Saturday April 7, 2024 10:55 a.m.

The rental car’s front right tire sat almost on top of the crumbling concrete curb. As opposed to parallel parking, Daniel did something more akin to “acute angle parking.” Considering everything else that went on in this side of town, it wouldn’t have surprised him if this minor infraction went unnoticed by local authorities. Small town, big city problems.

Even though he was early, he didn’t bother to fix his parking job. It wasn’t worth the gas he would need to restart the car. Instead, he stood in front of the grimy glass doors, put down his aluminum suitcase, and lit a cigarette. With how health conscious the world had become, it had become increasingly difficult to feed his habit. At the very least, bad sides of town were good for something, even if you had to risk getting mugged just to get a carton of reds.

Daniel liked to smoke and wear a long gray trenchcoat and an old fedora he had once found in a thrift store. Sometimes he wished that he had lived in “the old days” when his heroes like Sam Spade went around solving mysteries and saving the hardest of dames even if she didn’t ask you to. These days, you even said the word “dame,” and you’d get slapped with a lawsuit. Most likely, if he even looked at the woman walking in front of him on the sidewalk longer than a nanosecond, she would probably call the cops on her cell phone. That was the problem with advanced technology, even if the machines made it easier to communicate, the same misunderstandings would still occur due to human error. The irony of it all was that he was there to conduct an investigation of his own.

But no, this one was staring at him. No wait, not at him, she was looking at the marquee above him.

“I think you missed the weekend matinee by a few years.” He chuckled dryly, putting out his cigarette. She didn’t respond, not even to look at him coldly the way women often did. Tough crowd.

At first, Daniel had thought this woman was barely even that, just some teenager who got off the bus at the wrong stop. After all, this was hardly the multiplex or the mall. But upon really looking at her, he realized that she was probably as old as he was, maybe even older. There was just something about the wide-eyed way she stared up at the building in front of her that made her seem younger.

Another car pulled up, maybe it was the owner of this wreck. Nobody else would be out here this early in the day otherwise.

“Amber. Daniel. Sorry I’m late, I just got caught up in traffic.” Matthew was so out of breath that anyone would have thought that he had run all the way across town as opposed to driving and taking a few steps out of the car onto the sidewalk.

Daniel looked at the woman again, who continued to stare at the building. So, this was her, the psychic. Personally, Daniel didn’t believe in such things, but then again, in their line of work, it was always good to have friends. Nonetheless, she didn’t seem all that friendly toward him.

“Shall we?” As if from a magical transformation, the woman came back to earth, or this reality, or whatever place she seemed to be avoiding. And she was smiling.

“Sure.” Matt took a large key ring and managed to find the exact key on the first try.

“So, you’re uh, the psy-” Daniel held the door for the lady with his right hand as the left loosely held his case.

Amber quickly turned around to silence his last syllable. “Don’t call me that. I don’t know what I am. All I know is that this is what I do.”

“I know the feeling.” He muttered as he followed her into the darkened lobby.

Daniel tried to remember the last time he had heard the name “Amber.” There was something he had read in a newspaper several years ago about a missing girl. The case had gone cold for years until the cops had become so desperate as to call in not only one psychic, but two. Apparently, some crime writer had tagged along on the case. You’d think with publicity like that, Amber would have steady work with the FBI or CIA or some covert organization that neither acknowledges the existence of psychics nor explicitly denies using them in their operations.

On one of the long bus rides across the country, Daniel had read the book, titled Girl in a Blue Dress or something like that. It seemed that the primary image which came to Amber was that of a little girl in a blue dress playing in a field of wheat. According to the police reports, which the psychic siblings had not seen or given any background from, the girl was last seen wearing a blue dress. The conclusion most readily drawn was that somebody had pulled over and got the girl to get into a car, whether by force or a more subtle coercion. The police had searched the woods surrounding the town, under every stone and pile of dead branches. Supposedly, Amber actually saw the girl playing in the field on her family’s farm. Amber told the police to pull over on the side of the road so she could go take a look, even though the field had already been cut. Her brother Max said that he had heard the grinding of a metal machine and the screaming of the little girl. The author of the book reported that Max had often had terrible headaches while on cases like this.

Maybe that could explain why he wasn’t there with Amber. Daniel could easily imagine that hearing something like that constantly could drive someone insane. That would make sense, especially considering how “off” Amber seemed, so distant and disconnected with reality as everyone else knew it. It turned out that after a tear-filled confession, the girl’s father confessed to the accidental death of his youngest daughter, who had been playing in the fields during harvest. Naturally, in the high tractor and with the loud sound, he was unable to hear or see what had happened until it was too late.

Considering such eerie accuracy, the twins could have easily gotten jobs with other law enforcement organizations. Yet Daniel could easily tell that Amber wasn’t exactly living the good life, with her large, unkempt clothing. He wasn’t one to judge exactly, but he could relate. People in their line of work never got any sort of credit. At least Daniel could masquerade what he did as “science,” despite the naysayers and skeptics. It wasn’t like science fiction where he could actually communicate with the dead using gadgets or entrap them with technological snares. He just took readings the same way people measured radiation to see if levels were low enough for people to safely live there.

In his case, even if he couldn’t do the equivalent of a paranormal fumigation, he could at least advise people to look to the real estate pages. One house he visited, the woman was so shaken from just living in the space that she didn’t sleep and often got sick. Maybe it was really just a psychological placebo effect, but Daniel would never forget the thank-you card he received from Nicole a month after she took his advice and moved out. It wasn’t so much what she said in the card or the card itself but the photograph she had enclosed. She looked healthy, not as haggard or as aged as before. As impossible as it would seem, perhaps it was possible that places could suck the life out of living people as well as acting as conduits for the dead.

With someplace as old as The Phoenix Theater, Daniel could probably expect a few interesting readings. Still, he couldn’t get his hopes up. After all, Nicole’s case was a rarity in his rather failed career. Once, he had made the mistake of allowing a documentary crew to follow him around while on the job. To his chagrin, they had interspersed his bit with the analysis of a skeptic who completely dissected his work and how easily it could have been faked. Just because it was possible to fake this sort of evidence didn’t mean that Daniel did it. What was the point of chasing after the various bumps in the night if nobody even believed you? Daniel was tempted to light up another cigarette, but considering the state of the wood and everything else in the building, he thought better of it. Maybe it was a good thing that the city was going to tear it all down, the whole block even.

Still, wasn’t that the point of his being there? He was supposed to try and find some link to the past which would make The Phoenix worth preserving for a few more generations, right? Wasn’t that worth anything? Even if he was going to go quietly into an obscure end, at least he could make sure someone or something else didn’t have to go that same route.

Nonetheless, that small comfort didn’t make it any less depressing that the woman walking next to him had completely forgotten that he even existed. For one thing, it would have been nice if she could point out the “spirits” she could see so he could point his fancy “gun” at the general area and see if the reading would spike in comparison to the rest of the room. Sometimes Daniel would clear his throat as if ready to say something, but never did. Not like he had much to say, but at the very least, it would make things a hell of a lot less creepy while they both wandered through the empty aisles.

Christ, he thought. Even the backs of the seats looked like tombstones.