by JL Bryan
“It was closed years before Preston died. He just kept on living here anyway.”
“That’s some real dedication,” Stacey said. “He must have loved this place.”
“Or couldn’t afford to move.”
“Yeah, there’s that. Hypothermia while watching a movie alone. That’s sad. Now I feel bad for him. Unless he actually was a murderer, obviously.”
“Obviously. Finally, we have a report that the stepson, Zeb, died in an airboat accident in Louisiana and was partly eaten by alligators. That sounds… interesting, I guess… but not directly related to the case.”
“Unless he was doing a Legend of the South airboat tour, maybe? If that exists? Wasn’t there a real flooded plantation that inspired that movie?”
“I have no indication he was on such a tour… or that they exist… but I guess anything’s possible. That was in 2010, after their mother Nancy had died, but a few years before Stanley did. Stanley was elderly by then, though. I doubt he was out arranging his stepson’s death in a swamp at that point, unless he has a clear motive to, which I don’t see, either. If Stanley murdered his mother-in-law, it was to gain control of the farm. If he murdered Adaire Fontaine, it was some kind of obsessive-stalker thing based on their past relationship and maybe her national fame.”
“And we don’t know that he committed any murders, really. We’re just guessing.”
“Right. We need to get inside Stanley’s mind and try to figure out what he was thinking and what he might have done. I guess it’s time to watch the home movies.”
“I hope they’re not too creepy.”
“That’s why I’ve been avoiding them.”
In the afternoon, Stacey picked me up and we returned to the drive-in, where we met up with the family at the concession stand.
The mood felt less friendly than before.
Callie emerged from the kitchen and told her husband to take Daisy and Gumby to play outside. Then she looked us over without too much warmth.
“Can you explain the damage in the game room a little more?” She removed the kerchief from her head and shook out her braided hair. “There’s damage to the wall, and the corner of the foosball table is bashed up. I’m sure it’ll still work fine, but it seems like things are getting more dangerous, aren’t they?”
“We always have to be extra careful with entities capable of throwing objects around.” I drew out the yellowed postcards and letter from my laptop bag. “I believe she was trying to show us these. We have a lot to catch up on, if you have a minute.”
“I don’t have much more than a minute. We’re putting some final touches on the kitchen. A million things to do before the grand opening, but what’s fun is doing them with no time or money or energy.” She sighed and dropped into one of the booths. “So, what’s up?”
We caught her up, showing her the correspondence we’d discovered and our recordings from the night before. My footage of the foosball attack was pretty short and low-quality, but the audio of the entity saying “Look at me” made Callie shiver. She read over the postcards and letter from Adaire Fontaine, her jaw dropping.
“So, the drive-in owner and Adaire Fontaine really were an item at one point?” Callie asked.
“It’s possible,” Stacey said. “Adaire obviously felt warmly about him, but she was known to be friendly and flirtatious all around, so it’s hard to tell how serious it was.”
“It was serious enough for Stanley to keep these. And hide them,” Callie said. “He must have been hiding them from his wife, right?”
“He left them hidden even after his wife’s death,” Stacey pointed out. “And there’s another possibility. They could be evidence potentially tying him to Adaire’s murder.”
“You think he murdered Adaire Fontaine?” Callie looked shocked. “The owner of this grungy middle-of-nowhere place?”
“That’s one possibility,” I said. “We know Adaire was murdered, and Stan Preston had some kind of relationship with her, and possible obsession given how he placed her posters all over the drive-in. And we know violent and tragic deaths can lead to a haunting. But it’s possible he didn’t do that at all, and that the real history is something we still have to uncover.”
Callie shook her head slowly, taking it all in. “Does that mean Adaire Fontaine is haunting this drive-in? It seems like a really bleak place for her to end up.”
“That’s just what I said!” Stacey told her.
“I don’t know whether she’s here permanently, if at all,” I said. “All we know that she, or an entity posing as her, wanted this information found.”
