“What is it?” Tim jerked away, propelling the rest of his cotton candy off the end of his stick and into the lap of the woman behind him.

“There!” I pointed. But even as I searched for Lenny across the crowded circus, I saw him get up and slip out into the night. By the time Tim had followed my finger to the other side of the tent, he had gone.

“Is it a clown?” Tim asked.

“No, Tim! It’s the blurred man!”

“Who?”

“Never mind. We’ve got to go . . .”

“But the circus hasn’t even begun!”

I dragged Tim to his feet and we made our way to the end of the row and out of the big top. My mind was racing. I still didn’t know who the man in the dark coat really was. But if it was the same person I had seen at the cemetery, what was he doing here? Could he perhaps have followed us? No—that was impossible. I was sure he hadn’t seen us across the crowded auditorium. He was here for another reason, and somehow I knew it had nothing to do with spinning plates and cream pies.

We left the tent just as the ringmaster, a tall man in a bright red jacket and black top hat, arrived to introduce the show. I heard him bark out a few words in Russian, but by then Tim and I were in the open air with the moon high above us, the park eerie and empty, and the trailers clustered together about a hundred feet away.

“What is it?” Tim demanded. He had forgotten why we had come and was disappointed to be missing the show.

Quickly I told him what I had seen. “We’ve got to look for him!” I said.

“But we don’t know where he is!”

“That’s why we’ve got to look for him.”

There seemed to be only one place he could have gone. We went over to the trailers, suddenly aware how cold and quiet it was out here, away from the crowds. The first trailer was empty. The second contained a dwarf sipping sadly at a bottle of vodka. As we made our way over to the third, a man dressed in a fake leopard skin walked past carrying a steel barbell. Inside the tent I heard the ringmaster come to the end of a sentence and there was a round of applause. Either he had cracked a joke or the audience was just grateful he’d stopped talking. There was a drumroll. We approached the fourth trailer.

Lenny Smile—if that’s who it was—had disappeared. But there was another dead man in Battersea Park that night.