Chapter 3
TED BUNDY. GARY RIDGWAY. ROBERT Lee Yates.
Kenneth Bianchi. Edward Shank. In a state that’s produced more than its fair share of serial killers, Samuel Figg barely ranks.
He’s not even close to a household name.
His crimes have not been dissected in best-selling true crime books or documentaries, nor have they spawned Hollywood movies designed to entertain audiences with a lust for romanticized portrayals of human monsters.
As far as Barb knows, there’s been no Dateline episode about the Carnival Killer, no podcast, nothing.
Until now.
“You know the producer wanted to interview me, too?” Dr. Hassan Nassif says to her. “Because I worked at the Millers’ farm that summer? I wasn’t even the one who found Lorelei’s remains; that was Jonathan.”
Remains. Barb has never liked that word.
She cranes her neck, trying to peer past the stocky medical examiner blocking the door to the morgue where the Legacy Sands body is lying on a steel autopsy table.
She only managed to catch a glimpse of the toe tag before Hassan intercepted her in the hospital’s hallway.
“Jana Jones called you, too?” Barb says. “She’s persistent, I’ll give her that.”
“I told her no, of course.”
“So did I,” Barb says. “Come on, Hassan. I just need to see the body for a minute.”
“What for? We don’t even know who she is.”
To see if it’s Kylie Kahl, Barb thinks, but cannot say. “I need something for the Chronicle. Help a girl out. Pretty please?” She tugs playfully at the Seaside Hospital ID tag clipped to his white coat, giving him her most winning smile, the one where her eyes are big and round and hopeful.
“Stop it with that cutesy thing, it doesn’t work on me anymore. PD was clear on this. No visitors.” Hassan crosses his arms. “Barbie, you know I’d do it if I could. But this came down from the top. With Wonderland reopening, they can’t risk leaks.”
“Fine,” Barb says, finally giving up. “Is there anything about the victim you can tell me? I get paid per word. If I don’t write, I don’t eat.”
“Doesn’t Greg know that nobody reads the newspaper anymore?” Hassan shakes his head. “All I can confirm is that the vic is female. Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five would be my guess, but don’t even think about writing that.”
The age range fits for Kylie. “How long was she in the water?”
“A while.”
“Black hair?” she asks, even though she knows the answer.
The ME shrugs.
“What about tattoos?”
“Come on.” Hassan’s lips flatten. “Not telling you that.”
She makes a mental note to reach out to her contact at Seaside PD. For the right price, computer expert Alice Chu will sometimes pass along information to Barb that the police aren’t willing to share. Like crime scene photos.
“At least tell me if she was naturally dark-haired, or no?” Barb conjures up a mental image of Kylie on Trophy Wives, where her light brown roots were always a telltale sign that her hair was chemically darkened.
The ME smirks. “You mean, does the carpet match the drapes?”
“Gross. Seriously, why are you still like this?” Barb can still remember a teenage Hassan in the Seaside High cafeteria, cracking inappropriate jokes at the next table over. Medical degree or not, her friend hasn’t changed. “I wouldn’t have put it that way, but yeah.”
“Well, I can’t say. Because there is no carpet.” Hassan sees the look on her face and puts up his hands. “Hey, dude, you asked.”
He’s right. She did.
* * *
If Wonderland is Seaside’s crown jewel, then Lucky’s Kitchen is its stubborn, beating heart.
Located right off I-5, the popular roadside diner is either the first place you stop when you get to Seaside or the last place you stop before you leave it.
The giant oval sign that greets you in the entryway says as much:
LUCKY’S KITCHEN, SINCE 1958
coming or going, we’re here for you
Barb scans the busy dining room, which is noisier than usual with conversations, laughter, plates clanging, and cooks shouting in the open kitchen that spans the back wall.
An old-fashioned U-shaped counter dotted with mushroom-shaped red vinyl stools stretches the length of the room, and white Formica tables with pale blue vinyl seats line the perimeter.
Some writers can’t work in busy places, but Barb’s the opposite. The more people, the better.
She finally spots a two-seater near the back that a young couple is vacating and heads straight for it, murmuring hellos and good mornings to the other regulars as she passes.
