Ghost Trapper 14 Midnight Movie Page 16

  “And the other two are?” Jacob asked. “Wait, isn’t Legend of the South with Adaire Fontaine? And we’re also watching Body in the Basement, with Portia Reynolds, directed by Antonio Mazzanti? The director who murdered them both? We’re having a murder movie double feature? Y’all are twisted.”

  “We are not!” Stacey told him in mock anger. “You’re the Boggy Creek fanboy.”

  “Benny,” I said, “like I mentioned earlier, we need Jacob to walk through the tower, including your apartment. It’s better to do it after dark, but at the same time we shouldn’t be tramping through talking about ghosts while Daisy is there—”

  “We’ve got it figured out,” Benny replied. “I’ll set up some cartoons ahead of the feature, and we’ll sit out on the lawn and watch those with Daisy. You guys can psychic around the tower while we watch the ‘toons, then text us when you’re done. Daisy will probably fall asleep on the picnic blanket before then.”

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  “But then we have to miss the cartoons!” Stacey said. “Just kidding. That totally works for us.”

  “Excellent. Now, who wants pizza?”

  “Look at the concession stand!” Jacob marveled as we approached the enormous Purple Pizza Eater with its smiling dragon sign. “Tell me the pizza is actually purple.”

  “It’s not actually purple,” Stacey said.

  “We could probably pull that off, though.” Benny scratched his beard thoughtfully. He opened the concession stand door and gestured for us to enter, bowing a little like a proper butler.

  “If anybody could, it’s y’all.” I stepped inside, into the aroma of warm freshly baked crust and melted cheese—and, of course, popcorn.

  “Hey.” Callie glanced at Stacey and me quickly, then even more quickly at Jacob before looking down at the counter again, as if she were especially shy around new people. “I’ve got a couple pizzas coming up for you to try, but if you hate them, I can make something else.”

  “I doubt it’ll be possible for us to hate them,” Stacey said.

  “Pick a spot. I’ll bring them out.”

  “Who’s playing foosball?” Daisy came skipping out of the game room, a Darkwing Duck comic book in her hands.

  “I will, champ,” Benny said.

  “You always lose-ball.” Daisy looked among us carefully, then pointed at Jacob. “You wanna play?”

  “I mean, kind of. There’s a foosball table?” Jacob turned to look.

  “It’s a little dinged up,” I said.

  “Daisy, they’re here to have dinner and work,” Callie said.

  “We could probably handle one game while we wait, though.” Stacey looked at me. “We’ll play teams. Daisy already picked Jacob. So that leaves us.”

  I shrugged and followed them in. Daisy whispered some kind of secret instructions or strategy to Jacob.

  As we played, my eyes kept drifting to the blank spot on the wall where the Pocketful of Aces poster had been. Adaire Fontaine, or at least an entity who wanted me to believe it was Adaire Fontaine, had gone to a lot of trouble to make those old pieces of correspondence known, but I still wasn’t clear why. Was she trying to tell me Preston was innocent of her murder? Or guilty? Or was I confusing the whole situation by focusing on her murder? Maybe I’d rushed into some assumptions that kept me from seeing the big picture.

  “Ellie! Look alive!” Stacey snapped. I glanced down to see the ball whizz past my goalie, who was clearly sleeping on the job, and down out of sight through the goal hole. I spun the little character uselessly, seconds too late.

  “Lose-ball!” Daisy announced triumphantly. “And no spinning.”

  “You made us lose-ball,” Stacey told me with an accusing stare, while Jacob and Daisy high-fived each other.

  “Okay, Daisy, it’s time for cartoons on the lawn.” Benny waved his tablet, from which he could control the digital projector upstairs if needed. “Let’s go grab Blankety.”

  “Blankety! Yes!” Daisy, still the reigning foosball champ, ran after her father as he walked out the door.

  Stacey, Jacob, and I returned to the main concession stand room, where Callie was at one of the booths, setting out two steaming pizzas on elevated metal plates.

