by Stephen King
I pointed to the briefcase. "That would go with a suit from Brooks Brothers...if they really make suits for women, that is."
She sighed. "It was a gift from my parents. My father wants me to be a lawyer, like him. So far I haven't gotten up the nerve to tell him I want to be a freelance photographer. He'll blow his stack."
We walked up Joyland Avenue in silence--except for the bonelike rattle of the fallen leaves. She looked at the covered rides, the dry fountain, the frozen horses on the merry-go-round, the empty Story Stage in the deserted Wiggle-Waggle Village.
"Kind of sad, seeing it this way. It makes me think mortal thoughts." She looked at me appraisingly. "We saw the paper. Mrs. Shoplaw made sure to leave it in our room. You did it again."
"Eddie? I just happened to be there." We had reached Madame Fortuna's shy. The lawn chairs were still leaning against it. I unfolded two and gestured for Erin to sit down. I sat beside her, then pulled a pint bottle of Old Log Cabin from the pocket of my jacket. "Cheap whiskey, but it takes the chill off."
Looking amused, she took a small nip. I took one of my own, screwed on the cap, and stowed the bottle in my pocket. Fifty yards down Joyland Avenue--our midway--I could see the tall false front of Horror House and read the drippy green letters: COME IN IF YOU DARE.
Her small hand gripped my shoulder with surprising strength. "You saved the old bastard. You did. Give yourself some credit, you."
I smiled, thinking of Lane saying I had a merit badge in modesty. Maybe; giving myself credit for stuff wasn't one of my strong points in those days.
"Will he live?"
"Probably. Freddy Dean talked to some doctors who said blah-blah-blah, patient must give up smoking, blah-blah-blah, patient must give up eating French fries, blah-blah-blah, patient must begin a regular exercise regimen."
"I can just see Eddie Parks jogging," Erin said.
"Uh-huh, with a cigarette in his mouth and a bag of pork rinds in his hand."
She giggled. The wind gusted and blew her hair around her face. In her heavy sweater and businesslike dark gray pants, she didn't look much like the flushed American beauty who'd run around Joyland in a little green dress, smiling her pretty Erin smile and coaxing people to let her take their picture with her old-fashioned camera.
"What have you got for me? What did you find out?"
She opened her briefcase and took out a folder. "Are you absolutely sure you want to get into this? Because I don't think you're going to listen, say 'Elementary, my dear Erin,' and spit out the killer's name like Sherlock Holmes."
If I needed evidence that Sherlock Holmes I wasn't, my wild idea that Eddie Parks might have been the so-called Funhouse Killer was it. I thought of telling her that I was more interested in putting the victim to rest than I was in catching the killer, but it would have sounded crazy, even factoring in Tom's experience. "I'm not expecting that, either."
"And by the way, you owe me almost forty dollars for interlibrary loan fees."
"I'm good for it."
She poked me in the ribs. "You better be. I'm not working my way through school for the fun of it."
She settled her briefcase between her ankles and opened the folder. I saw Xeroxes, two or three pages of typewritten notes, and some glossy photographs that looked like the kind the conies got when they bought the Hollywood Girls' pitch. "Okay, here we go. I started with the Charleston News and Courier article you told me about." She handed me one of the Xeroxes. "It's a Sunday piece, five thousand words of speculation and maybe eight hundred words of actual info. Read it later if you want, I'll summarize the salient points.
"Four girls. Five if you count her." She pointed down the midway at Horror House. "The first was Delight Mowbray, DeeDee to her friends. From Waycross, Georgia. White, twenty-one years old. Two or three days before she was killed, she told her good friend Jasmine Withers that she had a new boyfriend, older and very handsome. She was found beside a trail on the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp on August 31st, 1961, nine days after she disappeared. If the guy had taken her into the swamp, even a little way, she might not have been found for a much longer time."
"If ever," I said. "A body left in there would have been gator-bait in twenty minutes."
"Gross but true." She handed me another Xerox. "This is the story from the Waycross Journal-Herald." There was a photo. It showed a somber cop holding up a plaster cast of tire tracks. "The theory is that he dumped her where he cut her throat. The tire tracks were made by a truck, the story says."
