Catch a Falling Clown: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Seven) Read Online Free PDF Page B

above in the big top. But that wasn’t going to happen. What might happen was that Tanucci’s body would roll from its balanced place on the mat and lose its dignity.
    The four remaining Tanuccis were an older man and woman, a young woman, and a teenage boy. The older man and woman held each other’s hands and looked at the body. All four of them looked down, as if the dead man held a camera and they had been told to pose solemnly.
    It had happened to me before, that nightmare moment when everyone is turned to stone and no one wants to break the spell, even though everyone knows whoever doesn’t break it will stay there forever. The next step meant choosing an emotion or letting one out that you maybe didn’t know was there. Or worse, it meant feeling nothing, which soon turned to guilt.
    Elder broke through and walked over to the Tanuccis, taking the older man’s arm in both of his. “Carlo, I am sorry, truly sorry. What happened?”
    The young Tanucci girl turned her head in a daze toward Elder. “The rigging,” she said. “The Mechanic tore. Marco … he came down on …”
    “Rennata is the only one who speaks English,” Kelly whispered to me, his voice almost as unsteady as hers.
    “Who’s the Mechanic?” I whispered back, keeping my eye on the doctor who was examining the body. The doctor was a remarkably old man named Ogle, who looked as if he would probably need help getting up and would surely need help if the body rolled over on him.
    “Mechanic’s a what, not a who,” said Kelly. “The leather safety harness flyers wear in practice sessions. Someone controls it from the ground. They must have been working out something new or having trouble with something old.”
    At the entrance flap of the tent, a crowd had gathered but was being held back by a trio of men.
    “Do accidents happen a lot in the circus?” I said. Elder was going down the line of Tanuccis, consoling them in English they couldn’t understand but with a tone they could.
    “No, not much,” said Kelly. “Sometimes, but usually when it does happen it’s because an animal acted like an animal. You know, a lion or a bear smells something, hears something. But it happens.”
    Peg, the dark-eyed woman with the gray man’s jacket who had called Elder to the tent, stayed just a step behind him, trying to see his face to know how she was supposed to act.
    “He’s dead,” said Doc Ogle in a high monotone. It was the tone of my landlady back in Los Angeles, the tone of the deaf who have no idea how loud they are talking and no sense of emotion in the words they can’t hear. Everyone else in the tent had known Tanucci was dead the moment they saw him, but the doctor’s pronouncement hit behind the knees of the older Tanucci woman, who crumpled forward and would have smashed face first into a metal rigging bar if the older man had not pulled her back and up with a single, powerful pull.
    The tent smelled of horse and elephant crap, of straw arid stale sweat. For twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses I sometimes had to get a little closer to things beating below the surface than most of us want to get. It always attracted me, that exposed, tender fear. I wanted to touch it in others but was afraid of how it might contaminate me. Grief was as dangerous as disease.
    The Tanuccis moved forward toward the body, supporting each other, and Kelly stepped up to help the Tanucci girl, who looked a little unsteady.
    “Neck bone and spinal cord just snapped like that,” said the doctor, struggling to get up. He wore a dark plaid coat, and his wild white hair had been combed by a drunken witch. He looked more like a clown than Kelly, and his voice cut through the smells and sobs like a set of instructions for building a model airplane.
    “Probably not a long fall,” he said, addressing himself to everyone assembled. “Probably dead as soon as he hit.”
    “Thank God,” said Peg.
    Well, that was one way of looking at it. I knew some who