Joyland (27 page)

The
Banner’s
photographer posed me in front of the Thunderball. The picture made me wince when I saw it. I was squinting and thought I looked like the village idiot, but it did the job; the paper was on Fred’s desk when I came in to see him on Friday morning. He hemmed and hawed, then okayed my request, as long as Lane promised to stick with us while the kid and his mother were in the park.

Lane said okay to that with no hemming or hawing. He said he wanted to see my girlfriend, then burst out laughing when I started to fulminate.

I called Annie Ross later that morning, using the same phone Lane had used to call the ambulance. I told her I’d set up a tour of the park the following Tuesday morning, if the weather was good—Wednesday or Thursday if it wasn’t. Then I held my breath.

There was a long pause, followed by a sigh.

Then she said okay.

That was a busy Friday. I left the park early, drove to Wilmington, and was waiting when Tom and Erin stepped off the train. Erin ran the length of the platform, threw herself into my arms, and kissed me on both cheeks and the tip of my nose. She made a lovely armful, but it’s impossible to mistake sisterly kisses for anything other than what they are. I let her go and allowed Tom to pull me into an enthusiastic back-thumping manhug. It was as if we hadn’t seen each other in five years instead of five weeks. I was a working stiff now, and although I had put on my best chinos and a sport-shirt, I looked it. Even with my grease-spotted jeans and sun-faded dogtop back in the closet of my room at Mrs. S.’s, I looked it.

“It’s so great to see you!” Erin said. “My God, what a tan!”

I shrugged. “What can I say? I’m working in the northernmost province of the Redneck Riviera.”

“You made the right call,” Tom said. “I never would have believed it when you said you weren’t going back to school, but you made the right call. Maybe
I
should have stayed at Joyland.”

He smiled—that I-French-kissed-the-Blarney-Stone smile of his that could charm the birdies down from the trees—but it didn’t quite dispel the shadow that crossed his face. He could never have stayed at Joyland, not after our dark ride.

They stayed the weekend at Mrs. Shoplaw’s Beachside Accommodations (Mrs. S. was delighted to have them, and Tina Ackerley was delighted to see them) and all five of us had a hilarious half-drunk picnic supper on the beach, with a roaring bonfire to provide warmth. But on Saturday afternoon, when it came time for Erin to share her troubling information with me, Tom declared his intention to whip Tina and Mrs. S. at Scrabble and sent us off alone. I thought that if Annie and Mike were at the end of their boardwalk, I’d introduce Erin to them. But the day was chilly, the wind off the ocean was downright cold, and the picnic table at the end of the boardwalk was deserted. Even the umbrella was gone, taken in and stored for the winter.

At Joyland, all four parking lots were empty save for the little fleet of service trucks. Erin—dressed in a heavy turtleneck sweater and wool pants, carrying a slim and very businesslike briefcase with her initials embossed on it—raised her eyebrows when I produced my keyring and used the biggest key to open the gate.

“So,” she said. “You’re one of them now.”

That embarrassed me—aren’t we all embarrassed (even if we don’t know why) when someone says we’re one of
them
?

“Not really. I carry a gate-key in case I get here before anyone else, or if I’m the last to leave, but only Fred and Lane have all the Keys to the Kingdom.”

She laughed as if I’d said something silly. “The key to the gate
is
the key to the kingdom, that’s what I think.” Then she sobered and gave me a long, measuring stare. “You look older, Devin. I thought so even before we got off the train, when I saw you waiting on the platform. Now I know why. You went to work and we went back to Never Never Land to play with the Lost Boys and Girls. The ones who will eventually turn up in suits from Brooks Brothers and with MBAs in their pockets.”

I pointed to the briefcase. “That would go with a suit from Brooks Brothers . . . if they really make suits for women, that is.”

She sighed. “It was a gift from my parents. My father wants me to be a lawyer, like him. So far I haven’t gotten up the nerve to tell him I want to be a freelance photographer. He’ll blow his stack.”

