Summoning the Night (Arcadia Bell #2)(56)

“Right as rain. Come on, girl.”

Following his method, I climbed the fence. But when I threw my leg over, my body froze up, midstraddle.

“Other leg now,” Lon coaxed. “You can do it.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Well, then. Let me just find a long stick and prod you back over. You can wait in the car.”

I grumbled under my breath. Once I got the leg over, I clung to the top of the fence, trying to get my shoe into one of the links. Then I felt his hands on my hips.

“Drop down. I’ve got you.”

Not much of a choice there. My arms were starting to shake from holding myself up. I lowered myself down a few inches. He snaked a steely arm around my waist, so I let go and he caught me, setting me down on my feet.

“Would you like to check my parts now?” he asked, smugly holding his jacket open.

“Oww.” I bent over and rubbed the heel of my hand over my jean zipper, wincing. “Maybe you should check mine instead. I need some fence-jumping lessons.”

His lower lip pouted sarcastically. He slipped a gloved hand between my legs and pressed a finger into the bump in my jeans where all the seams converged. “Where? Here?”

“I’m not sure.” I fought back a breathless laugh. “Keep it up and I’ll tell you.”

He patted me appreciatively, then pulled my coat back into place. “We can continue that later. Let’s do this before it starts raining again.”

We trudged through a marshy maze of tangled undergrowth, fallen trees, and broken branches and emerged in a graveyard of dismantled course obstacles. An immobilized windmill sat on its side, tethered to the ground by vines. Just past it, a dinosaur was broken into ten sections of sun-faded, molded metal.

Tiers of synthetic putting greens lay just ahead of us, most of them choked with real weeds growing between the seams of plastic grass. A few others were flooded. All of it was sad and silent—no children, no cars passing in the distance.

“When I was a kid, my dad and I came here,” Lon said. “Used to be an A&W next door. We’d get root beer floats after we played.” A nostalgic smile lightened his face. “He’d always let me win.”

“Do you miss him?” I asked, trying not to think of my own parents.

“Sometimes,” he admitted at length. “Jupe was just a kid when he died. I wish he’d lived long enough to see him grow up. He was better at expressing his feelings than I am.”

I was surprised to hear him admit this. “If you ask me, what you do is more important than what you say.” Had I understood this a few years ago, my life might’ve been different. My parents lied to my face my whole life, then ditched me before I’d finished high school. I couldn’t imagine Lon forcing Jupe to live on his own at seventeen—no matter the circumstances, not in a million years. “Besides, it’s not like Jupe needs a role model for expressing himself. He’s expressive enough for both of you.”

He squinted down at me and suppressed a smile. “Maybe you’re right.”

We meandered past a gigantic Mother Hubbard shoe on hole twelve and a morbid decapitated crocodile on the tenth hole. The missing head was three holes down, its too-wide eyes mocking us atop the bank of a pinball obstacle.

After a few minutes of walking, Lon stopped at the seventh hole. The final resting place for the ball in this course was beneath a colorful castle. But that’s not where Lon’s eyes were. He was studying the cartoonish King and Queen statues that flanked a small bench at the beginning of the path: King Bull and Queen Cow, to be precise. They stood upright on two legs, both dressed in medieval finery, now faded and grimy. A miniature forest of weeds grew up around them.

Their frozen bovine faces stared back at us. The Queen’s black fiberglass nose had broken off and been plugged with an orange golf ball.

Lon pulled out his phone and opened a JPEG of the scanned Polaroid, held the screen in front of him and squinted. “Look.”

I slipped under his arm and compared the image on the screen with the dreary vista in front of us. The elusive dark shape in the foreground of the photo matched the outline of the Queen’s torso—her molded blond hair, crown askew, and the sign she was holding on her shoulder that read: USE THE HONOR SYSTEM WHEN COUNTING STROKES.

Behind her, the same two palm trees stood in the distance, only taller. I squatted low to get a different angle. “How in the world did you remember this?”

“I broke her nose,” Lon said, shoving the phone back into the front pocket of his jeans. “An accident. Was swinging my club around. Reared back and poked a hole through one of her nostrils with the grip. Looks like someone else punched the rest of it out.”

We stood together in silent memorial for the defaced Queen.

“What now?” I finally said. “There must be something important about her.”

“Important enough that Bishop either swallowed the photo to keep someone else from getting it—”

“Or someone shoved it down his throat in anger,” I finished. “Trying to hide a secret.”

And maybe that someone was Frater Merrin. He bit Cindy Brolin—as Lon said, the magician certainly wasn’t innocent in all this—and may have even murdered the original seven kids taken in the ’80s. Stands to reason that he could’ve done away with Bishop.