“You okay?” Richards asked when Tally had stopped slapping my back and I was able to quit coughing.

“Yeah, sorry,” I said. “I must have swallowed wrong.”

She turned back to her agenda. “Mrs. Ames, how did Ms. Viscardi and your son get along?”

“Val? Fine.”

“No, I meant your other son. Brazos Hartley.”

“The same, so far as I know. I don’t think they had much to do with each other, okay?”

“She didn’t have any reason to want him dead?”

“No, of course not! What are you saying?”

“Nothing. Just trying to see if there’s a connection between your son’s death and hers.”

“If there is,” Tally said stiffly, “I don’t know what it could be.”

The other four professed to have noticed no tension between Polly and Braz.

With that, Mayleen Richards said she was sorry, but she was going to have to take a look inside if that was all right with them. She and I both knew that she’d need a search warrant if they refused. But the trailer belonged to Tally and she offered no objections.

As it turned out, the girls’ worries about bothering Sam weren’t necessary. He slept right through Mayleen’s search, even when the deputy lifted the mattress beneath him.

“Didn’t even turn over,” Kay marveled.

“Yeah, he could sleep through a tornado,” said Tasha without thinking.

The others went silent for an instant, then started chattering like finches, but Richards didn’t pick up on that slip of Tasha’s tongue. She asked again if anyone had anything to add, and when they all shook their heads, she headed back to the Plate Pitch.

The girls took the keys to the truck and went of mournfully with duffel bags of dirty laundry and a shopping list from Tally.

“If I can just keep them from running off on me for three more weeks, we’ll have our nut for the winter,” Tally said, watching Eve maneuver the truck through the parking lot.

She offered me another beer, but I was still nursing my first one and passed. I hadn’t eaten since my early lunch with Portland, which now seemed a million years ago. The moon was rising and another beer would put me right over it. But it was pleasant to sit here in the cool early fall night and listen to Tally talk about life in the carnival: on the road all summer, their winters in Gibsonton, Florida—Gibtown to its citizens—a town founded by a giant and a half woman, where everything was zoned Residential/Show Business instead of Residential/Agricultural as it was in our corner of Colleton County.

“What does that mean exactly?” I asked.

“Means you can have an elephant in your backyard if you want to.”

I heard about January trade fairs where the latest thrill rides can sell for close to a million dollars or a pizza trailer with ovens and icemaker for a hundred thousand. I heard about buying goldfish wholesale for seven cents apiece, where to buy the best stuffed toys for the least amount of money, and why iguanas don’t make such good prizes. (“Too hard to keep warm on the northern routes.”) She told me how to cool the marks and how you can get sucker sore after weeks on the road.