Inferno Park (19 page)

A third photograph showed three young, beautiful female models standing in front of the pitchfork-prison waiting area for Inferno Mountain, wearing horns and a high-collared cape (presumably red) over skimpy ballet leotards. They smiled and offered commemorative toy pitchforks to the passing crowd. A banner above them read, in fiery letters flanked by cartoon devils:

INFERNO MOUNTAIN

GRAND OPENING

“RIDE IF YOU DARE!”

“The article says more about him than the newspaper did,” Victoria said. “This one guy, Schopfer, designed several big things around the park—the Dark Mansion, Professor Atomic’s Brain-Scrambler, the jungle ride...”

“All the cool stuff,” Carter said.

“Exactly. He actually built stuff at little amusement parks all over the country, from Maine to California. Haunted houses, mazes, things like that. It says he started out building and running a small funhouse for a traveling carnival when he was just sixteen.”

“Sounds like a great job. Better than moving furniture,” Carter said.

“So I tried to find these guys.” Victoria tapped the picture of Artie Shopfer and Theodore Hanover. “There’s no ‘Schopfer’ in the local phone listings, though.”

“If he worked all over the country, then he could be anywhere by now,” Carter said. “Why would he stick around here?”

“I did find a Hanover Realty in an office building on 98, right in the middle of town.”

“That’s the family you’re looking for, but old Mr. Hanover died a few years ago. Right around the time of the sinkhole, I think. His son, Hanover Junior, is the one in charge now.”

“We have to talk to him, then,” Victoria said. “We’ll say it’s for a school project. You have to come with me.”

“I doubt he’ll meet with us.”

“Maybe not if it was just me, but you’re local. Your family even had an amusement business like theirs.”

“It wasn’t anything like theirs! We were tiny.”

“But still...”

“But still,” he agreed. “You’re right. He would think of you as an out-of-towner.”

“Do you know him?” Victoria asked.

“Not at all. I think my dad might.”

“Can you check?”

Carter felt less than comfortable with the idea of approaching the richest and most powerful individual in town to ask about the sensitive subject of the amusement park, but he didn’t want to look scared in front of Victoria.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

Victoria stood up as the bell rang. “I’ll work on tracking down Artie Schopfer. I’ll try contacting that amusement-park magazine and the people who used to work at the local newspaper.”

“Good luck. Maybe the guy’s still alive.”

“I hope so. You know, I read that something like thirty million people visited Starland during the years it was open. It’s crazy how quickly the history of it can just disappear.”

“My dad says everything disappears faster at the beach,” Carter said. “It’s all built on sand and water.”

Chapter Twelve

Carter was strolling to the bus after school when someone grabbed his arm. He jumped, his nerves badly frayed by recent events and his chronic lack of sleep.

“Whoa, relax,” Victoria said. “You aren’t taking the bus, are you?”

“It’s faster than walking home.”

“Come on.” Holding his arm, she steered him away from bus loading area and toward the student parking lot. “So have you talked to your dad about getting in touch with Mr. Hanover?”

“Um, no, I’ve been at school,” Carter pointed out. “I can ask him tonight.”

“Can you ask him now?”

“He’s at work.”

“He has a cell phone, though?” Victoria asked.

“You’re getting obsessed.” Carter opened the driver-side door of her Fiesta.

“I’m not obsessed. Do you think you’re driving?”

“Just getting the door for you.”

She laughed and shook her head. “Get in.”

“Admit you’re obsessed,” Carter said from the passenger seat as they pulled out of the parking lot.

“Would you really be willing to forget all about it?” she asked him. “With those two kids still missing?”

“Is it really just about the kids?”

“Well...it wouldn’t be as urgent without them.”

“But you’re really just obsessed with the park.”

“Can you call your dad already?”

Carter groaned. He called his dad’s cell phone.

“What’s up? Everything okay?” his dad answered.

“Hey, Dad, I’m okay. I was wondering if you knew the Hanover family at all?”

“Sure. I play golf with the Hanovers at the country club on Thursdays,” his dad said sarcastically. “Why would you ask that, Carter?”

“Oh. Um, I was hoping to talk to Theodore Hanover. For this school project. About...local history.”