“She didn’t reach out to Benny and me, though.” Callie sounded almost disappointed. “I mean, we would have helped. If you’re going to have a ghost, it may as well be someone cool like her.”
“It might be that playing Aces on the big screen gave her the opportunity,” I explained. “There’s an idea that an image of someone can, under the right conditions, have a little of their spirit or soul in it.”
“Like the old idea that taking someone’s picture can steal their soul,” Stacey said.
“And if there’s any grain of truth in that idea, it’s most likely to apply to this kind of situation. An actress like Adaire would be pouring her spirit and emotion out deliberately, trying to transmit it through the medium of film,” I said. “This is another idea we’re looking at as we try to find some clear pattern or order to the haunting here.”
“From what you’re telling me, this place is crawling with… actual ghosts. Dead people, wandering around everywhere.” She gestured to the parking lot outside, the sky painted late-afternoon orange. “And they come out at night. Next you’ll tell me the drive-in was built on an old graveyard. Or someone was murdered here.”
“We haven’t found any sign of that,” I said. I didn’t add that, around Savannah, lots of things were built on old graveyards. “We have someone coming out tonight who’s extra sensitive to these entities.”
“Like a psychic?”
“Right. He’ll help us map things out a little more clearly.”
“And you plan on playing more of the Stan Preston’s favorite movies tonight,” Callie said. “Benny told me. Legend of the South and The Body in the Basement.”
“Yes, we’ll see if it helps bring out the ghosts while our psychic is here.”
“Then I have one request. Play Legend of the South first. I’ve seen the poster for Body in the Basement, and I don’t want to be outside while that’s on the screen. And I definitely don’t want to risk Daisy seeing it.”
“Of course,” I said, though for selfish reasons I’d hoped to get the horror movie out of the way first and then have the period-piece costume drama to help wash the first one out of my mind. I had to respect the client’s wishes, though. “First, we’re heading to the top floor of the screen tower, playing some of the old home movies we found up there.”
“Okay,” Callie said. “Well, this is bad news overall, because there’s so much happening here. I hope it doesn’t get even worse.”
“We’ll get it straightened out,” I said, hoping I could keep my word on that.
Chapter Seventeen
Stacey and I again ascended the concrete stairs to the screen tower’s less-than-hospitable third floor. We ducked through the musty curtain of the haunted-castle doorway frame and into the dark little room beyond. Stacey hesitated, looking over the dusty equipment on the shelves and the disorganized spools of film on the desk.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m just worried about what we’re going to see on Preston’s home movies here. Hopefully nothing that scars us for life.” She nervously studied the archaic home projector, rubbing her scalp through her short blonde hair. “It’ll just take a sec to figure out. I don’t want to break this thing. It's basically prehistoric. Dinosaurs probably watched movies on this thing.”
The only seating was the worn, icky-looking armchair where Preston had spent untold hours viewin
g his home films and whatever else he did up here alone in this hidden room. Neither of us wanted to sit there, so we cleared the assorted Halloween decorations off the black coffin and carried it in to use as a bench. It was sturdy enough to hold us both. We’d considered the Santa sleigh, but it was too rickety.
“There better not be anything too scary on these,” Stacey said, not for the first time. “Should we go get popcorn? Or maybe that pizza Callie offered to make us?”
“If there is anything disturbing on Preston’s home movies, maybe it’s better to watch them on an empty stomach.”
Stacey blanched and nodded.
The flickering eight-millimeter movies were in color but had no sound. Most focused on the theater itself. We saw the heyday of the Nite-Lite Drive-In’s glory days, with rows of Titanic-sized automobiles with bench seats and tail fins squeezed in between the speaker poles. At night it was like a miniature carnival, crowds of people chattering, long lines at the concession stand, colorful lights guiding their way.
Summertime scenes on the lawn were full of minor attractions like pony rides and clowns, and once a guy in a Superman costume, inexplicably wearing a ski mask and driving a tractor. In one video, a mob of boys received cap guns as a promotion for some cowboy movie. A battle ensued among the children, full of smoke and howls as the boys hunted and shot at each other, parents cringing and covering their ears.
