Wonderland

by Jennifer Hillier

  It was safe to assume that Oz currently worked for the park in some capacity—a lot of people in Seaside did—but he never confirmed it and she didn’t ask. He was a few years older than Vanessa, maybe midforties, but his confidence and easy smile made him seem younger.

  After exactly three Ninkasi IPAs each, he picked up the tab and invited her back to his place for more drinks. She accepted without hesitation. The ease with which he’d extended the invitation suggested that he’d done this a time or two before, and the ease with which she’d accepted probably told him the same thing. Again, it didn’t matter. All she wanted was not to be alone tonight in the new house, with memories of the past jammed into boxes she had yet to unpack. It was why she’d thrown on a pair of high heels with her jeans, and why she was wearing her one good Victoria’s Secret push-up bra underneath her low-cut top. Oz only lived three blocks away, and though they should have walked over due to their level of inebriation, the cool night air would have sobered them up. Neither of them wanted that. Besides, bringing her car made for a quicker getaway in the morning.

  They had sex twice. The first time was on his living room sofa after two shots of Patrón, and it was the ripping-off-your-clothes kind of sex, sloppy and hard and fast. The second time was a bit later, in his bedroom, and they both took their time. If he was married, there was no evidence of it anywhere, not that she was looking too closely. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, and that was good enough for her.

  Vanessa watched him sleep a moment longer. Even in the minimal light of the bedroom with one side of his face pushed into the pillow, she could see the chiseled angles of his jaw, the curve of his lips, the strong shape of his brow. That, too, was unusual. In her experience, most princes turned out to be frogs once the beer goggles were off. This was a guy she would have been attracted to sober. She wondered if he’d feel the same about her—he’d certainly been complimentary about her dark hair, dark eyes, and curvy build the night before—but she wasn’t planning on sticking around to find out.

  She eased out of bed, careful not to joggle the mattress. Dressing quickly and quietly in the dark, she slipped out of the bedroom with a small sigh of relief. Her high heels were in one hand and her purse was in the other as she tiptoed down the stairs and out the door in her bare feet.

  This was the last time she would do this. Once the kids joined her on the weekend, she was done with strange beds and strange men. Her grief would have to manifest itself in a different way.

  Driving home, she couldn't help but compare Seaside to Seattle. Dubbed the “Wonder of Washington,” according to the sign at the side of the freeway as you drove in, Seaside was picturesque. Small enough to be charming, but large enough to have all the amenities, it was safe, clean, and right on the Pacific Ocean. And it was home to Wonderland, the Northwest’s largest amusement park.

  Turning onto Main Street, she could clearly see the silhouette of the Wonder Wheel and the roller coasters, though they were two miles away. Because of Wonderland, all the local businesses did well, and not just in the summer, but all year-round. Seaside had money, and lots of it. And it spared no expense in ensuring that everything always looked pretty.

  Which it did. The downtown, with its mature oak trees casting dappling shadows on the sidewalks and its old-fashioned store signs, looked like something out of a postcard. In fact, you could buy postcards in almost every shop in the downtown stretch that featured photos of all the shops in the downtown stretch. Seaside relished in its own aesthetic appeal.

  It hadn’t always been like this. In the midnineties, back when Wonderland was still called World of Wonder, the town hadn’t exactly been flourishing. The accusations against Jack Shaw were no longer being ignored, and Shaw had finally been charged with multiple counts of sexual abuse. His accusers were several young men who’d worked for him in the eighties. The ugliness of the whole thing had tainted Seaside, but right before the trial was set to begin, Shaw died.

  By then, the amusement park—and Seaside as a whole—had dried up. Many of the privately owned businesses downtown, hanging by a thread over the summer, were closed and boarded up by winter. Families moved away; tourists spent their dollars elsewhere. Vanessa had spent one fabulous summer between high school and college working at Wonderland, and during her time as a Wonder Worker, the park had never been more than half full on its busiest day.

