“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.
