“What do bulls do?” Bobby asked the doctor, who was still fussing with his paperwork.
“Besides the cows?” Christiansen looked up. “A lot of damage. Basically a bull is pissed off in a huge package. With horns.”
Bobby started to get nervous. Maniacs with knives, druggies with guns, no problem—but a ton of pissed off, with horns— “No bull.” The chief snapped his phone shut. “I was thinking that since you’re not familiar with livestock you might spook ’em.”
Bobby was spooked all right. However, he couldn’t let the chief go off on his own to herd a herd. “I’ll manage.”
“Maybe you could interview Mrs. Noita instead.”
“Sure!”
Christiansen snorted. Bobby had sounded pathetically eager.
Ten minutes later he was knocking on Mrs. Noita’s door. He’d already rung the bell twice. If she was still sleeping, she shouldn’t be anymore. He listened for signs of movement—heard none. He should have called first.
The house was nondescript—wood plank painted white, gray shingles. The trees, on the other hand, were odd. Not only were they birch, willow, oak, walnut, and a couple others he couldn’t identify, instead of the usual maples and pine he’d seen everywhere else, but items had been tied in the branches. Mostly paper, some metal—he could swear one of them was a spoon—and on many of the leaves symbols had been drawn.
The wind stirred, causing the papers to rustle and the spoon to clank and jangle. Bobby rubbed the back of his neck and knocked again.
After a few more minutes on the front porch, he walked around to the rear—more trees, more stuff swaying in them. He tried knocking on that door with the same results. He bent to glance in the window stationed about gut high in the door, straightened, turned, froze as his brain caught up to his eyes.
Then he yanked off his jacket, wrapped it around his hand, and punched his fist through the glass.
*
We were doing pretty well at the carnival until the fire alarm went off.
Not our fire alarm. We were outside. Even if the school alarm had blown, it wouldn’t have mattered except to our eardrums.
However, when the New Bergin fire alarm sounds, every last male on the staff responds. Not that there are very many in an elementary school. How many first-grade teachers do you know who are guys?
But all emergency services in New Bergin, except for the police, were volunteer and belonging was a status thing. Personally I just think they liked to run away from whatever they were doing whenever they could—and wear the T-shirt.
When the alarm blared we lost six people from carnival duty, and the crowd went wild.
“I’m volunteering for the fire department tomorrow,” Jenn said.
We were working the goldfish game. An ocean of tiny fishbowls filled with water, a bucket of Ping-Pong balls, toss one of the latter into one of the former and Nemo is yours. For the few days until he goes belly up and is consigned to burial at sea—i.e., the sewer system.
“I think there’s a height requirement.” I transferred another Nemo from the huge cooler beneath the table where the extras swam, into an empty fishbowl. I’d just dumped the previous contents into a plastic bag for another lucky winner.
“Bite me.” Jenn glared at the taillights of the volunteers’ cars as they raced toward town.
“I don’t know what you’re complaining about.” I checked the bowls to make certain we had no floaters. I’d had kids point and shriek at the sight of one. It made for bad business. “You’re handing out Ping-Pong balls. I’m trolling for dead guppies.”
It was that or do everything myself. Jenn did not touch fish—even when sautéed with capers and butter. Anything slimy or scaly was my department. Always had been.
With the loss of six workers, several game booths had closed, along with the popcorn machine. This meant that those who’d wanted popcorn bought cotton candy or snow cones or Raisinets, increasing the sugar quotient at the worst possible time.
Because there were fewer game booths available, that meant longer lines at the ones still open. When combined with the excess sugar … disaster.
Shoving and pushing, pinching and crying. Someone dropped their Nemo, someone else stepped on it, slid, banged into someone else. A punch was thrown, a shirt was torn, several bodies landed in the grass and began to roll around.
And those were the adults.
“Watch out for the—” Jenn shouted, then ran shrieking as the table holding our game toppled over, followed by the cooler, releasing Nemo upon Nemo to flop and flip and die in plain view of everyone.
We’d thought there’d been crying before … that was nothing compared to now. The wailing competed in volume with the still shrill sirens. What was going on in town?