“Shoot-fire, it wasn’t painful. I’m just antsy about the whole thing is all. I should have told the police and I didn’t. Now, it’s eatin’ at me,” Dianna said.
Of course, the next logical response would have been something like, “Then maybe you should tell them.” But it didn’t feel like my place to say it. I hoped someone else would.
“And I shouldn’t have said anything,” Ward said. “Sorry about that, but everyone here, except our new friends Becca and Scott, knew already, Dianna. In fact, almost everyone else who works the fair knows, and someone might have already told the police. It’d be best if you told them, even if you are late with the information.”
Dianna nodded.
Ward cleared his throat. “Dianna, Randy, and Virgil were our population explosion,” he said as he looked at me. The others all looked at him.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Orderville is a small place—you probably already know that.”
I did, though I’d never ventured into the town itself.
“Our population stays pretty close to the same number all the time. It seems like the second someone kicks the bucket, someone else has a baby to fill that space. Anyway, Virgil, Dianna, and Randy all came to town about twenty years ago, all within the same week, if I remember correctly.”
“We didn’t know each other. It was just coincidence,” Dianna added.
Randy nodded as he scratched his elbow again.
“We called them the Outsiders. Even after a good long time passed, we still called them that: the Outsiders. I’d almost forgotten all about that,” Ward continued.
“Since we are the three ‘Outsiders,’ the ones who aren’t ‘like the others’”—Randy rolled his eyes—“Dianna probably feels a little extra paranoid or guilty about Virgil. I had dinner at his house. Twice. I don’t have any idea why he invited me, but he did and that was it,” Randy said.
“Anyone else have dinner at Virgil’s house?” Jerry asked. “Well, other than maybe you, Dianna?”
“I didn’t. We had dinner out. I’ve been to his place but never for very long and never for dinner. Did he cook for you?” Dianna asked Randy.
“Yes, ma’am. Hamburgers on the grill, twice.” Randy laughed. “He was funny. I think he was very against drinking. He joked that I didn’t look old enough to have a beer. He knew me for years, but had me show him my driver’s license before he let me drink.”
“Where did he live?” Scott asked.
Dianna and Randy both pointed toward the north. “That way about a mile,” Dianna said.
“Yeah,” Randy said. “Nice little old country house. He was out in the middle of nowhere, but he didn’t do any farming. You know, he told me that he’d been married once, which was something I’d never known before.”
“I knew that,” Dianna said almost defensively. “I mean, I knew he was married, but that was a long time ago.”
Randy nodded. “A long, long time ago apparently. His wife was killed in some sort of accident, but he wouldn’t give me the details. I asked.”
We all turned toward Dianna. She shrugged. “Never told me that much. I didn’t know about an accident, just that he’d once been married. He said he didn’t like to talk about it and it was another life.”
Randy nodded.
“What else did you talk about?” I said to Randy.
“Gosh, I don’t know if I can remember. Stuff, I guess. You know, sports and his time in the military. He was in the army for the full ticket, the full twenty years. Oh, the house was in his family, so he owned it outright. That’s why he moved here, a free house. I asked him. I wondered how he was able to make any sort of living working the odd jobs that he worked. That’s how I heard about the military retirement money he got and the fact that he didn’t have any house payments. It was a pretty cushy life for a loner.”
“What were some of his other odd jobs?” I asked.
Everyone laughed, but Ward said, “He did everything, loved working at the fair, liked to paint houses, some construction, he was a waiter sometimes . . .”
“I heard he even walked dogs once,” Randy added.
“Actually, Virgil’s odd jobs seem to be a popular topic of local gossip,” Jerry said. “At least that’s what I’ve noticed.”
“That’s about right. Virgil was a loner, and the fact that Randy or Dianna knew him a little better is a big deal. Twenty years in town and I can’t recall one conversation I had with him that lasted longer than about a minute,” Ward said. “You just started at the fair this year, right, Jerry?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve only been in town for about six months.”
