Carnival of Death Read Free Page A

are. Just some guys from school. What difference does it make?”
    Matt thought it over. OK, maybe it didn’t matter. The kids weren’t hurt badly except for the one with the knife, who probably had a broken wrist. Well, it would heal. They’d get over what had happened, and they could find their own way home. He was sure they could come up with some clever way to explain their injuries rather than telling anybody they’d been trying to rape one of their classmates. And Cap’n Bob didn’t want the cops coming around. Matt didn’t want them any more than the cap’n did.
    But the whole thing bothered him. So he tried again. “They wanted to hurt you. They might try to hurt someone else.”
    Sue Jean gave a short laugh. “Them? They’re drunk or they wouldn’t have bothered me. I think they learned an important lesson.”
    Matt hadn’t smelled any liquor, but maybe the girl was right about the lesson. They’d sure gotten their asses kicked.
    As he and Sue Jean got back to the midway, Matt turned back to look for them. He didn’t see them anywhere.
    He also didn’t see the lollipop wrapper that the breeze blew across the bent tops of some weeds. It caught for a moment on the jagged edge of a leaf and then slipped away to move on.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Madame Zora’s real name was Gloria Farley, and she was scared witless. She’d been scared before, but never like this, not even when she’d been arrested that time in a little northern Mississippi town for shoplifting. She’d been eighteen years old and two days away from the home she’d fled the day after her stepfather had come into her bedroom for the first time.
    She wouldn’t have tried shoplifting if she’d known of any other way to get free food at the supermarket, but she didn’t think they’d give it to her. She was trying to slip out with a couple of cans of tuna and five candy bars when they grabbed her. The candy bars had probably been a bad idea. Not much nutrition in a candy bar.
    She’d thought that if she cried enough and acted younger than her age, she wouldn’t go to jail, but Mississippi was tough on shoplifters, at least in that part of the state, and she went to the pokey all right. It turned out that the chief of police wasn’t a whole lot different from her stepfather when it came to methods of interrupting sleep, and after she got out of jail a couple of days later because the supermarket manager decided not to press charges, she promised herself she’d never go back in.
    Not long after that she met a woman named Frances Devore, a woman who was old and getting frail but who still had an active and inquiring mind. She and Gloria had both been in a public library in another little town in Mississippi, which, in spite of what some people thought, did indeed have a literate population.
    Gloria was there because it was warm and had comfortable chairs. Frances was there to read the magazines and be around people for a change instead of being cooped up in her house. She’d struck up a conversation with Gloria that had begun with her asking why Gloria wasn’t in school. Gloria had told her the truth, more or less, glad to have a sympathetic listener, and Frances got interested.
    She was looking for somebody who’d help her out a little bit, keep house for her, do her shopping, drive her to the doctor, and fix a few meals.
    “I could give you a roof over your head and your own room,” she said, “and I’ll keep you out of trouble.”
    It sounded like a good deal to Gloria, who went home with Frances and stayed for six years, until the old lady died. Frances had an eclectic library of her own and didn’t mind if Gloria read the books that were there. In fact, she encouraged it. Frances didn’t have TV, so when Gloria wasn’t doing her chores, she read. She read novels and biographies and self-help books, books about Greek and Norse mythology, Shakespeare. She’d discovered that she loved to read. Whenever a book interested her, she