  “This one is just avocado and bacon, and that one is kind of a spicy Southwestern style with grilled chicken and peppers and olives and queso, and the sauce is frijole-based with jalapeno. It’s not even really a pizza. If you don’t like it, I can just make a regular cheese pizza or whatever.” Her voice was fast and nervous, her eyes flickering among us.

  Jacob gaped at the meal as he and Stacey dropped down into one side of the booth. I took the other. Since I had no date tonight, I could sprawl all I wanted. My fingers ran over the years of hand-carved names, smiley faces, stars, peace signs, and the occasional scratched-out phone number on the table.

  “I didn’t realize it was crazy gourmet pizza night,” Jacob said. “This looks amazing. Definitely the Southwestern for me.”

  Callie watched nervously as we took slices. I picked the bacon-avocado one, and no surprise, it was as good as everything else she’d made.

  “Oh, man.” Jacob shook his head after the first bite. He looked out the window, almost wistfully, at the parking lot and the huge outdoor screen where a Grape Ape cartoon played. “This place is basically paradise, you know that? I’m never leaving. Are you guys going to be adding condos out here?”

  Callie laughed. “Don’t suggest it to Benny, he might try. In the olden days, they did have drive-in movie motels. You could lie in bed, turn on a speaker box in your room, and watch the movie. Believe me, we’ve learned about every type of drive-in there was, trying to take every idea that worked and avoid the ones that didn’t. Learning why so many have failed but some stay in business.”

  “I’ll tell you what, if you keep making pizza like this, I don’t see how you can fail,” Jacob said, and she blushed. “Do you have somebody to do your taxes?”

  “Don’t we have to make money first?” she asked.

  “Absolutely not! Losses can be your friend.” He fished out a business card and passed it to her. “I will personally do what I can to help this place on the financial end.”

  “Okay, thanks.” Callie headed outside to join her family.

  “I guess we’d better hurry so they can put their kid to bed,” I said.

  “Fine, but we’re taking the rest of these pizzas to go,” Stacey said. “All of this is going into my stomach while we watch Legend of the South.”

  “You’d better have it finished before Body in the Basement,” Jacob said. “I don’t think that one pairs well with food.”

  “I’m getting creeped out the more I think about it,” Stacey said. “I mean, it was weird enough watching The Heart of Man with my film-nerd friends in school, knowing the filmmaker was a murderer. But Body in the Basement stars Portia Reynolds, one of the women he actually murdered. Maybe we shouldn’t watch it.”

  “I want to watch it less than anyone else,” I said. “In fact, I might keep night watch on the monitors instead.”

  “Oh, come on,” Jacob said. “Of all the people I know, I can’t believe the two of you would be afraid of a horror movie.”

  “But it’s the murder movie,” Stacey said.

  “He didn’t kill her while making it, though, right?” Jacob asked. “Not like Adaire Fontaine?”

  “It was never proven that Mazzanti murdered Adaire,” Stacey reminded him.

  “Yeah, but come on. Everybody knows it.” Jacob looked around the purple concession stand, smiled at the Rocky poster. “This place is great,” he said, yet again.

  We loaded our leftover pizza slices into a take-out box, wiped down our table so Callie wouldn’t have to, and headed out to the parking lot. My heart was nervous, my stomach heavy. I should have kept it to one slice, but I’d failed at doing so.

  Behind us, the family sat on a large checkered picnic blanket on the lawn—close to the concession stand, I noticed with
approval, nowhere near the back gate and the farmhouse. Callie waved at us. Daisy fell over in laughter at the antics of the befuddled Grape Ape and his sidekick Beegle Beagle.

  We dropped our leftovers in the cooler in the van—always good to have a cooler for long, late-night stakeouts—and continued on to the screen tower. The night was overcast, but the reflected Grape-Ape glow from the screen helped light our way. It was warm outside, but we wore jackets as protection against possible supernatural attacks. I don’t like to go poking around in haunted spots without a layer of leather protecting at least some of my more vital organs.

  We rounded the corner and opened the steel door in the side of the tower.

