Joyland(11)

You know how some girls like to dramatize."



Joy land





39


As a matter of fact, I did. Wendy's friend Renee could turn a routine trip to the dentist into a horror-movie scenario.

"That was the best picture, but not the only one. The cops went through all the Hollywood Girl snaps from that day and found the Gray girl and her friend in the background of at least four others. In the best of those, they're standing in line for the Whirly Cups, and he's got his hand on her keister. Pretty chummy for someone none of her family or friends had ever seen before."

"Too bad there aren't closed-circuit TV cameras," I said.

"My ladyfriend got a job at Filene's in Boston this summer, and she says they've got a few of those cameras, and are putting in more. To foil shoplifters."

"A day will come when they have em everywhere," she said.

"Just like in that science fiction book about the Thought Police.

I don't look forward to it, either. But they'll never have them in rides like Horror House. Not even infrared ones that see in the dark."

"No?"

"Nope. There's no Tunnel of Love at Joyland, but Horror House is most definitely the Tunnel of Grope. My husband told me once that a day when the graveyard shift cleanup crew didn't find at least three pairs of panties beside the track was a slow day, indeed.

"But they did have that one great photo of the guy at the shooting gallery. A portrait, almost. It ran in the papers and on TV for a week. Him snuggled up to her hip to hip, showing her how to hold the rifle, the way the guys always do. Everyone in both Carolinas must have seen it. She's smiling, but he looks dead serious."





STEPHEN KING

"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?"





Joyland

"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 J oyland 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.





42


STEPHEN KING


A cold pocket, he called it. When he turned and looked back, she was gone."