Joyland

“Wendy’s part of it,” I admitted, “but not all of it. I just need some time off. A breather. And I’ve gotten to like it here.”

He sighed. “Maybe you do need a break. At least you’ll be working instead of hitchhiking around Europe, like Dewey Michaud’s girl. Fourteen months in youth hostels! Fourteen and counting! Ye gods! She’s apt to come back with ringworm and a bun in the oven.”

“Well,” I said, “I think I can avoid both of those. If I’m careful.”

“Just make sure you avoid the hurricanes. It’s supposed to be a bad season for them.”

“Are you really all right with this, Dad?”

“Why? Did you want me to argue? Try to talk you out of it? If that’s what you want, I’m willing to give it a shot, but I know what your mother would say—if he’s old enough to buy a legal drink, he’s old enough to start making decisions about his life.”

I smiled. “Yeah. That sounds like her.”

“As for me, I guess I don’t want you going back to college if you’re going to spend all your time mooning over that girl and letting your grades go to hell. If painting rides and fixing up concessions will help get her out of your system, probably that’s a good thing. But what about your scholarship and loan package, if you want to go back in the fall of ’74?”

“It won’t be a problem. I’ve got a 3.2 cume, which is pretty persuasive.”

“That girl,” he said in tones of infinite disgust, and then we moved on to other topics.

I was still sad and depressed about how things had ended with Wendy, he was right about that, but I had begun the difficult trip (the journey, as they say in the self-help groups these days) from denial to acceptance. Anything like true serenity was still over the horizon, but I no longer believed—as I had in the long, painful days and nights of June—that serenity was out of the question.

Staying had to do with other things that I couldn’t even begin to sort out, because they were piled helter-skelter in an untidy stack and bound with the rough twine of intuition. Hallie Stansfield was there. So was Bradley Easterbrook, way back at the beginning of the summer, saying we sell fun. The sound of the ocean at night was there, and the way a strong onshore breeze would make a little song when it blew through the struts of the Carolina Spin. The cool tunnels under the park were there. So was the Talk, that secret language the other greenies would have forgotten by the time Christmas break rolled around. I didn’t want to forget it; it was too rich. I felt that Joyland had something more to give me. I didn’t know what, just… s’more.

But mostly—this is weird, I have examined and re-examined my memories of those days to make sure it’s a true memory, and it seems to be—it was because it had been our Doubting Thomas to see the ghost of Linda Gray. It had changed him in small but fundamental ways. I don’t think Tom wanted to change—I think he was happy just as he was—but I did.

I wanted to see her, too.

During the second half of August, several of the old-timers—Pop Allen for one, Dottie Lassen for another—told me to pray for rain on Labor Day weekend. There was no rain, and by Saturday afternoon I understood what they meant. The conies came back in force for one final grand hurrah, and Joyland was tipsed to the gills. What made it worse was that half of the summer help was gone by then, headed back to their various schools. The ones who were left worked like dogs.

Some of us didn’t just work like dogs, but as dogs—one dog in particular. I saw most of that holiday weekend through the mesh eyes of Howie the Happy Hound. On Sunday I climbed into that damned fur suit a dozen times. After my second-to-last turn of the day, I was three-quarters of the way down the Boulevard beneath Joyland Avenue when the world started to swim away from me in shades of gray. Shades of Linda Gray, I remember thinking.

I was driving one of the little electric service-carts with the fur pushed down to my waist so I could feel the air conditioning on my sweaty chest, and when I realized I was losing it, I had the good sense to pull over to the wall and take my foot off the rubber button that served as the accelerator. Fat Wally Schmidt, who ran the guess-your-weight shy, happened to be taking a break in the boneyard at the time. He saw me parked askew and slumped over the cart’s steering bar. He got a pitcher of icewater out of the fridge, waddled down to me, and lifted my chin with one chubby hand.

“Hey greenie. You got another suit, or is that the only one that fits ya?”

“Theresh another one,” I said. I sounded drunk. “Cossume shop. Ex’ra large.”

“Oh hey, that’s good,” he said, and dumped the pitcher over my head. My scream of surprise echoed up and down the Boulevard and brought several people running.

“What the fuck, Fat Wally?”

He grinned. “Wakes ya up, don’t it? Damn right it does. Labor Day weekend, greenie. That means ya labor. No sleepin on the job. Thank yer lucky stars ’n bars it ain’t a hunnert and ten out there.”

If it had been a hunnert and ten, I wouldn’t be telling this story; I would have died of a baked brain halfway through a Happy Howie Dance on the Wiggle-Waggle Story Stage. But Labor Day itself was actually cloudy, and featured a nice sea-breeze. I got through it somehow.

Around four o’clock that Monday, as I was climbing into the spare fur for my final show of the summer, Tom Kennedy strolled into the costume shop. His dogtop and filthy sneakers were gone. He was wearing crisply pressed chinos (wherever were you keeping them, I wondered), a neatly tucked-in Ivy League shirt, and Bass Weejuns. Rosy-cheeked son of a bitch had even gotten a haircut. He looked every inch the up-and-coming college boy with his eye on the business world. You never would have guessed that he’d been dressed in filthy Levis only two days before, displaying at least an inch of ass-cleavage as he crawled under the Zipper with an oil-bucket and cursing Pop Allen, our fearless Team Beagle leader, every time he bumped his head on a strut.

“You on your way?” I asked.

“That’s a big ten-four, good buddy. I’m taking the train to Philly at eight tomorrow morning. I’ve got a week at home, then it’s back to the grind.”

“Good for you.”

“Erin’s got some stuff to finish up, but then she’s meeting me in Wilmington tonight. I booked us a room at a nice little bed and breakfast.”

I felt a dull throb of jealousy at that. “Good deal.”

“She’s the real thing,” he said.

“I know.”

“So are you, Dev. We’ll stay in touch. People say that and don’t mean it, but I do. We will stay in touch.” He held out his hand.

I took it and shook it. “That’s right, we will. You’re okay, Tom, and Erin’s the total package. You take care of her.”

“No problem there.” He grinned. “Come spring semester, she’s transferring to Rutgers. I already taught her the Scarlet Knights fight song. You know, ‘Upstream, Redteam, Redteam, Upstream—’ ”

“Sounds complex,” I said.

He shook his finger at me. “Sarcasm will get you nowhere in this world, boy. Unless you’re angling for a writing job at Mad magazine, that is.”

Dottie Lassen called, “Maybe you could shorten up the farewells and keep the tears to a minimum? You’ve got a show to do, Jonesy.”

Tom turned to her and held out his arms. “Dottie, how I love you! How I’ll miss you!”

She slapped her bottom to show just how much this moved her and turned away to a costume in need of repair.

Tom handed me a scrap of paper. “My home address, school address, phone numbers for both. I expect you to use them.”

“I will.”

“You’re really going to give up a year you could spend drinking beer and getting laid to scrape paint here at Joyland?”

“Yep.”

“Are you crazy?”

I considered this. “Probably. A little. But getting better.”

I was sweaty and his clothes were clean, but he gave me a brief hug just the same. Then he headed for the door, pausing to give Dottie a kiss on one wrinkled cheek. She couldn’t cuss at him—her mouth was full of pins at the time—but she shooed him away with a flap of her hand.

At the door, he turned back to me. “You want some advice, Dev? Stay away from…” He finished with a head-jerk, and I knew well enough what he meant: Horror House. Then he was gone, probably thinking about his visit home, and Erin, the car he hoped to buy, and Erin, the upcoming school year, and Erin. Upstream, Redteam, Redteam, Upstream. Come spring semester, they could chant it together. Hell, they could chant it that very night, if they wanted to. In Wilmington. In bed. Together.

There was no punch-clock at the park; our comings and goings were supervised by our team leaders. After my final turn as Howie on that first Monday in September, Pop Allen told me to bring him my time-card.

“I’ve got another hour,” I said.

“Nah, someone’s waiting at the gate to walk you back.” I knew who the someone had to be. It was hard to believe there was a soft spot in Pop’s shriveled-up raisin of a heart for anyone, but there was, and that summer Miss Erin Cook owned it.

“You know the deal tomorrow?”

“Seven-thirty to six,” I said. And no fur. What a blessing.

“I’ll be running you for the first couple of weeks, then I’m off to sunny Florida. After that, you’re Lane Hardy’s responsibility. And Freddy Dean, I guess, if he happens to notice you’re still around.”

“Got it.”

“Good. I’ll sign your card and then you’re ten-forty-two.” Which meant the same thing in the Talk as it did on the CBs that were so popular then: End of tour. “And Jonesy? Tell that girl to send me a postcard once in a while. I’ll miss her.”

He wasn’t the only one.

Erin had also begun making the transition back from Joyland Life to Real Life. Gone were the faded jeans and tee-shirt with the sassy rolled-to-the-shoulder sleeves; ditto the green Hollywood Girl dress and Sherwood Forest hat. The girl standing in the scarlet shower of neon just outside the gate was wearing a silky blue sleeveless blouse tucked into a belted A-line skirt. Her hair was pinned back and she looked gorgeous.

“Walk me up the beach,” she said. “I’ll just have time to catch the bus to Wilmington. I’m meeting Tom.”

“He told me. But never mind the bus. I’ll drive you.”

“Would you do that?”

“Sure.”

We walked along the fine white sand. A half-moon had risen in the sky, and it beat a track across the water. Halfway to Heaven’s Beach—it was, in fact, not far from the big green Victorian that played such a part in my life that fall—she took my hand, and we walked that way. We didn’t say much until we reached the steps leading up to the beach parking lot. There she turned to me.

“You’ll get over her.” Her eyes were on mine. She wasn’t wearing makeup that night, and didn’t need any. The moonlight was her makeup.

“Yes,” I said. I knew it was true, and part of me was sorry. It’s hard to let go. Even when what you’re holding onto is full of thorns, it’s hard to let go. Maybe especially then.

“And for now this is the right place for you. I feel that.”

“Does Tom feel it?”

“No, but he never felt about Joyland the way you do… and the way I did this summer. And after what happened that day in the funhouse… what he saw.

“Do the two of you ever talk about that?”

“I tried. Now I leave it alone. It doesn’t fit into his philosophy of how the world works, so he’s trying to make it gone. But I think he worries about you.”

“Do you worry about me?”

“About you and the ghost of Linda Gray, no. About you and the ghost of that Wendy, a little.”

I grinned. “My father no longer speaks her name. Just calls her ‘that girl.’ Erin, would you do me a favor when you get back to school? If you have time, that is?”

“Sure. What is it?”

I told her.

She asked if I would drop her at the Wilmington bus station instead of taking her directly to the B&B Tom had booked. She said she’d rather take a taxi there. I started to protest that it was a waste of money, then didn’t. She looked flustered, a trifle embarrassed, and I guessed it had something to do with not wanting to climb out of my car just so she could drop her clothes and climb into the sack with Tom Kennedy two minutes later.

When I pulled up opposite the taxi stand, she put her hands on the sides of my face and kissed my mouth. It was a long and thoroughly thorough kiss.

“If Tom hadn’t been there, I would have made you forget that stupid girl,” she said.

“But he was,” I said.

“Yes. He was. Stay in touch, Dev.”

“Remember what I asked you to do. If you get a chance, that is.”

“I’ll remember. You’re a sweet man.”

I don’t know why, but that made me feel like crying. I smiled instead. “Also, admit it, I made one hell of a Howie.”

“That you did. Devin Jones, savior of little girls.”

For a moment I thought she was going to kiss me again, but she didn’t. She slid out of my car and ran across the street to the taxis, skirt flying. I sat there until I saw her climb into the back of a Yellow and drive away. Then I drove away myself, back to Heaven’s Beach, and Mrs. Shoplaw’s, and my autumn at Joyland—both the best and worst autumn of my life.

Were Annie and Mike Ross sitting at the end of the green Victorian’s boardwalk when I headed down the beach to the park on that Tuesday after Labor Day? I remember the warm croissants I ate as I walked, and the circling gulls, but of them I can’t be completely sure. They became such an important part of the scenery—such a landmark—that it’s impossible to pinpoint the first time I actually noticed their presence. Nothing screws with memory like repetition.

Ten years after the events I’m telling you about, I was (for my sins, maybe) a staff writer on Cleveland magazine. I used to do most of my first-draft writing on yellow legal pads in a coffee shop on West Third Street, near Lakefront Stadium, which was the Indians’ stomping grounds back then. Every day at ten, this young woman would come in and get four or five coffees, then take them back to the real estate office next door. I couldn’t tell you the first time I saw her, either. All I know is that one day I saw her, and realized that she sometimes glanced at me as she went out. The day came when I returned that glance, and when she smiled, I did, too. Eight months later we were married.

Annie and Mike were like that; one day they just became a real part of my world. I always waved, the kid in the wheelchair always waved back, and the dog sat watching me with his ears cocked and the wind ruffling his fur. The woman was blonde and beautiful—high cheekbones, wide-set blue eyes, and full lips, the kind that always look a little bruised. The boy in the wheelchair wore a White Sox cap that came down over his ears. He looked very sick. His smile was healthy enough, though. Whether I was going or coming, he always flashed it. Once or twice he even flashed me the peace sign, and I sent it right back. I had become part of his landscape, just as he had become part of mine. I think even Milo, the Jack Russell, came to recognize me as part of the landscape. Only Mom held herself apart. Often when I passed, she never even looked up from whatever book she was reading. When she did she didn’t wave, and she certainly never flashed the peace sign.

I had plenty to occupy my time at Joyland, and if the work wasn’t as interesting and varied as it had been during the summer, it was steadier and less exhausting. I even got a chance to reprise my award-winning role as Howie, and to sing a few more choruses of “Happy Birthday to You” in the Wiggle-Waggle Village, because Joyland was open to the public for the first three weekends in September. Attendance was way down, though, and I didn’t jock a single tipsed ride. Not even the Carolina Spin, which was second only to the merry-go-round as our most popular attraction.

“Up north in New England, most parks stay open weekends until Halloween,” Fred Dean told me one day. We were sitting on a bench and eating a nourishing, vitamin-rich lunch of chili burgers and pork rinds. “Down south in Florida, they run year-round. We’re in a kind of gray zone. Mr. Easterbrook tried pushing for a fall season back in the sixties—spent a bundle on a big advertising blitz—but it didn’t work very well. By the time the nights start getting nippy, people around here start thinking about county fairs and such. Also, a lot of our vets head south or out west for the winter.” He looked down the empty expanse of Hound Dog Way and sighed. “This place gets kind of lonely this time of year.”

“I like it,” I said, and I did. That was my year to embrace loneliness. I sometimes went to the movies in Lumberton or Myrtle Beach with Mrs. Shoplaw and Tina Ackerley, the librarian with the goo-goo-googly eyes, but I spent most evenings in my room, re-reading The Lord of the Rings and writing letters to Erin, Tom, and my dad. I also wrote a fair amount of poetry, which I am now embarrassed even to think about. Thank God I burned it. I added a new and satisfyingly grim record to my small collection—The Dark Side of the Moon. In the Book of Proverbs we are advised that “as a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.” That autumn I returned to Dark Side again and again, only giving Floyd the occasional rest so I could listen to Jim Morrison once more intone, “This is the end, beautiful friend.” Such a really bad case of the twenty-ones—I know, I know.

At least there was plenty at Joyland to occupy my days. The first couple of weeks, while the park was still running part-time, were devoted to fall cleaning. Fred Dean put me in charge of a small crew of gazoonies, and by the time the CLOSED FOR THE SEASON sign went up out front, we had raked and cut every lawn, prepared every flowerbed for winter, and scrubbed down every joint and shy. We slapped together a prefab corrugated metal shed in the backyard and stored the food carts (called grub-rollers in the Talk) there for the winter, each popcorn wagon, Sno-Cone wagon, and Pup-a-Licious wagon snugged under its own green tarp.

When the gazoonies headed north to pick apples, I started the winterizing process with Lane Hardy and Eddie Parks, the ill-tempered vet who ran Horror House (and Team Doberman) during the season. We drained the fountain at the intersection of Joyland Avenue and Hound Dog Way, and had moved on to Captain Nemo’s Splash & Crash—a much bigger job—when Bradley Easterbrook, dressed for traveling in his black suit, came by.

“I’m off to Sarasota this evening,” he told us. “Brenda Rafferty will be with me, as usual.” he smiled, showing those horse teeth of his. “I’m touring the park and saying my thank-yous. To those who are left, that is.

“Have a wonderful winter, Mr. Easterbrook,” Lane said.

Eddie muttered something that sounded to me like eat a wooden ship, but was probably have a good trip.

“Thanks for everything,” I said.

He shook hands with the three of us, coming to me last. “I hope to see you again next year, Jonesy. I think you’re a young man with more than a little carny in his soul.”

But he didn’t see me the following year, and nobody saw him. Mr. Easterbrook died on New Year’s Day, in a condo on John Ringling Boulevard, less than half a mile from where the famous circus winters.

“Crazy old bastid,” Parks said, watching Easterbrook walk to his car, where Brenda was waiting to receive him and help him in.

Lane gave him a long, steady look, then said: “Shut it, Eddie.”

Eddie did. Which was probably wise.

One morning, as I walked to Joyland with my croissants, the Jack Russell finally trotted down the beach to investigate me.

“Milo, come back!” the woman called.

Milo turned to look at her, then looked back at me with his bright black eyes. On impulse, I tore a piece from one of my pastries, squatted, and held it out to him. Milo came like a shot.

“Don’t you feed him!” the woman called sharply.

“Aw, Mom, get over it,” the boy said.

Milo heard her and didn’t take the shred of croissant… but he did sit up before me with his front paws held out. I gave him the bite.

“I won’t do it again,” I said, getting up, “but I couldn’t let a good trick go to waste.”

The woman snorted and went back to her book, which was thick and looked arduous. The boy called, “We feed him all the time. He never puts on weight, just runs it off.”

Without looking up from her book, Mom said: “What do we know about talking to strangers, Mike-O?”

“He’s not exactly a stranger when we see him every day,” the boy pointed out. Reasonably enough, at least from my point of view.

“I’m Devin Jones,” I said. “From down the beach. I work at Joyland.”

“Then you won’t want to be late.” Still not looking up.

The boy shrugged at me—whattaya gonna do, it said. He was pale and as bent-over as an old man, but I thought there was a lively sense of humor in that shrug and the look that went with it. I returned the shrug and walked on. The next morning I took care to finish my croissants before I got to the big green Victorian so Milo wouldn’t be tempted, but I waved. The kid, Mike, waved back. The woman was in her usual place under the green umbrella, and she had no book, but—as per usual—she didn’t wave to me. Her lovely face was closed. There is nothing here for you, it said. Go on down to your trumpery amusement park and leave us alone.

