It would be funny, Jalena thinks, if even one of her colleagues were laughing. But Parrott and Rogan are staring across each other into opposite corners of the yard they’ve parked beside. Green is a motionless, bullfrog-shaped hump in the front seat. And Frazee is still ankle deep in leaves, watching Bemis clamber up the dark steps, rap on the door, ring the bell of this particular house, which has no jack-o’-lanterns on its porch, and no lights inside or out. He picks a piece of stuck something off the screen and stares at it, then returns, slowly, across the grass, looking down at what he’s taken. As he passes Frazee, he hands it to her, and Jalena gets a glimpse. A little torn, pink piece of stiff paper.
“What’s it say?” Jalena asks when Frazee just stands there, looking down.
“Mit ne,” Frazee murmurs. She crumples the paper in her hand and stuffs it in her pocket.
“Is that some kind of—”
“Admit One.” Frazee ignores Rogan’s offered hand, clambers up, and resumes her seat next to Jalena. “Before it got ripped—used, presumably — it said Admit One.”
“To the Carnival?” Parrott gasps. Her gloved hand dives into Frazee’s pocket, pulls out the ticket. But Frazee laughs, grimly, even before Parrott smoothes the ticket in her palm.
“To the Eastlake Plaza Cineplex 6, I think. Taken 2. 9:45 showing.”
Parrott stares at the ticket, then up at Frazee. “Why was it stuck to the door?”
Frazee shrugs. “Because Maddy Roemer is starting a collection? Because she sensed we might show up, and thought she’d have a little fun?”
“Because she’s a clever, nasty little biker bitch?” Rogan says. Angrily.
Or. no. protectively?
“How about because she pulled it out of her pocket accidentally when she was getting her keys to get back in her house? What do you think about that?”
“Maddy Roemer?” Jalena asks. “He had a wife, your history professor? Was this while he had his grad student lover?”
“Sister. Maddy is his sister.”
“And she owes you,” Rogan says, in that same, adamant tone, as the engine starts up.
Frazee just looks at her hands, or the bed of the truck. “Yeah,” she says.
The truck has completed its U-turn and returned to the frontage road. The wind blasts over them again. And Rogan, Jalena sees, has tears in her eyes.
“Have you seen her, Alexa? Since, I mean?”
“Seen her,” says Frazee.
“Spoken to her?”
“To say what?”
Then all of them, even Parrott, go silent for a while. The new Walmart flashes past, closed but all lit up. Then the airport. Atop the freight terminal, billowing and flapping as the wind buffets and blows through and then abandons it, a gigantic, black, inflatable Halloween something tilts into the night, leaning almost off the roof over the road. At first, Jalena thinks it’s some sort of giant bat or a Godzilla. But it turns out to be. actually, she doesn’t know what it is. A shape, in an inflatable cowl. Like one of those Harry Potter dementors, if that’s what they’re called. Like a monster costume with the monster sucked out of it, rooted to the terminal roof like a flag.
They all stare at it. Rogan, the closest to it, actually shrinks away. “That’s new,” she says.
Then they’re past the last Clarkston buildings, veering away from the freeway onto the local access road that cuts through the plain, following the feed trucks and the moonlight west toward the far-off mountains.
“Those, too,” Frazee mutters a minute or two later, as they rocket by the second, then the third of the scarecrows, propped up on fence-post crosses next to each passing speed limit sign. Their faces are identicaclass="underline" white circular pillows with stitched black Xs for eyes, and no other features except clown noses. Their straw forms have been stuffed into matching overalls and striped flannel shirts that look too soft and comfortable to be work shirts.
Pajama tops? Jalena wonders, as yet another scarecrow appears in front of and then vanishes behind them, its stitched-shut gaze aimed across the road, out at the prairie. Not at them. Surely not.
“Wow,” she says, trying to pull her scarf tighter against her neck without unfolding her hands from across her chest. “Are those meant to be funny?”
Through the window of the cab, she can see Bemis and Green noting the scarecrows, too. Their heads turn sideways in time, then away in time, back toward the unspooling road ahead.
“Maybe we should go home,” Frazee half whispers.
“Three days after the burial,” Parrott resumes, as though someone has flipped a switch and triggered her again. “That’s when it really started. Alexa, you were there, weren’t you? The day David Roemer came back to work?”
“I was there,” Frazee says. Jalena expects her to pick up the story, but she doesn’t. Parrott continues.
“He came in completely covered, hair to shoe soles, in dirt. And he was waving his papers around. Those papers. You understand?”
Jalena doesn’t, at first, and then does. Though she thinks she must be wrong. “Not the ones he—”
“Yep. Those,” says Rogan.
“The ones he’d buried with his lover,” says Parrott.
“It was all pretty Dante Rossetti,” Frazee says, and Rogan snorts.
“Or Burke and Hare.”
“He showed them to us. He was already more at home with us, in the English hallway, than the people in his own department. Or maybe he just thought we were less likely to label him insane.”
“Yeah,” says Rogan, “because he figured we already were.”
“What were they?” Jalena asks. “The papers.”
“His handwritten list,” Parrott says, as yet another clown-nosed scarecrow — and another — flashes past. They look less pinned to than draped over their posts, like neighboring ranchers calling to each other across the road. Creatures of the plains.
“Handwritten,” Jalena feels herself murmur, in Parrott’s cadence.
“The list he’d compiled on the night he found the Carnival. The night his lover died. A list of everyone he was absolutely certain had been there, or claimed to have been. Not just on that specific night in that particular place, either. He’d listed everyone he’d ever heard of or talked to, in all his time in Montana, who claimed to know something about it. Mr. Dark’s Carnival, you see, it comes and goes. Moves around. That’s always been the story, anyway. ‘This is my life’s work, now,’ he told us. ‘I’m going to find them all. Every single person who’s ever so much as seen that place. And then I’m going to find the Carnival. Because that’s where I’ll find her.’ ”
“Her? Her who?”
“Ah, yes. Forgot to mention that part, didn’t you, Darlene?” says Frazee. She looks up at Jalena, her teeth chattering behind her scarf. The expression in her eyes is not friendly. And for the second time since her colleagues spirited her out of Green’s office, Jalena wonders if she’s being had. Or hazed. Or worse.
“What part?” she says.
“Just one crucial little detail. David Roemer’s murdered lover? Well, it turns out — we learned this days afterward — that she’d been killed Halloween afternoon. Roughly six hours before David claimed to have driven with her to Mr. Dark’s Carnival, and then left her there.”