"Dumped her like garbage," I said.
"Also gross but true." She handed me another Xeroxed newspaper clipping. "Here's number two. Claudine Sharp, from Rocky Mount, right here in NC. White, twenty-three years old. Found dead in a local theater. August second, 1963. The movie being shown was Lawrence of Arabia, which happens to be very long and very loud. The guy who wrote the story quotes 'an unnamed police source' as saying the guy probably cut her throat during one of the battle scenes. Pure speculation, of course. He left a bloody shirt and gloves, then must have walked out in the shirt he was wearing underneath."
"That just about has to be the guy who killed Linda Gray," I said. "Don't you think so?"
"It sure sounds like it. The cops questioned all her friends, but Claudine hadn't said anything about a new boyfriend."
"Or who she was going to the movies with that night? Not even to her parents?"
Erin gave me a patient look. "She was twenty-three, Dev, not fourteen. She lived all the way across town from her parents. Worked in a drugstore and had a little apartment above it."
"You got all that from the newspaper story?"
"Of course not. I also made some calls. Practically dialed my fingers off, if you want to know the truth. You owe me for the long-distance, too. More about Claudine Sharp later. For now, let's move on. Victim number three--according to the News and Courier story--was a girl from Santee, South Carolina. Now we're up to 1965. Eva Longbottom, age nineteen. Black. Disappeared on July fourth. Her body was found nine days later by a couple of fishermen, lying on the north bank of the Santee River. Raped and stabbed in the heart. The others were neither black nor raped. You can put her in the Funhouse Killer column if you want to, but I'm doubtful, myself. Last victim--before Linda Gray--was her."
She handed me what had to be a high school yearbook photo of a beautiful golden-haired girl. The kind who's the head cheerleader, the Homecoming Queen, dates the football quarterback...and is still liked by everyone.
"Darlene Stamnacher. Probably would have changed her last name if she'd gotten into the movie biz, which was her stated goal. White, nineteen. From Maxton, North Carolina. Disappeared on June 29th, 1967. Found two days later, after a massive search, inside a roadside lean-to in the sugar-pine williwags south of Elrod. Throat cut."
"Christ, she's beautiful. Didn't she have a steady boyfriend?"
"A girl this good-looking, why do you even ask? And that's where the police went first, only he wasn't around. He and three of his buddies had gone camping in the Blue Ridge, and they could all vouch for him. Unless he flapped his arms and flew back, it wasn't him."
"Then came Linda Gray," I said. "Number five. If they were all murdered by the same guy, that is."
Erin raised a teacherly finger. "And only five if all the guy's victims have been found. There could have been others in '62, '64, '66...you get it."
The wind gusted and moaned through the struts of the Spin.
"Now for the things that trouble me," Erin said...as if five dead girls weren't troubling enough. From her folder she took another Xerox. It was a flier--a shout, in the Talk--advertising something called Manly Wellman's Show of 1000 Wonders. It showed a couple of clowns holding up a parchment listing some of the wonders, one of which was AMERICA'S FINEST COLLECTION OF FREAKS! AND ODDITIES! There were also rides, games, fun for the kiddies, and THE WORLD'S SCARIEST FUNHOUSE!
Come in if you dare, I thought.
"You got this from interlibrary loan?" I asked.
"The Wellman carny was in Waycross when the first girl disappeared?"
"Her name was DeeDee Mowbray, and no--it had moved on by then. But it was there when DeeDee told her girlfriend that she had a new boyfriend. Now look at this. It's from the Rocky Mount Telegram. Ran for a week in mid-July of 1963. Standard advance advertising. I probably don't even need to tell you that."
It was another full-pager shouting Manly Wellman's Show of 1000 Wonders. Same two clowns holding up the same parchment, but two years after the stop in Waycross, they were also promising a ten thousand dollar cover-all Beano game, and the word freaks was nowhere to be seen.
"Was the show in town when the Sharp girl was killed in the movie theater?"
"Left the day before." She tapped the bottom of the sheet. "All you have to do is look at the dates, Dev."
