Bull’s words came back to me: people change. I pushed down the terrible thoughts trying to claw their way out of my heart and tried to focus on the job at hand.
Seamus followed me around, and I explained to him how frustrating it was to struggle with the buttons on my shirt, a struggle I hadn’t had a few days ago. The baby was growing by the minute. I was already in the largest women’s size the station stocked. I’d be moving into the men’s sizes in another week.
After that I might as well wear a muumuu. God, Finn Nowlin would have a field day if I walked into the station in a muumuu, my handgun on one hip and a radio on the other. If it came to that I was just going to retire and journal my eating habits on a blog. I’ve heard people can make big bucks doing that, taking pictures of their meals and posting it for the whole world to see.
I headed out of town, my thoughts dancing between two big questions: Who killed Nicky? And what really happened on that beautiful July day three years ago?
It didn’t make sense, any of it.
The story of Nicky Bellington for three long years has been one of fate. A tragic slip and a long fall; a matter of timing and improper footwear and recent rains and whatever else you could attribute to the cause of the accident.
But Nicky didn’t die. And that changed everything: how we looked at the accident; his family; his life. I thought about Ellen’s strange question: is it different, being the parent of a murdered child as opposed to a child who’s died in an accident? I thought there was a difference there, but I couldn’t see what it was worth, or what it meant. It seemed to me that with murder comes intent, whereas with an accident comes fate.
I realized, as I took a hard right on the steering wheel and headed to the south part of town, there was another question that needed to be answered. Who was the real victim here: Reed? Or Nicky?
Chapter Thirteen
I arrived at the fairgrounds shortly before ten. The sun was an orange orb in a blue silk sky. There was a sharp quality to the sunlight that only served to highlight the trash and dirt of the Fellini Brothers’ Circus of Amazements. I put on my sunglasses and walked to the box office at the front of the fairgrounds, watching where I stepped. The grounds were littered with evidence of visitors. Empty soda cans and cups and crumpled foil wrappers lay scattered among orange rinds and apple cores and paper plates and those cardboard tubes that cotton candy is wound upon.
In the distance, just beyond the red and white stripes of the big top, a man swept trash into a large bag, pausing every few seconds to wipe his brow and adjust his grip on the broom. The air was heavy with the smell of rotting fruit and farm animals. I heard children crying, their voices rising together in panic, and I moved in the direction of their cries until the scent hit me and I realized it was not children, but goats.
Joseph Fatone met me at the closed ticket-taker stand. He was in his early seventies; deep grooves made parallel vertical tracks on his forehead and continued down to bookend his mouth. An unlit cigar hung from his thin pale lips and he patted at the four strands of hair on his head as though making sure they were still there.
“Thanks for meeting me here. It’s hard to get away, especially at a time like this. We’re all devastated, our family has been broken,” he said, his words garbled around the Cuban.
He offered me his hand and I shook it. It was clammy and damp and I resisted the urge to wipe my palm on the seat of my pants. Fatone pointed to an Airstream trailer just beyond the box office and we walked toward it. On the ground, orange raffle tickets lay among the trash like trampled poppies in a field.
“The family?”
Fatone nodded and held the trailer door open for me. “Yes, we’re a big family around here. Reed was a son, a brother to us all. He was a real great kid, full of heart and vigor. You don’t meet too many kids with vigor these days. Vigor went out of style fifty years ago.”
The air inside the trailer was musty and smelled of tobacco and lemon Pledge and burnt coffee grounds. Fatone gestured at the tiny kitchen table with its two mismatched plastic chairs and I carefully lowered myself into the one on the right. There was barely an inch between my belly and the edge of the table and I scooted back in the chair as far as I could.
Fatone sat across from me and picked up a chipped mug.
As he drank, I took a look around the trailer. It seemed to be his office and his home. There was a narrow, unmade bed behind a halfway open door near the back of the Airstream. A stack of dishes filled the tiny kitchen sink. The prints on the walls were hunting and fishing scenes clipped from various men’s magazines, mounted in cheap black plastic frames. A sad-looking spider plant hung out of an old coffee can, its tips brown and brittle.
Fatone took another long sip from the mug and his next words wafted toward me on a breeze of booze.
“I still can’t believe he’s gone. I keep expecting him to turn up at the door with T, hollering that the elephants have gotten loose or that he needs to borrow the car. He was such a jokester, that one. A real wise guy.”
He took another sip from the cup and coughed. I smelled tomato juice and put my money on a Bloody Mary.
“T?” I asked.
“Tessa O’Leary. Calls herself T. She and Reed were, uh, well… you know. Going together,” Fatone said. He touched his head again, found the hairs intact, and returned his hand to his lap.
“Dating?”
In the window behind me, I heard the angry buzz of some small insect beating itself against the pane, too desperate to get out of the trailer to notice the open door a few feet away.
He nodded. “Yup, ever since Omaha. Oh, they were friends before that, everyone is friends, you know. But eventually, they all pair up, even the old ones. Everyone’s got a partner.”
“Do you have a partner, Mr. Fatone?”
“I had a wife once. It didn’t really take, her and I. Now, you might say I’m like an old grandpa,” he said. “I have a lady friend every now and then, but nothing serious. Those days are behind me.”
I nodded. “Mr. Fatone, how long have you been the manager for Fellini’s?”
The old man leaned back and pursed his lips and stared at the ceiling. The short-sleeve shirt he wore was yellow and thin and it strained against his belly. I watched as dark patches of sweat made half-moons in the pits of the shirt.
“Well, I started with them back in the late seventies, when it was just Jack Fellini. Then he got his brother Sam involved, and it became the Fellini Brothers. When Sam was killed in the plane crash in eighty-five, Jack promoted me to general manager. So, yeah, it’s been about twenty-five, thirty years. Jesus, the time goes fast, doesn’t it?” he said. “Hey, can I get you a soda pop? Or some water?”
“No, thank you. And how’s it been, business, I mean? I imagine you’ve seen a lot of changes over the years.”
Fatone nodded. “You know, the circus used to be the greatest thing in town. When that long caravan of trains and trucks would roll in, the energy and excitement was just electric. It was a real family event you know, parents and kids together, having a good time. And then… I don’t know. Somewhere, I think it was in the late 1980s, everyone sort of lost their innocence. Maybe it was the recession. The circus became this antiquated creature, going from town to town, feeding and then moving on.”
I said, “That’s a strange way to describe it. You make it sound like some kind of parasite.”
He shrugged. “It was bad for a while there, but it’s better now. I think folks are ready for joy again in their lives. The kids just adore coming, you know. They love the animals, the cotton candy, the clowns, too. All of it, it’s just a blast.”