“Teddy Hanover Junior couldn’t care less about local history. His father did, but all Teddy sees is dollar signs.”

“Okay,” Carter said. “So, you don’t know him? I was hoping you could call him for me...”

“Call him yourself,” Carter’s dad said. “He’s more likely to talk to you. I’ve already cussed him out to his face, back when he refused to lower the rent on the Eight-Track, even when the tourist business was dying fast.”

“Oh...I didn’t know that.”

“Yep. I’d do it again, too. Anything else? We’ve got to pack here...”

“No, that’s okay. Thanks, Dad.” Carter hung up.

“Well?” Victoria asked.

“My dad isn’t friends with him. He said I might as well call him myself.”

“Go ahead.”

“Right now?”

“I don’t have the number...”

“Hanover Realty. Look it up on your phone,” Victoria said.

“You’re pushy when you’re obsessed.”

“I’m not obsessed. Just...focused,” she told him.

Carter found the number and called. A receptionist answered, and he told her he was a senior at the town high school and wanted to speak to Mr. Hanover for a local history project. She put him on hold. Easy-listening jazz played over the phone.

“What did she say?” Victoria asked.

“She told me to wait a minute. I guess she’s asking him.”

The “minute” turned into more than five. By the time the receptionist returned, mercifully killing a long, drawn-out saxophone solo, Victoria had driven to Carter’s apartment complex and they sat idling in the parking lot.

“Mr. Hanover can give you a fifteen-minute appointment,” she said. “I have tomorrow at nine-thirty available.”

“I’ll be in school then,” Carter told her. “Is there anything after two-thirty?”

“Not tomorrow. He has a very important golf game.” The receptionist said this in a deadly serious tone. “The only other time would be eleven forty-five tomorrow morning, for fifteen minutes. Or we could schedule something for next week.”

Carter passed that information to Victoria. They could sneak away during away lunch, but they would have to hurry back to avoid being caught leaving school. It didn’t sound as though the man expected to speak to them very long, anyway.

“We’ll do it, thank you,” Carter told the receptionist. After he’d hung up, he asked Victoria, “Are you happy and calm now?”

“I’m a little better. We also need to plan our next trip to the park.”

“That doesn’t sound like a good idea. Let’s just wait and see what we find out.”

“But those kids—”

“Okay, okay.” Carter thought about something the police chief had said. “I don’t think we should go in there alone. We need more warm bodies. Our own search party.”

“Who could we bring?”

“Some kids from school, I guess. We don’t want the police to find out.”

“You’re in charge of that,” Victoria said. “I don’t know anybody.”

“Great.” Carter couldn’t imagine talking anyone else into searching the park with them. Who would ever agree to go there? “I’ll try, but most of us locals avoid that park...”

“Just give them your most charming smile.” She looked around the parking lot where they’d been sitting. “Do you want to hang out for a while?”

“Wish I could, but I’ve got my police-ordered volunteer work
and
homework for five A.P. classes,” he said. “I’d rather be doing anything at all with you.”

She smiled and gave him a one-armed hug, her arm across his back, the top of her head against his cheek. He wasn’t sure where his own arms fit into this particular hug configuration, so he touched his fingers to her side for a second, feeling her ribs and warm skin through her thin summer shirt.

“I’m glad we met,” she said as she pulled back from him. “Most people would probably think I was insane by now.”

“Me, too.”

“You think I’m insane?”

“Who isn’t?” He stepped out of her car. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks for the ride.”

Carter didn’t have much time to wait before one of the retired men from the search party picked him up in an old truck. They walked a hiking path at Dead Lake that afternoon, keeping to the flattest, easiest trails because of the age of the other men in the group. The young deputy muttered to himself much of the way, shaking his head, and little was accomplished. The deputy ended the day’s search an hour early, and nobody complained.

Ned Willoughby, who hadn’t been strangled and tied to his boat with fishing line after all, offered to give Carter a lift home. Carter accepted, but had the man drop him off at a house a few miles north of town, next to a deep creek that fed into the town’s small, shallow bay. The house was wide, with two full stories and a wraparound porch, but its paint had gone gray and a number of patches of shingles were missing from the roof. Groves of enormous citrus trees surrounded the house.