We walked up Joyland Avenue in silence—except for the bonelike rattle of the fallen leaves. She looked at the covered rides, the dry fountain, the frozen horses on the merry-go-round, the empty Story Stage in the deserted Wiggle-Waggle Village.

“Kind of sad, seeing it this way. It makes me think mortal thoughts.” She looked at me appraisingly. “We saw the paper. Mrs. Shoplaw made sure to leave it in our room. You did it again.”

“Eddie? I just happened to be there.” We had reached Madame Fortuna’s shy. The lawn chairs were still leaning against it. I unfolded two and gestured for Erin to sit down. I sat beside her, then pulled a pint bottle of Old Log Cabin from the pocket of my jacket. “Cheap whiskey, but it takes the chill off.”

Looking amused, she took a small nip. I took one of my own, screwed on the cap, and stowed the bottle in my pocket. Fifty yards down Joyland Avenue—our midway—I could see the tall false front of Horror House and read the drippy green letters: COME IN IF YOU DARE.

Her small hand gripped my shoulder with surprising strength. “You saved the old bastard. You did. Give yourself some credit, you.”

I smiled, thinking of Lane saying I had a merit badge in modesty. Maybe; giving myself credit for stuff wasn’t one of my strong points in those days.

“Will he live?”

“Probably. Freddy Dean talked to some doctors who said blah-blah-blah, patient must give up smoking, blah-blah-blah, patient must give up eating French fries, blah-blah-blah, patient must begin a regular exercise regimen.”

“I can just see Eddie Parks jogging,” Erin said.

“Uh-huh, with a cigarette in his mouth and a bag of pork rinds in his hand.”

She giggled. The wind gusted and blew her hair around her face. In her heavy sweater and businesslike dark gray pants, she didn’t look much like the flushed American beauty who’d run around Joyland in a little green dress, smiling her pretty Erin smile and coaxing people to let her take their picture with her old-fashioned camera.

“What have you got for me? What did you find out?”

She opened her briefcase and took out a folder. “Are you absolutely sure you want to get into this? Because I don’t think you’re going to listen, say ‘Elementary, my dear Erin,’ and spit out the killer’s name like Sherlock Holmes.”

If I needed evidence that Sherlock Holmes I wasn’t, my wild idea that Eddie Parks might have been the so-called Funhouse Killer was it. I thought of telling her that I was more interested in putting the victim to rest than I was in catching the killer, but it would have sounded crazy, even factoring in Tom’s experience. “I’m not expecting that, either.”

“And by the way, you owe me almost forty dollars for interlibrary loan fees.”

“I’m good for it.”

She poked me in the ribs. “You better be. I’m not working my way through school for the fun of it.”

She settled her briefcase between her ankles and opened the folder. I saw Xeroxes, two or three pages of typewritten notes, and some glossy photographs that looked like the kind the conies got when they bought the Hollywood Girls’ pitch. “Okay, here we go. I started with the Charleston
News and Courier
article you told me about.” She handed me one of the Xeroxes. “It’s a Sunday piece, five thousand words of speculation and maybe eight hundred words of actual info. Read it later if you want, I’ll summarize the salient points.

“Four girls. Five if you count
her.”
She pointed down the midway at Horror House. “The first was Delight Mowbray, DeeDee to her friends. From Waycross, Georgia. White, twenty-one years old. Two or three days before she was killed, she told her good friend Jasmine Withers that she had a new boyfriend, older and very handsome. She was found beside a trail on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp on August 31st, 1961, nine days after she disappeared. If the guy had taken her into the swamp, even a little way, she might not have been found for a much longer time.”

“If ever,” I said. “A body left in there would have been gator-bait in twenty minutes.”

“Gross but true.” She handed me another Xerox. “This is the story from the Waycross
Journal-Herald.”
There was a photo. It showed a somber cop holding up a plaster cast of tire tracks. “The theory is that he dumped her where he cut her throat. The tire tracks were made by a truck, the story says.”

“Dumped her like garbage,” I said.

