by JL Bryan
The rod handles moved slightly, one after the other, as though someone were invisibly brushing their fingers across them. The small player figures dangling from the rods rocked and swayed as if touched by a strong breeze.
I put away my voice recorder and drew out my phone to take video, but by the time I opened the camera app and pressed record, the rods and the figures had gone still again.
“Hello?” I said again. “Is someone there? I’m listening if you want to talk—”
All the rods slammed toward me at once. I barely managed to leap backwards before one rod handle stabbed me in the gut. While I avoided major organ damage, I stumbled and fell into an awkward sitting position on the floor near the wall. My phone skittered away from my hand.
“That… wasn’t very nice.” I reached to draw my flashlight, and with my other I prepared to blast a little Aretha Franklin-powered holy music from the speaker on my belt to drive back the aggressive spirit.
Before I could do either, though, the entire table slid across the floor toward me, threatening to crush me against the wall.
I rolled aside as the corner of the table slammed into the wall just beside me, near where my head had been.
“Stop it!” I shouted, which probably didn’t come across as commanding as I’d hoped.
Something large came rushing down from above.
The table had slammed into the wall below one of the movie posters, which came unmoored by the impact and toppled forward.
As it fell, I found myself looking into the stunning gray eyes of Adaire Fontaine. It was the Pocketful of Aces poster, swinging down toward me in its heavy lighted frame.
I flinched aside as it smashed face first into the edge of the foosball table. The glass front of the poster’s frame shattered into a thousand pieces, half of them raining down onto the green foosball playing field, the other half raining down onto me and the floor.
I clicked on my flashlight and pointed it toward the center of the room, where the table had been, striking the entity with three thousand lumens of full-spectrum white light, trying to defend myself.
In that instant before my flashlight turned on, looking into the dark room ahead, I saw something that I first took for a ghostly afterimage of the movie poster.
She was as pale and misty as she’d been outside, but now so close I could see her face, as beautiful as in all the pictures. Her big, captivating gray eyes drank me in.
An apparition of Adaire Fontaine stood before me—and in my haste to defend myself, I chased her away with a blast of white light.
When I clicked off the flashlight to restore the darkness, she had gone, and the icy chill of her presence had gone with her.
Chapter Fourteen
“Whoa! Are you okay? What happened?” Stacey turned on the overhead lights and ran to my side, helping me up though I didn’t really need it. I shook broken glass off my jacket and out of my hair.
“I guess the movie worked,” I said. “Another entity showed up to the party, looking for trouble.”
“What kind of entity? Any idea who it was?”
“I got a good look at her. And it definitely looked like Adaire Fontaine.”
“What? You got to meet Adaire Fontaine?” Stacey drew back in shock. “I am… so jelly. Super jelly. Lime jelly, because I’m green with envy.” She looked around the empty game room. “Do you think she’s still here?”
“It wasn’t great. She threw a table at my head.”
“That’s so like her! Passionate and impulsive.”
“Yeah, she’s a real charmer. We need to clean up this broken glass. See if you can find a broom.”
While Stacey sought out janitorial supplies, I gathered up my phone, fortunately undamaged after its high-speed collision with the floor, but that was why I paid extra for the sport pack. I stopped the video recording and replayed it. The phone had captured a couple seconds of a dark, blurry partial view of the table lunging at me, following many seconds of a dark, blurry view of the ceiling after it flew out of my reach. Amazing camera work.
Stacey returned with a broom, dustpan, and a big shop-vac so we could suck the broken glass from inside the foosball table.
Before we could do that, though, we had to lift away the poster frame, which was wooden and even heavier than it looked. Good thing the foosball table had blocked it from landing on my skull.
Stacey gave me a hand, and we heaved it away as delicately as we could, wary of the broken glass inside.
The movie poster flopped out facedown onto the foosball rods when we lifted the frame away. Small, yellowed squares of paper dropped out of the frame, having been concealed behind the poster.