“Ain’t that George Islington’s place?” Ned asked. “He’s still living, ain’t he?”

“He’s on home care, with a nurse.”

“Why you coming here? Are you kin to him?”

“I’m friends with his grandson, Jared.”

“Hmph.” It was a small noise, but it told him Ned knew a bit about Jared’s reputation as a hard-partying troublemaker who’d had scrapes with the police.

“Thanks for the ride,” Carter said.

“Yep.” The man watched Carter climb down from the old truck, then asked, “You figure we’re ever going to find them two boys?”

“Out at Dead Lake? I’d be surprised.”

“Waste of time, ain’t it?”

“Probably.”

Ned nodded, and Carter closed the door.

While the pick-up drove away, Carter walked up the gravel drive to the house, flanked by weeds and wildflowers. He didn’t approach the front door, but cut diagonally across the yard, passing under orange and lemon blossoms, toward a long barn that couldn’t be seen from the road. It had once been an actual working barn, housing actual pigs. More recently, it had been refurbished as a full-service workshop lined with tools, work counters, and tables with built-in clamps and saws. Even more recently, the place had fallen into disuse and become overgrown with thorny vines.

The gravel drive curled past the house and behind the barn, where a couple of old cars and pick-ups were parked. The wide wooden door into the barn was slightly ajar, letting out a narrow vertical strip of dim electric light. Carter heard Incubus blasting over a stereo as he approached the door.

Carter looked in through the door. Jared occupied a chair near the middle of the room, wearing his battered old Joker cap and a thin white tank top, drinking beer from a forty-ounce bottle. His girlfriend, a cute junior named Becca Towbridge, sat in Jared’s lap smoking a cigarette, casually flicking ashes onto the dirty wooden floor. Carter could hear more voices, and he could see part of one girl in a chair, her back to him, and the hairy legs of a couple of guys sitting up on the wide work counter.

He nudged open the door while knocking on it. Most of the people in the room looked up and immediately scowled at him. Three guys sat on the counter near a rusty table saw.

Carter recognized two of them, both juniors—Finn McKinley, shirtless, his freckles particularly dense and heavy on his face, shoulders, chest, and arms. Finn was the younger but larger brother of Wes McKinley, who was in most of Carter’s classes. The second guy was Derek Butcher, a sandy-haired kid with a scrubby attempt at a goatee, also shirtless to show off his tanned muscles. The third guy was younger, maybe a sophomore, stocky and heavyset, the type who likely had chunks of muscle under his layer of fat. He wore a gold hoop in his left ear.

Two girls sat in chairs and half-turned to look at him, but Carter didn’t recognize them, either, which meant they were likely sophomores or freshman. One had dyed her hair an unnaturally bright shade of blond and streaked it with purple. The other, pudgier girl had tied her dark hair back with a kerchief and wore dark purple eyeshadow and lip gloss, which left stains on the white filter of the cigarette she was smoking. All the kids seemed to be smoking cigarettes and drinking beer.

“Whoa, look who that is,” Jared said. “Somebody’s slumming tonight. What the hell are you doing here, Carter?”

“Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?” Carter asked him.

“Go ahead.” Jared leaned back in his chair, grinning, clenching a lit cigarette between his teeth. His girlfriend Becca settled against back against him, frowning at Carter. She had brunette hair streaked with gold, and dressed in a bikini top and tiny black shorts. Studs and rings stippled the edges of her ears.

“I mean privately, though,” Carter said.

“What, you don’t like us?” Finn asked.

“Probably scared of us,” Derek said, which got a few laughs, so he milked it for more. “Hey yo, you scared of us, nerd-boy?”

“Am I supposed to be?” Carter asked.

“What the fuck do you mean by that?” Derek scowled, his voice drunk and aggressive. “Hey, Jared, what the fuck does he mean by that?”

“Relax, dude,” Jared told him. “Slide off, Becca, I’m going to talk to him for a second.”

“Can’t I come?” Becca frowned.

“Nah, go get yourself another beer from the cooler. Good girl.” Jared slapped her butt as she stood up, and she shrieked and turned back, playfully slapping at him with both hands. Carter had to endure more than a minute of their laughing play-fight before Jared finally shook the girl off and walked to the door. He stepped outside with Carter and eased the door shut.