I wasn't as familiar with the timeline as she was, but I didn't bother defending myself. "The third girl? Longbottom?"
"I didn't find anything about a carny in the Santee area, and I sure wouldn't have found anything about the Wellman show, because it went bust in the fall of 1964. I found that in Outdoor Trade and Industry. So far as I or any of my many librarian helpers could discover, it's the only trade magazine that covers the carny and amusement park biz."
"Jesus, Erin, you should forget photography and find yourself a rich writer or movie producer. Hire on as his research assistant."
"I'd rather take pictures. Research is too much like work. But don't lose the thread here, Devin. There was no carny in the Santee area, true, but the Eva Longbottom murder doesn't look like the other four, anyway. Not to me. No rape in the others, remember?"
"That you know of. Newspapers are coy about that stuff."
"That's right, they say molested or sexually assaulted instead of raped, but they get the point across, believe me."
"What about Darlene Shoemaker? Was there--"
"Stamnacher. These girls were murdered, Dev, the least you can do is get their names right."
"I will. Give me time."
She put a hand over mine. "Sorry. I'm throwing this at you all at once, aren't I? I've had weeks to brood over it."
"Have you been?"
"Sort of. It's pretty awful."
She was right. If you read a whodunit or see a mystery movie, you can whistle gaily past whole heaps of corpses, only interested in finding out if it was the butler or the evil stepmother. But these had been real young women. Crows had probably ripped their flesh; maggots would have infested their eyes and squirmed up their noses and into the gray meat of their brains.
"Was there a carny in the Maxton area when the Stamnacher girl was killed?"
"No, but there was a county fair about to start in Lumberton--that's the nearest town of any size. Here."
She handed me another Xerox, this one advertising the Robeson County Summer Fair. Once again, Erin tapped the sheet. This time she was calling my attention to a line reading 50 SAFE RIDES PROVIDED BY SOUTHERN STAR AMUSEMENTS. "I also looked Southern Star up in Outdoor Trade and Industry. The company's been around since after World War II. They're based in Birmingham and travel all over the south, putting up rides. Nothing so grand as the Thunderball or the Delirium Shaker, but they've got plenty of chump-shoots, and the jocks to run them."
I had to grin at that. She hadn't forgotten all the Talk, it seemed. Chump-shoots were rides that could be easily put up or taken down. If you've ever ridden the Krazy Kups or the Wild Mouse, you've been on a chump-shoot.
"I called the ride-boss at Southern Star. Said I'd worked at Joyland this summer, and was doing a term paper on the amusement industry for my sociology class. Which I just might do, you know. After all this, it would be a slam-dunk. He told me what I'd already guessed, that there's a big turnover in their line of work. He couldn't tell me offhand if they'd picked anyone up from the Wellman show, but he said it was likely--a couple of roughies here, a couple of jocks there, maybe a ride-monkey or two. So the guy who killed DeeDee and Claudine could have been at that fair, and Darlene Stamnacher could have met him. The fair wasn't officially open for business yet, but lots of townies gravitate to the local fairgrounds to watch the ride-monkeys and the local gazoonies do the setup." She looked at me levelly. "And I think that's just what happened."
"Erin, is the carny link in the story the News and Courier published after Linda Gray was killed? Or maybe I should call it the amusement link."
"Nope. Can I have another nip from your bottle? I'm cold."
"We can go inside--"
"No, it's this murder stuff that makes me cold. Every time I go over it."
I gave her the bottle, and after she'd taken her nip, I took one of my own. "Maybe you're Sherlock Holmes," I said. "What about the cops? Do you think they missed it?"
"I don't know for sure, but I think...they did. If this was a detective show on TV, there'd be one smart old cop--a Lieutenant Columbo type--who'd look at the big picture and put it together, but I guess there aren't many guys like that in real life. Besides, the big picture is hard to see because it's scattered across three states and eight years. One thing you can be sure of is that if he ever worked at Joyland, he's long gone. I'm sure the turnover at an amusement park isn't as fast as it is in a road company like Southern Star Amusements, but there are still plenty of people leaving and coming in."
