Shadows at the Fair Read Free Page B

properly. Lydia and Abe wouldn’t have approved.
    “Maggie, I’m really hoping you can help me. Have you got any of those prints from nineteenth-century herbals? The kind that show the plant and lists its uses? I’d love to give my niece back in Iowa prints of coffee and tea plants as a wedding gift. She’s getting married in August, and she drinks coffee, and her intended is a tea drinker.”
    “I think I have some that might do.” Maggie remembered sticking coffee and tea prints into her portfolio of miscellaneous trees and bushes that are used medicinally.
    Lydia put her hand on Maggie’s arm. “Don’t bother about looking through everything today. We’ll both be here all weekend. Just sometime before the show closes. I know we’re all busy as bees with setting up today.”
    Maggie nodded. “No problem.” She had hardly started to set up. The opening tonight, and then two long days, would leave plenty of time to look through portfolios. She’d just have to make sure she didn’t forget or sell those prints to anyone else.
    Harry Findley was arranging early children’s books on one of Joe Cousins’s back tables. “I notice Harry’s helping Joe set up his booth.”
    Abe Wyndham suddenly appeared next to his wife, at least a foot taller than she was, and half as wide. “I don’t think we need to talk about that in public, do we?” He put his arm around his wife’s shoulders and steered her back to their booth. “Dear, where did you pack the silver-plate miniatures? I was sure they were in the same carton as the dressing-table bottles, but I can’t seem to find them.”
    “They’re right where we always put them, in the green carton.” Lydia looked at Maggie and shrugged as she moved back into her booth, pointing.
    “Maggie!”
    She covered the distance between her booth and the outside door in a moment. “Gussie!” Maggie bent down and gave her a big hug. “Now the show can begin! You look great—new hairdo!”
    “I was forty-seven last month. I decided to celebrate.” Gussie reached up and touched her hair, cut in a sophisticated ear-length wave. “Like it?”
    “Love it! I’ve been thinking of trading in my mop, and you are an inspiration!” Gussie did look great, but Maggie had no intention of cutting her own hair. She’d worn it long since her student days, and it was a part of her that she didn’t plan to change. “New wheels?”
    Gussie spun her electric scooter around. “Cool, right? The doctor says I’m supposed to stop stressing my muscles, so I gave in and she wrote a prescription for this beauty. Cost a few pennies even so, but when I go, I go in style. Want to drag?”
    “No way, lady. You’d beat me; no contest. Have you checked in with Vince yet?”
    “My assistant is taking my check over as we speak. Told you I was getting lazy!”
    “Assistant? Who?” Gussie had always insisted on total independence. She hadn’t mentioned an assistant in any of their telephone calls during the winter. Maybe that new man in her life had come along. What was his name? Jim? Yes, almost certainly Jim.
    “Do you remember my sister’s son, Ben?”
    Maggie nodded; she had first met Gussie’s nephew when she’d visited the Cape eight years before. He had been twelve at the time and had just received a community service award from the mayor for having found a toddler who had wandered away from his mother on the beach. The award had received a lot of media attention in the area because Ben had Down’s syndrome.
    “Well, I needed a little brawn, and Ben needed to get away from home and be a little more independent, so we’ve decided to be partners when I do shows. He helps me out at the shop when we’re at home. It’s company. Ben loves meeting people and traveling, and I love not having to look for porters, and not worrying about someone dumping cartons into my van without caring which one holds the iron banks and which the German bisque dolls.” Gussie grinned. “We’re