She saw my raised eyebrow and smiled. “Well, actually, the pot’s padded and filled with gold-colored sponges that look like gold bars. If you land in the pot, though, you either get a prize or you get to slide again.”
“Sounds as if you probably hand out a lot of freebies,” I said.
“It’s a little harder than you might think,” she drawled. “But maybe you’d like to try it yourself in a few weeks. We’re booked to play the harvest festival over in Dobbs.”
“As to the night of July seventh?” said Chester Nance.
“My husband had gone on up to Virginia to check out a new elephant-ear trailer, okay? So it was just me and my two sons to look out for things.”
(At least I didn’t have to ask what an elephant ear was. Not with my weakness for fried dough. Hot and crispy, sprinkled with cinnamon and powdered sugar, it’s my biggest indulgence when the state fair comes to Raleigh every October.)
“I’d just snapped the locks when I heard Val yelling.”
“Val being your younger son?” asked Nance.
“Yeah. He’s only sixteen. Hasn’t got his full growth yet or he’d’ve busted them three’s butts.”
Hastily, Nance pushed on. “When you looked over to where he was, what did you see?”
“I saw them knock him over and start climbing up my rainbow on the outside, but the compressor was still going, so it was twisting enough that they couldn’t get a good hold. The plastic’s tough, but I was worried they might stomp a hole. Braz and me—”
“Braz is—?”
She gave an impatient toss of her head at having her narrative interrupted yet again. “Braz is my oldest boy, Val’s the youngest, Binga’s our Bozo, and Herve was the one working that ride, okay? The others had gone to the bunkhouse.”
Nance nodded and let her keep going.
“Braz and me, we ran over. I hollered for Binga to come help, too, but by the time we got there, that one”—she pointed to Vic Lincoln—“had his knife out and before we could get to him, he cut a slit ten feet long and let all the air out. Whole thing collapsed, okay? It was a miracle somebody didn’t break an arm or a leg.”
A Widdington town police officer who’d been there that night with his wife gave corroborating evidence as to the defendants’ presence, general belligerency, intoxication, and possession of knives. He hadn’t witnessed the incident, but since the Lincoln brothers and their friend Partin weren’t actually denying it, that point was moot.
When the prosecution rested, Vic Lincoln took the stand and the oath and asked if he could tell his story in his own words.
“See, Your Honor, we went there to get back the stuff her old man stole from us, but—”
“Stole from you?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am. See, when you put us in jail last time, we rented us a storage locker for our tools and stuff. But Danny’s sorry girlfriend that was supposed to be keeping up the payments on it? She went off to Myrtle Beach with another guy, and when we got out, the people at the locker place said they’d sold our stuff off for back rent. Her dude’s the one that bought it and we were there to find him. I mean, how can we make a honest living if we don’t have our tools?”
“And when you didn’t find Mr. Ames at the carnival, you decided to take it out in trade?” asked Nance.
“Well, naw, that just sorta happened,” said Lincoln.
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You put your tools in storage, nobody pays the rent on it, the company auctions it off, yet you blame the Ameses for your loss? Seems to me, you should be going after your brother’s old girlfriend.”
Lincoln looked at me as if I were dumber than dirt.
“She ain’t the one got our tools,” he said.
I let him have his full say, then found the men guilty as charged. Because they each had less than five priors, I could only give them forty-five days max for the injury to personal property, same for the simple assault. It was tempting to send them all back to jail for thirty days, but most victims prefer cash restitution over the satisfaction of seeing their assailants do time, so I suspended the active sentence and put them on supervised probation for two years with the usual conditions. This included a fine, restitution for property damage and any medical bills, an injunction to stay away from this carnival, plus an alcohol assessment at the local mental-health clinic.
Despite the unusual property that had been damaged, it was, as I said, a routine case and I didn’t give it another thought for the next few weeks.
And then the carnival came to Dobbs.
CHAPTER 2
FRIDAY NIGHT, LATE SEPTEMBER
“If she says, ‘Oh, Dwight, honey’ in that little girl voice one more time,” Portland Brewer muttered in my ear, “I’m going to dump orange slush down the back of her shirt.”
