CHAPTER TWO
Present Day
Until I vanished into thin, sea-scented air, I considered myself an average eighteen-year-old. Sure, the funky atmosphere in the beach town where I live is in danger of obliteration, the stepfather who raised me is in prison and my mom’s massively screwed up. But everybody has issues.
Hardly anybody gets selective amnesia, though.
That’s pretty much what happened to me on the wintry night I set out for my best friend Becky’s house after my stepdad pled guilty to holding up a liquor store with a gun that wasn’t even loaded. How’s that for dumb and dumber? Mom wasn’t even around to lie and say everything would be all right. She’d taken off a few months earlier.
I remember the wind whipping at my face and turning the tears that dripped down my cheeks to ice as I hurried down the dark sidewalk and then... nothing. Until forty-eight hours later when I turned up confused and disoriented at the carnival on the beach.
The carnival was closed for the season, not teeming with people and noise and music like it is now. Just about every teenager in Midway Beach, including me, works summers either at the carnival or one of the other businesses along the boardwalk. Think Coney Island on a smaller, shabbier scale. We have an arcade, tacky souvenir shops, greasy pizza joints and a wooden pier with an open-air bar that hosts some epically terrible music.
This is my third straight year working as a ride operator although I wasn’t supposed to be at the carnival this summer. My plan was to line up a job at a daycare center. But that was before my life went off track, back when I thought I’d be heading to the University of North Carolina on a full academic scholarship and majoring in elementary education.
I couldn’t swing the UNC tuition after my grades tanked and I lost the scholarship. But as much as that hurts, the scholarship isn’t what I want back most.
What I want back are those two lost days.
“Hey, Jade,” Roxy Cooper, my boss, bellows at me as she approaches the Wild Mouse roller coaster. She’s a powerfully built platinum blonde somewhere between thirty-five and fifty. The line of teenagers part like the Red Sea to let her through. “How many times you gonna let those cars go ’round?”
I’m supposed to keep it to a three-lap limit. Some of the riders look green from all the tight, flat turns and switchbacks so I’m probably over that. The controls aren’t automated but antiquated, like everything else at the carnival. I yank up the long lever that operates the skid brakes, and the coaster groans like it’s dying.
“You okay?” Roxy asks me that question at least once a day, like she’s really concerned. I know better. After the cops figured out I was missing time, they’d investigated where I’d been for the previous two days.
According to Roxy, the spineless liar, I’d been with her. She claimed to have dropped me off at my house shortly before the cops found me. Of course she insisted she had no idea how I ended up at the carnival.
“I’m just peachy.”
Her jaw works as she chomps down on her gum. Wintergreen, from the smell of it. The orange Midway Beach Carnival T-shirt all the employees wear is too tight for her, the material straining against her Double D’s. “You know, I’m real glad to have you back this summer.”
Would she say that if she knew my ulterior motive was to figure out how she was involved in what the hell happened to me last February? Maybe. Roxy and the truth aren’t exactly on good terms.
She’s waiting for me to respond so I dredge up my inner Valley Girl. “It’s, like, so awesome to be here.”
The kids on the previous ride have disembarked and new riders are taking their places, laughing and shouting and trying to claim the best cars. I always head for the last car myself. Roxy’s smile goes only as far as her lips. “I need you to head over to the funhouse and relieve Becky. I want her at the bumper cars.”
The funhouse. I try to hide my shudder.
Roxy likes to rotate the ride operators to keep everybody fresh, but three weeks into the season I’ve managed to avoid manning the funhouse. Not for the world will I tell Roxy that, ever since my incident, the funhouse creeps me out big time.
“Sure thing, boss.”
I salute her and start the trek across the carnival. Along the way I pass the Hurricane, the iconic wooden roller coaster that is the carnival’s centerpiece. Workmen are finishing up an extensive renovation project to update the aging structure with new wooden planks and beams. Any day now, it’ll be back in operation.
The childish screams and shouts from the midway drown out the sound of waves pummeling the shore, but I can see the wide expanse of ocean and smell the salt on the breeze. When I was growing up, our family spent lots of lazy hours at the beach. My stepdad used to build amazing sand castles with spires and moats and fortress walls. I can’t think about what used to be, though, not when my reality is so starkly different.
Besides, those aren’t the memories I’m worried about.
To delay my arrival at the funhouse, I detour through Kiddie Land, where bells ring, horns blow and little kids rush from one of the dozen or so rides to the other. Merry-go-round music blares while parents wave to boys and girls riding up and down on the carved horses.
