May Day Page 11

  I folded the note and tucked it in my pocket. It took me about fifteen minutes to close the library up, and then I headed to the liquor store. I found myself with a case of Rolling Rock in my hands, knocking on Gina’s door with my foot. It was midafternoon. If she had worked the early shift, she would be home.

  “Christ, Mira, I was wondering when you were gonna stop by!” She pulled me in and locked the door behind me.

  I flopped on her couch and reached for the open beer she handed me. “You heard?”

  “I heard about Jeff’s death yesterday on my lunch break. I didn’t hear about you snaking him first until I was almost done with my shift.”

  I grimaced. “What is up with this town?”

  “It’s the seven degrees of sexual separation, Mir. You live in Otter Tail County long enough to get laid by a native, and I can guarantee you’re no more than seven degrees from having slept with everyone in the county. A new member in the club is a big deal. Word’s gonna spread.” She shrugged her shoulders and chuckled, taking a pull off her beer.

  I shuddered. That meant I was likely only one degree from having slept with Kennie Rogers, and that slippery slope could lead anywhere. “What do I do, Gina?”

  “About what?”

  I filled her in, beginning with the first meeting with Jeff, our excellent sex, the article I wrote, him standing me up, Kennie’s weird treatment of me at the café, Karl telling me who Jeff really was, finding Jeff’s body, finding the invitation and checking it out in the yearbook, the interview with Curtis, finding out about Lartel’s connections, and finally the note on the computer today. It was a great relief to say it all out loud at once. The only detail I left out was about the petroglyphs I had found. I still felt protective of that information for a reason I didn’t know.

  “Hoe-lee shit,” Gina said.

  “I know.” And suddenly, I was crying so hard I was hiccupping. Since finding Jeff’s body, I had made a point of being busy to the point of crazy, but talking about it with another person, and one who cared about me, was too much.

  Gina rushed over to the couch and put her arms around me. “It’s not your fault, Mir. None of it is.”

  “But the article came out the day before I found his body, and . . . and . . .”

  “And nothing. No one even reads that rag, and for sure they don’t kill over it. Jeff had something going on that you didn’t even know about.”

  I tried to wipe the hot tears from my face but managed only to blend them with the snot gushing from my nose. “Yeah, he had lots I didn’t know about going on,” I said darkly.

  Gina pulled back a little but kept her arm around me. “You tell him about your dad?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’ve got no right to be upset at him for not telling you about growing up in Battle Lake. He used to date Kennie Rogers, for chrissake. That’s worse than being Manslaughter Mark’s daughter any day of the week.”

  I sniffled and laughed a little.

  “Here, have another beer.” She handed me my third, along with a box of Kleenex from off the coffee table. “You know, I’ve heard about those class of ’82 parties. I don’t think it’s a reunion thing.”

  I blew my nose hard. “What is it, then?”

  “I don’t really know. People never answer you when you ask them straight on. I think it’s one of those direct sales things, like Tupperware or lingerie parties in your home. Better bring some extra cash.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be buying anything. I just want to check it out. Why would there be an invitation to the party right by where I found Jeff’s body?”

  “Who knows? Why do I have the body of Nell Carter when I have the personality of Cameron Diaz?” Gina laughed her throaty, contagious laugh, and I felt myself loosening up.

  “You know,” I said, “beer can be so delicious. It makes me want to smoke cigarettes again.”

  “But don’t,” Gina said, firing up a Marlboro Light 100. “If I could quit, I’d never start again. By the way, what’re you doing for lunch tomorrow?”

  “Nothing. Wanna meet?”

  Instead of answering me, she charged me with another question. “So what was Jeff like in bed?”

  My hiccups were gone, and the beer was lubricating my joints and my tongue. “Mmm, you know how he’s an archaeologist?”

  Gina nodded, leaning forward.

