by JL Bryan
"The inside actually isn't that bad," Stacey said. "I expected more vandalism, you know, and all kinds of gross stuff like in the bathroom out there."
We continued on, past a storeroom with scattered cardboard boxes and milk crates, plus a yellow mop bucket that I didn't want to inspect too closely. We found another small room with a two-drawer filing cabinet topped by a hubcap overflowing with cigarette butts and ashes. The ceiling tiles and upper walls were stained nicotine yellow, and the foul smell of the place was still strong. I could imagine the gas station manager sitting at his desk, chain-smoking, day in and day out. That was probably illegal now, smoking in a gas station.
Holding my nose, I looked into the two cabinet drawers. The upper one was empty. The lower one was brimming with bills and collection notices addressed to ABNER'S GAS N' GET. I knew from Calvin's research that the name of the gas station had changed a few times over the decades, but that was its final name before going bust for good.
We finally crossed into the largest room, the convenience-store area. Several movable steel shelves remained, scattered in disarray, as well as the checkout area and some other built-in counters where they'd probably sold coffee and whatever sort of gas-station refreshments they'd offered to the desperately hungry.
On the outside, we'd seen that all of the big windows were sealed by graffiti-coated plywood. On the inside, old newspapers had been taped all over the windows, as if to protect the glass somehow or to seal out every trickle of light.
I ripped away a patch of Sunday comics to reveal the glass behind it, perfectly intact and even clean and dust-free.
"You're right," I told Stacey. "It's pretty amazing how non-destroyed it is. It's almost like somebody could walk in and open it back up. Well, you know, if they added some merchandise. And a cash register."
"And made the outside look like less of a nightmare." Stacey picked up a display box of Pink Fairy cupcakes, sealed in plastic packaging, the cartoon logo fairy waving her sparkle-sprinkled cupcake wand on the front. "Ew. Ten-year-old food."
"Those are packed with preservatives," I said. "They're probably as safe to eat as they ever were."
"I'm not allowed. I used to love this stuff, but my mom said the artificial colors drove me crazy. They had to put me on ADD pills before they figured it out. Or was it ADHD pills? Anyway, I'm off them now." She held out the box of snack cakes toward me.
"Yeah, I'm not eating them, either." I nudged the pink and gold box away. Stacey shrugged and tossed them back on the shelf.
We found a Sir Slippy frosty machine, with a plastic dog in a scarf perched on a snow-capped plastic castle on top. It offered six plastic barrels of flavor, each one lined with black sludge at the bottom, near the filth-caked dispenser nozzle.
I looked behind the counter, but nothing remained except empty shelves and stray wires.
"Getting anything on the Mel-Meter?" Stacey asked. "Because mine looks asleep. No cold spots in here."
"There wouldn't be cold spots," I said. "Not if it's Anton." I stood quietly for a minute, moving my light from one corner to another. It must have been my imagination, but I thought I'd seen something dark flicker across my field of vision. "I'm not getting any readings, either, but let's set up anyway. The place seems safe enough for our gear."
"Yeah, if nobody's eaten the free cupcakes in all this time," Stacey said.
We grabbed a night vision camera and high-sensitivity microphone from the van and set them up as quickly as we could inside the convenience store area.
"It's hard to believe his house was right here," I said, looking around the empty convenience store shelves and counters again with my flashlight. "Did you read the file?"
"Yeah, mostly," Stacey said.
"After Anton died, his closest relative inherited the big mansion that used to be here. That turned out to be a cousin. He and his family moved in, slowly fell ill one by one, and finally lost the place during the Civil War. It's hard to run a cotton plantation without slaves."
"I imagine so," Stacey said.
"In 1872, another man named James Ellman bought the land and built a new house for his family. The old mansion was falling apart, so he kept his animals there. Pigs, goats, horses."
"I bet Anton would have loved that," Stacey said. "Seeing his old house used for a barn, his rooms slowly filling with manure..."