“Be nice, Por,” her husband Avery pleaded from the other side. “Dwight’ll hear you.”
“Over all this noise?”
Opening night at Dobbs’s Annual Harvest Festival carnival and the mild moonlit evening seemed to have brought out half of Colleton County to ride the Tilt-A-Whirl, swings, and Ferris wheel, to throw quarters onto a red dot, sling rope rings around Coke bottles, or toss Ping-Pong balls into bowls of live goldfish against a cacophony of music, clacking machines, and hucksterism.
The air was sweetly redolent of hot grease, fried dough, grilled meats, and spun sugar and one whiff was all it took to send me straight back to childhood, holding my mother’s hand, riding on the shoulders of one of my many older brothers, or clinging to my daddy’s pant leg, a little farm girl so dazzled by the bright lights that I thought I’d stumbled into Oz.
The lines between our small towns and the surrounding countryside have always been blurred, and now that creeping urbanization is turning tobacco fields into high-density developments, the differences are even fewer. Nevertheless, there are still enough farmers in the area to give meaning to the harvest side of this festival. And even though many now toil in the Research Triangle’s high-tech fields, most of the local people crowding the midway had roots that go deep in our sandy loam. These days, the huge gardens that once fed families through the winter might be reduced to little patches of tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers in the backyards of pretentiously named subdivisions, but even little patches can produce a few jars of piccalilli or spaghetti sauce for pantry shelves and bragging purposes.
In the meeting hall at the front of the makeshift midway, golden bundles of hand-tied tobacco, field corn, pumpkins, and other produce awaited tomorrow’s judging; as did rows of spiced peaches, bread-and-butter pickles, and strawberry jam. There would be cakes and pies for sale, and even now, black iron cookers were getting set up for the barbecue contest. With their appetites whetted by the smell of grilled pork basted with spiced-up vinegar, hungry spectators would be able to sample the winners for a charitable donation to the local rescue services.
This wasn’t the State Fair in Raleigh, with its huge array of gravity defying rides and every inch of ground taken up with catch-me-eye game or food stands, and amusements that went nonstop from ten A.M. till midnight. These rides were fewer, smaller, shabbier, and in bad need of a wire brush and fresh paint. Cracks in vinyl cushions had been mended with duct tape.
Nevertheless, there were enough neon tubes and chasing lights to put stars in children’s eyes and make their grandparents remember their own first carnivals. Barkers with hand-held cordless mikes or makeshift megaphones stood before colorfully lit stands, exhorting people to step right up to the best game around—“A winner every time, folks!”—and bluegrass music with a heavy, toe-tapping beat blared from a speaker above Dwight Bryant’s head where he was trying to knock over the milk bottles with two softballs.
There was no way he could have heard Portland’s catty remark, but she subsided anyhow. Advancing pregnancy had tied my best friend’s hormones in such knots that her normally happy disposition had degenerated into wildly erratic mood swings. Sylvia Clayton’s giggles were enough
to grate on anyone’s nerves, but we all like Dwight and wouldn’t hurt his feelings for the world, even though it depressed us to think he might be getting serious about Sylvia and that we’d be stuck with her for the rest of our lives.
She’d been wished on us by my brother Andrew’s wife. April teaches sixth grade in the same school with Sylvia, and she had decided that Sylvia would be perfect for Dwight. Most of my sisters-in-law, both past and present (I have eleven older brothers, some of whom have been married more than once), have tried to fix Dwight up ever since he resigned from Army Intelligence and came back to Colleton County to be Sheriff Bo Poole’s right-hand man.
Came home to lick his wounds, my sisters-in-law decided after Jonna divorced him and got custody of their little boy. “He needs somebody to make a new home with so he can have Cal down more often,” they said as they pushed their unmarried friends at Dwight.