So that was what I did. But I continued to wave, and the kid waved back. Morning and night, the kid waved back.

The Monday after Gary “Pop” Allen left for Florida—bound for Alston’s All-Star Carnival in Jacksonville, where he had a job waiting as shy-boss—I arrived at Joyland and found Eddie Parks, my least favorite old timer, sitting in front of Horror House on an apple-box. Smoking was verboten in the park, but with Mr. Easterbrook gone and Fred Dean nowhere in evidence, Eddie seemed to feel it safe to flout the rule. He was smoking with his gloves on, which would have struck me as strange if he ever took them off, but he never seemed to.

“There you are, kiddo, and only five minutes late.” Everyone else called me either Dev or Jonesy, but to Eddie I was just kiddo, and always would be.

“I’ve got seven-thirty on the nose,” I said, tapping my watch.

“Then you’re slow. Why don’t you drive from town, like everybody else? You could be here in five minutes.”

“I like the beach.”

“I don’t give a tin shit what you like, kiddo, just get here on time. This isn’t like one of your college classes, when you can duck in and out anytime you want to. This is a job, and now that the Head Beagle is gone, you’re gonna work like it’s a job.”

I could have pointed out that Pop had told me Lane Hardy would be in charge of my schedule after he, Pop, was gone, but kept my lip zipped. No sense making a bad situation worse. As to why Eddie had taken a dislike to me, that was obvious. Eddie was an equal-opportunity disliker. I’d go to Lane if life with Eddie got too hard, but only as a last resort. My father had taught me—mostly by example—that if a man wanted to be in charge of his life, he had to be in charge of his problems.

“What have you got for me, Mr. Parks?”

“Plenty. I want you to get a tub of Turtle Wax from the supply shed to start with, and don’t be lingerin down there to shoot the shit with any of your pals, either. Then I want you to go on in Horra and wax all them cars.” Except, of course, he said it caaas. “You know we wax ’em once the season’s over, don’t you?

“Actually I didn’t.”

“Jesus Christ, you kids.” He stomped on his cigarette butt, then lifted the apple-box he was sitting on enough to toss it under. As if that would make it gone. “You want to really put some elbow-grease into it, kiddo, or I’ll send you back in to do it again. You got that?”

“I got it.”

“Good for you.” He stuck another cigarette in his gob, then fumbled in his pants pocket for his lighter. With the gloves on, it took him awhile. He finally got it, flicked back the lid, then stopped. “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Then get going. Flip on the house lights so you can see what the fuck you’re doing. You know where the switches are, don’t you?”

I didn’t, but I’d find them without his help. “Sure.”

He eyed me sourly. “Ain’t you the smart one.” Smaaat.

I found a metal box marked LTS on the wall between the Wax Museum and the Barrel and Bridge Room. I opened it and flipped up all the switches with the heel of my hand. Horror House should have lost all of its cheesy/sinister mystique with all the house lights on, but somehow didn’t. There were still shadows in the corners, and I could hear the wind—quite strong that morning—blowing outside the joint’s thin wooden walls and rattling a loose board somewhere. I made a mental note to track it down and fix it.

I had a wire basket swinging from one hand. It was filled with clean rags and a giant economy-size can of Turtle Wax. I carried it through the Tilted Room—now frozen on a starboard slant—and into the arcade. I looked at the Skee-Ball machines and remembered Erin’s disapproval: Don’t they know that’s a complete butcher’s game? I smiled at the memory, but my heart was beating hard. I knew what I was going to do when I’d finished my chore, you see.

The cars, twenty in all, were lined up at the loading point. Ahead, the tunnel leading into the bowels of Horror House was lit by a pair of bright white work lights instead of flashing strobes. It looked a lot more prosaic that way.

I was pretty sure Eddie hadn’t so much as swiped the little cars with a damp rag all summer long, and that meant I had to start by washing them down. Which also meant fetching soap powder from the supply shed and carrying buckets of water from the nearest working tap. By the time I had all twenty cars washed and rinsed off, it was break-time, but I decided to work right through instead of going out to the backyard or down to the boneyard for coffee. I might meet Eddie at either place, and I’d listened to enough of his grouchy bullshit for one morning. I set to work polishing instead, laying the Turtle Wax on thick and then buffing it off, moving from car to car, making them shine in the overhead lights until they looked new again. Not that the next crowd of thrill-seekers would notice as they crowded in for their nine-minute ride. My own gloves were ruined by the time I was finished. I’d have to buy a new pair at the hardware store in town, and good ones didn’t come cheap. I amused myself briefly by imagining how Eddie would react if I asked him to pay for them.

I stashed my basket of dirty rags and Turtle Wax (the can now mostly empty) by the exit door in the arcade. It was ten past noon, but right then food wasn’t what I was hungry for. I tried to stretch the ache out of my arms and legs, then went back to the loading-point. I paused to admire the cars gleaming mellowly beneath the lights, then walked slowly along the track and into Horror House proper.

I had to duck my head when I passed beneath the Screaming Skull, even though it was now pulled up and locked in its home position. Beyond it was the Dungeon, where the live talent from Eddie’s Team Doberman had tried (and mostly succeeded) in scaring the crap out of children of all ages with their moans and howls. Here I could straighten up again, because it was a tall room. My footfalls echoed on a wooden floor painted to look like stone. I could hear my breathing. It sounded harsh and dry. I was scared, okay? Tom had told me to stay away from this place, but Tom didn’t run my life any more than Eddie Parks did. I had the Doors, and I had Pink Floyd, but I wanted more. I wanted Linda Gray.

Between the Dungeon and the Torture Chamber, the track descended and described a double-S curve where the cars picked up speed and whipped the riders back and forth. Horror House was a dark ride, but when it was in operation, this stretch was the only completely dark part. It had to be where the girl’s killer had cut her throat and dumped her body. How quick he must have been, and how certain of exactly what he was going to do! Beyond the last curve, riders were dazzled by a mix of stuttering, multi-colored strobes. Although Tom had never said it in so many words, I was positive it was where he had seen what he’d seen.

I walked slowly down the double-S, thinking it would not be beyond Eddie to hear me and shut off the overhead work-lights as a joke. To leave me in here to feel my way past the murder site with only the sound of the wind and that one slapping board to keep me company. And suppose… just suppose… a young girl’s hand reached out in that darkness and took mine, the way Erin had taken my hand that last night on the beach?

The lights stayed on. No bloody shirt and gloves appeared beside the track, glowing spectrally. And when I came to what I felt sure was the right spot, just before the entrance to the Torture Chamber, there was no ghost-girl holding her hands out to me.

Yet something was there. I knew it then and I know it now. The air was colder. Not cold enough to see my breath, but yes, definitely colder. My arms and legs and groin all prickled with gooseflesh, and the hair at the nape of my neck stiffened.

“Let me see you,” I whispered, feeling foolish and terrified. Wanting it to happen, hoping it wouldn’t.

There was a sound. A long, slow sigh. Not a human sigh, not in the least. It was as if someone had opened an invisible steam-valve. Then it was gone. There was no more. Not that day.

“Took you long enough,” Eddie said when I finally reappeared at quarter to one. He was seated on the same apple-box, now with the remains of a BLT in one hand and a Styrofoam cup of coffee in the other. I was filthy from the neck down. Eddie, on the other hand, looked fresh as a daisy.

“The cars were pretty dirty. I had to wash them before I could wax them.”

Eddie hawked back phlegm, twisted his head, and spat. “If you want a medal, I’m fresh out. Go find Hardy. He says it’s time to drain the irry-gation system. That should keep a lag-ass like you busy until quittin time. If it don’t, come see me and I’ll find something else for you to do. I got a whole list, believe me.”

“Okay.” I started off, glad to be going.

“Kiddo!”

I turned back reluctantly.

“Did you see her in there?”

“Huh?”

He grinned unpleasantly. “Don’t ‘huh’ me. I know what you were doin. You weren’t the first, and you won’t be the last. Did you see her?”

“Have you ever seen her?”

“Nope.” He looked at me, sly little gimlet eyes peering out of a narrow sunburned face. How old was he? Thirty? Sixty? It was impossible to tell, just as it was impossible to tell if he was speaking the truth. I didn’t care. I just wanted to be away from him. He gave me the creeps.

Eddie raised his gloved hands. “The guy who did it wore a pair of these. Did you know that?”

I nodded. “Also an extra shirt.”

“That’s right.” His grin widened. “To keep the blood off. And it worked, didn’t it? They never caught him. Now get out of here.”

When I got to the Spin, only Lane’s shadow was there to greet me. The man it belonged to was halfway up the wheel, climbing the struts. He tested each steel crosspiece before he put his weight on it. A leather toolkit hung on one hip, and every now and then he reached into it for a socket wrench. Joyland only had a single dark ride, but almost a dozen so-called high rides, including the Spin, the Zipper, the Thunderball, and the Delirium Shaker. There was a three-man maintenance crew that checked them each day before Early Gate during the season, and of course there were visits (both announced and unannounced) from the North Carolina State Inspector of Amusements, but Lane said a ride-jock who didn’t check his ride himself was both lazy and irresponsible. Which made me wonder when Eddie Parks had last ridden in one of his own caaas and safety-checked the baaas.

Lane looked down, saw me, and shouted: “Did that ugly sonofabitch ever give you a lunch break?”

“I worked through it,” I called back. “Lost track of time.” But now I was hungry.

“There’s some tuna-and-macaroni salad in my doghouse, if you want it. I made up way too much last night.”

I went into the little control shack, found a good-sized Tupper-ware container, and popped it open. By the time Lane was back on the ground, the tuna-and-macaroni was in my stomach and I was tamping it down with a couple of leftover Fig Newtons.

“Thanks, Lane. That was tasty.”

“Yeah, I’ll make some guy a good wife someday. Gimme some of those Newtons before they all go down your throat.”

I handed over the box. “How’s the ride?”

“The Spin is tight and the Spin is right. Want to help me work on the engine for a while after you’ve digested a little?”

“Sure.”

He took off his derby and spun it on his finger. His hair was pulled back in a tight little ponytail, and I noticed a few threads of white in the black. They hadn’t been there at the start of the summer—I was quite sure of it. “Listen, Jonesy, Eddie Parks is carny-from-carny, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s one mean-ass sonofabitch. In his eyes, you got two strikes against you: you’re young and you’ve been educated beyond the eighth grade. When you get tired of taking his shit, tell me and I’ll get him to back off.”

“Thanks, but I’m okay for now.”

“I know you are. I’ve been watching how you handle yourself, and I’m impressed. But Eddie’s not your average bear.”

“He’s a bully,” I said.

“Yeah, but here’s the good news: like with most bullies, you scratch the surface and find pure chickenshit underneath. Usually not very far underneath, either. There are people on the show he’s afraid of, and I happen to be one of them. I’ve whacked his nose before and I don’t mind whacking it again. All I’m saying is that if the day comes when you want a little breathing room, I’ll see that you get it.”

“Can I ask you a question about him?”

“Shoot.”

“Why does he always wear those gloves?”

Lane laughed, stuck his derby on his head, and gave it the correct tilt. “Psoriasis. His hands are scaly with it, or so he says—I can’t tell you the last time I actually saw them. He says without the gloves, he scratches them until they bleed.”

“Maybe that’s what makes him so bad-tempered.”

“I think it’s more likely the other way around—the bad temper made the bad skin.” He tapped his temple. “Head controls body, that’s what I believe. Come on, Jonesy, let’s get to work.”

We finished putting the Spin right for its long winter’s nap, then moved on to the irrigation system. By the time the pipes were blown out with compressed air and the drains had swallowed several gallons of antifreeze, the sun was lowering toward the trees west of the park and the shadows were lengthening.

“That’s enough for today,” Lane said. “More than enough. Bring me your card and I’ll sign it.”

I tapped my watch, showing him it was only quarter past five.

He shook his head, smiling. “I’ve got no problem writing six on the card. You did twelve hours’ worth today, kiddo. Twelve easy.”

“Okay,” I said, “but don’t call me kiddo. That’s what he calls me.” I jerked my head toward Horror House.

“I’ll make a note of it. Now bring me your card and buzz off.”

The wind had died a little during the afternoon, but it was still warm and breezy when I set off down the beach. On many of those walks back to town I liked to watch my long shadow on the waves, but that evening I mostly watched my feet. I was tired out. What I wanted was a ham and cheese sandwich from Betty’s Bakery and a couple of beers from the 7-Eleven next door. I’d go back to my room, settle into my chair by the window, and read me some Tolkien as I ate. I was deep into The Two Towers.

What made me look up was the boy’s voice. The breeze was in my favor, and I could hear him clearly. “Faster; Mom! You’ve almost g—” He was temporarily stopped by a coughing fit. Then: “You’ve almost got it!”

Mike’s mother was on the beach tonight instead of beneath her umbrella. She was running toward me but didn’t see me, because she was looking at the kite she was holding over her head. The string ran back to the boy, seated in his wheelchair at the end of the boardwalk.

Wrong direction, Mom, I thought.

She released the kite. It rose a foot or two, wagged naughtily from side to side, then took a dive into the sand. The breeze kicked up and it went skittering. She had to chase it down.

“Once more!” Mike called. “That time—” Cough-cough-cough, harsh and bronchial. “That time you almost had it!”

“No, I didn’t.” She sounded tired and pissed off. “Goddamned thing hates me. Let’s go in and get some sup—”

Milo was sitting beside Mike’s wheelchair, watching the evening’s activities with bright eyes. When he saw me, he was off like a shot, barking. As I watched him come, I remembered Madame Fortuna’s pronouncement on the day I first met her: In your future is a little girl and a little boy. The boy has a dog.

“Milo, come back!” Mom shouted. Her hair had probably started that evening tied up, but after several experiments in aviation, it hung around her face in strings. She pushed it away wearily with the backs of her hands.

Milo paid no attention. He skidded to a stop in front of me with his front paws spraying sand, and did his sitting-up thing. I laughed and patted his head. “That’s all you get, pal—no croissants tonight.”

He barked at me once, then trotted back to Mom, who was standing ankle-deep in the sand, breathing hard and eyeing me with mistrust. The captured kite hung down by her leg.

See? she said. “That’s why I didn’t want you to feed him. He’s a terrible beggar, and he thinks anybody who gives him a scrap is his friend.”

“Well, I’m a friendly sort of guy.”

“Good to know,” she said. “Just don’t feed our dog anymore.” She was wearing pedal pushers and an old blue tee-shirt with faded printing on the front. Judging from the sweat-stains on it, she had been trying to get the kite airborne for quite some time. Trying hard, and why not? If I had a kid stuck in a wheelchair, I’d probably want to give him something that would fly, too.

“You’re going the wrong way with that thing,” I said. “And you don’t need to run with it, anyway. I don’t know why everybody thinks that.”

“I’m sure you’re quite the expert,” she said, “but it’s late and I have to get Mike his supper.”

“Mom, let him try,” Mike said. “Please?”

She stood for a few more seconds with her head lowered and escaped locks of her hair—also sweaty—clumped against her neck. Then she sighed and held the kite out to me. Now I could read the printing on her shirt: CAMP PERRY MATCH COMPETITION (prone) 1959. The front of the kite was a lot better, and I had to laugh. It was the face of Jesus.

“Private joke,” she said. “Don’t ask.”

“Okay.”

“You get one try, Mr. Joyland, and then I’m taking him in for his supper. He can’t get chilled. He was sick last year, and he still hasn’t gotten over it. He thinks he has, but he hasn’t.”

It was still at least seventy-five on the beach, but I didn’t point this out; Mom was clearly not in the mood for further contradictions. Instead I told her again that my name was Devin Jones. She raised her hands and then let them flop: Whatever you say, bub.

I looked at the boy. “Mike?”

“Yes?”

“Reel in the string. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

He did as I asked. I followed, and when I was even with where he sat, I looked at Jesus. “Are you going to fly this time, Mr. Christ?”

Mike laughed. Mom didn’t, but I thought I saw her lips twitch.

“He says he is,” I told Mike.

“Good, because—” Cough. Cough-cough-cough. She was right, he wasn’t over it. Whatever it was. “Because so far he hasn’t done anything but eat sand.”

I held the kite over my head, but facing Heaven’s Bay. I could feel the wind tug at it right away. The plastic rippled. “I’m going to let go, Mike. When I do, start reeling in the string again.”

“But it’ll just—”

“No, it won’t just. But you have to be quick and careful.” I was making it sound harder than it was, because I wanted him to feel cool and capable when the kite went up. It would, too, as long as the breeze didn’t die on us. I really hoped that wouldn’t happen, because I thought Mom had meant what she said about me getting only one chance. “The kite will rise. When it does, start paying out the twine again. Just keep it taut, okay? That means if it starts to dip, you—”

“I pull it in some more. I get it. God’s sake.”

“Okay. Ready?”

“Yeah!”

Milo sat between Mom and me, looking up at the kite.

“Okay, then. Three… two… one… lift-off.”

The kid was hunched over in his chair and the legs beneath his shorts were wasted, but there was nothing wrong with his hands and he knew how to follow orders. He started reeling in, and the kite rose at once. He began to pay the string out—at first too much, and the kite sagged, but he corrected and it started going up again. He laughed. “I can feel it! I can feel it in my hands!”

“That’s the wind you feel,” I said. “Keep going, Mike. Once it gets up a little higher, the wind will own it. Then all you have to do is not let go.”

He let out the twine and the kite climbed, first over the beach and then above the ocean, riding higher and higher into that September day’s late blue. I watched it awhile, then chanced looking at the woman. She didn’t bristle at my gaze, because she didn’t see it. All her attention was focused on her son. I don’t think I ever saw such love and such happiness on a person’s face. Because he was happy. His eyes were shining and the coughing had stopped.

“Mommy, it feels like it’s alive!”

It is, I thought, remembering how my father had taught me to fly a kite in the town park. I had been Mike’s age, but with good legs to stand on. As long as it’s up there, where it was made to be, it really is.

“Come and feel it!”

She walked up the little slope of beach to the boardwalk and stood beside him. She was looking at the kite, but her hand was stroking his cap of dark brown hair. “Are you sure, honey? It’s your kite.”

“Yeah, but you have to try it. It’s incredible!”