My twelve-year-old brother, Julian, and two of his friends are buying fried dough and cotton candy at one of the food booths outside Kiddie Land. Julian has such dark hair and eyes that he’ll be a looker when he grows into his big feet. He doesn’t resemble me at all. How could he when Mom and Dad adopted him from Colombia? He’s wearing a T-shirt I bought for him imprinted with Bring Back the Land Shark. The slogan’s in protest of the town council’s decision to replace the ceramic statue of the Great White Shark that used to greet visitors to the boardwalk with a grinning dolphin.
Maniacal laughter that sounds like it’s coming from crazed clowns drifts on the sea breeze. The funhouse is in sight.
“Jade! Jade!” Becky Littleton calls from her post in front of the attraction, waving her right arm madly. No one is waiting in line. No surprise there. “You heard what happened, right? Because you’re not gonna believe it. You’re just gonna die.”
Becky is beautiful, with hair that is naturally blonde and straight instead of reddish-brown and unruly like mine. She has it pulled back from her face, calling attention to her sky-high cheekbones. Modeling might have been her calling if she’d grown past five feet and one hundred pounds. I’m five feet five and what I like to think of as athletically built. Next to Becky, I look like an Amazon.
“I might die,” I say with a grimace. “The thing laughing in the funhouse is the top suspect.”
Becky’s mouth gapes open. Before she gets any words out, I know she doesn’t think I’m nearly as funny as I find myself. “You can’t say things like that! Someone’s gonna hear you. They won’t know you’re kidding.”
I’m not kidding. Becky must know it, too, even though she doesn’t understand about the funhouse. Even if I was as easy to read as she is, my intense dread of the place makes no sense to me, either.
“What won’t I believe?”
“The Black Widow is out on bail!” Becky leans forward, her eyes bright. “I give it a week before someone turns up dead!”
See, things can always be worse. At least my stepdad hasn’t killed anybody like Constance Hightower, aka The Black Widow.
Constance is accused of whacking her rich husband, Boris. The murder took place sixty miles south of Midway Beach in Wilmington. The details are all over TV, the newspaper and the Internet. The former Miss North Carolina and the tobacco magnate fascinated the gossip-hungry even before the ugly accusations surfaced. Constance is thirty-one. At the time of his death, Boris was seventy-nine.
The story goes that Constance discovered Boris was cheating on her and sprinkled his food with a slow-acting poison until death did them part. Since the symptoms mirrored a heart attack, she would have gotten away with it if the children from Boris’s first marriage hadn’t pressed for an autopsy.
“You gotta wonder why Co
nstance did it,” I say. “Boris dumped his first wife for her. She had to know he was a cheater.”
“She did it for the money, silly,” Becky says breathlessly. “I think she was planning to murder him all along. If the poison didn’t work, she would have smothered him in his sleep.”
“That got dark really fast.”
“Hey, we’re talking about a murderer here. And I bet I know something about her you don’t.”
“She’s childless because she ate her young?”
“No.” Becky’s so far from smiling, her teeth don’t show. “Right before he died, Boris bought a beachfront place at Ocean Breeze. The Black Widow has made it her lair.”
The proper name of the exclusive residential community that has invaded the outskirts of Midway Beach is The Estates at Ocean Breeze. The Lair at Ocean Breeze has a better ring to it.
“Wonder if she’ll show her face in town,” Becky says. “I want to get a good look at her eyes. I hear they’re empty. No remorse.”
As much as I dread my new assignment, I’m tired of talking about the Black Widow. “Roxy says it’s my turn at the funhouse. You’re supposed to head over to the bumper cars.”
Becky grimaces and chews on her bottom lip. “You didn’t tell her the funhouse creeps you out?”
“Nope.”
“Well, maybe it’s a good thing you’re working the funhouse,” Becky says. “You know, face your fears.”
The creepy, canned laughter drifting out of the makeshift building makes me want to cover my ears. Amid the laughter, I pick out another sound. “Is someone crying?”
Becky cocks an ear, her expression growing serious. “Oh, damn. It is crying. Lacey’s probably lost in the mirror maze.”
“Lacey Prescott? Hunter’s cousin?” Just saying his name sends a thrill through me. My hormones don’t seem to care that Hunter’s going out with my arch-rival.
“Yeah. I let her go in there alone.”
