gave him an eye roll. “So it’s farmer’s daughters now? Does she wear bib overalls and walk around with a piece of straw hanging out of her mouth?”
Richard laughed. “She runs a bakery.”
“Who can keep up?” she said. “One day it’s yoga instructors. Now it’s raspberry scones.”
“I’d eat the hell out of a scone right now,” Richard muttered. He gave Jake a quick look of apology. “I don’t mean that way, of course.”
When they turned onto Main Street, Jake took a look around. There was something charming and unpretentious about Cuervo that strongly appealed to him. The sidewalks were swept and the fire hydrants freshly painted. Some storefronts had striped awnings over their doors. Others were crammed with flowerboxes full of daisies and purple coneflowers. Two old men played checkers in front of a place called Fred’s Hardware.
The street ended at an intersection. One of those old hooded traffic lights hung suspended from wire. Just past it was a water tower with the word Cuervo painted on it. Maggie’s bakery was around that corner. He found himself a little impatient to see her.
Richard gestured toward a building across the street. “Well, what do you think? You said you wanted someplace big enough to turn into residential lofts.”
Jake looked up and went a little lightheaded.
It was an old Art Deco movie theater, probably built in the early thirties, but boarded up now, a grande dame past her prime and sadly neglected. The Regal, it said in broken, unlit neon.
For most of his thirty-one years, Jake had dreamed about renovating an Art Deco building.
Uncle Marty had taken him to see The Adventures of Robin Hood in a lushly romantic Art Deco theater when he was a kid. The city bulldozed it ten years later and built a parking garage. But ever since, Jake had vacuumed up every scrap of knowledge, lore, history and hearsay he could find about the period. Something about its extravagance and naïveté strongly appealed to him.
Now here he was standing in front of what could be a lifelong dream come true. He could easily imagine there were cartoon Valentine hearts floating out of his eyeballs.
“Nice to meet you,” a slightly pudgy man with horn-rim glasses said to them. “I’m Chuck, the owner of this old popcorn palace.” He pushed open an old-fashioned grate and then unlocked the front doors. “It’s going to be dusty in there. No one’s set foot in the place in ages. My dad—he’s in assisted living now—says the last regular weekday movie they showed at the Regal before going to weekends was Hooper in—”
“Nineteen seventy-eight,” Jake said.
Chuck looked surprised. “You’re a movie buff.”
Jake followed Chuck inside a lobby every bit as dusty as promised. His heart couldn’t have been beating any harder if he’d run a marathon. It was like finding Ali Baba’s cave or Atlantis or the lost library of Alexandria.
Once his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he had to keep himself from spinning in circles and trying to see everything at once. The vaulted ceilings were high and heavily embellished in the sleek, angular Art Deco style—Hollywood starlets in cloche hats and drop-waist dresses smoking cigarettes in elegant filters. Men in spats and tux tails. The light fixtures may have been from an even earlier part of the last century.
Chuck went on about the theater’s history, but Jake had trouble keeping up. He still couldn’t believe he’d discovered something that he’d pretty much given up trying to find. The theater was built in 1928, Chuck told him. Registered as a historic landmark, but vacant all these years because no one wanted to stake the money for a proper restoration. There was a photo upstairs of what the Regal looked like in its heyday with the soaring neon marquee and mosaic archways.
Jake drifted into the vast auditorium and just stood there, basking. He looked at the dirty wall sconces, the ruined red velvet theater seats, the cratered floor.
All he saw was beauty.
Richard came up beside him, followed by Carmen with her clipboard.
“What an absolute nightmare,” she muttered. “A money pit if ever I saw one.”
“Buy it,” Jake said. “Whatever it takes. I won’t accept no for an answer.”
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