  Still, she’d enjoyed her time in Seaside tremendously. It was the first time she’d ever been away from home. Wonderland had been her first real job, where she’d learned to make cotton candy and caramel apples. Shabby though it was in those days, Seaside was the first place she’d fallen in love. Marcus, a local boy with shaggy hair and a Harley, had brought her to the beach the night of July Fourth to watch the fireworks. They’d shared a joint, talked all night, and then he’d taken her virginity in the sand as the sun came up. That summer had been the first and last time Vanessa had ever felt like she was exactly where she wanted to be. It was the first and last time she’d ever felt free.

  And perhaps that’s why she’d decided to move her family to Seaside. She hadn’t dissected it too closely, not that anybody at her former job had asked. Most of them hadn’t even said goodbye.

  John-John had been sad at first when she’d told him they were moving. He was only seven, but old enough to have a school he liked and friends he would miss. The fact that Wonderland was in Seaside had helped sweeten things. Every kid loved Wonderland, and her son was no exception.

  Ava, on the other hand, was still not convinced. Teenage girls were difficult in the best of circumstances, and god knew these circumstances were less than ideal. At fourteen, Ava was old enough to understand why they had to leave Seattle, but she’d made it no secret that she resented Vanessa for moving them out of the city she loved. According to her daughter, going to high school at Seaside Academy in the fall was “tantamount to social suicide.” The only saving grace was that she’d been hired to work at Wonderland for the summer, which would be her first real job other than baby-sitting.

  The kids wouldn’t be in Seaside until school let out in a few days, and in the meantime they were staying with their grandmother. The current living situation was another thing that displeased Ava. Her grandmother, she complained, cooked “weird, inedible things.” Vanessa secretly agreed. Cecilia Castro—her late husband John’s mother, not Vanessa’s—had turned vegetarian at age sixty, and liked to feed the kids things like bean burgers and tofu pancakes.

  Her cell phone rang, and the call display showed Cecilia’s house. Vanessa smiled. It was too early for her mother-in-law to be calling, but not too early for John-John, who was always the first person awake.

  She put him on speaker phone. “Good morning, sweetheart.”

  “How come you’re already in the car?” he asked, sounding as if he’d been up for hours.

  “I have an early work thing.” Vanessa mentally cursed herself for having to lie. “What’s going on, monkey?”

  “I was thinking about Wonderland.” John-John had no use for small talk. She could imagine him sitting in the living room, Cecilia’s cordless phone pressed to his ear, wearing his Spider-Man pajamas. She missed him so much in that moment she almost couldn’t breathe. “Apparently the Legion of Doom is the highest and fastest roller coaster in the world.”

  “In the world?” Vanessa said indulgently, knowing it wasn’t. “Even taller and faster than Space Mountain at Disneyland?”

  “Apparently,” John-John said, because “apparently” was his new favorite word. “I should be big enough to go on it now. I wasn’t last year, remember?”

  Vanessa remembered. Wonderland had long been an annual summer getaway for the Castro family. They’d rent a beach house, and Frank Greenberg, John’s old Army buddy who lived in Seaside, would be over for dinner almost every night. At the end of the week, they’d all go to Wonderland together, saying goodbye to Frank after Sunday brunch before
heading home. Every August, every year, for nine years running.

  But not this year. It was hard to believe how much had changed in six short months.

  “If you’re tall enough, then the Legion of Doom it is,” Vanessa said. “Is your grandmother up?”

  “Yes. She’s making breakfast.”

  “What about your sister?”

  “I tried to wake her but she threw a pillow at me and yelled at me to get out of her room. Apparently she was up late last night having a text fight with some boy. She said he’s a douche. What’s a douche?”

  “It’s, uh . . .” Vanessa scrambled to think of an appropriate way to explain it, realized she couldn’t, then said, “It’s a bad word. Don’t say it again.”

  “Okay. Are you coming to pick us up tomorrow?”

