by JL Bryan
The walls and ceiling dipped and sloped here and there, following the house’s irregular roofline. Michael’s bedroom was dominated by a giant bay window. I glanced toward the closed door to his room, then at another closed door.
“Is Melissa home?” I asked, figuring it would be great to stray out onto some delicate ice, conversation-wise.
“Soccer practice,” he said. “She might show up for dinner. Might not. I texted her. It’s not like I cook all the time. We might have to invite Alicia and her kids to help eat all this.”
“Melissa’s okay, then?”
He shrugged. “She’s a different person now. Quieter. More serious. It definitely changed her.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Sure.” We both knew it was, that my personal demon, the ghost of a murderous, long-dead plantation owner named Anton Clay, had taken her as part of a plan to renew himself, to make himself into something dangerously powerful, a true devil.
We’d stopped the malevolent spirit and sent him on his way, but we’d all paid a personal price for it, one way or another.
“What’s new with you? Any new fix-it projects?” I glanced at the closed door to his room again; his little workshop area was also in there.
“Just the big chess-piece one,” he said.
“I thought that had moved permanently into the corner.”
The tall, massive clock, made of dark walnut wood and carved to look like a castle, was currently my least favorite feature of his room, even with its faceless bishops and knights hidden away inside. Those chess-piece characters emerged on the hour, or at least they did when the clock functioned. It presently did not.
“Yeah, I’m looking for something else. Maybe a nice small cuckoo clock. Something simple.”
“To restore your clock-repair confidence?”
“Exactly. The chess clock has blown that out of the water.”
“Like I’m about to blow through your crabs,” I said. “Are they ready yet?”
“Almost.”
A door creaked open. Melissa entered, nine years younger than I was and about that many inches taller, at least at the moment in her soccer cleats.
“Oh, hey, Ellie’s here.” Melissa’s tone was completely neutral. She advanced on Michael, trailing mud clots across the hardwood. “Is the food ready?”
“Cleats!” Michael shouted.
“Way to turn into Mom,” she grumbled, backing up to the door.
“One of us had to,” Michael said. “And Mom would tell you to change clothes before you get dirt on the kitchen chairs.”
“Too bad.” Melissa elbowed in front of him and dipped boiling stew into a bowl. Mud fell from her soccer practice uniform.
“How’s school?” I asked her, attempting to be friendly, but I instantly cringed at the boring parental question that came out of my mouth. Was I really that old now?
“Fine. Just holding my breath until graduation.”
“Looking forward to that?”
“New city, new state, new school, new people. My own life, finally.” She cracked open a crab leg and slurped down the meat while looking me in the eye. “I wish I could leave tomorrow. What about you? Any exciting ghouls and ghosts invading people’s brains?”
“Not lately,” I said, hoping to avoid talk of the supernatural. I’d brought too much of that into her life.
“Ellie went to that old drive-in theater in Pembroke,” Michael said, oblivious to my stance on the topic. “Was it haunted?”
“No idea yet.” I ladled out crab, corn, and potatoes for myself.
“This stew has not been cleared for ladling, people,” Michael said. “You haven’t let it simmer. If it doesn’t simmer, it doesn’t thicken.”
“What was the theater like?” Melissa asked me, surprising me with her interest.
“It has a lot of character, I guess. The previous owner seemed obsessed with certain Golden Age movie stars, so I’ve been reading up on those.”
“Like who?” Melissa asked.
“One called Chance Chadwick. That was a stage name,” I said.
“Obviously.” Melissa sat at the kitchen table, watching me over her steaming soup.
“His real name was Carlos Gonzales.” I took the seat across from her, happy to try to bridge some of the dark gulf between us. “He made movies in the 40s and 50s. He had a pretty wild reputation. He was an amateur pilot and liked racing cars. That’s how he died, actually, driving his Rolls-Royce too fast along Mulholland Drive and flying off the road into a canyon. There are graveyards of cars off that road.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of him,” Melissa said. “Who else?”
