Joyland

bargain—I started renting out the top two stories of this place. What else was I going to do? We just had the one kid, and now she’s up in New York, working for an ad agency.” She lit her cigarette, inhaled, and chuffed it back out as laughter. “Working on losing her southern accent, too, but that’s another story. This overgrown monstrosity of a house was Howie’s playtoy, and I never begrudged him. At least it’s paid off. And I like staying connected to the park, because it makes me feel like I’m still connected to him. Can you understand that?”
    “Sure.”
    She considered me through a rising raft of cigarette smoke, smiled, and shook her head. “Nah—you’re being kind, but you’re a little too young.”
    “I lost my Mom four years ago. My dad’s still grieving. He says there’s a reason wife and life sound almost the same. I’ve got school, at least, and my girlfriend. Dad’s knocking around a house just north of Kittery that’s way too big for him. He knows he should sell it and get a smaller one closer to where he works—we both know—but he stays. So yeah, I know what you mean.”
    “I’m sorry for your loss,” Mrs. Shoplaw said. “Some day I’ll open my mouth too wide and fall right in. That bus of yours, is it the five-ten?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, come on in the kitchen. I’ll make you a toasted cheese and microwave you a bowl of tomato soup. You’ve got time. And I’ll tell you the sad story of the Joyland ghost while you eat, if you want to hear it.”
    “Is it really a ghost story?”
    “I’ve never been in that damn funhouse, so I don’t know for sure. But it’s a murder story. That much I am sure of.”

    The soup was just Campbell’s out of the can, but the toasted cheese was Muenster—my favorite—and tasted heavenly. She poured me a glass of milk and insisted I drink it. I was, Mrs. Shoplaw said, a growing boy. She sat down opposite me with her own bowl of soup but no sandwich (“I have to watch my girlish figure”) and told me the tale. Some of it she’d gotten from the newspapers and TV reports. The juicier bits came from her Joyland contacts, of whom she had many.
    “It was four years ago, which I guess would make it around the same time your mother died. Do you know what always comes first to my mind when I think about it? The guy’s shirt. And the gloves. Thinking about those things gives me the creeps. Because it means he planned it.”
    “You might be kind of starting in the middle,” I said.
    Mrs. Shoplaw laughed. “Yeah, I suppose I am. The name of your supposed ghost is Linda Gray, and she was from Florence. That’s over South Carolina way. She and her boyfriend—if that’s what he was; the cops checked her background pretty closely and found no trace of him—spent her last night on earth at the Luna Inn, half a mile south of here along the beach. They entered Joyland around eleven o’clock the next day. He bought them day passes, using cash. They rode some rides and then had a late lunch at Rock Lobster, the seafood place down by the concert hall. That was just past one o’clock. As for the time of death, you probably know how they establish it . . . contents of the stomach and so on . . .”
    “Yeah.” My sandwich was gone, and I turned my attention to the soup. The story wasn’t hurting my appetite any. I was twenty-one, remember, and although I would have told you different, down deep I was convinced I was never going to die. Not even my mother’s death had been able to shake that core belief.
    “He fed her, then he took her on the Carolina Spin—a slow ride, you know, easy on the digestion—and then he took her into Horror House. They went in together, but only he came out. About halfway along the course of the ride, which takes about nine minutes, he cut her throat and threw her out beside the monorail track the cars run on. Threw her out like a piece of trash. He must have known there’d be a mess, because he was wearing two shirts, and he’d put on a pair of yellow work-gloves. They found the top shirt—the one that would have caught most of the blood—about a hundred yards farther along from the body. The gloves a little farther along still.”
    I could see it: first the body, still warm and pulsing, then the shirt, then the gloves. The killer, meanwhile, sits tight and finishes the ride. Mrs. Shoplaw was right, it was creepy.
    “When the ride ended, the son of a bee just got out and walked away. He mopped up