Hell, they even push me at him whenever I’m between men and that hasn’t worked any better than their other candidates. This time around, though, April was starting to preen herself on her success. Dwight and Sylvia had been seeing each other on a fairly regular basis since June and here it was a week away from October.
To be fair about it, Sylvia Clayton’s a perfectly nice woman.
Which is part of the problem, of course.
Ever since the two of us got kicked out of the Junior Girls’ Class at Sweetwater Missionary Baptist Church for less than sanctified behavior, Portland and I have never been real comfortable around perfect women. It’s not that we smoke like wet bonfires, drink like the crappies in my daddy’s pond, or curse like farmers trying to hitch a set of forty-year-old plows to a thirty-year-old tractor, but everybody in our crowd indulges in one or the other on occasion.
Sylvia doesn’t smoke or swear and while she’s never actually said anything about the evils of alcohol, we’re acutely aware of her awareness if any of us order a second round while she’s still toying with her first glass of wine as if it were the threshold on the doorway to hell. Not that Por orders anything stronger than ginger ale these days. (We only get rowdy, not reckless.) Rut Sylvia’s hair is always perfect, her nails look as if they’ve just been manicured, and she seems to have discovered a lipstick that never wears off because it’s usually as fresh at the end of an evening as it was at the beginning and we never see her touch it up.
(“Bet you a nickel she does it in the stall,” Por says.)
Dwight’s first ball hit one of the bottles and pushed it back but not over and my cousin Reid groaned in sympathy.
Like Portland and Avery, Reid Stephenson’s an attorney here in Dobbs, and like me, he’s not seeing anyone special these days, so I’d invited him to come along to the carnival tonight to even the numbers.
Dwight pessimistically gave the second ball a sidearm pitch almost level with his belt buckle and over went all the wooden milk bottles with a satisfying clatter.
Sylvia squealed with excitement, and when the concessionaire told her to take her pick of the big stuffed animals at the top of his canvas wall, she said, “Oooh, Dwight, honey, I can’t decide!”
She finally settled on a black-dotted white plush Dalmatian that would have been sticky with elephant ears and corn dogs by evening’s end if it were mine, but would probably arrive at her house as pristine as it began. The thing was the size of a real Dalmatian sitting up on its hind legs and just as cumbersome to carry. I figured Dwight would wind up with it on one of his broad shoulders as soon as Sylvia tired of cooing at it. She’d already decided it would be a perfect guard dog by the door of her bedroom.
“That’s right,” I said pleasantly. “It’s all white, isn’t it?”
I knew for a fact that it was. April and I had stopped by her rented townhouse one day back in July and it hadn’t been hard to get the fifty-cent tour.
(Okay, so I’m nosy, but Dwight’s like another brother and I wanted to see what he was letting himself in for.)
Sylvia’s bedroom reminded me of the inside of an eggshell. Carpet, curtains, rocking-chair cushion, and bed linens were white. Bed, chests, and chair were a pale oak. The coverlet and lampshades were ruffled white eyelet and the bed was piled thickly with white ruffled pillows of various sizes. April told her it was just lovely. I had trouble keeping a straight face and Por had whooped when I described it to her later.
“That was the bedroom my mother decorated for my twelfth birthday,” she said, laughing. “Poor Mama.”
(For her thirteenth birthday, while her mother was out, we striped the walls silver and midnight blue and screwed black bulbs into the dainty milk-glass lamps.)
“More to the point, poor Dwight,” I’d said, and we’d both laughed again, trying to imagine Dwight’s muscular six-foot-three body taking its pleasure amid fluffy white ruffles. Dwight? Who’d once described himself as looking like the Durham bull in a pea jacket? Imagination faltered.
“I’m sure it’ll look darling there,” Portland said with such wicked innocence that Dwight gave her a suspicious glance.
“What about you, Avery?” I said hastily. “Don’t you need to win a teddy bear for the baby?”
“Hey, I won us a goldfish. What else you want?” Avery asked, holding aloft a plastic bag. The bag held about a quart of water and a contused-looking little black-and-orange fish that he intended to add to his koi pond. It’d only cost him about four dollars to win the thing.