“Huh, seems like longer,” Ward said. “You already seem to fit in. Becca and Scott, you have to understand that we all work these two weeks at the fair, but most of us know each other outside of it as well. As I said, it’s a small community.”
“What are your regular jobs?” I said.
“Farmer,” Ward answered. I knew that already.
“Corn dogs for now, but mostly in between,” Jerry said sheepishly.
“I own a bar in town,” Dianna said. “Bottoms Up.” I about saluted with my soda but then realized she was stating the name of the bar, not offering a toast.
“I teach high school math,” Randy said as he started scratching at his other elbow. I wondered if his ceaseless movement drove his students crazy, and then I wondered if his twitchiness was due to a medical condition. If that was the case, I felt bad about having moved my legs away.
I tried to picture them in their regular jobs. I’d already “seen” Ward as a farmer. I could imagine Dianna behind a bar. I could see Jerry being in between things; I sensed a sort of flakiness there I wasn’t quite able to put my finger on. Baby-faced Randy as a math teacher didn’t seem to fit, though. I couldn’t envision him doing any particular job—other than cotton-candy overlord, of course—but not because he didn’t seem smart.
“What did you do before you were in between? Where’re you from?” I asked Jerry.
“I moved here from Los Angeles. I wanted to get away from the big city, and this is where I ended up. Other than the fair, I haven’t had a real job or kept one, I suppose, but I have some savings. I’m still okay, but I need to start looking seriously.”
I’d heard the story before. Sam had moved to Monson to get out of Chicago, and Ian had wanted to farm in South Carolina rather than in his home state of Iowa, but I had a sense that something other than the desire for a change of scene had lured Jerry this far away from home.
“What brought you two here?” I asked Dianna and Randy.
“Bar was for sale,” Dianna said. “I wanted my own business.”
“Wanted to teach in a small town, stay in South Carolina, and this was one of the jobs that came open.”
“All right,” Scott interrupted, “I need to know how many cards you all need.”
We played a little longer, but it was nothing like the old days when Scott and I could play all night, which actually made this experience better. Somehow, we ended pretty even, all of us with similar amounts of peanuts and licorice. I enjoyed getting to know my fellow fair workers and tried to compare them with my farmers’ market friends, but it was difficult. Most of my fellow market vendors worked at Bailey’s full-time. It would be strange to think of one of them running a bar most of the time and their stall only part-time. But I knew we were a lucky and unique group at Bailey’s. Not everyone gets to work their passion day in and day out.
I didn’t ask about Jena Bellings and gypsy magic. The right moment never came, and I didn’t want to ruin the good mood we all, even Dianna, fell into.
We said good-bye in the parking lot and planned on being back at the fair the next morning. It had been a long day, but as I drove my truck toward the exit, reveling a little in
my wild ways of playing poker until the late hour of eleven forty-five at night, I happened to glance in my rearview mirror. Scott had also gotten in his truck, but he let the rest of us leave before him. He and I were the last ones in the lot, so no one else witnessed him turning off his engine and climbing back out of his truck. The parking lot was lit well enough that I clearly saw what he was doing.
As I sat idling at the fairgrounds exit, I watched him disappear around Lucy’s trailer. When he did not return even after a long two minutes, I decided I wasn’t leaving without trying to figure out what he was up to.
Nine
I couldn’t turn around and park in the lot again, unless I didn’t care if Scott saw my truck. I did care. In fact, I suddenly really cared; if he was up to no good, he wouldn’t play it out with me as an audience. However, I thought as I pulled my truck onto the road and then off to the side and into the gully, maybe he just forgot something and was retrieving it before heading home, or wherever he was staying. I’d seen him disappear around the trailer. That didn’t mean he’d gone into it. He might have just gone back to the shooting gallery to gather something.
