Chapter Text
Caldwell slammed his glass back onto the table surface. Strawberry milkshake sloshed over the rim and trailed down the side of the glass, coating his irritable fingers in the sticky liquid.
He angrily sucked his fingers clean, then turned to glare at the girl sitting opposite him in the cramped booth. He shook his head emphatically.
The girl had thin wire-rimmed glasses perched on her nose. She shared an exasperated look with the other girl beside her. Probably out of false solidarity, Caldwell knew; Ophelia Johnson didn’t simply ‘share looks’ with people—everything she did was for a reason, and you could bet your whole family and the household cat that she had thought it out in excruciating detail beforehand. Caldwell was once fooled by her friendly manner, too.
“I’m busy!”
She looked at him disbelievingly.
“I’ve got plans. With people. All summer.”
Ophelia glared openly at the spot directly next to his left eye, where there were three moles falling off his eyelid onto his cheek.
“It won’t take all summer,” she snapped. Her metallic gold glasses slid further down her nose. “Probably. And anyway, you love it when the adrenaline kicks in.” She cut off his sharp protests.
Caldwell took a large, angry slurp of his milkshake. “That,” he said through a mouthful of milkshake, “is the part I try to avoid. Fergus,” he elbowed the taller boy sitting beside him in the booth, “tell her that running-for-our-lives is not the best part.”
Ophelia sipped pacifyingly at her own milkshake. It was vanilla because you are what you eat. It could be said that Caldwell was still nursing a grudge from the last time she nearly got him killed. Which was deserved.
“It’s you who chooses flight over fight, clearly, since I don’t make a habit of running from my problems…”
“You create the problem in the first place, dragging us all to dodgy places with dodgy people! I just want to spend my summer before the last year of school peacefully.”
“Cal, please.” She had both hands wrapped around her glass, and was leaning forward beseechingly. “We can just take a look at what Jason told me about, and then be on our way.”
The problem with Ophelia was that she was very persuasive. And not even in the ethical way: if she wanted something badly enough, she’d burn down the world and sift through the ashes until she found what she was searching for. Caldwell had told her no before about going to a scary place and hunting around for stuff, but that night he’d awoken to a flashlight beaming directly into his soul, in the middle of a graveyard. He still didn’t know how a girl of her size had managed to carry him out of his bed and into her car without waking him up.
“Witchcraft,” he’d told Leilani, another of their friends. “That’s how she did it.”
Leilani snorted at the same time she took a drag of her cigarette. “You’re tiny. All she would have to do is sling you over her shoulder like a bartender with a tea towel.”
He wasn’t. And he was taller than both Leilani and Ophelia, so she was one to talk.
Anyway, what Ophelia wanted, Ophelia got.
He sighed heavily, deeply, like his grandfather did when he caught Caldwell setting off homemade bombs in the backyard.
“What exactly did Jason tell you this time?” He nursed his sorrow with another swig of his dwindling supply of strawberry milkshake.
Ophelia flung herself into recounting the story her older brother had told her that morning. Emphasis on story, because that’s exactly what Caldwell thought it was: fiction.
“—and he said that all the lights go off every night without fail. They eventually turn back on, but don’t you think it’s a little weird how it happens every night? And then people carry on as normal, because it’s accepted to be normal now, which—”
“…Is far from normal but still has an explanation, we know,” Leilani finished. She hadn’t spoken until now, cooped up in the corner of the booth and staring at the grotesque paintings littering the walls of the diner.
The diner was brightly decorated with pink booths, tables and walls. It had splashes of yellow and white dotted around—presumably to even out the overload of other colours (or colour)—and featured as a popular hangout for kids after school. Now, it was the start of summer and the place was heaving with fifty percent of Maude’s 18-and-under population.
“What do you think, Cal?” Ophelia fixed him with an expectant expression. “Normal or weird? And don’t give me that crap about how it’s none of our business and we should just go see a movie or something.”
He did want to see that new film about pirates.
“Normal,” he said, because he liked to see the world burn. Fergus nudged him none too gently.
“You think it’s normal how an entire carnival blacks out every night for a minute or so and nobody has said anything about it?” Leilani had an air of superiority about her, like the smoke that wafted about her body constantly.
Ophelia sat back in her seat; milkshake abandoned. “It’s weird; definitely, gloriously weird. We’ll take Misty and check it out next week.”
Leilani dipped a fry into the remains of Caldwell’s milkshake. “Why next week?”
“We’ll need to sort out an inn or something to stay over at. The carnival’s two hours away, and I don’t want to waste time driving back and forth.” She flashed a smile at them. “In the meantime, we can research the town where the carnival is at the moment, the carnival itself, and anything else we can find out. Capishe?”
