Joyland (5 page)

“And I bet I know who the other two were. Anything else I can show you? The bathroom’s not much, I know, but it beats having to take a dump in a dormitory bathroom while a couple of guys at the sinks fart and tell lies about the girls they made out with last night.”

I burst into roars of laughter, and Mrs. Emmalina Shoplaw joined me.

We descended by way of the outside stairs. “How’s Lane Hardy?” she asked when we got to the bottom. “Still wearing that stupid beanie of his?”

“It looked like a derby to me.”

She shrugged. “Beanie, derby, what’s the diff?”

“He’s fine, but he told me something . . .”

She was giving me a head-cocked look. Almost smiling, but not quite.

“He told me the Joyland funhouse—Horror House, he called it—is haunted. I asked him if he was pulling my leg, and he said he wasn’t. He said you knew about it.”

“Did he, now.”

“Yes. He says that when it comes to Joyland, you know more than he does.”

“Well,” she said, reaching into the pocket of her slacks and bringing out a pack of Winstons, “I know a fair amount. My husband was chief of engineering down there until he took a heart attack and died. When it turned out his life insurance was lousy—and borrowed against to the hilt in the bargain—I started renting out the top two stories of this place. What else was I going to do? We just had the one kid, and now she’s up in New York, working for an ad agency.” She lit her cigarette, inhaled, and chuffed it back out as laughter. “Working on losing her southern accent, too, but that’s another story. This overgrown monstrosity of a house was Howie’s playtoy, and I never begrudged him. At least it’s paid off. And I like staying connected to the park, because it makes me feel like I’m still connected to him. Can you understand that?”

“Sure.”

She considered me through a rising raft of cigarette smoke, smiled, and shook her head. “Nah—you’re being kind, but you’re a little too young.”

“I lost my Mom four years ago. My dad’s still grieving. He says there’s a reason
wife
and
life
sound almost the same. I’ve got school, at least, and my girlfriend. Dad’s knocking around a house just north of Kittery that’s way too big for him. He knows he should sell it and get a smaller one closer to where he works—we both know—but he stays. So yeah, I know what you mean.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Mrs. Shoplaw said. “Some day I’ll open my mouth too wide and fall right in. That bus of yours, is it the five-ten?”

“Yes.”

“Well, come on in the kitchen. I’ll make you a toasted cheese and microwave you a bowl of tomato soup. You’ve got time. And I’ll tell you the sad story of the Joyland ghost while you eat, if you want to hear it.”

“Is it really a ghost story?”

“I’ve never been in that damn funhouse, so I don’t know for sure. But it’s a murder story. That much I
am
sure of.”

The soup was just Campbell’s out of the can, but the toasted cheese was Muenster—my favorite—and tasted heavenly. She poured me a glass of milk and insisted I drink it. I was, Mrs. Shoplaw said, a growing boy. She sat down opposite me with her own bowl of soup but no sandwich (“I have to watch my girlish figure”) and told me the tale. Some of it she’d gotten from the newspapers and TV reports. The juicier bits came from her Joyland contacts, of whom she had many.

“It was four years ago, which I guess would make it around the same time your mother died. Do you know what always comes first to my mind when I think about it? The guy’s shirt. And the gloves. Thinking about those things gives me the creeps. Because it means he
planned
it.”

“You might be kind of starting in the middle,” I said.

Mrs. Shoplaw laughed. “Yeah, I suppose I am. The name of your supposed ghost is Linda Gray, and she was from Florence. That’s over South Carolina way. She and her boyfriend—if that’s what he was; the cops checked her background pretty closely and found no trace of him—spent her last night on earth at the Luna Inn, half a mile south of here along the beach. They entered Joyland around eleven o’clock the next day. He bought them day passes, using cash. They rode some rides and then had a late lunch at Rock Lobster, the seafood place down by the concert hall. That was just past one o’clock. As for the time of death, you probably know how they establish it . . . contents of the stomach and so on . . .”

“Yeah.” My sandwich was gone, and I turned my attention to the soup. The story wasn’t hurting my appetite any. I was twenty-one, remember, and although I would have told you different, down deep I was convinced I was never going to die. Not even my mother’s death had been able to shake that core belief.

“He fed her, then he took her on the Carolina Spin—a slow ride, you know, easy on the digestion—and then he took her into Horror House. They went in together, but only he came out. About halfway along the course of the ride, which takes about nine minutes, he cut her throat and threw her out beside the monorail track the cars run on. Threw her out like a piece of trash. He must have known there’d be a mess, because he was wearing two shirts, and he’d put on a pair of yellow work-gloves. They found the top shirt—the one that would have caught most of the blood—about a hundred yards farther along from the body. The gloves a little farther along still.”

I could see it: first the body, still warm and pulsing, then the shirt, then the gloves. The killer, meanwhile, sits tight and finishes the ride. Mrs. Shoplaw was right, it
was
creepy.

“When the ride ended, the son of a bee just got out and walked away. He mopped up the car—that shirt they found was soaking—but he didn’t get quite all of the blood. One of the Helpers spotted some on the seat before the next ride started and cleaned it up. Didn’t think twice about it, either. Blood on amusement park rides isn’t unusual; mostly it’s some kid who gets overexcited and has a nose-gusher. You’ll find out for yourself. Just make sure you wear your own gloves when you do the cleanup, in case of diseases. They have ’em at all the first-aid stations, and there are first-aid stations all over the park.”

“Nobody noticed that he got off the ride without his date?”

