Boardwalk Cottage

by Barbara Cool Lee

  "I guess he did." Tom put his head in his hands. "But don't you see, Kyle? That means anyone could have gotten in that way."

  "Convenient. But how did it get unlocked?" Kyle glared at Tom.

  "I... I don't know," Tom said. He looked at Hallie, and there was a plea in his eyes. "I didn't do anything to you, I swear I didn't."

  Hallie looked from Tom to Kyle. It seemed so hard to believe that Tom could be the man who choked her, but then again.... She thought of the way he'd yelled at her when he found her going through the timecards.

  Tom watched her with that hurt expression on his face, and she just didn't know. She was a lousy judge of character—her ex-husband was proof of that. If she'd learned anything from her mistakes it was that cruel men didn't always look the part. She leaned wearily against the file cabinet. She'd already experienced enough violence to last her a lifetime.

  She noticed both men were looking at her. "Why would someone attack me?" she finally said. "There's gotta be a reason for all this."

  "I don't know," Tom said quickly. "I really don't know, Hallie." He looked hurt at the accusation, but Dave had looked hurt when she accused him of driving away her friends and isolating her. He'd sworn up and down that she was paranoid, and it was too late when she realized the truth. She touched the bruises on her neck. Would it be too late this time, too?

  Kyle saw her rubbing her sore neck. He pulled her close and held her in his arms. "No one's going to hurt you anymore," he said. Tom started to say something, but Kyle interrupted him. "I'll make sure of it."

  The deep murmur of Kyle's voice was seductive. She could let him take care of everything. He'd keep her safe.

  She pulled away from him, out of arm's reach. She had vowed never to be vulnerable again. She rubbed her neck some more. This was something she'd have to handle by herself. And if Tom was behind it, she'd just have to deal with that, too.

  "Better find that ladder," she said gruffly.

  Kyle looked confused at her reaction, but he turned away and dug through the pile of junk some more.

  Tom shuffled the papers on his desk as if his life depended on it.

  Kyle straightened up. "Here it is." He pulled a folded aluminum ladder out from its resting place under a couple of inner tubes. The ladder was one of those that folded down into a compact bundle. He handed it to her, and she was able to lift it, even with her hands.

  He faced Tom again. "If I'm wrong, I'm sorry, Tom. I'm out of my skull worrying."

  It wasn't much of an apology.

  "But if you have even the slightest involvement in hurting anyone I care about, I'll kill you," Kyle finished.

  No, it definitely wasn't an apology. But maybe he had his own reasons for doubting Tom. There was definitely some old anger between them—but why?

  "Kyle," There was a plea in Tom's voice.

  Tom looked so hurt. Were they crazy to suspect him?

  "We're family," Tom muttered, turning away.

  Outside Tom's office, Hallie turned to Kyle. "Are you ready to explain that? I don't understand what just happened in there. What makes you suspect Tom?"

  "Hey—it was your idea in the first place," Kyle said.

  "I just asked if it was possible he was hiding something, and you said it was my overactive imagination."

  "I don't know," Kyle said. "Oh," he said, noticing she was carrying the ladder. He took it from her and then went down the stairs ahead of her.

  Hallie felt a brief sense of disorientation when they walked out of the building and found themselves bathed with sunshine amid the bright colors of the promenade. A fresh, salt-tinged breeze blew in from the bay, and it was hard to believe anything more serious than a case of sunburn could be going on in Pajaro Bay today. They made their way through the tourist crowd to the haunted cottage.

  Hallie had to walk fast to try to stay beside Kyle. He finally slowed down for her and she caught up. "Still thinking about conspiracy theories?" she asked him.

  His glum expression softened. "I dunno. Maybe my imagination is getting the better of me—just like yours. I just can't believe all this weird stuff is coincidental—it's all part of some bigger picture and we just don't have all the pieces put together yet. And Tom has been acting squirrelly since I've been coming around here, so I've gotta wonder if it's connected to all this." He smiled faintly. "I don't know. He and I aren't the best friends in the world."

  "I noticed. Why is that?"

