“With his gloves and knife in his pockets the whole time,” I said. Marveling at the idea.
“Razor.”
“Huh?”
“He used a straight razor or something like it, that’s what the medical examiner figured. Anyway, they had those photos, including the one great one, and you know what? You can’t make his face out in any of them.”
“Because of the sunglasses.”
“For starters. Also a goatee that covered his chin, and a baseball cap, the kind with a long bill, that shaded what little of his face the sunglasses and goatee didn’t cover. Could have been anyone. Could have been you, except you’re dark-haired instead of blond and don’t have a bird’s head tattooed on one of your hands. This guy did. An eagle or maybe a hawk. It showed up very clearly in the Shootin’ Gallery pic. They ran a blowup of the tat in the paper for five days running, hoping someone would recognize it. Nobody did.”
“No leads at the inn where they stayed the night before?”
“Uh-uh. He showed a South Carolina driver’s license when he checked in, but it was stolen a year before. No one even saw her. She must have waited in the car. She was a Jane Doe for almost a week, but the police released a full-face sketch. Made her look like she was just sleeping, not dead with her throat cut. Someone—a friend she went to nursing school with, I think it was—saw it and recognized it. She told the girl’s parents. I can’t imagine how they must have felt, coming up here in their car and hoping against hope that when they got to the morgue, it would turn out to be someone else’s well-loved child.” She shook her head slowly. “Kids are such a risk, Dev. Did that ever cross your mind?”
“I guess so.”
“Which means it hasn’t. Me… I think if they turned back that sheet and it was my daughter lying there, I’d lose my mind.”
“You don’t think Linda Gray really haunts the funhouse, do you?”
“I can’t answer that, because I hold no opinion on the afterlife, pro or con. My feeling is I’ll find that stuff out when I get there, and that’s good enough for me. All I know is that lots of people who work at Joyland claim to have seen her standing beside the track, wearing what she had on when they found her: blue skirt and blue sleeveless blouse. None of them would have seen those colors in the photos they released to the public, because the Speed Graphics the Hollywood Girls use only shoot black-and-white. Easier and cheaper to develop, I guess.”
“Maybe the color of her clothes was mentioned in the articles.”
She shrugged. “Might have been; I don’t remember. But several people have also mentioned that the girl they saw standing by the track was wearing a blue Alice band, and that wasn’t in the news stories. They held it back for almost a year, hoping to use it on a likely suspect if they came up with one.”
“Lane said the rubes never see her.”
“No, she only shows up after hours. It’s mostly Happy Helpers on the graveyard shift who see her, but I know at least one safety inspector from Raleigh who claims he did, because I had a drink with him at the Sand Dollar. Guy said she was just standing there on his ride-through. He thought it was a new pop-up until she raised her hands to him, like this.”
Mrs. Shoplaw held her hands out with the palms upturned, a supplicatory gesture.
“He said it felt like the temperature dropped twenty degrees. A cold pocket, he called it. When he turned and looked back, she was gone.”
I thought of Lane, in his tight jeans, scuffed boots, and tilted tuff-boy derby. Truth or horseshit? he’d asked. Live or Memorex? I thought the ghost of Linda Gray was almost certainly horseshit, but I hoped it wasn’t. I hoped I would see her. It would be a great story to tell Wendy, and in those days, all my thoughts led back to her. If I bought this shirt, would Wendy like it? If I wrote a story about a young girl getting her first kiss while on a horseback ride, would Wendy enjoy it? If I saw the ghost of a murdered girl, would Wendy be fascinated? Maybe enough to want to come down and see for herself?
“There was a follow-up story in the Charleston News and Courier about six months after the murder,” Mrs. Shoplaw said. “Turns out that since 1961, there have been four similar murders in Georgia and the Carolinas. All young girls. One stabbed, three others with their throats cut. The reporter dug up at least one cop who said all of them could have been killed by the guy who murdered Linda Gray.”
“Beware the Funhouse Killer!” I said in a deep announcer-type voice.
“That’s exactly what the paper called him. Hungry, weren’t you? You ate everything but the bowl. Now I think you’d better write me that check and beat feet to the bus station, or you’re apt to be spending the night on my sofa.”
Which looked comfortable enough, but I was anxious to get back north. Two days left in spring break, and then I’d be back at school with my arm around Wendy Keegan’s waist.
I took out my checkbook, scribbled, and by so doing rented a one-room apartment with a charming ocean view that Wendy Keegan—my lady-friend—never got a chance to sample. That room was where I sat up some nights with my stereo turned down low, playing Jimi Hendrix and the Doors, having those occasional thoughts of suicide. They were sophomoric rather than serious, just the fantasies of an over-imaginative young man with a heart condition… or so I tell myself now, all these years later, but who really knows?
When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.
I tried to reach Wendy from the bus station, but her stepmom said she was out with Renee. When the bus got to Wilmington I tried again, but she was still out with Renee. I asked Nadine—the stepmom—if she had any idea where they might have gone. Nadine said she didn’t. She sounded as if I were the most uninteresting caller she’d gotten all day. Maybe all year. Maybe in her life. I got along well enough with Wendy’s dad, but Nadine Keegan was never one of my biggest fans.
Finally—I was in Boston by then—I got Wendy. She sounded sleepy, although it was only eleven o’clock, which is the shank of the evening to most college students on spring break. I told her I got the job.
“Hooray for you,” she said. “Are you on your way home?”
“Yes, as soon as I get my car.” And if it didn’t have a flat tire. In those days I was always running on baldies and it seemed one of them was always going flat. A spare, you ask? Pretty funny, señor. “I could spend the night in Portsmouth instead of going straight home and see you tomorrow, if—”
“Wouldn’t be a good idea. Renee’s staying over, and that’s about all the company Nadine can take. You know how sensitive she is about company.”
Some company, maybe, but I thought Nadine and Renee had always gotten on like a house afire, drinking endless cups of coffee and gossiping about their favorite movie stars as if they were personal friends, but this didn’t seem like the time to say so.
“Ordinarily I’d love to talk to you, Dev, but I was getting ready to turn in. Me ’n Ren had a busy day. Shopping and… things.”
She didn’t elaborate on the things part, and I found I didn’t care to ask about them. Another warning sign.
“Love you, Wendy.”
“Love you, too.” That sounded perfunctory rather than fervent. She’s just tired, I told myself.
I rolled north out of Boston with a distinct feeling of unease. Something about the way she had sounded? That lack of enthusiasm? I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. But I wondered. Sometimes even now, all these years later, I wonder. She’s nothing to me these days but a scar and a memory, someone who hurt me as young women will hurt young men from time to time. A young woman from another life. Still I can’t help wondering where she was that day. What those things were. And if it was really Renee St. Clair she was with.