I stared at her, baffled. Why would my family history be any priority at all? At some point between last night and now, one of us had stopped making sense. I was pretty sure it wasn’t me.
She cocked her head to one side. “You really don’t know, do you? You didn’t have to listen to endless tales of the infamous ‘book club’?”
“What book club?” I asked cautiously.
Mina made a disgusted noise and slapped a business card down on the table. “Be at this address in an hour. They want to meet you, see what you can do. Let them answer your questions.”
“Leadership?” I hazarded a guess.
She stood up. “You don’t deserve this.”
I didn’t even know what “this” was, but I sensed arguing with her about it now probably wasn’t a good idea.
“You know the thing that would scare the crap out of me, if I were you? If they’re willing to go this far to get you, what do you think they’ll do to keep you?”
I might have been more worried if I’d understood half of what she was talking about.
“Here.” She pulled the disruptor from her pants pocket. “Just remember, this”—she tapped her finger on the open end with the exposed wires jutting out slightly—“is the dangerous end.”
She tossed it at me, and I caught it with fumbling fingers.
“And then I guess we’ll see if you’re worth everything they think you are.” She gave me a mocking smile and then walked away.
Well. That didn’t sound good.
“Yep, should be fun. Don’t wait up.” I juggled the phone between my ear and my shoulder and tried to check building numbers as I drove by. This area of town — one of the oldest sections of Decatur — was not the greatest, and the lighting was sketchy at best. This had once been a bustling downtown area and now consisted mainly of empty and papered-over storefronts like blind eyes staring out at me.
“Have fun, sweetie,” my mom said. “I’m so glad you’re out having a good time. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”
My mother, unused to me having much of a social life, had been astonishingly easy to lie to, something I already felt guilty about. She was so eager for me to have friends that my story of bumping into some buddies from school who wanted to see a late movie didn’t raise a single red flag, when it should have hoisted several.
“Okay. Good night.” I waited for her response, then closed my phone and chucked it onto the passenger seat.
I could have gone home. I probably should have gone home instead of coming out here on what was probably at best a wild goose chase and at worst some other scheme Mina had cooked up that would get me into trouble.
But there were two things that bothered me about that conversation with Mina that I couldn’t quite dismiss: First, how much she really, really did not want me to come down here for whatever meeting this was. Given Mina’s previous lack of interest in my health and well-being, I was intrigued by what would cause such concern. In fact, I suspected she was more worried for herself than for me.
Second, could it really just be chance that both my mom and Mina had referenced a book club, one that clearly had nothing to do with reading, in the last twenty-four hours? I doubted it. And what was all that about my “family history”?
I had no idea what that meant, other than something to do with my dad. It was all too much to pin on coincidence. If all of this had something to do with him, I wanted…no, needed to know about it.
I squinted at the scrawled address—2600 Lincoln Avenue — on the back of the business card Mina had left for me. The front of the card was simply an 800 number. I hadn’t yet attempted to call it, but I might have to if I didn’t find the address soon.
I was on Lincoln Avenue already, and the numbers were descending the farther east I headed, so I should have been in the right area.…
There. At the corner ahead of me, a huge billboard announced new loft-style condos at 2601 Lincoln Avenue, and directly across the street…the boarded up remains of the Archway Theater.
The Archway Theater topped my list of places (along with Ground Zero in New York) to never, ever visit. It was legend.
It had been built in the twenties, before the Great Depression. In theory, it had cultural significance for Decatur as one of the few former stage theaters converted to a movie theater still in existence, though it had been closed for decades. The historical society kept trying to bring it back to life, butpeople kept getting hurt or dying during the various renovation attempts over the years. Workers fell to their deaths from the old stage, had unforeseen heart attacks, or were electrocuted when the power was supposed to be off.
It was always written off as superstition and coincidence, but in truth, there was something fundamentally wrong with the Archway that any idiot could recognize and no architect or contractor could repair. Back in the twenties, when the plans for the theater were approved, some genius got the idea to build it on some prime abandoned real estate in the center of town…right on top of an old hotel that had burned down in the middle of the night a decade before.
Sixty-some people had died in that hotel fire, and some of the bodies had never been recovered. Then, less than ten years later, construction crews started tearing at the ground to build the theater. Not to go all
That kind of mass event, so many violent deaths all atone time in one place, created a unique energy of its own. Myguess was that the theater was caught in a reenactment loopof the hotel fire, the same events cycling over and over againand playing out just as they had that night. From what I’d read online, Gettysburg had a couple of big loops like that. Battalions of soldiers still fought for their lives there, evenafter they’d been dead for more than a century and a half.
Every year, some group of stupid kids dared each other to break in and spend the night on Halloween, and almost all of them came out scared, sometimes hurt pretty badly, and refusing to talk about their experiences.
And yet, here I was.
I shook my head. Why would a bunch of ghost-talkers want to meet at the most haunted location in town, possibly even the whole state?
Someone honked behind me, and I jumped. I let my foot off the brake and turned down Springfield to get a closer look at the building. The theater sat on the corner with entrances on both sides, though everything looked dark and boarded up tightly. Thankfully. I really had no interest in going inside.
Then as I was driving past, a flash of red caught my attention. A banner, hanging where the old marquee had been, read: NOW UNDER RENOVATION. OPENING SOON!
Great. Well, that explained it. Assuming Mina had been telling the truth at least some of the time last night, this Order organization was involved with the Decatur Governance and Development Committee. I didn’t know anything about what that committee did — something about permits or permission or something? — but if someone on it was concerned about “cleaning” the Gibley property before the parking garage was built, then it would make sense that same person might be interested in making sure the theater was equally untainted before opening day.
So maybe they, the mysterious Leadership Mina kept talking about, really were around here somewhere.
I reached the end of the block and pulled a U-turn to double back. This time, I noticed the open lot at the back of the theater, where a building had obviously just been torn down. Amid the still-standing piles of rubble, a half dozen cars were parked haphazardly. But they were all pointed toward the chain-link fence between the empty lot and the back of the theater. And one of them, though it was hard to be certain in the reduced light, I thought might be Mina’s beat-up Malibu.
I backed up and pulled into the open lot, gritting my teeth as my poor Dodge rattled and thumped over the uneven ground. I parked next to a pile of bricks, tucked the card Mina had given me into my pocket, grabbed my phone from the passenger seat, and got out.