“Nope. This was mid-July, the very height of the season, and the place was a swarming madhouse. They didn’t find the body until one o’clock the next morning, long after the park was closed and the Horror House work-lights were turned on. For the graveyard shift, you know. You’ll get your chance to experience that; all the Happy Helper crews get cleanup duty one week a month, and you want to catch up on your sleep ahead of time, because that swing-shift’s a booger.”

“People rode past her until the park closed and didn’t see her?”

“If they did, they thought it was just part of the show. But probably the body went unnoticed. Remember, Horror House is a dark ride. The only one in Joyland, as it happens. Other parks have more.”

A dark ride.
That struck a shivery chord, but it wasn’t strong enough to keep me from finishing my soup. “What about a description of him? Maybe from whoever served them at the restaurant?”

“They had better than that. They had pictures. You want to believe the police made sure they got on TV and printed in the newspapers.”

“How did that happen?”

“The Hollywood Girls,” Mrs. Shoplaw said. “There are always half a dozen working the park when it’s going full-blast. There’s never been anything close to a cooch joint at joyland, but old man Easterbrook didn’t spend all those years in rolling carnies for nothing. He knows people like a little dash of sex appeal to go with the rides and the corndogs. There’s one Hollywood Girl on each Helper team. You’ll get yours, and you and the rest of the guys on your team will be expected to keep a big-brotherly eye out in case anyone bothers her. They run around in these short green dresses and green high heels and cutie-pie green hats that always make me think of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Only they’re the Merry Chicks. They tote Speed Graphic cameras, like the kind you see in old movies, and they take pictures of the rubes.” She paused. “Although I’d advise you against calling the customers that yourself.”

“Already been warned by Mr. Dean,” I said.

“Figures. Anyhow, the Hollywood Girls are told to concentrate on family groups and dating couples who look over twenty-one. Kids younger than that usually aren’t interested in souvenir photos; they’d rather spend their money on food and arcade games. So the deal is, the girls snap first, then approach.” She did a breathy little Marilyn Monroe voice. “ ‘Hello, welcome to Joyland, I’m Karen! If you’d like a copy of the picture I just took, give me your name and check at the Hollywood Photo Booth on Hound Dog Way as you exit the park.’ Like that.

“One of them took a picture of Linda Gray and her boyfriend at the Annie Oakley Shootin’ Gallery, but when she approached, the guy gave her the brushoff. A
hard
brushoff. She told the cops later that he looked like he would’ve taken her camera and broken it, if he thought he could get away with it. Said his eyes gave her chills. Hard and gray, she said.” Mrs. Shoplaw smiled and shrugged. “Only it turned out he was wearing sunglasses. You know how some girls like to dramatize.”

As a matter of fact, I did. Wendy’s friend Renee could turn a routine trip to the dentist into a horror-movie scenario.

“That was the best picture, but not the only one. The cops went through all the Hollywood Girl snaps from that day and found the Gray girl and her friend in the background of at least four others. In the best of those, they’re standing in line for the Whirly Cups, and he’s got his hand on her keister. Pretty chummy for someone none of her family or friends had ever seen before.”

“Too bad there aren’t closed-circuit TV cameras,” I said. “My lady-friend got a job at Filene’s in Boston this summer, and she says they’ve got a few of those cameras, and are putting in more. To foil shoplifters.”

“A day will come when they have ’em everywhere,” she said. “Just like in that science fiction book about the Thought Police. I don’t look forward to it, either. But they’ll never have them in rides like Horror House. Not even infrared ones that see in the dark.”

“No?”

“Nope. There’s no Tunnel of Love at Joyland, but Horror House is most definitely the Tunnel of Grope. My husband told me once that a day when the graveyard shift cleanup crew didn’t find at least three pairs of panties beside the track was a slow day, indeed.

“But they did have that one great photo of the guy at the shooting gallery. A portrait, almost. It ran in the papers and on TV for a week. Him snuggled up to her hip to hip, showing her how to hold the rifle, the way the guys always do. Everyone in both Carolinas must have seen it. She’s smiling, but he looks dead serious.”

“With his gloves and knife in his pockets the whole time,” I said. Marveling at the idea.

“Razor.”

“Huh?”

“He used a straight razor or something like it, that’s what the medical examiner figured. Anyway, they had those photos, including the one great one, and you know what? You can’t make his face out in any of them.”

“Because of the sunglasses.”

“For starters. Also a goatee that covered his chin, and a baseball cap, the kind with a long bill, that shaded what little of his face the sunglasses and goatee didn’t cover. Could have been anyone. Could have been you, except you’re dark-haired instead of blond and don’t have a bird’s head tattooed on one of your hands. This guy did. An eagle or maybe a hawk. It showed up very clearly in the Shootin’ Gallery pic. They ran a blowup of the tat in the paper for five days running, hoping someone would recognize it. Nobody did.”

“No leads at the inn where they stayed the night before?”

“Uh-uh. He showed a South Carolina driver’s license when he checked in, but it was stolen a year before. No one even saw her. She must have waited in the car. She was a Jane Doe for almost a week, but the police released a full-face sketch. Made her look like she was just sleeping, not dead with her throat cut. Someone—a friend she went to nursing school with, I think it was—saw it and recognized it. She told the girl’s parents. I can’t imagine how they must have felt, coming up here in their car and hoping against hope that when they got to the morgue, it would turn out to be someone else’s well-loved child.” She shook her head slowly. “Kids are such a risk, Dev. Did that ever cross your mind?”