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silent movie revival house to Pussycat Adults Only Showcase, and was shut down in the midnineties after “the incident.” The less said about that, the better.
    In the aftermath of that, it was designated for the wrecking ball. That’s when Barnabas stepped in.
    He bought it, refurbished it, and dedicated it to the showing of Grindhouse cinema. It was the one altruistic gesture Barnabas Yancey ever made. He programmed it himself and even showed up sometimes (you never knew when), so that movie buffs and wannabe filmmakers made a pilgrimage to it every evening. They hoped to catch a glimpse, or better yet catch the ear or some other body part, of Barnabas Yancey in person.
    In the end, he bought other run-down theaters across the country, always anonymously, and brought them back from extinction. It was his saving grace.
    But Eva Quiller had had enough of Barnabas Yancey, in person or otherwise. At twenty-two, she was just old enough to still be desirable as a babe-film-groupie-slash-movie-geek. She’d shown up at the Fairfax about three years ago with a tenuous introduction to Barnabas (her mother had gone to high school with him) and a low-cut Top Cat T-shirt. The introduction had gone better than she expected. She was offered a job in Barnabas’s theater and a place in his “harem.”
    She’d made a short film, of course, and Barnabas had told her it was “full of promise.” But she could never figure out how to start a real movie, so she just became one of his hangers-on. In the intervening years, she had seen every film Jack Hill and Jean Rollin made and taken part in every type of kinky sex act imaginable. The end result? Movies still fascinated her, sex bored her, and Barnabas Yancey revolted her.
    Live and learn.
    “Are you selling tickets?”
    Eva was jolted out of her reverie by an actual customer. This surprised her, both because it was a bit early for walk-ups and because the movie they were showing tonight was Zzzzzz . Even Yancey’s die-hard fans had trouble sitting through that one.
    “Yeah,” she said.
    The man in front of the window didn’t fit any of her stereotypes of Fairfax Cinema customers. He wasn’t a hipster or an aging hippy. He was in his thirties but wasn’t trying to look any younger. He was muscular, but it wasn’t the kind of muscular you got from working out in a gym; it looked like the kind of muscular you got from doing really hard work. He wore a trucker cap, but it wasn’t the kind that Ashton Kutcher wore ironically—Eva guessed that this man might have actually seen the inside of a truck sometime.
    She was intrigued.
    “One, please,” the man said.
    “All right,” Eva sighed. “But I gotta ask you, do you really want to see this movie?”
    “No,” the man replied.
    “Then why do you want a ticket?” she asked.
    “Because I want to see the ladies’ room,” Matt Cahill said.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Matt hadn’t set foot in a movie theater since Janey had died, not until last weekend. He’d never really liked going to the movies, never really liked the feeling of wasting time in the dark when he could be outside, doing things. Living.
    But Janey had loved movies, loved the act of going to them whether they were good, bad, or indifferent. She loved buying popcorn and snuggling down into the seat, loved watching previews and staying till the last of the end credits rolled. So he loved going to the movies too. And after she died he never went again. Everything about it, from the darkness to the smell of old candy, was another reminder of her.
    He could skip that.
    So when, last week, he stepped across the threshold of the Telegraph Hill Cinema in Charlottesville, Virginia, he might have felt all those feelings rushing back.
    The fact that he didn’t have that flood of emotion had more to do with the condition of the theater than with any resolution of Matt Cahill’s mourning process.
    The Telegraph Hill Cinema had burned to the ground three days before. During a