Nobody Knows Your Secret (11 page)

W
hen Hardy heard
the news about Claire Winthrop, he felt as if he’d been punched in the gut. All the wind was knocked out of him. Claire had always been such a sensitive girl. Hardy had tried to make her feel special after the accident. Whenever he’d run into Virgie and Claire at Pixies, he make an effort to say “hey.”

What a waste, Hardy thought. What an incredible crying-shame waste.

His brain flashed back to that dreadful day.

The sun was shining and the bright blue sky was filled with huge, cotton-ball clouds. Hardy hoped they didn’t foretell of thunderstorms later in the afternoon.

“Come on, Willie Mae,” Hardy said. “Let’s get a move on.”

Hardy was on summer vacation. Willie Mae was young and a knockout, and Hardy was head-over-heels in love. It had been just Hardy and his girlfriend for several months now – just the way he liked it. It felt good to have a pretty girl cruising the mountains alongside him in his old pickup. All his friends at school were jealous.

Hardy had a moment of inspiration.

Why not take Willie May to that amusement park everybody was always talking about?

Willie Mae was less than enthusiastic about the idea of spending a whole day with her boyfriend at a playground.

“It’s not a playground,” Hardy had said. “It’ull be fun. Come on. What’sa matter? Too scared to ride the coaster, Willie Mae?”

“No,” she said, punching Hardy on the arm. “I thought we were going to grab a few beers and make our own fun.”

“We’ll do that later,” Hardy said. “We got all day.”

“You’re not going to let go of this, are you, Hardy?

Hardy’s eyes twinkled. He smiled and shook his head no.

Reluctantly, Willie Mae agreed to go.

“All right,” she said. “but let me change first.”

Willie Mae went into her parents’ small house. She came back in a few minutes.

“Go back in and put on something with a little more material, sweetheart,” Hardy had said when Willie Mae reappeared from her bedroom wearing a long-tail tee and skin-tight
Daisy Duke
shorts.

“Don’t you think this looks good, Hardy?”

“You look too good. Every boy in Hope Rock County will be following you around, Willie Mae. I don’t need a bunch ‘a hound dawgs in heat on our tails.”

“Aw, Hardy.” .

“Don’t ‘aw Hardy’ me. Just put on some jeans. Those rides are rough on your clothes. I’ll be waiting for you in the truck.”

Willie Mae huffed and puffed but went back into her bedroom.

“I’m going to buy the all-day passes,” Hardy said. “We’ll be able to ride anything we want.”

Willie Mae said nothing. She was still steamed at having to change clothes and at having to go at all. She’d planned on finding a nice cool shade tree in a beautiful meadow and making out with Hardy. But all Hardy wanted to do was ride a bunch of stupid kiddie rides. They were going to a carnival on steroids, Willie Mae thought.

She’d almost rather go the gynecologist. What were those stupid rides going to do to her hair? And what was so fantastic about banging your brains out in the bumper cars? And spinning in circles on the swings?

Willie Mae could lose her lunch just thinking about it. But Hardy was stuck on the idea like a broken record. She wished they’d never run into Betsy and Billy last night. She hated Betsy Lincoln. Girl was more stuck up than a stuck pig. Thought she was so much better than everybody else ’cause her Daddy worked the mines and could afford to buy his daughter a brand new convertible.

Willie Mae’s father was a janitor at the high school. All he could afford was the bright yellow public school bus for Willie Mae to ride to school. Though lately, she’d been able to persuade Hardy to swing by and give her a lift in his truck.

Still, it would be nice to be breezing around in a convertible. If it didn’t mess her hair up too much. And didn’t Betsy say that if you left the windows rolled up, you could tool around with the top down in cool weather?

Geez, Willie Mae thought, some gals have all the luck. But not me.

Anyway, Hardy Branwell was as cute as a speckled pup, even if he did insist on putting a wad of chewing tobacco the size of a softball inside his cheek. Willie Mae wiggled in her seat. If only Hardy would find that perfect meadow instead of insisting they go to that stupid playground, amusement park, or whatever the heck you called it.

She sighed and looked out her window. Hardy turned up the country music and started humming. It was a catchy little tune, she thought, letting her hand move toward Hardy’s cute little booty. Willie Mae threw Hardy her sexiest smile. She noticed the color flare just above the collar of his western shirt.

Oh well, she thought. If she had to endure a day at the carnival for a night of carnal lust, it was a small price to pay. She’d be patient. Paradise under the stars was just as lovely as it was under that big old tree in a perfect meadow.

B
etsy and Billy
were pulling into the parking lot of the MEGA amusement park when Hardy and Willie Mae arrived. Billy was driving Betsy’s convertible.

“Hey, Willie Mae,” Betsy said.

