Premeditated (25 page)

I knew there was a chance of seeing people from Lowry there—the fairgrounds draw tens of thousands of people when they’re open each year—but it was still a surprise to see Brooks standing beside one of the gaming kiosks. He was spending half his fortune, one tossed quarter at a time, to win an overdyed blue doggish creature. Rather than wait where I was, I decided on a last conversation before I checked out of Lowry and never had to see him again. If nothing else, it gave me an excuse to get out of the middle of the walkway and stop looking like a human speed bump.

“It’s a little morbid, don’t you think?” I asked.

Brooks turned at the sound of my voice, completely blowing his toss. He had a blank look in his eyes, like he’d been focused on nothing other than hitting that glass plate for way too long.

“What is?” he asked.

“Hangman’s Row.”

I pitched my head sideways and pretended to hang myself with an invisible rope, adding popped eyes and a lolled out tongue to match the appearance of the stuffed animals over our heads.

“Now that you mention it … maybe those aren’t happy faces at all,” Brooks said.

“You have a little sister stashed away somewhere that I’ve yet to see?”

“Chandi’s having a rough day. I didn’t know what else to do, so I promised her I’d win something for her.… This stupid thing’s about to make me a liar.”

I choked on the instant urge to tell him the game couldn’t make him into something he already was before he entered the midway.

“No luck?” I asked instead.

“I’m forty bucks in.”

“I could get you one for half that.”

“With or without losing your clothes?”

“Very funny,” I said. “I
was
going to explain that these things are rigged and that you can stand there all night pitching coins at the glass and never win. But if you don’t want my help …”

“I saw a six-year-old dragging a giraffe twice as tall as he was. If he can figure it out, so can I.”

He flicked another quarter off the end of his fingers. It hit a plate in the sixth row, bounced to one in the seventh, then rolled right off the edge onto the ground.

“Maybe if you bite your tongue and stand on one foot. I think the left is probably your best bet.”

“Go ahead, mock my pain. The plates are inverted or something. It’s impossible.”

“Watch and learn, rookie.” I leaned across the barrier and tapped the shoulder of the guy supervising the stand. “ ’Scuse me.”

He turned around with a delayed smile that said it had already been a long night and it wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. From the back, I would have thought the guy was close to my age,
maybe someone in college at the most, but despite being nothing but pimples and teeth, he had to be over thirty. He was a walking warning sign for why you shouldn’t eat a steady diet of carnival food. It looked, and smelled, like he’d styled his hair with french fry grease.

“You wanna try, cutie?” he asked.

The universe was determined to ruin my good mood; it was the only explanation. Another, more satisfying, response went unspoken while I picked another part to play.

“My boyfriend bet me I couldn’t win a thing tonight,” I whispered, then glanced back at Brooks.

“He’s probably right,” French Fry said.

“See, that’s my problem. He thinks he’s always right, and I’d really like for him to be wrong this time.”

“Maybe you’ll get lucky.” French Fry reached under the counter for a scoop of coins as I dipped my hand into my pocket. “Girls like you draw business. I’ll spot you a round for free advertising.”

“Luck’s for those who don’t plan ahead.” I held a folded twenty out between my fingers. “You drop this?”

“Maybe …”

“Because I’d swear it fell out of your pocket when you bent down to pick my quarter up off that platform.…”

“Lucky and honest.” French Fry snatched the bill, checking to make sure it had the right president on it, and crammed it into his back pocket. “You want a pink one?”

“Blue.”

“Blue it is.” He pulled one of the doggish things down with a loop and handed it over the counter. The shabby fur was stiff
and dyed darker in places. Missed stitches allowed the stuffing to poke out here and there, and whoever had glued the tongue into its mouth had let the adhesive spread too far, causing a hard ridge.

Cheap, and oh-so-less-than-perfect. I named it Chandi, Jr.

“You have to sign the list,” French Fry said. “Only one big prize per customer per night. We can’t have ringers going around robbing the games.”

I took the clipboard he offered and scribbled “Bite Me, Esq.” in tiny, cramped script that could have said anything.

