Dreamland Social Club(37)

Leo nodded.

“I found these.” Jane opened her hand and Leo took the keys, his fingers briefly brushing hers.

He flipped through them and examined the labels. “Oh. My. Garage.”

Her pulse quickened at the phrase, which she was sure she’d heard before, from her mother’s mouth. This was the kind of boy her mother would have hung out with, flirted with. This was the kind of boy who spoke her mother’s language. He was exactly the kind of boy—no, he was the exact boy—Jane needed. She said, “Do you think any of them still work?”

“From the look in your eyes,” he said, “I’d guess you were going to try to find out?”

Jane nodded and said, “I’d be afraid to do it alone.” Which was true, but of course not exactly why she was asking.

He handed the keys back. “Is that an invitation?”

She nodded. “What are you doing later?”

He smiled again. “Isn’t it already later?”

She shook her head. “Two a.m. Like our mothers did.”

“You’re serious.”

“Very.”

He nodded and said, “You’re on.”





“Well, you survived,” Babette said when they cut up to the boardwalk to walk home. She patted Jane on the back of her calf. “I’m proud of you, kid.”

“Thanks,” Jane said.

She was about to tell Babette everything she’d been keeping to herself—about the postcard, about the fact that her mother and Leo’s had been friends, about the keys—but the words that came out were “Is Venus Leo’s girlfriend?”

“I don’t think so.” Babette shook her tiny head and seemed to be walking too hard in order to keep up.

Jane slowed her gait. “I think I saw them kissing.”

“Well, either they were or they weren’t.”

“I couldn’t be sure.”

Babette’s voice was small, like the wind had snatched her up and carried her far away, when she said, “It probably doesn’t mean anything.”

But Jane knew that wasn’t true.

Everything meant something.





CHAPTER two


IT WASN’T EASY TO SNEAK OUT of Preemie’s house. Floorboards creaked. Doors whined. The staircase practically whistled “Dixie” when walked down. But Jane tiptoed and stepped on the stairs at their wall edge and opened the doors in slow motion and finally managed to get out undetected. The street was dark, abandoned, so she took off running to meet Leo outside the Anchor.

It was 2:00 a.m. and the bar was still open, still loud. But they weren’t staying. No one even noticed as they moved away and sat on a bench to make a plan. Leo had a backpack hooked on one shoulder, and Jane suddenly regretted not coming more prepared, though she had no idea what she would have brought apart from the keys, which were in her jeans pocket.

“So.” She took them out. “I’m guessing this one has to do with the Parachute Jump. And this one the Thunderbolt. The other two, I have no idea. Bath, no clue. And I guess this one’s either the Wonder Wheel or Wonderland.”

Leo nodded and said, “I say we start with Thunder.”

“But I thought you said it was gone.” She had already accepted that that key might be useless, that they all might be. But she wanted to be sure.

“It’s gone,” Leo said, and they took off down the boardwalk. “But we can still go there.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Some stuff is never really gone.” He led Jane down along the side of an abandoned lot that faced the boardwalk and a side street she’d walked down countless times before, right to a padlock on an old chain-link fence and said, “Okay. Try it.”

Jane got the keys out, then took the lock in her hand and inserted the key. Sure enough, the lock turned.

“Unbelievable,” she said, and Leo said, “Well, this may be the only key that does anything. This lot hasn’t changed hands in like thirty years.”

In they went, stomping over tall weeds and cracked bottle glass, eventually taking cover behind a small trailer that looked abandoned. Not that Jane got the impression anyone was there to see them or that anyone who saw them would care, but it felt like taking cover anyway, their backs leaning up against the metal wall.

“There’s nothing here,” Jane said.

“Nothing but ghosts,” Leo said. “This land is owned by a fried chicken mogul. The same chicken mogul that wanted to try to rebuild Steeplechase Park in the eighties.”

“For real?” Jane said. Clearly, this chicken mogul would have to be found, so that her father could pitch his coaster to him, too. She desperately wanted to tell Leo about it all, but she simply couldn’t break her father’s trust.

“Yup.” Leo nodded.

“Why didn’t it happen?”

“Same reason most things here don’t happen. Money. Greed. Ego. Lack of follow-through. But this is where the Thunderbolt used to be.” He unzipped his backpack, pulled out a photo album and a flashlight and then a small blanket. “I was there when they knocked it down. Want to see?”

“Of course.”

He opened the blanket up and they sat. He handed her the album and moved closer, shining the flashlight on the first photo. There was Leo, as a boy, standing on the boardwalk with the Thunderbolt—a long series of track hills and valleys—behind him. The coaster’s support beams had been overgrown by shrubs and weeds and climbing vines, and Jane had to push away an image of Venus’s viney arms around Leo. He said, “That was the day before we heard the mayor was having it ripped down. It was two thousand, so I was like five or six.”