How I Spent My Summer Vacation (9 page)

“Is this a prank call? Because I don’t find it funny at all.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

“Of course I remember Dunstan Farmer. Everybody in these parts would. We knew his parents, too, since they were born. They didn’t move here from any foreign country. They’ve lived here forever, for generations, except for when the family moved South and the tragedy happened. Atlanta, or Mobile—one of those places. They came back after. And stayed.” She sighed, twice. “Broke the town’s heart, how bad we felt for them.”

“How…what happened?” I whispered.

“Broke his neck in one of those freak accidents during a practice scrimmage down in Atlanta—or Mobile. I never can remember. He was a junior in high school. He was a good young man and it was a hard loss when he died. Family never got over it, either. Whoever you met, whoever sent you those photographs, was most certainly not our Dunstan Farmer.”

When I hung up, I was dizzy, light-headed. The man who’d borrowed the identity of a dead teenager could be anybody—Edgar from Yorkshire, that married man who’d made himself seem dead. Or he could be a murderer. And where did Sasha fit into all this?

I felt as if I were in that Poe story where the walls contract and crush their inhabitant. Something dreadful had happened and was continuing to happen, and I wanted desperately to do something about it, but I had no idea what that something could be. In lieu of action, I accepted motion.

I left my room and walked down the hall toward the elevator bank, pondering the past twenty-four hours spent in the Twilight Zone. Nothing whatsoever made sense, yet it had all happened, starting with the mysterious motives, methods, and identities of the people who’d used Sasha’s and my room as their killing ground. And how the devil had they gotten in?

And then I stopped in my tracks. At the other side of the elevator bay, a chambermaid’s cart piled high with towels and cleaning apparatus propped open a door. The most ordinary of hotel sights—but now it looked like one of the puzzle pieces.

I tested my hypothesis by rushing through the open door. “Oh!” I said to the startled woman making up the bed. “I’m interrupting, sorry! I had wanted to use my bathroom, take a shower, but I’ll come back later.”

“No, no. Is fine.” She waved me toward the bathroom. “Has clean towels already.”

I went into the bathroom, closed the door, ran the taps and flushed. I went back into the room, sat down, picked up a book on the desk, flipped through it, then smiled at the chambermaid, who was nearly finished. “I’ll come back later,” I said. “No problem. Thanks for making the room look so great.”

And that was how it could be done. Nobody had needed a key to our room. Chambermaids couldn’t be expected to know the ever-changing guest faces. So anyone could enter, look as if she belonged, and wait out the maid. And then later, after propping the door to make sure it didn’t lock, reenter along with an accomplice and a future victim.

And the entry technique was possible twice every day. The same open-door policy held in the evenings, when towels were replaced and bedspreads removed. Sasha had mentioned that throughout the carnage, my bed had remained pristine, turned down, a chocolate on its pillow.

A good thing to know if I ever wanted to murder or even simply ambush somebody. A bad thing to know if I ever again wanted to feel entirely comfortable or safe when entering a hotel room.

It was only after I was downstairs and out on the boardwalk that I inventoried what I’d seen at the site of my room experiment. A pair of men’s shoes near the bed. A technothriller as leisure reading. A man’s leather toiletry kit in the bathroom. Not a sign of a female inhabitant. I tried to imagine what the chambermaid had made of my intrusion.

I walked briskly past a woman standing by her storefront fortune-telling parlor under a sign reading KNOW THE FUTURE. I might have been tempted—the future was certainly something for which I needed a clue—but she was talking on a cellular phone. It seemed to me that people with extra powers should not need to rely on Ma Bell in order to find something out. I walked on.

I paused at the wide-open front of a raucous arcade. I could see a Skee-Ball game that I remembered from years past, although that was the only manual, nonelectronic game in sight, almost a fossil. The aisles were packed with loud machines. A talking tic-tac-toe was nearest to me. This, then, was casino prep school, or the really poor man’s casino, where a quarter would buy a chance. More likely, this was where the people who had my room and a losing streak came to get rid of their spare change.

I wandered inside and saw that if you took chance after chance and won, you were eligible for the world’s sorriest collection of prizes. A life-sized moose head made of polyester plush. Almost life-sized plastic figures of the Brady Bunch. Garishly painted plaster carousel horses.