I stayed in the gully for another few long minutes. I turned off the truck, and the engine clicked a few times in rhythm with the crickets. The road was up the gully to my left, and a thickly treed patch of woods stretched out to my right. Those same trees bordered the parking lot and then one long side of the corn maze. I peered through the trees and was relieved to see that the meager glow from the few parking lot lights seeped between the branches enough to make the wooded area look only somewhat foreboding.
If Scott didn’t leave soon, I would get out of the truck and walk to the trailer using the cover of the woods. I’d have enough light to see where I was walking.
What was I thinking? Was I really going to travel through a darkened wood next to a corn maze just to see if I could catch Scott in the act of . . . something?
No, I wasn’t going to do that. I put my fingers around the keys.
But . . . I really wanted to know what he was up to. I took my fingers away again.
It might not be so bad. The dark was just the dark, after all, and I could stay well away from the corn maze.
And I’d stay close enough to the parking lot that if I needed to run away fast, I could.
But that was only if Scott didn’t leave in the next few minutes.
He didn’t leave—I watched five minutes click by on my phone’s clock, and then five more. That was long enough.
I got out of the truck and tromped through weeds and gravel to get to the trees. Even if I’d not had the parking lot lights to partially illuminate where I was going, my feet would have noticed the change in the terrain: it suddenly went from somewhat even and flat to uneven and bumpy. I’d have to be careful not to roll an ankle.
Despite the fact that I could see fairly well and that I knew someone was close enough to hear me if I screamed really loudly, walking through the woods, on the edge of them though I was, at night with the quiet rides ahead of me was more unsettling than I’d prepared myself for. As I’d noticed during the poker game, the fairgrounds were minimally lit with a few well-placed security lights, but the rides were mostly obscured in murky shadow. The Ferris wheel, of course, took on a murderous pose, its tall metal body appearing even more sinister and deadly in the sparse light. I shivered.
And then the parking lot lights went out. They went dark at the exact moment I blinked, which for a brief instant made me wonder if they’d actually gone out or if something had happened to my vision.
The only lights left in the entire world, it seemed, were the few and random security lights on the fairgrounds. For an instant I froze and blinked some more, hoping my eyes would quickly adjust. I was only about halfway to the trailer, and suddenly whatever bravery I had mustered for this excursion was replaced by a big dose of fear.
“It’s not that far,” I mumbled to myself. “There are no monsters in the dark.” Of course, there might be snakes and other hazards, but I couldn’t allow myself to think too much about those undesirable possibilities. If Virgil’s killer was still in the vicinity of Orderville, I hoped he or she was smart enough to have already gone home for the night.
I could have used my phone as a makeshift flashlight, but I knew that would raise suspicion if someone happened to see its glow moving through the woods. I picked up the pace, hoping even harder that I didn’t step on or into something that would harm me.
It was probably less than a minute later that I reached the trailer. I sat and leaned against the end of it, the side that faced the parking lot and not the fairgrounds. My heart was pounding in my ears, and I was out of breath.
“Calm down,” I breathed.
I looked around as I attempted to regain my composure. There were no security gates keeping people out. I didn’t see the security guards that I’d heard had been hired. After a murder, it seemed only logical to hire someone to patrol the grounds during the day and the night. But as far as I could tell, Scott and I were the only people on-site. His truck stood alone in the lot, so unless someone lived in the trailer and didn’t keep transportation close by, it was just me and my second ex.
Surprisingly, that was a comforting thought. I had no doubt that Scott wouldn’t hurt me. He wasn’t capable of harming another human, was he?
I hoped not because when I heard the trailer door open, I peered around and saw that he was stepping out of it.
I was in almost complete darkness, but he was somewhat lit by one of the distant security lights. I couldn’t see the details of his face, but his actions were clear. He stepped down the two short steps, looked around the fairgrounds, even glancing in my direction without noticing me in the shadows, and then locked the door. He looked around again and then put the key above the door, in a space between the frame and the trailer itself. Once that was accomplished, he hurried right past me and to his truck. A moment later, in a move that reminded me of the Scott I once knew and loved, he spun the tires and then peeled out of the parking lot.