  "He was here the night my parents died. I always wondered if he was drunk—it seems like he's been constantly drunk ever since that night. But everybody in town knows that. It's hardly a secret."

  They stopped in front of the building. A metal gate blocked the front of the building, with a hastily lettered sign reading Boardwalk Cottage closed until further notice hung on it.

  "And it's not reopening until we get some answers," Kyle said.

  The little cars sat on their track, and the place looked just as it had the last time she'd seen it. The dorky little ride was harmless. Why would someone attack her there? The cops had been all over this park, so it was impossible for Windy and Zac to be hidden around here. The place was crawling with cops, crawling with employees. It was crawling with tourists. There was no way to hide two kidnapped teenagers here. Hallie was determined to think of them as kidnapped. She was not going to think about the logistics of hiding bodies. She wouldn't go there. They were alive, and her brain held some key to finding them. Somewhere in that missing hour of her life was the key. There had to be an answer.

  She took a step back to look up at the building. "How many floors are there?" she asked, counting four, no, five, gables pointing up toward an arch in the roller coaster's track overhead, maybe forty feet above the promenade.

  "Just two. The fancy roofline is only on the outside. Inside it's just one big attic above the main floor."

  "And what's in the attic?"

  "Bats?" Kyle said with a small smile. She must have looked less than amused, because he added, "just junk, really. It's organized along the Tom Robles management plan. Joe said it took them hours to search the place."

  She looked up at the gables, which seemed to glare back at her like menacing eyes. "I'd rather not meet any bats."

  He kissed her on the forehead. "No bats. And nobody's hidden there, alive or dead," he added, echoing her own thoughts.

  "They're alive, Kyle." She grabbed his hand. "They are."

  He nodded. "Of course they are," he said firmly, his voice sounding rough. "We're just double-checking everything the police have done. We're going to keep going over the same territory until we get some answers."

  "It'll all work out," she said, trying to believe it.

  "Right." He didn't sound any more convinced than she did.

  He fished some keys out of his pocket, and unlocked the gate. They pushed the unlocked gate up toward the ceiling, and slipped under.

  Kyle punched a button on the control panel next to the entrance. "Let's see, displays off—I'd rather not listen to that inane headless horseman giggling for an hour. But let's shed a little light on the subject," he said, flipping one switch to on. "I don't want any dark corners in there." He grabbed a flashlight from a niche under the control panel. "I don't think there are lights in the attic."

  Hallie felt a surge of adrenaline—the old fight or flight mechanism, as they'd called it in Intro to Biology last term. She definitely didn't want to go back in there. But she knew she had to face her fear. "Time to get back on the horse," she muttered.

  They followed the track on its winding path through the haunted house. With all the lights on, the interior looked like what it was: a warehouse partitioned by flimsy wooden walls painted flat black. They passed each of the displays, which looked even cheesier with industrial-strength fluorescent lights glaring overhead.

  "I'd forgotten something," Hallie said as they walked along. "The cigarettes on the floor."

  "You noticed that?" he said. "Yeah, Charlie denied it at first, but when
Joe showed her the spot she admitted it was her. He thought it was a clue at first." He shook his head. "She said we were paranoid about fires." He looked around at the wooden walls. "She doesn't know what these old rides look like after a fire." He shuddered. "I don't ever want to see that sight again." He changed the subject: "You said the creep set off some of the displays. That ought to give us a clue about which direction he came from."

  "Yeah," she said. "It was the axe murderer first, then the bus crash, and then—" she shuddered.

  Kyle put his arm around her shoulders. "It's okay. I'm right here."

  She moved away to walk on the other side of the track, out of arm's reach. "I'm fine. He's not going to get another shot at me. I just let my guard down before. I won't make that mistake again."

  He raised an eyebrow. "No, you definitely don't like to let your guard down."

  "Every time I do, somebody tries to hurt me. I'm a slow learner, but I catch on eventually."

  He didn't seem to have a response to that.

  They examined the axe murderer display. Hallie glared at the menacing murderer. "He could have been hiding behind this guy," Hallie said. "He's big enough for a man to hide behind."

