The Girl in Acid Park (2 page)

Hiroki appeared at my shoulder, and I didn't have to look at him to know he was making a face equivalent to "Why am I friends with you? Remind me why I'm friends with you."

Brother What-a-waste beckoned us toward the office. My legs moved before I'd even registered that Hiroki and I might be in for something serious. The trio of police officers standing across from Principle Brown clued me in.

"...sorry to raise questions on a parent visitation day," one officer was saying.
 
"But the severity of the situation calls for immediate action."

I stopped on the threshold, and heard Hiroki's slow inhale. A thousand things crossed my mind at once--they stopped believing us, they needed us to testify again, the three lacrosse players now serving out a murder sentence had, in fact, broken free and were rampaging across the state and writing my name in the blood of their victims.

Hiroki kicked my shoe, and I managed a stiff few steps into the office before Brother What-a-waste shut the door behind us.

My pulse throbbed in my ears, and I couldn't stand to meet the officers' serious faces. Instead, I stared at the stripes of afternoon light across Mr. Brown's desk. We dropped into the indicated chairs.

"Georgia, Hiroki," Mr. Brown said, and we both tensed. The student first-name only came out when something bad had happened. I was pretty sure they taught it to all authority figures--establish familiarity, then deliver the blow. "This is Sheriff Archibald, Deputy Reid, and Deputy Thompson. They're just here to ask-"

"We're pursuing an investigation of a sensitive nature," Sheriff Archibald interrupted, in a deep southern accent. The words sounded memorized--like they didn't quite fall naturally from his lips but he'd put them on with his uniform and badge. "I expect discretion with what we're about to tell you." He looked right at me when he said it, and I smiled and bit my tongue. Call it the journalistic instinct, but as soon as I know there's something I don't know, I need to find out what it is.

"We've confirmed the DNA of a missing person at a location in the county. He is a known gang member, but he's worked with the office before on some of our larger busts. We believe he was found out and killed, but haven't been able to locate a body."

"So what does this have to do with us?" Hiroki said, but I heard in his voice that he already had an idea.

The sheriff looked like he wanted to roll his eyes. "We received reports of unusual activity at the scene. I'd like to shut the door on the possibility of that being a ghost. Seems like y'all's word might help for the crystals and auras crowd."

I raised my eyebrows at Hiroki, who shook his head. We'd dealt with plenty of skeptics. Hiroki's one of two people in the entire state with Spectral Sight, and the police have used him as a dead-to-living translator to establish reasonable cause on several occasions. It clearly annoyed the sheriff to have to ask for help when he didn't believe, but it was easier to ask Hiroki's consultation than to pay for a medium to come all the way from Durham.

But why was I here? I couldn't see ghosts, not unless Hiroki gave me another concussion. Besides, I was pretty much a guaranteed method of destroying the metaphysical evidence--ghosts could use me as a bridge to the beyond. I'd be better off as clean-up crew than interrogation team.

I was about to point this out when a thought struck me. All this media attention had done so much damage to us here at school, but what if we could make it work in our favor? What if Hiroki and I actually
could
help the Sheriff's office solve this case, catch the bad guys--take down a freaking gang. If we did something that big, maybe we could regain some much-needed popular support.

"Of course we'll help," I said, and so eagerly that the woman deputy, Officer Reid, drew her chin back toward her neck in apparent surprise. "Where is it? Do we need to go right now, or do we have time to-"

"I'm not helping."

I nodded before I registered what Hiroki had said. Then I whipped my head around to look at him. "But...There isn't a body, right?" I confirmed with the Sheriff, who shook his head.

"That's part of the problem. We need the body to charge them with anything."

"See," I drew my hand across the air, as if presenting this fact to my friend. "You don't have to go near a body. It's just talking to-"

"No, Georgia," he said, raising his voice. I couldn't detect any humor in his face. "I'm not going." He looked up at Sheriff Archibald. "You've got someone in Durham with Spectral Sight. Get her down here to work with you. This is disruptive to my life and my studies."

"Hiro," I said. "But you-you always--you like doing this sort of thing!" I couldn't believe it. The guy with a paranormal library set up under his bed was refusing to go talk to a ghost. I'd
never
seen him refuse.