“Ca-piss off,” Caldwell muttered grumpily. He hated this kind of thing. He hated mysteries and spookiness and investigations. There were a lot of things he hated, but those were the top three.
Fergus stood up. “I’m getting more fries. Oh, hey Alby.”
Alby was a tall, blond boy who looked more like he belonged on the top deck of a yacht than hovering awkwardly over their small booth. He wore Topsiders and a vivid blue polo shirt that matched his eyes and gave Caldwell a headache.
“Alby! Thank goodness you’re here. We’re back in the game,” said Ophelia excitedly. “Isn’t that brilliant? My brother told me about this mystery in Derny and we’re checking it out.”
Alby, to give credit where credit was due, took it like a champ. “I thought we were going to the waterpark. You said we were going to the waterpark.”
“After. Right now, we’re going to research the town’s history regarding abnormal activity.”
“She keeps saying ‘we’,” Fergus muttered, then left to get his fries. At least he was treating this situation with caution. He was Caldwell’s best friend for a reason.
Leilani had her phone out on the pink chequered tablecloth; her, Ophelia and Alby crowded around the small screen.
She made interested sounds as she swiped with her index finger. “There. Something about politics.”
Alby peered at where she was pointing. “That’s talking about the mayor elections.”
“Politics is always dodgy,” Ophelia agreed. She tucked a strand of dark brown hair behind her ear. “Does it say anything about whether people were upset about the recent mayor’s election?”
Silence, in which Caldwell studied the lines of the tablecloth.
“No,” said Alby. He sounded frustrated. “It keeps going on about the local flower shows Derny hosts.”
“That is suspicious,” Caldwell agreed. “Who looks at the exact same flowers for days in a row voluntarily.”
“Lots of people,” Leilani said. “Maybe the shows are a front for something.”
Ophelia considered her thoughtfully. “The shows have gone on for decades, though, and the lights only seem to only go out when the carnival opens for the holidays. It makes me think it has something more to do with the carnival itself, than Derny.”
Fergus appeared with his fries. He slid in beside Caldwell, who snuck a fry from the carton.
“Julie says hi,” he told Caldwell, who nearly snapped his neck when he whipped around in the booth to stare at the serving counter.
Julie had been his girlfriend, for the month they dated before school broke up for the holidays.
He grumbled, “Julie always says hi. That’s the problem.” Because when Julie said hi, she really meant fuck you, and she meant fuck you to Caldwell because he had dumped her over text with no warning.
“She’s psychotic. Where is she?”
Fergus chewed and swallowed. “She left already. With some guy.”
Leilani smirked. “She moves fast for someone who’s still heartbroken.”
“Look,” said Ophelia, and they looked.
She waved the phone screen at them. “I searched the carnival and loads of other things came up—unimportant—but then I clicked carnivals in this area, and it says stuff about who runs it and how long it’s staying for.” She clapped her hands and in doing so dropped the phone.
Leilani glared at her and rescued her phone from the milkshake puddle Caldwell had made on the table.
“And?” prompted Alby.
Ophelia drummed a finger on the table. “It’s been owned by the Czechowski family for the last hundred years, being passed down from generation to generation. This website states that the Czechowski family doesn’t like media attention, so haven’t given any interviews about the carnival or themselves. Most of the publicity has come from word-of-mouth and people posting on blogs.”
Fergus snorted. “They’re like Gatsby. No one knows them but everyone’s heard of them.”
“Way to make it creepy,” Caldwell groaned. “Gatsby snuffs it at the end.”
Everyone looked at him.
“I read,” he said, blowing tendrils of fair hair out of his eyes.
He read when he wanted to ignore them, which was a lot of the time. When Ophelia hauled them to strange places, he sat in silent protest in the backseat of her beaten up car and read the classics on his phone. Some may call it a passive protest, he called it ‘let’s see how much I can annoy Ophelia before she whacks me with the torch she carries around in her handbag’.
“—go back to my place and we can hook the phone up to the big screen to have a better look,” Alby was saying.
They stood to go, Fergus gathering all their glasses in a neat pile in the centre of the table.
He was always doing things like that: tidying up after them. He’d grown up in the system, passed from foster home to foster home- never at home and never at ease.
“I want candy,” Caldwell announced, as they left the diner and walked out into the carpark. Sunlight streamed onto the tarmac. It glinted off Ophelia’s glasses, shone through strands of Leilani’s dark hair.
Leilani groaned. “Come on, we need to go through the website.”
