by Diane Hoh
He keeps saying that if I really cared about my baby I’d give it up. What am I going to do?
A few days later:
Buddy was back again today. He told me this family that wants my baby has offered to pay my rent and my expenses until the baby’s born. The only strings attached, he says, are that they get the baby when it’s born, and I don’t let anyone know that I’m pregnant. When I asked him why, he said, “My friends wouldn’t want anyone to know the baby isn’t theirs. The woman has gone to Europe and expects to be given the child when she returns, and she’ll tell everyone she had the baby in England.”
I have to let him help me now. I have no choice. I have so little money left, and no one will give me a job. So I’ll have to accept their money for now, for my baby. But I’ll think of something before the baby’s born. I’m not going to give up my baby.
Chapter 12
TESS’S ONLY THOUGHT AS she struggled through the remaining passageways toward an exit was, No, not Gina. Not Gina! Fake bats swung down from the ceiling, diving for her head. Dragons on the walls breathed hot smoke in her face. Skeletons rattled their bones in a crazy dance. She brushed them all aside and kept going. Don’t be dead, Gina, she prayed. Don’t be dead like Dade Lewis!
What would she ever do without Gina?
Gina wasn’t dead. But she was unconscious. Tess’s companions had already gathered around her limp body. Beak was kneeling by her side, holding one of her hands, with Doss on the other side. Beachgoers gathered around the small group as the sun sank beneath the sea.
“Someone call an ambulance,” Beak cried as Tess, gasping for breath, her face tear-streaked, arrived and knelt at Gina’s side. Someone called, “I’ll go,” and Beak turned back to Gina, calling her name repeatedly.
She didn’t answer.
There didn’t seem to be any blood. But Tess hated the fact that the big dark eyes refused to open. The smoothly packed sand was almost as hard as wood, and Gina had fallen a long way.
Jim Mancini, The Boardwalk’s manager, pushed through the growing crowd. A short, squat man wearing tan pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, he made a soft sound when he saw Gina lying on the sand. “What happened?” he asked as he knelt beside her and lifted her wrist to check her pulse. “She’s alive,” he said. A murmur of relief rose from the crowd. Turning toward Tess, he asked, “Did she hit her head? How long has she been unconscious? What’s wrong with her leg?”
There was definitely something wrong with Gina’s leg. No normal bone could make such a crazy angle.
“It’s broken,” volunteered Sam, whose father was a doctor. “Fractured, probably. Doesn’t look like a clean break.”
“I don’t understand how this happened,” Tess said in a bewildered voice over the sound of an approaching siren. “Why was that circle missing?”
Mancini’s eyes narrowed. “Missing? What was missing?”
With tears in her eyes, Tess answered, “One of the spinning circles in the Funhouse. It was … gone. It had been there when we went through earlier. But this time, when I followed Gina into that passageway to see why she had screamed, one of the circles was gone. There was just this great big hole. Gina probably didn’t see it in time and fell right through.”
Mancini would have questioned her further, but the ambulance arrived just then. Tess wanted to ride in it with Gina, but the paramedics discouraged her.
“Call her parents,” one of them said, “and have them meet us at the Medical Center.” As he turned away to help carry the stretcher, he told his colleague, “I was on duty the other night when that roller coaster went. Some mess! And now this! I’m keeping my kids away from here from now on.”
Tess turned away, intent on going straight to her car and then to the Medical Center. She wanted to be with Gina.
But Mancini stopped her. “Look,” he said, “your friend’s in good hands. You can see her later. Right now, I need you to show me where this happened. So it won’t happen to somebody else.”
Tess realized he had a point. That missing circle was dangerous. And she probably wouldn’t be allowed to see Gina for a while, anyway.
She nodded. “Okay, come on. But I need to call Gina’s parents first.” She bit her lip anxiously. “They’re going to be so upset.”
“Someone already called,” Candace said softly, putting a sympathetic arm around Tess’s shoulders. “I heard someone say so.”
