Dwight turned a becoming shade of red, which made my brothers laugh and rag him about wedding bells in his future.

We were halfway to Dobbs before I remembered the pictures I’d found.

“Doesn’t matter,” Dwight said. “Doesn’t look like those lockers have anything to do with Hartley’s death after all.”

“But what about the person who tried to break in the shed out at the farm when the gang of three were liberating Lamarr’s grandfather’s pictures?” I asked. “How do you explain that?”

“I don’t. Sure would’ve helped if they’d gotten a good enough look to say if the person was male or female. It might be sheer coincidence, you know. A burglar totally unconnected with the carnival, just looking to take what he could.”

“So instead of ransacking the house or unlocked sheds, he—or she—headed straight for the most securely locked outbuilding on the place?”

“Okay,” he conceded, “but if it was Viscardi, we still don’t know why she would want Hartley dead. That story she told us about his blackmail attempt? Maybe he had something on her more serious than who she was sleeping with. Something she couldn’t get out of just by having him beat up.”

“She really did have him beat up?”

“Oh, yes. Jamison interviewed that Sam Warrick and he admitted it. Didn’t want the Ameses to know, but from what we gather, everybody knew it but Mrs. Ames, including her husband and her son.”

So we were back to the Ameses again, with yet another reason to dislike Polly Viscardi.

Even with Dwight driving, we had plenty of time to get to Dobbs and he kept the truck on back roads that were more direct as the crow flies but meandered through the country. Summer was definitely winding down. Wild asters made patches of blue along the ditch banks, and wasteland was yellow with coreopsis, sneezeweeds, and goldenrod. Pokeberries hung in clusters from dark purple stalks and sassafras leaves were bright red and orange against the pines.

“We still don’t have a viable theory as to how Viscardi killed Hartley without being seen,” he said.

I’d been thinking about that myself ever since last night when Arnold told us about Polly’s shoes being bagged.

“Her game is one that’s pretty hard to win,” I said. “That’s something I picked up on the Internet. Unless the coins have a lot of backspin or land just right, they simply won’t stay on the plates. And remember, you don’t have to buy chances to play. People just step up and start tossing. In fact, her main reason to be there was to keep them back behind the foul line.”

Dwight looked dubious. “Okay, so maybe she could leave it for the two or three minutes it’d take her to get across to the Dozer, do Braz, and get back. But why didn’t anybody see her enter or leave?”