Stacey and I shared a look—this was definitely something—and hurried to put aside the frame so we could study the unexpected items.
A stiff, faded postcard showed the Lyceum Theater on Broadway in New York, its facade full of bright lights and soaring columns. I turned it over to read the large, looping handwriting aloud: “‘Dearest Stanley—’”
“Oh, dearest, not just dear,” Stacey said. “Interesting.”
“‘I have arrived safely in New York, and it has been the grandest of times already. It is a world of dreams, and while I suffer awe and fear at the strangeness and size of the city, there are so many theaters, opera houses, playhouses, dance halls, nightclubs—it is all so fine! I do look forward to your visit, when I shall show you the town, and no doubt entice you to join me here. All my love, Adaire Fontaine.’ And she wrote her name really big, like signing an autograph.” I showed Stacey.
“Ooh, that’s probably worth some cash,” she said.
“It’s dated 1949.”
“Definitely worth some cash. That would have been just after she moved to New York.”
“She sent him this in 1951.” I held up a postcard featuring the Hollywood sign in the hills. “Want to hear it?”
“Of course.”
“‘Dearest Stanley…’ There she goes with the ‘dearest’ again. ‘I am having the most wonderful time on set. Film acting is a rather different craft than the stage, as you know, both allowing and demanding greater subtlety. But posh on the stiff stuff—I’m to be in a feature! Watch for me playing a party girl in Hotel Island, with the amazing Chance Chadwick. My part in the film is small and short, as is my dress! Tell me your latest, even if only auditions—your talent is true, and your time will come! Beloved as ever, Adaire Fontaine.’”
“Benny and Callie could probably sell this big autograph for a bundle, too,” Stacey said. “Enough to replace a hundred lighted poster frames.”
“And there’s a letter.” I picked up the yellowed envelope, ripped open along one end, and tucked it into my jacket pocket.
“What? We’re not reading it now?” Stacey looked outraged.
“Let’s clean up the broken glass first.”
“Ugh. Fine.”
After some effort, we gathered up and threw away all the glass, vacuuming afterward to be safe.
“What happened with the movie?” I asked Stacey as we put the supplies away in the concession stand’s janitorial closet. “Did you make a digital recording?”
“No, I rolled back the reel, but you got all noisy down here with the crashing and smashing before I could start the replay. I’ll go do it now.”
While she returned upstairs, I stepped outside. The night was warm, certainly warmer than the game room had been, summer clearly just around the corner. The insects were chorusing again. It was dark until the projector flared to life above, creating a glowing square on the second-story window.
On the screen tower, Chance Chadwick and Adaire Fontaine appeared again. This time they stood on the roof of his grungy apartment building, surrounded by other grungy buildings. They were having some kind of quarrel, but Stacey hadn’t activated the exterior speakers around the concession stand, and I wasn’t back in the van to hear the radio, so it was like a silent film.
Then I remembered I’d attempted an EVP—electronic voice phenomenon—sessi
on with Adaire before she’d hurled the foosball table at me. I played that back while watching the large, glowing, silent black and white people on the screen.
Adaire spun dramatically from Chance and faced away from him, while he remained in the background, growing indistinct, continuing to speak without making any sound that I could hear.
A voice spoke on my recorder, too soft to hear.
I played it again, louder. Out spilled a low, breathy voice, like that of Adaire Fontaine in some of her more emotive moments.
“Look at me.”
Even as her recorded voice spoke, the image on the screen tower shifted so that the background, including Chadwick, faded into almost complete darkness. Adaire’s face remained, enormous, taking up most of the screen, her eyes wide and imploring.
“Look at me…” repeated the recorded voice from the device in my hand. Then a third time, much more firmly: “Look at me!”
Apparently, that was what she’d been trying to communicate while I spoke to her inside the concession stand. When I’d failed to look at her, she’d thrown a table, as one does. And brought my attention to her long-hidden correspondence.
