Elaine Orr - Jolie Gentil 03 - When the Carny Comes to Town

WHEN THE CARNY COMES TO TOWN

By Elaine Orr

E-Book Edition

Published by Lifelong Dreams Publishing

When the Carny Comes to Town

Third book of the Jolie Gentil Series

Copyright 2012 by Elaine L. Orr

ISBN:  978-0-9851158-0-7

Poetry by James W. Larkin:  Breakfast Table Cordial

Copyright 2012 by James W. Larkin

This electronic book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and my not be sold or given to other people.  If you would like to share this book with others, please purchase an additional copy.  Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

Discover other books and novellas by Elaine Orr in ebook format
or paperback
.

Biding Time (young adult)

Secrets of the Gap (mystery with a touch of romance)

Searching for Secrets: Author Preferred Edition (mystery with a touch of romance)

Appraisal for Murder (first of the Jolie Gentil cozy mystery series)

Rekindling Motives (first of the Jolie Gentil cozy mystery series)

Tess and All Kinds (short story)

www.elaineorr.com

ISBN:
978-0-9851158-0-7

Dedication

To Aunt Tancy, who helped me win a plate at my first carnival.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my husband, Jim Larkin, for insisting that I take the time to write what I want.  I am grateful to my friend Lynn Gordon, whose comments on an early draft were especially helpful.
  And to her dogs Cheyenne and Legend, who taught Mr. Rogers and Miss Piggy a couple of tricks.
  The Iowa State Fair is the best in the nation.  Thanks to the fair for providing several photos of the Midway.  The cover uses one of those photos.
.  Mrs. Leanora Kensil had many wonderful expressions.  In her memory, one is used in
When the Carny Comes to Town
.

CHAPTER ONE

I SHOULD NEVER HAVE BET WITH SCOOBIE.  I guess I could have bet about what color Aunt Madge’s hair would be on St. Patrick’s Day, but I should have insisted on a different wager.  Whatever.

Here I am, sitting on the plank above the dunk tank at St. Anthony’s spring carnival.  OK, it’s for a good cause.  But at this point, it could be to save all the whales on the planet and I wouldn’t…

Kerplash!

And who the hell said we shouldn’t heat the dunk tank?

When my head came above the water line the loudest laugh was from Aunt Madge.  Since she spent more than twenty dollars trying to dunk me, I wasn’t surprised that she was so pleased. 
I’ll get her later.

I swam the two strokes to the small ladder and George Winters reached down to give me a lift out of the tank.  Honest, I didn’t plan it.  It was a natural reaction to all the stupid things he’s said about me in the
Ocean Alley Press
.  George kind of catapulted over me, somersault style, and there was a really loud splash.

I moved up the ladder as I heard George break the surface.  “I’ll get your ass Jolie Gentil! You owe me a new phone!”

If I had planned it I’d feel guilty about him ruining his mobile phone.  But, I didn’t plan it, so no pangs of remorse.  Not now anyway. 
Maybe when I read the paper tomorrow.

“All right, Jolie!”  Scoobie scrambled up from where he’d been sitting on the ground laughing his tail off and hurried to steady the small ladder that led down from the dunk tank.  He knew I wouldn’t pull him in.  I wanted to get as far away from George Winters as I could in ten seconds or so.

I accepted the towel from Reverend Jamison and kept moving.

I made it to the ladies room before George could catch me.  Since we were on church property he didn’t follow me in.  Just before I slammed the door I heard Father Teehan tell George to watch his language.

I was sitting on a toilet, bent over laughing, when the door to the restroom opened.  I looked under the stall and saw Ramona’s ankle-length skirt.  Since I hadn’t latched the booth door, she stuck her head in.

“I can’t believe you did that.”  Her large eyes were wider than ever.  “I mean, I can believe you’d want to, but at a church carnival…”  Her voice trailed off and she grinned at me.  “You know you’ll pay for it.”

“It was worth it.”  I wrapped the already wet towel around my hair and grinned back at her.  Ramona is a lot taller than my five feet two inches, so from my sitting position I had to lean my head back to look at her.  “If he hadn’t written about the hospital giving me a donut cushion when I broke my tailbone I might ignore him.”

The door to the restroom opened again.  “Jolie.”  It was Scoobie.  “It’s safe.  Winters went home to change.”

Ramona moved back so I could stand and lean out of the stall to look at Scoobie, or rather Scoobie’s head, complete with wet beard.  He knew better than to walk all the way in.  “You’re setting me up.  He’s out there.”

