Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
Aven
As Quinn and I board the swan boat, the mood is decidedly different from this afternoon.
Gone are the easy smiles and laughter. Instead of getting flirty and crawling all over me, her hands sit still in her lap.
Her green eyes look at the ride attendant as he checks the seatbelt over our laps, but she doesn’t really see him. She’s miles away.
I wrap my arm around her shoulder and pull her closer. “Hey, it’ll be okay, lass. Let’s worry about Desmond when we need to, yeah?”
She nods and tries to smile, but I stop the attendant from sending the swan boat into the tunnel.
“Give us a sec,” I say, and he nods and steps away.
Water drifts under the boat and gently splashes against the sides of the tunnel as it continues into the darkness.
I firm my hold on her and bring her closer.
She doesn’t protest. She just slides over until she’s pressed against my side.
Her head drops against my shoulder, and her hands find mine. I give them a squeeze.
“They’ll find him. Jim has cameras everywhere.” I kiss the top of her head. “Just stick with me until they do.”
“Will you stay in my room tonight?” she asks.
I smile against her hair. “Aye, I’ve already had it taken care of. When we get back to the room, my things will have been moved over. Jim saw to it.”
That relaxes her a bit, and she squeezes back. “It wasn’t as scary when I felt like we had the control, but now that he’s gone missing, I’m terrified. He could be anywhere.”
When we met with Jim and King, they didn’t pull any punches.
Desmond isn’t in his room, and the last footage they have is of him boarding the gondola that takes parkgoers from one side of the property to the other.
The footage showed his ride vehicle arriving at the second station, but it was empty.
Jim didn’t have any cameras stationed along the track, so there’s no way to know when or how he exited.
Worst of all, Jim reiterated that we aren’t to take him out if we find him. He still hasn’t broken the cardinal rule in a way we can prove, and until he does, we can’t kill him. Not without becoming complete outcasts.
But what Jim doesn’t know is that I overheard King speaking candidly to him before they realized I’d arrived at their door. It was only two sentences, but they left me with too many questions.
“He isn’t to kill him, and neither is the girl. The right is mine, and I’ll be damned if I’ll be robbed of it again.”
I shake my head and sigh. “There’s more to this than they’re telling us, lass. If they’ve been hunting Desmond all these years, why haven’t they taken him out? Why did they need to keep using you as bait?”
“They need something else from him, I guess. Something we’re unaware of. And until they have it, they don’t want to kill him. I just hope it doesn’t end up costing my life.”
My heart shatters when I consider a world without Quinn in it. I’ve never been happier to be annoyed by a wee lass in my life, and I cannae let that go now. “That’ll never happen. I won’t allow it. As long as Desmond draws breath, I won’t leave your side. He can’t hurt you if he can’t reach you.”
She offers a weak smile and squeezes my hands. “Let’s just try to enjoy ourselves and forget about him for a bit.”
I call for the attendant, and he sets the ride in motion. This one is much gentler than the log flumes, and there’s no murder activity to take my focus away from Quinn. I’m just able to enjoy her amusement as we float into an enchanted scene and soft, romantic music plays overhead.
“Oh, Aven,” she breathes. “It’s so beautiful.”
Aye, even I have to admit it’s pretty incredible.
Purple lighting casts a faux weeping willow in a romantic glow as we pass beneath its drooping branches, which have been shaped into a sort of tunnel entrance.
As we pass into the next scene, however, a record scratches, and the music changes from gentle and romantic to playful and fast.
“Fucking Jim,” Quinn mutters. “Can we not even have a romantic boat ride? It sounds like he produced this shit on his iPhone.”
“Aye, he fucks around with that Garage Band app all the fucking time. That bird of his loves it.”
The tunnel opens up, and we float through a picnic scene.
Two animatronic figures—a young man and woman—sit on a blanket by a large basket filled with food.
They’re dressed in fifties attire, which well suits the theming for the area, though the music is more like something out of the eighties.
Their heads rock from side to side with the playful beat as a large bipedal rabbit hops into the scene and begins to sing.
Two animatronic birds descend from the ceiling, each of them holding a butcher knife in their scaly feet. They sway to the beat, then swoop down and slice open the animatronic throats. The robotic heads tip back, and blood jets over us as we jerk back in shock.
“What the fuck kind of love tunnel is this shit?” Quinn says with a laugh. “I fucking love it.”
The boat jerks forward again, and the song continues its refrain behind us, with the happy animals occasionally belting, “At the picnic!” as we depart.
The merry tune gets a bit softer. This time we’re stopped in front of a drive-in theater.
We can only see the shadows of two figures in the car, but it’s easy enough to figure out what they’re doing.
The car rocks with their efforts as two animatronics—a smiling hot dog and a dancing popcorn bucket—bounce into the fray.
The music picks up again, and they begin to sing.
“What the fuck is even happening?” Quinn says with a laugh.
