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for anything. I don’t want to turn him down.” Gina’s voice took on a stubborn note. “I’m going over there this afternoon. You coming?”
    Tess hesitated. Gina’s father had always been kind to Tess. If he was really worried, she should help out.
    “Okay, I’ll come. What time?”
    “Oh, great! Listen, we’ll just hang out in the Funhouse, okay? No rides, not when you’re so uptight. I wouldn’t torture you by forcing you on The Dragon’s Breath or Helicopter Hell. But the Funhouse is perfectly safe. We’re meeting at the entrance at two, but I thought maybe you could pick me up?”
    “Sure.” The Funhouse wasn’t always safe, Tess thought grimly. Someone had committed suicide in there, a long time ago. But then, it wasn’t as if someone had attacked him in there. He’d taken his own life.
    “The Funhouse isn’t my favorite place to be,” Tess said before she hung up, “but at least it doesn’t have any windows so it won’t have a view of The Devil’s Elbow. That’s about the only place on The Boardwalk that doesn’t. So maybe it won’t, be so grim.”
    Gina laughed. “If it was grim,” she teased, “they’d have to call it the Grimhouse. And nobody would visit it and the whole boardwalk would go out of business and we’d all be poor.”
    Tess hung up.
    And realized immediately that she’d forgotten to ask Gina if her father had heard anything about the investigation. The police should know something by now, shouldn’t they?
    She’d ask this afternoon. Beak might have heard something if Gina hadn’t. His parents were on the board of directors, too, as were Sam’s and Trudy’s. And Chalmers would probably go to the board with whatever he found before he shared it with the general public.
    Too bad she couldn’t call her own father. Well, it wasn’t that she couldn’t. She just didn’t want to. If she told him how nervous the note had made her, he’d tell her she was being illogical and unreasonable and overreacting.
    She’d rather find out what she needed to know from Gina or Guy Joe or any one of her friends. They wouldn’t lecture her. Before she left, she gave Trilby a small bowl of water and a dish of the cat food Gina had sent with her.
    Gina hadn’t heard a thing about the investigation and neither had anyone else. When Tess complained, Sam lifted one dark eyebrow as if to say, “See? What did I tell you?”
    The roller coaster frame had been roped off and tagged with large cardboard signs commanding NO ENTRY and STAY OUT! and CLOSED FOR REPAIRS. Everything else on The Boardwalk remained open. And just as Mr. Giambone had feared, few people were taking advantage of the fact. After all, something terrible had happened there. Something terrible could easily happen again. Why take a chance?
    Tess understood that feeling. It was slinking around in her own head, tugging at her and making it impossible for her to relax. The purple note had mentioned a next. But it hadn’t said when to expect it. Which meant that today couldn’t be ruled out, could it?
    Gina, trying to keep everyone’s mind off the crash, chattered cheerfully as the group headed for the Funhouse. A bright red scarf tied around her dark curls, she trotted purposefully ahead of them in knee-length red shorts and a red-and-white flowered shirt. The sight of her, looking as if she hadn’t a care in the world, should have perked up Tess’s spirits, but it didn’t. She had already begun gnawing on the fingernails it had taken her months to grow. She shouldn’t have come. Keeping her eyes averted from the silent Devil’s Elbow frame didn’t keep the screams and moans and cries for help from echoing in her head. And she found herself continually looking over her shoulder, consumed by a creepy feeling that someone was watching her.
    The Funhouse was a long, narrow tunnel built in an L shape, the foot of the L built out over the beach and supported by wooden stilts. The dark wooden structure contained several