  “Well, let’s just say he knew how to use his digging tools, and he was definitely into finding value in things discarded by past civilizations.” We both laughed at this until tears came out of our eyes. Gina knew the story of my first boyfriend, a clitoriphobic bass player in some lame garage band based in the Cities. I should have known better when he told me their name was Ancient Chinese Penis. I misread his quietness for intelligence and confidence, and we were together for four months. I pretended that it was OK that he thought foreplay was rubbing an erection against my leg, and he pretended that he had a personality. It was enough that we were both not lonely for a while, and then I moved on. It was that being-happier-with-my-own-thoughts thing.

  By the time Gina’s husband, Leif, got home, we were both completely in the bag and playing the “Would You Sleep with . . .” game. He offered me a ride home, but I chose the couch instead. I didn’t want to be at the mercy of someone else’s wheels the next day, even though I knew her husband to be a reliable man. I woke up before sunrise, a bad habit I’d developed this past week, and drove home to shower and change. My head was only slightly throbby, and I shoved aside my guilt about getting drunk.

  The Thursday morning library crowd was a lot more reasonable than the Wednesday afternoon one had been, and some of those who showed up even dropped off memorial cards in the basket at the front counter that held slips of scratch paper. I had forgotten about the “viewing.” I was reaching for the phone when it rang. It was Ron Sims, the Battle Lake Recall’s editor, desktop publisher, only full-time reporter, photographer, and salesman, and I hadn’t called him back after he had left a message telling me to come up with an article on Jeff’s murder.

  “Mira.” Ron wasn’t one for small talk. “I got good news. We’ve had a staff illness, so I have some extra work for you.” The only other people besides Ron on staff were me and Betty Orrinson, who wrote the “Tittle-Tattler” and “Hometown Recipes” columns. If you wanted to know who had dined with whom and whose relatives were visiting from where and what to cook them, you read her stuff. She apparently had a good following and actually had to turn down tidbits and recipes from readers on a regular basis.

  “Betty’s sick?”

  “Sick of writing the recipes. She says there’s nothing new out there. The job’s yours. I need one recipe a week, starting tomorrow, and make it original with a Battle Lake feel. Questions?”

  Only a hundred. “What do you mean by a ‘Battle Lake feel’? Where do I get the recipes? How long do they have to be?”

  “You’ll figure it out. I’ll be in the office all day today. Get me a recipe before lunchtime.” Click.

  Ron had come at me so quick that I’d forgotten to tell him I was working on the Jeff article. This recipe mandate was Battle Lake’s version of cutting-edge, push-the-deadline journalism; I would have complained if Ron hadn’t hung up on me.

  Instead, I plopped myself in front of my computer, fired up Word, and made a sign advertising a contest for “Homegrown Minnesota Recipes. Winners will be published.” I printed the sign and stuck it on the other side of my counter, where it would stay, at least until Lartel returned. I folded another sheet of paper in half and stapled the edges, making a pocket for people to slip their recipes into. I visualized it full and plump.

  Being a realist, I also went online and punched “Minnesota recipes” into a search engine. A lot of wild rice and game recipes, along with carb-heavy hotdishes, popped up, but none of them spoke to me like the recipe for “Phony Abalone.” Some clever woman had discovered that if you marinate chicken breasts in a bottle of clam juice overnight, wake them up a
nd pound them between wax paper, roll them in flour, corn flakes, and egg, and cover them in tartar sauce, they taste just like fish. To me, this had a Battle Lake feel. I especially loved the phrase “Fool your friends and family!” at the top of the recipe. I retyped it and e-mailed it to Ron.

  Then, I returned to what I had been doing when he called. It took me twelve minutes of wait time to track down the Fergus Falls coroner. When she got on the phone, I explained who I was and that I was writing an article on Jeff Wilson’s death for the Battle Lake Recall. She placed Jeff’s time of death at sometime Sunday evening. She said his corpse had been in surprisingly good shape but that there wasn’t enough fluid to do a toxicology report. She told me that’s common in a shooting. Something about the heart pumping after the person is dead.

  The strange thing is I didn’t feel anything when she told me all of this. I filed it away with the rest of the information, knowing that I was going to have to schedule a full-blown nervous breakdown in the near future. For now, there was too much work to do.

