Blood of Cain

1

Of all the rides in the carnival, Courtney Burke felt safest on the ride that scared many people. She liked the double Ferris wheel the best. She loved to ride it at night, wind in her face, hair blowing, and the lights of the town like stars twinkling in the valley. She rode after the crowds had gone back to their cozy homes, gone back to warm places where beds had real pillows. On the double Ferris wheel, she was free. It was as if she had wings, flying high above the evil that crawled across the ground like the rattlesnake slithering on its belly. As a girl, she remembered almost stepping on a rattler behind her uncle’s barn, the same barn where bad things had happened. But that was in another world, a world that couldn’t hurt her again. Now, at age nineteen, she was free, free to travel the country with the carnival, free to ride the Big Wheel.

Courtney lowered the safety bar in the seat, pinned her long raven hair into a ponytail, and turned toward the ride operator. He was cute, she thought. Maybe two years older than her. She smiled, the dimples showing, her blue-green eyes wide, catching light like the crest of a breaking wave on a moonlit tropical beach. “Just a quick ride, okay, Lonnie?”

“I don’t know, Courtney. We’re gonna get caught one of these nights, sneaking back to turn on this wheel.”

“Where’s your sense of adventure, huh? C’mon let’s ride a wheel that turns but never takes you anywhere, unless you let it. Pretty please, Lonnie.”

Lonnie Ebert lifted his baseball cap and ran his hand though dirty blond hair that hadn’t been washed in two weeks. He glanced around the carnival grounds, his lean face unshaven, eyes searching for a sign of movement. Most of the carnies were asleep, stoned on weed, or in honky-tonks knocking back cheap whisky chased by cheaper beer. He licked his dry lips and looked at Courtney, her smile the brightest thing in the shadows of the midway. “I do things for you that I wouldn't do for no other girl.”

Courtney smiled. “I know, and I don't take it for granted. Okay? Press the button.”

“All right, but we gotta make it quick. If Big John catches my ass he’d fire me, or worse.”

“He’s gone to town. I saw him leave. C’mon, start this thing. I wanna to feel the rush.”

“Five minutes. Tops.” He pressed the green start button, the black dirt under his thumbnail visible as the lights popped on and the Big Wheel lurched into motion.

She grinned. “Thank you! Can you stop it at the top on the second time around for a minute? I love the feeling of being that far up. I’ve never been in a jet plane. But up there I'm on top of the world.”

Lonnie blew out a pent-up breath, ran his tongue on the inside of his cheek, and looked to his right, down the midway. “Just for a few seconds, and one time only.”

Courtney gripped the safety bar, electricity surging through the motors, gears groaning, metal popping, the Big Wheel defying gravity and lifting the double wheels higher into the night sky. She rose above the lingering smells of the midway, the spilled beer and half-eaten corndogs and cotton candy stomped into the sea of damp sawdust, the stench quickly replaced with a cool night breeze of wild honeysuckles as the Big Wheel turned skyward in the warm summer night.

She sat in the center of the seat and glanced up at the harvest moon. It seemed so close, so big and bright. The wind whipped her hair as she raised her arms. Tonight, I'm a bird, a dove flying high above the world. She looked down. Lonnie smoked a cigarette and paced near the operator's stand, the tiny orange glow the only movement on the ground. Up here the wind caressed her face under a big yellow moon, and the stars seemed almost within her reach. She held her breath as a meteor streaked across the deep purple with a welder's spark of fire that sliced a fleeting crack into the heart of the heavens.

The Ferris wheel lifted her higher, almost to the summit of its cycle, the wind picking up. As the Big Wheel crested at the top, it descended quickly, going through its spinning cycle. She held her hands up and made a contorted, funny face at Lonnie, zipping by him on her way back to the top. “Yeeeeessss! I'm a bird,” she sang the words.

At the top of the cycle, the Big Wheel came to a sudden stop. Courtney looked down and blew a kiss to Lonnie, who removed his baseball cap and grinned. The night was suddenly very quiet. She raised her eyes up and felt as if she could see for a hundred miles in any direction. There was the nightglow of Gainesville, Florida, at the edge of the horizon. She saw the headlights of cars creeping down dark back roads in the distance. A flicker of heat lighting hung in the outlying clouds for a beat no longer than the blush of a firefly's belly.

The seat, attached by two metal pins as wide as her little finger, rocked back and forth at the top of the Ferris wheel. Courtney couldn't help but smile. She closed her eyes for a moment and felt the breeze on her skin, her mind in sharp focus, the world now smaller, her troubles and past seemed far beyond the horizon. She watched a plane flying low in the distance, climbing higher as it gained altitude after leaving an airport. One day I'll catch a jet plane to fly to some far away, romantic place. But right now this is the best seat in the whole world. My rockin' chair with a view that goes forever.

She glanced down. Lonnie was smoking a cigarette, looking across the darkened midway. A movement caught her eye. Someone in the shadows. A man wearing a hooded sweatshirt. He was standing between the RV's, campers and trailers, someone staring up at her. Even from the distance, she felt there was something wrong with the way the man was looking at her. The fairgrounds suddenly darkened. Courtney looked to the sky as a cloud shadow-danced over the face of the moon, and she thought of her grandmother. Her Irish grandma, someone who spoke Gaelic and Irish cant, was believed by many to be a psychic. She used to say that Courtney’s ability to see things, to get a feeling that something or someone was not right — that something was about to happen, was a gift from a higher power. “It skips a generation, baby girl,” Grandma told her one spring night on the steps of her grandmother's small home in South Boston. “Your mother never got it. Neither did your sister, but you sure did.”

She remembered looking into her grandmother’s sea-green eyes, eyes that smiled with insight and absolute love. “Use your gift wisely, Courtney.” People, mostly from the clan, the Irish travelers — the gypsies, called the old woman a mystic, and they'd consult her for all kinds of things. Some wanted to know about the future. Others wanted to know how to hide their past to protect their future. A few wanted to reach out to dead relatives. Most things, Courtney figured, based on the conversations she overheard between Grandma and her clients, had to do with sex. The lack of it. Too much of it. Men chasin’ it, and women fakin’ it. It’s all crap, really.

Courtney looked down at Lonnie, her seat rocking slightly as she leaned over the safety bar. He waved and started the wheel again. Courtney closed her eyes as she descended, the wind in her face, her thoughts over the horizon. As she rotated closer to the ground, she looked toward the operator’s stand.

The horror hit her in the gut.

Please, God, no. She held her hand to her mouth and screamed, her lower lip trembling. She felt sick. She looked down a second time. Maybe Lonnie would stand up and say he was joking. But she knew the way he was lying in the sawdust he was hurt, maybe killed, his left leg twisted behind him.

Courtney knew that Lonnie Ebert wasn’t going to stand up. And she knew the man in the hooded sweatshirt was the killer.

But she didn’t know why.