Ansel turned the radio down. "Means if the commission votes that this block's blighted, the city can take it. Condemnation. Eminent domain. They pay what the county says it's worth, which with no roof is about what you'd get for a used Buick, and then they turn around and sell it to the Downtown Development Authority for a dollar, and the Downtown Development Authority is Royce. And then they knock it down and pave it so people can drive through and cash their paychecks without getting out of their cars."
"Can they do that?"
"They did it to the Fox in Salina. They did it to the Orpheum in Hutchinson. They can do it to anything if nobody shows up to say no." Ansel rubbed his eyes under his glasses. "He's been trying to buy it for two years, Danny. Nobody'll sell, so he's going to take it. That's what Saturday was. He brought his money men to see it full. He wanted them to see the crowd so they'd know what kind of business they'd be killing and not care. And then you told him three-fifty." Ansel's mouth moved in something that might have been a smile. "Nobody's told Royce Hadley a price in a long time."
"Who won't sell?" Danny said. "Mrs. Dunning? Is it hers?"
Ansel was quiet for long enough that Danny thought he hadn't heard. Then he reached over and switched on the work light above the rewind bench, and the photograph of the laughing woman at the organ came out of the dark.
"Sit down," Ansel said. "It's a while till the Royals lose."
* * *
Her name was Cora Lindqvist, and she had been, Ansel said, the best theater organist west of the Mississippi and the worst businesswoman in the state of Kansas, and she would have told you both of those things herself.
She was born in Merritt in 1894, the daughter of a Swedish salt-mine foreman, and she had gone to Chicago at nineteen to study piano and come back at thirty-two with a reputation, a small fortune from playing the great Wurlitzer at the Tivoli for six years of silent pictures, and an idea. The idea was that a town of nine thousand people on the Arkansas River deserved a palace. Not a nickelodeon. Not a storefront with folding chairs. A palace, with a sun on the ceiling and wheat on the walls and an organ in the pit, where a man who shoveled salt eight hundred feet underground all week could sit on Saturday night in the same kind of seat, under the same kind of gold, as a banker in Chicago.
"She spent every dime she had building it," Ansel said. "Opened October 1927. The Big Parade. I was sixteen. I was the first usher she hired. I had a jacket like yours, only it fit." He smiled. "Two years later the talkies came in and the organ was out of a job, and so was she, and then the crash came and everybody was out of a job. Anybody else would've sold it. Paramount wanted it. Fox wanted it. She wouldn't sell. She ran it through the whole Depression on ten-cent tickets and dish nights, and she hired every kid in town whose father was on relief, and she paid 'em, and she never once in thirty-seven years paid herself more than the projectionist. Which was me, by then."
He reached up and touched the frame of the photograph with one finger, straightening it, though it wasn't crooked.