Scoobie had the decency not to look offended.  “If I could get away with it, I’d help him throw you back in the tank, but he really did leave.”  He looked behind him and then back at Ramona and me.  “I think Reverend Jamison wants to talk to you.”  Scoobie left.

Reverend Jamison is the main reason I’m sopping wet.  He’s the minister at First Presbyterian, where Aunt Madge has gone to church for forty years and I now chair the food pantry committee.  OK, he’s one of the reasons.  Having a dunk tank fundraiser at St. Anthony’s spring carnival was Scoobie’s idea.  All the churches in town contribute to the food pantry, so Father Teehan was glad to have us.

As fundraisers go, it was a good one.  The last time I saw the list there were more than forty people who’d agreed to sit on the plank and have people try to hit the lever that would throw them into the four-foot deep, soft-side swimming pool.

I pulled the towel off my head and threw it over my shoulder.  “I guess I better go face the music.”  I looked at Ramona.  “And I don’t believe you have a cold.”

Ramona has a strong sense of style, which I do not.  I’m perfectly happy in khakis or jeans.  She makes a lot of her clothes because she favors the tie-dye skirts and loose-crocheted vests that were popular in the early 1970s, and she wears them well.  I had known all along she’d find a reason not to get dunked.

She shrugged.  “We make more money if I keep doing my caricatures.” 

She’s right.  She usually does them on the boardwalk in the summer, but the chair of the St. Anthony’s carnival asked her to do her charcoal pencil drawings at the carnival, and she said she would if half the money could go to the food pantry.

The first person I saw when I walked out was Scoobie.  He was still grinning.  Instead of his usual jeans and t-shirt, today he was wearing a pair of 1900s-style swimming trunks with horizontal stripes, which hit him below the knees, and a top from the same era.  Aunt Madge made them for him.

I looked around.  “Where’s Reverend Jamison?”  I eyed Scoobie with suspicion.

“I lied.  Come on, they got the cotton candy machine working again.  I’ll get some for both of you.”

“Uh uh.  My clothes are in my car.  I’m changing first.”

He shrugged.  “OK.  Come on, Ramona.  Miss Party Pooper can find us when she dries off.”  He studied me for a couple seconds.  “You might want to comb your hair while you’re at it.”

I threw the towel at him.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER my shoulder-length hair was as dry as it was going to get without a hair dryer and my wet clothes were in the trunk of my car in a plastic bag. 

“Hey, Jolie.” 

I knew the person didn’t know me too well, since he mispronounced my name.  Jolie Gentil is a French name.  The J and G are soft and the L at the end of Gentil is silent.  Translated my name means “pretty nice.”  My French Canadian father is very proud of his novel naming idea.  I am not, but it’s my name so I live with it.

I looked closer and recognized the owner of our small beach town’s in-town grocery store.  He knows me, since I hit him up for donations to the food pantry, but I guess I’ve never clarified the pronunciation for him.  “Hey, Mr. Markle.  Glad you could get away.”

“I’m on my way back to the store.”  He waved as he kept walking toward his car.  “I heard you were going on the plank at one, and I was going to try to knock you off.”

“How nice of you.”  I can’t be rude, he does give us food.

My car was almost a block from the church parking lot, which houses the carnival, so I had a chance to take a good look at the entire carnival as I made my way back.  The Ferris Wheel is visible for blocks, but you can’t see most of the other rides and booths until you get closer.  A few years ago St. Anthony’s built a new church on the edge of Ocean Alley, and there are a bunch of larger pine trees that surround three sides of the grounds.  Aunt Madge said they used bingo money to buy the big lot.

There were more than a dozen colorful canopies along the edge of the carnival, each one housing a so-called game
, such as throw-a-dart-to-pop-a-
balloon-and-you-win-a-plastic-snake or — if you win enough — a stuffed animal.  I’ve played these games enough times that I know the darts or softballs are weighted oddly so you have a hard time winning. 

I smiled to myself.  When I was about five, I wanted to win a little doll by throwing a coin onto one of many small plates sitting on a low-level table a couple feet away.  Every coin skidded off until Aunt Madge gave me a nickel.  I won the doll and Aunt Madge told me years later that all the plates had a tiny bit of cooking oil rubbed on them, so the coins would skid off.  She had slyly spit on a nickel and rubbed it in a bit of the sawdust we were standing on, so it didn’t skid.  My aunt, a pillar of propriety.

“Ladies and gents.”  The loud speaker carried the voice of the carnival’s manager for blocks.  He gets on the PA system about every five minutes. 
I wish he’d get laryngitis.
 

“Ladies and gents.  You haven’t eaten even half the foot-long hot dogs.  You can’t come to a carnival without eatin’ a dog.”  His voice droned on.