Hunter lives with his aunt and uncle. Lacey’s their only child. She’s a couple years behind my brother Julian in school, a sweet-faced girl who hardly says a word to anyone. “Is she even old enough?”
“She’s ten. Her friends are over there on the tilt-a-wheel. She said that was too scary but she was all gung-ho about the funhouse.”
Last weekend, I went to a matinee showing of the new Batman movie after my mother showed up at our house and moved back in, like she had the right after being gone for almost six months without a word. Lacey was at the movie, too. The death and destruction had barely begun when she practically ran out of the theater. The body count was at two or three. Tops.
“I guess I have to go in there after her,” Becky says.
“Let me,” I say, shocking myself.
“Really? You?” Becky makes a face. “Girl, please tell me you’re not still stuck on Hunter?”
I can’t tell her that.
“Forget him,” Becky says. “If he was interested, he had his chance. He’s not good enough for you.”
Loyalty sometimes makes you delusional. Hunter is a rarity, a talented actor who gives off vibes that are one hundred percent heterosexual. He’s been accepted into the same prestigious drama school in New York City where M. Night Shyamalan studied. I’m headed nowhere at the speed of light. I walk toward the funhouse without responding.
“Remember, everything in there is just pretend,” Becky calls.
The way my legs are trembling, she just as easily could have shouted for me to watch out for the guy with the chainsaw. I climb the rickety stairs and step into a dark corridor. Lights flash on and off while aggressively cheerful music blares, punctuated by that clownish laughter. The floor dips in places, adding to the disorientation.
Becky’s not entirely correct about my motives. Sure, I’d like word to get back to Hunter that I rescued his young cousin. But I’d have gone into the funhouse after Lacey even if she didn’t have a hot relative. She has a little-girl-lost quality that gets to me.
The sobs tear at my heart until I feel physical pain. My pulse trips. What if my aversion to the funhouse has something to do with those days I disappeared? My brain’s blurry on the details of where exactly at the carnival I reappeared, but why couldn’t it have been the funhouse?
What if Lacey is in real danger, the kind that greeted me back in February? Will she be the next to vanish?
I try to shut out the music and laughter and focus on the crying. It sounds animalistic, a cross between a cry and a scream. Shivers rack my body. But, wait. The feral noises are part of the soundtrack. The human whimpering seems to be coming from the right and the hall of mirrors.
Gathering my resolve, I forge on toward the distortion mirrors. A screeching cry reverberates through me. The animal in distress on the soundtrack? It’s getting harder to partition Lacey’s weeping from the manufactured noises.
There’s another sound, too: Ragged gasps that pass for my breathing. While I’m trying to get myself under control, I reach the first mirror. Staring back at me from two sets of eyes is a short, squatty young woman with a pencil neck and an extra mouth. It’s me. So is the spindly figure in the second mirror who is taller than Shaquille O’Neal.
Turning a corner, I nearly slam into another illusion of myself. I jump back. So does my double image.
The crying is more faint now.
“Lacey.” My shaking voice competes with the music, the animal cries and the never-ending laughter. “Lacey, where are you?”
No answer. I speed up, past mirrors where I look demented and mirrors that give the illusion that my body has been sliced in half. While I’m deciding which way to go, colored lights flicker on and something jumps out of an oversized box.
It’s a life-sized clown, its red lips pulled back in an unnatural grin.
A memory flashes through my brain. I’m sitting in a hard-backed chair with rope cutting into my bound hands and feet. A hood covers my head, effectively blinding me. I feel groggy but know I’m outside, because I can hear the crescendo of cicadas and the nearby wail of some sort of animal, maybe a fox.
Sharp pain explodes inside my head. Bile rises in my throat, and I fight nausea. The pain is relentless, like something is assaulting my brain. My head jerks back and forward, back and forward, sending fresh waves of agony through me. If it goes on much longer, that will be the end. I can’t survive this. No one could.
And then, suddenly, it’s over. I slump forward, my head falling below my knees, the loosened hood coming free and dropping to the ground. Fresh air reaches my nostrils. I lift my throbbing head at the same time something sharp stabs me in the right shoulder. The groggy feeling immediately intensifies.
With every ounce of willpower I possess, I fight the wooziness, managing with great difficulty to turn my head. Through lids growing heavier by the second, I get a glimpse of whatever’s doing this to me.
Holding an empty syringe is a clown, its face cloaked in white makeup and its oversized nose and mouth painted blood-red.