She took the reel, which had thinned considerably as the twine paid out and the kite rose (it was now just a black diamond, the face of Jesus no longer visible) and held it in front of her. For a moment she looked apprehensive. Then she smiled. When a gust tugged the kite, making it wag first to port and then to starboard above the incoming waves, the smile widened into a grin.

After she’d flown it for a while, Mike said: “Let him.”

“No, that’s okay,” I said.

But she held out the reel. “We insist, Mr. Jones. You’re the flightmaster, after all.”

So I took the twine, and felt the old familiar thrill. It tugged the way a fishing-line does when a fair-sized trout has taken the hook, but the nice thing about kite-flying is nothing gets killed.

“How high will it go?” Mike asked.

“I don’t know, but maybe it shouldn’t go much higher tonight. The wind up there is stronger, and might rip it. Also, you guys need to eat.”

“Can Mr. Jones eat supper with us, Mom?”

She looked startled at the idea, and not in a good way. Still, I saw she was going to agree because I’d gotten the kite up.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I appreciate the invitation, but it was quite a day at the park. We’re battening down the hatches for winter, and I’m dirt from head to toe.”

“You can wash up in the house,” Mike said. “We’ve got, like, seventy bathrooms.”

“Michael Ross, we do not!”

“Maybe seventy-five, with a Jacuzzi in each one.” He started laughing. It was a lovely infectious sound, at least until it turned to coughing. The coughing became whooping. Then, just as Mom was starting to look really concerned (I was already there), he got it under control.

Another time,’ I said, and handed him the reel of twine. “I love your Christ-kite. Your dog ain’t bad, either.” I bent and patted Milo’s head.

“Oh… okay. Another time. But don’t wait too long, because—”

Mom interposed hastily. “Can you go to work a little earlier tomorrow, Mr. Jones?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“We could have fruit smoothies right here, if the weather’s nice. I make a mean fruit smoothie.”

I bet she did. And that way, she wouldn’t have to have a strange man in the house.

“Will you?” Mike asked. “That’d be cool.”

“I’d love to. I’ll bring a bag of pastries from Betty’s.”

“Oh, you don’t have to—” she began.

“My pleasure, ma’am.”

“Oh!” She looked startled. “I never introduced myself, did I? I’m Ann Ross.” She held out her hand.

“I’d shake it, Mrs. Ross, but I really am filthy.” I showed her my hands. “It’s probably on the kite, too.”

“You should have given Jesus a mustache!” Mike shouted, and then laughed himself into another coughing fit.

“You’re getting a little loose with the twine there, Mike,” I said. “Better reel it in.” And, as he started doing it, I gave Milo a farewell pat and started back down the beach.

“Mr. Jones,” she called.

I turned back. She was standing straight, with her chin raised. Sweat had molded the shirt to her, and she had great breasts.

“It’s Miss Ross. But since I guess we’ve now been properly introduced, why don’t you call me Annie?”

“I can do that.” I pointed at her shirt. “What’s a match competition? And why is it prone?”

“That’s when you shoot lying down,” Mike said.

“Haven’t done it in ages,” she said, in a curt tone that suggested she wanted the subject closed.

Fine with me. I tipped Mike a wave and he sent one right back. He was grinning. Kid had a great grin.

Forty or fifty yards down the beach, I turned around for another look. The kite was descending, but for the time being the wind still owned it. They were looking up at it, the woman with her hand on her son’s shoulder.

Miss, I thought. Miss, not Mrs. And is there a mister with them in the big old Victorian with the seventy bathrooms? Just because I’d never seen one with them didn’t mean there wasn’t one, but I didn’t think so. I thought it was just the two of them. On their own.

I got no clarification from Annie Ross the next morning, but plenty of dish from Mike. I also got one hell of a nice fruit smoothie. She said she made the yogurt herself, and it was layered with fresh strawberries from God knows where. I brought croissants and blueberry muffins from Betty’s Bakery. Mike skipped the pastries, but finished his smoothie and asked for another. From the way his mother’s mouth dropped open, I gathered that this was an astounding development. But not, I guessed, in a bad way.

“Are you sure you can eat another one?”

“Maybe just half,” he said. “What’s the deal, Mom? You’re the one who says fresh yogurt helps me move my bowels.”

“I don’t think we need to discuss your bowels at seven in the morning, Mike.” She got up, then cast a doubtful glance my way.

“Don’t worry,” Mike said brightly, “if he tries to kiddie-fiddle me, I’ll tell Milo to sic ’im.”

Color bloomed in her cheeks. “Michael Everett Ross!”

“Sorry,” he said. He didn’t look sorry. His eyes were sparkling.

“Don’t apologize to me, apologize to Mr. Jones.”

“Accepted, accepted.”

“Will you keep an eye on him, Mr. Jones? I won’t be long.”

“I will if you’ll call me Devin.”

“Then I’ll do that.” She hurried up the boardwalk, pausing once to look over her shoulder. I think she had more than half a mind to come back, but in the end, the prospect of stuffing a few more healthy calories into her painfully thin boy was too much for her to resist, and she went on.

Mike watched her climb the steps to the back patio and sighed. “Now I’ll have to eat it.”

“Well… yeah. You asked for it, right?”

“Only so I could talk to you without her butting in. I mean, I love her and all, but she’s always butting in. Like what’s wrong with me is this big shameful secret we have to keep.” He shrugged. “I’ve got muscular dystrophy, that’s all. That’s why I’m in the wheelchair. I can walk, you know, but the braces and crutches are a pain in the butt.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That stinks, Mike.”

“I guess, but I can’t remember not having it, so what the hell. Only it’s a special kind of MD. Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy, it’s called. Most kids who have it croak in their teens or early twenties.”

So, you tell me—what do you say to a ten-year-old kid who’s just told you he’s living under a death sentence?

“But.” He raised a teacherly finger. “Remember her talking about how I was sick last year?”

“Mike, you don’t have to tell me all this if you don’t want to.”

“Yeah, except I do.” He was looking at me with clear intensity. Maybe even urgency. “Because you want to know. Maybe you even need to know.”

I was thinking of Fortuna again. Two children, she had told me, a girl in a red hat and a boy with a dog. She said one of them had the sight, but she didn’t know which. I thought that now I did.

“Mom said I think I got over it. Do I sound like I got over it?”

“Nasty cough,” I ventured, “but otherwise…” I couldn’t think how to finish. Otherwise your legs are nothing but sticks? Otherwise you look like your mom and I could tie a string to the back of your shirt and fly you like a kite? Otherwise if I had to bet on whether you or Milo would live longer, I’d put my money on the dog?

“I came down with pneumonia just after Thanksgiving, okay? When I didn’t improve after a couple of weeks in the hospital, the doctor told my mom I was probably going to die and she ought to, you know, get ready for that.”

But he didn’t tell her in your hearing, I thought. They’d never have a conversation like that in your hearing.

“I hung in, though.” He said this with some pride. “My grandfather called my mom—I think it was the first time they’d talked in a long time. I don’t know who told him what was going on, but he has people everywhere. It could have been any of them.”

People everywhere sounded kind of paranoid, but I kept my mouth shut. Later I found out it wasn’t paranoid at all. Mike’s grandfather did have them everywhere, and they all saluted Jesus, the flag, and the NBA, although possibly not in that order.

“Grampa said I got over the pneumonia because of God’s will. Mom said he was full of bullshit, just like when he said me having DMD in the first place was God’s punishment. She said I was just one tough little sonofabitch, and God had nothing to do with it. Then she hung up on him.”

Mike might have heard her end of that conversation, but not Grampa’s, and I doubted like hell if his mother had told him. I didn’t think he was making it up, though. I found myself hoping Annie wouldn’t hurry back. This wasn’t like listening to Madame Fortuna. What she had, I believed (and still do, all these years later), was some small bit of authentic psychic ability amped up by a shrewd understanding of human nature and then packaged in glittering carny bullshit. Mike’s thing was clearer. Simpler. Purer. It wasn’t like seeing the ghost of Linda Gray, but it was akin to that, okay? It was touching another world.

“Mom said she’d never come back here, but here we are. Because I wanted to come to the beach and because I wanted to fly a kite and because I’m never going to make twelve, let alone my early twenties. It was the pneumonia, see? I get steroids, and they help, but the pneumonia combined with the Duchenne’s MD fucked up my lungs and heart permanently.”

He looked at me with a child’s defiance, watching for how I’d react to what is now so coyly referred to as “the f-bomb.” I didn’t react, of course. I was too busy processing the sense to worry about his choice of words.

“So,” I said. “I guess what you’re saying is an extra fruit smoothie won’t help.”

He threw back his head and laughed. The laughter turned into the worst coughing fit yet. Alarmed, I went to him and pounded his back… but gently. It felt as if there were nothing under there but chicken bones. Milo barked once and put his paws up on one of Mike’s wasted legs.

There were two pitchers on the table, water in one and fresh-squeezed orange juice in the other. Mike pointed to the water and I poured him half a glass. When I tried to hold it for him, he gave me an impatient look—even with the coughing fit still wracking him—and took it himself. He spilled some on his shirt, but most of it went down his throat, and the coughing eased.

“That was a bad one,” he said, patting his chest. “My heart’s going like a bastard. Don’t tell my mother.”

“Jesus, kid! Like she doesn’t know?”

“She knows too much, that’s what I think,” Mike said. “She knows I might have three more good months and then four or five really bad ones. Like, in bed all the time, not able to do anything but suck oxygen and watch MASH and Fat Albert. The only question is whether or not she’ll let Grammy and Grampa Ross come to the funeral.” He’d coughed hard enough to make his eyes water, but I didn’t mistake that for tears. He was bleak, but in control. Last evening, when the kite went up and he felt it tugging the twine, he had been younger than his age. Now I was watching him struggle to be a lot older. The scary thing was how well he was succeeding. His eyes met mine, dead-on. “She knows. She just doesn’t know that I know.”

The back door banged. We looked and saw Annie crossing the patio, heading for the boardwalk.

“Why would I need to know, Mike?”

He shook his head. “I don’t have any idea. But you can’t talk about it to Mom, okay? It just upsets her. I’m all she’s got.” He said this last not with pride but a kind of gloomy realism.

“All right.”

“Oh, one other thing. I almost forgot.” He shot a glance at her, saw she was only halfway down the boardwalk, and turned back to me. “It’s not white.”

“What’s not white?”

Mike Ross looked mystified. “No idea. When I woke up this morning, I remembered you were coming for smoothies, and that came into my head. I thought you’d know.”

Annie arrived. She had poured a mini-smoothie into a juice glass. On top was a single strawberry.

“Yum!” Mike said. “Thanks, Mom!”

“You’re very welcome, hon.”

She eyed his wet shirt but didn’t mention it. When she asked me if I wanted some more juice, Mike winked at me. I said more juice would be great. While she poured, Mike fed Milo two heaping spoonfuls of his smoothie.

She turned back to him, and looked at the smoothie glass, now half empty. “Wow, you really were hungry.”

“Told you.”

“What were you and Mr. Jones—Devin—talking about?”

“Nothing much,” Mike said. “He’s been sad, but he’s better now. ”

I said nothing, but I could feel heat rising in my cheeks. When I dared a look at Annie, she was smiling.

“Welcome to Mike’s world, Devin,” she said, and I must have looked like I’d swallowed a goldfish, because she burst out laughing. It was a nice sound.

That evening when I walked back from Joyland, she was standing at the end of the boardwalk, waiting for me. It was the first time I’d seen her in a blouse and skirt. And she was alone. That was a first, too.

“Devin? Got a second?”

“Sure,” I said, angling up the sandy slope to her. “Where’s Mike?”

“He has physical therapy three times a week. Usually Janice—she’s his therapist—comes in the morning, but I arranged for her to come this evening instead, because I wanted to speak to you alone.”

“Does Mike know that?”

Annie smiled ruefully. “Probably. Mike knows far more than he should. I won’t ask what you two talked about after he got rid of me this morning, but I’m guessing that his… insights… come as no surprise to you.”

“He told me why he’s in a wheelchair, that’s all. And he mentioned he had pneumonia last Thanksgiving.”

“I wanted to thank you for the kite, Dev. My son has very restless nights. He’s not in pain, exactly, but he has trouble breathing when he’s asleep. It’s like apnea. He has to sleep in a semi-sitting position, and that doesn’t help. Sometimes he stops breathing completely, and when he does, an alarm goes off and wakes him up. Only last night—after the kite—he slept right through. I even went in once, around two AM, to make sure the monitor wasn’t malfunctioning. He was sleeping like a baby. No restless tossing and turning, no nightmares—he’s prone to them—and no moaning. It was the kite. It satisfied him in a way nothing else possibly could. Except maybe going to that damned amusement park of yours, which is completely out of the question.” She stopped, then smiled. “Oh, shit. I’m making a speech.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“It’s just that I’ve had so few people to talk to. I have housekeeping help—a very nice woman from Heaven’s Bay—and of course there’s Janice, but it’s not the same.” She took a deep breath. “Here’s the other part. I was rude to you on several occasions, and with no cause. I’m sorry.”

“Mrs… . Miss…” Shit. “Annie, you don’t have anything to apologize for.”

“Yes. I do. You could have just walked on when you saw me struggling with the kite, and then Mike wouldn’t have gotten that good night’s rest. All I can say is that I have problems trusting people.”

This is where she invites me in for supper, I thought. But she didn’t. Maybe because of what I said next.

“You know, he could come to the park. It’d be easy to arrange, and with it closed and all, he could have the run of the place.”

Her face closed up hard, like a hand into a fist. “Oh, no. Absolutely not. If you think that, he didn’t tell you as much about his condition as I thought he did. Please don’t mention it to him. In fact, I have to insist.”

“All right,” I said. “But if you change your mind…”

I trailed off. She wasn’t going to change her mind. She looked at her watch, and a new smile lit her face. It was so brilliant you could almost overlook how it never reached her eyes. “Oh boy, look how late it’s getting. Mike will be hungry after his PE, and I haven’t done a thing about supper. Will you excuse me?”

“Sure.”

I stood there watching her hurry back down the boardwalk to the green Victorian—the one I was probably never going to see the inside of, thanks to my big mouth. But the idea of taking Mike through Joyland had seemed so right. During the summer, we had groups of kids with all sorts of problems and disabilities—crippled kids, blind kids, cancer kids, kids who were mentally challenged (what we called retarded back in the unenlightened 70s). It wasn’t as though I expected to stick Mike in the front car of the Delirium Shaker and then blast him off. Even if the Shaker hadn’t been buttoned up for the winter, I’m not a total idiot.

But the merry-go-round was still operational, and surely he could ride that. Ditto the train that ran through the Wiggle-Waggle Village. I was sure Fred Dean wouldn’t mind me touring the kid through Mysterio’s Mirror Mansion, either. But no. No. He was her delicate hothouse flower, and she intended to keep it that way. The thing with the kite had just been an aberration, and the apology a bitter pill she felt she had to swallow.

Still, I couldn’t help admiring how quick and lithe she was, moving with a grace her son would never know. I watched her bare legs under the hem of her skirt and thought about Wendy Keegan not at all.

I had the weekend free, and you know what happened. I guess the idea that it always rains on the weekends must be an illusion, but it sure doesn’t seem like one; ask any working stiff who ever planned to go camping or fishing on his days off.

Well, there was always Tolkien. I was sitting in my chair by the window on Saturday afternoon, moving ever deeper into the mountains of Mordor with Frodo and Sam, when Mrs. Shoplaw knocked on the door and asked if I’d like to come down to the parlor and play Scrabble with her and Tina Ackerley. I am not at all crazy about Scrabble, having suffered many humiliations at the hands of my aunts Tansy and Naomi, who each have a huge mental vocabulary of what I still think of as “Scrabble shit-words”—stuff like suq, tranq, and bhoot (an Indian ghost, should you wonder). Nevertheless, I said I’d love to play. Mrs. Shoplaw was my landlady, after all, and diplomacy takes many forms.

On our way downstairs, she confided, “We’re helping Tina bone up. She’s quite the Scrabble-shark. She’s entered in some sort of tournament in Atlantic City next weekend. I believe there is a cash prize.”

It didn’t take long—maybe four turns—to discover that our resident librarian could have given my aunts all the game they could handle, and more. By the time Miss Ackerley laid down nubility (with the apologetic smile all Scrabble-sharks seem to have; I think they must practice it in front of their mirrors), Emmalina Shoplaw was eighty points behind. As for me… well, never mind.

“I don’t suppose either of you know anything about Annie and Mike Ross, do you?” I asked during a break in the action (both women seemed to feel a need to study the board a looong time before laying down so much as a single tile). “They live on Beach Row in the big green Victorian?”

Miss Ackerley paused with her hand still inside the little brown bag of letters. Her eyes were big, and her thick lenses made them even bigger. “Have you met them?”

“Uh-huh. They were trying to fly a kite… well, she was… and I helped out a little. They’re very nice. I just wondered… the two of them all alone in that big house, and him pretty sick.

The look they exchanged was pure incredulity, and I started to wish I hadn’t raised the subject.

“She talks to you?” Mrs. Shoplaw asked. “The Ice Queen actually talks to you?”

Not only talked to me, but gave me a fruit smoothie. Thanked, me. Even apologized to me. But I said none of that. Not because Annie really had iced up when I presumed too much, but because to do so would have seemed disloyal, somehow.

“Well, a little. I got the kite up for them, that’s all.” I turned the board. It was Tina’s, the pro kind with its own little built-in spindle. “Come on, Mrs. S. Your turn. Maybe you’ll even make a word that’s in my puny vocabulary.”

“Given the correct positioning, puny can be worth seventy points,” Tina Ackerley said. “Even more, if a y-word is connected to pun.”

Mrs. Shoplaw ignored both the board and the advice. “You know who her father is, of course.”

“Can’t say I do.” Although I did know she was on the outs with him, and big-time.

“Buddy Ross? As in The Buddy Ross Hour of Power? Ring any bells?”

It did, vaguely. I thought I might have heard some preacher named Ross on the radio in the costume shop. It kind of made sense. During one of my quick-change transformations into Howie, Dottie Lassen had asked me—pretty much out of a clear blue sky—if I had found Jesus. My first impulse had been to tell her that I didn’t know He was lost, but I restrained it.

“One of those Bible-shouters, right?”

“Next to Oral Roberts and that Jimmy Swaggart fellow, he’s just about the biggest of them,” Mrs. S. said. “He broadcasts from this gigantic church—God’s Citadel, he calls it—in Atlanta. His radio show goes out all over the country, and now he’s getting more and more into TV. I don’t know if the stations give him the time free, or if he has to buy it. I’m sure he can afford it, especially late at night. That’s when the old folks are up with their aches and pains. His shows are half miracle healings and half pleas for more love-offerings.”

