"What mystery?"

"The mystery of who sent the head, dummy."

Annie sighed with theatrical exasperation and said, "If the guy who sent the head wants us to figure who sent it, why doesn't he just write his name on the thing?"

"On what thing?" Andy asked.

"On the thing, whatever it is, that's between the teeth of the stupid head," Annie clarified.

Solemnly, Lucy said, "If there's a head, I'm gonna barf."

"There's not a head in the box, sweetcakes," Lorrie promised. "And there's no bomb, either. They don't deliver bombs in flashy silver-and-red limousines."

"Who doesn't?" Andy asked.

"Nobody doesn't," Annie said.

Lorrie got a pair of scissors from a kitchen drawer and snipped the red ribbon.

Studying the box, I figured it was just about the perfect size to hold a head. Or a basketball. If I had to bet on one or the other, I'd put my money on the head.

As I was about to lift the lid from the box, Annie and Lucy put their hands over their ears. They were concerned more about the noise of an explosion than about the shrapnel.

Under the lid was a layer of folded white gift-wrapping tissue.

Having climbed onto a chair, kneeling there to get a better view, Andy warned me as I reached for the tissue paper, "Could be snakes."

Instead of snakes, packed into the box were banded packets of twenty-dollar bills.

"Wow, we're rich!" Andy declared.

"This isn't our money," Lorrie said.

"Then whose is it?" Annie wondered.

"I don't know," Lorrie said, "but it's bad money, for sure, and we can't keep it. I can smell the evil on it."

Sniffing at the treasure, Andy said, "I don't smell nothin'."

"All I smell is Andy's beans from yesterday dinner," Annie announced.

"Maybe it could be my money," Lucy suggested.

"Not as long as I'm your mother."

Together, the five of us took all the money out of the box and piled it on the table so we could smell it better.

There were twenty-five packets of twenty-dollar bills. Each packet contained a hundred bills. Fifty thousand bucks.

The box also contained an envelope. From the envelope, Lorrie extracted a plain white card with handwriting on one side.

She read the card and said, "Hmmm."

When she passed the card to me, the six eyes of three children followed it with intense interest.

Never before had I seen handwriting as meticulously scripted as this.

The letters were bold, elegantly formed, flowing as precisely as if a machine had penned them: Please accept this as a token of my esteem and as proof of my sincerity. I request the honor of a most cordial meeting with you at seven o'clock this evening at the Halloway Farm. The precise location will be obvious upon your arrival.

The note was signed Vivacemente.

"This," I told the kids, "is evil money. I'm going to put it back into the box, and then we're all going to wash our hands with a lot of soap and water so hot it hurts a little."

My name is Lorrie Tock. I'm not the goddess Jimmy said I am. For one thing, I've got a pinched nose. For another thing, my teeth are so straight and symmetrical that they don't look real.

And no matter how meticulous the surgeon has been, once you've been shot in the gut-well, when you wear a bikini, you turn heads but not always for the same reason that Miss America does.

Jimmy would have you believe that I am as tough as one of those acid-for-blood bugs in the Alien movies. That is an exaggeration, though it's a major mistake to piss me off.

On the night that I was born, no one made predictions about my future, and thank God for that. My father was chasing a tornado in Kansas, and my mother had recently decided that snakes would be better company than he was.

I have to take over this story for reasons that will become clear and that you might already have deduced. If you let me take your hand, metaphorically speaking, we'll get through this together.

So Near twilight, under a fiery sky, we took the kids next door to stay with Jimmy's parents. Rudy and Maddy were in the living room when we arrived, taking practice swings with the Louisville Sluggers they had bought in 1998.

Immediately after us, six of the most trusted neighbors on the block came to visit, ostensibly for an evening of cards, though all of them had brought baseball bats.

"We play an aggressive game of bridge," Maddy said.

Jimmy and I hugged the kids, kissed them good-bye, kissed them again, but tried not to make such a big deal of it that we might scare them.

After returning to our house, we dressed as seemed suitable for a "most cordial meeting." In preparation for the fifth of the five days, we had added to our wardrobes. We had shoulder holsters, pistols, two little cannisters of pepper spray for each of us.

Jimmy made a pitch for me to wait with the kids while he went alone to meet with the aerialist, but I presented a convincing case for accompanying him: "You remember what happened to Punchinello's testicles? If you try to keep me from going with you, you'll discover that Punch got off easy."

We were mutually agreed that going to Huey Foster and bringing in the cops would be a bad idea.

For one thing, Vivacemente had done nothing wrong thus far. We would have a difficult time convincing a jury that a gift of fifty thousand bucks in cash constituted a threatening gesture.

Besides, we worried that whatever Vivacemente's intentions, he would clam up in front of cops and later would go after whatever he wanted more discreetly. Even alerted by his first approach, we would most likely be blindsided. Better that everything remained out in the open between us.