  “This is so cool.” Jacob gazed around the interior, looking at the steeply slanted wall, the mountain bikes and Rollerblades, the camping gear, then beyond the mud room space into the long theater office, the walls papered with movie posters, surfaces cluttered with paperwork and junk exhumed from Preston’s apartment on the second floor. “I didn’t know you could go inside the old movie screens like this. Mind, blown.”

  “I thought it was pretty neat, too,” Stacey said. “And, hey, they’re a nice couple. They’re fun and outdoorsy.”

  “Bad movies and camping,” I said. “Y’all should double date.” I was sort of joking, but Stacey nodded with a “hmm” and looked like she was seriously considering it.

  “Okay…” Jacob took a deep breath and walked forward, holding out his hand like Baby Yoda using the Force. I think that was deliberate. “I’ve got a lot of flickering impressions here. This was a workplace, obviously, people in and out, money being counted. I’m sensing one guy at the middle of it all. But it’s all just quiet trace memories here. I doubt your clients are having trouble in this room.”

  I nodded, not so much because he was right—he was—but to let him know I was listening. When a medium is surveying a location for the presence of the dead, it’s best not to interrupt their thoughts and impressions, but instead pay attention and take notes.

  Jacob looked through the open door to the playroom with its picture books and stuffed animals now neatly organized on low shelves, a rainbow rocking horse, a kid-sized painting easel. He nodded and kept moving. “I think this floor is fine. Let’s go up.”

  We walked through the clients’ second floor apartment next, the most awkward part of the evening. Jacob trailed his fingers along the recently painted walls and occasionally leaned his head against them, as if listening to some hidden presence crawling through hidden spaces.

  “I’m getting that same guy from downstairs, but stronger,” Jacob said. “He lived up here, right? But it didn’t look like this. You can tell it’s been recently renovated. Before it was kind of a beige old-man sort of place, that’s the impression I’m getting. He lived here alone, for years. I see him as very elderly, feeling himself shrink, feeling himself get weaker year by year… but still, this apartment wasn’t really his focus. It could just as well as have been a motel room. His real interest was more…” Jacob frowned up at the ceiling. “There’s a third floor, isn’t there?”

  “There is,” I said.

  He sighed, and any trace of good humor left his face. “I guess we’d better get it over with.” He trudged back to the stairwell door like he expected gloom and doom ahead.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The bleak, unadorned climb to the third floor was a good prelude to the shadowy chaos that waited inside. We let Jacob lead the way, following his supernatural senses.

  He opened the door, flicked on the scattered overhead bulbs, and stood inside the dim room shaking his head at the old movie theater decorations.

  “I really don’t know what’s creepier, the actual haunted castle flat or that Santa Claus.” He pointed to the Santa Claus mannequin sitting in the sleigh, with its unnerving permanent plastic smile and staring eyes.

  “The Body in the Basement poster is worse than both.” I pointed to the faded promo pinned to the wall, with its image of rotten fingers poking around the edges of the basement door as someone—The Body, presumably—made their way up from below into the pleasant-looking suburban hallway above.

  “Uh, maybe we shouldn’t watch that, after all,” Stacey said.

  “No chickening out now,” Jacob said. “This area is probably your most active. The male entity I mentioned earlier, he’s really focused up here more than anywhere else in the building. He’s not here right now, but he comes and goes. A lot. His energy is like…brown slime all over everything. Your clients should stay away from this floor. This is his territory.”

  Jacob poked around, moving aside junk to reveal more junk. He lifted a child-size cowboy hat hanging on a shoddily painted plywood space rocket, put it back. Nudging aside some tiki statues, he dragged out a wooden treasure chest painted with a skull and crossbones and opened it, revealing books and papers crammed inside the gold-painted interior. “Hm,” he said, but continued poking and exploring elsewhere.

  I dug into the treasure chest. I hadn’t seen it before—Jacob had found it crammed behind a cutout of a palm tree with a sand-colored hill at the bottom, like those tiny deserted islands where any number of forlorn cartoon characters have found themselves marooned over the years.

  The chest held technical specs for the Super 8 camera, celebrity magazines, and a few underground-type newspapers of the late 1960s and or early 70s, stiff and crumbling with age.