And to have him refuse now, when I needed him, when we needed this just to get back to as normal as ever... I tried to convey the importance through an intense stare. He stared back, and there was something in his dark brown eyes I didn't like--some little flicker, like the fin of a fish that immediately disappeared into the depths again. It seemed to take great effort to shake his head.

"I can't believe you think I like it," he said, then turned to Principal Brown. "May I be excused, sir?"

Principal Brown was pinching his fingers, and looked startled to be addressed. "B-I...yes. Yes, of course, if you don't want to involve yourself in an investigation, no one will hold it against you."

"And you, Miss Collins?" said Sheriff Archibald. All eyes turned to me.

I was useless without Hiroki. I couldn't talk to the ghost, or even see him. I reached up to my temple, touching the spot Hiroki had kicked two months ago when I boosted him through a nun's office window. The concussion had given me a brief taste of Spectral Sight. I hadn't wanted it then, but now?

I looked at the streak of red lipstick on my thumb, the scars hiding beneath the cuff of my white school blouse. I was sick of hiding. Sick of letting my mistakes haunt me more than any ghost ever could. I could let my classmates force me back into invisibility, or I could go out there and demand their respect, whether Hiroki backed me up or not.

"I'll do it," I said.

CHAPTER TWO

There's an App for That

Let it never be said that I don't do my research, even if it is on a cell phone in the passenger's seat of a patrol car.

A fifteen minute drive from Millroad Catholic Academy, between pines growing close as the bristles on a hairbrush, is a sharp bend in the road. On the outside curve is a repair shop, which flanks the fantastical memorials locals call Acid Park.

Back in the sixties, a girl on her way back from prom missed her driveway and wrapped her VW Van around the tree beside her dad's roadside repair shop. She made it out of the wreck, but died in the undergrowth ten feet away, her dress a bloody cobweb of tulle between the rhododendrons.

Her father left the van as a warning, but it wasn't enough. In his grief, he erected an eerie memorial among the trees where she died. He suspended sheets of aluminum or tin to throw back headlights and warn drivers of the bend in the road, then used his mountain of accumulated scrap to build enormous, pinwheel-like structures he called whirligigs.

The first piece was a weather-vane, studded with bicycle reflectors and mounted on an old basketball hoop, sunk into the ground between the rhododendrons where he'd found his girl that terrible morning.

He stopped repairing cars, turned away customers with their tractors and backhoes, and hurled himself into work on his whirligigs. Within a few years, he was creating moving masterpieces larger than a state fair ride. Brightly painted whirligigs creaked and flashed in the night, propellers spinning on giant axles that swung like booms.

During the day, it looks almost like a junk-yard with the way the metal stands among the trees, getting rusty under its shawl of wisteria. But at night, it turns into acid park--a post-apocalyptic carnival of shimmering reflections to blow the chemically-altered mind. Though the father's work gathered artistic praise across the nation, the story's creepiness and the easy roadside access made the memorial site something of an acid-dropping destination for the local purveyors of fringe and free-love. Apparently, he was bitter about the unintended result.

Until pulling up the article online, I hadn't heard the father died. I
had
heard the Arts Council was disassembling Acid Park--meticulously moving and restoring each crazy whirligig for reassembly in a lot downtown, where they could be appreciated by more than urban legend-chasers and druggies.

Sheriff Archibald had left me in the care of Deputy Reid, who turned out to be both less formal and less fake than the Sheriff himself. She was a narrow-framed black woman in her twenties, and her short hair was cropped close and worn natural. The no-fuss set to her mouth convinced me to lay off the questions, so we drove in silence until the road took us around a sharp curve, and straight into Acid Park.

From the roadside, it looked like a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie. Dirt and gravel lapped at the the asphalt highway in a wide shoulder that funneled into a narrow side-road. Tall pines and deciduous brush grew in tangles along the edges, not quite obscuring the rusting structures turning in the breeze. A giant yellow windmill stood as tall as any pines on its kindergarten-blue stilts. Its sails had rusted through.

