Shadow in Serenity

six


Logan was grinning when she closed the door behind her. Slowly, he ambled to the window and watched her march down the steps to her motorcycle.

Still chuckling, he went back to his logbook and flipped until he came to the pages of notes he’d taken about her — the pages he was glad she hadn’t seen. It was as complete as a dossier, and he was proud of it. He’d learned a lot about her today. Much more than he’d expected to. The citizens of Serenity didn’t even know they were being pumped for information. But Montague had taught him years ago that there was one difference between a successful huckster and a jailbird. And that was research.

That was why he’d wound up in Serenity in the first place. After watching the 20/20 episode, he had researched all of western Texas, soaking up information about the farms that had reverted to the banks, about the oil wells drying up, and about the people, most of whom had lived here all their lives.

He’d sought out a town that was down on its luck, a town that needed a dream or two. But it also had to be a town that still had resources. Preferably green resources — the kind that kept him in the lifestyle to which he was accustomed. He had researched the building of amusement parks so that he’d be able to speak intelligently on the subject and answer any questions from the most astute of the populace without babbling or stumbling.

Then, after he’d come to the town, he researched the people, one at a time, deciding who would be the easiest marks, who had the most money, who were the entrepreneurs of the community, and who had the least to lose.

And today, he had researched Carny Sullivan.

Pulling out the chair at his desk, he sat down and went back over the things he’d learned about her. The facts about her — from birth until today — still surprised him, and he couldn’t help feeling an affinity for her. Whether she liked it or not, the two of them had a lot in common.

Carny had been a con artist until she was seventeen, pushed that way by both heredity and upbringing. According to Lahoma — whose brain he’d picked during her appointment this morning — Carny had been raised by two small-time frauds in a traveling carnival. Someone else had told him she was born in the back of a Winnebago in a carnival’s convoy, somewhere between Shreveport and Monroe, Louisiana. She’d been named after her family’s lifestyle and trained to follow in her parents’ footsteps.

The town’s accounts of Carny’s past had been colorful and detailed. She’d dazzled many of them with tales of her childhood over the nine years she’d lived in Serenity. Her in-laws had told Logan about Ruth, the carnival’s fat lady and Carny’s tutor, who had the IQ of a genius and a table full of computers in her own RV, and spent every morning tutoring Carny to such an extent that Carny probably knew more about a broader range of subjects than any college graduate.

From Blue Simpson, he learned how Carny had spent afternoons with her parents — learning card tricks instead of ballet, rigging games instead of playing them, and creating diversions for their cons. And from Eloise Trellis, whose deceased husband had launched Carny’s current career, Logan heard about the little girl walking alone each evening through the carnival while her father picked pockets and her mother guessed ages and weight.

He sat back and tried to imagine the details he hadn’t been told. It wasn’t hard — his own childhood had left him with plenty of images to fill in the blanks of Carny’s life. In his mind, he could see a little towheaded girl with huge, beautiful eyes, dark circles under them from staying up too late and eating too much junk. She probably wandered through the carnival, following happy families with normal children who went to school and sang in choirs and had best friends. Did she imagine staying behind as one of those happy children after the rides were broken down and the booths were loaded back onto their trailers? Leaning his head back on the seat, he rubbed his eyes and wondered if, in her darkest hours, she had dreamed of starting over with normal parents who went to church and had barbecues and coached softball.

God knew, he had, until he’d grown too hardened to allow himself such painful indulgences.

For a moment, he allowed himself to sink into the mire of self-pity, a luxury he rarely afforded himself. For a split second, he was that abandoned child again, firmly believing that his mother would return, not understanding why she hadn’t. For a split second, he knew intimately that little girl wandering down the midway, looking for her fantasy family.

Turning the page, he read through the rest of his notes. There was much he hadn’t written down yet. He hadn’t recorded the part about her escape from her old life and how she had come to Serenity. But he had it all in his head. Her in-laws, two people who loved her as if she were their own, had told him, almost in apology, everything else he needed to know.

Carny, at age seventeen, had met Abe Sullivan when the carnival came through Serenity. He was good-looking and seemed soft-spoken, clean-cut, the apple-pie-and-mom type. After a week-long romance, she had slipped out in the night with him and eloped, and the next morning when it was time for the carnival to tear down, she informed her parents that she was staying behind.

She had been just a child, according to Abe’s parents, but Logan knew better. You never got to be a child in that kind of environment. He suspected that she’d behaved in ways much older than her years, and that the marriage had had as much to do with her fascination for the sweet little town itself as it had with the man she’d married. She had probably believed that, in the quiet little town of Serenity, she could have the kind of home she’d only dreamed of before. She was old enough to know what she wanted out of life, and young enough to fool herself into believing such things existed.

He suspected that now, nine years later, she was much more savvy about the goodness that existed — or failed to exist — in the world. According to Abe’s father — who’d seemed disgusted even to recount the tale, but had been compelled to explain Carny’s “rudeness” — Abe had taught Carny her first lesson about the grass being greener on the other side. Abe wasn’t the sweet husband material Carny thought she was getting. He drank most of the time, had trouble holding a job, and stayed out too late. It amazed Logan that two such sweet, kind people could have raised such a son. But as Bev Sullivan had said with a tear in her eye, “There’s such a thing as loving too much. We had him in church every time the doors were open, and tried to instill our Christian values in him. But he chose a different path. We spoiled him rotten. We blame ourselves. That’s why we took Carny in when he ran out on her. We felt so responsible.”

When Abe left her and her baby, then drank himself dead, Carny stayed with the Sullivans. Logan suspected that they’d given her the first nurturing love she’d ever known. The town, which had that Western quality of prizing rugged individualism, had rallied around her, something he found unusual for a community with relatively few newcomers. But the people he’d asked about her today had all voiced a deep love for the young woman, tinged with amusement.

She had a wild, unconventional streak, they said, and a free spirit that made them all smile, but since coming to Serenity she had turned into a God-fearing disciple of Jesus. She was a little of what everyone in town wished they could be. She hadn’t meant to be rude at the bingo hall, they’d all said. She was just overly suspicious because of her past, and overly protective of the people she loved.

He envied their love for her. Carny had truly made herself a home here, while Logan was still running, looking for that pot of gold at the end of a self-made rainbow. Someday he’d come to the end of that rainbow.

But he doubted that there was a Serenity waiting at the end of his.