She waves to Daniel Hawksfield, her former high school English teacher, who’s sitting with his wife and kids.
Generations of Seaside families and god only knows how many tourists have sat at these tables over the years.
Lucky’s is open 24/7, making it a popular spot for the teenagers who are too young for the Main Street bars.
The diner was one of Lorelei’s favorite places to hang out.
But if Barb avoided every place in Seaside with any significance to her best friend, there’d be nowhere left to go.
That’s life in a small town: everything and everyone braided together like a tapestry, making it dangerous to pull at the threads.
A waitress dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with the diner’s signature clover on it approaches her table with a coffee carafe. Noni has been working at the diner longer than Barb has been alive, and was one of her mother’s closest friends.
“Morning, sweetie,” Noni says as she fills Barb’s mug.
As usual, her reading glasses are perched precariously on the tip of her nose.
At least they’re secured to the gold chain around her neck that Barb gifted her last Christmas after Noni had dropped her third pair.
“What’s happening with that body at Legacy Sands? ”
Word travels fast. Information moves through the Seaside grapevine faster than the highest-speed Wi-Fi.
“Don’t know anything yet,” Barb says as Noni sets the carafe down and flexes her fingers. The older woman’s right hand appears to be trembling more than usual, but Barb knows better than to mention it. “The police haven’t released any information, and the morgue’s on lockdown.”
“But don’t you get the inside scoop? Thought you were dating that tall drink of water.” Noni winks. “The detective.”
Barb winces. “That, uh, didn’t work out. And of course that’s not why I was dating him,” she adds.
“Don’t be so choosy. You’re not getting any younger and the clock is ticking.” Her chastising tone reminds Barb so much of her mother, it hurts. As if reading Barb’s mind, Noni’s voice softens. “And you know Becky would have said the same thing, God rest her soul.”
Though it’s nearly lunchtime, Barb orders her usual—scrambled eggs with cheese and hot sauce, bacon, home fries with onions, and toast with butter—and then dumps a generous amount of cream and sugar into her coffee.
No, it’s not a healthy meal, and yes, all her clothes are getting tight, but she’s completely unmotivated to attempt yet another diet.
Taking a sip of her coffee, she pulls up the email from the producer again and sighs.
According to Jana Jones, the docuseries that everyone in Seaside is talking about will start streaming next month on Quan.
A few years back, Barb thought maybe she might be the one to tell Lorelei’s story.
In a burst of inspiration, she’d written a proposal that included a ten-page synopsis and five chapters of a true crime memoir she unimaginatively titled “My Best Friend’s Murder.
” She’d sent it to a hundred literary agents, most of whom were based in New York.
Half didn’t even respond. Of the other half, forty-nine were rejections.
They all had a variety of reasons for passing, but the most common was that Samuel Figg wasn’t notorious enough.
The investigation hadn’t been big enough.
I just googled this, and he confessed, no?
one agent wrote to Barb. Sorry about your friend, but I just don’t see a hook here—true crime stories that center the victim tend to be depressing.
However, you have a great voice. Have you considered writing this as a novel instead, ‘loosely based’ on your friend’s murder?
Readers can’t get enough of serial killers, and a teenage protagonist could be compelling . . .
Inspired by the suggestion, Barb changed tack and got to work. She wrote fifty pages and then reached out again to the one agent who’d shown interest.
A month later, the agent called to tell her they’d gotten a tentative offer from a smaller press, with a possible advance in the low five figures. But they want to see another fifty pages and a detailed outline before moving forward, the agent told her.
Barb got to work. She finished another fifty pages and a synopsis, and sent them off. The publisher was pleased, and Barb’s new agent was able to negotiate a higher advance amount.
But before the contract was finalized, Covid happened. The publisher withdrew their offer, then later shut down altogether. Six years later, the book remains unfinished. It feels like a metaphor for Barb’s life—she’s great at making plans, but not so great at seeing them through.
She wonders for the millionth time what her life would be like now had she not gotten stuck in Seaside.
Would she be writing best-selling mysteries from her Hamptons beach house and have a boyfriend who looked like Keanu Reeves?
