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seats and exits complied as in previous years." There was nothing unusual, nothing new that he could see.

    The circus missing its show was front-page news. Just the circus being in town was front-page news. In the age of radio, during a war that limited not just travel but the everyday amenities, the circus was a diversion all of Hartford looked forward to, a hardy perennial. The Times and the Courant gave it space, aping the stories they'd received from publicist Roland Butler's pressbook. The band was all brass this year, the oompah of the tubas replaced by the much classier, more exotic Bayreuth tuben—invented, Robert Ringling said, by Richard Wagner himself.
    The ballyhoo was unnecessary. Hartford had always loved the circus. The first, Rickett's Equestrian Circus, had shown here in 1795; the first elephant in 1826, for a steep I2V2 cents. P. T. Barnum exhibited his Wild Men of Borneo in 1855. For the rest of the century Hartford was considered Barnum territory, being so close to Bridgeport, but there was room and time for Dan Rice's Circus and Melville's Australian Circus and Nixon's Royal Circus and Old John Robinson's Circus and the Hippozoonomadon Circus and Nathan's Big Bonanza Circus and the Great Forepaugh Show and even Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Hartford had seen Jumbo and the Sacred White Elephant and Barnum's $25,000 Behemoth Monster Hippopotamus; they'd seen Grizzly Adams in his cage of bears and Tom Thumb and Alice Montague the $ 10,000 Beauty and Chang the Chinese Giant and Zip the What Is It? and come back for more.
Tickets were on sale at McCoy's Music Store, 89 Asylum Avenue, and at the circus grounds—at "Popular Prices," the ads bragged. The cheaper grandstand tickets were $1.20, the most expensive $2.20. And the bond campaign was still on, a $100 bond entitling the buyer to excellent seats.
Mildred Cook bought four reserved tickets for Thursday's matinee, one for herself and one for each of her three children. She and her husband had separated, and the children were living with her brother and his wife back in their hometown of Southampton, Massachusetts. She figured Donald and Eleanor and Edward needed a stable home with two parents. Mildred worked two jobs—days as a claims adjustor at Liberty Mutual insurance and part-time as a housekeeper at the Hartford seminary—and rarely had time off. She'd invited the children down, and the circus was part of the lure.
They'd come down earlier in the week. Wednesday the four of them went to the duckpin lanes on Farmington Avenue and then to Church Hill

    Park in Newington. While they were there, another little girl drowned. The lifeguards lifted the body out of the pool and laid it on the hot concrete in front of everyone. The next morning Eleanor Cook, who was eight, would write her aunt Marion Parsons: "Dear Mom, We are getting ready to go to the circus now. When we were at Newington a girl got drowned. We just got to the bus in time." Tonight, though, Mildred Cook just wanted to get her children dinner and forget all about it. The circus would help.
    The evening show went on as scheduled. The crowd was large, partly due to the matinees cancellation. Hartford police detective Thomas Barber drew his usual assignment, mingling with the midway crowd and keeping an eye out for pickpockets. Barber was a widower and a single father—an anomaly for the time. His daughter Gloria watched the two boys while he worked the night shift. On Monday she was getting married; her fiancé Orville Vieth was in the service and shipping out, so she'd still be home to help, but the war would be over soon and he'd be left with the boys. His youngest, Harry, was supposed to go to the circus with his uncle Boots tomorrow, and Barber had taken the day shift so they'd be at the same show.
As the performance started, the lighted midway cleared out, and Thomas Barber noticed fellow detective William Dineen waiting by the marquee. MAIN ENTRANCE, it said. THE GREATEST SHOW ON