Wonderland

by Jennifer Hillier

  John Castro had always been a little “moody,” according to her mother, but the proper word, as Ava had learned a couple of years ago, was bipolar. John Castro would spend weeks in a “low state”—another one of her mother’s made-up terms—and when he was like that, when he was severely depressed, he wouldn’t come out of the spare room for days on end. He “wasn’t feeling well,” he would mumble to Ava whenever she dared to ask, and eventually she learned not to ask because it seemed to upset him.

  Mind you, it wasn’t that weird, because his moods were all Ava had ever known. Not until she’d gotten older, and had started spending more time at her friends’ houses, had she begun to suspect that her home life wasn’t that typical, and that it wasn’t normal for her dad to sleep all day and be awake all night watching old movies and smoking like a chimney, and not go to work. That it wasn’t okay that her dad sometimes didn’t shower for a week, or brush his teeth, or eat anything.

  But when he was “up”—which was another word the in-denial Vanessa Castro liked to use—well, those were the good times. The house was a completely different place when her dad was manic. Because when John Castro was manic, it was exciting. He would shower every day and dress to the nines, his hair perfectly combed and his eyes bright. He would talk a mile a minute, filled with grandiose plans and spontaneous ideas, and he would make her mom laugh. He would work ten or twelve hours a day at the security consulting firm he’d started, and come home and still have a ton of energy. He’d take the family out on shopping sprees, buying Ava and John-John whatever they wanted, and everybody would accuse Vanessa Castro of being a “party pooper” because she’d make them return everything, because someone had to be financially responsible. Once, her dad had surprised her mom with a Lexus, which she’d demanded he take back to the dealership immediately. And another time, he’d surprised the entire family—her grandmother included—with a trip to Italy, to which her mom, after much protestation, had eventually acquiesced.

  And that’s how it went. Life revolved around John Castro’s “moods.” As awesome as it was when he was “up,” there was always the inevitable crash, followed by weeks of darkness. Then he would come out of it and be just even, blissfully normal, for months, sometimes for as long as a year. And then something would trigger him, either up or down.

  John Castro refused to admit that he had a problem. His family physician and two different psychiatrists had diagnosed him with bipolar disorder, but her dad refused to believe them. “They’re paid to prescribe drugs,” he would say. “It’s all a conspiracy to sell me pills that make my mind dull and my body fat. I’m fine.”

  And then, in early December, after months of fighting with her mom about some old boyfriend of hers named Marcus Henry, John Castro crashed, for the last time. He fell back into his private hell, the place where everything was black and all he could do was sleep and sleep until it passed. And while it wasn’t the first time Ava had seen him like this, it definitely seemed to be the worst. John Castro believed his wife was cheating on him.

  “Your son is paranoid,” Ava had overheard her mother say on more than one occasion to Cecilia Castro. “It’s a symptom of the bipolar. He needs to be on medication.”

  “You don’t think I’ve tried?” her grandmother would say. “He won’t take them. The one time in his twenties he did, he complained they made him feel stupid.”

  Scared, Ava had finally tried to talk to her father herself. He had been in the spare room for almost two weeks, sleeping around the clock, and Christmas was coming. She was scared he would sleep right through the holidays. She had sat on the edge of the bed for an hour until he’d woken up, and then she’d forced her fear aside and had spoken from the heart.

  “Daddy, you need help,” she said. “You’re bipolar, and it sucks, but it isn’t your fault. You have, like, a chemical imbalance in your brain, but they can fix it. They make all kinds of medications that can help you. And if you don’t like the first one, we can try a different one, as many as it takes until you feel normal.” The tears had come then. “Daddy, please. You can’t live like this. Mom can’t live like this. We need you to get better.”

  He’d looked at her, his eyes bloodshot, his hair sticking up like a crazy man’s, and for a split second Ava thought he might hit her. Not that he’d ever laid a hand on her, but she always thought that if he ever did, it would be when his mood was black.