“Adaire Fontaine,” I said.
“Your case involves her, too? Really?” Melissa drew closer.
“Well, no, I’m just saying the theater owner had a number of posters of her. I doubt she’s directly involved. But everyone seems to know all about her, so I’m catching up—”
“You’ve seen A Soldier’s Dame, though,” Melissa said, a corn cob forgotten halfway to her mouth.
“No, but I’m sure Stacey has—”
“You have to see it. It was one of my mom’s favorites. It’s really sad. A total classic.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll watch it sometime.”
“Yeah, like now,” she said. “How can you not have seen it? You cannot be part of this household without seeing it.”
“Oh.” I was surprised by her phrasing. Pleasantly.
“Grab your crabs and come on.” Melissa headed for the living room.
“Stay off the furniture, Melissa,” Michael said. “Your practice clothes are dirty.”
“You can just steam clean it later, Mom.” Melissa rolled her eyes and dropped onto their couch, shedding dirt.
I sat beside her, definitely not complaining about the dirt, glad for this sign of her drawing me into their family a little bit. We’d all lost our own. My parents died in the fire. Michael and Melissa’s father abandoned them not long after Melissa was born, and their mother had died of cancer a few years earlier.
Michael eventually gave up complaining and came to join us, his bowl piled with two crabs, which he’d arranged so that they gripped sausages and potatoes in their claws. They were freaky looking critters, but growing up by the ocean meant I was accustomed to eating creatures with claws and tentacles and eye stalks and shells.
Sandwiched between Michael and Melissa, I ate my stew and watched the 1954 movie. A Soldier’s Dame was in black and white, and it really was a tearjerker, helped along by the orchestral accompaniment.
Essentially, it was the film promised by the poster, the story of young lovers during World War II. He became a soldier, she a nurse. He died in the war—or so she thought! She returned home and married. Only years later did she learn he had survived and eventually come home, too. But then he died in a coal mining accident, a true American tragedy.
The final scene had Adaire Fontaine’s character brooding in the cemetery at her lost soldier’s funeral, dark hair arranged in elaborate coils around her face, long black dress rippling in the wind, violins filling the air. She read the letter he’d written to her not long before his death. The camera zoomed closer and closer on her face as she brimmed with emotion at the soldier’s voice-over.
“…when I finally returned from the prisoner of war camp, I heard you’d married J. P. van Rockevelt. I went to pay you a visit, but then I seen you through the window of that big ol’ mansion on the hill, surrounded by all them fine things. What could a no-good chump like me ever hope to offer you next to all that? I’m just a no-good bum without a penny in my pocket, a fella without future, a soldier without a war. That’s why I never knocked on that door. I moved on. But I’ll think about you every day ‘til my last. I’ll never love another woman as long as I live, and that’s all right. It’s enough for me to know you’re happy and safe. That’s why I fought in that war, after all.”
As the sad violin
s rose to a melodramatic crescendo, Adaire looked from the letter to the fresh grave of her long-lost boyfriend. She spoke to his headstone.
“Today, I may be Mrs. J. P. van Rockevelt, wife of the noted industrial magnate,” she said, clutching the letter to her chest. “But in my heart, I will always be… a soldier’s dame.”
Melissa was sobbing next to me. “They missed out on everything,” she whispered. Wiping her eyes, she looked at me and whispered, “They could have been so happy together. But she never even knew.”
“It’s okay.” I put an arm around her, with as little awkwardness as I could manage.
Michael looked at us and shook his head. Having sat patiently through eighty-five minutes of lost love and heavily emoted tragedy, he clicked the remote, ending the schmaltzy sad music of the closing credits, and jumped to his TV’s main menu. “I’m picking next,” he said.
Chapter Five
I was in a good mood the next day. With no urgent need to go into the office, I could sleep late. I spent the afternoon straightening up my little apartment, my window and balcony door open to catch sunlight and fresh air from our city’s lovely tree canopy. My cat tiptoed out onto the tiny afterthought of a balcony and watched bicycles and pedestrians below.
