“I saw that,” said Luther Parker. Luther is tall and gangly and looks sort of like a black Abe Lincoln without the beard. He’s Colleton County’s first African American district court judge and has a dry sense of humor. “No playing favorites, now.”
I looked around the hall and saw his wife Louise. We exchanged waves as a bright-eyed little girl ran up to her and tugged at her hand.
Luther and Louise’s first grandchild.
“May we assume Sarah’s entered in the first category?” I asked sweetly.
He gave a sheepish shrug.
“And what about you?” I asked our third judge, Ellis Glover, who’s Clerk of Court.
“I don’t have a dog in the first fight,” he laughed, “but my sister’s son’s in the six-to-sixteen bunch.”
“I probably have some nieces there, too,” I told them. “Shall we all recuse ourselves and go home?”
“Not unless you know which entries are which,” said Luther.
I admitted I didn’t and the same held true for Ellis and him, so we got down to it.
The object, of course, is to give out as many rosettes as possible to the younger children. Neither Bert nor Sarah won first, second, or third, but they each carried off one of the ten green ribbons for honorable mention and were too young not to be pleased with their success.
In the second group, I was pretty sure that the wagonload of yam children pulled by a remarkably horse-shaped yam was Jess’s entry. She’s crazy about horses and it would have taken something serendipitous like this for her to enter when I’d asked the family to skip the contest this year. Ellis and Luther had marked it as a possible winner on their first ballots, so I didn’t feel bad keeping it in the first round, too. The yam baby had a natural indentation that made it look as if it was bawling its head off.
It was cute enough to win a unanimous second place, but the blue ribbon went to a Hispanic boy’s tableau that featured space yams walking on the moon along with some yam aliens. When Jess bounced up to accept her award, we both pretended we didn’t know each other. Wouldn’t have looked good for a judge to hug one of the winners.
That didn’t stop Minnie and Seth, though, and while they were distracted, I slipped back to the pig cookers. The Ladies Auxiliary of Colleton Memorial Hospital had brought coleslaw, spiced apples, hushpuppies, and various desserts to augment the meat and were now selling plates of the donated barbecue to benefit the children’s wing. I asked Isabel and Nadine if I could have a foam take-out box of barbecue and another of slaw and apples.
“Not that you’re not welcome, Deborah, but what’re you going to do with so much food?” they asked me.
“I thought I’d take it over to the family of that boy that got killed yesterday,” I said. “They’d probably like something a little more substantial than corn dogs and elephant ears.”
That’s all I had to say. I don’t know if it’s genes or something in the water, but death or sickness always triggers the female impulse to provide food for the afflicted, and the next thing I knew, Nadine and Isabel were cutting into the serving line to fill more foam boxes with hushpuppies and banana pudding, too. They divided the boxes between two shopping bags and I set off down the midway like someone making a delivery from a Chinese restaurant.
When I reached the compound where all the carnival vehicles were parked, I saw Dwight standing beside the open back end of a tractor-trailer van with Arnold Ames and a couple of uniformed town officers. I didn’t have to ask him which travel trailer belonged to the Ameses. There was a small spray of white carnations wired to the lamp beside the door.
CHAPTER 5
SATURDAY AFTERNOON
I tapped on the metal door, and eventually Tally Ames opened it. Like me, she was wearing a long blue skirt and her charm bracelet. Her eyes were red rimmed and bloodshot, and she stared at me a moment as if trying to think why I was there.
“I thought you were another reporter.”
“Have they been bothering you?” I asked.
“Not as much as you’d’ve thought. Carnies are like migrant workers far as the local newspapers ever care.” Her tone was bitter as she held the door wider for me to step inside. “They’re always so sure it’s one of us whenever there’s any trouble, and as long as we’re killing each other...” She shrugged in resignation.
Those first few minutes of a condolence call are always awkward. Anything I say sounds so trite in the face of such loss and it’s even worse when it’s the death of someone young.
I held out my shopping bags of food cartons. “My sisters-in-law thought maybe you and your family might be able to eat a little something.”
“That’s nice of them.” She took the bags with a wan smile and set them on the kitchen counter that probably doubled as a snack bar.
This travel trailer was fairly big, designed to be pulled by a two-ton truck. The master bedroom was two steps up over the flatbed, and there was a pop-out bedroom at the back end. In the middle were a bathroom, a tiny kitchen, and a surprisingly roomy dining room/den combination. The deep blues, turquoise, and amethyst of the furnishings had been chosen with a knowing eye for her dark hair and blue eyes, and the space was brightened by September sunlight that spilled through a line of skylights in the ceiling.
Except for a drink cup of clear purple plastic on the shelf beside the plaid couch and an ashtray with three cigarette butts, there wasn’t a paper or thread out of place. Janice Needham would’ve been hard-pressed to find something to pick at here.