  After I hung up the phone, I tried to chase down more information about building on sacred Indian land. I had no reason to doubt Karl, but it would be my name on the Recall article I was working on, and I wasn’t in the habit of using secondary information. After some Internet searching, I found out Minnesota had a state archaeologist, and I tracked down his e-mail address. I wanted to know what the rules were. I was pleased with the quick reply but disappointed to find what Karl had told me corroborated:

  M—

  Non-burial archaeological sites (incl. petroglyphs), and non-burial-related archaeological artifacts are private property

  if they occur on private property. There are no restraints on sale/use/etc. of such property/sites/artifacts by property owner. E-mail with any more qs.

  MD

  So it was true. The petroglyphs wouldn’t slow Trillings down. On a hunch I decided to see if the company had a website. I clicked on the blank bar at the top of my computer screen and was about to type

  in the address for my favorite search engine when my eyes caught on the word Trillings in the list of addresses that dropped down. I knew I hadn’t typed it in before. I opened up the whole list and didn’t see anything else familiar—just some doll sites, a couple links to state casino home pages, and the URL for WebPALS. I clicked on the Trillings address and looked over their bland home page, trying to figure out what Lartel had been looking for. It had to be him who had gone to the site before. He and I were the only ones who used this computer.

  After finding nothing of note on the page, I opened up the field book and jotted down a contact number for the company, which was located in Pennsylvania. I didn’t know what I was going to do with that number, but it seemed like a good thing to have. I imagined they would begin building soon. Jeff had said he was going to give them a report on Saturday, and Karl said they had called him Monday to say that they wanted the land, so that seemed like a done deal.

  I was so caught up in researching that when the tall, salt-and-pepper-haired man with deep brown eyes stood at my counter, it took me ten beats to notice him and another ten to figure out who he was.

  “Mira?”

  “Yes, I’m Mira.” My heart was beating fast and deep, like a techno beat in a smoky club. I wasn’t just playing dumb.

  He held out his hand. “I’m Jake. We were supposed to meet for lunch?”

  Gina. The big, hairy hagasaurus had e-mailed the Moorhead State professor with an online ad and set up a lunch date for us, and here he was, squiring me at the Battle Lake Public Library. That’s why Gina had asked me if I was free for lunch today. I thought quickly. “Sure. Right. I have some things to shut down. Can I meet you at the Turtle Stew, the diner right on the corner?”

  “Absolutely.” His smile revealed an underbite that hadn’t been apparent in his online picture, and his hands were small and soft, the hands of an academic. He was cute, but the last thing I wanted to do was date someone. Apparently that hadn’t been of concern to Gina. I told myself she must have set this up before she knew about Jeff and me, but that didn’t make me dread it any less. I abhor small talk, and the thought of mining someone for compatibility instead of responding to the natural thrust of chemistry was repellent, particularly in the wake of my most recent lover’s death. Sigh. But this wasn’t the professor’s fault, and I didn’t need to make this any harder on him.

  I put up the Out to Lunch sign and pouted all the way to the Stew. When I got there, Professor Jake was waiting, his bark-brown eyes eager as a puppy’s. He was around six foot one and wore a suit, vest, and button-down-collar shirt, and his hair was close trimmed and neat.

  “I hope this booth is OK.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, in what I hoped was a magnanimous voice. I took the menu out of the waitress’s hand and scanned it for the quickest items. “I only have a short lunch break today. So sorry. How was your drive?”

  “Fine, thank you.” He had a soft accent, maybe Mississippi. “What’s good?”

  “I always get soup and a sandwich,” I lied.

  “Deal.” He closed his menu and ordered for both of us. Lunch was quick and not memorable. He was pleasant and attentive, asking me about my cat and my friends and college. Actually, he was remarkably easy to talk to for a man, but I found myself spending most of forty-five minutes counting the ways he was not Jeff, and the rest of the time counting the number of times he mentioned his mother. Eleven. I wondered from a distance how odd that was. I could go whole months without mentioning my mother to another living person, and here this environmental sciences professor had mentioned his eleven times.

