Boardwalk Cottage

by Barbara Cool Lee

  "Not real horses," their mother explained with a laugh, following after them.

  Feed the horses. The little girl's voice in unknowing imitation of Zac's desperate plea echoed inside her head. What did Zac mean? She remembered Kyle's deep drawl: "This isn't the Maltese Falcon, honey."

  "Hey, Charlie," she said. "You know those projects Zac was always working on?"

  "Yeah. I always fell asleep in class in school, so I never understood half of what he was talkin' about."

  "Did he ever say anything about a project with horses?"

  "Horses?" She thought a bit. "No, can't say that I remember him saying anything about horses. Why?"

  "Hey! What about the rides, like, for example, the carousel?"

  But she just looked blank. "Not that I remember. And if he did, I think I'd remember. He talked so much. He was a friendly kid, like I said. But you could ask Jan and Steve, they work the carousel most days."

  "And did you ever see Windy?"

  But there Charlie just shrugged. "I don't remember her. She must not have worked the same shifts as me." She stood up. "Here come some people, so I'll go in the back now."

  "I can't imagine how that guy's holding up," she said. "Them Madrigals may be rich, but all the money in the world wouldn't help if you lost your kid."

  On her lunch break, she grabbed another of Mama Thu's hot dogs, and was glad the flirtatious guy wasn't on duty this time. The sun was out, and tourists streamed along the promenade, some stopping to sit on the benches that gave perfect close-up views of the waves. She gazed out at the pristine white sails dotting the deep Pacific blue of the bay. The sea gulls swooped and arced over the beach in the warm breeze.

  She grabbed flyers from her knapsack and taped one to the back of every bench along the promenade, and asked every tourist sitting on a bench if they recognized the faces on the flyer. All she got were a couple of "I saw them on the news last night," and curious looks at her, the woman with amnesia who was probably hiding something.

  So she headed for the carousel.

  When she stepped into the carousel building, she had to cover her ears against the roar of the music blaring from the ride.

  "It attracts customers," someone shouted from behind her.

  She turned around. A man in a ride operator's uniform grinned at her. "What?" she asked.

  "The music," he said. He gestured to the air around them that was filled with the ear-piercing waltz.

  "Well, it definitely gets your attention," she shouted back. "I'm Hallie Reed." She handed him a flyer.

  "I'm Steve," he said. "That's Jan." He pointed to a woman standing on the carousel platform. She waved back.

  Steve pressed the button to start the ride and the platform, and Jan, began to move. Jan drifted by, holding onto one of the outside poles. "I hear the 'Carousel Waltz' in my sleep," she shouted over the roar with a grin.

  "Let's talk over here," Steve said to Hallie. He pointed to a spot just outside the building, still within sight of the control panel.

  "They like to keep the volume high to add to the atmosphere," he explained when they were outside the building and were able to talk a little more easily. He looked down at the flyer in his hand. "Yeah. You're the one with amnesia."

  Hallie started to correct him, but then just nodded. "Yeah." She thought of something. "So the music machine—is it a band organ?"

  The guy shrugged. "It's a cd player hooked up to big speakers. Why?"

  "Nothing. So have you seen anything unusual around recently?"

  "You mean something to do with Windy and Zac?"

  "I mean anything—even something small."

  "Nothing springs to mind—except seeing the boss kissing you, of course."

  Hallie blushed. "That was you? I was so flustered I didn't even get a good look at you."

  "Yeah, I got the impression I wasn't the most important thing on your mind." He grinned at her.

  Hallie cleared her throat, and tried to sound like she knew what she was doing. "Other than that little, um, incident, have you noticed anything?"

  He shook his head.

  "Have you seen any strangers hanging around?"

  Steve looked at the line of tourists in front of the ride. "Strangers?"

  "I guess that's not a good question. I mean anybody who acted strange, lurked around for no good reason?"

  "Oh. You mean drooling axe murderers."

  She sighed. "Yeah. I guess that's what I mean."

  "Nope. Not a one. I've already been through these questions twice."