“Thanks, mister.” I winked.

“Any time, sugar. It’s always a pleasure to meet someone who understands how to play the game.”

I tucked my prize under my arm and headed back to where I’d left Brooks at the other end of the kiosk.

“Like I said, nothing to it.”

“That’s just not fair,” he said. “How could I not have thought of that forty dollars ago?”

“It’s not even worth four.”

“I know, but it’s what Chandi wanted.”

“Here. The cheap dog is officially your problem.” I slapped the doggish thing into his chest.

“I’ll pretend you mean the toy,” he said. “You’re not here alone, are you?”

“My best friend sort of dumped me on yours, and now he’s run off after some sort of ‘surprise’ and I have no idea how long it’ll be before he comes back.”

“You’re here with Dex?”

“So?” I asked.

A strange tone had crept into his words that brought out the colder edge in my own. He had no right to ask who I was with or what I was doing or anything else.

“So, you haven’t talked to me in a while.”

“I talked to you yesterday morning,” I said.

“A wave hello isn’t a conversation. I was beginning to think you’d switched sides on me.”

Nope. I was on the same side I’d always been on—Claire’s.

“I’ve been preoccupied,” I said. “Too much time in the hospital.”

“Your cousin?”

“Yeah.” That cold edge flamed white hot. I was not discussing Claire with him. Not while he was holding the prize I’d just won for the girl who was I-don’t-know-how-many notches down the line from her on his conquest list, and not when there was finally a chance that all my worrying was about to be past tense.

“Should I assume your being here means she’s okay?” he asked.

“She woke up today.”

“That’s great,” he said; I almost bought it. I don’t care how good an actress Chandi was, she had nothing on her boy toy. Brooks’ eyes actually lit up as though he were capable of sharing in someone else’s good fortune.

“It’ll be great when she’s home,” I said shortly. “What about you? You said that’s for Chandi.”

He shifted the dog-thing to his hip like it was an overlarge baby.

“Jordan dragged her off to the fun house, I think. They should be back any minute.”

And they were. The fun house exit opened, releasing a small cluster of people into the night. Chandi and Jordan were the first two out. Jordan pointed an angry finger at our bench and stalked off.

“Speak of the bi—”

“Dinah!”

“What? I was going to say ‘big dog lover.’ ”

“Sure you were.”

Well, I was. At least, I was going to say something dog-related. Technically it was a female of the species, and the queen “b” herself was headed straight for our bench with a scowl hard enough to crack the porcelain coat she called makeup.

“You owe me twenty bucks.” I stood from the bench and headed back to the center of the midway, where Dex had left me.

A glance back didn’t give me the angry girlfriend scene I expected. Chandi had the blue dog-thing in one arm; her other one was around Brooks, and her face was buried in his shoulder. The way she shook while he rubbed a hand up and down her back made me sure she was crying.

He reached for one of her hands, but she jerked it back, hugging it around the stuffed monstrosity as a shield.

People walked past them, as though they didn’t notice the teenage girl in the middle of a breakdown. Others obviously did notice but were trying not to. A minute or so later, Jordan appeared with two soda cups, sat on Chandi’s other side, and the dynamic shifted along with Chandi’s posture. Brooks and Jordan locked eyes over her head; he twisted his wrist in the air like it was some sort of prearranged signal, then gave Chandi a kiss on the head and walked off with his hands in his pockets.

I began to feel a niggling prick of something suspiciously remorse-like for the things I’d said. From the look of it, this was more than the usual “bad day” I’d been picturing when Brooks said he was trying to cheer her up.

He looked in my direction, if not directly at me; the naked concern on his face made me want to go back over and find out what was going on. Brooks turned, like maybe he’d come my way and spare me the need to go his, but he changed his mind. He ducked his head and retreated.

I was confused until I realized Dex had come back. Whatever had been in Brooks’ head, he didn’t want to share while his buddy was nearby.

“Come on,” Dex said, oblivious to the entire scene. He took my hand.

“Do you know what’s wrong with Chandi?” I asked.

He hardly bothered to look her way before puffing out a scoff.

