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he checked in, but it was stolen a year before. No one even saw her. She must have waited in the car. She was a Jane Doe for almost a week, but the police released a full-face sketch. Made her look like she was just sleeping, not dead with her throat cut. Someone—a friend she went to nursing school with, I think it was—saw it and recognized it. She told the girl’s parents. I can’t imagine how they must have felt, coming up here in their car and hoping against hope that when they got to the morgue, it would turn out to be someone else’s well-loved child.” She shook her head slowly. “Kids are such a risk, Dev. Did that ever cross your mind?”
    “I guess so.”
    “Which means it hasn’t. Me . . . I think if they turned back that sheet and it was my daughter lying there, I’d lose my mind.”
    “You don’t think Linda Gray really haunts the funhouse, do you?”
    “I can’t answer that, because I hold no opinion on the afterlife, pro or con. My feeling is I’ll find that stuff out when I get there, and that’s good enough for me. All I know is that lots of people who work at Joyland claim to have seen her standing beside the track, wearing what she had on when they found her: blue skirt and blue sleeveless blouse. None of them would have seen those colors in the photos they released to the public, because the Speed Graphics the Hollywood Girls use only shoot black-and-white. Easier and cheaper to develop, I guess.”
    “Maybe the color of her clothes was mentioned in the articles.”
    She shrugged. “Might have been; I don’t remember. But several people have also mentioned that the girl they saw standing by the track was wearing a blue Alice band, and that wasn’t in the news stories. They held it back for almost a year, hoping to use it on a likely suspect if they came up with one.”
    “Lane said the rubes never see her.”
    “No, she only shows up after hours. It’s mostly Happy Helpers on the graveyard shift who see her, but I know at least one safety inspector from Raleigh who claims he did, because I had a drink with him at the Sand Dollar. Guy said she was just standing there on his ride-through. He thought it was a new pop-up until she raised her hands to him, like this.”
    Mrs. Shoplaw held her hands out with the palms upturned, a supplicatory gesture.
    “He said it felt like the temperature dropped twenty degrees. A cold pocket, he called it. When he turned and looked back, she was gone.”
    I thought of Lane, in his tight jeans, scuffed boots, and tilted tuff-boy derby. Truth or horseshit? he’d asked. Live or Memorex? I thought the ghost of Linda Gray was almost certainly horseshit, but I hoped it wasn’t. I hoped I would see her. It would be a great story to tell Wendy, and in those days, all my thoughts led back to her. If I bought this shirt, would Wendy like it? If I wrote a story about a young girl getting her first kiss while on a horseback ride, would Wendy enjoy it? If I saw the ghost of a murdered girl, would Wendy be fascinated? Maybe enough to want to come down and see for herself?
    “There was a follow-up story in the Charleston News and Courier about six months after the murder,” Mrs. Shoplaw said. “Turns out that since 1961, there have been four similar murders in Georgia and the Carolinas. All young girls. One stabbed, three others with their throats cut. The reporter dug up at least one cop who said all of them could have been killed by the guy who murdered Linda Gray.”
    “Beware the Funhouse Killer!” I said in a deep announcer-type voice.
    “That’s exactly what the paper called him. Hungry, weren’t you? You ate everything but the bowl. Now I think you’d better write me that check and beat feet to the bus station, or you’re apt to be spending the night on my sofa.”
    Which looked comfortable enough, but I was anxious to get back north. Two days left in spring break, and then I’d be back at school with my arm around Wendy Keegan’s waist.
    I took