Joyland(59)

She opened her briefcase and took out a folder. "Are you absolutely sure you want to get into this? Because I don't think





STEPHEN K I N G

you're going to listen, say 'Elementary, my dear Erin,' and spit out the killer's name like Sherlock Holmes."

If I needed evidence that Sherlock Holmes I wasn't, my wild idea that Eddie Parks might have been the so-called Funhouse Killer was it. I thought of telling her that I was more interested in putting the victim to rest than I was in catching the killer, but it would have sounded crazy, even factoring in Tom's experience. "''m not expecting that, either."

"And by the way, you owe me almost forty dollars for interlibrary loan fees."

"''m good for it."

She poked me in the ribs. "You better be. I'm not working my way through school for the fun of it."

She settled her briefcase between her ankles and opened the folder. I saw Xeroxes, two or three pages of typewritten notes, and some glossy photographs that looked like the kind the conies got when they bought the Hollywood Girls' pitch.

"Okay, here we go. I started with the Charleston News and Courier article you told me about." She handed me one of the Xeroxes. "It's a Sunday piece, five thousand words of speculation and maybe eight hundred words of actual info. Read it later if you want, I'll summarize the salient points.

"Four girls. Five if you count her." She pointed down the midway at Horror House. "The first was Delight Mowbray, Dee Dee to her friends. From Waycross, Georgia. White, twentyone years old. Two or three days before she was killed, she told her good friend Jasmine Withers that she had a new boyfriend, older and very handsome. She was found beside a trail on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp on August 31st, 1961, nine days after she disappeared. If the guy had taken her into the Joyland

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swamp, even a little way, she might not have been found for a much longer time."

"If ever," I said. "A body left in there would have been gatorbait in twenty minutes."

"Gross but true." She handed me another Xerox. "This is the story from the Waycross Journal-Herald." There was a photo.

It showed a somber cop holding up a plaster cast of tire tracks.

"The theory is that he dumped her where he cut her throat.

The tire tracks were made by a truck, the story says."

"Dumped her like garbage," I said.

"Also gross but true." She handed me another Xeroxed newspaper clipping. "Here's number two. Claudine Sharp, from Rocky Mount, right here in NC. White, twenty-three years old.

Found dead in a local theater. August second, 1963. The movie being shown was Lawrence of Arabia, which happens to be very long and very loud. The guy who wrote the story quotes 'an unnamed police source' as saying the guy probably cut her throat during one of the battle scenes. Pure speculation, of course.

He left a bloody shirt and gloves, then must have walked out in the shirt he was wearing underneath."

"That just about has to be the guy who killed Linda Gray," I said. "Don't you think so?"

"It sure sounds like it. The cops questioned all her friends, but Claudine hadn't said anything about a new boyfriend."

"Or who she was going to the movies with that night? Not even to her parents?"

Erin gave me a patient look. "She was twenty-three, Dev, not fourteen. She lived all the way across town from her parents.

Worked in a drugstore and had a little apartment above it."

"You got all that from the newspaper story?"



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"Of course not. I also made some calls. Practically dialed my fingers off, if you want to know the truth. You owe me for the long-distance, too. More about Claudine Sharp later. For now, let's move on. Victim number three-according to the News and Courier story-was a girl from Santee, South Carolina. Now we're up to 1965. Eva Longbottom, age nineteen. Black. Disappeared on July fourth. Her body was found nine days later by a couple of fishermen, lying on the north bank of the Santee River. Raped and stabbed in the heart. The others were neither black nor raped. You can put her in the Funhouse Killer column if you want to, but I'm doubtful, myself. Last victim-before Linda Gray-was her."

She handed me what had to be a high school yearbook photo of a beautiful golden-haired girl. The kind who's the head cheerleader, the Homecoming Queen, dates the football quarterback . . . and is still liked by everyone.

"Darlene Stamnacher. Probably would have changed her last name if she'd gotten into the movie biz, which was her stated goal. White, nineteen. From Maxton, North Carolina.

Disappeared on June zgth, 1967. Found two days later, after a massive search, inside a roadside lean-to in the sugar-pine williwags south of Elrod. Throat cut."

"Christ, she's beautiful. Didn't she have a steady boyfriend?"

"A girl this good-looking, why do you even ask? And that's where the police went first, only he wasn't around. He and three of his buddies had gone camping in the Blue Ridge, and they could all vouch for him. Unless he flapped his arms and flew back, it wasn't him."

"Then came Linda Gray," I said. "Number five. If they were all murdered by the same guy, that is."