  “Don’t you want to get better?” Ava said in a small voice. “Don’t you want to feel . . . even?”

  “No, I don’t,” he finally said. His voice was hoarse from underuse, and his lips were so chapped they looked like a cracked glazed doughnut. “Because as bad as this is, when the highs come, they’re so good, honey. They’re just so good.”

  “But it’s not fair to us,” Ava said. “Daddy, it’s scary when you’re like this, when you sleep for days and you don’t talk to us. And it’s scary when you’re ‘up,’ too, because we never know what you’re going to say or do, and Mom is always scared we’re going to run out of money. I like it best when you’re even. When you go to work like other dads, and then you come home and just have dinner with us and talk about normal things. I imagine that it’s boring for you, but . . . it’s what we need from you, Daddy. Please.”

  “I’ll think about it, honey,” John Castro said. “I promise.”

  “You’ll see the doctor?”

  “I said I’ll think about it.” Her father’s voice had been firm. “Now leave me alone, please. I’m not feeling well and I need to sleep.”

  He died nine days later. Her mom had been the one to find his body.

  The official cause of death was a gunshot wound, and her mother to this day was adamant that it was an accident. Her dad’s gun-cleaning products had been laid out on his worktable in the garage where he’d died. Her theory was that he had forgotten to unload his weapon before he’d begun to clean it. The gun had gone off, killing him instantly.

  The medical examiner’s report, which Ava had found buried in her mother’s underwear drawer, backed this up. The bullet had entered the skull just above the nose, an unlikely place if somebody was committing suicide—which had been Ava’s first thought—and the trajectory of the bullet, which was upward, also suggested an accidental but self-inflicted gunshot wound.

  But Ava wasn’t stupid. She knew her dad had been drinking that day; she’d smelled it on his breath when she’d come home briefly to get her stuff before heading over to McKenzie’s house for a sleepover. She also knew that he’d had an old friend over, an old army buddy named Frank Greenberg. They’d served all three tours together, and her mom often called Frank when her dad was particularly low, as sometimes Frank was the only one who could reach her husband. And yet none of that was in the official report detailing John Castro’s death. Frank Greenberg’s name wasn’t mentioned anywhere.

  A few days after the funeral, Ava asked her mother about Frank. Vanessa Castro had looked her daughter in the eye and said, in a firmer tone than she’d ever heard before, “No, Ava. It’s not Frank’s fault that your father’s dead. And don’t you dare ask me that again. Frank and your father were best friends, and they loved each other, and his loss is almost as great as ours.”

  Ava would probably never know what really happened, but what she did know was that she blamed both her mother and her grandmother for her father’s death. As far as she was concerned, neither of them had done enough to help him. But Ava was especially angry at her mother. Her mom was the one having the affair with Marcus Henry, which made her dad’s sickness and paranoia worse, which was the reason her dad was drinking, and the reason he was dead. And her mother had supposedly done something to help Marcus Henry get acquitted of those drug charges, which was the reason Seattle PD had forced her out.

  And now they all lived in Seaside, population who-gives-a-fuck. Where Frank Greenberg—good old Uncle Frank, of all people—had become mayor. Because Seaside w
as his hometown.

  Wonderland was the only good thing Ava had right now. She had a lot of happy memories here, and she’d been thrilled to get the job, even though it was her mother’s idea that she apply. Her plan was to work here year-round during high school, earning as much money as she could, and then she and McKenzie would apply to college together, someplace far away like New York or Boston. And she would never, ever come back.

  A loud snore jolted her out of her reverie, and Ava turned to see Xander slumped in his chair, sleeping. Even with his eyes closed and his mouth hanging open, he was adorable. Those long legs, his lean-but-still-muscular arms, the perfectly mussed-up blond hair. Sure, he was four years older, but hey, he did say he thought she looked sixteen.

  She quietly snapped a couple of pictures of him sleeping and texted them to McKenzie. Her friend texted back instantly with OMG SO GORG ur so lucky!!!! Are u feeling better now after the fight with ur mom???