“Guess you weren’t trying to be quiet,” I said to his taillights.
I sat at the end of the trailer a long time debating what I should do. I finally concluded that I should hurry through the lot, get in my truck, and get home to Hobbit.
But what I wanted to do was use the key and go into the trailer. It wasn’t all that difficult to talk myself out of that maneuver, though. I didn’t know what or who was inside it. I didn’t know if Scott was supposed to have access to the key or not. I didn’t know if a killer lurked within, just waiting for someone to enter and offer themselves up as the next victim. And the walls of a trailer could be confining. If I was going to happen upon someone with deadly intentions, I wanted it to be someplace where I’d at least have a shot at escape.
I was just about to pick the smart choice and sprint back to my truck when something else occurred to me. I’d snuck back to the fairgrounds to see what Scott was up to. I wasn’t willing to go into the trailer, but I recalled that there was a storage space behind the shooting gallery. Maybe I could just look through it quickly.
Really, had anyone else been around, they couldn’t possibly have missed me scurrying to the shooting gallery. I wasn’t trying to be obvious, but I wasn’t trying to hide well either. I didn’t whistle or duck and hide as I moved past the empty food trailers that still smelled of sugar and grease. I decided that even the kiddie rides looked horrifying in the dark.
The shooting gallery target wall and the storage area were separated by a piece of flimsy black fabric. I pulled back the curtain, pushed the button on my phone, aimed it inside, looked around, and then stepped into the mess.
The space was about five feet deep and as wide as the target wall, about fifteen feet. I remembered Scott as being organized and neat, almost to the point of irritation. I wasn’t messy, but though I kept my kitchen o
bsessively clean, I wasn’t all that concerned about the preciseness of the silverware in the silverware drawer. Scott always stacked the spoons evenly or made sure the knives were laying in the same direction. If they weren’t being used, his tools were always in the exact spot they belonged, and his closet was organized with his jeans together and his T-shirts grouped by sleeve length and color.
It had driven me crazy, but of course there was a point when we’d driven each other crazy no matter what we did.
I could think of only three explanations for the current state of the storage area: (1) Scott had been cured of his obsessive ways, (2) he’d been searching for something and hadn’t had time to put everything back where it belonged, or (3) someone else had ransacked the place.
Cables, screws, nuts, bolts, tools were strewn everywhere. There were even a few broken-apart guns, their pieces spread throughout.
An old card table occupied the far end of the space. I high-stepped over the mess, intent on getting to the files I’d spied on the table. The mess didn’t tell me much, but the files might provide some detailed information.
There were three of them, all old brown folders with worn edges. They were neatly stacked—surprising given the disarray around them. One held only a few pieces of paper, but the other two were fairly thick. One of the thick ones was full of documents about the Ferris wheel: schematics and blueprints of the machine, drawn with precision and detail. I thought the pictures might be interesting if I had the time to really look at them, but I only thumbed through, wondering why Scott had the folder. Toward the end of the papers, I came upon some engine drawings and realized he must have been using what was inside the folder to help him fix the motor.
The other thick folder contained papers similar to those in the Ferris wheel file, but these pertained to the roller coaster. The Mad Maniacal Machine was the shortest, probably slowest roller coaster I’d ever seen. But it was rickety, and I’d had no desire to try to work up the courage to ride it. I thumbed through those pages, too, and when I got to the end of the stack, I realized I’d seen a document that didn’t quite fit with the rest. I moved slowly back through the papers. A few pages in, I found the sheet that had caught my attention: a drawing of only one part of the roller coaster track system. Like all the drawings in the folder, this one was black-and-white, but unlike the others, it had a big red arrow hand-scribbled on the paper and pointing at a spot on the tracks.
A Killer Maize Page 10