“Hey, Betsy.”

“Dude,” Billy said. “I didn’t know you two were planning to come here. You didn’t say anything about it last night. Y’all coulda ridden over with us. Betsy’s car is the bomb. You two wanna keep us com’ny?”

“Nah,” Hardy said.

“Come on, Billy,” Betsy said.

“’Kay,” Billy said. “Check you later. Gotta split.”

“Later, man,” Hardy said.

Willie Mae nestled close to Hardy.

“Thanks, Hardy,” she said.

“I know you, and Betsy doesn’t cut it. You two mix about as well as fire and TNT,” Hardy said. “I think Betsy’s a grueller.”

“Me, too,” said Willie Mae. “You gonna win me a teddy bear, Handsome?”

“You bet,” said Hardy, kissing Willie Mae in the ticket line.

That was how the day started. Good enough. Hardy could have never known what lay in store for the visitors at MEGA Mountain later that afternoon.

They had wandered all over the amusement park. Willie Mae and Hardy had seen Billy and Betsy a couple of times, but the day had gone really well. Willie Mae actually enjoyed the rides, and just as he promised, Hardy had won her a teddy bear and an enormous striped tiger.

“Wanna ride The Cyclone?” Hardy asked.

“Not with Teddy and Tony,” Willie Mae said, holding up her stuffed animals. You can if you want to, but I’m sittin’ this one out.”

Hardy wandered to the line. He waved at Cleve and Claire, who were way ahead of him in the line. The cutoff was several people ahead of Hardy. Cleve and Claire boarded the coaster.

That was all right with Hardy. He wanted to position himself in the very front car, if possible.

It was going to be a ride to remember. This Blue Cyclone was huge. Hardy had never seen so many twists and turns in his life. As the cars pulled away for the slow ascent for the first drop, Hardy tried to calculate the height of the wooden monster. That first jaw-dropping drop looked to be about 100 feet.

Hardy smiled. Cleve looked a little more than sauced. He wondered if the old guy would spew chunkies before the end of the coaster ride. He glanced behind him. Willie Mae had found a bench near Virgie Winthrop. He smiled Willie Mae’s way.

Willie Mae blew him a kiss. Hardy heard the crash, but it did not hit him instantly that tragedy had struck the riders on The Blue Cyclone. Willie Mae’s face registered shock. Virgie Winthrop looked like death. Hardy was pushed and jostled as people in the line rushed away from the coaster.

Hardy followed the general crush of bystanders toward the far end of the coaster. The cars of the coaster were twisted and tangled. People lay injured on the ground. Hardy ran to see if he could help. He heard a scream.

Claire Winthrop lay crumpled and bleeding at his feet. Hardy took off his belt and made a tourniquet, twisting it around Claire’s left arm to staunch the bleeding.

“
W
ell
, Beanie, I guess we are going to have to tackle the stairs before we can even hope to get to the second story rooms,” Hadley said.

“Okay. Let’s clean the kitchen last, Hadley. Eustian died in that room. It’s spooky. What if he’s haintin’ that room? I don’t want to make Eustian’s ghost mad,” Beanie said.

“Okay, Bean,” Hadley said, “if that makes you happy. But I promise you only Eustian’s junk is there. This place is not haunted. No ghosts. No ghosts. Just keep telling yourself that. Doggone it, but I think I can see a small speck of light at the end of this tunnel. We’re making good progress, Beanie. Good progress.”

“No ghost,” Beanie muttered as he worked. “No ghost. No ghost. No ghost.”

Hadley started to the bottom of the stairs. The stairway was as cluttered as the rest of the house.

With the bottom steps cleared, it was much easier to move the litter at the top down the steps and out the door to the dumpster.

“Onward and upward, Bean,” she said as she grabbed the first of an astounding number of old piles of yellowing newspapers. “For some odd reason, I want to add ‘tally ho!’ Must be the dust. It’s gooping up my brain!”

Hadley stumbled and almost tripped. She sat the large box down on the landing.

“That was close,” she said.

“Be careful,” Beanie said.

“I will. I think I was hurrying. I’ll slow it down. No sense breaking my neck of a bunch of old newspapers.”

Hadley sat down beside the box.

“I don’t know who’s dustier. Me or this box of old newspapers. Who would’ve thought papers could be so heavy?”

“Must be the dust,” Beanie said. “You know, weighting ’em down.”

“Umm. Probably right,” said Hadley. “Look here, Bean! This one on top’s about the terrible roller coaster accident.”

“A lot of folks got hurt in that,” Beanie said quietly.

“They sure did,” said Hadley. “Claire Winthrop was one of them. Look at those mangled cars.”