“Good!” Mancini said. “Then we can get right to it. Come on, miss, show me what you were talking about.”
Which Tess would have been happy to do, except for one thing. When she led Mancini and her friends into the chamber, there was absolutely nothing to see.
Because not a single circle was missing.
Tess stared at the spot where the gaping hole had been. It was now filled by a whirling, innocent-looking saucer, just as it was supposed to be. The disk stared right back at her as if to say, “But I’ve been here all along. You were imagining things!”
She could feel everyone’s eyes on her after they’d searched in vain for anything out of the ordinary. “I don’t believe this,” she said slowly, feeling a flush rise up out of her neck and spread to her face.
“Well, I don’t get it!” Mancini said, eyeing Tess suspiciously. “There’s nothing wrong here. What were you talking about down on the beach?”
“It was gone!” she cried. “It was!” She knew, even as she said it, how crazy that sounded. After all, the circles were huge. Someone couldn’t just lift one out and walk away with it without being seen. “The one in the middle was missing. There was a hole there! That’s how I could see Gina, lying on the beach.”
No one said a word. And that silence told her, very clearly, that no one believed her.
“Honestly, Tess,” Trudy said lazily, “first you see some dark spirit under The Devil’s Elbow and now you’re seeing missing saucers. I thought people like you always saw flying saucers.”
And even though Candace said, “Trudy, don’t be so mean!” and Sam moved closer to Tess and said, “Take it easy, Tess. You’re upset about Gina,” Tess began to shake violently. Her arms and legs trembled and Sam had to take hold of her with both hands to keep her upright.
“I know what I saw,” Tess managed to say. “And if I didn’t see it, then exactly how did Gina end up on the beach?”
Mancini shrugged toward the passageway up ahead. “Tumbled over the railing, maybe.”
The railing was high, to protect small children from accidental falls. And Gina wasn’t clumsy. “She couldn’t have fallen over that railing,” Tess argued. “It’s too high.”
“I think you’d better talk to the police, miss,” he said coolly. “Something fishy here. I had my assistant give them a call. They should be here by now. You were the only person in here when your friend fell. They’ll want to talk to you.”
The police? A chilly fog descended upon Tess. “But I want to go to the Medical Center,” she argued as they all left the Funhouse, taking the wooden stairs.
“That will have to wait,” the manager said sternly, taking her elbow as they reached the foot of the stairs. Dusk had fallen and the air had turned chilly. Tess shivered. But she wasn’t really cold. She was frightened. “We need to clear this up right now. I don’t want any questions,” Mancini went on, “about The Boardwalk’s safety.”
“Too late,” Sam said drily. “Two accidents in one week makes for a lot of questions.”
Ignoring his remark, Mancini gripped the sleeve of Tess’s yellow sweatshirt and led her to his office. Her friends followed, grumbling their support for her to themselves. Candace looked even more pale and frightened than usual, and Guy Joe’s lips were drawn together tightly in anger. Tess could feel people along The Boardwalk staring at them, and knew that by nightfall the story of Tess Landers being dragged into Mancini’s office would be all over town. Her face felt feverish, and she kept her eyes on the ground.
The police questioning wasn’t as bad as
she’d feared. There were only two uniformed men and they were more polite than Mancini had been. They asked her to take them back to the Funhouse and point out the spot where Gina had fallen. When they could find no evidence of any circle having been tampered with, they walked away from her, talking in low voices. But Tess heard every word.
“Isn’t this the girl who brought that note in?” the taller one asked his partner. “You know, the one in purple crayon that Boz showed us?”
Boz. The desk sergeant, Tess guessed, and her cheeks burned with humiliation as the second policeman answered, “Yeah. One of those rich kids, lives up on the hill. Broken home and all that. Probably gets everything at home except attention, know what I mean?” He shook his head sadly.
She couldn’t just let them dismiss her as some kind of attention-getting kook. “Excuse me,” she said politely.