“Guess he didn’t have any luck healing his grandson,” I said.

Tina withdrew her hand from the letter-bag with nothing in it. She had forgotten about Scrabble for the time being, which was a good thing for her hapless victims. Her eyes were sparkling. “You don’t know any of this story, do you? Ordinarily I don’t believe in gossip, but…” She dropped her voice to a confidential tone pitched just above a whisper. “… but since you’ve met them, I could tell you.”

“Yes, please,” I said. I thought one of my questions—how Annie and Mike came to be living in a huge house on one of North Carolina’s ritziest beaches—had already been answered. It was Grampa Buddy’s summer retreat, bought and paid for with love-offerings.

“He’s got two sons,” Tina said. “They’re both high in his church—deacons or assistant pastors, I don’t know what they call them exactly, because I don’t go for that holy rolling stuff. The daughter, though, she was different. A sporty type. Horseback riding, tennis, archery, deer hunting with her father, quite a bit of competition shooting. All that got in the papers after her trouble started.”

Now the CAMP PERRY shirt made sense.

“Around the time she turned eighteen, it all went to hell—quite literally, as he saw it. She went to what they call ‘a secular-humanist college,’ and by all accounts she was quite the wild child. Giving up the shooting competitions and tennis tournaments was one thing; giving up the church-going for parties and liquor and men was quite another. Also…” Tina lowered her voice. “Pot-smoking.”

“Gosh,” I said, “not that!”

Mrs. Shoplaw gave me a look, but Tina didn’t notice. “Yes! That! She got into the newspapers, too, those tabloids, because she was pretty and rich, but mostly because of her father. And being fallen-away. That’s what they call it. She was a scandal to that church of his, wearing mini-skirts and going braless and all. Well, you know what those fundamentalists preach is straight out of the Old Testament, all that about the righteous being rewarded and sinners being punished even unto the seventh generation. And she did more than hit the party circuit down there in Green Witch Village.” Tina’s eyes were now so huge they looked on the verge of tumbling from their sockets and rolling down her cheeks. “She quit the NRA and joined the American Atheist Society!”

“Ah. And did that get in the papers?”

“Did it ever! Then she got pregnant, no surprise there, and when the baby turned out to have some sort of problem… cerebral palsy, I think—”

“Muscular dystrophy.”

“Whatever it is, her father was asked about it on one of his crusade things, and do you know what he said?”

I shook my head, but thought I could make a pretty good guess.

“He said that God punishes the unbeliever and the sinner. He said his daughter was no different, and maybe her son’s affliction would bring her back to God.”

“I don’t think it’s happened yet,” I said. I was thinking of the Jesus-kite.

“I can’t understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there’s already so much pain in the world,” Mrs. Shoplaw said. “Religion is supposed to comfort.”

“He’s just a self-righteous old prig,” Tina said. “No matter how many men she might have been with or how many joints of pot she might have smoked, she’s still his daughter. And the child is still his grandson. I’ve seen that boy in town once or twice, either in a wheelchair or tottering along in those cruel braces he has to wear if he wants to walk. He seems like a perfectly nice boy, and she was sober. Also wearing a bra.” She paused for further recollection. “I think.”

“Her father might change,” Mrs. Shoplaw said, “but I doubt it. Young women and young men grow up, but old women and old men just grow older and surer they’ve got the right on their side. Especially if they know scripture.”

I remembered something my mother used to say. “The devil can quote scripture.”

“And in a pleasing voice,” Mrs. Shoplaw agreed moodily. Then she brightened. “Still, if the Reverend Ross is letting them use his place on Beach Row, maybe he’s willing to let bygones be bygones. It might have crossed his mind by now that she was only a young girl, maybe not even old enough to vote. Dev, isn’t it your turn?”

It was. I made tear. It netted me four points.

My drubbing wasn’t merciful, but once Tina Ackerley really got rocking, it was relatively quick. I returned to my room, sat in my chair by the window, and tried to rejoin Frodo and Sam on the road to Mount Doom. I couldn’t do it. I closed the book and stared out through the rain-wavery glass at the empty beach and the gray ocean beyond. It was a lonely prospect, and at times like that, my thoughts had a way of turning back to Wendy—wondering where she was, what she was doing, and who she was with. Thinking about her smile, the way her hair fell against her cheek, the soft rise of her breasts in one of her seemingly endless supply of cardigan sweaters.

Not today. Instead of Wendy, I found myself thinking of Annie Ross and realizing I’d developed a small but powerful crush on her. The fact that nothing could come of it—she had to be ten years older than me, maybe twelve—only seemed to make things worse. Or maybe I mean better, because unrequited love does have its attractions for young men.

Mrs. S. had suggested that Annie’s holier-than-thou father might be willing to let bygones be bygones, and I thought she might have something there. I’d heard that grandchildren had a way of softening stiff necks, and he might want to get to know the boy while there was still time. He could have found out (from the people he had everywhere) that Mike was smart as well as crippled. It was even possible he’d heard rumors that Mike had what Madame Fortuna called “the sight.” Or maybe all that was too rosy. Maybe Mr. Fire-and-Brimstone had given her the use of the house in exchange for a promise that she’d keep her mouth shut and not brew up any fresh pot-and-miniskirt scandals while he was making the crucial transition from radio to television.

I could speculate until the cloud-masked sun went down, and not be sure of anything on Buddy Ross’s account, but I thought I could be sure about one thing on Annie’s: she was not ready to let bygones be bygones.

I got up and trotted downstairs to the parlor, fishing a scrap of paper with a phone number on it out of my wallet as I went. I could hear Tina and Mrs. S. in the kitchen, chattering away happily. I called Erin Cook’s dorm, not expecting to get her on a Saturday afternoon; she was probably down in New Jersey with Tom, watching Rutgers football and singing the Scarlet Knights’ fight song.

But the girl on phone duty said she’d get her, and three minutes later, her voice was in my ear.

“Dev, I was going to call you. In fact, I want to come down and see you, if I can get Tom to go along. I think I can, but it wouldn’t be next weekend. Probably the one after.”

I checked the calendar hanging on the wall and saw that would be the first weekend in October. “Have you actually found something out?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I love to do research, and I really got into this. I’ve piled up lots of background stuff for sure, but it’s not like I solved the murder of Linda Gray in the college library, or anything. Still… there are things I want to show you. Things that trouble me.”

“Trouble you why? Trouble you how?”

“I don’t want to try explaining over the phone. If I can’t persuade Tom to come down, I’ll put everything in a big manila envelope and send it to you. But I think I can. He wants to see you, he just doesn’t want anything to do with my little investigation. He wouldn’t even look at the photos.”

I thought she was being awfully mysterious, but decided to let it go. “Listen, have you heard of an evangelist named Buddy Ross?”

“Buddy—” She burst into giggles. “The Buddy Ross Hour of Power! My gramma listens to that old faker all the time! He pretends to pull goat stomachs out of people and claims they’re tumors! Do you know what Pop Allen would say?”

“Carny-from-carny,” I said, grinning.

“Right you are. What do you want to know about him? And why can’t you find out for yourself? Did your mother get scared by a card catalogue while she was carrying you?”

“Not that I know of, but by the time I get off work, the Heaven’s Bay library is closed. I doubt if they’ve got Who’s Who, anyway. I mean, it’s only one room. It’s not about him, anyway. It’s about his two sons. I want to know if they have any kids.”

“Why?”

“Because his daughter has one. He’s a great kid, but he’s dying.”

A pause. Then: “What are you into down there now, Dev?”

“Meeting new people. Come on down. I’d love to see you guys again. Tell Tom we’ll stay out of the funhouse.”

I thought that might make her laugh, but it didn’t. “Oh, he will. You couldn’t get him within thirty yards of the place.”

We said our goodbyes, I wrote the length of my call on the honor sheet, then went back upstairs and sat by the window. I was feeling that strange dull jealousy again. Why had Tom Kennedy been the one to see Linda Gray? Why him and not me?

The Heaven’s Bay weekly paper came out on Thursdays, and the headline on the October fourth edition read JOYLAND EMPLOYEE SAVES SECOND LIFE. I thought that was an exaggeration. I’ll take full credit for Hallie Stansfield, but only part of it for the unpleasant Eddie Parks. The rest—not neglecting a tip of the old Howie-hat to Lane Hardy—belongs to Wendy Keegan, because if she hadn’t broken up with me in June, I would have been in Durham, New Hampshire that fall, seven hundred miles from Joyland.

I certainly had no idea that more life-saving was on the agenda; premonitions like that were strictly for folks like Rozzie Gold and Mike Ross. I was thinking of nothing but Erin and Tom’s upcoming visit when I arrived at the park on October first, after another rainy weekend. It was still cloudy, but in honor of Monday, the rain had stopped. Eddie was seated on his apple-box throne in front of Horror House, and smoking his usual morning cigarette. I raised my hand to him. He didn’t bother to raise his in return, just stomped on his butt and leaned over to raise the apple-box and toss it under. I’d seen it all fifty times or more (and sometimes wondered how many butts were piled up beneath that box), but this time, instead of lifting the apple-box, he just went right on leaning.

Was there a look of surprise on his face? I can’t say. By the time I realized something was wrong, all I could see was his faded and grease-smeared dogtop as his head dropped between his knees. He kept going forward, and ended up doing a complete somersault, landing on his back with his legs splayed out and his face up to the cloudy sky. And by then the only thing on it was a knotted grimace of pain.

I dropped my lunchsack, ran to him, and fell on my knees beside him. “Eddie? What is it?”

“Ticka,” he managed.

For a moment I thought he was talking about some obscure disease engendered by tick-bites, but then I saw the way he was clutching the left side of his chest with his gloved right hand.

The pre-Joyland version of Dev Jones would simply have yelled for help, but after four months of talking the Talk, help never even crossed my mind. I filled my lungs, lifted my head, and screamed “HEY, RUBE!” into the damp morning air as loud as I could. The only person close enough to hear was Lane Hardy, and he came fast.

The summer employees Fred Dean hired didn’t have to know CPR when they signed on, but they had to learn. Thanks to the life-saving class I’d taken as a teenager, I already knew. The half-dozen of us in that class had learned beside the YMCA pool, working on a dummy with the unlikely name of Herkimer Saltfish. Now I had a chance to put theory into practice for the first time, and do you know what? It wasn’t really that much different from the clean-and-jerk I’d used to pop the hotdog out of the little Stansfield girl’s throat. I wasn’t wearing the fur, and there was no hugging involved, but it was still mostly a matter of applying hard force. I cracked four of the old bastard’s ribs and broke one. I can’t say I’m sorry, either.

By the time Lane arrived, I was kneeling alongside Eddie and doing closed chest compressions, first rocking forward with my weight on the heels of my hands, then rocking back and listening to see if he’d draw in a breath.

“Christ,” Lane said. “Heart attack?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Call an ambulance.”

The closest phone was in the little shack beside Pop Allen’s Shootin’ Gallery—his doghouse, in the Talk. It was locked, but Lane had the Keys to the Kingdom: three masters that opened everything in the park. He ran. I went on doing CPR, rocking back and forth, my thighs aching now, my knees barking about their long contact with the rough pavement of Joyland Avenue. After each five compressions I’d slow-count to three, listening for Eddie to inhale, but there was nothing. No joy in Joyland, not for Eddie. Not after the first five, not after the second five, not after half a dozen fives. He just lay there with his gloved hands at his sides and his mouth open. Eddie fucking Parks. I stared down at him as Lane came sprinting back, shouting that the ambulance was on its way.

I’m not doing it, I thought. I’ll be damned if I’ll do it.

Then I leaned forward, doing another compression on the way, and pressed my mouth to his. It wasn’t as bad as I feared; it was worse. His lips were bitter with the taste of cigarettes, and there was the stink of something else in his mouth—God help me, I think it was jalapeno peppers, maybe from a breakfast omelet. I got a good seal, though, pinched his nostrils shut, and breathed down his throat.

I did that five or six times before he started breathing on his own again. I stopped the compressions to see what would happen, and he kept going. Hell must have been full that day, that’s all I can figure. I rolled him onto his side in case he vomited. Lane stood beside me with a hand on my shoulder. Shortly after that, we heard the wail of an approaching siren.

Lane hurried to meet them at the gate and direct them. Once he was gone, I found myself looking at the snarling green monster-faces decorating the façade of Horror House, COME IN IF YOU DARE was written above the faces in drippy green letters. I found myself thinking again of Linda Gray, who had gone in alive and had been carried out hours later, cold and dead. I think my mind went that way because Erin was coming with information. Information that troubled her. I also thought of the girl’s killer.

Could have been you, Mrs. Shoplaw had said. 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.

Eddie’s hair was the premature gray of the lifelong heavy smoker, but it could have been blond four years ago. And he always wore gloves. Surely he was too old to have been the man who had accompanied Linda Gray on her last dark ride, surely, but…

The ambulance was very close but not quite here, although I could see Lane at the gate, waving his hands over his head, making hurry-up gestures. Thinking what the hell, I stripped off Eddie’s gloves. His fingers were lacy with dead skin, the backs of his hands red beneath a thick layer of some sort of white cream. There were no tattoos.

Just psoriasis.

As soon as he was loaded up and the ambulance was heading back to the tiny Heaven’s Bay hospital, I went into the nearest donniker and rinsed my mouth again and again. It was a long time before I got rid of the taste of those damn jalapeno peppers, and I have never touched one since.

When I came out, Lane Hardy was standing by the door. “That was something,” he said. “You brought him back.”

“He won’t be out of the woods for a while, and there might be brain damage.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no, but if you hadn’t been there, he’d have been in the woods permanently. First the little girl, now the dirty old man. I may start calling you Jesus instead of Jonesy, because you sure are the savior.”

“You do that, and I’m DS.” That was Talk for down south, which in turn meant turning in your time-card for good.

“Okay, but you did all right, Jonesy. In fact, I gotta say you rocked the house.”

“The taste of him,” I said. “God!”

“Yeah, I bet, but look on the bright side. With him gone, you’re free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, you’re free at last. I think you’ll like it better that way, don’t you?”

I certainly did.

From his back pocket, Lane drew out a pair of rawhide gloves. Eddie’s gloves. “Found these laying on the ground. Why’d you take ’em off him?”

“Uh… I wanted to let his hands breathe.” That sounded primo stupid, but the truth would have sounded even stupider. I couldn’t believe I’d entertained the notion of Eddie Parks being Linda Gray’s killer for even a moment. “When I took my life-saving course, they told us that heart attack victims need all the free skin they can get. It helps, somehow.” I shrugged. “It’s supposed to, at least.”

“Huh. You learn a new thing every day.” He flapped the gloves. “I don’t think Eddie’s gonna be back for a long time—if at all—so you might as well stick these in his doghouse, yeah?”

“Okay,” I said, and that’s what I did. But later that day I went and got them again. Something else, too.

I didn’t like him, we’re straight on that, right? He’d given me no reason to like him. He had, so far as I knew, given not one single Joyland employee a reason to like him. Even old-timers like Rozzie Gold and Pop Allen gave him a wide berth. Nevertheless, I found myself entering the Heaven’s Bay Community Hospital that afternoon at four o’clock, and asking if Edward Parks could have a visitor. I had his gloves in one hand, along with the something else.

The blue-haired volunteer receptionist went through her paperwork twice, shaking her head, and I was starting to think Eddie had died after all when she said, “Ah! It’s Edwin, not Edward. He’s in Room 315. That’s ICU, so you’ll have to check at the nurse’s station first.”

I thanked her and went to the elevator—one of those huge ones big enough to admit a gurney. It was slower than old cold death, which gave me plenty of time to wonder what I was doing here. If Eddie needed a visit from a park employee, it should have been Fred Dean, not me, because Fred was the guy in charge that fall. Yet here I was. They probably wouldn’t let me see him, anyway.

But after checking his chart, the head nurse gave me the okay. “He maybe sleeping, though.”

“Any idea about his—?” I tapped my head.

“Mental function? Well… he was able to give us his name.”

That sounded hopeful.

He was indeed asleep. With his eyes shut and that day’s late-arriving sun shining on his face, the idea that he might have been Linda Gray’s date a mere four years ago was even more ludicrous. He looked at least a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty. I saw I needn’t have brought his gloves, either. Someone had bandaged his hands, probably after treating the psoriasis with something a little more powerful than whatever OTC cream he’d been using on them. Looking at those bulky white mittens made me feel a queer, reluctant pity.

I crossed the room as quietly as I could, and put the gloves in the closet with the clothes he’d been wearing when he was brought in. That left me with the other thing—a photograph that had been pinned to the wall of his cluttered, tobacco-smelling little shack next to a yellowing calendar that was two years out of date. The photo showed Eddie and a plain-faced woman standing in the weedy front yard of an anonymous tract house. Eddie looked about twenty-five. He had his arm around the woman. She was smiling at him. And—wonder of wonders—he was smiling back.

There was a rolling table beside his bed with a plastic pitcher and a glass on it. This I thought rather stupid; with his hands bandaged the way they were, he wasn’t going to be pouring anything for a while. Still, the pitcher could serve one useful purpose. I propped the photo against it so he’d see it when he woke up. With that done, I started for the door.

I was almost there when he spoke in a whispery voice that was a long way from his usual ill-tempered rasp. “Kiddo.”

I returned—not eagerly—to his bedside. There was a chair in the corner, but I had no intention of pulling it over and sitting down. “How you feeling, Eddie?”

“Can’t really say. Hard to breathe. They got me all taped up.”

“I brought you your gloves, but I see they already…” I nodded at his bandaged hands.

“Yeah.” He sucked in air. “If anything good comes out of this, maybe they’ll fix ’em up. Fuckin itch all the time, they do.” He looked at the picture. “Why’d you bring that? And what were you doin in my doghouse?”

“Lane told me to put your gloves in there. I did, but then I thought you might want them. And you might want the picture. Maybe she’s someone you’d want Fred Dean to call?”

“Corinne?” He snorted. “She’s been dead for twenty years. Pour me some water, kiddo. I’m as dry as ten-year dogshit.”

I poured, and held the glass for him, and even wiped the corner of his mouth with the sheet when he dribbled. It was all a lot more intimate than I wanted, but didn’t seem so bad when I remembered that I’d been soul-kissing the miserable bastard only hours before.