Benny finally called me from the drive-in.
“Yeah, we slept on it, and the paranormal investigation is a go,” he told me. “We don’t have a ton of room, budget-wise, but we can’t live with this craziness. We’re approaching it like one more renovation problem, like the plumbing or the electrical.”
“Great, we’ll be glad to help. What day would be most convenient for us to begin?”
“Literally ASAP,” he said, pronouncing the acronym as one word. “With our grand opening coming up, we can’t afford to delay.”
I checked my phone. “The weather’s on our side today. We could set up this evening, monitor things tonight.”
“Okay, but the drive-in’s open tonight. We’ll be running from sunset to about midnight. Is that a problem? Should we shut it down?”
“No, just carry on as planned. Maybe your parking lot phantom will show up while we’re there.”
Afterward, I texted Stacey to let her know we’d be on duty that night.
Jacob wants to come ASAP, Stacey replied.
Does he pronounce ASAP as four letters or all as one word? I’m doing an informal survey.
I don’t know, we’re texting.
We aren’t ready for the psychic yet, I sent back. We have procedures.
Grrr. OK but LMK when we can invite him. And then we have to bring the whole Bad Movie Club. Which you should join.
I see enough bad movies by accident, I replied. I’m sure our clients will be happy to have us bring customers later, though.
Can’t wait, see you at the off.
The what?
The office. It’s a new abbreviation I’m trying out. The off. Meaning the office. Cool huh?
No.
At the office workshop, we did a standard pre-job check of our gear and found no issues. We were ready to watch for ghosts.
Stacey and I drove separately to the theater, me in the van and she in her Escape.
At the drive-in, we parked in the first row. Benny bicycled over to meet us.
“We’ll set up to listen, watch, and record here in the parking lot, where people saw the apparition,” I told him after I climbed out. “It would be nice to have a wider, more panoramic view of the place. Could we put a camera in the projection booth?”
“The projection booth’s pretty cramped already.” He cringed, probably at the idea of us hanging around his pricey new projector. “You could put something in the concession stand’s arcade area. Just don’t block foosball access. Or if you really want to get up high… well, that’s probably not a good idea.”
“I’m open to bad ideas,” I assured him.
“She always is.” Stacey nodded a little too enthusiastically.
“The old farmhouse,” he said. “It has one of those rooftop walkways, with the railing, you know?”
“A widow’s walk?” I asked.
“Right. Way back in the day, the drive-in owners could sit up on their roof and watch the big screen from home. That had to be a pretty sweet arrangement. There’s a speaker pole up there for sound, too. This was 1955, so it was like having a large-screen TV decades before anyone else. Of course, they were probably too busy working the drive-in to really kick back and enjoy it too often.”
“We should probably check out the farmhouse.” I looked past the cheerful purple concession stand to the wide lawn behind it, stretching away toward the high, gnarly-looking wooden fence.
“Okay.” Benny pedaled reluctantly in that direction while Stacey and I walked behind him. “But fair warning, it is rundown, and there is definitely no power in there, no light. I’m pretty sure any attempt to turn on the electricity would burn it down.”
“We’d better go while there’s still daylight, then.”
He checked his phone. “I can’t come with you. Callie’s leaving for work, so I have to watch Daisy. I’ll open the gate first, though. It’s hard to find if you don’t know where to look.” He biked on ahead.
The gate was indeed a nondescript chunk of the fence, with no visible handle on this side. It had to be pushed open by someone who knew the right spot. It reminded me of a jib door, a design usually found in extravagant homes with serving staffs. Such doors vanish completely among the wall paneling when closed.
Benny waited for us, having pushed open the gate, and looked glumly into the area beyond.
“Callie’s got the garden beds going pretty well back here,” he said. “Stuff grows fine, but she doesn’t like it because of the farmhouse. I just told her to think of it like the world’s biggest garden shed, but she doesn’t like to go inside. She leaves her things here on the porch.”
