"It--- it isn't thundering," Jeff stammered.
To Jeff, it was. The manner in which Tracy Whitney had outwitted them at the airport was the most ingenius con he had ever witnessed. A scam on top of a scam. Conrad Morgan had told them the woman was an amateur. My God, Jeff thought, what would she be like if she were a professional? Tracy Whitney was without doubt the most beautiful woman Jeff Stevens had ever seen. And clever. Jeff prided himself on being the best confidence artist in the business, and she had outsmarted him. Uncle Willie would have loved her, Jeff thought.
Thomas Bowers--- né Jeff Stevens--- sat at the plane window looking out as the aircraft took off. He raised his handkerchief to his eyes, and his shoulders heaved up and down.
"I'll be right there," Jeff promised.
When Uncle Willie asked Jeff why he had run away from home, all he would say was, "I don't get along with my stepmother."
The boy was in a panic. "Sure. Can we do it in Dad's bed?"
She slid out of bed and went into the other bedroom. Jeff had never dressed faster in his life. He went out the window and headed for Cimarron, Kansas, where Uncle Willie's carnival was playing. He never looked back.
It was Uncle Willie who had educated Jeff. Jeff's mother was the trusting heiress to a farm-equipment fortune, married to an improvident schemer filled with get-rich-quick projects that never quite worked out. Jeff's father was a charmer, darkly handsome and persuasively glib, and in the first five years of marriage he had managed to run through his wife's inheritance. Jeff's earliest memories were of his mother and father quarreling about money and his father's extramarital affairs. It was a bitter marriage, and the young boy had resolved, I'm never going to get married. Never.
"Hold me, Jeffie," his stepmother whispered. "I'm afraid of thunder."
"Okay." She laughed. "Kinky, huh?"
Dennis Trevor--- a.k.a. Brandon Higgins--- seated next to him, looked at him in surprise. "Hey," he said, "it's only money. It's nothing to cry about."
Jeff Stevens turned to him with tears streaming down his face, and Higgins, to his astonishment, saw that Jeff was convulsed with laughter.
"But it could be. The paper said rain." She pressed her body close to his. "Make love to me
newports cigarettes, baby."
When Jeff was fourteen, his mother died in an automobile accident. Two months later Jeff's father married a nineteen-year-old cocktail waitress. "It isn't natural for a man to live by himself," his father had explained. But the box was filled with a deep resentment, feeling betrayed by his father's callousness.
"What the hell's the matter with you?" Higgins demanded. "It's nothing to laugh about, either."
His father's brother, Uncle Willie, owned a small traveling carnival, and whenever he was near Marion, Ohio
newport cartons, where the Stevenses lived, he came to visit them. He was the most cheerful man Jeff had ever known, filled with optimism and promises of a rosy tomorrow. He always managed to bring the boy exciting gifts
monster beats headphones, and he taught Jeff wonderful magic tricks. Uncle Willie had started out as a magician at a carnival and had taken it over when it went broke.
Jeff's father had been hired as a siding salesman and was on the road three days a week. One night when Jeff was alone in the house with his stepmother, he was awakened by the sound of his bedroom door opening. Moments later he felt a soft, ########## body next to his. Jeff sat up in alarm.
Uncle Willie telephoned Jeff's father, and after a long conversation
Police seize contraband cigarettes, two arrested, it was decided that the boy should remain with the carnival. "He'll get a better education here than any school could ever give him," Uncle Willie promised.
life is hard (8)
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