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.