“Also gross but true.” She handed me another Xeroxed newspaper clipping. “Here’s number two. Claudine Sharp, from Rocky Mount, right here in NC. White, twenty-three years old. Found dead in a local theater. August second, 1963. The movie being shown was
Lawrence of Arabia,
which happens to be very long and very loud. The guy who wrote the story quotes ‘an unnamed police source’ as saying the guy probably cut her throat during one of the battle scenes. Pure speculation, of course. He left a bloody shirt and gloves, then must have walked out in the shirt he was wearing underneath.”

“That just about has to be the guy who killed Linda Gray,” I said. “Don’t you think so?”

“It sure sounds like it. The cops questioned all her friends, but Claudine hadn’t said anything about a new boyfriend.”

“Or who she was going to the movies with that night? Not even to her parents?”

Erin gave me a patient look. “She was twenty-three, Dev, not fourteen. She lived all the way across town from her parents. Worked in a drugstore and had a little apartment above it.”

“You got all that from the newspaper story?”

“Of course not. I also made some calls. Practically dialed my fingers off, if you want to know the truth. You owe me for the long-distance, too. More about Claudine Sharp later. For now, let’s move on. Victim number three—according to the
News and Courier
story—was a girl from Santee, South Carolina. Now we’re up to 1965. Eva Longbottom, age nineteen. Black. Disappeared on July fourth. Her body was found nine days later by a couple of fishermen, lying on the north bank of the Santee River. Raped and stabbed in the heart. The others were neither black nor raped. You can put her in the Funhouse Killer column if you want to, but I’m doubtful, myself. Last victim—before Linda Gray—was her.”

She handed me what had to be a high school yearbook photo of a beautiful golden-haired girl. The kind who’s the head cheerleader, the Homecoming Queen, dates the football quarterback . . . and is
still
liked by everyone.

“Darlene Stamnacher. Probably would have changed her last name if she’d gotten into the movie biz, which was her stated goal. White, nineteen. From Maxton, North Carolina. Disappeared on June 29th, 1967. Found two days later, after a massive search, inside a roadside lean-to in the sugar-pine williwags south of Elrod. Throat cut.”

“Christ, she’s beautiful. Didn’t she have a steady boyfriend?”

“A girl this good-looking, why do you even ask? And that’s where the police went first, only he wasn’t around. He and three of his buddies had gone camping in the Blue Ridge, and they could all vouch for him. Unless he flapped his arms and flew back, it wasn’t him.”

“Then came Linda Gray,” I said. “Number five. If they were all murdered by the same guy, that is.”

Erin raised a teacherly finger. “And only five if all the guy’s victims have been found. There could have been others in ’62, ’64, ’66 . . . you get it.”

The wind gusted and moaned through the struts of the Spin.

“Now for the things that trouble me,” Erin said . . . as if five dead girls weren’t troubling enough. From her folder she took another Xerox. It was a flier—a shout, in the Talk—advertising something called
Manly Wellman’s Show of 1000 Wonders.
It showed a couple of clowns holding up a parchment listing some of the wonders, one of which was AMERICA’S FINEST COLLECTION OF
FREAKS
! AND
ODDITIES
! There were also rides, games, fun for the kiddies, and THE WORLD’S SCARIEST FUNHOUSe!

Come in if you dare,
I thought.

“You got this from interlibrary loan?” I asked.

“Yes. I’ve decided you can get anything by way of interlibrary loan, if you’re willing to dig. Or maybe I should say cock an ear, because it’s really the world’s biggest jungle telegraph. This ad appeared in the Waycross
Journal-Herald.
It ran during the first week of August, 1961.”

“The Wellman carny was in Waycross when the first girl disappeared?”

“Her name was DeeDee Mowbray, and no—it had moved on by then. But it was there when DeeDee told her girlfriend that she had a new boyfriend. Now look at this. It’s from the Rocky Mount
Telegram.
Ran for a week in mid-July of 1963. Standard advance advertising. I probably don’t even need to tell you that.”

It was another full-pager shouting
Manly Wellman’s Show of 1000 Wonders.
Same two clowns holding up the same parchment, but two years after the stop in Waycross, they were also promising a ten thousand dollar cover-all Beano game, and the word
freaks
was nowhere to be seen.