They turned around.
“If the saucer really wasn’t missing,” she asked them, “how could Gina have fallen? There isn’t any place here for her to fall through to the beach. Not with all the saucers in place.”
“Good question,” the tall policeman said heartily. “And you have our word, miss, that the matter will be investigated thoroughly. We may have to call on you again.”
They wouldn’t call on her again, and she knew it. But she also knew there wasn’t any way to convince them that she was telling the truth. She had no proof.
“Look, kid,” the taller policeman said, “you can go collect your friends now. We’ll look into this, I promise. You’re probably anxious to find out how your friend is.”
He was being nice. Trying to smile, she admitted that she was anxious to get to the Medical Center. Now if only Gina was fine.
Gina wasn’t fine. And they weren’t allowed to see her, Tess was informed by the emergency room nurse. “You can wait in there,” she said crisply, pointing toward a room at the end of the hall. Tess, seeing Mr. Giambone pacing the hall outside of the waiting room, ran to see if Gina’s parents knew anything about her condition.
They didn’t. No one had told them anything.
The sight of Gina’s normally cheerful mother weeping, her hands over her face, shocked Tess. She wanted to say something to comfort the woman who had always been so good to her, but nothing seemed right. Quietly, Tess took a seat beside her.
“The doctor said she’d be in there a while,” Doss said, his usual swaggering air gone as he gestured toward the emergency room. He seemed as worried as everyone else in the room.
But suspicion had taken a firm hold on Tess and was growing with every passing minute. Two accidents in less than a week! In a town where things like this never happened. She didn’t care what explanation for Gina’s fall the police came up with, they’d never convince her that the saucer hadn’t been missing. It had. Someone had taken it. She didn’t have the slightest idea how someone would do such a thing. She only knew that someone had.
But who?
The person who had written the purple note, of course. The intention was clear from that awful poem. The police, and then Gina, hadn’t taken it seriously. Maybe they should have. If there’d been no more accidents, Tess would have agreed with them that it was just a sick joke. But now Gina had fallen, and it was clear, at least to Tess, that the note had been for real.
What frightened Tess most was the fact that every single person who had been seriously hurt so far, with the exception of some innocent bystanders injured in The Devil’s Elbow crash, had been her age, in her group of friends: Dade, Sheree, Joey, and now Gina. Why would someone target them?
And then Tess thought of something else, even more frightening.
Whoever had slipped that purple note under her door had known where she lived—that she lived with Shelley in the condominium, not with her father anymore. Only a few people knew that. Only her closest friends.
But that was impossible! None of her friends could ever do anything this horrible. Never! Could they?
Tess glanced around the room nervously. Could shy, quiet Candace be harboring feelings of hatred and anger toward her fellow students? Why? Because she felt left out? If people didn’t pay that much attention to Candace, it was because she was so quiet. Maybe underneath that quiet, she was full of rage. Maybe she wasn’t who they all thought she was.
Beak? Lover of practical jokes? Even he couldn’t possibly find The Devil’s Elbow crash funny—could he?
Trudy? Remembering the temper tantrum that Trudy had thrown in the school parking lot, Tess watched Trudy for a long moment. Wearing an expensive pink jumpsuit belted in rich leather, Trudy was filing her nails with an emery board, glancing up every now and then to smile at Guy Joe, who lounged against the wall. Could Trudy have some reason for wanting the people she knew well to suffer?
I can’t believe, Tess thought unhappily, that I am even considering the possibility that one of my friends could have done such horrid things! It’s just not possible, that’s all!
Then who had? And why?
Doss, she thought, as she looked across the room at him, slumped in one of the hard plastic chairs. Doss would know the Funhouse inside and out. And he’d know how to remove those metal saucers and replace them, wouldn’t he?
The trouble with that theory, she realized instantly, was that Gina would be the last person Doss would want to hurt. Anyone who had seen the expression on his square, dark face when he looked at Gina would understand that Doss would rather break his own leg than Gina’s.