He didn’t thank me, but when had he ever? What he said was, “Hold that picture up.” I did as he asked. He looked at it fixedly for several seconds, then sighed. “Miserable scolding backbiting cunt. Walking out on her for Royal American Shows was the smartest thing I ever did.” A tear trembled at the corner of his left eye, hesitated, then rolled down his cheek.

“Want me to take it back and pin it up in your doghouse, Eddie?”

“No, might as well leave it. We had a kid, you know. A little girl.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. She got hit by a car. Three years old she was, and died like a dog in the street. That miserable cunt was yakking on the phone instead of watching her.” He turned his head aside and closed his eyes. “Go on, get outta here. Hurts to talk, and I’m tired. Got a elephant sitting on my chest.”

“Okay. Take care of yourself.”

He grimaced without opening his eyes. “That’s a laugh. How e’zacly am I s’posed to do that? You got any ideas? Because I haven’t. I got no relatives, no friends, no savings, no in-surance. What am I gonna do now?”

“It’ll work out,” I said lamely.

“Sure, in the movies it always does. Go on, get lost.”

This time I was all the way out the door before he spoke again.

“You shoulda let me die, kiddo.” He said it without melodrama, just as a passing observation. “I coulda been with my little girl.”

When I walked back into the hospital lobby I stopped dead, at first not sure I was seeing who I thought I was seeing. But it was her, all right, with one of her endless series of arduous novels open in front of her. This one was called The Dissertation.

“Annie?”

She looked up, at first wary, then smiling as she recognized me. “Dev! What are you doing here?”

“Visiting a guy from the park. He had a heart attack today.”

“Oh, my God, I’m so sorry. Is he going to be all right?”

She didn’t invite me to sit down next to her, but I did, anyway. My visit to Eddie had upset me in ways I didn’t understand, and my nerves were jangling. It wasn’t unhappiness and it wasn’t sorrow. It was a queer, unfocused anger that had something to do with the foul taste of jalapeno peppers that still seemed to linger in my mouth. And with Wendy, God knew why. It was wearying to know I wasn’t over her, even yet. A broken arm would have healed quicker. “I don’t know. I didn’t talk to a doctor. Is Mike all right?”

“Yes, it’s just a regularly scheduled appointment. A chest X-ray and a complete blood count. Because of the pneumonia, you know. Thank God he’s over it now. Except for that lingering cough, Mike’s fine.” She was still holding her book open, which probably meant she wanted me to go, and that made me angrier. You have to remember that was the year everyone wanted me to go, even the guy whose life I’d saved.

Which is probably why I said, “Mike doesn’t think he’s fine. So who am I supposed to believe here, Annie?”

Her eyes widened with surprise, then grew distant. “I’m sure I don’t care who or what you believe, Devin. It’s really not any of your business.”

“Yes it is.” That came from behind us. Mike had rolled up in his chair. It wasn’t the motorized kind, which meant he’d been turning the wheels with his hands. Strong boy, cough or no cough. He’d buttoned his shirt wrong, though.

Annie turned to him, surprised. “What are you doing here? You were supposed to let the nurse—”

“I told her I could do it on my own and she said okay. Its just a left and two rights from radiology, you know. I’m not blind, just dy—”

“Mr. Jones was visiting a friend of his, Mike.” So now I had been demoted back to Mr. Jones. She closed her book with a snap and stood up. “He’s probably anxious to get home, and I’m sure you must be ti—”

“I want him to take us to the park.” Mike spoke calmly enough, but his voice was loud enough to make people look around. “Us.”

“Mike, you know that’s not—”

“To Joyland. To Joy… Land.” Still calm, but louder still. Now everyone was looking. Annie’s cheeks were flaming. “I want you both to take me.” His voice rose louder still. “I want you to take me to Joyland before I die.”

Her hand covered her mouth. Her eyes were huge. Her words, when they came, were muffled but understandable. “Mike… you’re not going to die, who told you…” She turned on me. “Do I have you to thank for putting that idea in his head?”

“Of course not.” I was very conscious that our audience was growing—it now included a couple of nurses and a doctor in blue scrubs and booties—but I didn’t care. I was still angry. “He told me. Why would that surprise you, when you know all about his intuitions?”

That was my afternoon for provoking tears. First Eddie, now Annie. Mike was dry-eyed, though, and he looked every bit as furious as I felt. But he said nothing as she grabbed the handles of his wheelchair, spun it around, and drove it at the door. I thought she was going to crash into them, but the magic eye got them open just in time.

Let them go, I thought, but I was tired of letting women go. I was tired of just letting things happen to me and then feeling bad about them.

A nurse approached me. “Is everything all right?”

“No,” I said, and followed them out.

Annie had parked in the lot adjacent to the hospital, where a sign announced THESE TWO ROWS RESERVED FOR THE HANDICAPPED. She had a van, I saw, with plenty of room for the folded-up wheelchair in back. She had gotten the passenger door open, but Mike was refusing to get out of the chair. He was gripping the handles with all his strength, his hands dead white.

“Get in!” she shouted at him.

Mike shook his head, not looking at her.

“Get in, dammit!”

This time he didn’t even bother to shake his head.

She grabbed him and yanked. The wheelchair had its brake on and tipped forward. I grabbed it just in time to keep it from going over and spilling them both into the open door of the van.

Annie’s hair had fallen into her face, and the eyes peering through it were wild: the eyes, almost, of a skittish horse in a thunderstorm. “Let go! This is all your fault! I never should, have—”

“Stop,” I said. I took hold of her shoulders. The hollows there were deep, the bones close to the surface. I thought, She’s been too busy stuffing calories into him to worry about herself.

“LET ME G—”

“I don’t want to take him away from you,” I said. “Annie, that’s the last thing I want.”

She stopped struggling. Warily, I let go of her. The novel she’d been reading had fallen to the pavement in the struggle. I bent down, picked it up, and put it into the pocket on the back of the wheelchair.

“Mom.” Mike took her hand. “It doesn’t have to be the last good time.”

Then I understood. Even before her shoulders slumped and the sobs started, I understood. It wasn’t the fear that I’d stick him on some crazy-last ride and the burst of adrenaline would kill him. It wasn’t fear that a stranger would steal the damaged heart she loved so well. It was a kind of atavistic belief—a mother’s belief—that if they never started doing certain last things, life would go on as it had: morning smoothies at the end of the boardwalk, evenings with the kite at the end of the boardwalk, all of it in a kind of endless summer. Only it was October now and the beach was deserted. The happy screams of teenagers on the Thunderball and little kids shooting down the Splash & Crash water slide had ceased, there was a nip in the air as the days drew down. No summer is endless.

She put her hands over her face and sat down on the passenger seat of the van. It was too high for her, and she almost slid off. I caught her and steadied her. I don’t think she noticed.

“Go on, take him,” she said. “I don’t give a fuck. Take him parachute-jumping, if you want. Just don’t expect me to be a part of your… your boys’ adventure.”

Mike said, “I can’t go without you.”

That got her to drop her hands and look at him. “Michael, you’re all I’ve got. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” he said. He took one of her hands in both of his. “And you’re all I’ve got.”

I could see by her face that the idea had never crossed her mind, not really.

“Help me get in,” Mike said. “Both of you, please.”

When he was settled (I don’t remember fastening his seatbelt, so maybe this was before they were a big deal), I closed the door and walked around the nose of the van with her.

“His chair,” she said distractedly. “I have to get his chair.”

“I’ll put it in. You sit behind the wheel and get yourself ready to drive. Take a few deep breaths.”

She let me help her in. I had her above the elbow, and I could close my whole hand around her upper arm. I thought of telling her she couldn’t live on arduous novels alone, and thought better of it. She had been told enough this afternoon.

I folded the wheelchair and stowed it in the cargo compartment, taking longer with the job than I needed to, giving her time to compose herself. When I went back to the driver’s side, I half-expected to find the window rolled up, but it was still down. She had wiped her eyes and nose, and pushed her hair into some semblance of order.

I said, “He can’t go without you, and neither can I.”

She spoke to me as if Mike weren’t there and listening. “I’m so afraid for him, all the time. He sees so much, and so much of it hurts him. That’s what the nightmares are about, I know it. He’s such a great kid. Why can’t he just get well? Why this? Why this?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

She turned to kiss Mike’s cheek. Then she turned back to me. Drew in a deep, shaky breath and let it out. “So when do we go?” she asked.

The Return of the King was surely not as arduous as The Dissertation, but that night I couldn’t have read The Cat in the Hat. After eating some canned spaghetti for supper (and largely ignoring Mrs. Shoplaw’s pointed observations about how some young people seem determined to mistreat their bodies), I went up to my room and sat by the window, staring out at the dark and listening to the steady beat-and-retreat of the surf.

I was on the verge of dozing when Mrs. S. knocked lightly on my door and said, “You’ve got a call, Dev. It’s a little boy.”

I went down to the parlor in a hurry, because I could think of only one little boy who might call me.

“Mike?”

He spoke in a low voice. “My mom is sleeping. She said she was tired.”

“I bet she was,” I said, thinking of how we’d ganged up on her.

“I know we did,” Mike said, as if I had spoken the thought aloud. “We had to.”

“Mike… can you read minds? Are you reading mine?”

“I don’t really know,” he said. “Sometimes I see things and hear things, that’s all. And sometimes I get ideas. It was my idea to come to Grampa’s house. Mom said he’d never let us, but I knew he would. Whatever I have, the special thing, I think it came from him. He heals people, you know. I mean, sometimes he fakes it, but sometimes he really does.”

“Why did you call, Mike?”

He grew animated. “About Joyland! Can we really ride the merry-go-round and the Ferris wheel?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“Shoot in the shooting gallery?”

“Maybe. If your mother says so. All this stuff is contingent on your mother’s approval. That means—”

“I know what it means.” Sounding impatient. Then the child’s excitement broke through again. “That is so awesome!”

“None of the fast rides,” I said. “Are we straight on that? For one thing, they’re buttoned up for the winter.” The Carolina Spin was, too, but with Lane Hardy’s help, it wouldn’t take forty minutes to get it running again. “For another—”

“Yeah, I know, my heart. The Ferris wheel would be enough for me. We can see it from the end of the boardwalk, you know. From the top, it must be like seeing the world from my kite.”

I smiled. “It is like that, sort of. But remember, only if your mom says you can. She’s the boss.”

“We’re going for her. She’ll know when we get there.” He sounded eerily sure of himself. “And it’s for you, Dev. But mostly it’s for the girl. She’s been there too long. She wants to leave.”

My mouth dropped open, but there was no danger of drooling; my mouth had gone entirely dry. “How—” Just a croak. I swallowed again. “How do you know about her?”

“I don’t know, but I think she’s why I came. Did I tell you it’s not white?”

“You did, but you said you didn’t know what that meant. Do you now?”

“Nope.” He began to cough. I waited it out. When it cleared, he said, “I have to go. My mom’s getting up from her nap. Now she’ll be up half the night, reading.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I really hope she lets me go on the Ferris wheel.”

“It’s called the Carolina Spin, but people who work there just call it the hoister.” Some of them—Eddie, for instance—actually called it the chump-hoister, but I didn’t tell him that. “Joyland folks have this kind of secret talk. That’s part of it.”

“The hoister. I’ll remember. Bye, Dev.”

The phone clicked in my ear.

This time it was Fred Dean who had the heart attack.

He lay on the ramp leading to the Carolina Spin, his face blue and contorted. I knelt beside him and started chest compressions. When there was no result from that, I leaned forward, pinched his nostrils shut, and jammed my lips over his. Something tickled across my teeth and onto my tongue. I pulled back and saw a black tide of baby spiders pouring from his mouth.

I woke up half out of bed, the covers pulled loose and wound around me in a kind of shroud, heart pumping, clawing at my own mouth. It took several seconds for me to realize there was nothing in there. Nonetheless, I got up, went to the bathroom, and drank two glasses of water. I may have had worse dreams than the one that woke me at three o’clock on that Tuesday morning, but if so, I can’t remember them. I re-made my bed and laid back down, convinced there would be no more sleep for me that night. Yet I had almost dozed off again when it occurred to me that the big emotional scene the three of us had played out at the hospital yesterday might have been for nothing.

Sure, Joyland was happy to make special arrangements for the lame, the halt, and the blind—what are now called “special needs children”—during the season, but the season was over. Would the park’s undoubtedly expensive insurance policy still provide coverage if something happened to Mike Ross in October? I could see Fred Dean shaking his head when I made my request and saying he was very sorry, but—

It was chilly that morning, with a strong breeze, so I took my car, parking beside Lane’s pickup. I was early, and ours were the only vehicles in Lot A, which was big enough to hold five hundred cars. Fallen leaves tumbled across the pavement, making an insectile sound that reminded me of the spiders in my dream.

Lane was sitting in a lawn chair outside Madame Fortuna’s shy (which would soon be disassembled and stored for the winter), eating a bagel generously smeared with cream cheese. His derby was tilted at its usual insouciant angle, and there was a cigarette parked behind one ear. The only new thing was the denim jacket he was wearing. Another sign, had I needed one, that our Indian summer was over.

“Jonesy, Jonesy, lookin lonely. Want a bagel? I got extra.”

“Sure,” I said. “Can I talk to you about something while I eat it?”

“Come to confess your sins, have you? Take a seat, my son.” He pointed to the side of the fortune-telling booth, where another couple of folded lawn chairs were leaning.

“Nothing sinful,” I said, opening one of the chairs. I sat down and took the brown bag he was offering. “But I made a promise and now I’m afraid I might not be able to keep it.”

I told him about Mike, and how I had convinced his mother to let him come to the park—no easy task, given her fragile emotional state. I finished with how I’d woken up in the middle of the night, convinced Fred Dean would never allow it. The only thing I didn’t mention was the dream that had awakened me.

“So,” Lane said when I’d finished. “Is she a fox? The mommy?”

“Well… yeah. Actually she is. But that isn’t the reason—”

He patted my shoulder and gave me a patronizing smile I could have done without. “Say nummore, Jonesy, say nummore.”

“Lane, she’s ten years older than I am!”

“Okay, and if I had a dollar for every babe I ever took out who was ten years younger, I could buy me a steak dinner at Hanratty’s in the Bay. Age is just a number, my son.”

“Terrific. Thanks for the arithmetic lesson. Now tell me if I stepped in shit when I told the kid he could come to the park and ride the Spin and the merry-go-round.”

“You stepped in shit,” he said, and my heart sank. Then he raised a finger. “But.”

“But?”

“Have you set a date for this little field trip yet?”

“Not exactly. I was thinking maybe Thursday.” Before Erin and Tom showed up, in other words.

“Thursday’s no good. Friday, either. Will the kid and his foxy mommy still be here next week?”

“I guess so, but—”

“Then plan on Monday or Tuesday.”

“Why wait?”

“For the paper.” Looking at me as if I were the world’s biggest idiot.

“Paper… ?”

“The local rag. It comes out on Thursday. When your latest lifesaving feat hits the front page, you’re going to be Freddy Dean’s fair-haired boy.” Lane tossed the remains of his bagel into the nearest litter barrel—two points—and then raised his hands in the air, as if framing a newspaper headline. “ ‘Come to Joyland! We not only sell fun, we save lives!’ ” He smiled and tilted his derby the other way. “Priceless publicity. Fred’s gonna to owe you another one. Take it to the bank and say thanks.”

“How would the paper even find out? I can’t see Eddie Parks telling them.” Although if he did, he’d probably want them to make sure the part about how I’d practically crushed his ribcage made Paragraph One.

He rolled his eyes. “I keep forgetting what a Jonesy-come-lately you are to this part of the world. The only articles anybody actually reads in that catbox-liner are the Police Beat and the Ambulance Calls. But ambulance calls are pretty dry. As a special favor to you, Jonesy, I’ll toddle on down to the Banner office on my lunch break and tell the rubes all about your heroism. They’ll send someone out to interview you pronto.”

“I don’t really want—”

“Oh gosh, a Boy Scout with a merit badge in modesty. Save it. You want the kid to get a tour of the park, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then do the interview. Also smile pretty for the camera.”

Which—if I may jump ahead—is pretty much what I did.

As I was folding up my chair, he said: “Our Freddy Dean might have said fuck the insurance and risked it anyway, you know. He doesn’t look it, but he’s carny-from-carny himself. His father was a low-pitch jack-jaw on the corn circuit. Freddy told me once his pop carried a Michigan bankroll big enough to choke a horse.”

I knew low-pitch, jack-jaw, and corn circuit, but not Michigan bankroll. Lane laughed when I asked him. “Two twenties on the outside, the rest either singles or cut-up green paper. A great gag when you want to attract a tip. But when it comes to Freddy himself, that ain’t the point.” He re-set his derby yet again.

“What is?”

“Carnies have a weakness for good-looking points in tight skirts and kids down on their luck. They also have a strong allergy to rube rules. Which includes all the bean-counter bullshit.”

“So maybe I wouldn’t have to—”

He raised his hands to stop me. “Better not to have to find out. Do the interview.”

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.

“Was the show in town when the Sharp girl was killed in the movie theater?”

“Left the day before.” She tapped the bottom of the sheet. “All you have to do is look at the dates, Dev.”

I wasn’t as familiar with the timeline as she was, but I didn’t bother defending myself. “The third girl? Longbottom?”

“I didn’t find anything about a carny in the Santee area, and I sure wouldn’t have found anything about the Wellman show, because it went bust in the fall of 1964. I found that in Outdoor Trade and Industry. So far as I or any of my many librarian helpers could discover, it’s the only trade magazine that covers the carny and amusement park biz.”

“Jesus, Erin, you should forget photography and find yourself a rich writer or movie producer. Hire on as his research assistant.”

“I’d rather take pictures. Research is too much like work. But don’t lose the thread here, Devin. There was no carny in the Santee area, true, but the Eva Longbottom murder doesn’t look like the other four, anyway. Not to me. No rape in the others, remember?”

“That you know of. Newspapers are coy about that stuff.”

“That’s right, they say molested or sexually assaulted instead of raped, but they get the point across, believe me.”

“What about Darlene Shoemaker? Was there—”

“Stamnacher. These girls were murdered, Dev, the least you can do is get their names right.”

“I will. Give me time.”

She put a hand over mine. “Sorry. I’m throwing this at you all at once, aren’t I? I’ve had weeks to brood over it.”

“Have you been?”

“Sort of. It’s pretty awful.”

She was right. If you read a whodunit or see a mystery movie, you can whistle gaily past whole heaps of corpses, only interested in finding out if it was the butler or the evil stepmother. But these had been real young women. Crows had probably ripped their flesh; maggots would have infested their eyes and squirmed up their noses and into the gray meat of their brains.

