September Fair Read online

  Lana Sorensen, Carlos, Minnesota, native and first runner-up in the pageant, received the title of Milkfed Mary in a somber passing of the crown.

  The article was embarrassingly short.

  Wednesday morning, Mrs. Berns and Kennie caught me. They had stacked beer cans on the floor under my bed, and so when I tried to sneak out like I had for the previous mornings, I made a huge clatter. Mrs. Berns rushed out of her room, hair askew and face smudged with sleep, and Kennie sat up in her bed across the trailer and stared triumphantly at me. Well, as triumphantly as someone can stare when one of her eyes is mascaraed shut.

  “Thought you’d get away again, missy?” Mrs. Berns cackled. “Leaving before we’re awake and being asleep like a rock when we get in?”

  I was counting the beer cans at my feet. “It looks like you two are doing just fine without me.”

  “That’s not the point. This was supposed to be a fun ladies’ week,” Kennie piped in.

  “I didn’t get that memo.”

  “Consider yourself informed in person. Mrs. Berns and I have made some exciting discoveries at the fair, opportunities very few people know about, and we’re going to show them to you today.”

  I gingerly stacked the beer cans into a garbage bag to bring to the recycling bin. “Can’t. I have appointments. Some of us are working here.”

  “Tonight. We’re meeting right out front of the International Bazaar at five o’clock. You’ll be free then,” Mrs. Berns said confidently.

  She was right, of course. My only plans were to check out Christine as she posed this morning and then head to the tour of BPM before noon. And I wouldn’t mind hanging out with Mrs. Berns, but Kennie was a lot of work on a good day. I enjoyed my own company enough that I didn’t feel the need to socialize with people who exhausted me. Catching my hesitation, she sweetened the pot. “I found the super spiciest food on the planet right here at the fair. I’ll buy supper, and then we’ll show you what else we found.”

  Ah. She knew me too well. Food so spicy that it made my eyes water and my nose feel like it had been bored with a drill dunked in battery acid was my new vice, now that liquor was taboo, and I hadn’t found anything to sate it at the fair, not even the spiciest hot sauce at the Jamaican booth. And if Mrs. Berns was getting along with Kennie, who was I to judge? Besides, I didn’t really have a choice. These two knew where I lived. “Fine. Five o’clock, in front of the Bazaar.”

  “You won’t be sorry!” Kennie trilled.

  “I already am. Hey, which one of you pinched my digital camera?”

  “Hunh?”

  “My camera. I kept it under this bench, in a soft case, and now it’s gone. I scoured the whole trailer looking for it.”

  “I didn’t take it,” Kennie said.

  “Me neither. Last I saw it, you were coming back from Ashley Pederson’s fresh corpse, telling me about how you had seen something funky in a photo and you were going to enlarge it on your computer. Did you ever do that?”

  A simultaneous explosion of memory and fear met in my brain, creating a sulfurous smell. “You sure neither of you has my camera?”

  They shook their heads in the negative. “You think somebody stole it, somebody who wanted to know what you saw when you snapped Ashley’s last minutes?”

  Mrs. Berns was reading my mind. I nodded. “But I don’t even know what I saw.”

  “Who else knew you took those pictures?”

  “Who didn’t? I told Ron Sims, a reporter from the Pioneer Press that I met up with at the press conference …” My mouth went dry. “I think I mentioned something to Kate and Lars backstage at the Neil Diamond concert, too.”

  “Who’s Lars?”

  “He works for the company sponsoring the Milkfed Mary pageant, and there’s a good chance he was sleeping around with Ashley.”

  Mrs. Berns whistled. “I like a good thrill myself, but you got a death wish, honey. Why you like to swim with the sharks, I’ll never know. You better watch your back.”

  I would have answered her, but I was already out the door, bag of clanking beer cans in hand, to change out of my pajamas and brush my teeth before heading over to the Dairy building to watch Christine and the sculptor spin in the booth. Things were getting complicated.