I stepped through the gate and into an area beyond it that felt a little dimmer, a little cooler.
Garden beds brimmed with vegetables and herbs, their spicy scent filling the air. A broken brick path twisted through them, from the gate to the decrepit ruins of the house.
“I can see why she doesn’t really like it here,” Stacey said, shaking her head at the overgrown building.
The farmhouse was indeed in poor shape, sagging and rotten, thick with vines and undergrowth. On the porch, shaded by thatches of ivy, a set of crumbling wooden shelves held new hand tools and a bag of potting soil.
A railing had been added on the top and sides of the front porch roof, which was slanted and clearly not originally intended for pedestrian use, creating the widow’s walk area for film viewing. A speaker pole jutted up like a lightning rod, the rusty speaker still attached after all these years. Next to it lay the weathered, broken-down remains of a wooden bench.
“Have you been inside at all?” I asked Benny.
“Oh, yeah, and it’s bad. Water damage. Rotten furniture. Vines growing through the windows.”
“Are the floors intact enough to walk on?”
“They’re creaky but solid. Kind of. I’d be careful in there. When you’re done, you can swing by the concession stand. Popcorn’s on at eight. The movie should start by nine, earlier if it gets cloudy.”
He left through the gate, seeming to be in a hurry to get away.
“I can see why they’re living in the screen tower,” Stacey said. “This house is a total tear-down. You couldn’t restore this.”
“Nope. Nor would you want to, really.” The house was large, but that was probably the only positive thing I could say about it. It had an unpleasant, cagey look, with so many of its windows shrouded by vines. “We’d better grab some cameras.”
We made a round trip to the van, returning with utility belts and thick jackets and backpacks, like a team-up of Batwoman and Batgirl, sort of. We don’t enter spooky old houses without high-powered flashlights and other basic defenses. These only run off the specters temporarily, so their usefulness is limited, ev
en counterproductive when trying to observe and learn about the ghosts that are haunting a client.
The front porch didn’t feel all that stable under my feet, and the porch roof sagged, making the railing on top of it uneven. While the drive-in had been kept up to some extent until the owner’s death, it was clear nobody had lived in this house in many years.
A foul stench greeted us within the house. Plant life was indeed actively growing up the walls in the kitchen, having invaded through a broken window. Water-damaged paintings and framed posters advertising theatrical performances from decades earlier adorned the walls.
“Hey, this used to be pretty posh,” Stacey said. “Too bad about the leaks.”
“It’s definitely not like any farmhouse I’ve seen.”
The living room had been decked out in decadent Hollywood Regency fashion. A long, low, screamingly green couch heaped with the remnants of bright, brocaded cushions was flanked by immense faux-Grecian black and gold urns decorated with horses and bulls. Everything that wasn’t marble or black lacquer was instead puffy, bright, thick with fringe and busy striped patterns. It was a weird, dreamlike environment.
We headed up the warped, wobbling stairs. For our safety, Stacey waited until I was at the top before she started up.
On the second floor, vines and tree limbs had grown in through broken windows. Several doors surrounded the rickety banister at the top of the stairs, where one could look over and easily imagine falling to the first floor.
The large bedroom at the front of the house was furnished in a similar fashion as downstairs, and again had been left in neglect for many years, with a leaky roof feeding mold and mildew.
My eyes danced dizzily over the extravagant decay. The black lacquer bedframe was virtually buried in a heap of golden tassels the size of horse’s tails. Matching black lacquer mirrors trimmed in gold flake hung above the headboard. Water damage had wrecked the zigzagging bright green wallpaper. The fluffy zebra-striped rug hadn’t fared well over the years, either, physically or stylistically.
In front of the enormous, gold-leaf-encrusted dresser mirror was an array of dried-up cosmetics, left open ages ago. A pink coffee mug full of black filth sat at one end of the dresser.