“Was there a carny in the Maxton area when the Stamnacher girl was killed?”

“No, but there was a county fair about to start in Lumberton—that’s the nearest town of any size. Here.”

She handed me another Xerox, this one advertising the Robeson County Summer Fair. Once again, Erin tapped the sheet. This time she was calling my attention to a line reading 50 SAFE RIDES PROVIDED BY SOUTHERN STAR AMUSEMENTS. “I also looked Southern Star up in Outdoor Trade and Industry. The company’s been around since after World War II. They’re based in Birmingham and travel all over the south, putting up rides. Nothing so grand as the Thunderball or the Delirium Shaker, but they’ve got plenty of chump-shoots, and the jocks to run them.”

I had to grin at that. She hadn’t forgotten all the Talk, it seemed. Chump-shoots were rides that could be easily put up or taken down. If you’ve ever ridden the Krazy Kups or the Wild Mouse, you’ve been on on a chump-shoot.

“I called the ride-boss at Southern Star. Said I’d worked at Joyland this summer, and was doing a term paper on the amusement industry for my sociology class. Which I just might do, you know. After all this, it would be a slam-dunk. He told me what I’d already guessed, that there’s a big turnover in their line of work. He couldn’t tell me offhand if they’d picked anyone up from the Wellman show, but he said it was likely—a couple of roughies here, a couple of jocks there, maybe a ride-monkey or two. So the guy who killed DeeDee and Claudine could have been at that fair, and Darlene Stamnacher could have met him. The fair wasn’t officially open for business yet, but lots of townies gravitate to the local fairgrounds to watch the ride-monkeys and the local gazoonies do the setup.” She looked at me levelly. “And I think that’s just what happened.”

“Erin, is the carny link in the story the News and Courier published after Linda Gray was killed? Or maybe I should call it the amusement link.”

“Nope. Can I have another nip from your bottle? I’m cold.”

“We can go inside—”

“No, it’s this murder stuff that makes me cold. Every time I go over it.”

I gave her the bottle, and after she’d taken her nip, I took one of my own. “Maybe you’re Sherlock Holmes,” I said. “What about the cops? Do you think they missed it?”

“I don’t know for sure, but I think… they did. If this was a detective show on TV, there’d be one smart old cop—a Lieutenant Columbo type—who’d look at the big picture and put it together, but I guess there aren’t many guys like that in real life. Besides, the big picture is hard to see because it’s scattered across three states and eight years. One thing you can be sure of is that if he ever worked at Joyland, he’s long gone. I’m sure the turnover at an amusement park isn’t as fast as it is in a road company like Southern Star Amusements, but there are still plenty of people leaving and coming in.”

I knew that for myself. Ride-jocks and concession shouters aren’t exactly the most grounded people, and gazoonies went in and out like the tide.

“Now here’s the other thing that troubles me,” she said, and handed me her little pile of eight-by-ten photos. Printed on the white border at the bottom of each was PHOTO TAKEN BY YOUR JOYLAND “HOLLYWOOD GIRL.”

I shuffled through them, and felt in need of another nip when I realized what they were: the photos showing Linda Gray and the man who had killed her. “Jesus God, Erin, these aren’t newspaper pix. Where’d you get them?”

“Brenda Rafferty. I had to butter her up a little, tell her what a good mom she’d been to all us Hollywood Girls, but in the end she came through. These are fresh prints made from negatives she had in her personal files and loaned to me. Here’s something interesting, Dev. You see the headband the Gray girl’s wearing?”

“Yes.” An Alice band, Mrs. Shoplaw had called it. A blue Alice band.

“Brenda said they fuzzed that out in the shots they gave to the newspapers. They thought it would help them nail the guy, but it never did.”

“So what troubles you?”

God knew all of the pictures troubled me, even the ones where Gray and the man she was with were just passing in the background, only recognizable by her sleeveless blouse and Alice band and his baseball cap and dark glasses. In only two of them were Linda Gray and her killer sharp and clear. The first showed them at the Whirly Cups, his hand resting casually on the swell of Grays bottom. In the other—the best of the lot—they were at the Annie Oakley Shootin’ Gallery. Yet in neither was the man’s face really visible. I could have passed him on the street and not known him.

Erin plucked up the Whirly Cups photo. “Look at his hand.”

“Yeah, the tattoo. I see it, and I heard about it from Mrs. S. What do you make it to be? A hawk or an eagle?”

“I think an eagle, but it doesn’t matter.”

“Really?”

“Really. Remember I said I’d come back to Claudine Sharp? A young woman getting her throat cut in the local movie theater—during Lawrence of Arabia, no less—was big news in a little town like Rocky Mount. The Telegram ran with it for almost a month. The cops turned up exactly one lead, Dev. A girl Claudine went to high school with saw her at the snackbar and said hello. Claudine said hi right back. The girl said there was a man in sunglasses and a baseball cap next to her, but she never thought the guy was with Claudine, because he was a lot older. The only reason she noticed him at all was because he was wearing sunglasses in a movieshow… and because he had a tattoo on his hand.”

“The bird.”

“No, Dev. It was a Coptic cross. Like this.” She took out another Xerox sheet and showed me. “She told the cops she thought at first it was some kind of Nazi symbol.”

I looked at the cross. It was elegant, but looked nothing at all like a bird. “Two tats, one on each hand,” I said at last. “The bird on one, the cross on the other.”

She shook her head and gave me the Whirly Cups photo again. “Which hand’s got the bird on it?”

He was standing on Linda Gray’s left, encircling her waist. The hand resting on her bottom…

“The right.”

“Yes. But the girl who saw him in the movie theater said the cross was on his right.”

I considered this. “She made a mistake, that’s all. Witnesses do it all the time.”

“Sure they do. My father could talk all day on that subject. But look, Dev.”

Erin handed me the Shootin’ Gallery photo, the best of the bunch because they weren’t just passing in the background. A roving Hollywood Girl had seen them, noted the cute pose, and snapped them, hoping for a sale. Only the guy had given her the brushoff. A hard brushoff, according to Mrs. Shoplaw. That made me remember how she had described the photo: Him snuggled up to her hip to hip, showing her how to hold the rifle, the way guys always do. The version Mrs. S. saw would have been a fuzzy newspaper reproduction, made up of little dots. This was the original, so sharp and clear I almost felt I could step into it and warn the Gray girl. He was snuggled up to her, his hand over hers on the barrel of the beebee-shooting .22, helping her aim.

It was his left hand. And there was no tattoo on it.

Erin said, “You see it, don’t you?”

“There’s nothing to see.”

“That’s the point, Dev. That’s exactly the point.”

“Are you saying that it was two different guys? That one with a cross on his hand killed Claudine Sharp and another one—a guy with a bird on his hand—killed Linda Gray? That doesn’t seem very likely.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I thought I saw something in one of the photos, but I wasn’t sure, so I took the print and the negative to a grad student named Phil Hendron. He’s a darkroom genius, practically lives in the Bard Photography Department. You know those clunky Speed Graphics we carried?”

“Sure.”

“They were mostly for effect—cute girls toting old-fashioned cameras—but Phil says they’re actually pretty terrific. You can do a lot with the negs. For example…”

She handed me a blow-up of the Whirly Cups pic. The Hollywood Girl’s target had been a young couple with a toddler between them, but in this enlarged version they were hardly there. Now Linda Gray and her murderous date were at the center of the image.

“Look at his hand, Dev. Look at the tattoo!”

I did, frowning. “It’s a little hard to see,” I complained. “The hand’s blurrier than the rest.”

“I don’t think so.”

This time I held the photo close to my eyes. “It’s… Jesus, Erin. Is it the ink? Is it running? Just a little?”

She gave me a triumphant smile. “July of 1969. A hot night in Dixie. Almost everybody was sweating buckets. If you don’t believe me, look at some of the other pictures and note the perspiration rings. Plus, he had something else to be sweaty about, didn’t he? He had murder on his mind. An audacious one, at that.”

I said, “Oh, shit. Pirate Pete’s.”

She pointed a forefinger at me. “Bingo.”

Pirate Pete’s was the souvenir shop outside the Splash & Crash, proudly flying a Jolly Roger from its roof. Inside you could get the usual stuff—tee-shirts, coffee mugs, beach towels, even a pair of swim-trunks if your kid forgot his, everything imprinted with the Joyland logo. There was also a counter where you could get a wide assortment of fake tattoos. They came on decals. If you didn’t feel capable of applying it yourself, Pirate Pete (or one of his greenie minions) would do it for a small surcharge.

Erin was nodding. “I doubt he got it there—that would have been dumb, and this guy isn’t dumb—but I’m sure it’s not a real tattoo, any more than the Coptic cross the girl saw in that Rocky Mount movie theater was a real tattoo.” She leaned forward and gripped my arm. “You know what I think? I think he does it because it draws attention. People notice the tattoo and everything else just…” She tapped the indistinct shapes that had been the actual subject of this photo before her friend at Bard blew it up.

I said, “Everything else about him fades into the background.”

“Yup. Later he just washes it off.”

“Do the cops know?”

“I have no idea. You could tell them—not me, I’m going back to school—but I’m not sure they’d care at this late date.”

I shuffled through the photos again. I had no doubt that Erin had actually discovered something, although I did doubt it would, by itself, be responsible for the capture of the Funhouse Killer. But there was something else about the photos. Something. You know how sometimes a word gets stuck on the tip of your tongue and just won’t come off? It was like that.

“Have there been any murders like these five—or these four, if we leave out Eva Longbottom—since Linda Gray? Did you check?”

“I tried,” she said. “The short answer is I don’t think so, but I can’t say for sure. I’ve read about fifty murders of young girls and women—fifty at least—and haven’t found any that fit the parameters.” She ticked them off. “Always in summer. Always as a result of a dating situation with an unknown older man. Always the cut throat. And always with some sort of carny connec—”

“Hello, kids.”

We looked up, startled. It was Fred Dean. Today he was wearing a golfing shirt, bright red baggies, and a long-billed cap with HEAVEN’S BAY COUNTRY CLUB stitched in gold thread above the brim. I was a lot more used to seeing him in a suit, where informality consisted of pulling down his tie and popping the top button of his Van Heusen shirt. Dressed for the links, he looked absurdly young. Except for the graying wings of hair at his temples, that was.

“Hello, Mr. Dean,” Erin said, standing up. Most of her paperwork—and some of the photographs—were still clutched in one hand. The folder was in the other. “I don’t know if you remember me—”

“Of course I do,” he said, approaching. “I never forget a Hollywood Girl, but sometimes I do mix up the names. Are you Ashley or Jerri?”

She smiled, put her paperwork back in the folder, and handed it to me. I added the photos I was still holding. “I’m Erin.”

“Of course. Erin Cook.” He dropped me a wink, which was even weirder than seeing him in old-fashioned golfing baggies. “You have excellent taste in young ladies, Jonesy.”

“I do, don’t I?” It seemed too complicated to tell him that Erin was actually Tom Kennedy’s girlfriend. Fred probably wouldn’t remember Tom anyway, never having seen him in a flirty green dress and high heels.

“I just stopped by to get the accounts books. Quarterly IRS payments coming up. Such a pain in the hindquarters. Enjoying your little alumna visit, Erin?”

“Yes, sir, very much.”

“Coming back next year?”

She looked a trifle uncomfortable at that, but stuck gamely to the truth. “Probably not.”

“Fair enough, but if you change your mind, I’m sure Brenda Rafferty can find a place for you.” He switched his attention to me. “This boy you plan to bring to the park, Jonesy. Have you set a date with his mother?”

“Tuesday. Wednesday or Thursday if it’s rainy. The kid can’t be out in the rain.”

Erin was looking at me curiously.

“I advise you stick to Tuesday,” he said. “There’s a storm coming up the coast. Not a hurricane, thank God, but a tropical disturbance. Lots of rain and gale-force winds is what they’re saying. It’s supposed to arrive mid-morning on Wednesday.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for the tip.”

“Nice to see you again, Erin.” He tipped his cap to her and started off toward the back lot.

Erin waited until he was out of sight before bursting into giggles. “Those pants. Did you see those pants?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Pretty wild.” But I was damned if I was going to laugh at them. Or him. According to Lane, Fred Dean held Joyland together with spit, baling wire, and account-book wizardry. That being the case, I thought he could wear all the golf baggies he wanted. And at least they weren’t checks.

“What’s this about bringing some kid to the park?”

“Long story,” I said. “I’ll tell you while we walk back.”

So I did, giving her the Boy-Scout-majoring-in-modesty version and leaving out the big argument at the hospital. Erin listened without interruption, asking only one question, just as we reached the steps leading up from the beach. “Tell me the truth, Dev—is mommy foxy?”

People kept asking me that.

That night Tom and Erin went out to Surfer Joe’s, a beer-and-boogie bar where they had spent more than a few off-nights during the summer. Tom invited me along, but I heeded that old saying about two being company and three being you-know-what. Besides, I doubted if they’d find the same raucous, party-hearty atmosphere. In towns like Heaven’s Bay, there’s a big difference between July and October. In my role as big brother, I even said so.

“You don’t understand, Dev,” Tom said. “Me ’n Erin don’t go looking for the fun; we bring the fun. It’s what we learned last summer.”

Nevertheless, I heard them coming up the stairs early, and almost sober, from the sound of them. Yet there were whispers and muffled laughter, sounds that made me feel a little lonely. Not for Wendy; just for someone. Looking back on it, I suppose even that was a step forward.

I read through Erin’s notes while they were gone, but found nothing new. I set them aside after fifteen minutes and went back to the photographs, crisp black-and-white images TAKEN BY YOUR JOYLAND “HOLLYWOOD GIRL.” At first I just shuffled through them; then I sat on the floor and laid them out in a square, moving them from place to place like a guy trying to put a puzzle together. Which was, I suppose, exactly what I was doing.

Erin was troubled by the carny connection and the tattoos that probably weren’t real tattoos at all. Those things troubled me as well, but there was something else. Something I couldn’t quite get. It was maddening because I felt like it was staring me right in the face. Finally I put all but two of the photos back in the folder. The key two. These I held up, looking first at one, then at the other.

Linda Gray and her killer waiting in line at the Whirly Cups.

Linda Gray and her killer at the Shootin’ Gallery.

Never mind the goddam tattoo, I told myself. It’s not that. It’s something else.

But what else could it be? The sunglasses masked his eyes. The goatee masked his lower face, and the slightly tilted bill of the baseball cap shaded his forehead and eyebrows. The cap’s logo showed a catfish peering out of a big red C, the insignia of a South Carolina minor league team called the Mudcats. Dozens of Mudcat lids went through the park every day at the height of the season, so many that we called them fishtops instead of dog-tops. The bastard could hardly have picked a more anonymous lid, and surely that was the idea.

Back and forth I went, from the Whirly Cups to the Shootin’ Gallery and then back to the Whirly Cups again. At last I tossed the photos in the folder and threw the folder on my little desk. I read until Tom and Erin came in, then went to bed.

Maybe it’ll come to me in the morning, I thought. I’ll wake up and say, “Oh shit, of course.”

The sound of the incoming waves slipped me into sleep. I dreamed I was on the beach with Annie and Mike. Annie and I were standing with our feet in the surf, our arms around each other, watching Mike fly his kite. He was paying out twine and running after it. He could do that because there was nothing wrong with him. He was fine. I had only dreamed that stuff about Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy.

I woke early because I’d forgotten to pull down the shade.

I went to the folder, pulled out those two photographs, and stared at them in the day’s first sunlight, positive I’d see the answer.

But I didn’t.

A harmony of scheduling had allowed Tom and Erin to travel from New Jersey to North Carolina together, but when it comes to train schedules, harmony is the exception rather than the rule. The only ride they got together on Sunday was the one from Heaven’s Bay to Wilmington, in my Ford. Erin’s train left for upstate New York and Annandale-on-Hudson two hours before Tom’s Coastal Express was due to whisk him back to New Jersey.

I tucked a check in her jacket pocket. “Interlibrary loans and long distance.”

She fished it out, looked at the amount, and tried to hand it back. “Eighty dollars is too much, Dev.”

“Considering all you found out, it’s not enough. Take it, Lieutenant Columbo.”

She laughed, put it back in her pocket, and kissed me goodbye—another brother-sister quickie, nothing like the one we’d shared that night at the end of the summer. She spent considerably longer in Tom’s arms. Promises were made about Thanksgiving at Tom’s parents’ home in western Pennsylvania. I could tell he didn’t want to let her go, but when the loudspeakers announced last call for Richmond, Baltimore, Wilkes-Barre, and points north, he finally did.

When she was gone, Tom and I strolled across the street and had an early dinner in a not-too-bad ribs joint. I was contemplating the dessert selection when he cleared his throat and said, “Listen, Dev.”

Something in his voice made me look up in a hurry. His cheeks were even more flushed than usual. I put the menu down.

“This stuff you’ve had Erin doing… I think it should stop. It’s bothering her, and I think she’s been neglecting her course-work.” He laughed, glanced out the window at the train-station bustle, looked back at me. “I sound more like her dad than her boyfriend, don’t I?”

“You sound concerned, that’s all. Like you care for her.”

“Care for her? Buddy, I’m head-over-heels in love. She’s the most important thing in my life. What I’m saying here isn’t jealousy talking, though. I don’t want you to get that idea. Here’s the thing: if she’s going to transfer and still hold onto her financial aid, she can’t let her grades slip. You see that, don’t you?”

Yes, I could see that. I could see something else, too, even if Tom couldn’t. He wanted her away from Joyland in mind as well as body, because something had happened to him there that he couldn’t understand. Nor did he want to, which in my opinion made him sort of a fool. That dour flush of envy ran through me again, causing my stomach to clench around the food it was trying to digest.

Then I smiled—it was an effort, I won’t kid you about that—and said, “Message received. As far as I’m concerned, our little research project is over.” So relax, Thomas. You can stop thinking about what happened in Horror House. About what you saw there.

“Good. We’re still friends, right?”

I reached across the table. “Friends to the end,” I said.

We shook on it.

The Wiggle-Waggle Village’s Story Stage had three backdrops: Prince Charming’s Castle, Jack’s Magic Beanstalk, and a starry night sky featuring the Carolina Spin outlined in red neon. All three had sun-faded over the course of the summer. I was in the Wiggle-Waggle’s small backstage area on Monday morning, touching them up (and hoping not to fuck them up—I was no Van Gogh) when one of the part-time gazoonies arrived with a message from Fred Dean. I was wanted in his office.

