Dreamland Social Club(77)

Jane studied the wire he handed her and thought that yes, it would. She trailed him to the register and he said, “Oh, and don’t let me forget the key.”

“The key?”

“Your grandfather’s key. No use my hanging onto it now that you’re here.”

“Oh, a spare key to the house, you mean?” Jane was absentmindedly fingering some rubber worms.

“No, my dear, the horse.”





No one answered the door at the Claveracks, but Jane was pretty sure she heard a TV inside, so she knocked louder.

Then louder.

Then louder.

“What is that infernal knocking?” Grandpa Claverack said when he whipped the door open.

Jane held up the key.

“Well, if you had a key, why’d you knock?” he said, and then he turned to shuffle away.

“No, Mr. Claverack.” She’d almost said “Grandpa.” “You don’t understand. It’s the key to the horse.”

He turned.

“Your horse.” She pointed across the street in the direction of Preemie’s house and the bait-and-tackle shop. “When he told you to ‘go fish,’ it didn’t mean the key was in the ocean. It was in the—”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m Preemie’s granddaughter,” she backtracked. “I thought you should do the honors.” She turned the key in the air to make it clear. “Unlock the horse. So you can take it.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, why didn’t you just say so?”





It took longer to get the old man down the block between their houses than Jane would have thought possible. Halfway there, she thought she should run home and see if her father or Marcus was there, so they could help her carry the old carousel maker the rest of the way, but she was afraid, too, of leaving him—a wisp—on the street by himself. Not in this breezy weather.

Her father poked his head out onto the porch while Jane was helping Claverack up the stairs. “What’s going on?” he said.

“I’ve got the key.” Jane held it up. “This is Mr. Claverack.”

In the living room, the horse was reflecting sunlight from the window. Its coat seemed shinier, its mane more alive. Even the horse’s eyes seemed to have more life in them, like they sparked with recognition of their creator.

“There she is,” Claverack said. “Still a beaut after all these years.”

He stepped up to the horse then and ran a shaky hand down its hide, then down its mane. “They just don’t make’em like this anymore.”

Jane and her father stood back a bit, letting him have his moment. But when his fingers found the chain around the horse’s tail, Jane stepped forward. “The lock’s right there,” she said. “And we’ll figure out how to get the horse to your house, or to your buyer.”

“You do it,” he said. “Knees don’t bend as well as they used to.”

Jane looked at her father, who shrugged, and then she went to the lock, inserted the key, and opened it. Gingerly, she took the thick chain and unwound it so that it was no longer holding the horse. The heavy links slumped by the radiator in a pile.

“That bastard really said I could have it?”

He looked at Jane, and she could see something missing in his eyes. They looked a lot like the horse’s eyes right then, without memories or proper focus.

Jane said, “He did.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do with it?” he said. “It won’t fit through the front door of my place.”

“Your son said you had a buyer.”

“Not me, no,” he said. “He’s the one with the buyer.” He studied her again. “I just wanted to see her again. She should be in a museum, don’t you think?” He sighed and said again, “They just don’t make them like this anymore.”

“Actually,” Jane said, “I do think it should be in a museum.”

“Well then, get on the horn.”

“But what about your son, and the European buyer?”

Claverack rested a hand on the horse’s nose and seemed to look right into its empty eyes and see something that Jane couldn’t. When he looked back at her, he said, “They’ll live.”





CHAPTER seven


THINGS WERE SUDDENLY very grim on Coney the next morning. Word spread quickly through homeroom that a six-year-old girl had been hit by a stray bullet from a robbery in the building next to hers the night before and was dead. That very same night, a famous competitive eater—he’d won the hot-dog-eating contest at Nathan’s a number of times—had been killed in a hit-and-run accident on Surf Avenue at the age of 103. And while it shouldn’t have inspired nearly as much grief as the other two tragedies, the announcement that Wonderland was going to be dismantled and packed up on Saturday seemed to be the thing that pushed everyone over the edge. Even Mr. Simmons seemed incapable of talking about it without getting visibly upset. “It’s been here forever,” he kept saying, which everyone knew wasn’t exactly true, but apparently it felt that way.

In class he dimmed the lights and pulled a movie screen down from above the blackboard and said, “No field trip today, but I managed to get my hands on a few more Edison films with a Coney connection. He filmed some reenactments of the Boer War, which was also one of the larger spectacles ever staged at Dreamland.” He seemed to lose his train of thought for a second and just said, “Let’s watch.”