As Deputy Reed pulled onto the gravel, I squinted into the trees, at the morning glories tangled around corrugated tin sheets. The most prominent feature, however, was right at the edge of the gravel shoulder: a VW Van, wrapped halfway around a pine tree--the ticket booth to this abandoned carnival. Saplings grew in through the open driver's side door, and the magenta rhododendron blossoms littered the ground around it. The paint job would have been a bright butter yellow once, but now its paint was cracked, old, and flaking.

A girl had died in there.

I shivered and was glad when we pulled down the dirt drive and left the van behind. The road was only wide enough for one car, and we bounced along over roots and pine needles, crushing spiky sweetgum balls into the dirt. Soon, the tunnel of pines led us to an ill-kempt yard.

Straight ahead, a ramshackle building heaped high with scrap metal and car parts. On the left stood a farmhouse--a dingy thing that had once been white, with black shingled roof and black shutters.

There's a feeling you get when you look at empty houses. I can't really explain it, but you know they're empty, as if their darkened windows were the eyes of someone whose mind has gone.

We exited the car in front of the workshop. The scents of hot metal burned my nose, and I fought the urge to plug my ears against the shriek of a saw.

Deputy Reid scowled. "They're not supposed to be working right now," she called, motioning me under the caution tape alongside the workshop. My stomach flipped as we ducked beneath it.

I was in a crime scene. A real, fucking crime scene! It felt so badass.

That was, until I saw the pasture beyond. Late afternoon sunlight poured onto a field that would have been idyllic if not for the giant craters where half the whirligigs had been uprooted and carried downtown, as if by giant hurricane. Now, two officers walked the perimeter of those holes, half-dragged by German Shepherds.

The remaining devices stretched on grasshopper-long limbs, looking like grownup-sized tinker toys. Their whirling mechanisms and long boom-like arms would have been creepy and impressive, but atop each one sat a metal cutout. From this distance, the only one I could identify was a tractor, which wasn't terribly intimidating, even if it was atop a whirligig approximately the size of a water tower.

Deputy Reid marched to the shack's rear and shot an annoyed look at the dude wielding a saw. He was cutting into a metal sheet, thick gloves maneuvering the sparking blade in a slow curve. An enormous green pinwheel leaned up against the door behind him, missing one of its petals.

Deputy Reid waved, and the guy must have been keeping his eyes on us, because I swear he'd been staring too intently at his project to see that tiny little wave. He pushed up his goggles, revealing slightly bugled blue eyes, and wiped the back of a glove over his forehead. He had a whippet-like appearance to him. With his skin tight over his bones, he could have looked like the very kind of druggie the planned whirligig park was trying to avoid, but the "Bill Nye is my bro" tee shirt destroyed his street cred.

"I thought your crew wasn't allowed on site today," Deputy Reid said.

The man shrugged and nodded toward the K-9 unit. "They didn't say anything."

His accent was local, and when he talked, his teeth showed as tobacco stained nubs. I gave his shirt a skeptical glance.

"Your supervisor should have told you."

"Supervisor? Hon, I own the place."

Deputy Reid leaned back, looking him up and down. "You're the inheritor?"

"Ee-yup," he said, tugging off his gloves and tossing them onto a pile of scrap. "Mr. Weir didn't have no more family. Reckon I helped him out."

My fingers itched to pull out a notepad. "So why are you working on a whirligig?" I asked.

The man looked at me, taking in my school uniform and spending just a moment too long on my hair. I forced myself not to wince as recognition dawned on his face, which twisted immediately into a sneer.

"I think she's asking the questions here, missy," he said, nodding to Deputy Reid.

"So why are you working on a whirligig?" Deputy Reid asked. I bit back a smile.

Bill's Bro jerked his chin at the whirligig. "I made this one. Good long time ago. When I first started workin' for Mr. Weir. The Art Council don't want it, so I figured I might as well fix it up my own self."

He poked one the shiny blades, the lines in his face growing deeper.

Deputy Reid nodded, her hand resting on her belt.

"We're going to have to ask you to vacate the premises until the investigation is complete," she said.

I held up a hand. "Wait." I narrowed my eyes at the man. "You weren't here during the paranormal activity, were you? Did you experience any chills? Hear any strange noises or-"