  Pretty, tall, flaxen-haired Christine Taylor was now the first runner-up in the Milkfed Mary, Queen of the Dairy contest, having also been promoted by Ashley’s death. She didn’t draw as big of a crowd as the first and then second queen, but a steady group of fairgoers moved in and out of the Dairy building. As I watched Christine rotate slowly in the refrigerated booth, I wondered what crazy Minnesotan mind had invented the idea of whittling a person’s head out of butter. If you were debating which dairy product would make the best medium for head carving, sure, I can understand choosing butter, but how do you even arrive at that bizarre point in a conversation?

  The intricacies of the dairy world escaped me, but imagining them freed my brain enough to reprioritize my list of duties for the day: I still didn’t know a thing about the sculptor. As the last person to see Ashley alive, in fact the one who had been trapped in a tiny spinning room with her at the moment she had died, she was a likely suspect. I made a note to speak with her after today’s session, something I was sure the police had already done. And the fact that she was still at work spoke to their belief in her innocence, but I wasn’t going to leave any butter pat unturned.

  A familiar voice to my left caught my ear. It was Janice, conversing with a woman her age and two small children. She was viciously squirting disinfectant gel on her hands as she spoke. I sidled closer, hoping to eavesdrop, but Janice’s sixth sense warned her I was near.

  “Mira. How are you?” Her eyebrows arched, making her look both years younger and pissed. She dropped the gel into her purse and massaged it into her hands. The acrid smell assaulted my nostrils.

  “Fine, thank you. Christine’s doing great up there.”

  “Thank you,” the other woman said, holding out her hand. “I’m her mother.”

  Janice’s eyebrows darted back down, and she relaxed her body language with some effort. “If you’ll excuse me? I have work to do.”

  As Janice stalked off, I noticed for the first time that she had a small chunk of hair missing in back. Her shoulder-length, helmet-like tresses were dark and glossy, making it hard to distinguish one area from another, but there was definitely a tiny ragged spot where one layer had been sliced shorter than the rest, about a centimeter across. I wondered if Janice knew about her shitty haircut, but she was out of sight before I could ask her. I turned back to Christine’s mom and took her proffered hand. “Pleased to meet you. You must be proud of your daughter.”

  “Very.”

  “So where’re you guys from?”

  “Hibbing originally, but Christine lives in White Bear Lake now.”

  I was surprised. “Milkfed Mary contestants aren’t all newly graduated seniors?”

  “Nope. They need to have graduated high school and can’t be more than twenty-four years old. Christine’s twenty-two, so she’s the oldest one this year.”

  Knowing Christine was eight years younger than me made me feel old, not to mention cheated. She really could have bought her own beers the other day; she had been using my money, not my ID. “And who are these two?” I asked, indicating the giggly, towheaded children with her.

  “My grandkids. Christine’s nieces. The whole family will be in and out at some time today, including my husband. We had to hire extra help to run the dairy farm while we were away, but this is important. We’re all thrilled to bursting about Christine’s placing in the pageant.”

  It was the second time she made the point, and when I gave her my full attention, I read her earnestness. She was a simple-looking woman in worn blue jeans and a shapeless yellow T-shirt with a smiling cat on the front. From the little I knew of family dairy farming, it was one of the most time-consuming jobs on the planet, requiring early mornings, late nights, and constant atte
ntion to your herd. Christine’s mom’s calloused hands supported my theory that she was a hard worker. To have her daughter up there getting all this attention, the picture of milkfed goodness, must be a highlight to her life. “You should be,” I said. “Will you excuse me? I have to get to an appointment. I just wanted to stop by and say hi to Christine.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “You too.” I turned, shooting Christine a wave as I passed her. She grinned and waved back just before the booth turned her away from me. That’s when I saw she was missing a curl of hair from the exact same place as Janice.

  I made a note to ask Christine about the hair weirdness later. She was scheduled for a long session in the booth, and I had to catch a bus to Bovine Productivity Management. Heading out of the Dairy building, I was surprised to run into a crowd on the outside larger than the one on the inside, and they were all holding signs. Meat is Murder. Free the Cows. Have you Had your Glass of Chemicals Today?

