🎪 - go to a creepy carnival (CREEPY CARNIVAL CREEPY CARNIVAL)
In the south, October is still widely considered an extension of summer.
There are times, Will had to admit, that he longs for the chill of a Michigan winter, the kind he’d get when he visited his grandparents’ as a kid. The chattering cold that seeped into your bones, the way the leaves fell early sometimes and danced through the streets in tiny hurricanes of foliage, the colors, even he had to admit, beautiful. He’d never been east, to see the leaves, but as a kid, his gran had told him about them, promised to take the trip when they could.
Time has a way of sneaking past you.
The moment it rolled into town, its reputation seemed to have preceded it–everyone had either gone and loved it, mystified by its sights and laughing about its thrills, or longed to.
Will could not say he was so inclined.
His head is resting in his hand, the paper against the steering wheel, when he gets the call: a missing girl.
Children–teenagers, especially-have a way of disappearing, and Will would be hesitant to admit that his first response wasn’t one of fear or urgency but that of…well, slight indifference. The town grows stifling once you hit a certain age, and high school seems to go on forever, and you ache for nothing more than freedom. To just be out. To just see something other than the island, than it’s people, than the ocean spread for miles and miles, hopelessly endless, a void. Most kids do make it out. Why should he look for them?
But then he gets the details, murky as they are: last seen in the woods surrounding the newest attraction in town. Suspected kidnapping. Daughter of the Wellington’s, the family with the biggest house at the top of the highest hill. For a minute, Will thinks, maybe that’d give her more reason to run.
But it doesn’t sit right, even with him.
He turns over the ignition and heads off to the edge of town.
It isn’t what he expected.
For all the clamor surrounding it, the carnival itself–if it can be called that–is decidedly mundane, despite the lavish decor, golds and blacks adorning the tents and displays, the scent of funnel cake smoothing away the unseasonable chill of the night breeze, the sounds of trilling laughter and shrill screams from the ferris wheel carrying through the night air.
Will heads to the booth at the front of the carnival, the ticket seller, and shows his badge in the window. The gi seems unimpressed.
Until he explains what he’s there for.
She comes to her feet quickly, flipping the open signed to read “closed”, eliciting a small chorus of groans from a line Will cut into. Wordlessly, she begins off through the fanfare, and Will understands that he’s to follow her. She stops at a big tent, closed, but illuminated by strings of lights inside, and pushes the cloth to the side to allow her and Will’s entrance; he’s surprised to find the tent nearly completely empty, aside from a desk, some paperwork, a radio, and a cot.
Someone has been living here.
Will feels a familiar prickle trickle it’s way down his arms and legs, adrenaline surging inside him. This is it, he finds himself thinking. This is something.
“Listen,” the woman bites-she is a woman, will can see now, despite the glow of her wide eyes and way she braids her silken hair in a single plait to the side of her face–“I don’t know who you are. And I don’t know what you think you’re doing–”
“I am the sheriff of the chief of police of this town,” he warns her, his voice sharp. “A girl is missing. And if you know something about that–”
The woman interjects just as quickly as Will can take a breath. “I know a hell of a lot about missing girls, Sheriff.”
Her voice is rueful, even wounded. Will’s stomach sinks as she continues: “But this girl isn’t one of them.”
“And I’m not supposed to find that suspicious?”
“find it however you want,” the woman jabs. “I am telling you, I am giving you my word: she isn’t here.”
A stranger’s word, Will has learned, isn’t worth all that much.
When he returns, she’s awaiting him. Her hand even seems outstretched, as thought she could anticipate what he’d come bearing. They come during the day, when the carnival is closed, and in the light of the early morning, the silken blonde of the woman’s hair is brighter than should be normal, nearly glowing in the fresh sun.
Still, he returns the next night, and the one after. He watches from his car, exhausted and angry, helpless and hopeless, knowing the girl is somewhere else but unwilling to admit where that somewhere might be. From the ticket booth, the woman watches him, occasionally offering a small wave when patrons aren’t lined up and she can indulge in a moment’s rest. Will, politely, nods.
And so they goes their dance, for weeks.
While the rest of the station scours the town on Will’s command, stakes out the popular teen Hangouts, makes the Wellington’s uncomfortable with the pressure of insistence–are they sure they don’t remember anything? Are they sure she didn’t tell anyone where she might be going?–Will sits, watching the woman in the ticket booth, watching her smile at children and nod politely at adults, and he knows, for what is probably the first time, that her word rings true: the girl isn’t there.
One evening, she closes the ticket booth to bring him a bag of kettle corn, his favorite, despite her having know ability of knowing. He rolls down the window to the cruiser and she hands it to him wordlessly.
“This could be considered a bribe.” Will admonishes, though a bite of playfulness nips at the edges of his words.
“I don’t need to bribe you,” she murmurs, leaning down. Their eyes are level, now, and Will swallows. “You already trust me.”
Another impossible thing about him that she could own. Another truth he doesn’t want to admit.
He watches her for a moment and, then, she closes the gap between them, entering the small space of the cruiser, her scent filling it as her lips graze Will’s own–frankinscense and lavender, the smell of fire, the crispness of a chilled autumn night. Things that shouldn’t be. Just like this.
In the soft glow of the morning light, he watches her breathe, her form moving gently on top of his with the rise and fall of ease, and after what seems like an eternity, she speaks.
“I never wanted to have to keep this up,” she mumbles, her breath soft and hot, ghosting across Will’s chest. “It was my father’s. And his father’s before him. And it’s supposed to be the sons’. The sons run the show.”
Will lowers his nose into her hair. “And what about the daughters?”
Tabitha inhales shakily, and Will tightens his grip around her.
“The daughters run it, now.”
All things must come to an end: the investigation, with Jessica Wellington in nearby Biloxi with her boyfriend whose been moved there on leave from the army. The month, the childish euphoria of October giving way to the sensible and soft maturity of the month of November. And, despite Will’s surprise, the carnival, too.
It’s the finality that gets him–one evening, the woods are full, children screaming and laughing, adults chortling at their own low inhibitions, how easy it is to be scared, to feel safe. The next evening, the tents are gone. In their place a single truck. Will hurries from the cruiser to the truck to find a man behind the wheel, one he’s never seen, and when he asks for Tabitha, he is met with only a shrug.
She has become nothing but yet another thing Will has allowed to slip through his hands.