  Below these were a couple of biographies. One was called The Rough Bunch, after the nickname given to Chance Chadwick and his circle of brash, hard-partying young actors and musicians of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Those were the type of people Stanley Preston and his wife Nancy had aspired to be, in their own way, among the smaller stages of Savannah’s theater and arts scene.

  A casual flip-through revealed many dog-eared pages, some with notes hand-scribbled in the margins. All of the marked pages mentioned Chance Chadwick or had pictures of him. In each role, he wore a similar outfit topped with a fedora, cutting a similar figure, regardless of whether he played a mobster, con man, detective, or spy.

  While Jacob and Stacey wandered off through the haunted castle cutout, through the curtain to Preston’s hidden film-viewing room, I flipped through another book crammed into the treasure chest, one that interested me far more.

  Legendary Lioness: The Adaire Fontaine Story featured on its cover an image from Adaire’s most popular movie, Legend of the South, in which she wore an immense curly red wig and the wide, many-layered antebellum dress currently on display at the Savannah Historical Association.

  Inside the book, someone, presumably Stanley Preston, had added a number of hand-drawn notations, circles, and scribbles between the lines and in the margins, creating a real serial-killer bulletin-board-of-obsession look.

  In the black and white picture section at the book’s center, he’d circled a squat, balding man with solid black-circle sunglasses and a long beard, dressed in a tuxedo. On his arm, in a dress studded with glittering stones, was the stunning Adaire Fontaine, her face as inscrutable as the Mona Lisa.

  Adaire Fontaine and director Antonio Mazzanti at the Academy Awards, 1959, read the caption. Adaire would be murdered later that year. It was one of the last pictures in the book.

  “Mazzanti,” I murmured.

  The room grew colder.

  I looked up, sharply aware that I was alone, though Jacob and Stacey weren’t far away, just beyond the curtain. Unless they’d tiptoed past and left me alone while I was looking through the books, but surely they wouldn’t have done that.

  Holding the Adaire book in one hand, I rose from where I’d been squatting. I widened and strengthened my stance, ready for an attack, and drew my flashlight in case I needed it.

  A dark figure stood silently watching me, unmoving, back in the cluttered shadows. It was so still that at first I thought it was Santa the Dirty Mannequin, but the shape was all wrong. It was the outline of a man wearing a fedora.

  An acrid cigar smell filled
the air. A pale glow rose, barely illuminating the face.

  Chance Chadwick remained back in the shadows, as he had when we’d glimpsed him before under the screen, his face even paler than it had been in black and white. Under the brim of his hat, his eyes were locked onto me, his expression flat and emotionless.

  “Why are you here?” I asked, keeping my voice low. If the entity was a fragile sort, I didn’t want Stacey and Jacob responding to the sound of my voice and possibly chasing it off.

  Of course, it could also have been the malevolent, aggressive sort, so I kept my grip on my flashlight instead of reaching for a voice recorder.

  The entity didn’t move. It stood like a statue, as though merely observing me.

  I held up the book in my hand, with Adaire Fontaine on the cover. “Did you know her? Is she here with you?”

  The apparition continued to stare at me, its eyes never blinking, as though they had been painted on, like the face was a death mask rather than living flesh. Its uncanny lack of movement, and the coldness of its gaze, made it completely impossible for me to enjoy what could have been a handsome apparition of the dead movie star.

  “Why are these books hidden here?” I asked. “What was Stanley Preston doing? Did he murder Adaire Fontaine?”

  A loud bang sounded next to me, making me jump.

  The treasure chest had slammed shut, as though he wanted me to look no further.

  This, of course, could only make me want to look much further.

  When I turned back to look, he was no longer in the distant shadows, but right in front of me, his bloodless, pale face inches from mine, staring at me with those painted-on death-mask eyes.

  Up close, the whole face seemed even more artificially smooth, mask-like.

  “Are you really Chance Chadwick?” I asked. “Or Stanley Preston, trying to look like Chance in death, just like you did in life? Is that it?” The air grew freezing cold around me, so fast I could hear the crackle of ambient humidity hardening into frost, coating everything in the room. Suddenly it was winter up there.