I got to the edge of the carnival and carefully looked through the crowd.  No George Winters.  He’s the main reporter for the Ocean Alley Press, and he likes to mention that in the six months since I moved into Aunt Madge’s Bed and Breakfast I’ve had a role in solving two local murders. 

It’s not my fault.  A real estate appraiser is in a lot of houses every week.  I didn’t put the bodies there, especially the skeleton in the Fisher’s attic.

My gaze found Scoobie.  He was holding the large mallet used to hit a platform to try to make a metal ball go up the pole and make a bell gong.  He was imitating a body builder’s stance as he showed off muscles.  Ramona and Jennifer Stenner were pretending to feel his biceps. 

I shook my head slightly and smiled. Scoobie is not a tough guy.  Not in the physical sense, that is.  In the almost eleven years since we finished high school Scoobie has fought back from alcoholism and an affinity for pot that put him in the county jail a couple times.  As he once told me, he’s eventually trainable and he decided to stop periodically boarding with the county. 

I only went to Ocean Alley High for junior year.  I stayed with Aunt Madge while my parents “worked some things out” in their marriage.  I was not happy being here then, so it might seem odd that I came back after my now ex-husband Robby was arrested for supporting his gambling habit by embezzling money from the bank where he worked.  I came to Aunt Madge, not the town, but the town is growing on me.

A wolf whistle caught my attention and I turned around to see if it was aimed at me.  Lance Wilson is the food pantry treasurer.  He’s also close to ninety, so some would say he should have a bit more decorum.  I would not be one of those. 

He raised a small ledger into the air.  “More than $400 already.”

“Wow.  That’s really good.  Who would have thought?”  Certainly not me.  It’s the only time I’ve agreed with Sylvia Parrett, one of our more rigid-thinking food pantry committee members.  I would never have expected so many people to sign up to be dunked.  The fact that local election primaries are next month helped.  Even the guy running unopposed for coroner agreed to sit above the tank.

Lance caught up to me and we stood watching the crowd for a moment.  “So far you’re the biggest income source, but I hear Annie Milner and Martin Small are lining up a lot of people.” 

Annie and I didn’t really know each other in high school, but I much prefer her as the candidate to be the county’s next prosecuting attorney.  Small is the current one and he’s a jerk and a half.  “What about Jennifer?”  I asked.  Jennifer Stenner went to high school with us and manages to always look like she walked off a movie set.  One where she has a role as a fashion goddess.

Lance smiled slightly.  “She gave me a check for twenty-five dollars and said she had other responsibilities today so she couldn’t get dunked.”

I tried to turn my snort into a polite laugh.  “Good for her.”

Lance walked left, toward the dunk tank, and I continued toward the “High Striker” gong ringer game.  Aunt Madge was watching Scoobie, and I considered sneaking up and goosing her, but that would be childish.  And there were too many people around.  She turned toward me as I walked up.

“I still have eyes in the back of my head, you know.”

“No you don’t.”  I nodded ahead of her.  “You saw me in that big mirror.” 

“The jig is up,” she said, looking toward the large mirror that distorts the images of anyone peering in it.  She turned back to watch Scoobie try to get the ball up to the gong.

I stared at Aunt Madge for a second.  She’s actually my Grandmother Alva’s sister, though she’s a lot less strict than my grandmother was.  At five feet six inches, Aunt Madge is about four inches taller than I am and she keeps her hair in a soft French twist.  Today it’s black, but not the deep black that’s popular with teens and college kids.  She doesn’t use permanent color, so she can change it at least once a month.  I don’t know if it’s the hair color or her continued use of her carpentry skills, but she doesn’t look even close to her eighty-plus years.

The thud of the mallet hitting the bottom of the tower drew my attention back to Scoobie.  “You can get higher than that!”  I hollered to him.

He grinned at me and handed the carnival worker another dollar.  “One for my friend with the loud mouth.”

“And the wet head,” Ramona added.  A couple people laughed.

After another try, Scoobie announced he was just practicing and would be back in a few minutes to show off his real stuff.  We hung around to watch Ramona, who diplomatically insisted she did not hit the ball higher than Scoobie.

We trailed each other to a food booth and sat at a rickety picnic table near the booth.  Ramona and I split a foot-long dog while Scoobie polished off one on his own.  We could see the food pantry dunk tank from where we sat, and in between bites commented on the prowess, or lack of it, of the ball throwers. 

“While you were changing they tried to get Dr. Welby to take a toss at the guy who runs the eyeglass place,” Scoobie said.

Ramona laughed.  “Dr. Welby said he couldn’t see well enough to hit him.”