Joyland

Shop law knocked on the door and asked if I'd like to come down to the parlor and play Scrabble with her and Tina Ackerley.

I am not at all crazy about Scrabble, having suffered many humiliations at the hands of my aunts Tansy and Naomi, who each have a huge mental vocabulary of what I still think of as "Scrabble shit-words"-stuff like suq, tranq, and bhoot (an Indian ghost, should you wonder). Nevertheless, I said I'd love to play. Mrs.

Shoplaw was my landlady, after all, and diplomacy takes many forms.

On our way downstairs, she confided, "We're helping Tina bone up. She's quite the Scrabble-shark. She's entered in some sort of tournament in Atlantic City next weekend. I believe there is a cash prize."

It didn't take long-maybe four turns-to discover that our resident librarian could have given my aunts all the game they could handle, and more. By the time Miss Ackerley laid down nubility (with the apologetic smile all Scrabble-sharks seem to have; I think they must practice it in front of their mirrors),

Emmalina Shoplaw was eighty points behind. As for me.. well, never mind.

"I don't suppose either of you know anything about Annie and Mike Ross, do you?" I asked during a break in the action (both women seemed to feel a need to study the board a looong time before laying down so much as a single tile). "They live on Beach Row in the big green Victorian?"

Miss Ackerley paused with her hand still inside the little brown bag of letters. Her eyes were big, and her thick lenses made them even bigger. "Have you met them?"

"Uh-huh. They were trying to fly a kite.. well, she was… and joy land I helped out a little. They're very nice. I just wondered… the two of them all alone in that big house, and him pretty sick… "

The look they exchanged was pure incredulity, and I started to wish I hadn't raised the subject.

"She talks to you?" Mrs. Shoplaw asked. "The Ice Queen actually talks to you?"

Not only talked to me, but gave me a fro it smoothie. Thanked me. Even apologized to me. But I said none of that. Not because Annie really had iced up when I presumed too much, but because to do so would have seemed disloyal, somehow.

"Well, a little. I got the kite up for them, that's all." I turned the board. It was Tina's, the pro kind with its own little built-in spindle. "Come on, Mrs. S. Your turn. Maybe you'll even make a word that's in my puny vocabulary."

"Given the correct positioning, puny can be worth seventy points," Tina Ackerley said. "Even more, if a y-word is connected to pun."

Mrs. Shoplaw ignored both the board and the advice. "You know who her father is, of course."

"Can't say I do." Although I did know she was on the outs with him, and big-time.

"Buddy Ross? As in The Buddy Ross Hour of Power? Ring any bells?"

It did, vaguely. I thought I might have heard some preacher named Ross on the radio in the costume shop. It kind of made sense. During one of my quick-change transformations into Howie, Dottie Lassen had asked me-pretty much out of a clear blue sky-if I had found Jesus. My first impulse had been to tell her that I didn't know He was lost, but I restrained it.

"One of those Bible-shouters, right?"

"Next to Oral Roberts and that Jimmy Swaggart fellow, he's just about the biggest of them," Mrs. S. said. "He broadcasts from this gigantic church-God's Citadel, he calls it-in Atlanta.

His radio show goes out all over the country, and now he's getting more and more into TV. I don't know if the stations give him the time free, or if he has to buy it. I'm sure he can afford it, especially late at night. That's when the old folks are up with their aches and pains. His shows are half miracle healings and half pleas for more love-offerings."

"Guess he didn't have any luck healing his grandson," I said.

Tina withdrew her hand from the letter-bag with nothing in it. She had forgotten about Scrabble for the time being, which was a good thing for her hapless victims. Her eyes were sparkling.

"You don't know any of this story, do you? Ordinarily I don't believe in gossip, but… " She dropped her voice to a confidential tone pitched just above a whisper."… but since you've met them,

I could tell you."

"Yes, please," I said. I thought one of my questions-how Annie and Mike came to be living in a huge house on one of North Carolina's ritziest beaches-had already been answered.

It was Grampa Buddy's summer retreat, bought and paid for with love-offerings.

"He's got two sons," Tina said. "They're both high in his church-deacons or assistant pastors, I don't know what they call them exactly, because I don't go for that holy rolling stuff.

The daughter, though, she was different. A sporty type. Horseback riding, tennis, archery, deer hunting with her father, quite a bit of competition shooting. All that got in the papers after her trouble started."

Now the CAMP PERRY shirt made sense.