I went with some unease, wondering if I was going to get a reaming for bringing Erin into the park on Saturday. I was surprised to find Fred dressed not in one of his suits or his amusing golf outfit, but in faded jeans and an equally faded Joyland tee-shirt, the short sleeves rolled to show some real muscle. There was a paisley sweatband cinched around his brow. He didn’t look like an accountant or the park’s chief employment officer; he looked like a ride-jock.

He registered my surprise and smiled. “Like the outfit? I must admit I do. It’s the way I dressed when I caught on with the Blitz Brothers show in the Midwest, back in the fifties. My mother was okay with the Blitzies, but my dad was horrified. And he was carny.”

“I know,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows. “Really? Word gets around, doesn’t it? Anyway, there’s a lot to do this afternoon.”

“Just give me a list. I’m almost done painting the backdrops in the—”

“Not at all, Jonesy. You’re signing out at noon today, and I don’t want to see you until tomorrow morning at nine, when you turn up with your guests. Don’t worry about your paycheck, either. I’ll see you’re not docked for the hours you miss.”

“What’s this about, Fred?”

He gave me a smile I couldn’t interpret. “It’s a surprise.”

That Monday was warm and sunny, and Annie and Mike were having lunch at the end of the boardwalk when I walked back to Heaven’s Bay. Milo saw me coming and raced to meet me.

“Dev!” Mike called. “Come and have a sandwich! We’ve got plenty!”

“No, I really shouldn’t—”

“We insist,” Annie said. Then her brow furrowed. “Unless you’re sick, or something. I don’t want Mike to catch a bug.”

“I’m fine, just got sent home early. Mr. Dean—he’s my boss—wouldn’t tell me why. He said it was a surprise. It’s got something to do with tomorrow, I guess.” I looked at her with some anxiety. “We’re still on for tomorrow, right?”

“Yes,” she said. “When I surrender, I surrender. Just… we’re not going to tire him out. Are we, Dev?”

“Mom,” Mike said.

She paid him no mind. “Are we?”

“No, ma’am.” Although seeing Fred Dean dressed up like a carny road dog, with all those unsuspected muscles showing, had made me uneasy. Had I made it clear to him how fragile Mike’s health was? I thought so, but—

“Then come on up here and have a sandwich,” she said. “I hope you like egg salad.”

I didn’t sleep well on Monday night, half-convinced that the tropical storm Fred had mentioned would arrive early and wash out Mike’s trip to the park, but Tuesday dawned cloudless. I crept down to the parlor and turned on the TV in time to get the six forty-five weathercast on WECT. The storm was still coming, but the only people who were going to feel it today were the ones living in coastal Florida and Georgia. I hoped Mr. Easterbrook had packed his galoshes.

“You’re up early,” Mrs. Shoplaw said, poking her head in from the kitchen. “I was just making scrambled eggs and bacon. Come have some.”

“I’m not that hungry, Mrs. S.”

“Nonsense. You’re still a growing boy, Devin, and you need to eat. Erin told me what you’ve got going on today, and I think you’re doing a wonderful thing. It will be fine.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said, but I kept thinking of Fred Dean in his work-clothes. Fred, who’d sent me home early. Fred, who had a surprise planned.

We had made our arrangements at lunch the day before, and when I turned my old car into the driveway of the big green Victorian at eight-thirty on Tuesday morning, Annie and Mike were ready to go. So was Milo.

“Are you sure nobody will mind us bringing him?” Mike had asked on Monday. “I don’t want to get into trouble.”

“Service dogs are allowed in Joyland,” I said, “and Milo’s going to be a service dog. Aren’t you, Milo?”

Milo had cocked his head, apparently unfamiliar with the service dog concept.

Today Mike was wearing his huge, clanky braces. I moved to help him into the van, but he waved me off and did it himself. It took a lot of effort and I expected a coughing fit, but none came. He was practically bouncing with excitement. Annie, looking impossibly long-legged in Lee Riders, handed me the van keys. “You drive.” And lowering her voice so Mike wouldn’t hear: “I’m too goddam nervous to do it.”

I was nervous, too. I’d bulldozed her into this, after all. I’d had help from Mike, true, but I was the adult. If it went wrong, it would be on me. I wasn’t much for prayer, but as I loaded Mike’s crutches and wheelchair into the back of the van, I sent one up that nothing would go wrong. Then I backed out of the driveway, turned onto Beach Drive, and drove past the billboard reading BRING YOUR KIDS TO JOYLAND FOR THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES!

Annie was in the passenger seat, and I thought she had never looked more beautiful than she did that October morning, in her faded jeans and a light sweater, her hair tied back with a hank of blue yarn.

“Thank you for this, Dev,” she said. “I just hope we’re doing the right thing.”

“We are,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt. Because, now that it was a done deal, I had my doubts.

The Joyland sign was lit up—that was the first tiling I noticed. The second was that the summertime get-happy music was playing through the loudspeakers: a sonic parade of late sixties and early seventies hits. I had intended to park in one of the Lot A handicapped spaces—they were only fifty feet or so from the park entrance—but before I could do so, Fred Dean stepped through the open gate and beckoned us forward. Today he wasn’t wearing just any suit but the three-piecer he saved for the occasional celebrity who rated a VIP tour. The suit I had seen, but never the black silk top hat, which looked like the kind you saw diplomats wearing in old newsreel footage.

“Is this usual?” Annie asked.

“Sure,” I said, a trifle giddily. None of it was usual.

I drove through the gate and onto Joyland Avenue, pulling up next to the park bench outside the Wiggle-Waggle Village where I had once sat with Mr. Easterbrook after my first turn as Howie.

Mike wanted to get out of the van the way he’d gotten in: by himself. I stood by, ready to catch him if he lost his balance, while Annie hoisted the wheelchair out of the back. Milo sat at my feet, tail thumping, ears cocked, eyes bright.

As Annie rolled the wheelchair up, Fred approached in a cloud of aftershave. He was… resplendent. There’s really no other word for it. He took off his hat, bowed to Annie, then held out a hand. “You must be Mike’s mother.” You have to remember that Ms. wasn’t common usage back then, and, nervous as I was, I took a moment to appreciate how deftly he had avoided the Miss/Mrs. dichotomy.

“I am,” she said. I don’t know if she was flustered by his courtliness or by the difference in the way they were dressed—she amusement-park casual, he state-visit formal—but flustered she was. She shook his hand, though. “And this young man—”

“—is Michael.” He offered his hand to the wide-eyed boy standing there in his steel supports. “Thank you for coming today.”

“You’re welcome… I mean, thank you. Thank you for having us.” He shook Fred’s hand. “This place is huge.”

It wasn’t, of course; Disney World is huge. But to a ten-year-old who had never been to an amusement park, it had to look that way. For a moment I could see it through his eyes, see it new, and my doubts about bringing him began to melt away.

Fred bent down to examine the third member of the Ross family, hands on his knees. “And you’re Milo!”

Milo barked.

“Yes,” Fred said, “and I am equally pleased to meet you.” He held out his hand, waiting for Milo to raise his paw. When he did, Fred shook it.

“How do you know our dog’s name?” Annie asked. “Did Dev tell you?”

He straightened, smiling. “He did not. I know because this is a magic place, my dear. For instance.” He showed her his empty hands, then put them behind his back. “Which hand?”

“Left,” Annie said, playing along.

Fred brought out his left hand, empty.

She rolled her eyes, smiling. “Okay, right.”

This time he brought out a dozen roses. Real ones. Annie and Mike gasped. Me too. All these years later, I have no idea how he did it.

“Joyland is for children, my dear, and since today Mike is the only child here, the park belongs to him. These, however, are for you.”

She took them like a woman in a dream, burying her face in the blooms, smelling their sweet red dust.

“I’ll put them in the van for you,” I said.

She held them a moment longer, then passed them to me.

“Mike,” Fred said, “do you know what we sell here?”

He looked uncertain. “Rides? Rides and games?”

“We sell fun. So what do you say we have some?”

I remember Mike’s day at the park—Annie’s day, too—as if it happened last week, but it would take a correspondent much more talented than I am to tell you how it felt, or to explain how it could have ended the last hold Wendy Keegan still held over my heart and my emotions. All I can say is what you already know: some days are treasure. Not many, but I think in almost every life there are a few. That was one of mine, and when I’m blue—when life comes down on me and everything looks tawdry and cheap, the way Joyland Avenue did on a rainy day—I go back to it, if only to remind myself that life isn’t always a butcher’s game. Sometimes the prizes are real. Sometimes they’re precious.

Of course not all the rides were running, and that was okay, because there were a lot of them Mike couldn’t handle. But more than half of the park was operational that morning—the lights, the music, even some of the shys, where half a dozen gazoonies were on duty selling popcorn, fries, sodas, cotton candy, and Pup-A-Licious dogs. I have no idea how Fred and Lane pulled it off in a single afternoon, but they did.

We started in the Village, where Lane was waiting beside the engine of the Choo-Choo Wiggle. He was wearing a pillowtick engineer’s cap instead of his derby, but it was cocked at the same insouciant angle. Of course it was. “All aboard! This is the ride that makes kids happy, so get on board and make it snappy. Dogs ride free, moms ride free, kids ride up in the engine with me.”

He pointed at Mike, then to the passenger seat in the engine. Mike got out of his chair, set his crutches, then tottered on them. Annie started for him.

“No, Mom. I’m okay. I can do it.”

He got his balance and clanked to where Lane was standing—a real boy with robot legs—and allowed Lane to boost him into the passenger seat. “Is that the cord that blows the whistle? Can I pull it?”

“That’s what it’s there for,” Lane said, “but watch out for pigs on the tracks. There’s a wolf in the area, and they’re scared to death of him.”

Annie and I sat in one of the cars. Her eyes were bright. Roses all her own burned in her cheeks. Her lips, though tightly pressed together, were trembling.

“You okay?” I asked her.

“Yes.” She took my hand, laced her fingers through mine, and squeezed almost tight enough to hurt. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

“Controls green across the board!” Lane cried. “Check me on that, Michael!”

“Check!”

“Watch out for what on the tracks?”

“Pigs!”

“Kid, you got style that makes me smile. Give that yell-rope a yank and we’re off!”

Mike yanked the cord. The whistle howled. Milo barked. The airbrakes chuffed, and the train began to move.

Choo-Choo Wiggle was strictly a zamp ride, okay? All the rides in the Village were zamps, meant mostly for boys and girls between the ages of three and seven. But you have to remember how seldom Mike Ross had gotten out, especially since his pneumonia the year before, and how many days he had sat with his mother at the end of that boardwalk, listening to the rumble of the rides and the happy screams coming from down the beach, knowing that stuff wasn’t for him. What was for him was more gasping for air as his lungs failed, more coughing, a gradual inability to walk even with the aid of crutches and braces, and finally the bed where he would die, wearing diapers under his PJs and an oxygen mask over his face.

Wiggle-Waggle Village was sort of depopulated with no greenies to play the fairy-tale parts, but Fred and Lane had reactivated all the mechanicals: the magic beanstalk that shot out of the ground in a burst of steam; the witch cackling in front of the Candy House; the Mad Hatter’s tea party; the nightcap-wearing wolf who lurked beneath one of the underpasses and sprang at the train as it passed. As we rounded the final turn, we passed three houses all kids know well—one of straw, one of sticks, and one of bricks.

“Watch out for pigs!” Lane cried, and just then they came waddling onto the tracks, uttering amplified oinks. Mike shrieked with laughter and yanked the whistle. As always, the pigs escaped… barely.

When we pulled back into the station, Annie let go of my hand and hurried up to the engine. “Are you okay, hon? Want your inhaler?”

“No, I’m fine.” Mike turned to Lane. “Thanks, Mr. Engineer!”

“My pleasure, Mike.” He held out a hand, palm up. “Slap me five if you’re still alive.”

Mike did, and with gusto. I doubt if he’d ever felt more alive.

“Now I’ve got to move on,” Lane said. “Today I am a man of many hats.” He dropped me a wink.

Annie vetoed the Whirly Cups but allowed Mike—not without apprehension—to ride the Chair-O-Planes. She gripped my arm even harder than she had my hand when his chair rose thirty feet above the ground and began to tilt, then loosened up again when she heard him laughing.

“God,” she said, “look at his hair! How it flies out behind him!” She was smiling. She was also crying, but didn’t seem aware of it. Nor of my arm, which had found its way around her waist.

Fred was running the controls, and knew enough to keep the ride at half-speed, rather than bringing it all the way up to full, which would have had Mike parallel to the ground, held in only by centrifugal force. When he finally came back to earth, the kid was too dizzy to walk. Annie and I each took an arm and guided him to the wheelchair. Fred toted Mike’s crutches.

“Oh, man.” It seemed to be all he could say. “Oh man, oh man.”

The Dizzy Speedboats—a land ride in spite of the name—was next. Mike rode over the painted water in one with Milo, both of them clearly loving it. Annie and I took another one. Although I had been working at Joyland for over four months by then, I’d never been on this ride, and I yelled the first time I saw us rushing prow-first at Mike and Milo’s boat, only to shear off at the last second.

“Wimp!” Annie shouted in my ear.

When we got off, Mike was breathing hard but still not coughing. We rolled him up Hound Dog Way and grabbed sodas. The gazoonie refused to take the livespot Annie held out. “Everything’s on the house today, ma’am.”

“Can I have a Pup, Mom? And some cotton candy?”

She frowned, then sighed and shrugged. “Okay. Just as long as you understand that stuff is still off-limits, buster. Today’s an exception. And no more fast rides.”

He wheeled ahead to the Pup-A-Licious shy, his own pup trotting beside him. She turned to me. “It’s not about nutrition, if that’s what you’re thinking. If he gets sick to his stomach, he might vomit. And vomiting is dangerous for kids in Mike’s condition. They—”

I kissed her, just a gentle brush of my lips across hers. It was like swallowing a tiny drop of something incredibly sweet. “Hush,” I said. “Does he look sick?”

Her eyes got very large. For a moment I felt positive that she was going to slap me and walk away. The day would be ruined and it would be my own stupid goddam fault. Then she smiled, looking at me in a speculative way that made my stomach feel light. “I bet you could do better than that, if you had half a chance.”

Before I could think of a reply, she was hurrying after her son. It really would have made no difference if she’d hung around, because I was totally flummoxed.

Annie, Mike, and Milo crowded into one car of the Gondola Glide, which crossed above the whole park on a diagonal. Fred Dean and I rode beneath them in one of the electric carts, with Mike’s wheelchair tucked in back.

“Seems like a terrific kid,” Fred commented.

“He is, but I never expected you to go all-out like this.”

“That’s for you as much as for him. You’ve done the park more good than you seem to know, Dev. When I told Mr. Easterbrook I wanted to go big, he gave me the green light.”

“You called him?”

“I did indeed.”

“That thing with the roses… how’d you pull it off?”

Fred shot his cuffs and looked modest. “A magician never tells his secrets. Don’t you know that?”

“Did you have a card-and-bunny-gig when you were with Blitz Brothers?”

“No, sir, I did not. All I did with the Blitzies was ride-jock and drag the midway. And, although I did not have a valid driver’s license, I also drove a truck on a few occasions when we had to DS from some rube-ranch or other in the dead of night.”

“So where did you learn the magic?”

Fred reached behind my ear, pulled out a silver dollar, dropped it into my lap. “Here and there, all around the square. Better goose it a little, Jonesy. They’re getting ahead of us.”

From Skytop Station, where the gondola ride ended, we went to the merry-go-round. Lane Hardy was waiting. He had lost the engineer’s cap and was once more sporting his derby. The park’s loudspeakers were still pumping out rock and roll, but under the wide, flaring canopy of what’s known in the Talk as the spinning jenny, the rock was drowned out by the calliope playing “A Bicycle Built for Two.” It was recorded, but still sweet and old-fashioned.

Before Mike could mount the dish, Fred dropped to one knee and regarded him gravely. “You can’t ride the jenny without a Joyland hat,” he said. “We call ’em dogtops. Got one?”

“No,” Mike said. He still wasn’t coughing, but dark patches had begun to creep out beneath his eyes. Where his cheeks weren’t flushed with excitement, he looked pale. “I didn’t know I was supposed to…”

Fred took off his own hat, peered inside, showed it to us. It was empty, as all magicians’ top hats must be when they are displayed to the audience. He looked into it again, and brightened. “Ah!” He brought out a brand new Joyland dogtop and put it on Mike’s head. “Perfect! Now which beast do you want to ride? A horse? The unicorn? Marva the Mermaid? Leo the Lion?’

“Yes, the lion, please!” Mike cried. “Mom, you ride the tiger right next to me!”

“You bet,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to ride a tiger.”

“Hey, champ,” Lane said, “lemme help you up the ramp.”

While he did that, Annie lowered her voice and spoke to Fred. “Not a lot more, okay? It’s all great, a day he’ll never forget, but—”

“He’s fading,” Fred said. “I understand.”

Annie mounted the snarling, green-eyed tiger next to Mike’s lion. Milo sat between them, grinning a doggy grin. As the merry-go-round started to move, “A Bicycle Built for Two” gave way to “Twelfth Street Rag.” Fred put his hand on my shoulder. “You’ll want to meet us at the Spin—we’ll make that his last ride—but you need to visit the costume shop first. And put some hustle into it.”

I started to ask why, then realized I didn’t need to. I headed for the back lot. And yes, I put some hustle into it.

That Tuesday morning in October of 1973 was the last time I wore the fur. I put it on in the costume shop and used Joyland Under to get back to the middle of the park, pushing one of the electric carts as fast as it would go, my Howie-head bouncing up and down on one shoulder. I surfaced behind Madame Fortuna’s shy, just in time. Lane, Annie, and Mike were coming up the midway. Lane was pushing Mike’s chair. None of them saw me peering around the corner of the shy; they were looking at the Carolina Spin, their necks craned. Fred saw me, though. I raised a paw. He nodded, then turned and raised his own paw to whoever was currently watching from the little sound booth above Customer Services. Seconds later, Howie-music rolled from all the speakers. First up was Elvis, singing “Hound Dog.”

I leaped from cover, going into my Howie-danee, which was kind of a fucked-up soft-shoe. Mike gaped. Annie clapped her hands to her temples, as if she’d suddenly been afflicted with a monster headache, then started laughing. I believe what followed was one of my better performances. I hopped and skipped around Mike’s chair, hardly aware that Milo was doing the same thing, only in the other direction. “Hound Dog” gave way to the Rolling Stones version of “Walking the Dog.” That’s a pretty short song, which was good—I hadn’t realized how out of shape I was.

