“Was there someone here making change?”
“Yeah, a guy about our age, maybe a little older. Is that who got hurt?”
Before I could answer, Dwight borrowed the hand mike from the game next door and addressed the crowd. “Anybody who played this game tonight, we ask you to speak to the officer over here to my left. The rest of you can go on home. There’s nothing more to see here.”
Even before he spoke, I’d noticed several don’t-want-to-get-involved types melt away toward the entrance, but Dwight had already posted someone there at the gate to take down the names of everybody still on the lot. He wouldn’t be able to catch them all, of course. The place was too porous. But with close questioning and crosschecking, I was willing to bet he could come up with the names of ninety-five percent of the people who’d come to the carnival today and surely one of them would have seen something.
I looked around for Stevie and Eric but they were gone.
Without telling the deputy they’d played the Dozer.
All this time, there was an eerie glow from the floodlights aimed at the floor inside the wagon, and now the photographer stepped out to let a colleague start collecting any physical evidence. He handed one of the instant prints to Dwight, who showed it to Dennis Koffer, who confirmed my original guess.
“It’s Braz, Tally.”
“Braz?”At first she seemed incredulous. Then her head began to shake back and forth in denial. “No! Oh God, no! How? What happened?”
She tried to duck under the yellow tape, but was held back.
Across the lot, I saw Val Ames returning with a wiry man of middle height and a receding hairline.
Pushing through the stragglers who probably wouldn’t leave till they were chased with a stick, he roared, “What the hell’s going on, Dennis?”
Tally Ames had been watching him, and now she burst into tears, rushed to him, and buried her head on his shoulder. “It’s Braz. He’s been hurt bad, Arn. He’s dead.”
“Arnold Ames,” Dennis Koffer told Dwight. “Tally’s husband. Arn, this is Major Bryant of the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department. He and the judge here were playing your Dozer when they found Braz in the hole.”
Colleton County’s in the process of switching away from the old coroner system, and the doctor who’s acting as interim medical examiner came over and told Dwight that he was ready to have the body transported to Chapel Hill for autopsy as is required in cases of violent death.
Uniformed officers of the Dobbs PD moved people back even further so that the boxy EMS truck could move in closer. The techies had draped the still form before lifting him out onto the gurney. As they transferred him into the ambulance, Tally Ames’s low sobs were the only sound until the ambulance drove slowly away and murmured speech returned to the onlookers.
The crime scene technician went back inside in case there had been anything under the body that he’d missed the first time. When he came back out, he extinguished the floods, packed up the van, and told Dwight he was finished for now.
“I’d like to come back tomorrow morning, though. In the daylight.”
Dwight nodded, then asked the Ameses if there was someplace private where they could sit down and talk.
Tally Ames looked around. “Dennis?”
“You could use the cookhouse,” he suggested, pointing toward the one food stand that offered places to sit down and eat. Four wooden picnic tables with attached benches stood beneath a yellow tent. “We can close the flaps so you can be private.”
“What about the Dozer?” asked Mr. Ames. “We got close to five hundred dollars in quarters there.”
“I’m going to leave a guard here for tonight,” said Dwight, “but if it’d make you feel better, you can let the sides down. I assume they lock? I’ll ask you not to go inside till we’re finished tomorrow morning.”
The man nodded and looked around for some of his help. “Binga? Herve? Raggs?”
The three men slipped under the tape. Inside their glass boxes, the Dozer blades moved back and forth until one of the men disconnected the power cord that snaked from the back side.
As the men lowered the sides of the game and locked them in place, the carnival’s patch asked Dwight, “What about tomorrow? Saturday’s usually our biggest day. You’re not going to keep us from playing tomorrow, are you?” He glanced at the Ameses. “No disrespect, Tal, Arnie, but you know we can’t afford to close tomorrow.”
“We know,” Arnold Ames said grimly.
“We’ll get someone to cover for you,” said Koffer, and murmurs of agreement from the other carnies backed him up.
“There’s no reason you can’t open the rest of the carnival,” said Dwight. “If we keep these tent flaps shut, we can come in and out without anybody hardly knowing we’re here.”
I realized that Dwight probably wasn’t going to get to me tonight and that I might as well go on home, but thinking of how the Ameses were strangers in a strange town, I slipped over to them and said, “If there’s anything I can do to help with the legalities—”
Before either adult could speak, their son glared at me with hot, resentful eyes. “We don’t need the help of any damn Knotts. Just leave us the hell alone!”
The boy’s hostility was like a slap across the face, and I could feel my cheeks flushing.
Arnold Ames glared at him. “Shut your mouth, Val! Now! Help the others close up, then get to the trailer and stay there. You hear me?”
The teenager nodded with matching anger, then stomped off toward his game stand.
