Joyland

another s’more. “She was just practicing on you. Staying sharp. I bet she’s told a lot of other greenies stuff, too.”
    “Would you be one of them?” I asked.
    “Well . . . no. But that means nothing.”
    I looked at Erin, who shook her head.
    “She also thinks Horror House is haunted,” I said.
    “I’ve heard that one, too,” Erin said. “By a girl who got murdered in there.”
    “Bullshit!” Tom cried. “Next you’ll be telling me it was the Hook, and he still lurks behind the Screaming Skull!”
    “There really was a murder,” I said. “A girl named Linda Gray. She was from Florence, South Carolina. There are pictures of her and the guy who killed her at the shooting gallery and standing in line at the Spin. No hook, but there was a tattoo of a bird on his hand. A hawk or an eagle.”
    That silenced him, al least for the time being.
    “Lane Hardy said that Roz only thinks Horror House is haunted, because she won’t go inside and find out for sure. She won’t even go near it, if she can help it. Lane thinks that’s ironic, because he says it really is haunted.”
    Erin made her eyes big and round and scooted a little closer to the fire—partly for effect, mostly I think so that Tom would put his arm around her. “He’s seen —?”
    “I don’t know. He said to ask Mrs. Shoplaw, and she gave me the whole story.” I ran it down for them. It was a good story to tell at night, under the stars, with the surf rolling and a beach-fire just starting to burn down to coals. Even Tom seemed fascinated.
    “Does she claim to have seen Linda Gray?” he asked when I finally ran down. “La Shoplaw?”
    I mentally replayed her story as told to me on the day I rented the room on the second floor. “I don’t think so. She would have said.”
    He nodded, satisfied. “A perfect lesson in how these things work. Everyone knows someone who’s seen a UFO, and everyone knows someone who’s seen a ghost. Hearsay evidence, inadmissible in court. Me, I’m a Doubting Thomas. Geddit? Tom Kennedy, Doubting Thomas?”
    Erin threw him a much sharper elbow. “We get it.” She looked thoughtfully into the fire. “You know what? Summer’s two-thirds gone, and I’ve never been in the Joyland scream-shy a single time, not even the baby part up front. It’s a no-photo zone. Brenda Rafferty told us its because lots of couples go in there to make out.” She peered at me. “What are you grinning about?”
    “Nothing.” I was thinking of La Shoplaw’s late husband going through the place after Late Gate and picking up cast-off panties.
    “Have either of you guys been in?”
    We both shook our heads. “HH is Dobie Team’s job,” Tom said.
    “Let’s do it tomorrow. All three of us in one car. Maybe we’ll see her.”
    “Go to Joyland on our day off when we could spend it on the beach?” Tom asked. “That’s masochism at its very finest.”
    This time in spite of giving him an elbow, she poked him in the ribs. I didn’t know if they were sleeping together yet, but it seemed likely; the relationship had certainly become very physical. “Poop on that! As employees we get in free, and what does the ride take? Five minutes?”
    “I think a little longer,” I said. “Nine or ten. Plus some time in the baby part. Say fifteen minutes, all told.”
    Tom put his chin on her head and looked at me through the fine cloud of her hair. “Poop on that, she says. You can tell that here is a young woman with a fine college education. Before she started hanging out with sorority girls, she would have said shitsky and left it at that.”
    “The day I start hanging out with that bunch of half-starved mix-n-match sluts will be the day I crawl up my own ass and die!” For some reason, this vulgarity pleased me to no end. Possibly because Wendy was a veteran mix-n-matcher. “You, Thomas Patrick Kennedy, are just afraid we will see her, and you’ll have to take back all those things you said about Madame Fortuna and ghosts and UFOs and—”
    Tom raised his hands. “I give up. We’ll get in the line with the rest of the rubes—the conies, I mean—and take the Horror House tour. I only insist it be in the afternoon. I need my beauty rest.”
    “You certainly do,” I said.
    “Coming from someone who looks like you, that’s pretty funny. Give me a beer, Jonesy.”
    I gave him a beer.
    “Tell us how it went with the Stansfields,” Erin said. “Did they blubber all over you and call you their