Another video lingered on a long line of 1960s-era cars and trucks waiting to enter the drive-in, as if Preston just wanted to brag about how popular it was. And it did seem popular.
We glimpsed his family incidentally in these scenes, his wife Nancy working the concession stand with her son Zeb and daughter Leah, all in the striped and bow-tied costumes that Leah had complained she was embarrassed to wear in front of schoolmates. None of the family members looked especially happy with the roles Preston had assigned them. Nancy looked particularly glum. Doling scoops of popcorn into paper bags and pouring fountain drinks probably wasn’t the glamorous life she’d expected from fast-talking Preston and his big theater dreams.
One home movie captured a couple minutes of a Christmas morning. The boy and girl were in their early or middle teen years, both looking sullen. The film focused mostly on panning across the pink plastic tree and glittering decorations around the house. It was hard to believe the farmhouse had ever looked habitable, much less in living memory.
“Is it just me, or does it seem like Preston spent a lot more time filming the drive-in than his own family?” Stacey asked.
“It sounds like he never really got close with his stepkids, beyond using them as labor,” I said. “Leah didn’t seem to like Preston at all, and she said her brother never got into Preston’s good graces despite trying.”
“Man, their dad dies in a tractor accident, then they get some dude who’s totally cold as their stepdad. Then their grandma, who took care of them while Mom was out partying, dies right after that. That’s all kinda sad.”
Another reel showed a view out of a moving bus window, which Stacey quickly identified as Hollywood Boulevard. “That’s Grauman’s Chinese Theater, home of countless movie premieres. This is basically a touristy look at Los Angeles.”
Another one, also viewed from the bus window, provided glimpses of immense, ornate mansions through front gates and palm trees.
“Looks like one of those celebrity home tours,” Stacey said. “I wish there was sound so we could know whose houses these are.”
After the celebrity home tour, we watched a reel of Preston’s wife and stepkids on the beach. The two teenagers seemed to almost be having fun for once, until they noticed their stepfather filming them, at which point they frowned and walked glumly away.
Preston turned the camera on his wife instead. Dressed in a brightly pinstriped bathing suit, Nancy waved, smiling under her sunglasses, though it looked forced. Maybe their marriage had grown strained, or maybe she was thinking about going back to the concession stand after vacation was over, back to endlessly popping and scooping popcorn for lines of impatient snackers.
Nancy took the camera and turned it back on her husband, giving us a look at Stan Preston around age forty, going saggy and gray. He was still rocking the big Chance Chadwick mustache well into the 1960s, though Chadwick himself had died back in 1957. His swimsuit was almost inappropriately European.
Another reel returned us to Hollywood Boulevard, but on foot instead of a tour bus, filming the Walk of Fame stars embedded in the sidewalk. Stacey pointed out such notable names as Burt Lancaster and Joanne Woodward.
The next reel gave us a view through a high, wrought-iron fence, into a garden with a swimming pool, the back yard of a bright pink mansion with elaborate white trim reminiscent of pastry icing.
The person holding the camera—Preston, presumably—was on foot, apparently spying on the house.
“Isn’t that one of the mansions from the celebrity tour?” I asked Stacey.
“Yep. In fact, let me check…” Stacey looked up something on her phone. It only took her a few seconds to find an image of the pink mansion, located on a current Hollywood tour company’s website. “It’s hers.”
“Adaire’s house?” I guessed.
“The ‘Adaire Fontaine Murder House.’ She was renting it, but yep, that’s where she lived.”
I shivered. “Maybe Stanley Preston took a little detour from his family vacation to murder Adaire Fontaine.”
“Hm. But not so much. This reel was filmed with a Super 8.”
“And?”
“Those didn’t come out until the 1960s, and Adaire Fontaine was murdered in 1959. This film had to be made years after she died. Maybe he was just going for a trip down Murder Memory Lane, as psycho killers do.” Stacey checked her phone as the reel ended. “Jacob’s on his way.”