  "Twice?"

  Yeah. First with the police, and then with Mr. Madrigal. Sorry I can't help you."

  "I guess they've covered the park pretty thoroughly. Sorry to bother you. Oh!" She thought of something. "Did anybody ask you about a gray pickup truck?"

  "Yup. That too. But I don't usually leave the park during the day, so I don't know how many cars might come and go from the parking lot while I'm working. And anyway, somebody could park up on Calle Principal and walk—it's only a few blocks."

  The carousel stopped and a new group of passengers got on. Hallie and Steve went back inside.

  "Do you mind if I look around at the ride?" she asked.

  "Help yourself," he said, and went back to work.

  Hallie circled around the carousel. She squatted down and looked at the undercarriage of the platform. Nothing.

  She looked up at the ceiling, brightly painted to imitate a circus tent. Nothing unusual there. Well, what did she expect to find? It was a dead end.

  She looked up again. Tom's office would be right overhead, above that circus-tent ceiling. She still had a little more time left on her lunch hour. She sighed, and went out the back door of the carousel and made her way upstairs.

  She stopped at the rack of timecards. Down the hall she could hear the creak of a chair in Tom's office.

  She looked at the timecards. "Miller, Sara; Martinez, Mary," she muttered. "Here we go: Madrigal, Christopher; Madrigal, Windy; Madrigal, Zachary." Today was Wednesday. She picked up Zac's card. Sure enough, he'd clocked out at 11:30 Monday morning, and hadn't been in since.

  She looked at Chris's card. On the day Zac disappeared Chris had worked the whole day, with a check-out time of 5 p.m. Chris had called them after he got off work, and his message had been on the tape after Zac's. So Zac had called before then. None of this was news.

  Windy's card showed she'd clocked out right before picking her up.

  This was getting her nowhere.

  Hallie went through the cards, looking at any familiar names. Charlie worked all day Monday, until 10 p.m.; Jan and Steve worked all day. Oh well. So much for her detective abilities.

  "What're you doing?" Tom barked at her.

  Hallie jumped and dropped a stack of timecards on the floor. She scrambled around on the floor trying to pick them all up. Her hands shook and she shoved them in her pockets. She hated men who yelled.

  "What're you doing?" Tom repeated, a bit softer.

  She looked up at him from her spot on the floor, resisting the instinct to cower when he growled at her. "Um," she cleared her throat. What was the matter with her? She wasn't doing anything wrong. Why did a man's loud voice still send such a shiver of fear through her? She pulled her scarred hands out of her pockets and made herself calmly pick up the timecards and scramble to her feet.

  She forced herself to meet Tom's glaring eyes. "I was looking at the timecards," she explained, trying to keep that familiar placating tone from creeping into her voice. She cleared her throat again, and spoke firmly. "I'm helping Kyle in the search, and I was looking for clues."

  Tom raised an eyebrow. "By throwing the timecards on the floor?"

  She glared back at him. "I tend to drop things when somebody yells in my face."

  "Touché." He grinned at her. Hallie was surprised. All of a sudden he looked younger, and Hallie was startled by the realization that Tom was probably not more than his early 50s. Somehow she'd thought he was an old ma
n, with his graying hair and heavy, stooped posture.

  The smile quickly vanished behind the glum mask again, and Tom turned away. But now Hallie saw that mask for what it was: it wasn't age that made Tom that way—she knew in her heart Kyle would still be the same warm and funny man when his hair was peppered with gray. And somehow she doubted that even the alcohol that apparently drugged the long days Tom spent at his desk was the cause of his gloom. That was part of his mask, too. But there was something else bothering him, some pressure that had weighed him down for so long that he could no longer make the effort to lift it.

  "The cops have already checked all that stuff. But be my guest. Just don't leave a mess," he muttered to her. "We've got enough problems around here without your meddling." He went back to his office.

  When she left the building, her hands were still shaking. She spotted a tall man walking ahead of her on the promenade. "Kyle!" she shouted over the carousel's roar. He turned around and made his way through the crowd to her.

