he’d kept his heart protected inside a safe, sturdy iron cage.
Maddie drifted to the fortune-teller’s tent, a red-and-gold India print with a hand-lettered sign pinned to one flap: Madame Sofia, Gypsy Fortune-Teller.
Maddie was already seated at the scarf-draped table across from the wrinkled old woman and was stretching out her palm.
He tried his darnedest not to listen, but one word sliced into his brain like a shard of glass. Chicago.
Maddie rose from the table, an odd look on her face. “Your turn, Jericho. Let Madame Sofia tell your fortune.”
“What for? I can pretty much see my life from here on out.” He’d be a good sheriff and he’d never get involved with a woman. At least, not until he was too old to care.
Maddie sped across the grass to his side. “I dare you.”
She tugged on his good arm.
Damn, she was more persuasive than he’d bargained for. Finally, shamed into it, he seated himself before the gypsy woman, slid his right arm out of the sling, and opened his hand, palm up. The old woman bent over it, stroking the lines with her gnarled forefinger. After a moment she looked up into his face.
“You have known great sorrow,” she said in her gravelly voice. Then she reached out and touched his face. “What comes will not be easy.”
“What won’t?” he said without thinking.
The gypsy smiled. “This.” She cut her gaze to where Maddie waited.
His face set, Jericho paid the gypsy and propelled Maddie away from the tent. Twenty yards further, he stopped with a jerk and gazed upward.
“What the hell is that?” He squinted to read the signboard. “Turkish Up-and-Down Wheel.”
Directly in back of the sign stood the strangest contraption he had ever seen, a grid of steel bars with a bucket-type seat at each end. A man in baggy pants and a pointed red hat cranked on a gearlike arrangement; as the bars turned, the seats rose up and then came slowly down.
“Oh, look! Could we...?”
“Could we what? Ride that thing? Probably break both our necks.”
“Oh, please? Just this once?” She sent him a pleading look.
Damn, she was sure hard to refuse. Jericho shrugged and moved into the ticket line. A few minutes later they were side by side in the cushioned tublike seats, and the wheel began to rotate with squeaks and groans. Their seat swung high above the carnival grounds.
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