She nodded and peered forward from the platform’s edge. The corpse was positioned on an ostrich. The ostrich was beautiful, carved out of wood, brown with a red and gold saddle. His yellow legs stretched apart, as if frozen in a joyful skip. Stephanie Towner was posed as if riding the thing. But it wasn’t convincing. She’d slumped down, her chin now pressed against the base of the ostrich’s neck, her arms dangling on either side of its belly. Thankfully, her hair covered her face. Susan couldn’t see well enough to make out many details. But it was clear that she’d been in the water. Or at least in mud.

Archie stepped up behind Susan. She could smell the coffee in his hand and the wet fur on his coat. The rain fell against the carousel roof. The seagulls squawked. “She was moved,” he said. “There’s mud and grass.” He turned to face behind them and motioned across the park to the picnic area at the river’s edge, where a chain-link fence lined the riverbank. “We found hair on the fence. Looks like the current washed her downstream and she got tangled up there. Then someone found her, got her over the fence, and dragged her here. Rain washed away any good footprints, but you can make out the drag marks in the mud.”

Susan got out her damp notebook and wrote all that down.

Archie was throwing her a bone and she knew it. He’d done that a few times over the last six months. It wasn’t his fault that she’d almost gotten herself killed a couple of times in his presence, but he didn’t seem to know that. So he gave her a heads-up on the weird stuff. Scoops. She was sure everyone at the newspaper thought they were sleeping together.

“Who called it in?” she asked.

“Crew working on the rink,” he said. “I think they’re doing something to the floor.”

Susan had grown up roller-skating at the Oaks Park Roller Rink. Everyone celebrated birthdays there. All the kids skated around under the disco ball until someone inevitably broke a bone and had to go to the emergency room. The rink was now the home of the Rose City Rollers roller derby team, a bunch of tattooed, big-thighed, badass girls in short-shorts. “It floats,” she said. “The rink floor. It’s on pontoons. When the park floods they detach it from the foundation.”

Archie shrugged and took a sip of coffee. “That’s clever. I guess.”

Susan craned her head toward the roller rink, which was at the other end of the park, and tried to catch sight of the workers. “You think one of them…?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” Archie said.

She turned back to the carousel. It was ringed by three rows of animals on ascending circular platforms. Jumping horses. Standing horses. A cat. A deer. A dragon. Zebras. Mules. Pigs.