She unfolded the paper and a cloud of dust poofed up in her face. She shook the paper to get a better view of the images on the page. Several large photos accompanied the article. One was a close-up of the disturbing MEGA clown.

“Look,” Hadley said, “that old clown looked as creepy then as it does now. Poor sod looks as bad in his pictures as I do mine.”

“I like you in pictures,” said Beanie.

“Spoken like a true gentleman,” said Hadley. “Look. That’s Vance Odis. This ruined him.”

There were several more shots of the twisted coaster cars. One shot pictured a lone tennis shoe dangling from a tree branch. The last couple of photos were of the crowds standing around gawking at the wreckage.

“Looks like Lou Edna there, Bean,” Hadley said. “I think she still has the same hairdo now that she did way back then. Can’t tell what color her hair was in black and white, but it looks light. I think I remember her as a blonde back then. She gets it out of a bottle, you know.

“Really,” Beanie said, as if he knew what his friend was talking about.

“Look how young and handsome Bill looks in his uniform. Gosh, we were all so young, then,” said Hadley, pointing Bill Whittaker out to Beanie. Hadley adjusted her glasses. “Hmmmm, if I didn’t know better, I think that was Hardy Branwell.”

Hadley held the paper to the side, hoping to catch some better light.

“He looks really shell-shocked,” she said.

Folding the paper up neatly, Hadley walked to the front door and placed it in her large pocketbook.

“Just making sure we don’t toss this in the dumpster. I want to get a better look at this later. Give me a minute. I’ll see if there are any more like this.”

Hadley rummaged through the box, but nothing else caught her attention.

“Back to work,” she said.

Beanie and Hadley made their way up the stairs. The towering piles leaned inward as they worked their way to the top step. Beanie grabbed an old suitcase off the top of the pile. The heap began to sway ominously toward the center of the path. Dust started falling over them like snow.

“Tiiiiimmmmber!” Beanie yelled.

There was a loud crash. The heap toppled over causing an avalanche of debris to rain down on Hadley and Beanie. Arms flying, legs flailing, bodies tumbling, they landed at the bottom of the stairs in a mound of dirt and debris.

“Shoot. Bean. Are you okay?” Hadley asked, rubbing her shoulder.

“I think I bumped my butt on the way down,” Beanie said. “Hadley, are you okay? I didn’t hurt you when we got tangled up, did I?”

“I think I’ll live, but I bet you and me are going to be two sore housecleaners in the morning. Nothing to do but pick ourselves up and brush off some of this dust.”

Beanie looked at the mountain of rubble.

“We sure know how to make a mess,” he said.

“No sense making an average mess, when with a little effort you can make a colossal one! Let’s be a little more careful, huh? We could have broken our necks on that one.”

A wicked grin spread over her face.

“But I will say this,” Hadley said. “It was quite a ride down, wasn’t it?”

“If you say so, Hadley,” Beanie said.

The cleanup proceeded, although at a much slower pace. The sun sank over the skeletal remains of the roller coaster in the distance.

“Let’s call it a day, Bean,” Hadley said.

“A day,” Beanie said.

Hadley patted Beanie on the back.

“We did good,” she said.

Beanie smiled. He liked it when his friend was happy. Hadley got her purse and the salvaged newspaper, and the two tired friends went home.

M
aury could not believe
Hadley was hunched over and taking such care as she walked. Hadley looked as if she was a paper-thin eggshell dancing on shards of broken glass.

“What happened to you? Did you get hit by a truck or something?”

“Feels like it,” Hadley said. “Let’s just say Beanie and I had an altercation with a pile of junk and Eustian’s stairs and leave it at that.”

“No, we will not, Hadley Jane Pell,” Maury said. “You tell me what happened.”

“Well, we had cleared out the bottom floor, minus Mother Singlepenny’s shrine of a bedroom, and the kitchen where Eustian’s body was found. Beanie wants to save those for last so we don’t make their ghosts mad or something.

“That’s okay with me. However Beanie wants to do it. If he’s happy, he works harder. I don’t care what rooms we do so long as they’re all done in the end. There’s a staircase that leads up to the second floor that’s crammed as full of junk as the rest of the house.

“How do you live that way, Maury?

“I dunno.

“So, we are cleaning off the stairway. Halfway up, Beanie reached up on top of a pile to pull off an old suitcase. It must have been the keystone holding up the whole mess together. When he grabbed the suitcase, the towering stack came crashing down on us. And we tumbled down the stairs in an avalanche of trash. I told Beanie we’d be sore pups, today. And boy howdy, was I right!”

“Oh Hadley, you are lucky the two of you weren’t hurt or killed,” Maury said.

“I think all the trash kept us from getting hurt badly,” Hadley said. “Cushioned the fall. Gave us something to ride over as we slid down those steps.”