"Eventually they tore down what was left of the house around the time they ran the railroad through," I said. "The gas station was built here in 1957. It used to be full-service."
"And now it's just known for the Murder Bathroom." Stacey sighed and shook her head.
"That's not funny."
"Well, after all those bodies they found out there."
"What are you talking about, Stacey?"
"That's why you showed me the bathroom, isn't it? The Murder Bathroom? That's what the cops call it. Four bodies were found in there over the last ten years, since the gas station closed down. Well, one was an overdose, and then a suicide, but two were murder victims..."
"I haven't heard any of this," I said.
"Yeah, see, I have research skills, too," Stacey said. "I'm more than just the tough chick in boots."
"Okay, thanks, good work. You said four bodies in that bathroom?"
"Over the past ten years, yeah. It's like a little death magnet in there. People keep breaking in to use drugs. Always that same door. Nobody breaks into the men's room. Or the main building, apparently."
"That's terrible. I guess we'd better monitor that bathroom, too. Let's get going."
Stacey finished positioning the camera on its tripod, then started out of the room. I lingered behind and turned my flashlight off, looking into the darkness. I tried to sense whether Anton was present. I may not have been psychic, but I was connected to him, and I was pretty sure he was hunting me.
If he was there, he was keeping himself hidden. Even if he wasn't there, he might show up at another time. If he did, our camera would be here, recording.
I followed Stacey out to the van.
We hurried to set up a thermal camera inside the disgusting bathroom of death. I padlocked it shut with a lock I'd brought with me. I did the same to the back door of the gas station, so we could easily get in and out in the future.
If the legal property owners showed up, they wouldn't be able to get in through the back door, but I doubted that would be an issue, considering how long they'd left the place abandoned and neglected so far.
By now the sun was fully up. I stood on the broken, weedy asphalt behind the store and watched a train full of rusty boxcars crawl past on the other side of the barbed wire, moving slow, like a procession of exhausted metal dinosaurs ready for extinction.
"So, you think we should get going?" Stacey asked. "I mean, with all the laws against trespassing and breaking and entering these days..."
"Who's breaking and entering?" I pointed to the shiny new padlock on the backdoor. "Maybe we're just trainspotting."
"Breaking into the old theater won't be so easy," Stacey said. "Downtown, surrounded by witnesses, broad daylight...all of those could be problems. In fact, I'm a little worried about cops noticing us here, so..." She made a big overhand gesture toward the van, like she was performing in a high school color guard or something, and then took big steps toward it, as if to demonstrate to me how to walk.
I lingered behind while she climbed into the shotgun seat. The flaming-skull graffiti on the back of the gas station looked less threatening by day, more childish, but it also indicated that some residue of Anton Clay must have endured here over the years, at least enough to creep into a deranged, drug-addled mind here and there.
"We're going," I said to the burning skull, "but we're coming back."
"Of course we are," Stacey said, kicking her legs impatiently as she watched me from the open door to the van. "We left like a thousand bucks' worth of gear in there. Now can we please go get some breakfast?"
"Soon," I said, still looking over the graffi
ti-covered, boarded-up old building, trying to imagine the plantation house that had stood here almost two centuries ago, when Anton was alive and bedding down unhappily married women around town. "Very soon."
Chapter Thirteen
East Broughton Street, as previously noted, was once lined with movie palaces and playhouses on both sides. Fifty or so years ago, it would have been a glowing neon wonderland, promising spectacles behind every door, in bright, flashing colors that lit up the night.
A couple of the old theaters were still open, offering plays and lesser-known films with the support of the city's huge art school. Most had been closed down, demolished or refurbished into habitats for trendy little retailers.
The old Corinthian theater remained in its original form, for the most part, neither destroyed nor rehabilitated, but instead left to slowly decay, its once-glorious colored-glass facade cracking and crumbling under weather and neglect. I had never seen a photograph of Anton's old townhouse, only an indication of it on a city map from 1850. I had no idea what that old building had looked like.
