Talk of the Town (21 page)
“Bye.” Amos pushed his hands into his pockets and focused on his shoes. Shifting uncomfortably, he added, “Have fun at the fair.”
“I will, Amos. Thanks.”
“Later.” Turning to follow them, Andy pulled his bottom lip between his teeth. With his blond hair and blue eyes, he looked the most like Amber, perhaps because he was the closest to her age—fourteen, maybe fifteen. He had an intelligent, contemplative way about him. Walking backward a few steps, he lifted his chin and gave a half smile. “Say hey to my sister.”
“Andrew, hush,” Imagene whispered, snaking out an arm and grabbing his T-shirt. “That’s supposed to be a secret.”
I couldn’t hear the rest of the conversation. I probably didn’t want to.
I gaped after him as he followed his brothers away. The edginess that had been festering since the Amber banner incident yesterday came back with a vengeance. My presence here and Amber’s entrée into the Final Five were the worst-kept secrets in history. Sooner or later, Ursula would find out about the information leak and my trip to Wonderland would end in disaster.
Off with her head
. Swoosh. I’d be just another casualty of
American Megastar
, season three.
Ursula would never buy the idea that this was not my fault—that I’d done nothing to cause the security breach.
Which brought up the question of who had. How could top secret results, known only to Ursula, me, and a few select individuals, have so quickly reached Daily? Even the employees of the Austin affiliate, who’d been gracious enough to provide me with the helicopter flyover, thought I was a producer from
48 Hours
, doing a piece on El Niño and erratic weather patterns in the southwest. The cover story seemed to have worked perfectly.
What went wrong?
The Doom-o-meter whispered a low electric hum in my head, slowly growing louder, higher in frequency, harder to ignore. I took a deep breath, tried to think logically.
Calm down, calm down. Attack the problem, don’t retreat. You can still pull this off. Make Amber’s hometown show a success and Ursula won’t have anything to complain about. The livestock trailer idea will work. It’ll work brilliantly
.
Finally, I walked to the Ferris wheel and purchased a ticket, still mulling over the problem of finding a truck, a trailer, and some form of livestock. Before tomorrow afternoon. I was going to need help. Somebody local. Someone who knew where short-term rental livestock could be procured. Someone who could be trusted not to reveal the plan. . . .
Who?
The attendant took my ticket and I entered the Ferris wheel enclosure, then followed the line onto the platform as the ride unloaded, one seat at a time. I watched as Andy and Amos stepped off, followed by Avery and Imagene. Her puffy gray hair had been rearranged by the ride, and she was laughing while trying to smooth it back into place.
Maybe her?
Could she be trusted?
Would she be willing to help?
Clutching the guardrail, she waved at me as she started down the steps. “We’re headed to the roller coaster! I’m going to do it.”
“You go, girl!” I hollered, then gave her the thumbs-up. The entry line moved forward and I focused on boarding the Ferris wheel. A little twitter started in my stomach as I tipped my head and gazed upward into the maze of lights and girders. It looked huge from here, the highest seats seeming to touch the wispy clouds as they surrendered the final blush of sunset to a blanket of deep twilight blue.
I could hear gears grinding and bolts creaking. Overhead, the seats swayed with each movement of the wheel. A teenage couple kissed as they waited for their chair to descend. The seat jerked as the wheel moved again, and the girl clutched the bar, then laughed and snuggled into the crook of her boyfriend’s arm. They looked as though they’d be content to stay there forever.
I missed David. I didn’t want to be here, riding the Ferris wheel alone. I wanted to be half of a pair, curled up together, spinning slowly into the sky. With someone. Not with just anyone. With David. I wanted to be with David.
“Lady . . . lady . . .” The operator touched my arm. “Step forward, please.”
Shaking off the fog, I moved into the loading area, looked over my outside shoulder, and waited for the seat. Breath caught in my throat as the basket slid across the platform, the wooden footrest making an almost inaudible swish. In another moment, I’d be on my way up.