Which was strange, because Leilani always had room for food, and maybe she was just sucking up to Ophelia because well why not everyone did and it was super annoying and he just wanted some starbursts—
“Fine! But be quick,” Ophelia snapped, heading for her scrappy little car. It was parked between two others, but so, so gaudy it could probably be picked up from outer space. Whoever decided on colouring a car yellow, Caldwell thought, should be tied to the very car they painted and dragged behind it for a mile.
He started for the convenience store across the carpark. It was extremely white compared to the diner opposite it, which resembled intestines and other bodily organs more than the permanent Valentine’s look it had going on.
The door to the store opened automatically, and a cheery little bell jangled as he stepped out of the heat.
Heaven.
That was his first thought when he positioned himself in front of the looming shelves of candy and chocolate.
The second bordered on unrepeatable, due to the sheer number of curses it contained.
“Caldwell,” said Julie. Her red hair was gathered in a complicated knot at the top of her head, wavy strands falling out everywhere. Somehow it looked good.
“Bitch,” he replied, under his breath. He gave her an incredibly beaming, incredibly false smile.
She didn’t return it.
“What are you doing here? Surely you’d be out with your little gang solving mysteries and digging up dead people.”
Caldwell scowled irritably. “That was one time,” he folded his arms across his chest, “and if I remember correctly, it was you who insisted I always join them instead of hanging out with you.”
“I did nothing of the sort. You wouldn’t know commitment if it bit you on your scrawny ass.”
He made an exasperated noise at the back of his throat. “And your idea of commitment is messing around with some dude while I was suffering in a graveyard.” It wasn’t a question.
“Caldwell—" she began, brown eyes wide and framed with black eyeliner.
He grabbed the nearest packet of candy off the shelf and stormed to the cashier’s.
Julie didn’t follow him out of the store, which was honestly a blessing because he really wanted to throw hands. He wanted to throw more than hands when Ophelia tooted the horn and drove up to the entrance of the convenience store.
He bit back a million insults and slid into the back seat of the car. It was also yellow, but slightly more muted than the sunshiney exterior. Of course, it was.
Alby stared at Caldwell’s lap. “I thought you were getting candy.”
Caldwell frowned at him, then down at his lap.
Wafers. Pink wafers.
“Aargh,” he yelled, and threw them across the car to hit Fergus in the back of the head.
“Watch it.” Ophelia glared at him in the rear-view mirror. “I’m driving.”
He couldn’t eat them.
Leilani snickered from her position behind the front passenger seat. She accepted the packet Fergus handed to her and ripped it open. “My favourite. How thoughtful of you, Caldwell.”
He slunk in his seat. “I wanted Starbursts.”
Alby shifted, and his shirt rustled. “Do you need glasses, dude?”
Caldwell grit out a, “I’m fine, thank you. I was in a hurry.”
The sounds of Leilani’s chewing filled the car.
“I didn’t know you were so eager to continue our investigation,” Ophelia crooned. She flicked her right indicator on. “I would have apologised for all the times I doubted your sincerity.”
The car made a smooth right turn onto Field’s Street.
“No, your doubt was justified,” Fergus told her. His voice was always louder when he spoke to Ophelia, like he wanted to make sure she heard him.
“Fergus! You’re meant to be on my side. We’ve always got each other’s backs when we search for clues.”
Fergus shrugged.
“It’s not exactly a secret.” Alby reached to pluck a wafer from the packet balanced on Leilani’s thigh. “You hate anything to do with sleuthing and mysteries.”
“Oh? What gave me away?” Caldwell asked, sarcastically.
Leilani chomped extra obnoxiously. “You have just as much fun when you get into it as the rest of us do.”
Fergus snorted.
She fixed him with a glare in his passenger’s visor mirror.
“As do you.”
Fergus snorted again. That’s why Caldwell loved him. They’d met in their second year of high school. Fergus had been relocated to Maude after his fifth disastrous foster home, and placed in the care of the Murphy’s, who were very knowledgeable on species of insects but not so much on young boys. Fergus had stayed, though.
~
“Where are all your sisters, Alby?” Ophelia asked, as she followed him up the steps and through the front door. Alby’s house was…exciting. There were a thousand other words to describe it: fresh, eccentric, vitalising.
It felt like walking through a forest. Bamboo made up most of the furniture, ferns and vines climbing up the walls and brushing people with leaves as they passed. In some parts of the house, the walls disappeared completely, leaving one to feel like they were standing on a rope bridge surrounded by a tropical rainforest. These sections were doused when it rained, and moss grew over the planks of wood and bled into the rooms of the house.
Alby’s house had to violate at least ten building codes.