“Every baby needs a teddy bear,” said a husky voice behind us. “Guess your age, guess your weight, guess the baby’s due date?”
We turned, and there, standing a little apart from the others, was a head-high hinged set of shelves stuffed with small pastel bears beside a large step-on scale. In front was the woman who’d been in my courtroom earlier this month—tall, blue-eyed, dressed tonight in a white shirt tied under her bare midriff and cutoffs that showed long, tanned legs.
Aines? Tampa Aines?
No, not Tampa or Miami. Tallahassee?
Yes, that was it. Tallahassee Ames. And she had recognized me, too.
“Hey, Judge! Guess your weight?”
As if I’d step on a scale anywhere except in a doctor’s office.
My horrified expression made her laugh. “How about your birthday, then? Get it within two months or any bear’s yours, okay?”
I peeled off two dollars, and she eyed me up and down as she added my money to the wad of bills in her pocket, then said, “Virgo, right? End of August?”
“On the nose!” said my nephew Reese, who’d suddenly appeared at my elbow. He’s one of my brother Herman’s sons. The one that hasn’t finished growing up. The one who owns nothing but a white Ford pickup and the contents of a trailer he rents from my brother Seth. An unfamiliar young woman hung on his arm.
“Aren’t they just the cutest little bears?” she cooed. “See if you can win me a pink one, Reese?”
“Guess your age within two years, your weight within three pounds, your birthday within two months. Only two dollars,” Tally Ames chanted.
Reese handed over the money. “Weight,” he said.
She walked around him, talking trash as she eyed his tall Knott build. “Muscles in those arms. Skinny backside, but a coupla beers too many in that belly. Let me see your hands. Umm, hardworking hands, but slow, right?” She winked at Reese’s girlfriend, who giggled in agreement.
She scribbled a number on the tiny pad in her hand. “A hundred and eighty-seven pounds, okay?”
Reese grinned, handed his foot-long chili dog to his girlfriend, and stepped confidently toward the scales. “I ain’t weighed but a hundred and seventy-five since—”
His grin turned to disbelief as the needle swung back and forth, then settled at 188.
“Better cut back on the beer and hot dogs, Reese,” I teased.
But my nephew was peeling off another two dollars. “So how old you think I am?”
She peered deeply into his eyes, then wrote the number on her pad. “I’ve written it down. What do you say?”
“Twenty-eight,” said Reese.
She showed him the pad where she’d scribbled twenty-eight.
“Damn!” said Reese, and two more dollars changed hands. “When’s my birthday?”
More scribbling. “I’m ready.”
“July,” Reese said.
She showed him her pad where she’d abbreviated “Jly.”
Reese swung around and glared at our laughing faces. “Y’all are telling her!”
“No, I they’re not,” said Tally Ames, her bright blue eyes sparkling from the roll she was on. “Son, I can even tell you what beer you drink!”
She took his two dollars and wrote Bud Lite on her pad.
“I know y’all’re telling her,” Reese insisted.
“Tell you what,” said the guesser. “For two dollars, I’ll make ‘em stand behind me and I’ll tell you what kind of car you drove here tonight, okay?”
“Now here’s where I get you your teddy bear, Patsy,” Reese told his girlfriend as she joined us behind Tally Ames.
Once more, the woman looked Reese up and down, then started writing on her pad. Patsy peered over her shoulder and began to giggle. “She’s got you, babe.”
I looked, too. Ford pickup.
“Now, how the hell you do that?” Reese asked, totally amazed. As if everybody in the world couldn’t look at him and know that he drove a truck and that the only chancy thing would be whether it was a Ford or Chevy. She’d had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right.
“You’re a good sport, son,” she said. “I’m gonna give you a free teddy bear, okay? You deserve it.”
My eyes met Dwight’s above Sylvia’s head. He winked at me and I knew I wasn’t alone in figuring out that Reese’s “free” teddy bear, a fuzzy little blue thing no bigger than my hand, had cost him ten bucks.
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