  They looked like the same bunch I had literally run into the day Ashley had been murdered. I tried to circumvent them, but it was impossible to leave the Dairy building without wading through the protestors. As I pushed forward, head down, a brochure was shoved in my hand. On the front was a brown-eyed, sad-looking calf over the words, “Can I have some of that milk?” I looked up and recognized the sign holder as the same guy I’d collided with when leaving the Cattle Barn the other day. “Hello,” I said to him.

  He ignored my greeting. “The average glass of nonorganic milk contains eight drops of pus.”

  “Um, gross.”

  “Factory-farmed cows spend their lives in cramped quarters with barely enough room to turn around. They’re force-fed antibiotics and growth hormone that end up in our food and our water supply, creating the perfect environment for a superbug strong enough to wipe out the human race, and causing both girls and boys to reach puberty prematurely.”

  He was tall, probably 6’5”, and wiry. His clothes hung off of him, but he was clean, and his eyes were bright but sane. Still. “You see those cows over there?” I asked, pointing at the Cattle Barn behind him. “They look pretty happy to me.”

  “Some small farmers still respect the land and their animals and grow sustainably,” he said grudgingly. “We’re not here protesting them. We’re speaking out against the corporate dairy industry, as exemplified by Bovine Productivity Management.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. “BPM? The sponsors of the Milkfed Mary, Queen of the Dairy pageant?”

  “Yeah. That’s why we’re here.” He indicated the Dairy building.

  “They’re pretty corporate, hunh?”

  “The worst.” He started warming up to his subject. “They’ve created some of the most toxic antibiotics in the industry, and their milk enhancer has some dangerous side effects.”

  “Like what?”

  He ran his fingers through his hair. “We can’t be sure. They guard their secrets well, but we’ve got it on good authority that they’re doing terrible things to cattle. They conduct a lot of their experiments right here in St. Paul, at their local lab. Cows go in, but they don’t come out.”

  We were talking about the lab I would just so happen to be at in about an hour. Interesting. “Thanks for your time.”

  “Wait, let me show you some pictures.” He pulled out photos of scrawny-looking cows packed together in mud up to their knobby knees. If cows had knees. “They basically don’t have room to turn around. In the U.S., corporate cows don’t get to eat their natural diet of grass. They’re fed grain, antibiotics, and noxious protein made from ground-up dead animals, including other cows. When they calve, their babies are taken away from them and fed an artificial diet of formula so humans can have that milk, which our bodies are not designed to digest. You know how your throat gets gummy when you drink milk? That’s your body telling you it wasn’t made for you.”

  I swallowed. As a point of fact, I hadn’t drunk a glass of milk in years. The faint animal smell always turned me off. I loved my cheese and ice cream, though, and I didn’t want to hear any more rank details about my diet. “Well, thanks for your time. I didn’t catch your name?”

  “Aeon. Aeon Hopkins. There are alternatives to dairy that are good for your health, good for the environment, good for cows. One glass of rice milk contains more calcium than your average glass of cow’s milk, and it’s easily digestible as well as delicious.”

  “All right, Aeon. Thanks.” His little speech had me feeling queasy and unsettled. I pushed my way through the protestors, finally reaching some breathing space when I was about a hundred feet from the Dairy building. The weather had bounced back from yesterday’s storm to the sultry climate that had opened the State Fair, and as I made my way to the south gates, I was thankful that I’d worn a sundress instead of the one pair of pants I’d packed. Already, the deep purple cotton was clinging to my back, and the humidity curled the baby hairs escaping from my ponytail. I passed an ice cream booth and looked longingly at someone licking a cone of toasted almond fudge, but all I could think of was salty pus. Damn. If that man had ruined my taste for ice cream, there was going to be some payback.