  Kyle nodded. "The emergency exit's back this way." He set down the ladder, and walked back along the track a ways, then stopped. "So this would be about where he attacked you?" He stood next to the vampire.

  "Yeah, right about there." Hallie stood on the track in front of the vampire's victim. She looked down. "In fact, exactly here. But where's my flashlight?"

  "The police found it. It had apparently rolled under the lady's negligee." Kyle pointed at the vampire's victim.

  "The track twists and turns all through here," she said. "It's full of hiding places."

  "Yeah," he said. "He could have been hiding behind any of the displays along here."

  She looked up. The ceiling, like the walls, was painted flat black. She felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up, as if something could come hurtling down on top of her from above at any moment. "So, how do you get to the attic?" she said.

  "It's back closer to the car crash, if I remember right," Kyle said. He picked up the ladder and they went back toward the earlier part of the ride. He stopped in front of the school bus and looked up. "There it is," he said.

  "That's a long way from the emergency exit," she said. Hallie looked up, too, and saw the outline of a large trap door. "You could put a moose through that door," she said.

  "Wait'll you see what's up there. There's a block-and-tackle up there for hauling up stuff for storage. We could probably fit King Kong up there."

  "You know," she said. "It seems pretty unlikely that someone would find this in the dark. I sure never noticed it. I never even thought to look."

  He unfolded the ladder and leaned it against one of the walls so it reached the trap door. "He might have known it was here."

  Another point against Tom Robles. They were adding up.

  "You ready?"

  She nodded. "But you can go first. I'm brave, not stupid."

  Kyle climbed up the ladder and pushed up on the trap door. It fell back with a creak of rusty hinges and a bang as it hit the floor above. He disappeared into the hole. She heard his heavy steps on the floor, and a shuffling noise.

  "Kyle?" she called up.

  He stuck his head through the door. His hair and shoulders were covered with dust. "You're not asthmatic, are you?"

  She shook her head. "That bad?"

  "Come see for yourself."

  When she stuck her head through the trap door she did see: the high gabled windows let in a pale light that cut through the clouds of dust in the air. He helped her through the door and to her feet.

  "How big is this place?"

  "Same size as downstairs. A few thousand square feet."

  "Don't you Madrigals believe in garage sales?" They were surrounded by junk in piles higher than Hallie's head.

  "Nope," he said. "We've got stuff that dates back to the conquistadors in the barn."

  She stood on tiptoes to try to see over a tarp-covered object that blocked her view. "Is it all this cramped?"

  He peeked over the pile from his higher vantage point. "Yup. It looks like it."

  "Kyle?" She moved closer to him. "How can you be sure there's nobody up here?" she whispered.

  "Don't be scared," he murmured. He started to put an arm around her, but put it back down by his side instead. "The police made a very thorough search this morning. And the place has been locked since."

  Hallie straightened her shoulders. "Then there's nothing to be scared of." She lifted up a corner of the nearest tarp. Underneath was a battered bumper car. "So what exactly are we looking for, anyway?"

  Kyle shrugged his shoulders. "I dunno. Anything out of the ordinary, I guess. Something Joe might have missed." He looked over Hallie's shoulder at the bumper car. "Piece of junk."

  He squeezed his way past it, then reached a hand back toward her. "Can you make it?"

  She grabbed his hand and squeezed gingerly through the narrow space after him. She bumped into a cardboard box and it tipped over, taking other boxes with it. A dusty pile of rubber bats spilled onto her head. She screamed.

  "It's okay, it's okay," Kyle said. He pulled her close, and brushed the bats off of her. "Don't be scared."

  She leaned against him, laying her head against his chest to listen to his heartbeat, like she had the first time she'd met him. He ran his hand over her hair. This was habit-forming, she realized. Every time she got scared she found herself looking for Kyle's arms to hide in.

  "When I find this guy I'm going to have to kill him," he muttered.

  "Mmm hmm," she agreed, then pulled away to look at him. "Like Rambo, eh? Machetes at ten paces? A duel to the death?"