  Much better, Ava texted back. Smiling, she slipped her phone back into her pocket—employees seen texting during a shift would be reprimanded—and settled in to watch the rest of the cheesy orientation video. Beside her, Xander snored, and in that moment, everything was just fine.

  TWELVE

  Vanessa had never regretted anything faster or more intensely than that slap. She had never even come close to spanking or slapping either one of her children before, and she was painfully ashamed she had lost her temper with Ava. Her daughter was refusing to speak to her, and Vanessa didn’t know how to fix the relationship that now seemed even more tenuous than before.

  But she’d just wanted Ava to stop. Because everything her daughter had said to her was true. She had cheated on John, but it wasn’t the long drawn-out affair that the press made it out to be. It was one time, with her old boyfriend Marcus Henry, after she and John had had a fight. And she had paid dearly for that mistake.

  “You used me,” she’d said to Marcus toward the end of his trial. She’d gone to visit him in prison, and he’d sat there, staring at her with a smug expression. She wanted to claw his eyes out. “You slept with me so it would taint your trial, and it’s going to cost me my job, you sonofabitch. What happened to you?”

  “I’m the same person I’ve always been,” Marcus said with a shrug. “And so are you. We used each other. You were lonely in your marriage, and you needed me, so I was there. And when it came up that we slept together, I didn’t lie about it.”

  “It didn’t come up. Your lawyers brought it up.”

  “I did what I had to do,” he said, his eyes meeting hers. She had told him things the night they were together, things about John that she probably shouldn’t have admitted to anyone, ever. “Nobody should understand that better than you. We’re survivors, you and me. We’ll do whatever it takes, won’t we?”

  Marcus’s lawyers suggested during the trial that Vanessa might have had access to drugs that had gone missing from the evidence locker. It didn’t matter that the Office of Professional Accountability had cleared her a month later. It was enough for reasonable doubt, and Marcus Henry had walked. Right alongside any chance Vanessa had of maintaining her credibility at Seattle PD.

  She had made mistakes, lots of them. She couldn’t change the past. All she wanted was for her kids to be happy and healthy, and for the three of them to build a new life in Seaside.

  Vanessa was wrapping up her first official meeting with Earl Schultz, and it was not going well. The chief of police was pushing hard for her to close the Homeless Harry case, but she couldn’t move any faster than she was. Both Glenn Hovey and the Wonder Wheel Kid were still MIA, and no new leads had popped up.

  “That picture of the dead guy that’s all over the Web is killing the park, Castro.” Earl’s hound dog eyes were fixed intently on her face. “We need to reassure the public that everything’s fine at Wonderland, that what happened is an isolated thing, and that there isn’t some killer running around.”

  “All due respect, Chief, there could be some killer running around. How’s the ID going?”

  “Nothing yet. His prints aren’t in the system, dental records should be back in a few days.”

  “What about the DNA?”

  “Could be weeks. Maybe a month. Lab’s backed up.” The police chief cracked his knuckles. His hands were the size of Christmas hams. “Speaking of dental, did Gloria tell you that he’s younger than we originally thought?”

  Vanessa frowned. In her experience, a medical examiner’s first impression was usually correct. “I thought she put him somewhere between thirty to forty.”

  “She thought so at first, because of the state of the body before he died,” Earl said. “Emaciation, muscle atrophy, the condition of the hair and skin—all of it pointed to someone older. But now she’s thinking he’s closer to twenty. Give or take a year.”

  “That’s a big difference. What changed her mind?”

  “His wisdom teeth haven’t come in yet.”

  “Oh,” Vanessa said. And now they never would. “That’ll do it. Did she confirm cause of death?”

  “Blunt-force trauma to the back of the head. Something with a rounded edge. She thinks a baseball bat.”

  “And his face?”