“Well, I’d say your guardian angel has a few tattered feathers.”

“Yeah, but I think Beanie thinks it is Eustian getting revenge on us for cleaning out his house. You know how he is. Always ready to blame anything on spooks, goblins, or ghosts.

“I wish he wasn’t so anxious about all that stuff. I talk to him until I’m blue in the face, but he doesn’t seem to be able to process it. Maybe, he just doesn’t want to, who knows. Old superstitions die hard, I guess. And Beanie’s still convinced if it’s not Eustian’s ghost we’ve stirred up, then it must be Mama Singlepenny’s.

“We were lucky, though. I tried to make light of it to ease Beanie’s mind, but we did take quite a tumble. We both ended up with some bruises and sore muscles. I don’t remember feeling this bad since you suckered me into taking that zoomba class with you. That next morning I was one big ache! I was pretty sure my muscles had ripped off my bones.”

“Ha!” said Maury. “I remember that! I grunted every time I moved. I think Bill thought I was constipated. I was bound and determined not to let him see how much pain I was really in.

“He’d already laughed at me for wanting to take that class in the first place. So, I just stood real straight and moved around the house like a tortoise. But sometimes, I’d grunt. Even though I was trying so hard not to. It was unconscious, I guess. He kept looking at me funny, you know, like which door was he going to run out of if I took a dump in my pants.”

“Speaking of dump,” Hadley said, “I did find something interesting in one of the old piles of newspapers. I brought it home with me to get a closer look at it, but it’s so old and dirty and yellowed, it’s hard to make out.”

“Hadley, you didn’t bring any of that man’s cootie-infested rubbish into your house, did you? What are you thinking! Are you crazy! You know cooties are catching. They probably multiply like the dickens.

“And if you bring them in your house, they will more than likely end up in mine! Don’t breathe too deeply when you unfold that musty old newspaper, Hadley. If you inhale, you might suck some muck up into your lungs. When you exhale, we will only be able to see the whites of your eyes in the dust cloud. And who knows what crud you’ll be blowing out around me and my air space!”

“Oh, shush, Maury. Don’t bust your corset. It’s just an old copy of the Hope Rock County Gazette. Here, take a look. It’s story about the roller coaster accident. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. You know me. Curious Cora. I just couldn’t pass it by.

“I can’t believe it’s been that long ago. Look at this photo. There’s a crowd shot of people looking at the wreckage of the coaster cars. I think I saw Hardy Branwell, but I’m not sure. Let me get that old magnifying glass, and we’ll see who we recognize.”

“It’s so yellowed and grimy,” Maury said. “Are you sure we won’t contract some weird lung fungus from this nasty old thing? It looks like it might dissolve into a million pieces in our hands. And I’ll bet there are molds clinging to this paper that have not even been discovered yet. It looks like something you pulled from the pyramids.”

“Here’s the glass,” Hadley said. “Can you make it out any better?”

They hunched over the paper spread out on the kitchen table.

“You will seriously think about burning this table cloth, I hope,” Maury said. “Do they make vats of bleach big enough to soak this table in? Maybe we should fumigate the whole room later. What do you think?”

“Will you chill out? I am constantly wiping off counters and tables. Don’t you think I know that Onus explores every surface he can while I’m out? I know a cat’s feet are nasty. Not to mention his bottom when he plops down to rest a spell.”

“Exactly why I do not have an indoor pet,” said Maury. “And can I just take a moment to thank you for all those glorious pictures you have just put in my head!”

“The filth is a tradeoff for the company,” said Hadley. “You have Bill.”

“Yep,” said Maury, “he’s a nasty little bugger sometimes, too. You would not believe how often I have to tell him to toss his skivvies into the dirty clothes bin. I think he’d wear them until they fell off his bottom. Why can’t he just change them every day like clockwork? He drives me crazy over that. But don’t tell him I said so. ”

“Your secret’s safe with me, Sis,” Hadley said. “Lips are sealed and locked tighter than Fort Knox.”

They bent down closer for a better look.

“There’s Lou Edna, you can tell by her wash-tub hairdo,” Hadley said. pointing to a woman in the crowd of faces. “That’s young deputy Bill. I can tell by that
Smokey the Bear
hat he’s wearing. That may or may not be Hardy Branwell. Shoot. This picture is so grainy. With this magnifying glass, all I can make out are a bunch of gray and black dots. I wish I could get a hold of the original photo.”

They tried to figure out more of the faces, but it was useless.

“You busy?” Hadley asked.

“No,” Maury said. “I got nothin’ pressin’ on my social calendar, today.”

“Good,” said Hadley. “Grab your purse.”

“Where we goin’?”

“To the library.”