“I’m looking at you now,” I told the face on the screen. She continued gazing out at me, the scene behind her darkened and forgotten, her immense gray eyes large enough to swallow me. No wonder she’d been a star.
“Hey, I got it!” Stacey skipped out the front door of the concession stand, waving her digital video camera around. “I bootlegged it, back-row style. Did you watch the scene?”
“Yeah, but I couldn’t hear it.” Up on the movie screen, the scene had shifted to a paddlewheel riverboat where the mob boss hosted the poker game. It was a swanky black-tie party, everyone dressed to the nines, or whatever they said in the early fifties. White-coated staff circulated with trays of wine glasses and hors d’oeuvres, and there was a live three-piece band, just to let us know this was a pretty fancy gathering indeed.
“Looks like it’s almost time for the big game,” I said.
“And the big heist,” Stacey added.
“Let me see what you just recorded.”
“But then we’ll miss the next part—”
“You go listen to the movie and catch me up when I get there.”
“Deal!” Stacey handed me her camera and sprinted to the van so she could tune in over the radio system.
I walked more slowly, my eyes on the little screen in my hand.
The hotel rooftop scene I’d just watched played again, filmed by Stacey up in the projection booth as it had played on the distant screen tower. She’d zoomed in, so the image was a bit grainy.
The scene was different this time. For one thing, I could hear what they were saying instead of just looking at their faces. I watched it play out, turning up the volume.
“You can’t cash me out like that,” Chance Chadwick said on the screen in my hand. “Just deal me back in, honey. That’s all I’m asking. Without you, it’s like I’m playing without a full deck.”
“You’re too much of a wild card.” Adaire spun away from him dramatically. “I need a man with a strong, steady hand. Who thinks about the long game. Who doesn’t put all his chips on the table because he thinks he has to win big every time.”
“You mean somebody like him? Listen, doll, he may own a few clubs—he may even be king of this town—but I know you. You’re not the kind of gal whose heart can be bought with diamonds, not even by a man who’s got ’em in spades.” He stepped forward and took her arm.
“Oh, I can’t keep bluffing like this. I may lose big, but it’s the only game worth playing.” She spun back toward him, getting in his face. She stared at him, and he stared back, their eyes locked, silent tension palpable through the screen. “I’m upping the ante, and I’m ready to bet it all. But you better not turn out to be some joker.”
“I’m no joker, honey. I’m the ace, and you’re my queen.” He kissed her, and the musical score hit a crescendo as the camera panned away from the lovers to a neon martini glass blinking above a dive-looking bar.
“That was weird,” I said out loud, to nobody but myself. I played it again.
When I’d watched it on the big screen, Adaire had turned away for a long, long moment, everything going dark behind her, leaving all in shadows but her face staring out at me.
On the digitally recorded version, when she whirled away from Chadwick, he’d come up right behind her, never going fuzzy and dark, and taken her arm. It had somehow played out differently than when I’d watched it up on the big screen.
“That’s not possible,” I said, also out loud. How could Stacey’s recording of it be different from what I’d seen? We’d been watching the same projection at the same time.
It was as if Adaire had broken the fourth wall, as well as the veil between worlds, and looked out at me personally from the big screen. Perhaps she’d wanted to see whether I’d gotten her message.
When I returned to the van, I wasn’t sure how to explain all that succinctly to Stacey. She immediately jumped into catching me up on the movie, anyway.
On the screen, the party boat rolled on, watched by a group of masked armed men on a riverbank, or maybe a lakeshore, who prepared to board a small motorboat.
“Okay, so those guys are going to rob the gambling boat,” Stacey explained, “but they’re actually the mob boss’s henchmen. It’s an inside job. But—oh!” Another group of men, led by Chance Chadwick himself, leaped out and ambushed the masked henchmen, literally from behind bushes, in a somewhat improbable fight scene.
Then Chance and the others stole the coats and masks from the henchmen and left them tied to a tree.
