Wild Ride Read Online Free

the counter and passed through to the other side. She took a clean dish towel out of the drawer, ran it under the cold water, wrung it out, and came back to stand behind Mab. “Hold still,” she said, and pressed it to the back of Mab’s head, where it stung for a moment and then just felt good.
    â€œThat’s nice,” she told Glenda, and then the door opened and she heard her uncle Ray’s voice saying, “What the hell happened?”
    â€œShe hit her head,” Glenda said, her voice hard. She went around to the other side of the counter, looked at the bloody dish towel, and threw it in the trash.
    Ray sat down on the stool beside her, his middle-aged muscular bulk crowding her. “You okay?”
    â€œGetting there.” Mab touched the back of her head again and then looked at her fingers. No blood. Things were looking up.
    â€œWhat are you doing here?” Glenda said to Ray. “It’s past midnight.”
    â€œWorking late, like everybody else,” Ray said, trying to sound jolly, which was not in his skill set. He jerked his head toward the back of the store and evidently to the yard beyond that, where he kept the small RV he used as an office. “Cleaning up some filing.” He transferred his smile to Mab. “What a worker you are, Mary Alice. I told you she’d be great, didn’t I, Glenda?”
    Glenda nodded at Mab. “I’ll make you a cup of tea,” she said, and began to fill the kettle.
    â€œLet me see your eyes,” Ray said to Mab, and she turned and looked at him as he leaned toward her, big and sure and expensive in his Burberry coat with his miniature black-and-gold Ranger crest stuck to his lapel like a designer label.
    He put his hand under her chin, which she hated, and she saw that his broad handsome face was getting puffy with age. She should tell him to stay away from close-ups with people. He looked a lot better from far away.
    He peered at her. “You look all right. Pupils the same size. What happened?”
    â€œA clown knocked me down.” Mab pulled back from his hand as her head throbbed. “Can I have an aspirin, Glenda?”
    â€œSure thing.”
    Glenda moved down the counter, and Ray sat back.
    â€œYou’ll be fine. You ready to start the Fortune-Telling Machine?”
    â€œYes,” Mab said, and the door opened again and Delpha came in with her bird.
    â€œHere you go.” Glenda handed Mab the aspirin as Delpha sat down beside her, Frankie on her shoulder.
    â€œIt’s as we thought,” she said to Glenda. “He’s gone.”
    Mab surveyed the people who surrounded her: Glenda, her platinum hair spiked up and her blue eyes tense; Ray, his shark eyes staring down at her from his beginning-to-bloat broad face; and Delpha with Frankie onher shoulder, her hollow eyes making her look as skull-like as the cheesecloth ghosts in the park. They all looked odd to Mab, as if they were only pretending things were fine. Frankie was the sanest looking of the lot.
    â€œSo who was this clown who knocked you down?” Ray said, trying to smile jovially at her, his tension obvious.
    â€œI think it was the FunFun by the gate,” Mab said, and Ray lost his smile.
    â€œThe FunFun by the gate? I thought you meant some clown of a guy—”
    â€œShe
hallucinated
that part,” Glenda said, staring at him. “She hit her head and then she
hallucinated
the FunFun, so—”
    â€œWell, hell, yeah, she hallucinated it,” Ray said. “Iron clowns don’t go running around, that’s crazy.”
    He sounded weird, as if he were trying too hard not to sound weird.
    â€œWeird,” Mab said aloud.
    â€œWhat?” Ray said, his eyebrows snapping together.
    â€œI finished the carousel,” Mab said, to get him on to something else before he drove the clown into the ground.
    â€œWell, good for you,” Ray said. “Now you can start on the