  I hopped the next bus, letting a breeze from the cracked window wash over my moist neck. Choosing the right bus—actually, buses, since I needed to transfer three times—to reach the headquarters of BPM had been no small task, and when, an hour later, I was dropped off near a deserted-looking industrial area, I wondered if I had wasted my time. I had no concrete course of action other than to size up Lars Gunder as Ashley’s possible lover and find out more about BPM and its products, but I hardly expected him to spill romantic or company secrets. Heck, I couldn’t even coax the Scotch egg guy into divulging his recipe. I was here, though, and so I might as well see this through.

  I recognized the front of the Bovine Productivity Corporation from their web page, though their official image had Photoshopped out the barbed wire-topped, ten-foot wall surrounding the gigantic facility. I pressed the speaker button next to the front gate, peeking through the iron bars at the scrubby brush surrounding the building. On BPM’s website, the bushes had been grand oak trees. I wondered what other false fronts the business had.

  When I identified myself, I was buzzed in and strode up the front sidewalk and into the main building, which was as sprawling as an urban high school. The interior of the business was straight out of Brave New World, all cold white walls and pristine floors. An immaculate receptionist, looking like she may have been a Milkfed Mary herself in the not too-distant past, smiled up at me as I entered. Her teeth were artificially white, and her eyes stayed flat, not reflecting her smile. “Welcome. Can I help you?”

  “I have an appointment with Lars Gunder.” I shifted from one foot to the other, feeling like bacterium in a Petri dish in my sweaty, sleeveless sundress and flip-flops. My hands were clenched as I waited for some sanitation system to detect and eject me. Red lights would flare, sirens would wail, and long metal pincers would emerge from behind a secret panel, snag me by the back of my dress, and lift me off the ground while a leather boot on a stick appeared to kick me out.

  “Of course.” No sirens. She spoke softly into a phone and then suggested I have a seat, holding her brittle smile all the while.

  Two white leather chairs flanked a glass table in the waiting room. I sunk silently into one, or at least tried to, but my wet thighs bleated loudly against the surface. It was in everyone’s best interest to pretend my body hadn’t just made that noise, and so I didn’t bother glancing apologetically at the receptionist. Instead, I leaned forward, rifling through both of my magazine options: Farm Journal and Dairy Farming Now. Fortunately, Lars’ arrival saved me from learning more about teat salve and the hoof-split crisis. I shook the hand he held out to me, glancing quickly back to make sure I hadn’t left a stain on the chair.

  “Thank you for coming, Mira. I wasn’t sure if you would.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” I said. “Quite an operation you have here.�
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  “Thank you. This main building is where we do some of our testing as well as house our corporate employees. Wait until you see the lab.”

  I followed as he slid a card into an electronic lock, opening two automatic metal doors that led off the foyer. A whoosh of air greeted us, and it smelled like rubbing alcohol, dry dog food, and something that caused an instinctual fear reaction in me. At first I thought it was the smell of the doctor’s office when you’re about to get a shot, or that weird tang someone who has intense stage fright gives off, but neither was it exactly. I couldn’t put my finger on it, so I ignored it. I found that by the time we had taken four different turns and were in the bowels of the faceless, white-halled building, it was hardly noticeable, and my heartbeat was back to normal.

  “Ever get lost in this place?”

  He chuckled, but like the receptionist there was something robotic about his attempt at good humor. “You get used to it. You see those guys in white coats?” He stopped, pointing at the glassed-in lab to our right, the first windowed room we’d passed. Inside, three men worked over a series of massive microscopes arranged on a stainless steel table. They wore protective goggles and face masks and thick rubber gloves. They were surrounded by whirring machines, delicate-looking computer equipment, and stacks of testing materials. In one particularly intricate operation, a blue liquid bubbled from one end of a glass piping unit to another, trying to escape the flames poised below. “They’re about to make history.”

  “What’re they doing?”

  “Updating ME. That’s Milk Enhancer, our best-selling product. In its current form, it doubles milk output on an average cow. These scientists are days away from changing the formula to quadruple output.”