  “I really enjoyed our lunch. Can I see you again?” he asked politely when he paid the bill.

  “Sure. E-mail me.” I stepped back from what was looking like an attempted cheek kiss, scurried out the door, and cursed my weakness. I couldn’t turn him down to his face. I didn’t look behind me until I got to the library, and by then Professor Jake was gone.

  My lunch date, by making me miss Jeff even more, only gave me one more reason to solve his murder in record time. Someone was going to pay for his death, and I had to find out who. The rest of the day I actually spent doing library-related duties. They say that idle hands are the devil’s minions, but for me it’s the opposite. When my hands are busy with mentally untasking duties, my mind plays. That’s what I blamed for the plan to case Lartel’s house—working and a bad date. If I had been doing anything else, I never would have come up with something so asinine.

  Lartel was caught up in all this somehow. He was related to Jeff, he had been Jeff’s coach in high school, and he had been researching Jeff’s employer shortly before the murder. If nothing else, Lartel would be the easiest to eliminate as a suspect. I just needed to verify that he wasn’t in Battle Lake at the time of the murder and only pretending to be in Mexico. A quick peek into his windows would tell me that. If I couldn’t get enough proof that Lartel wasn’t involved by spying from the outside, the way I figured it, I had done a pretty good job getting into the Battle Lake Motel. How hard would a house be? Most people around here didn’t lock their doors anyhow.

  As I drove under the cover of night to Lartel’s house, I marveled at how much television had prepared me for life. A Charlie’s Angels fan from the word go, I had seen every episode at least twice, sometimes three times thanks to Nickelodeon reruns. I was a fan of Sabrina, of course. She had the name and the smarts and didn’t have to do all that ridiculous fawning over the men, as her hair was short and her boobs small. Sabrina used the downtime to figure things out and get the real work done. She taught a whole legion of underdeveloped and underpopular girls how to lie, spy, and detect.

  And I had been a willing pupil, as evidenced by my about-to-be second break-in in three nights. Tonight I was wearing a black turtleneck and black jeans, dark hair pulled back, flashlight strapped onto a makeshift utility belt next to my spider knife. The spider knife was a purchase I’d made a few years back at Mi
dwest Mountaineering in the Cities before a solo road trip to Colorado. I figured a woman needed protection, and it felt cool to whip open the three-inch blade with a flick of my thumb.

  I had spent the first night of the road trip alone in my tent tossing the opened knife from one hand to the other just like bad guys in old cops-and-robbers movies, trying to look menacing. Apparently I was doing one thing too many because I fumbled the knife early on. It nicked the edge of my shin and started a solid bleeding bout. Since that time, I just relied on the knowledge that my secret inner superhero would know exactly how to use the knife should the need arise.

  Lartel’s house was about ten miles north of Battle Lake off of County Road 78, sandwiched somewhere between Ottertail and Blanche lakes. The night was beautiful and clear, the air crisp with the sweet threat of a winter past. The stars seemed low and bright, like they always do in the spring, and the lazy off-season traffic allowed me to take a couple wrong turns before I happened upon the black mailbox with the name McManus etched onto a plain signboard swinging below.

  I killed my lights (Sabrina would be proud) and rolled in stealthily. I felt the excited vibration brought on by elective fear. Lartel’s driveway was relatively short for a country home in this area—no more than three-quarters of a mile—hedged by oak trees on each side. I saw the glowing yard light as I neared the house, but I couldn’t make out the house itself until I turned the last bend in the driveway.

  The outside of the residence was pretty much as I had envisioned it, except for the alabaster Doberman pinscher statues on each side of his front door. I figured he would be more of a frolicking-lawn-trolls kind of guy, but this wasn’t the first time he’d surprised me this week. The house itself was painted a pristine white, with green trim on the windows and matching green shingles—a standard country home. I guessed that the bottom floor had about three main rooms, all small, one bathroom, and limited closet space and that the upstairs had three main rooms, all with low ceilings that slanted in on the sides.