“Pardon me, ma’am, I have to test this ride for safety. Mind if I go up with you?”
I turned around just in time to see Carter step into position beside me. The seat bumped me in the thighs, I landed awkwardly against the padded vinyl, a second operator slapped the safety bar into place, and we were spinning skyward.
I scooted gingerly into position, trying not to rock the chair as we went up. “I take it you’ve been talking to the ticket taker at the gate.”
His eyes reflected the red light from the gyrating Mister Twister Rocket Ride next door. “Not much fun to ride the Ferris wheel alone.”
Oddly enough, I’d just been thinking the same thing. “Well, considering that you saved me from the singing Elvis head last night, I guess I owe you one.”
“You definitely do,” he agreed.
“On the other hand, you led me into a life of crime.”
He laid a splay-fingered hand over his chest, feigning innocence. “You said you were hungry. Would Little Joe Cartwright let a lady go hungry? I don’t think so.”
Our chair moved upward, then stopped as the last seats on the opposite side were emptied and rolled forward for reloading. I pressed a hand over my eyes, not so much afraid of heights as humiliated by the image of the night before. “I’m sorry about the
Bonanza
marathon. I don’t know what was wrong with me.”
“That’s not exactly your normal hotel.”
The gears below whined and squealed as the last baskets were loaded and the Ferris wheel started into a continuous backward motion. Carter leaned over the safety bar, causing the seat to tip forward.
I grabbed blindly for something solid. “Stop that, okay? This thing’s been in operation over seventy years. It might not be that . . . strong.”
His knee touched mine and the chair wiggled again as he leaned over the side. “I figured it was about that old. We had one like this where I grew up. My granddad worked over the summer helping to put it in so he could pay for Mawmaw’s wedding ring.”
Mawmaw
, I thought.
He still calls his grandmother Mawmaw? How sweet.
“Where’s that?”
“Where’s what?”
“Where you’re from.”
“Down near Austin. One of those little spots on the map that’s been absorbed by urban sprawl. When I was a kid, it was like this place, though.” Our seat swept past the platform again and headed toward the apex. Carter gazed beyond the midway, toward the dim glow of ambient light surrounding the nearby town of Daily. “My folks moved into Austin a few years after my brother and I graduated from high school. They couldn’t keep up with the farm anymore, and all the land around was going for development.” He gave a somber, closed-lipped smile. “Kind of sad to see the old climbing trees plowed down for houses and golf courses.”
“I guess that would be hard.” I tried to imagine having that kind of attachment to a place. “My father’s a real estate lawyer. He buys and sells properties, so we moved a lot. Always around LA, though. It was a fun place to grow up. A lot going on.”
His gaze cut toward me, and he grinned. “Party girl, huh?”
“Hardly,” I admitted. “My parents were gone quite a bit. The minute they’d walk out the door, my sisters and my brother would take off with their friends and threaten me with my life if I left the house. It stinks, being the caboose baby.”
He laughed softly. “My parents were never gone. We used to
wish
they would go somewhere—not that it would have made much difference. There wasn’t much trouble to get into around town. Our parents never needed to give us a curfew. They just figured we’d get bored and come home.”
“Really?” I couldn’t imagine teenagers getting bored and coming home before curfew.
“It was a good place to grow up, you know?” Even though he was looking at me, his gaze seemed far away, filled with private thoughts and old memories. “We’d take off in the morning, and as long as we were home by the time the streetlights came on in town, nobody worried about us. I feel sorry for my nieces sometimes. Kids don’t have the same kind of freedom these days.”
We swept past the platform and the waiting line of customers. I realized I’d momentarily lost track of the fact that we were going around and around on a Ferris wheel. “How old are they—your nieces, I mean?”
He smiled. “Eight, five, and two.”
“Oh, they’re cute at that age.”
“They are that.”