  “He was chewed up within the last couple days. Definitely by a rat.” Earl shuddered slightly. “His clothes contained quite a bit of tree sap, suggesting he might have been dumped in the woods originally. Rat might have got him there. Anyway, you let me worry about the ID. What I need you to work on is who was at the park before the body was found.”

  “I’m doing my best, but without an ID, everybody who worked at Wonderland is a suspect,” Vanessa said. “Hell, everybody who would know how to sneak into Wonderland is also a suspect. It’s big pool, Chief.”

  “Then keep working on the security guard and the Wonder Wheel Kid. You gotta close this case quick, Castro, or at the very minimum give me something to reassure the public they’re safe. You know why I don’t mind them calling the dead guy Homeless Harry?” Earl didn’t wait for her to respond. “Because nobody gives a shit whether a homeless guy’s dead. Let’s pray this guy doesn’t turn out to be somebody important, because if he does, the bad publicity’s only going to get worse.”

  “All due respect, Chief,” Vanessa said again, “but everyone’s life matters, whether he was homeless or somebody important. And why are we so concerned about Wonderland’s bad publicity? We have enough to work on without having to worry about that.”

  “Because if Wonderland tanks, Seaside tanks. If you don’t get this case moving, I’ll be forced to find someone who can. But I’d rather it be you, so that people will stop assuming that Mayor Greenberg strong-armed me into hiring you. Which you and I both know he did, but nobody else has to know that.” Earl looked at her sternly. “Put in whatever overtime you need to, pull whatever manpower you need to. I’d be more involved if I could, but I’m head of this charity gala next week and all of Seaside’s finest are going to be there. They’re all going to ask me about Homeless Harry if we don’t have it locked up by then, so don’t make a fool out of me, understand?”

  Vanessa left her boss’s office. Donnie looked up from his desk, and she motioned for him to come and talk to her.

  “What’s going on?” They went into her office and the young detective closed the door behind him.

  She quickly got him up to speed with the information Earl had just given her. “I feel like I’m missing an integral piece of information, and it’s bugging me. I can’t accept that the Wonder Wheel Kid isn’t somehow tied to Homeless Harry, because it’s just too goddamned coincidental that both showed up at the park the same morning. How are you making out with the surveillance footage?”

  “I’ve watched it half a dozen times,” Donnie said. “There’s nothing useful on it.”

  “Earl gave me the go-ahead to do whatever it takes to solve this, so I might call a computer guy I
worked with at Seattle PD. He freelances. Maybe he’ll find something on it that can piece together what happened that morning.”

  He looked surprised. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt.”

  “Okay, so we know Blake’s a free climber. Climbing the wheel seems to be in keeping with his hobby, something he’d totally want to do.” Vanessa was thinking hard. “But why wear the uniform? He has to know that a picture like that, with the middle finger and the purple shirt, would get him fired.”

  “Maybe he wanted to quit.”

  “Okay, but why? What happened? He’s been with the park for years. There’s nothing in his employee file to say that he’s been a problem, or had any issues. If he wanted to quit, why not just quit? Why the need to go out with such a bang?”

  “I guess we’ll ask him that when we talk to him.” Donnie rubbed his head for a good ten seconds, something she noticed he did whenever he was thinking. It reminded her of John-John, who did the same thing, only her son’s hair would stick up in tufts afterward. Donnie’s was too short.

  “But that’s the thing,” Vanessa said. “He’s nowhere to be found. You’ve been monitoring his social media account. Has he posted anything since the picture?”

  “Nothing. No comments, no photos, nothing.” Donnie paused. “Which, yeah, seems unusual for a kid who liked to post everything he was doing online. But you said his dad wasn’t concerned?”

  “Not even a little bit,” Vanessa said. “I got the impression they weren’t super close, and that Blake pretty much does his own thing.”

  “This would be so much easier if we could just figure out who Homeless Harry was,” Donnie said. “It’s shitty of Earl to push you so hard to close this when you have no idea who’s even been killed.”