He led them down one of the narrow bridges and into the living room. “Ma took them to the water park for the day.”
He glanced sideways at Caldwell.
Caldwell was busy trying to not appear as awestruck as the first time he entered Alby’s house, eyes roaming the canvas canopy in place of a roof, the vines unfurling around the bamboo and brick walls. One side of the living room was all glass, which looked out onto the untamed wilderness of Alby’s back garden.
“I’ll get a cord,” Alby said eventually, and exited the room.
Not for the first time, Leilani and Caldwell shared amazed glances. It was a home and a jungle simultaneously.
“If you’re still hungry we have crackers in the kitchen. You want?” Alby said to Caldwell, re-entering the room with an iPhone cord dangled loosely in his fingers.
Caldwell nodded and set off for the kitchen, barely listening to Alby’s instructions of “left cupboard, second shelf.”
The kitchen was the most normal room of the house. It had been converted into something like a greenhouse, but all the walls were there and there was an oven, and a fridge and a sink made of hollowed crystal.
He opened the cupboard to find the crackers. One of Alby’s younger sisters was also a celiac, so there was no danger of Caldwell poisoning himself.
“I got some cheese as well,” he announced, walking back into the room with a plate piled with crackers, cheese and humous.
No one paid him any attention. Ophelia had hooked her phone up to the tv, and everyone was gathered around her, watching the screen.
Leilani huffed a frustrated breath. “You weren’t kidding about the fact they’re an incredibly private family. They don’t have any social media for this carnival. Public or private.”
“It is a bit weird,” Ophelia hummed, scrolling through the rather sparse blog page.
“Not really.” Caldwell settled himself and his plate on the rug in the middle of the room. It was fluffy and duck-egg blue. “Plenty of people don’t have Twitter or Insta.”
Leilani peered at him. “Don’t go all social justice warrior on us. It’s simply strange that they don’t publicise their business at all, yet it seems fairly well-known.”
Ophelia clicked onto another website. This one had a strong middle-aged mother vibe, with a section on healthy snacks for ‘your kiddie on the go’ and another on ‘cheap, fun day activities for the whole family’.
Alby peered at the tv screen. “Is that a picture?”
There was a blurry photograph—almost certainly taken in a moment of espionage—of the entrance of the carnival. In the foreground was a crowd of people, frozen in time. Behind them stretching up into the sky stood a Ferris wheel, metal glinting in the sunlight.
Ophelia tried to zoom in on the photograph but it stubbornly remained the same size. She glanced at the others. “I wonder who took it.”
Dipping a cracker into some of the humous, Caldwell examined the photograph. “Clearly not a professional. That’s probably how they got away with it.”
“The owner of the blog?” Fergus suggested, quietly.
“Perhaps. But I agree with Caldwell, it can’t have been someone with any ties to the media.”
“If it was, they should be fired.” Leilani reapplied lip gloss to her upper lip. “It’s not even taken straight. There’s no signage either. Nothing to indicate where or when it was taken.”
Ophelia scrolled to the bottom of the page, but no more photographs reappeared. She bookmarked the webpage and sat back with her hands balancing on the floor. “If this person’s managed to take a picture, there must be others who have.”
“I don’t really see why it matters,” Alby commented. His blond hair was mussed where he’d lain on the rug. “We’re going to see it for ourselves.”
“It would be helpful to have something to compare with what we see. To check if anything’s changed.”
Caldwell set his plate on the floor beside him. “I can’t wait to go on the Ferris wheel.”
Ophelia and Alby spluttered in indignation.
“We’re not going for fun,” Ophelia enunciated, saying the last word like a curse. “We’re going as sleuths.”
“Well then I’ll have fun while I sleuth. On the Ferris wheel.” Caldwell directed a sickly-sweet smile at her.
“I wouldn’t mind sleuthing around the shooting gallery,” was Leilani’s input.
Caldwell perked up. Things were starting to look up again: sure, they were doing the stupid mystery stuff again, but they usually did that in abandoned farm buildings, not lively carnivals.
Ophelia unhooked her phone from the tv and slid it into her back pocket. She stood up and glanced at everyone. “I’ll talk to my parents tonight and arrange the trip.”
Another thing about Ophelia was that she was filthy rich. Or her parents were. She funded all her crazy schemes, while the others chipped in with food or gas money.
“Let me know when to start packing,” said Leilani. “I need my best carnival outfit ready.”
Ophelia scoffed. “You always wear the same thing. Leather jacket, skimpy shirt, jeans.”
Leilani gasped. “Blasphemy.” She waved a finger up at Ophelia from her position sprawled on the floor. “Just you wait and see.”