“I had hoped to meet with you alone,” she said, “but the children’s parents called and asked me to open up. Finals are in a few weeks, and they need to use the reference library. I’m sure you understand.”
He nodded, then felt his face burn with embarrassment.
“Of course,” he said.
“Good. If we keep our voices low, I’m sure they won’t hear a thing.”
He pulled his chair up a little closer.
“My hearing isn’t what it used to be,” he admitted.
Surprise registered on her face. “If you don’t mind my asking, how old are you?”
“Soon to be sixty-three.”
“Really. With all that’s happened, well, I just assumed—”
“I was young and strapping?”
Her hand came up to her mouth. It was too late, and her laughter escaped. The five kids jerked their heads in her direction.
“Now you’ve really got them confused,” Valentine said.
“Are they staring?”
“Afraid so.”
“The town drums will be beating this afternoon.”
Valentine leaned back in his chair and laughed softly. She was an easy person to be around and seemed at peace with her situation. Maybe if he was good, she’d explain her secret.
“I’d like to tell you a story,” she said. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all.”
“I used to have a favorite little boy. By the time he’d reached the sixth grade he’d read every book in this library. He could also recite Shakespeare by heart and the Preamble to the Constitution and anything else he put his mind to. He was brilliant; only, he came from a terrible family situation. Parents always drinking and fighting and getting thrown in jail. He came to the library to escape. I used to open up on Sundays for him, too.
“One day, right after he turned thirteen, he disappeared. The police thought he’d been kidnapped, and there was a frantic manhunt around the state. All the women in town cried when he wasn’t found. I think I cried the hardest.
“Eleven months later, he was found in a sleepy town in the Florida Panhandle. He hadn’t been kidnapped as everyone thought. He’d gone and run away with a carnival.
“The carnival people were gypsies. They’d adopted him and had him working for them. They’d dyed his hair dark and given him a new name. When he came back to Slippery Rock, he was a different person. They hadn’t molested him or abused him or anything like that. But they’d changed him.”
She folded her hands and put them in her lap. Tears welled at the corners of her sightless eyes. The memory was so painful that her chest heaved up and down. Valentine felt like he’d sat down in the middle of a movie and didn’t know what was going on.
“You don’t understand, do you?” she said.
“No,” he said.
“That little boy was Ricky Smith.”
One of Valentine’s first jobs as a cop in Atlantic City had been to drive a carnival out of town. It hadn’t been an easy assignment. The same carnival had been coming to town ever since he could remember. They would rent an empty lot for the summer and set up their colorful tents and old-fashioned midways. They offered games where people could win prizes, and sometimes they had entertainment, as well. Right after Labor Day they would pack up and head down south. Watching them leave had always made him feel sad.
At first he had wondered why the carnival had to be run out. The Atlantic City Boardwalk also featured games and entertainment, and no one gave their owners a hard time. It didn’t seem right, so he’d gone to his superior and asked him.
His superior was a hard-ass named Banko. Normally, Banko would have chewed him out for not following orders. But he’d seen something in Valentine’s eyes that told him an explanation was warranted. So Banko had sat him down and explained.
“The carny people that come to Atlantic City are coldhearted thieves. Their games look the same as the Boardwalk games, but they ain’t. They’re crooked. Know why?”
Valentine shook his head. The carnival people had always been nice to him, and he was having a hard time believing Banko.
“Because they have to make a living, that’s why,” Banko snapped. “The carny people are here for two months. They’re only open at night. It’s not like the Boardwalk, which is always filled with customers. People go to the carnival once or twice. If one-tenth of them won prizes—like those big stuffed animals—the carny people would go broke. So they rig the games so nobody can win.”
“But I’ve seen people win,” Valentine blurted out.
“You’ve seen pretty girls win,” Banko replied.
“What do you mean?”
“Only pretty girls win.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s good for business. A pretty girl walking around a carnival carrying a giant stuffed panda? It’s gonna make everyone smile.” He put his hand on Valentine’s shoulder. “These people are rotten to the core. They offer acts on the midway. Sword swallowers, the world’s tallest man, Hilda the Bearded Lady. Some of them are pretty good. And the carnival people only charge you twenty-five cents admission. Bargain of the century, right?”
“Right,” Valentine said.
“Well, it’s a ploy, a con. The reason they charge you any admission is because they want to see inside a guy’s wallet. Guys always bring money with them to the carnival, especially if they’re on a date or have kids. The guy selling the tickets sits on a high chair and rips tickets off a spool. But what he really does is stare into wallets. If a guy has a lot of dough, he signals to another carny guy in the crowd.
“That guy walks up behind the pigeon and draws a mark down his back with a piece of chalk. He does this as he bumps into him. The pigeon never feels it.
“The pigeon is now a target for a pickpocket. He gets cleaned out, and his wallet gets returned without him knowing it. That way, if he goes to the police with a beef, they’ll see he still has his wallet and figure he just blew the money.”
Valentine tapped his fingers on Mary Alice Stoker’s desk. He could remember the conversation with Banko like it was yesterday. It had been like learning there was no Santa Claus. And now the librarian was telling him that Ricky Smith had spent nearly an entire year with bad carnival people.
“How was Ricky different when he came back?” he asked.
“He wasn’t a little boy anymore. I guess you could say he’d lost his innocence.”
“Did he get back with his parents?”
“They split up, and then Ricky moved in with his aunt.”
“Did you have much contact with him?”
She shook her head. Behind her desk was a window that faced the forest. A deer stepped into the picture, watching him out of the corner of its eye as it munched on the grass.
“Ricky stopped coming to the library,” she said. “He started cutting classes and never carried books in school. Somehow he still managed to get straight A’s.”
“Think he was cheating?”
“A lot of the teachers suspected it, but they couldn’t prove it.”
“What do you think?”
“He was cheating.”
Valentine stared over her shoulder at the deer. It was eating nervously, and he guessed it had gotten used to coming by and not getting any response out of Mary Alice.
“Any other suspicious behavior?”
The blind librarian nodded. “Ricky had a friend named Stanley Kessel who also came from a broken home. Stanley was a gambler. Got caught several times in school running card and dice games. Got expelled in his senior year and never returned.”
