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“Worse than yours. Here, check the fine print on this bad boy. See where it was manufactured. Could have been round here.”
Ella held the label right up to her glasses lens and it was still a struggle. She managed to make it out once her eyes adjusted to the tiny letters.
“Imperium Brands,” Ella said. “Heard of ‘em?”
Dennis’s eyes bulged in surprise. “No kidding? Haven’t heard that name in a long time. They made these matchboxes for me too.”
Ella’s reel begun to run again but she wasn’t paying attention. “Really?”
“Yeah. Small company down in Hayter. God, that takes me back.”
A connection. Ella’s mind flared with possibilities, one of which stood out more than the others. She grabbed the bag of tobacco and inspected the fine print on the back, barely readable thanks to lax legal laws from thirty years ago. Her eyes scanned it wildly an inch away from her glasses, but one line at the very end jumped out at her.
Manufactured by Imperium Brands, VA.
“Oh Christ,” Ella said. “Same manufacturer on here too.”
“We found the link?” Dennis asked, nearly as excited as she was.
Next up was the lighter. Plain and nondescript. She ran her fingers along its surface and metal clasp but found nothing. No brand name, no manufacturer name, no label.
She paused, not wanting to jump to conclusions. The past few days had told her just how damaging that could be.
“Nothing on here,” Ella said. “Dammit.”
Dennis reached over. “Here, let me take a look. You kids with your video games. You didn’t spend your childhoods taking things apart and putting them back together.” Dennis pulled the metal hood off the lighter and handed it back to Ella.
She flipped it over. There it was, engraved on the underside.
Imperium Brands.
“We got it?”
Ella could barely believe it. “Oh we’ve got it.”
“Looks like a connection to me,” Dennis said.
***
The old building stood in a state of disrepair: paneless windows, crumbling walls, weeds curling up the exterior like a hungry viper. This was the Imperium Brands building in Hayter, Virginia. Or at least what used to be. It looked like no one had been here in decades.
Ella fought her way through a chain-link fence, kicked her way through knee-high grass and arrived at something resembling a doorway. A loose door hung in place on its side, and so Ella easily pushed it aside and walked right inside the old building.
She entered a vast open space, the smell of charcoal and rust permeating her senses. Old machines, forges and anvils stood frozen in time, patiently counting down the eons until full corrosion. She saw metal buckets, old shovels, hammers long past their use-by date. Despite faint signs that still readImperium Brands,this place looked more like a blacksmith’s workshop than a tobacco factory.
Why would her dad want to bring her here? Had she interpreted the clue correctly or was she way off the mark? Aside from a bunch of forgotten relics of the industrial age, there was nothing much here she could use.
She must have gotten it wrong, she thought. Worth a try but no dice. Or perhaps the items from her dad’s lockbox didn’t mean a single thing. What if they were just the concealed possessions of a former smoker, or a symbolic gesture that he’d kicked the habit? Ripley always told her not to look too deeply into things that might not mean anything, so maybe that’s exactly what she was doing here.
Back to square one, she thought.
“How did you get in here?”
A voice carried on the dark, echoing from the past. Ella instinctively reached for her non-existent pistol as her heart rate tripled in speed. She frantically scanned every corner of the room, finally resting on a moving figure emerging from a distant hallway.
An elderly man in oil-stained overalls stepped forward, his snowy white hair now the brightest thing in the room. He had the face of a man who’d seen too many winters. Haggard, but with the wisdom of a thousand kings.
“I walked in. I thought this place was abandoned.”
