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“Just be careful,” she said in parting. “I’ve seen my brother break a lot of hearts.”
I found Braden waiting outside. He was texting on his phone. “I like your sister,” I told him as I shouldered into my coat. “She seems fun.”
But Braden wasn’t listening. “Just got a message from Andy. We have to get to the theater.”
23
Andy
I was an analytical man.
I’d always been that way, even as a little kid. You know those endless “why?” questions kids pestered their parents with? I was that, but an order of magnitude worse than most.
“Why is the moon brighter tonight?”
“Because it’s a full moon, Andy,” my dad would gently respond.
“But why is it full and not empty?”
“Because the angle of the sun is illuminating 100% of the side facing us.”
“Why isn’t it always that way?”
“Because the angle changes a little bit each day.”
“Why does it change?”
“Because the earth is tilted, so the moon is in a slightly different place each day.”
“Why is the earth tilted…”
I was that way for everything. Going to the doctor, or the grocery store, or watching hockey with my dad. And endless barrage of questions to help me better understand the world. My parents were patient and explained as best as they could, but looking back on it I could tell I was a pain. I wanted to learn everything. My curiosity was never sated. Every new experience brought a million new inquiries.
As such, it was difficult for me to accept things “just because.” I stopped believing in the Tooth Fairy because it didn’t stand up to scrutiny. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny soon followed. I wasn’t religious because I couldn’t accept that certain aspects of the church required faith. When grandma died and my parents told me she went to heaven, I challenged them to show me proof. I was incapable of believing anything unless there was a plausible explanation based on corroborating evidence.
That applied to the supernatural, too.
“Let me do the talking,” I told Ryan and Dorian as we approached the theater. “I believe I know how to convince him.”
“You got it,” Ryan said. I glanced at him. He was rarely so agreeable, and it wasn’t sarcasm. He was in an unusually good mood.
His insistence that the theater was haunted was silly. That kind of nonsense was unacceptable to me. There was no such thing as ghosts, or spirits, or any other supernatural trickster that might be causing havoc in our theater. There was a logical explanation. There had to be.
We just needed to prove what it was. And thanks to Dorian, we were on our way toward that conclusion.
“But you didn’t see anything,” Ryan said as we entered the theater. “You only heard a noise. Right?”
“Right,” Dorian admitted. “We heard a noise. But someone caused it.”
“Someone you couldn’t see,” Ryan said casually. “Like a ghost…”
“Please stop saying that out loud,” I insisted, pinching the bridge of my nose where my glasses rested. “At least, don’t say it around Director Atkins.”
Ryan was going to ruin everything. We needed to convince Atkins that there was a legitimate reason for the theater malfunctions, one which exonerated us. If Ryan rambled on about ghosts and demons and who knows what else, Atkins would assume he was covering for his own mistakes. Or that he was drunk on the job.
I was certain we hadn’t made any mistakes. I’d checked Ryan’s installation work right behind him to make sure everything was perfect. Something else was going on.
Something logical.