Both the popcorn and the hot dog brandish knives and start stabbing into the windows as they croon the next part with unrestrained glee. More blood sprays out and splatters over our skin, but when I look down, I realize it’s just warm water. The lighting makes it look red.
“I’m going to have this idiotic tune stuck in my brain for eons after this,” I groan.
Quinn gives me jazz hands as the boat lurches forward again. “At the drive-in.”
“Ach, don’t you start.”
The next scene is more of the same, this time featuring a couple getting engaged by the very stream we sail down.
Just as the animatronic man gets down on one knee, a pair of sentient garden gnomes appear from the bushes and start singing about how great love is down by the river.
Then they pull out machetes and lop off the heads of the man and woman.
It shouldn’t be romantic, but somehow, it is.
Just knowing that Quinn and I share this secret sickness the forest creatures sing about is enough to make my heart swell.
The ride floats beneath another purple willow, and we’re back at the station. I exit the swan boat first, then help Quinn onto the platform. We exit the ride and squint into the fading afternoon sun.
“Well, that was an experience,” she says. “It certainly wasn’t what I expected.”
“No, but it was good fun.”
“At the picnic,” she sings, then skips ahead a few steps. As she spins to look at me, I can’t help but pinch myself. She’s a fucking dream.
I don’t know what I’ve done in my sorry life to deserve a gift such as her, but I sure hope I’ve done enough to keep her forever. I want her to get on my last nerve for the rest of my natural life. Maybe the next as well. What a life we’ll have in Scotland if I can only get us there.
“Wait up,” I say as she skips toward the fun house.
She looks over her shoulder with a flirty smile, the trouble with our missing stalker all but forgotten. “Catch me if you can, Scotland Yard.”
And with that, she darts into the building.
I don’t run to catch up with her. The wee thing needs a head start, and I’m going to allow her that. When I catch her, however, I won’t allow much of anything other than whimpers as I make her come. I’ll pin her down and—
“Looking for someone?”
The hairs on my neck rise as Desmond’s voice reaches my ears.
I turn toward him. He’s standing a few feet away beside a drink stand, clutching a lemonade in his hand.
With a smirk, he draws the straw into his mouth and sucks some of the tart liquid down his throat. He smacks his lips and smiles at me.
Footsteps pound nearby, and Jim and King round the corner at a sprint. When they spot me standing a few feet from Desmond, they come to a halt. The men look between us, then come closer.
“Desmond, there you are,” King says with a forced smile. “We’ve been wondering where you’d got off to.”
The man runs his hand through his dark hair, and sunshine glints off the gray running through his sideburns. “You caught me. I spotted something on the gondola ride and wanted a closer look. Didn’t mean to raise the alarm.”
“No alarm raised,” Jim says. “I just prefer to keep a constant head count. We lost one of our own at the Sinners Retreat one summer, and I don’t want to go through that headache again.”
Desmond clucks his tongue. “Such a shame. Did you ever catch the bloke who did it?”
Bloke? Since when do American men use the term bloke?
King seems to catch the slip as well, and we share a look as Jim brushes right past it.
“No, we never did catch the man who killed Eighties, and we likely never will. Water under the bridge, but not a river I’d like to float down again.
” Jim rocks on his heels with his hands behind his back.
“Will you be joining us this evening for the fireworks show? I’ve had it specially arranged to mimic the same array the park used in its heyday. ”
“You don’t say . . . I wouldn’t want to miss it, then.” A sparkle glints in Desmond’s eye as he turns to me. “You and Quinn will be there as well?”
I nod once.
“Sounds like a party,” Desmond says. He tips his lemonade toward King and Jim. “Sorry to worry you men. I saw what I needed to see, though, so you won’t have to worry about me disappearing again. See you tonight.”
He strolls off, sipping his lemonade and looking around at the park as if he has a right to. Fucking idiot.
Quinn pops out of the fun house. She looks irritated until she spots King and Jim. Worry replaces the agitated furrow of her brow, and she hurries over to us.
“What’s going on? Did you find him?” she asks.
“No, he found me,” I say. “The asshole popped up when I was about to join you.”
“We know where he is now, though,” Jim says, “so there’s no need to worry. Go and have your fun, and we’ll all have a big surprise tonight at the fireworks show.”
I turn to Jim. “What are you planning, old man? And why don’t I have a good feeling about it?”
King shakes his head and walks off, and that only reinforces the rising feeling that Jim has something dastardly up his sleeve.
“All things in good time, my boy.” He laughs, then hurries to join King.
“I don’t like the sound of this,” Quinn mutters, and I’m inclined to agree.
But I have better things in mind at the moment.
I give her ass a firm pat. “You’d best get back in that fun house. I was trying to give you a chance to get away. You don’t want to know what I’ll do to you if I catch you in there.”
“Or maybe I do?” She nibbles her lip and takes off again.
This time, not even Desmond will deter me from having a bit of fun.