  “Not tomorrow, sweetheart. I’ll see you on the weekend, remember? The house is almost unpacked and ready to go.” Except for your dad’s things, she thought, but didn’t say. She pulled into her driveway.

  “Okay.” John-John was always so agreeable. “I have to go. Grandma says my omelet is ready.” He lowered his voice. “It smells weird. She put vegan cheese in it.”

  Vanessa laughed. “Eat it anyway, it’s good for you. I love you. I’ll call you tonight.”

  She disconnected and let herself into the house. Dropping her keys onto the table, she headed straight for the kitchen, making a point not to look at the boxes in the living room still left to unpack. She’d left them for last, not quite sure what she was going to do with the contents inside. They were John’s things, after all.

  She turned on the coffeemaker and stared out the kitchen window. Wonderland was in the distance, and she could clearly see the looping roller coaster that was the Legion of Doom, that hopefully John-John was now big enough to ride. He’d be terribly disappointed if he wasn’t, and Vanessa didn’t think she could take seeing her kids any more disappointed than they already were. Beside the roller coaster was the giant Wonder Wheel, all twinkling lights and colorful chairs swaying slightly in the breeze.

  The loneliness consumed her then. Taking a seat at the table, she cried for a good five minutes. Then she shook it off, as she’d been able to do every day over the past week, and went upstairs to take a hot shower. She needed to wash the scent of the man from the night before off her body. As she soaped, Vanessa prayed that she wouldn’t see Oz—or whatever his real name was—again. There was no room in her life for anything complicated, even if she’d liked him a bit more than she was willing to admit.

  An hour later, hair clean and dressed in fresh clothes, she walked through the glass doors into the Seaside Police Department, gun holstered at her hip. Though it was only her second time here, the officer staffing the reception desk recognized her the moment she entered.

  “Good morning, Deputy Chief,” he said. “Welcome to Seaside PD.”

  THREE

  Oscar Trejo, vice president of operations for Wonderland Amusement Park, walked across the midway to the nearest trash can and neatly vomited his breakfast into it. He was dismayed to notice that the scrambled eggs he’d whipped up that morning, a couple hours after his date for the night had snuck out, looked almost the same coming up as it had going down.

  The guy under the Wonder Wheel had been dead for a while, it seemed. Oscar had assumed he was sleeping, as they’d had incidents with homeless people sleeping inside the park before. But when he shook the man’s shoulder, he’d rolled over, and that’s when Oscar’s stomach turned. The stench in the air wasn’t because the guy was homeless. It was because he was dead, his face wholly unrecognizable because, well, he no longer had a face. Something—some kind of wild animal by the looks of it—had eaten most of it away, and what was left was a bloody stump Oscar had only seen in movies. Were it not for the stench of decay, he might have thought that someone from Elm Street had misplaced a prop.

  He couldn’t even begin to imagine how it had gotten here. It sure as hell hadn’t been here the day before—a decomposing human body in the middle of the park would not have gone unnoticed.

  The odor—a sickly sweet rot that seemed to permeate the air in a way no other smell ever had—hit Oscar again, and this time he heaved until his stomach was empty. The alcohol he’d consumed the night before wasn’t helping matters. Fishing a tissue out of his pocket, he dabbed at his mouth, and then pulled out his phone to call Glenn Hovey. The security guard was still on duty for another half hour, and Oscar was aggravated that it hadn’t been Hovey who’d discovered the body instead of him.

  The security guard didn’t answer. Cursing, Oscar left a message for Hovey to call him back, then tried the landline for the security office. Again, no answer. Either Hovey was in the bathroom watching something he shouldn’t on his iPad, or the man hadn’t shown up for his overnight shift. Again.

  Chewing his bottom lip, Oscar called Bianca Bishop. It wasn’t a call he wanted to make, but of course he had to. However, the CEO of Wonderland didn’t answer, either. Where the fuck was everybody?