The weather was surprisingly mild for an April evening in high-country Colorado. That doesn't tell you much, because sometimes in April, below freezing is considered mild. To Jimmy, facts are like recipe ingredients, so he would research the temperature in the Snow County Gazette before he wrote about it. Me, I'd guess it was maybe fifty degrees.

When we arrived at Halloway Farm, we debated where Vivacemente expected to meet with us. We decided that the giant red-and-white circus tent might be the place.

In this large flat meadow, adjacent to the highway, the circus had set up for business that week in August 1974, when Jimmy had been born.

Since then, they had played no return engagement, most likely because they figured that ticket sales would be adversely impacted by the fact that during their previous visit, one of their clowns had killed two much-loved locals.

Neither Jimmy nor I had heard anything about the circus coming to town here in April. For sure, the kids hadn't heard about it, or they would have been in full didja mode: Didja gets tickets, didja, didja?

Andy would have begun having clown-in-the-closet dreams again. Me, too, probably.

On second look, we realized that the entire circus wasn't here. An operation of their size involved scores of trucks, motor homes, massive portable generators, and other vehicles. Lined up along the lane to the distant Halloway farmhouse were just four Peterbilts, a VIP bus, and the limousine in which the costumed boy had delivered the fifty thousand smackers.

Emblazoned on the flank of each huge silver truck, festive red lettering announced VIVACE MENTE In small but still bold lettering:

BIG TOP! BIG SHOW! BIG FUN!.

"Big deal," I said.

Jimmy frowned. "Big trouble."

Only the single enormous tent awaited Jimmy and me. No smaller tents for the customary array of lesser attractions, no animal cages, no roach wagons offering hot dogs, snow cones, popcorn.

Standing alone, the big top made a greater impression than if it had been at the center of the usual bustling medieval fair.

Four poles marked the high ridge line of the tent. Atop each, in the glow of a spotlight, flew a red flag with a silver circle at its center. In each circle were an italicized red V followed by an exclamation point.

Regularly spaced strings of festive, low-voltage lights dropped from the ridge line to the sidewall, red bulbs alternating with white.

Twinkling white lights surrounded the main entrance.

One of the four Peterbilts housed the power source. The only sound in the night was the rhythmic chug-and-growl of gasoline-fed generators.

Above the twinkling lights of the main entrance, a banner warned

PREPARE TO BE ENCHANTED!.

Heeding that warning, we drew our pistols, checked to be sure the magazines were fully loaded-though we had checked them before leaving home-and eased them in and out of our shoulder holsters a few times to assure ourselves nothing would inhibit a quick draw.

No one had come forward to greet us when we parked and got out of the car. In spite of the tents and the lights, the meadow seemed to be deserted.

"We're probably misjudging Virgilio," Jimmy said.

"If Konrad Beezo thought he was a monster, then he's probably a saint,"

I reasoned. "Because when was anything Konrad said ever less than full-on nuts?"

"Exactly," Jimmy agreed. "And if Punch thinks he's a festering canker on Satan's ass-"

"-swine of swines-"

"-animated sewage-"

"-worm from the bowels of a syphilitic weasel-"

"-spawn of a witch's toilet-"

"-then he's probably a sweetheart," I concluded.

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"Ready?"

"No."

"Let's go."

"Okay."

We had tied shut the silver box. Jimmy carried it by the new red ribbon, and together we crossed the meadow to the tent. We went inside.

Under the big top, the meadow grass had been mown short, but no sawdust had been spread.

The bleachers to accommodate the paying public had not been assembled.

This was meant to be a show for an audience of two.

At each end of the tent, they had erected the sturdy frames that supported platforms and trapezes for the aerialists. Rope ladders and loop lines provided access to the heights.

Aimed toward upper realms, banks of footlights revealed flyers in the air. The men looked like cape less superheroes in silver and red tights. The women wore one-piece, legless, silver-and-red gymnast uniforms, their bare limbs fetching.

They hung by their hands from trapeze bars, hung by their knees. They arced, they somersaulted, they twirled, they flew, they snared one another out of thin air.

No circus band played; no music was necessary. The performers themselves were music-elegant harmony, exquisite rhythm, symphonic in the complexity of their routines.

Jimmy put down the box of money.

For a few minutes we stood entranced, still aware of the weight of our wardrobes, pistols heavy in our holsters, but all thought of danger relegated to the backs of our minds.

They concluded with a particularly amazing series of midair exchanges during which aerialists flew from trapeze to trapeze with stunningly precise timing, three in flight at any time, only two trapezes available, collision and catastrophe always a possibility.

Out of this bedazzlement of wingless birds, one of the men soared high off a bar, twirled in midair, folded into a somersault position, and tumbled down, down. At the last moment he spread his arms like wings, came out of the ball position, and landed on his back in the safety net.

He bounced high, bounced again, rolled to the edge of the net, and dropped to the ground, on point like a ballet star, his arms raised above his head, as though he had just completed an entrechat.