That was when she remembered something, and sat up straight. Of course! The missing saucer hadn’t been intended for Gina. The missing keys belonged to Tess. The hole in the saucers had been created for her. And those keys hadn’t slid from her pocket at all. They’d been deliberately removed. That’s why she hadn’t been able to find them anywhere, and had to get a lift back home to pick up her extra set.
But who would have had the opportunity to take her keys? Doss would have. She now remembered he had been standing close to her on The Boardwalk before they’d first entered the Funhouse. He could easily have filched her keys. And then he could have removed the saucer, knowing Tess would return to the Funhouse to search for them.
But how on earth would someone time a stunt like that? And where would they put the missing saucer? There wasn’t any place in the passageway to hide something so large.
Never mind. She’d figure all of that out later. Right now, it was enough to realize that Gina’s fall hadn’t been an accident, that it hadn’t been intended for Gina, and that the note had been perfectly serious when it said Who will be next?
Tess shivered in her seat.
“Cold?” Sam asked, coming up to stand in front of her. “Want my jacket?” He slipped out of his brown suede jacket and handed it to her, but she shook her head no.
“Not cold,” she said quietly. “Just thinking ugly thoughts.”
He sat down beside her. “Like?”
She wasn’t ready to share what she’d been thinking. Saying it aloud would make it so much more real. She had to do some more heavy thinking before she told anyone.
“Never mind.”
He accepted that, and sat quietly beside her, asking no more questions.
“This is such a bad thing,” Mrs. Giambone said suddenly. “My Gina, she was in such pain when they brought her in.”
“She was conscious? That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”
The woman nodded, her round face, so like Gina’s, creased with worry. “She was awake. But she was crying. And I cried, too.” She shook her head, her curly graying hair moving with the motion. “That’s not good, for a mother to cry in front of her child. It scared my Gina. But I couldn’t help it.”
Tess put an arm around Mrs. Giambone’s ample shoulders. “She’ll be okay. Honest, she will.” Because anything else was unthinkable. “And I don’t blame you for crying. I cried, too, when I saw her on the beach.”
Until she saw Mrs. Giambone weeping, Tess hadn’t given a thought to what all of this must be lik
e for the parents. Sheree Buchanan’s mother had spent most of Sheree’s life bragging about how pretty her daughter was. Joey’s parents came to every single track meet, even the out-of-town events. And the Giambones were understandably scared to death.
It’s worse for them, Tess thought with conviction. It’s worse for the parents.
Her head began to pound furiously. The words Who will be next? danced across the white walls, taunting her. Who will be next, who will be—
Dr. Oliver, Sam’s father, stethoscope around his neck, appeared in the doorway. Mr. Giambone was right behind him.
“Your daughter,” the doctor told the parents, “has a fractured leg and a mild concussion. We’re going to keep her here for a while. No visitors for a day or two. Except, of course, for you two. You can go in and see her now, before we take her upstairs. She’s worried about you.”
“We can’t see her?” Tess asked, her voice quivering slightly. She wouldn’t be certain Gina was okay until she saw that for herself.
Dr. Oliver shook his head. “Sorry. Not yet. Give her some time to get over the shock to her system. A good night’s sleep is what she needs right now. Maybe tomorrow, although the next day would be even better, okay?”
It wasn’t okay. But she had to do what was best for Gina. Because in a way, this was all her fault. It had been her key case. The hole had been meant for her. So the fall, the concussion, and the fractured leg should have been hers, too.
Perhaps because of her guilt, Tess stayed for a while after everyone else went home, hoping Sam’s father would change his mind and let her see Gina.
He didn’t, and when she was so tired she felt like she was about to collapse, she left, too.
She hurried to her car, hating the darkness and wishing she had asked someone to wait with her. But who? Right now, she was so unsure about everyone she knew that she couldn’t think of a single person she absolutely trusted.