Beyond the puddle of light from her tablet, we couldn’t see much. With the projector shut down, the concession stand dark, and all the lights off, the place was a silent ghost town.
I looked over at the sunken projection booth on the third row, abandoned for decades. In the gloom of night, it looked remarkably like a crypt. Its small, square door was impossibly short. Anyone bigger than a child would have to sit down and slide inside, as if wriggling down into a sewer drain under a sidewalk, perhaps to meet that killer clown.
“Maybe we should wait until daylight to go in there,” Stacey whispered.
“Maybe.” I slid the key into the lock of the little Hobbit door. It swung inward, into a pitch-black space.
I knelt at the edge of the doorway and pointed my flashlight inside.
The interior was larger than the pillbox structure above and went down several feet. It had a cold, dank cellar feeling. A brick floor was barely visible under a layer of sandy mud.
Two bulky projector support pedestals sat at the far end, bolted to the floor, one for each of the building’s front portholes facing the movie screen. One pedestal held only remnants of the machine that had once been there, but the other still had the hulking antique projector I’d glimpsed from outside.
“I don’t smell the cigar anymore,” I said. “And that’s not a smell that generally disappears in a hurry from a closed environment.”
“Olfactory manifestation, maybe?” Stacey asked, and I nodded.
Searching the shelves with my flashlight turned up small hand tools, a film splicer, and scraps of damaged film. Electrical wires hung loose from the ceiling; I hoped they weren’t attached to anything live.
“Yep, let’s wait until daylight,” I decided, then pulled the door shut and locked it. Standing to brush dirt off my jeans, I said, “I guess we just head back to the van, continue the night in stakeout fashion—”
“Ellie.” Stacey’s voice was low and hushed. She pointed.
Someone stood on the stage under the screen, watching us from behind our cameras, as though he were a director and we were actors performing for him.
“Is that Benny?” I asked, even as I realized it wasn’t. Benny didn’t inspire this kind of dread.
A spot of light glowed in the darkness, illuminating the figure’s face.
It was all in black and white, the small light glowing from the tip of a cigar.
The spot-lit face was dashingly handsome, despite the huge old-
fashioned mustache that covered much of it. He wore a pinstriped coat and fedora, like in the Pocketful of Aces poster.
“It’s Chance Chadwick,” Stacey whispered.
When the cigar went dark, the figure vanished into the deep shadows of the stage and screen.
Chapter Seven
“Why would Chance Chadwick haunt this old drive-in?” Stacey wondered as we ran toward the stage. “He died in a car crash out west, thousands of miles from here.”
“Good question.” I jumped up onto the stage, swinging my light around. Nobody was there. The cameras hadn’t been damaged, which is always a plus. I thought of how Benny had immediately worried about damage to his projector, and I sympathized.
The apparition had stayed behind our cameras, out of view, like it was quite familiar with life around cameras and didn’t want to be caught on one.
“Maybe the owner guy, Stan, played a bunch of his movies here?” Stacey walked around the stage, as if looking for clues. Footprints or ghostly cigar ends, maybe. “It doesn’t make sense. Ooh, maybe they built the drive-in on top of a forgotten cemetery. Or some eighteenth-century witch put a hex on it. Or a werewolf was killed here by a vampire during a zombie outbreak—”
“Let’s just hope Stanley Preston’s daughter feels like talking about the past.”
We waited out the night in the van, hoping the ghostly movies our clients had described would appear on the screen. A pair of headlights appeared—Callie’s small, elderly Honda, trundling up the entrance drive. She parked by the screen tower and trudged out, looking exhausted from a late night at the restaurant, barely casting a look our way before walking out of sight around the side of the tower.
“She looks wiped out,” Stacey said.
We continued to sit and wait, watching the blank screen, but nothing appeared up there except moonlight.
Stacey pulled up footage from the camera in the farmhouse, hoping its overview perspective had caught Chance Chadwick’s appearance on the stage, but the distant camera had failed to do that.
We replayed what the woman had yelled at us in Spanish. Neither of us were fluent enough to catch much of it, especially shouting at us from a passing vehicle.
After a few listens, we agreed the main phrase she used was los muertos, which she repeated twice.
The dead.
The sky finally began to lighten, from black to deep blue, and the sprawling space of the drive-in started to grow visible again. That was our cue to head home. We collected the cameras from the stage but left those in the farmhouse where they were. Timers shut them down at sunrise.
Back home, I drew the blackout curtains tight against the morning sunlight. My cat meowed repeatedly for no real reason while I tried to sleep, as cats do.
I awoke at noon, made coffee, and sat in a square of sunlight on my bed to continue my Chance Chadwick research. It was nice to work from home, sitting on my bed in my pajamas.
Carlos Gonzales, known to his many fans as Chance Chadwick, had grown up in eastern Los Angeles, close to the burgeoning movie industry. After a stint in the Navy during World War II, he’d returned home and pursued acting.
He’d been a minor Hollywood heartthrob of his era, known for his dark eyes, his handsome face and cocky smile, his cold-steel attitude in assorted crime and caper movies, where he typically had time to romance a leading lady in between his plots and schemes, or as part of them.
His death in 1957 had been a shock but cemented his place as a Hollywood legend. The untamable, devil-may-care rebel, racing his Rolls-Royce into a canyon, the fire burning for hours before they put it out and pulled him from the wreckage.
An interesting life story, maybe, but one with zero obvious connection to a random drive-in theater outside Savannah, Georgia.
I texted Stacey to meet me at the lovely Bull Street Library, one of my personal favorite places in town.