“Ah, the old double-reverse inside job that becomes an outside job,” I said.
“Yes, so the mob boss, he’ll think he’s getting secretly robbed by his own guys, and he’ll go along with it.”
“But isn’t Chance supposed to be playing in the big poker game, too? He’ll have to move fast to make all that work.”
“Indeed he will,” Stacey said.
Soon the movie cut back to the party boat, where Adaire entertained her mob boss boyfriend. She stepped away and looked out off the deck, toward the shore. For a moment I wondered if she was going to darken the rest of the movie and stare into my soul again, but she stayed in character this time, signaling the armed robbers with a cigarette lighter. Her character was playing both sides of the fence, a dangerous game, a big gamble. I still wasn’t sure where her true loyalties fell—with the mob boss or the charming gambler plotting against him. That was good acting.
I found myself on the edge of my seat as the heist plot unfolded, watching to see if Adaire would throw me another look or another clue. Anything to confirm what I thought had happened earlier.
The heist went awry. Gunshots rang out. Gamblers, gangsters, waiters, and musicians died in the crossfire, strewn around the boat in their tuxedos and fur coats.
It all boiled down to a final gunfight, with Chance Chadwick cornered in a shootout with the mobsters, hunkered down next to Adaire behind a piano.
Adaire lay on the ship’s deck beside him, dying from a gunshot wound.
“Maybe we were wrong,” she whispered. “We bet too high. You can bluff and cheat for a while, but you can’t win the whole game that way. Sooner or later, they call your bluff, they spot the ace up your sleeve, and the house comes down on you hard.”
“Don’t say that,” Chance told her. “We’ll cash out here and move on. We’ll be playing with a whole new hand of cards after tonight. You’ll see.”
“Oh, but don’t you know?” she sighed. “There are no new cards, not really. It’s just the same old cards, being dealt again… and again… and again…” As she died, she released a stack of cards she’d been holding, and the wind scattered them across the boat deck and over the edge into the water.
“That’s it,” Chance’s character said. “If we aren’t walking out of here as a pair, I’m bringing down the whole dirty house
of cards.”
He charged out at the mobsters, a gun in each hand, and they all died in a mutual shootout.
The camera panned to the water below, where the blood-spattered cards floated face up—all aces.
Then the movie faded to black, and the credits rolled.
“That… was bleak at the end,” I said.
“Yep, that’s noir for you. These days, they’d never allow a sad ending where everyone dies. Maybe they were going for Shakespearean tragedy there, wrapped in hardboiled crime tropes.”
“If you say so.” I yawned and stretched. “Anyway, it looks like the movie worked. We evoked an entity.”
“Yep, I should go shut down the projector.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe you got to see Adaire Fontaine in person. You had no idea who she was a week ago.”
“I’d heard of her,” I said defensively. “I think.”
“Ugh.”
“Want to hear her voice?” I asked.
“Seriously? You got EVP from Adaire Fontaine, too? This case is solid gold. Like classic country gold, with Patsy Cline.”
I played the EVP for her, Adaire’s husky voice demanding, “Look at me… look at me… look at me…”
Stacey’s jaw dropped; ghostly voices are always a bit startling. “Sounds like something she’d say. She craved attention and praise, hated to be alone. Loved crowds, especially if she could be at the center of them.”
“Meaning she would hate life as a ghost,” I said.
“Especially a ghost in the middle of nowhere. Maybe she’d enjoy haunting some famous theater that still holds major performances. Maybe even an opera house. But out here… why would she even be here?”
“That’s the million-dollar question. I was leaning toward Stanley being a psycho stalker, maybe even the real murderer instead of Antonio Mazzanti—”
“That’s just what I was thinking!”
“—and maybe Stan hunted her down, perhaps motivated by jealousy, because she went on to become a famous movie star, and he didn’t. Maybe he had obsessed over her in some creepy way ever since they worked together.”
“You and me, same brain waves.” Stacey pointed back and forth between our heads.