  “It’s too early in the morning for this bullshit,” he said to himself, grimacing at the acidic taste of regurgitated eggs now present in his mouth. But really, was it ever convenient to find a dead body at work? It wasn’t like finding a dead rabbit, or a dead rat, both of which turned up not infrequently, in which case he could just call someone in the maintenance department and have it removed. A dead human being was a whole different level of inconvenience, and while he felt bad thinking of it that way, it didn’t make it any less true.

  Grabbing a bottle of water from his golf cart, Oscar rinsed his mouth, trying to dilute the taste of the vomit. He mentally ran through his options.

  Calling 9-1-1 was the obvious first course of action. But this was Wonderland. Things were done a certain way at the park, and if he broke protocol—which, in this scenario, meant calling 9-1-1 before getting Bianca Bishop on the phone—he was risking a clusterfuck. The fire department, the cops, and the paramedics would show up with their lights flashing, alerting the public that something terrible had just happened here. There’d be people everywhere, investigating, examining, scrutinizing, gathering whatever evidence they could find to explain the dead body and solve whatever crime had been committed. Reporters would appear and start asking questions. Wonderland would be the leading story on the news by noon. The publicity would be terrible, and Bianca Bishop’s pretty young head would explode. And then she’d blame Oscar, even though it wasn’t his fault.

  But if he didn’t call 9-1-1 and instead went to find his boss, he risked somebody else finding the body. The first wave of Wonder Workers were scheduled to show up in ten minutes, and there was no way they wouldn’t find it, because it was currently rotting in the midway for everyone to see. One of the Wonder Workers would immediately call 9-1-1, which of course was the right thing do, which would result in the fire department, cops, paramedics, and flashing lights. Reporters would appear. The park would be on the news by noon. But in this scenario, pictures were bound to show up on social media. Because that’s what the Wonder Workers did these days—they documented every aspect of their lives on Facebook and Twitter for the entire world to see. The pictures would go viral, Bianca’s head would explode, and the whole thing would still be Oscar’s fault.

  He tried calling Bianca one last time. She did have an apartment right here in the park, on the top floor of the administrative building on the east corner, but he didn’t know if she was there and he wasn’t willing to go and knock. Last time he did that, she’d been in bed with someone. Though Oscar and the CEO weren’t lovers anymore, he preferred not to know anything about her personal relationships if he could help it.

  The call went to voice mail again, and he made his decision. He sent Bianca a brief text message describing what he’d found, and then with a big sigh, called 9-1-1.

  After listening to his description of the scene and asking a few pointed questions for cl
arification, the emergency dispatcher assured Oscar that Seaside PD was on their way. As was protocol, the fire department and the paramedics would be coming as well. The dispatcher’s voice sounded kind of familiar and he briefly wondered if it was someone he’d dated a few years back. But of course that would be inappropriate to ask while making an emergency call. All Oscar could do was hang up and wait for the fanfare to start. A dead body turning up anywhere in Seaside was always a big deal, but a dead body at Wonderland was something else altogether.

  He trudged back to his purple golf cart. The park’s front gates required an access card at this time of the morning; he’d have to drive back to the entrance to let everybody in.

  As he gunned it through the park, Oscar thought, and not for the first time, how different his life might have been if he had never come back to Seaside. If he had stayed in the army instead of coming back to his hometown to work for his good friend Nick Bishop, who’d just bought the amusement park they’d both worked at as teenagers, and who’d had visions of turning it into a much different place. He had helped Nicky rebuild the park from the ground up, and it really should have been Oscar in charge of the park now, instead of Nicky’s niece, Bianca.

  No, he wasn’t bitter, but he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t disappointed.

  The wail of sirens grew louder and Oscar stepped on the gas. Bianca would hit the roof when she got his message, that was as certain as the sun rising. All he could hope for was that she’d take her anger out on whichever teenage Wonder Worker she was currently fucking, instead of him.

  FOUR