“She probably passed a mirror and realized one eye’s higher than the other one or something. Let’s go.”

He shook a set of keys at me and yanked my hand hard enough to pull me away.

There wasn’t much toward the back of the carnival grounds besides the walk-through attractions. The fun house, with its awful, ear-bleed-inducing music that sounded like a carousel on crack, had a winding line that snaked through three rounds of crowd control ropes. There was a boat ride with a shorter line made entirely of couples—most of which had decided not to wait for the darkened space inside to start making out. The third structure, and our apparent destination, was the house of horrors.

A plywood cutout of a creepy Gothic mansion with blacked-out windows served as the entry point for the house, but it was chained shut. There was no music coming from inside like with the other two, and a large wooden sign read “Closed for Maintenance” in tall orange letters. A couple of kids seemed to be testing the lock, but other than that, it was deserted.

“Where are we going?” I asked as he steered me toward another of the red-painted employee access fences. “It’s closed.”

“Only for the plebeians who must use the front door,
chérie
.” He stuck his nose in the air and put on this horrible fake French accent that made him sound like a waiter in a really bad movie. It was a habit I assumed he’d picked up from Brooks, because he was acting a lot like Brooks had when he’d showed me around his house. “Those of us with higher connections get the gold star treatment.”

Dex was the only person I knew who could make me giggle like an idiot at will; he was a human lithium shot. All the irritation dealing with Brooks had brought back and all the worry I’d felt for Chandi dissolved as easy as someone pouring cold water on a pile of soap bubbles.

“If it wasn’t so cold, I’d sneak us into the lakeside. It’s shut down for the run of the carnival, and we’d have the whole place to ourselves, but this is almost as good—trust me.”

On the other side of the employee fence, we stopped at a metal door on the back of a cement wall; Dex used his key to open the padlock. He reached for a light switch inside, finding it with enough ease that I was sure he’d come through that way several times. I wondered if this was one of the places he had to clean.

The first exhibit was the torture chamber, with a skeleton chained to a rack and another in a giant cage that hung from the ceiling, only with all the lights on, there wasn’t much to be afraid of. The shaded plastic bones didn’t have the right effect.

Dex led me from room to room, showing all the carnival’s tricks and where the different monsters would pop out along the track. He was the giant goofball version of himself I’d met my first day at Lowry, swinging from chains and switching the hats (and occasionally the heads) of the dummies to fit his own vision of how the place should look. Every room came with a story or a song; one even came with a dance. By the time we got to what he referred to as the finale, I was composing apologies—and thank-yous—to Tabs in my head. She was right; this wasn’t a night I needed to miss.

The last scene was a posh banquet table with dead roses and
brown ivy for a centerpiece. A pair of skeletal ghoul dummies sat in the center, one wearing a tux and the other a wedding dress. Melted-down candles were in candelabras spaced every few feet along the surface, and the set dresser had even gone to the trouble of making a rotten wedding cake for the display in the background. It was mostly green, with one side collapsed in, but instead of smelling like mildew, the whole space reeked of resin and latex.

“I have a confession,” Dex said. “This is where I used to bring my old girlfriend, but things didn’t work out.” He circled around behind the corpse bride and laid his chin on her shoulder.

“Couldn’t compete with someone prettier than you?” I asked.

“We all have our faults,” he said. “Sit down.”

“You want me to sit in the corpse chair?” I asked. “It’s not contagious.”

He lifted the dead mannequin up by her arms and set her aside. Strangely enough, neither she nor the groom had legs; tablecloth and cobwebs ran all the way from the tabletop to the floor, making it impossible to see behind them. Once the groom was out of the way, Dex took his seat.

“Why are we sitting at the dead people’s table?”

“Because we’re celebrating, remember? This place may not sparkle, but you can’t argue that it’s not built for a special occasion.”

If you define “special” as attending your own wake …

I wasn’t sure why he thought hanging out with the Crypt-keeper’s family was in any way something I’d consider
worthwhile when I’d just come too close to attending a real funeral, but somehow this had become a good idea in Dex’s head. I figured a few minutes of playing along couldn’t hurt.