"Cafes, bistros, bars..." Stacey studied her phone as I drove slowly down the street, as if she couldn't simply turn her head and look out the window. "And not a one of them open until eleven. Ellie, do you realize how many hours away that is? Can't you hear my stomach grumbling?"
"Nope, not from here."
"Hungry," Stacey whispered in a low growl. "Me so hungry. Me need food."
"Why does your stomach talk like Cookie Monster?"
"Me too hungry for proper grammar."
"Just keep the monster quiet for a minute." We passed yet another cafe with a CLOSED sign hanging behind its barred glass door. This stretch of street seemed oddly quiet for a sunny weekday morning—not many pedestrians, plenty of streetside parking available.
Stacey was right. Basically every business on the block was closed until lunchtime, even the coffee shops. We passed a trendy-looking boutique clothing store, another with large vintage toys displayed in the window, and a metaphysical book shop/palm reading place, all of them closed until at least ten, some of them shuttered until the early afternoon. This was clearly a neighborhood oriented toward the evening and night hours, a street much too cool to wake up in the morning.
"It's only nine," Stacey said, thumping her fingers near the dashboard clock in case I didn't know where it was. "There won't be any food available for two hours. What you need to do is turn around and head back across Whitaker to The Coffee Fox—"
"We're not here to eat, we're here to scope."
"I thought we could maybe do some of both?"
"Scope first, then eat."
Stacey sighed. "Fine. Maybe we should break right into the theater now, while the street's still deserted. We have a couple hours before these shops start to open."
"Maybe. Let's take a closer look."
I slowed as we passed the lifeless old theater. Stripes of dead light bulbs decked out the blank old Art Deco marquee, the early twentieth century false front awkwardly built onto the original nineteenth-century Greek-temple design. High Corinthian columns flanked the entrance.
We turned the next corner and circled around to the lane running behind the theater, a narrow alley with trash cans, dumpsters, and small loading docks jutting out along one side, behind the antique brick buildings. The other side of the alley was the back of a six-story parking deck, offering a view of shadowy concrete and impenetrable chain link. Altogether, the alley felt like a canyon, walled with old brick on one side and newer, uglier concrete on the other, a dark space out of sight of the world.
"It's a total kill zone," Stacey said.
"What?"
"Look, those buildings are so close together that the world's skinniest cat couldn't wriggle through." She pointed to the old brick buildings crowded in on our left, including the theater. "And there's no way out on the right, either. So if you could chase your enemies into this place and block both ends, they'd have nowhere to escape. You could just close in and wipe them out. That's why it's a total kill zone."
"What are you talking about, Stacey?"
"Have you never played paintball?"
"Not even once."
"My brothers used to take me. Well, my dad would make them do it. He wanted me to learn to shoot. I thought deer stands were boring, but I always liked hunting my older brothers and splatting them with red paint, so all I'm saying is let's not get trapped in this alley unless we have a couple paint grenades..." She smiled, her eyes going distant, as if looking back into her memories.
Then her smile faltered, and I supposed she was remembering that one of those brothers, Kevin, had died in the overgrown ruins of an old plantation house when he was thirteen. Officially it was ruled an accident, but Stacey had been there, eleven years old, and had seen the apparition of a horrific dead-bride specter standing over the body.
"I'll bear that in mind, Stacey." I slowed the van from a sloth crawl to a snail tip-toe. Okay, snails don't have toes, but the van was barely moving at all, is what I'm saying. We rolled past the theater's back door, which was a metal fire door chained and padlocked into place.
"Let's go in and get him," Stacey said, a steely look in her eyes, as if the thought of her dead brother had galvanized her into wanting to go on the offensive against the ghost that had killed my family. "The sooner the better, right?"
"There will be a burglar alarm. It would be crazy for a building this big, right in the middle of downtown, not to have one."
"But you know how to hack those, right?"