I was on my way out when I saw a machine that promised to tell my romantic future. It wasn’t quite as valuable as finding out who the real killer was, but neither could I pass it by.

I put in my four quarters and punched in my name and birthdate. And was almost immediately stymied, because next I had to enter Mackenzie’s name. Feeling vaguely ashamed, I pushed a C and a K. Let the machine figure out how to pronounce it.

After a lot of whirring and flashing, a computer printout emerged. I took it onto the sunny boardwalk and read it en route. It wasn’t a real mood lifter.
You’re a dreamy-eyed idealist,
it said under romance.
You become enslaved by negative situations.

Mackenzie, on the other hand, seemed straightforward and to be envied.
It’s sheer romance
, it said.
You love love.

What did a machine know, anyway?
You love school, or the learning process in general,
it said for me. Okay, so it guessed well now and then.
You are a workhorse,
it said of Mackenzie.
You can drive souls past their point of sanity.
I cut to the quick and looked at our overall compatibility. It appeared that I needed distance, while Mackenzie needed partnership. Ridiculous.

I tossed the printout in the next wastepaper basket I passed and focused on my fellow board-strollers, but that didn’t provide relief. The look of the place had certainly changed since its glory days. My mother sometimes reminisces about the times she paraded her new spring suits and hats on the boards. Today, white gloves and a flowered bonnet—except on the stunning woman Sasha had seen with the almost–Harry Belafonte—would be hooted off the place, and an elegant suit would be a shocker.

When my mother talks about long-ago stays at the shore, the place sounds regal. Hail Britannia and all that. Her hotels had names like Marlborough, Blenheim, and Claridge. Now, in the cause of progress, or all-Americanism, it was de-anglicized. Bally, Caesar’s, and Trump this and that. A potpourri of nowhere.

But that train of thought chugged into the station called Dunstan, the de-anglicized man. The thought of Dunstan still made me nervous, and nerves made me hungry. Besides, it was close to lunchtime, and breakfast had been a shared bagel en route to the arraignment.

However, the boardwalk had never been an epicurean haven, and now it was a junk-food smorgasbord. Peanuts, saltwater taffy, pizza, hamburgers, assorted candies, and my secret favorite, a garlicky hot dog dipped in cornmeal batter and fried—just in case its innate fat content wasn’t sufficiently astronomical.

I zipped over to the yellow and green stand. “A lemonade and a…a Dip Stick,” I said in the voice of a spy passing on information.

“Miss Pepper!”

A Philly Prep student. Eric Stotsle. He of the amazing Adam’s apple. He’d been in my homeroom, but not my class yet, and had seemed one of those ordinary people with a mildly annoying tic—his was an unblinking stare—who never receive attention until they take down an entire village from its bell tower. “He was a good kid,” neighbors and classmates tell the press. “Never would have suspected this. Stared a lot, sure, but otherwise…”

You just didn’t notice Eric Stotsle, except for that bobbing apparatus in his throat. But Eric Stotsle noticed you.

I looked plaintively heavenward, but saw, instead of a compassionate deity, the inflated Dip Stix lemon. I therefore asked a plastic citrus fruit whether this, too, was necessary. I already had a murder and a jailed friend. Did I also need to be observed by a Philly Prep student? The lemon did not choose to answer. Never ask a sign for a sign.

“What are
you
doing here?” Eric stood, mouth slightly open, a lemonade cup in his hand.

“You mean at a Dip Stix stand?” Wasn’t a teacher allowed to clog her veins?

“I mean in Atlantic City!”

Ah, yes. He, too, had the common student delusion that when school wasn’t in sessions, teachers were deflated and stored in trunks along with the basketballs. “Vacationing.” I took the lemonade out of his hand. “And you? Aren’t you a little young to have this kind of job?”

“Look, I—don’t say anything, all right? It’s legal. Really.”

He had fudged some form somewhere, I was sure. But given that the purpose was to get himself an honest job, not to deal crack or run guns, who was I to squawk?

It was Eric who squawked, actually. “Hey,” he said, flicking his wrist dismissively. “Get lost. Do I have to tell you again?”

“Excuse me?”

“Not you, Miss Pepper!” Various portions of his face flushed. He looked down and to his side. “You, out! I’m gonna get in trouble! You can’t stay here.”