“Is it that late already?” I checked my own phone. “Callie’s got dinner for us. Pizza.”
“I’m going to blimp up if this case drags on too long. That pizza’s too good to resist. I can’t wait for Jacob to try it.” Stacey set up another reel. The Super 8 reels were short, only three minutes each, their silence and faded colors giving them a strangely ephemeral quality, like half-remembered dreams.
The next reel showed a four-story stucco apartment building, not the fanciest place by any means. Plywood tagged with graffiti patched one ground-floor window. Dark concrete stairwells receded like caves into the building, the exact opposite of inviting.
“That doesn’t look like a stop on the Homes of the Stars tour to me,” I said.
The handheld camera wobbled and shifted. Pedestrians passed on the sidewalk, in the foreground and background. The camera holder was watching the building from across the street.
A woman emerged from the apartment building. She wore a definite late-sixties California style: orange-tinted sunglasses, sandals, and a threadbare shift dress with a swirling, psychedelic rose print. It was hard to tell her age at this distance, especially with the grainy, faded film, but I got the impression of a young adult, twenty to thirty years old, curvy with long dark hair.
“Who is she?” I asked. “Stacey, get a digital of this.”
“You got it.” Stacey drew the small digital camera from her belt. “It’s going to be awful quality, though.”
On the silent, wobbly Super 8 film, the woman stopped to mooch a cigarette off some disheveled guys lingering at the corner bus stop. She hurriedly smoked a part of it and passed it back as a bus arrived. She climbed aboard, and the reel ended.
Stacey’s phone buzzed again. “Jacob’s here,” she said. “Let’s go collect him. He’s been dying to see the drive-in.” She shut down the projector and hurried out through the curtained haunted-castle frame.
I lingered, looking at the suddenly dark portable screen, trying to make sense of what we’d watched.
Chapter Eighteen
“Okay, first off, this place is amazing,” Jacob said as he climbed out of his accountant-gray Hyundai. It was getting dark, and
a few exterior lights were lit, mostly around the concession stand. “I mean it. I can’t believe y’all are getting paid to hang out here.”
“It gets pretty weird late at night,” Stacey said, greeting him with a hug. She introduced him to Benny and to Gumby, who Benny held on a long leash. The dog wagged at Jacob, acting much friendlier to him than he’d been to me, but I tried not to be jealous of the dog’s clear preference.
“Even better. Weird is good.” Jacob adjusted his glasses. An accountant at a CPA firm, Jacob was not a particularly stereotypical kind of psychic. He was more of a buttoned-down and responsible guy—I mentioned the Hyundai already—who was into classic science fiction and fantasy novels and cheesy Mystery Science Theater movies. Maybe it was the bad movies that formed the basis of Jacob and Stacey’s otherwise unlikely relationship, making up for her insistence on dragging him into kayaking excursions and camping trips on their days off.
“Weird is good, that’s a great philosophy,” said Benny, with his red suspenders and his puffy newsboy hat. “You’re really a psychic, huh?”
“Some people prefer the term ‘sensitive,’” Jacob said. “Not me, though. I prefer ‘psychic.’”
“Whoa. How’s that work?”
“I’m just somewhat more aware of the dead than the average person. And the dead are sometimes more aware of me, which is annoying when I’d rather be left alone. Speaking of the dead, I understand we’ll be viewing The Body in the Basement? The mostly banned murder movie?”
“It’s a double feature,” Stacey said. “We’re starting with Legend of the South.”
Jacob winced. “I believe Legend of Boggy Creek was mentioned? We should watch that instead. There’s nothing like it. It’s all about this Bigfoot creature in Arkansas, part fake documentary, part docudrama, part inadvertent self-mockumentary.”
“Yeah, I could definitely line that up—” Benny began.
“No, thanks,” I said. “While Legend of Boggy Creek definitely sounds like… well, a pretty weird movie… it’s not related to our case.”