I finished by throwing my arms wide and yelling: “Mike! Mike! Mike!” That was the only time Howie ever talked, and all I can say in my defense is that it really sounded more like a bark.

Mike rose from his chair, opened his arms, and fell forward. He knew I’d catch him, and I did. Kids half his age had given me the Howie-Hug all summer long, but no hug had ever felt so good. I only wished I could turn him around and squeeze him the way I had Hallie Stansfield, expelling what was wrong with him like an aspirated chunk of hotdog.

Face buried in the fur, he said: “You make a really good Howie, Dev.”

I rubbed his head with one paw, knocking off his dogtop. I couldn’t reply as Howie—barking his name was as close as I could come to that—but I was thinking, A good kid deserves a good dog. Just ask Milo.

Mike looked up into Howie’s blue mesh eyes. “Will you come on the hoister with us?”

I gave him an exaggerated nod and patted his head again. Lane picked up Mike’s new dogtop and stuck it back on his head.

Annie approached. Her hands were clasped demurely at her waist, but her eyes were full of merriment. “Can I unzip you, Mr. Howie?”

I wouldn’t have minded, but of course I couldn’t let her. Every show has its rules, and one of Joyland’s—hard and fast—was that Howie the Happy Hound was always Howie the Happy Hound. You never took off the fur where the conies could see.

I ducked back into Joyland Under, left the fur in the cart, and rejoined Annie and Mike at the ramp leading up to the Carolina Spin. Annie looked up nervously and said, “Are you sure you want to do this, Mike?”

“Yes! It’s the one I want to do most!”

“All right, then. I guess.” To me she added: “I’m not terrified of heights, but they don’t exactly thrill me.”

Lane was holding a car door open. “Climb aboard, folks. I’m going to send you up where the air is rare.” He bent down and scruffed Milo’s ears. “You’re sittin this one out, fella.”

I sat on the inside, nearest the wheel. Annie sat in the middle, and Mike on the outside, where the view was best. Lane dropped the safety bar, went back to the controls, and reset his derby on a fresh slant. “Amazement awaits!” he called, and up we went, rising with the stately calm of a coronation procession.

Slowly, the world opened itself beneath us: first the park, then the bright cobalt of the ocean on our right and all of the North Carolina lowlands on our left. When the Spin reached the top of its great circle, Mike let go of the safety bar, raised his hands over his head, and shouted, “We’re flying!”

A hand on my leg. Annie’s. I looked at her and she mouthed two words: Thank you. I don’t know how many times Lane sent us around—more spins than the usual ride, I think, but I’m not sure. What I remember best was Mike’s face, pale and full of wonder, and Annie’s hand on my thigh, where it seemed to burn. She didn’t take it away until we slowed to a stop.

Mike turned to me. “Now I know what my kite feels like,” he said.

So did I.

When Annie told Mike he’d had enough, the kid didn’t object. He was exhausted. As Lane helped him into his wheelchair, Mike held out a hand, palm up. “Slap me five if you’re still alive.”

Grinning, Lane slapped him five. “Come back anytime, Mike.”

“Thanks. It was so great.”

Lane and I pushed him up the midway. The booths on both sides were shut up again, but one of the shys was open: Annie Oakleys Shootin’ Gallery. Standing at the chump board, where Pop Allen had stood all summer long, was Fred Dean in his three-piece suit. Behind him, chain-driven rabbits and ducks traveled in opposite directions. Above them were bright yellow ceramic chicks. These were stationary, but very small.

“Like to try your shooting skill before you exit the park?” Fred asked. “There are no losers today. Today ev-rybody wins a prize.”

Mike looked around at Annie. “Can I, mom?”

“Sure, honey. But not long, okay?”

He tried to get out of the chair, but couldn’t. He was too tired. Lane and I propped him up, one on each side. Mike picked up a rifle and took a couple of shots, but he could no longer steady his arms, even though the gun was light. The beebees struck the canvas backdrop and clicked into the gutter at the bottom.

“Guess I suck,” he said, putting the rifle down.

“Well, you didn’t exactly burn it up,” Fred allowed, “but as I said, today everyone wins a prize.” With that, he handed over the biggest Howie on the shelf, a top stuffy that even sharpshooters couldn’t earn without spending eight or nine bucks on reloads.

Mike thanked him and sat back down, looking overwhelmed. That damn stuffed dog was almost as big as he was. “You try, Mom.”

“No, that’s okay,” she said, but I thought she wanted to. It was something in her eyes as she measured the distance between the chump board and the targets.

“Please?” He looked first at me, then at Lane. “She’s really good. She won the prone shooting tournament at Camp Perry before I was born and came in second twice. Camp Perry’s in Ohio.”

“I don’t—”

Lane was already holding out one of the modified .22s. “Step right up. Let’s see your best Annie Oakley, Annie.”

She took the rifle and examined it in a way few of the conies ever did. “How many shots?”

“Ten a clip,” Fred said.

“If I’m going to do this, can I shoot two clips?”

“As many as you want, ma’am. Today’s your day.”

“Mom used to also shoot skeet with my grampa,” Mike told them.

Annie raised the .22 and squeezed off ten shots with a pause of perhaps two seconds between each. She knocked over two moving ducks and three of the moving bunnies. The teensy ceramic chicks she ignored completely.

“A crack shot!” Fred crowed. “Any prize on the middle shelf, your pick!”

She smiled. “Fifty percent isn’t anywhere near crack. My dad would have covered his face for shame. I’ll just take the reload, if that’s okay.”

Fred took a paper cone from under the counter—a wee shoot, in the Talk—and put the small end into a hole on top of the gag rifle. There was a rattle as another ten beebees rolled in.

“Are the sights on these trigged?” she asked Fred.

“No, ma’am. All the games at Joyland are straight. But if I told you Pop Allen—the man who usually runs this shy—spent long hours sighting them in, I’d be a liar.”

Having worked on Pop’s team, I knew that was disingenuous, to say the least. Sighting in the rifles was the last thing Pop would do. The better the rubes shot, the more prizes Pop had to give away… and he had to buy his own prizes. All the shy-bosses did. They were cheap goods, but not free goods.

“Shoots left and high,” she said, more to herself than to us. Then she raised the rifle, socked it into the hollow of her right shoulder, and triggered off ten rounds. This time there was no discernable pause between shots, and she didn’t bother with the ducks and bunnies. She aimed for the ceramic chicks and exploded eight of them.

As she put the gun back on the counter, Lane used his bandanna to wipe a smutch of sweat and grime from the back of his neck. He spoke very softly as he did this chore. “Jesus Horatio Christ. Nobody gets eight peeps.”

“I only nicked the last one, and at this range I should have had them all.” She wasn’t boasting, just stating a fact.

Mike said, almost apologetically: “Told you she was good.” He curled a fist over his mouth and coughed into it. “She was thinking about the Olympics, only then she dropped out of college.”

“You really are Annie Oakley,” Lane said, stuffing his bandanna back into a rear pocket. “Any prize, pretty lady. You pick.”

“I already have my prize,” she said. “This has been a wonderful, wonderful day. I can never thank you guys enough.” She turned in my direction. “And this guy. Who actually had to talk me into it. Because I’m a fool.” She kissed the top of Mike’s head. “But now I better get my boy home. Where’s Milo?”

We looked around and saw him halfway down Joyland Avenue, sitting in front of Horror House with his tail curled around his paws.

“Milo, come!” Annie called.

His ears pricked up but he didn’t come. He didn’t even turn in her direction, just stared at the façade of Joyland’s only dark ride. I could almost believe he was reading the drippy, cobweb-festooned invitation: COME IN IF YOU DARE.

While Annie was looking at Milo, I stole a glance at Mike. Although he was all but done in from the excitements of the day, his expression was hard to mistake. It was satisfaction. I know it’s crazy to think he and his Jack Russell had worked this out in advance, but I did think it.

I still do.

“Roll me down there, Mom,” Mike said. “He’ll come with me.”

“No need for that,” Lane said. “If you’ve got a leash, I’m happy to go get him.”

“It’s in the pocket on the back of Mike’s wheelchair,” Annie said.

“Um, probably not,” Mike said. “You can check but I’m pretty sure I forgot it.”

Annie checked while I thought, In a pig’s ass you forgot.

“Oh, Mike,” Annie said reproachfully. “Your dog, your responsibility. How many times have I told you?”

“Sorry, Mom.” To Fred and Lane he said, “Only we hardly ever use it because Milo always comes.”

“Except when we need him to.” Annie cupped her hands around her mouth. “Milo, come on! Time to go home!” Then, in a much sweeter voice: “Biscuit, Milo! Come get a biscuit!”

Her coaxing tone would have brought me on the run—probably with my tongue hanging out—but Milo didn’t budge.

“Come on Dev,” Mike said. As if I were also in on the plan but had missed my cue, somehow. I grabbed the wheelchair’s handles and rolled Mike down Joyland Avenue toward the funhouse. Annie followed. Fred and Lane stayed where they were, Lane leaning on the chump board among the laid-out popguns on their chains. He had removed his derby and was spinning it on one finger.

When we got to the dog, Annie regarded him crossly. “What’s wrong with you, Milo?”

Milo thumped his tail at the sound of Annie’s voice, but didn’t look at her. Nor did he move. He was on guard and intended to stay that way unless he was hauled away.

“Michael, please make your dog heel so we can go home. You need to get some r—”

Two things happened before she could finish. I’m not exactly sure of the sequence. I’ve gone over it often in the years since then—most often on nights when I can’t sleep—and I’m still not sure. I think the rumble came first: the sound of a ride-car starting to roll along its track. But it might have been the padlock dropping. It’s even possible that both things happened at the same time.

The big American Master fell off the double doors below the Horror House façade and lay on the boards, gleaming in the October sunshine. Fred Dean said later that the shackle must not have been pushed firmly into the locking mechanism, and the vibration of the moving car caused it to open all the way. This made perfect sense, because the shackle was indeed open when I checked it.

Still bullshit, though.

I put that padlock on myself, and remember the click as the shackle clicked into place. I even remember tugging on it to make sure it caught, the way you do with a padlock. And all that begs a question Fred didn’t even try to answer: with the Horror House breakers switched off, how could that car have gotten rolling in the first place? As for what happened next…

Here’s how a trip through Horror House ended. On the far side of the Torture Chamber, just when you thought the ride was over and your guard was down, a screaming skeleton (nicknamed Hagar the Horrible by the greenies) came flying at you, seemingly on a collision course with your car. When it pulled away, you saw a stone wall dead ahead. Painted there in fluorescent green was a rotting zombie and a gravestone with END OF THE LINE printed on it. Of course the stone wall split open just in time, but that final double-punch was extremely effective. When the car emerged into the daylight, making a semicircle before going back in through another set of double doors and stopping, even grown men were often screaming their heads off. Those final shrieks (always accompanied by gales of oh-shit-you-got-me laughter) were Horror House’s best advertisement.

There were no screams that day. Of course not, because when the double doors banged open, the car that emerged was empty. It rolled through the semicircle, bumped lightly against the next set of double doors, and stopped.

“O-kay,” Mike said. It was a whisper so low that I barely heard it, and I’m sure Annie didn’t—all her attention had been drawn to the car. The kid was smiling.

“What made it do that?” Annie asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Short-circuit, maybe. Or some kind of power surge.” Both of those explanations sounded good, as long as you didn’t know about the breakers being off.

I stood on my tiptoes and peered into the stalled car. The first thing I noticed was that the safety bar was up. If Eddie Parks or one of his greenie minions forgot to lower it, the bar was supposed to snap down automatically once the ride was in motion. It was a state-mandated safety feature. The bar being up on this one made a goofy kind of sense, though, since the only rides in the park that had power that morning were the ones Lane and Fred had turned on for Mike.

I spotted something beneath the semicircular seat, something as real as the roses Fred had given Annie, only not red.

It was a blue Alice band.

We headed back to the van. Milo, once more on best behavior, padded along beside Mike’s wheelchair.

“I’ll be back as soon as I get them home,” I told Fred. “Put in some extra hours.”

He shook his head. “You’re eighty-six for today. Get to bed early, and be here tomorrow at six. Pack a couple of extra sandwiches, because we’ll all be working late. Turns out that storm’s moving a little faster than the weather forecasters expected.”

Annie looked alarmed. “Should I pack some stuff and take Mike to town, do you think? I’d hate to when he’s so tired, but—”

“Check the radio this evening,” Fred advised. “If NOAA issues a coastal evacuation order, you’ll hear it in plenty of time, but I don’t think that’ll happen. This is just going to be your basic cap of wind. I’m a little worried about the high rides, that’s all—the Thunderball, the Shaker, and the Spin.”

“They’ll be okay,” Lane said. “They stood up to Agnes last year, and that was a bona fide hurricane.”

“Does this storm have a name?” Mike asked.

“They’re calling it Gilda,” Lane said. “But it’s no hurricane, just a little old subtropical depression.”

Fred said, “Winds are supposed to start picking up around midnight, and the heavy rain’ll start an hour or two later. Lane’s probably right about the big rides, but it’s still going to be a busy day. Have you got a slicker, Dev?”

“Sure.”

“You’ll want to wear it.”

The weather forecast we heard on WKLM as we left the park eased Annie’s mind. The winds generated by Gilda weren’t expected to top thirty miles an hour, with occasionally higher gusts. There might be some beach erosion and minor flooding inland, but that was about it. The dj called it “great kite-flying weather,” which made us all laugh. We had a history now, and that was nice.

Mike was almost asleep by the time we arrived back at the big Victorian on Beach Row. I lifted him into his wheelchair. It wasn’t much of a chore; I’d put on muscle in the last four months, and with those horrible braces off, he couldn’t have weighed seventy pounds. Milo once more paced the chair as I rolled it up the ramp and into the house.

Mike needed the toilet, but when his mother tried to take over the wheelchair handles, Mike asked if I’d do it, instead. I rolled him into the bathroom, helped him to stand, and eased down his elastic-waisted pants while he held onto the grab bars.

“I hate it when she has to help me. I feel like a baby.”

Maybe, but he pissed with a healthy kid’s vigor. Then, as he leaned forward to push the flush handle, he staggered and almost took a header into the toilet bowl. I had to catch him.

“Thanks, Dev. I already washed my hair once today.” That made me laugh, and Mike grinned. “I wish we were going to have a hurricane. That’d be boss.”

“You might not think so if it happened.” I was remembering Hurricane Doria, two years before. It hit New Hampshire and Maine packing ninety-mile-an-hour winds, knocking down trees all over Portsmouth, Kittery, Sanford, and the Berwieks. One big old pine just missed our house, our basement flooded, and the power had been out for four days.

“I wouldn’t want stuff to fall down at the park, I guess. That’s just about the best place in the world. That I’ve ever been, anyway.”

“Good. Hold on, kid, let me get your pants back up. Can’t have you mooning your mother.”

That made him laugh again, only the laughter turned to coughing. Annie took over when we came out, rolling him down the hall to the bedroom. “Don’t you sneak out on me, Devin,” she called back over her shoulder.

Since I had the afternoon off, I had no intention of sneaking out on her if she wanted me to stay awhile. I strolled around the parlor, looking at things that were probably expensive but not terribly interesting—not to a young man of twenty-one, anyway. A huge picture window, almost wall-to-wall, saved what would otherwise have been a gloomy room, flooding it with light. The window looked out on the back patio, the boardwalk, and the ocean. I could see the first clouds feathering in from the southeast, but the sky overhead was still bright blue. I remember thinking that I’d made it to the big house after all, although I’d probably never have a chance to count all the bathrooms. I remember thinking about the Alice band, and wondering if Lane would see it when he put the wayward car back under cover. What else was I thinking? That I had seen a ghost after all. Just not of a person.

Annie came back. “He wants to see you, but don’t stay long.”

“Okay.”

“Third door on the right.”

I went down the hall, knocked lightly, and let myself in. Once you got past the grab bars, the oxygen tanks in the corner, and the leg braces standing at steely attention beside the bed, it could have been any boys room. There was no baseball glove and no skateboard propped against the wall, but there were posters of Mark Spitz and Miami Dolphins running back Larry Csonka. In the place of honor above the bed, the Beatles were crossing Abbey Road.

There was a faint smell of liniment. Mike looked very small in the bed, all but lost under a green coverlet. Milo was curled up, nose to tail, beside him, and Mike was stroking his fur absently. It was hard to believe this was the same kid who had raised his hands triumphantly over his head at the apogee of the Carolina Spin. He didn’t look sad, though. He looked almost radiant.

“Did you see her, Dev? Did you see her when she left?”

I shook my head, smiling. I had been jealous of Tom, but not of Mike. Never of Mike.

“I wish my grampa had been there. He would have seen her, and heard what she said when she left.”

“What did she say?”

“Thanks. She meant both of us. And she told you to be careful. Are you sure you didn’t hear her? Even a little?”

I shook my head again. No, not even a little.

“But you know.” His face was too pale and tired, the face of a boy who was very sick, but his eyes were alive and healthy. “You know, don’t you?”

“Yes.” Thinking of the Alice band. “Mike, do you know what happened to her?”

“Someone killed her.” Very low.

“I don’t suppose she told you…”

But there was no need to finish. He was shaking his head.

“You need to sleep,” I said.

“Yeah, I’ll feel better after a nap. I always do.” His eyes closed, then slowly opened again. “The Spin was the best. The hoister. It’s like flying.”

“Yes,” I said. “It is like that.”

This time when his eyes closed, they didn’t re-open. I walked to the door as quietly as I could. As I put my hand on the knob, he said, “Be careful, Dev. It’s not white.”

I looked back. He was sleeping. I’m sure he was. Only Milo was watching me. I left, closing the door softly.

Annie was in the kitchen. “I’m making coffee, but maybe you’d rather have a beer? I’ve got Blue Ribbon.”

“Coffee would be fine.”

“What do you think of the place?”

I decided to tell the truth. “The furnishings are a little elderly for my taste, but I never went to interior decorating school.”

“Nor did I,” she said. “Never even finished college.”

“Join the club.”

“Ah, but you will. You’ll get over the girl who dumped you, and you’ll go back to school, and you’ll finish, and you’ll march off into a brilliant future.”

“How do you know about—”

“The girl? One, you might as well be wearing a sandwich board. Two, Mike knows. He told me. He’s been my brilliant future. Once upon a time I was going to major in anthropology. I was going to win a gold medal at the Olympics. I was going to see strange and fabulous places and be the Margaret Mead of my generation. I was going to write books and do my best to earn back my father’s love. Do you know who he is?”