It’s easy to blame her mother’s illness for why she never made it out of her hometown, but she’s done enough work with Dr. Leto to know that the guilt of what happened to Lorelei has kept her trauma-bonded to Seaside like welded steel.
Now someone else is going to tell the Carnival Killer’s story and, by extension, Lorelei’s.
She’d already had a long exchange with Jana Jones a few weeks ago, which Barb had finally shut down with a threat to sue.
For what, exactly, she didn’t know. Harassment?
Digging up an old wound? Forcing her to think about things she didn’t want to think about, let alone speak about to the entire world?
And yet the docuseries producer won’t give up. There’s a new email from Jana Jones. The subject line reads: “One last try . . .”
Hi again Barb,
I wanted to extend you one final opportunity to share your thoughts on camera.
As a fellow journalist, you know how important you are to this story.
You were Lorelei’s best friend. You met Samuel Figg the same time she did.
You were, perhaps, the last person to see her alive other than the person who killed her.
Please consider it, Barb. Frankly we’re quite baffled that not a single person still living in Seaside has been willing to talk to us about a crime that happened to one of your own.
If you’re still not interested, we’ll be forced to note that you declined to participate.
Really hope to hear from you,
Jana Jones
Executive Producer, Quan
Barb resists the urge to hurl her computer across the diner.
“Declined to participate”? Why does that line read as vaguely threatening, as if the documentary is going to insinuate that Barb—and apparently the rest of Seaside—has something to hide?
Jana Jones may be “baffled” that nobody wants to talk about Lorelei, but that only makes it clear that she knows nothing about small towns or the people who live in them.
Hell, any of the reporters who came to Seaside a decade ago could have told her that.
Barb deletes the email without responding.
The Wonderland scandal—which is what the locals call it—nearly killed Seaside.
When the park was shut down, the loss of the town’s greatest source of revenue affected everyone and everything.
Restaurants closed, motels shuttered, and half the stores on Main Street were boarded up.
The younger families were forced to move away in search of jobs, leaving behind the retirees who couldn’t afford to go anywhere at all.
Seaside had always had a drug problem, but it worsened when the meth addicts made their way up from Portland and down from Seattle to squat in the houses left vacant.
As home values plummeted, crime increased, and in some ways, it was exactly what Seaside deserved.
Not that Barb had said any of this in her op-eds for the Chronicle, of course.
It wasn’t fair to take it out on the people who still lived here.
But karma had come for the town. Seaside had protected Wonderland for decades and had thrived as a result.
In Barb’s opinion, that run of prosperity was never going to last forever.
Nothing ever does.
To date, the Wonderland scandal is the only time Seaside has ever made the national news.
But ask any local, and they can tell you a dozen more Seaside murder stories that would all make great true crime documentaries.
Bernarda Pippen, for example, poisoned her third husband slowly over the course of a year after successfully murdering her first two husbands in the exact same way.
Then there was Donna Brandt, whose husband decapitated her with an axe on their farm after he caught her sleeping with his brother.
And all the locals remember fourteen-year-old Ezekiel Thomas, who stabbed his own father and then fed his body to their dogs.
He’d suffered years of sexual abuse, which everyone around him seemed aware of and yet did nothing about.
Statistically, the murder rate in Seaside is the second highest in Washington state, second only to Seattle.
And when you compare the numbers to those of other small towns, the stats are even more alarming: In Seaside, death due to foul play happens twenty times more often than in any other town of similar size.
It’s basically the murder capital of Washington, though you won’t find those words printed on the cheerful bumper stickers and magnets they sell on the boardwalk souvenir shops that have finally started to reopen.
Because nobody in Seaside likes to talk about it.
And maybe that’s always been the problem.
Hell, maybe Jana Jones is right to question why no one is willing to help tell Lorelei’s part in Samuel Figg’s story .
. . but the truth is, there’s no one left in Seaside who knew Lorelei well enough to tell it.
Everybody who loved her has either moved away or died.
Except for Barb.
But what would you tell them? she hears Lorelei say in her head as her breakfast arrives. Would you tell them what you told the police back then, or would you tell them the truth?