Joyland

"Of course not. I also made some calls. Practically dialed my fingers off, if you want to know the truth. You owe me for the long-distance, too. More about Claudine Sharp later. For now, let's move on. Victim number three-according to the News and Courier story-was a girl from Santee, South Carolina. Now we're up to 1965. Eva Longbottom, age nineteen. Black. Disappeared on July fourth. Her body was found nine days later by a couple of fishermen, lying on the north bank of the Santee River. Raped and stabbed in the heart. The others were neither black nor raped. You can put her in the Funhouse Killer column if you want to, but I'm doubtful, myself. Last victim-before Linda Gray-was her."

She handed me what had to be a high school yearbook photo of a beautiful golden-haired girl. The kind who's the head cheerleader, the Homecoming Queen, dates the football quarterback… and is still liked by everyone.

"Darlene Stamnacher. Probably would have changed her last name if she'd gotten into the movie biz, which was her stated goal. White, nineteen. From Maxton, North Carolina.

Disappeared on June 29th, 1967. Found two days later, after a massive search, inside a roadside lean-to in the sugar-pine williwags south of Elrod. Throat cut."

"Christ, she's beautiful. Didn't she have a steady boyfriend?"

"A girl this good-looking, why do you even ask? And that's where the police went first, only he wasn't around. He and three of his buddies had gone camping in the Blue Ridge, and they could all vouch for him. Unless he flapped his arms and flew back, it wasn't him."

"Then came Linda Gray," I said. "Number five. If they were all murdered by the same guy, that is."

Erin raised a teacherly finger. "And only five if all the guy's victims have been found. There could have been others in '62,

'64, '66… you get it."

The wind gusted and moaned through the struts of the Spin.

"Now for the things that trouble me," Erin said… as if five dead girls weren't troubling enough. From her folder she took another Xerox. It was a flier-a shout, in the Talk-advertising something called Manly Wellman's Show of 1000 Wonders. It showed a couple of clowns holding up a parchment listing some of the wonders, one of which was:

AMERICA's FINEST COLLECTION OF FREAKS! AND ODDITIES!

There were also rides, games, fun for the kiddies, and

THE WORLD's SCARIEST FUNHOUSE!

Come in if you dare, I thought.

"You got this from interlibrary loan?" I asked.

"Yes. I've decided you can get anything by way of interlibrary loan, if you're willing to dig. Or maybe I should say cock an ear, because it's really the world's biggest jungle telegraph.

This ad appeared in the Waycross Journal-Herald. It ran during the first week of August, 1961."

"The Wellman carny was in Waycross when the first girl disappeared?"

"Her name was DeeDee Mowbray, and no-it had moved on by then. But it was there when DeeDee told her girlfriend that she had a new boyfriend. Now look at this. It's from the Rocky Mount Telegram. Ran for a week in mid-July of 1963.

Standard advance advertising. I probably don't even need to tell you that."

It was another full-pager shouting Manly Wellman's Show of 1000 Wonders. Same two clowns holding up the same parch- ment, but two years after the stop in Waycross, they were also promising a ten thousand dollar cover-all Beano game, and the word freaks was nowhere to be seen.

"Was the show in town when the Sharp girl was killed in the movie theater?"

"Left the day before." She tapped the bottom of the sheet.

"All you have to do is look at the dates, Dev."

I wasn't as familiar with the timeline as she was, but I didn't bother defending myself. "The third girl? Longbottom?"

"I didn't find anything about a carny in the Santee area, and I sure wouldn't have found anything about the Wellman show, because it went bust in the fall of 1964. I found that in Outdoor Trade and Industry. So far as I or any of my many librarian helpers could discover, it's the only trade magazine that covers the carny and amusement park biz."

"Jesus, Erin, you should forget photography and find yourself a rich writer or movie producer. Hire on as his research assistant."

''I'd rather take pictures. Research is too much like work.

But don't lose the thread here, Devin. There was no carny in the Santee area, true, but the Eva Longbottom murder doesn't look like the other four, anyway. Not to me. No rape in the others, remember?"

"That you know of. Newspapers are coy about that stuff."

"That's right, they say molested or sexually assaulted instead of raped, but they get the point across, believe me."

"What about Darlene Shoemaker? Was there-"

"Stamnacher. These girls were murdered, Dev, the least you can do is get their names right."

"I will. Give me time."

She put a hand over mine. "Sorry. I'm throwing this at you all at once, aren't I? I've had weeks to brood over it."

"Have you been?"

"Sort of. It's pretty awful."