Joyland Read Online Free PDF

night.”
    I burst into roars of laughter, and Mrs. Emmalina Shoplaw joined me.

    We descended by way of the outside stairs. “How’s Lane Hardy?” she asked when we got to the bottom. “Still wearing that stupid beanie of his?”
    “It looked like a derby to me.”
    She shrugged. “Beanie, derby, what’s the diff?”
    “He’s fine, but he told me something . . .”
    She was giving me a head-cocked look. Almost smiling, but not quite.
    “He told me the Joyland funhouse—Horror House, he called it—is haunted. I asked him if he was pulling my leg, and he said he wasn’t. He said you knew about it.”
    “Did he, now.”
    “Yes. He says that when it comes to Joyland, you know more than he does.”
    “Well,” she said, reaching into the pocket of her slacks and bringing out a pack of Winstons, “I know a fair amount. My husband was chief of engineering down there until he took a heart attack and died. When it turned out his life insurance was lousy—and borrowed against to the hilt in the bargain—I started renting out the top two stories of this place. What else was I going to do? We just had the one kid, and now she’s up in New York, working for an ad agency.” She lit her cigarette, inhaled, and chuffed it back out as laughter. “Working on losing her southern accent, too, but that’s another story. This overgrown monstrosity of a house was Howie’s playtoy, and I never begrudged him. At least it’s paid off. And I like staying connected to the park, because it makes me feel like I’m still connected to him. Can you understand that?”
    “Sure.”
    She considered me through a rising raft of cigarette smoke, smiled, and shook her head. “Nah—you’re being kind, but you’re a little too young.”
    “I lost my Mom four years ago. My dad’s still grieving. He says there’s a reason wife and life sound almost the same. I’ve got school, at least, and my girlfriend. Dad’s knocking around a house just north of Kittery that’s way too big for him. He knows he should sell it and get a smaller one closer to where he works—we both know—but he stays. So yeah, I know what you mean.”
    “I’m sorry for your loss,” Mrs. Shoplaw said. “Some day I’ll open my mouth too wide and fall right in. That bus of yours, is it the five-ten?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, come on in the kitchen. I’ll make you a toasted cheese and microwave you a bowl of tomato soup. You’ve got time. And I’ll tell you the sad story of the Joyland ghost while you eat, if you want to hear it.”
    “Is it really a ghost story?”
    “I’ve never been in that damn funhouse, so I don’t know for sure. But it’s a murder story. That much I am sure of.”

    The soup was just Campbell’s out of the can, but the toasted cheese was Muenster—my favorite—and tasted heavenly. She poured me a glass of milk and insisted I drink it. I was, Mrs. Shoplaw said, a growing boy. She sat down opposite me with her own bowl of soup but no sandwich (“I have to watch my girlish figure”) and told me the tale. Some of it she’d gotten from the newspapers and TV reports. The juicier bits came from her Joyland contacts, of whom she had many.
    “It was four years ago, which I guess would make it around the same time your mother died. Do you know what always comes first to my mind when I think about it? The guy’s shirt. And the gloves. Thinking about those things gives me the creeps. Because it means he planned it.”
    “You might be kind of starting in the middle,” I said.
    Mrs. Shoplaw laughed. “Yeah, I suppose I am. The name of your supposed ghost is Linda Gray, and she was from Florence. That’s over South Carolina way. She and her boyfriend—if that’s what he was; the cops checked her background pretty closely and found no trace of him—spent her last night on earth at the Luna Inn, half a mile south of here along the beach. They entered Joyland around eleven o’clock the next day. He bought them day passes, using cash.