  "Did you find anything?" she asked.

  "Nada." He shook his head. "How about you?"

  "Nope—well...."

  "What?"

  "Well, Tom acted a little strange." She told Kyle about her run-in with his uncle.

  Kyle dismissed her with a wave of his hand. "You shouldn't let Tom get to you. He's just a grouch."

  "That's a nice word for it. But—" she paused. "Don't you think he acts kind of suspicious?"

  "Oh, come on, Hallie. Tom couldn't have anything to do with all this."

  "Hey, you asked me to use my imagination...."

  "And that's all you could come up with?" Kyle turned away from her, frustrated.

  "Well, you asked," she said defensively.

  "Yeah, but Tom's family. He's a jerk, but he's a family jerk. You can't go accusing my own uncle of being, well, whatever you're accusing him of."

  She hadn't wanted to get involved in this in the first place. Kyle was the one who insisted she should use her so-called vivid imagination. She never intended to have anything to do with him, and then he'd forced her to give in with that lost puppy dog look of his. "Fine," she said. "I'm trying to come up with something. We don't have anything to go on, Kyle!" She walked away and left him standing alone on the promenade.

  He ran after her. "I'm sorry. I don't really expect you to find the answers. I'm just—" he paused. "I'm just scared, Hallie."

  "It's okay," she whispered. "I am, too. And so's Tom, I bet. We're all scared." She put her arms around him, giving him a big hug that he finally returned.

  "I don't know what to do," he muttered. "I just don't know."

  "I'll sit in the back," she said to Charlie when she got back to the haunted cottage.

  "Oh, okay," Charlie said. She handed Hallie a flashlight. "You'll need this until your eyes get used to the dark."

  Hallie walked through the arched doorway leading to the back and let the darkness swallow her up. Once inside, she took deep breaths of the cool, slightly musty air, forcing herself to calm down. All her nerves seemed stretched taut, ready to snap.

  She felt like her emotions were on a roller coaster ride. Every time she vowed to stay away from Kyle, he somehow managed to get back under her skin. She never could understand men—Kyle drove her crazy and Tom scared her half to death.

  Why had the conversation with Tom unnerved her so much? She knew why. A lifetime's training in avoiding violent men's anger had taught her to fear confrontations. She hated that streak of cowardice in herself. "You look brave to me," Kyle had said before, but he didn't know how she trembled when a man just looked at her the wrong way.

  She shoved her hands in her pockets to stop their shaking. She longed to run for the shelter of Kyle's arms, and cursed herself for that weakness. That was a familiar trap, looking for a man to protect her from life. No. She was going to have to learn to stand up for herself.

  Hallie heard a buzz from a speaker overhead, and heard the sound of a car heading down the track toward the ride's entrance.

  She flicked on the flashlight long enough to step off the track and then turned off the light as the car full of giggling kids swept past just a couple of feet away from her.

  She stood there for a few minutes until her eyes adjusted to the darkness, then, when the next car came through, she followed behind it along the track, watching as it went past each display.

  Now that her eyes had gotten used to the dark, she could see the black-painted walls on each side, and the metallic reflection of the track on the floor. She noticed that there were electric eyes set at ground level beside the track, and as the car passed in front of each one, it triggered the next mechanical display to start its macabre show.

  She followed more cars down the track, watching the passengers looking around, not seeing her standing only a few feet away from them.

  Over and over again they went past each display: King Kong, the headless horseman holding his laughing head under his arm, the school bus that "almost" crashed into the track, the vampire sucking on the neck of his scantily clad victim, and on and on.

  After a while she found herself giggling at the cartoonish displays, their fake violence ironically cheering her up and making her forget about her real fears.

  The last car disappeared down the track, and the building was silent around her. She stood in the cool blackness next to the little green alien, shuffling her feet on the floor, waiting for another car to come through.

  A pungent, smoky odor rose up from the floor. She clicked on the flashlight and pointed it at her feet. A few cigarette butts were crushed on the floor. She bent down to take a look. There must be a half-dozen of them, all stubbed out on this spot.