I knew that for myself. Ride-jocks and concession shouters aren't exactly the most grounded people, and gazoonies went in and out like the tide.
"Now here's the other thing that troubles me," she said, and handed me her little pile of eight-by-ten photos. Printed on the white border at the bottom of each was PHOTO TAKEN BY YOUR JOYLAND "HOLLYWOOD GIRL."
I shuffled through them, and felt in need of another nip when I realized what they were: the photos showing Linda Gray and the man who had killed her. "Jesus God, Erin, these aren't newspaper pix. Where'd you get them?"
"Brenda Rafferty. I had to butter her up a little, tell her what a good mom she'd been to all us Hollywood Girls, but in the end she came through. These are fresh prints made from negatives she had in her personal files and loaned to me. Here's something interesting, Dev. You see the headband the Gray girl's wearing?"
"Yes." An Alice band, Mrs. Shoplaw had called it. A blue Alice band.
"Brenda said they fuzzed that out in the shots they gave to the newspapers. They thought it would help them nail the guy, but it never did."
"So what troubles you?"
God knew all of the pictures troubled me, even the ones where Gray and the man she was with were just passing in the background, only recognizable by her sleeveless blouse and Alice band and his baseball cap and dark glasses. In only two of them were Linda Gray and her killer sharp and clear. The first showed them at the Whirly Cups, his hand resting casually on the swell of Gray's bottom. In the other--the best of the lot--they were at the Annie Oakley Shootin' Gallery. Yet in neither was the man's face really visible. I could have passed him on the street and not known him.
Erin plucked up the Whirly Cups photo. "Look at his hand."
"Yeah, the tattoo. I see it, and I heard about it from Mrs. S. What do you make it to be? A hawk or an eagle?"
"I think an eagle, but it doesn't matter."
"Really?"
"Really. Remember I said I'd come back to Claudine Sharp? A young woman getting her throat cut in the local movie theater--during Lawrence of Arabia, no less--was big news in a little town like Rocky Mount. The Telegram ran with it for almost a month. The cops turned up exactly one lead, Dev. A girl Claudine went to high school with saw her at the snackbar and said hello. Claudine said hi right back. The girl said there was a man in sunglasses and a baseball cap next to her, but she never thought the guy was with Cla
udine, because he was a lot older. The only reason she noticed him at all was because he was wearing sunglasses in a movieshow...and because he had a tattoo on his hand."
"The bird."
"No, Dev. It was a Coptic cross. Like this." She took out another Xerox sheet and showed me. "She told the cops she thought at first it was some kind of Nazi symbol."
I looked at the cross. It was elegant, but looked nothing at all like a bird. "Two tats, one on each hand," I said at last. "The bird on one, the cross on the other."
She shook her head and gave me the Whirly Cups photo again. "Which hand's got the bird on it?"
He was standing on Linda Gray's left, encircling her waist. The hand resting on her bottom...
"The right."
"Yes. But the girl who saw him in the movie theater said the cross was on his right."
I considered this. "She made a mistake, that's all. Witnesses do it all the time."
"Sure they do. My father could talk all day on that subject. But look, Dev."
Erin handed me the Shootin' Gallery photo, the best of the bunch because they weren't just passing in the background. A roving Hollywood Girl had seen them, noted the cute pose, and snapped them, hoping for a sale. Only the guy had given her the brushoff. A hard brushoff, according to Mrs. Shoplaw. That made me remember how she had described the photo: Him snuggled up to her hip to hip, showing her how to hold the rifle, the way guys always do. The version Mrs. S. saw would have been a fuzzy newspaper reproduction, made up of little dots. This was the original, so sharp and clear I almost felt I could step into it and warn the Gray girl. He was snuggled up to her, his hand over hers on the barrel of the beebee-shooting .22, helping her aim.
It was his left hand. And there was no tattoo on it.
Erin said, "You see it, don't you?"
"There's nothing to see."
"That's the point, Dev. That's exactly the point."
"Are you saying that it was two different guys? That one with a cross on his hand killed Claudine Sharp and another one--a guy with a bird on his hand--killed Linda Gray? That doesn't seem very likely."
