Joyland

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