  So Charlie "goes nuts without a cigarette," eh? Well, that explained why she was so eager to stay back here and leave Hallie out front. She'd have to say something to her. She hated confrontations, but Kyle's description of the ferocious, quick-burning fire that gutted the park was vivid enough to make confronting Charlie important.

  Behind her, the axe murderer went into action, chopping off the old lady's head with a blood-curdling scream.

  That was odd. She was alone in here. What had triggered that display?

  She stood up and looked down the track toward the axe murderer. She walked down the track, listening to the last echo as the scream died away. She turned her flashlight on and pointed it toward the display. When she got close she could see that it had already wound to a stop and reset itself. The little old lady mannequin sat frozen in her rocking chair, knitting needles poised over an afghan, with the maniacal axe-wielding murderer standing just behind her. She swept her flashlight over both figures, images of mannequins come to life springing to her mind from some late-night horror movie. She saw that the figures were dusty, and rather crudely painted—convincing enough in the dark, but not very lifelike with a bright light trained on them. She could see that Kyle had been right—the axe murderer had a surfer's dark tan and his original Hawaiian shirt had been painted black, but the flowers were still faintly visible through the paint. Not so scary after all.

  After examining the electric eye next to the track, and after sweeping her flashlight all around her, she shrugged her shoulders. Maybe there were mice in here, she thought. She was sure she'd watched all the cars closely all the way through the ride. No one could be wandering around back here.

  She was still shaking her head when she walked back along the track toward the bus crash.

  All of a sudden, the giant school bus filled with dummy school children began to shake. She jumped straight up, and her foot landed crookedly on the track. "Ouch!"

  She had tripped the electric eye when she walked past. With a roar of screeching tires and children's screams the bus lunged toward the track.

  Even though she knew better, she backed out of the way of the bus.

  She heard a man's scream of terror and whirled around in time to see the headless horseman raise his skull up high.

  Hallie found herself
giggling. This was ridiculous. She ignored the screaming skull and began to walk along the track again, watching her feet to avoid tripping any more displays.

  She passed the nightgown-clad woman, waiting patiently to fall victim yet again to the leering vampire.

  Why do vampires and axe murderers always have women victims? she thought. She was tired of women being victims of men.

  The vampire leaned over the woman, biting her neck with a lurid chuckle while she screamed in terror.

  "Hey!" Hallie jumped back. What had set that off? She backed away, staring at the vampire, and felt herself come up hard against something. Something alive.

  Hallie's scream echoed the nightgown-clad woman's as she felt a pair of powerful arms pull her back and off her feet.

  She felt an instinctive terror coupled with disbelief. Attacked by a monster in a haunted house? This couldn't be happening.

  But this was no haunted house monster, she realized. This was the human kind, the kind she knew too well. She felt his breath on her neck, could hear him grunt with exertion as he struggled to get control of her flailing arms and legs.

  She reached her hands up and scratched at where his face would be. He pushed at her arms with one hand while his other arm gripped her around the waist, knocking the wind out of her.

  She fell to the track, gasping for breath. The flashlight dropped to the floor with a clatter.

  Her attacker lifted her up to her feet and she took a deep breath, ready to struggle again, but then he looped something around her neck and she felt it tighten, and then there was no thought in her mind but the panicked instinct that she must have air.

  She kicked and clawed and scratched and bit at his arm, but he pulled her back hard against his body and gripped tighter to the noose around her neck.

  She heard a roar in her ears, and bells ringing, and then the darkness turned to blackness and she could no longer see anything. She heard the roar of King Kong, and the screams of the school children on the bus, but they seemed to be coming from somewhere far away.

  With a desperate surge of strength she stomped down on her attacker's foot, and felt the noose loosen around her neck as he muttered a guttural curse; she took a huge gasp of air before the noose tightened once again, and then she could no longer fight, no longer struggle, and she hardly noticed when the vampire bit once more into the maiden's neck and a car came by just in front of her and the kids inside screamed with delight as she collapsed gasping to the floor.