Dead Ringers 1: Illusion (2 page)

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 Constance 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.

My eyes drift closed, but I can still see the clown’s taunting grin. Something is shaking me. From a distance, I hear a familiar voice I can’t quite place. The shaking gets harder. My teeth rattle like they sometimes do during the scariest parts of a horror movie.

“Jade!” says a loud voice near my ear. “Jade! Snap out of it!”

I blink and the image of the evil clown fades to black. One more blink and the interior of the funhouse comes into intermittent focus, depending on whether the lights are flashing on or off. I’m on the floor, slumped against the cool glass of one of the mirrors.

Becky leans over me. In the artificial funhouse lights, her face appears as chalk-white as the clown’s. “Are you all right?”

I can’t make myself nod. I’m not all right. I haven’t been since last summer, when something so terrible happened to me that I buried the memories. Until now.

Because deep in my gut I know that what I just had was a memory. Even now, I can almost feel the ropes cutting into my wrists, smell the earthy richness of the outdoors and taste the acid rising in my throat along with the dread.

Becky sticks out a hand to help me up. She’s so small and my legs are so rubbery that I have to anchor my free hand against the mirror so I don’t fall.

“Come on,” she says when I’m upright, keeping hold of my hand and winding through the maze of mirrors like she’s navigated it dozens of times. Without her guidance, I’d never find my way outside where the ocean air sweeps away some of the cobwebs in my mind. Darkness is encroaching and the lights of the midway are on, the Ferris wheel outlined in a circle of white.

White. Like the clown’s face paint.

“I thought someone was dying in there!” Becky hasn’t let go of my hand. Nobody is within ten yards of us besides the guy working the ticket booth while listening to his iPod. “Why were you screaming like that?”

“I was screaming?” My head hurts, as though somebody took a sledgehammer and tried to split it in two.

“You were screaming bloody murder. I thought the Widow decided to start with Lacey.”

Lacey, Hunter Prescott’s young cousin. Had somebody abducted the girl and tied her to that chair? I grab Becky’s arm. “Please tell me Lacey’s all right.”

“I think so. She came out the exit a few seconds after you screamed.” Becky stares down at my hand on her arm. “Let go. You’re hurting me.”

“Sorry.” I release her, my mind crowded with questions.

How had I gotten into that field? Who had tied me to the chair? Why had it felt as though my mind was splintering? How did the clown fit in? And, most importantly, what did he want from me?

“So what the hell happened in there?” Becky persists, rubbing her arm. “I’ve never heard you scream like that.”

I wet my lips, trying to process my thoughts. “I remembered something. From when I vanished.”

Becky puts a finger to her lips. “Shhh. We agreed you wouldn’t talk about that.”

“But I remember, Becky. It was night and I was tied to a chair in a field.” I concentrate over the pounding in my head, conjuring a mental snapshot. Lining the edges of the clearing were sprawling live oak trees and tall loblolly pines. “I could smell grass but also something damp. The marsh or a swamp, maybe.”

“Jade,” Becky says with a warning tone in her voice. She doesn’t want me to continue, but she’s been my best friend since kindergarten. There is nothing about me she doesn’t know.

“At first I couldn’t see because I was wearing a hood. My head felt like it would explode. While I was thrashing around, the hood came loose. Then there was a needle in my shoulder.” I moisten my lips, knowing how she’ll react to what I’m about to say. “That’s when I saw the clown.”

“For God’s sake, Jade!” Becky drags a hand through her blond hair, and some strands come loose from her ponytail. “A clown? Are you listening to yourself? You actually believe you were abducted by an evil clown who tied you up and injected you with something?”

Stated that way, it sounds crazy. Yet I didn’t get to that field by myself. “I think it was a sedative.”

Becky’s blue eyes turn round and troubled. “You’re freaking me out, Jade.”

I can hardly wrap my mind around the vision myself, yet the life-sized clown that had sprung from the jack in the box uncovered something in my mind I’ve been trying to reach for months.

“I’m freaked out, too.” I rub my forehead, intensifying my headache. “But it could explain the gap in my memory. Maybe even where I was for those two days when I vanished.”

“We already know where you were,” Becky says, her voice gentle. “You were skiing in the Great Smoky Mountains with Roxy.”

“No.” I shake my head, rejecting the explanation the same way I have since I’d turned up dazed and disoriented at the carnival. It’s no secret that Roxy is passionate about skiing. After three years of working at the carnival, that’s the only personal thing I know about her. But we had most definitely not gone on a ski trip to the Cataloochee Ski Area together. “That’s a lie.”

“Jade, you sent me a text, remember? I know you were messed up about your dad’s conviction, but I still have it on my phone.”

“He’s my
stepdad
.” I never used to make that distinction. He’s the only father I’ve ever known and I call him Dad, but I’m just so damn angry at him.

“Okay, your
stepdad
.” She pulls out her cell, navigates to a screen and hands me the phone. “Here, maybe it’ll help if you see the text again.”

Going skiing for a few days with Roxy, the text reads. Don’t worry.

Becky hadn’t worried. Neither had Aunt Carol, my mom’s sister. She’d uprooted everything and moved in with my sister, brother and me after my stepdad’s arrest. My aunt received a text from my phone with the same message. Roxy even had an explanation for my temporary amnesia. She said I’d fallen on the slopes. The bump on the back of my head seemed to back up her lie, but I think someone knocked me out when I was walking to Becky’s.