“I could pour lemonade,” the voice said. “Put in ice.”

“You can’t even reach the spout. Besides, you’re too young to work.” Eric heard his own words and looked at me guiltily, then back down again. “
Really illegal
for you to work, understand, man?”

A door in the counter swung open and a small child—I estimated five or six—walked out. Like Eric, he wore a baseball cap backward and attempted a serious swagger as he made his way to a three-legged stool, high enough to give him difficulty perching on it. “Then do you have like leftovers?”

Urchin was the only word for him, with all its Dickensian overtones. “Are you lost?” I asked softly.

He stared at me as if I were one of the deinstitutionalized his mother had warned him about, then seemed to decide I wasn’t dangerous. “I know where I am,” he said.

“Your mom waiting for you?”

He shrugged.

I turned and tried to see if I could spot his mother, but I couldn’t find a woman watching the boardwalk stand.

“You sure you don’t have food?” the little boy asked Eric. “Something that didn’t come out looking too good?”

“Ask your mother for money, like I told you,” Eric said.

“I can’t,” the boy said. “I’m not allowed in.”

Barred from his home? What was going on here? It was lunchtime, and the child was hungry. “Here.” I handed him the sizzling hot dog Eric had given me. A cardiologist of the future would thank me for this. I ordered a second one, so my future cardiologist could also pay his mortgage. “What’s your name?”

He took an enormous bite and answered unintelligibly, muffled by corn-battered hot dog.

“Lucky,” Eric translated. “That’s his name, he says. You really shouldn’t encourage him.”

Encourage him to do what? Eat? “Let me take you home to your mom,” I said. That was a definite action I could perform. It wouldn’t help Sasha’s mess or my pending romantic incompatibility, but I’d be doing
something
.

Lucky shook his head and chewed away. “Plin.” He sounded like somebody talking through flannel.

Eric translated. “She’s playing. He’s not allowed.” He wasn’t making sense. I imagined Lucky’s mother turning a jump rope, covering her eyes for hide and seek, tossing a ball. “Have to be twenty-one,” Eric said, “to get in.”

“She’s in the casino?”

The little boy nodded and finished off his hot dog. “I’m dyin’ of thirst,” he said.

I wondered how long he’d been on his own while his mother gambled. I wondered if she’d understand if I tracked her down and gave her whatever piece of my mind I could spare. I wondered if she’d remember her kid if I reported her to Family Services.

Oh, God, but I didn’t want to have further doings with the police just now. I handed Lucky a lemonade.

“She said she’d only be a while,” Lucky said.

“He was here last night, too,” Eric said. “I made him go back inside the casino. It was like
dark
.”

The hot dog smelled delicious, but suddenly my stomach didn’t feel up to it. I offered it to the boy, but he declared himself full, so I held it like a small pennant. “Come on, Lucky.” It felt indescribably sad calling him that, and even sadder that he was so willing to go with me, to trust me, to be taken care of. “Let’s find your mom.”

I wished I had never come to this city.

“HEY!” IT WAS THE HOMELESS woman who lived under the boardwalk. Georgette. She raised her fingers in an almost military salute. “Who you got there?” She lounged on a bench by the stairs that led to the beach, her thin hair ruffling in the breeze. She wore a knee-length denim skirt with a ragged hemline over a long plaid skirt that touched the tops of her orange socks. A small and rumpled stack of newspapers was next to her, but she wasn’t reading them. I was glad of that, because the topmost page featured the portrait of Jesse Reese.

There was no escaping the murder. There was no trying not to think about it.

Georgette was reading a thick paperback that looked bloated, as if it had done time in a tub.

“This is Lucky,” I said. The little boy stared at her gravely.

“Yours?”

“Borrowing him for a while.” I could see the faded but still legible title of her book.
War and Peace.
Her thumb held her place far into its depths. She followed the track of my eyes. “Saw this goin’ out to sea one day.”

So that’s what other people did with their overly ambitious biodegradable summer reading lists.

“Nearly done now,” she said. “It’s good, except those Russians have so many names it hurts the eyes. So hello, Lucky. Makes sense I’d meet you today. This is a lucky one for me, all right.” She leaned closer to the little boy. “I’ve been at war, but now I’m at peace,” she said in a stage whisper. “Get it?”