"You're the tech manager," I pointed out. When Stacey blanched, I added, "Just kidding. Calvin taught me to disable the standard residential and commercial systems. But let's not go advertising that as part of our official package of services, okay?"
"This case isn't really official, either."
"True. Nobody's on our side here, and nobody's paying us, either. The best we can hope for is to stop Anton before he hurts too many people and maybe come out of it alive ourselves."
"It'll be our most rewarding case ever," Stacey said.
I continued driving at the same sleepy-turtle pace, trying to reach out with my virtually nonexistent intuition, attempting to pick up on any hint of Anton's presence. Nothing really leaped out at me. Anton seemed even more absent here than at the old gas station—but it was daytime, and he was likely hiding himself, and of course I'm not psychic.
"So...are we stopping?" Stacey asked, since I'd just about the brought the van to a complete halt while seeing if I could sniff out Anton. "Should we strap on our burglar masks? Did we bring burglar masks?"
"Hold your horses on the break-in," I said. "Maybe we should talk to the people who work in that restaurant next to the old theater. They're open late. Maybe they've noticed something strange in the last couple of nights."
"You've accidentally stopped the van." Stacey pointed toward the end of the alley, to the next major street. "Breakfast is like three or four blocks that way."
"Actually, let's forget breakfast," I said.
Stacey gasped. "Why would you say something like that?"
"We'll come back for lunch." I pointed at the rear entrance to the French restaurant next to the old theater. The restaurant was called simply Louis.
"You're talking about that meal people eat in the middle of the day?" Stacey asked. "When we're asleep? That one?"
"Yeah, that's what the daywalkers call 'lunch.' If anyone has seen anything, it'll most likely be the people who work next door."
"So, what do we say? 'I'd like the croissant, and have any apparitions in frock coats tried to burn you to death lately'?"
"That sounds great," I said. "A croissant, I mean."
"Finally, we agree on something. Now, off to Coffee Fox—"
"More like back to the office."
"But why? Don't you know it's been taken over by mean people in starchy collars?"
"Just to drop off the van," I said. "You can head home and sleep if you want. I'm going
to start background research on Mackenzie's house, and also follow up on what you learned about Anton's properties." Stacey had sent all the information she'd gathered to my phone.
"Why don't you sleep, too? It's past bedtime. Look, the sun's way above the horizon."
"I'll try."
Back at the office, I let Stacey out next to her car so she could head straight home. She also took all the gear we'd grabbed for the Anton case but hadn't used yet. If asked, we would pretend everything was over at the current client's home.
I drove the van around back and in through the garage door to park it in the workshop before grabbing my own car. Stacey had been lucky to get out of there and head home without any trouble. A different fate awaited me that morning.
The moment I'd parked the van, I hopped out and headed for the garage door, already rolling down into place. It was meant to be the perfect getaway. In only a few seconds, I'd be outside, hightailing it to my car, before any of the PSI invaders in their dark suits could bother me. A construction crew worked at the front corner, hammering together a lumber framework around a significant chunk of the floor space as if building a new room, but I didn't stop to ask questions.
I wasn't fast enough, sadly.
"Ellie," the Russian-accented voice called, like an ice pick flung across the room at me. "Where are you running?"
I stopped where I was, only three feet from sunlight and freedom. My back stiffened at the sound of Kara's voice. The garage door continued its descent, rattling its way down until it thudded to the concrete with the finality of a prison gate slamming shut.
Kara approached me from the open door to Calvin's old office, her pale blue eyes as cold and humorless as a porcelain doll's. She held a steaming mug in one hand. Around the room, the other PSI folks seemed to have slowed down their whispering and inspecting to watch us. The construction crew continued with their hammering and sawing in the background, paying us no attention.
"Don't mind me," I said. "I didn't want to interrupt your morning coffee."
"Green tea," she said, waving it in my direction so the smell of boiled woodlands would waft at me. "No sugar. I don't like to depend on stimulants in order to carry out my life."