  He pulled her close again. "That's right. He hurt's mine, I hurt him."

  "You're too articulate to play Rambo," she murmured into his shoulder.

  He grunted in response.

  She snuggled closer. She could get used to this side of him, she thought. He'd handle the scary stuff and she'd be the helpless female.

  She pulled away from him abruptly and shook her head. Not helpless, not ever again. "I'm fine," she said firmly. "Let's go on."

  "I'm not sure there's much point," he said. "I don't think this makes a very good vantage point for attacking anybody below. There's hardly room to breathe up here." He lifted a second tarp, kicking up more dust. They both coughed.

  "Not to mention hardly any air to breathe," Hallie said.

  Kyle lifted off another tarp and then dropped it back over before Hallie could look. "Nah," he said when she tried to look around him to see. "It's a haunted house reject, you don't wanna look."

  "I'm supposed to be facing my fears here, remember?"

  He obligingly lifted the tarp. It was a green scaly thing about eight feet long lying on its side, with claws that seemed, underneath layers of dust, to be dripping blood.

  "Ugh. What is it?"

  "I think it's supposed to be the Creature from the Black Lagoon."

  Hallie leaned over to examine it. "What were they thinking, making something like that for little kids to see?"

  "It's not half as bad as today's video games. Besides, in the old days, amusement parks were more for adults than for kids—if it was too tame the grown-ups would get bored. The cottage was originally designed as a ride to scare adults."

  She stepped back and he dropped the tarp over it again. "Let's see what other buried treasure we've got."

  Two tall tarp-covered objects flanked them. They each grabbed hold of an end of the nearest tarp and lifted it off.

  "There's your King Kong," he said. "Wanna hide behind me?"

  She shook her head. "Ah, he's cute. She rubbed a hand over it. "Real fur. It's an old one. You guys sure have a thing for King Kong."

  "This place goes back to the 1920s. King Kong was big stuff in those days."

  She craned her neck back to look at the
beast. "He's still pretty big stuff. What's he doing up here?"

  Kyle looked him over. "Well, most of this junk is stuff that got outdated and replaced with newer models, I imagine. This guy doesn't look like he has any moving parts, so he probably got replaced by that mechanical guy in Tom's office. Tom's guy lost his arm a few years ago, so he got dumped for the one that's downstairs now. It has a bigger range of motion."

  "Thanks for the history lesson."

  "I do sound like the kids." He looked wistful, then mad. "Well, this little walk down memory lane is getting us nowhere."

  Hallie put a hand on his arm. "Let's keep looking." She lifted the tarp opposite King Kong. She jumped back when she saw a face staring back at her, then laughed. It was her face reflected in glass. She pulled the tarp all the way off. "Wow." It was a large machine with a big glass window in the center, surrounded by painted scenes of the beach and mountains. Kong loomed behind her in the glass's reflection. She glanced back over her shoulder. It was as tall as the gorilla was, maybe seven or eight feet.

  The glass had a huge crack that ran from top to bottom, and behind it, she could see a jumble of what looked like broken pipes and even a snare drum. At the top the word "Wurlitzer" was painted in swirling letters.

  "March 11, 1933," she said.

  "What?"

  "The top story in the newspaper clippings I was reading. On March 11, 1933, an earthquake destroyed the band organ and Mayor Madrigal vowed to replace it before summer. I'll bet this is it."

  Kyle nodded. "Yeah. It would be outdated now, anyway. I think these need to be tuned regularly. An iPod's less trouble, and just as loud."

  Hallie remembered the raucous music at the carousel. "You say loud like it's a good thing."

  She ran her hand over the frame around the glass. It was painted in multicolored swirls. "It's beautiful," she said. "It must be a collector's item."

  "Everything here's a collector's item, I guess. Even broken, some collector would probably pay a few grand for it. We could auction a lot of this off, but the kids—" he stopped.

  "They wouldn't let you," she finished.

  "Yeah."

  "Hey," she said. "You don't think there's something valuable in here? Something they found?"