“So, is your brother older than you or younger?” Why I wanted to form the complete picture of his family, I couldn’t say, but I was enjoying trying to figure him out.
“The same age, actually.”
“You’re a twin?” I tried to imagine Carter, times two. “Identical or the other kind?”
“My brother’s adopted,” he said flatly. “I am too, actually.”
Heat rushed to my cheeks. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
Open mouth, insert foot
. “I mean, I shouldn’t have assumed . . . I didn’t mean to pry.”
Actually I did, and my mother would have said,
This is where being nosy will get you, Mandalay Maria
. “It’s none of my business. I have a bad habit of asking too many questions.” I fanned a hand in the air apologetically. “It’s one of those things my mother hoped to cure me of before she sent me out into the world. Too late now, I guess.”
Carter chuckled. “I think your mother did just fine.” Grabbing my hand, he squeezed my fingers, then fastened them on the bar as the Ferris wheel reversed directions and started forward, spinning us toward what looked like the edge of the world. “Hang on,” he said. “Here comes the good part.”
Standing in line for the roller coaster, I thought I’d have a stroke for sure. My heart raced, my breath came short, and my palms turned clammy and wet. Avery didn’t seem to notice. He was hanging on to me for dear life. He’d never been on the roller coaster, either. He’d only been to the fair one time, when Amber took him, and after they paid to get in the gate, they only had enough money for ten ride coupons and a couple of caramel apples. Amber let him go on the rides while she watched, and to save on tickets, she told him not to pick rides where he’d need an adult along.
Avery was real excited to have a grownup to ride the roller coaster with him this time. Andy and Amos seemed excited, too. They didn’t say it, but I had a feeling they’d never been on the roller coaster, either. The Lightning Snake was a pretty expensive ride. When I bought the coupons, Andy tried to give me the money he got paid from working at Donetta’s, but I told him this was my treat. It embarrassed him a little. Andy was a good boy but kind of careful about getting too warm toward folks. I think he would have said no about letting me pay for the roller coaster, but he didn’t want to cheat Amos and Avery out of the ride.
The closer we got, the bigger that thing looked.
Oh mercy,
I thought, watching that train zip around the curves, turn almost sideways, then whip up a hill, rush down into the valley, go up again, and take another fall. The riders threw their hands in the air before the cars jerked sideways around another curve.
Fat as I am, I’ll pull that thing right off the track and we’ll all die
.
It came into my mind that there was probably a limit on how much riders could weigh, and when we got to the front of the line they’d tell me I couldn’t get on. That’d be embarrassing, and one of the older boys would have to ride alone, since it was two per car, but at least they’d all get a turn on the coaster. I could sit and wait on the bench without looking like I’d chickened out.
I got a heavy feeling as I pictured myself left behind on the bench. Jack would sure be disappointed in me for sitting this one out.
“If I die, Imagene, I’m gonna die livin’,”
he used to say. The day he died, he was out on horseback sunup to sundown, helping work some cattle at Frank’s ranch. Jack came home tired and sore, and as happy as I’d ever seen him. He died in his chair sometime during the late show. When I woke up and went down to rouse him to come to bed, he was already gone. Everything changed so fast—just like that roller coaster whipping around the track—on top of the world one minute, racing downhill the next, and no way to stop or go back.
“Here it comes!” Avery said, and pointed as the blue train whizzed into the loading deck. The red one was still rushing around the other side of the track with folks screaming and girls’ hair flying in the air.
If I got on the roller coaster, it’d ruin my hair for sure, too. It’d be silly to wreck my hair, since I’d had it styled only yesterday, after the buzzard . . .
“It’s here! It’s here!” Avery squealed, pulling me forward as the line moved. Andy and Amos were already headed through the zigzag of ropes to the platform.
“C’mon!” Amos turned around and waved at us with a big grin. “They’re letting people on!” It was the most I’d heard Amos say all day, the first time he’d smiled like he meant it.