On my way there, I stopped at another favorite spot, the Sentient Bean, to treat myself to a stronger, darker, and perhaps more flavored coffee than I had at home. The interior was as welcoming as ever, cheerfully bright walls and a soaring woodwork ceiling, the smell of brewing coffee and baking sweets.
As I waited in line, someone tapped my shoulder, startling me. I turned, preparing to drop into a kickboxing stance in case I had to defend myself there among the pastries and college kids.
“Hey.” Stacey gave me a big wave as if spotting me across a huge distance, though she was in line right behind me. “Guess we had the same idea. Since you’re here, am I officially at work now? Or still off the clock?”
“Why? Do you want to complain about work?”
“I have this one co-worker who drives me crazy. She’s always sending me down in spidery cellars or up into haunted attics full of creepy artifacts.”
“She sounds like a monster.”
“She is. She drinks her coffee solid black. And not just when she’s camping.”
“I heard she hates camping,” I said.
“I bet I could change her attitude with a weekend in the woods.”
“I bet not,” I told her, as the customer in front of me, who’d had way too many questions about the difference between a latte and a frappe, finally moved off so I could step up and order. I’d been toying with getting something sweet, maybe even a mocha, but I went with solid black dark coffee instead, lest I ruin my tough-guy image in Stacey’s eyes.
We bought our coffees, filling our respective portable coffee tumblers. Stacey’s was a high-end REI model that could probably keep molten chocolate bubbling hot in Antarctica. Mine was from a local gas station chain whose logo had already worn off in the dishwasher.
We headed outside and strolled toward the library.
“I started reading a biography of Adaire Fontaine last night,” Stacey said. “Downloaded an ebook. She was considered a wild talent in her day, a dangerously free spirit. No wonder she dated Chance Chadwick. And they both had the tragedy of dying young, in their prime.”
“Wait, how did Adaire die?”
“You don’t know?”
“Yeah, we’ve established I would not win any prizes at Golden Age Hollywood trivia night. So spill it, Film School.”
“She was murdered. Strangled to death in her Beverly Hills mansion.”
“By who?”
“Some people suspected her director at the time. Antonio Mazzanti. He was rumored to be romantically involved with Adaire on the side. Of course, everyone was rumored to be romantically involved with her. He was directing her in House of Gold, a movie set in the Italian Renaissance. She stormed off the set, quitting in a rage, and it was never clear whether her reasons were personal or professional.”
“Wow.” I sipped coffee as I processed this. “I must have heard of Mazzanti before. Sounds familiar.”
“Uh, yeah. Mazzanti was later identified as the Silk Strangler. He murdered two other actresses after Adaire, strangling them with silk scarves. That was years after Adaire Fontaine’s murder, but one of the actresses had also starred in one of his later, much less successful movies, a cheesy horror flick called The Body in the Basement. That’s two actresses who starred in his movies, both strangled to death.”
“Yikes. He was arrested for those?”
“No, because he was dead of a heroin overdose by the time the police eventually figured out he was the Silk Strangler. Oh, there was evidence of occult ritual aspect to the murders, too, which made Mazzanti even more of a suspect, because he used a lot of occult and Satanic references in his movies. Maybe they were all ritually sacrificed.”
“That’s awful!” I thought it over. “What about Chance Chadwick’s car crash? Anything suspicious about that? Bear in mind I’m accepting gossip, innuendo, and conspiracy theories at this point. We can analyze and fact check later.”
“I’ll check. I can’t believe you didn’t know about Adaire—”
“Yes, no one can believe how little I know about Adaire Fontaine. I don’t suppose this biography mentions any connection
to our drive-in theater.”
“Not so far, but Adaire’s earliest stage roles were in Savannah and Atlanta, before she moved on to New York and Hollywood.”
“Keep reading. Maybe she knew somebody from the Preston family who owned the drive-in. Speaking of which, I still need to get in touch with his kids. That’ll be my first job. Yours is to find every Savannah Morning News article about the Nite-Lite Drive-In, back to its opening in 1955.”
Stacey frowned, but only a little. She doesn’t love research, but at least she’d be reading about a theater.
We reached the imposing Bull Street Library, designed like a temple of the ancient Greek world—like the Library of Alexandria, I like to imagine, probably inaccurately—and headed inside.
Our clients had provided contact information for Leah Williams Banford, Stanley Preston’s now-elderly daughter from whom Benny and Callie had purchased the theater. I called her first and left a voice message. I noticed Preston wasn’t part of her name; maybe she was a stepchild, or maybe she’d dropped it.
While Stacey fished through microfiche and microfilm for news stories, I opened my laptop at a table next to a floor-to-ceiling window looking out onto oaks dripping with Spanish moss. I accessed my data-fusion service, available to law enforcement, licensed private investigators, and other restricted groups, so I could dredge up records from recent years.
Stanley Preston, the drive-in’s creator, had died five years earlier, and the drive-in was his last known address. His family members included wife Nancy Jackson Williams Preston, deceased twenty years before him, and stepchildren Leah, who I’d attempted to contact, and Zebadiah, deceased. Leah appeared to be the only living relation to the original theater owner.
Stacey brought over a sheaf of warm printouts showing images of old newspapers. “There’s a lot,” she said. “And I haven’t even dug into the Pembroke Journal yet.”
I flipped through years of advertisements for the Nite-Lite Drive-In. Cowboy and war movies gave way over time to cheeseball films about teenagers from outer space and Annette Funicello beach parties. These in turn gave way to rough-looking biker movies, oddball psychedelic stuff, and lurid horror movies. A couple of these, like Sacrifice of Souls and The Body in the Basement, were by Antonio Mazzanti, the director-turned-serial killer suspected in Adaire Fontaine’s death.