September Fair Read online

  Dirk responded. “I don’t know anything.”

  There was an edge in his voice that made me wonder how long they’d been dating. He didn’t seem broken up at all. Rather, he acted peeved, like he’d been interrupted in the middle of a Guitar Hero session. I wrote his behavior off to shock, and watched as the camera crews finished interviewing bystanders before packing up. I couldn’t help but notice that behind the commotion, the two blondes had been retrieving and then placing the same bouquets near the entrance of the building since the cameras had started rolling. If my guess was right, they were Milkfed Mary runners-up and might give me some quotes I could use in an article. I wasn’t coldhearted enough to interview Dirk, even though he didn’t seem like he’d mind, hanging around the door of the Dairy building as he was.

  When the crowd dissipated to regular fair size, I strode up to the girls, both of whom had apparently come from the same Pretty Blonde Girl™ mold. “Hi. I’m Mira James. From Battle Lake. Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  Their expressions changed slightly at the mention of Battle Lake, but they overall looked exhausted. They both had lines under their eyes, and their mouths were droopy. “Sure.”

  “I can’t help but notice that you’ve been moving the same flowers around for a while. What’s up?”

  They exchanged glances, and the shorter of the two spoke in a high-pitched, almost childlike voice. “You said you’re from Battle Lake?”

  “Yeah. I’m a reporter for the paper there.”

  “Did you know Ashley?”

  “I’d never met her. I knew her reputation.”

  This interested both of them, judging by the light it ignited in their faces. I continued, improvising based on what Ron and Mrs. Berns had told me. “I got the impression that she didn’t have a lot of friends at school. I took it she was one of the bossy girls. She didn’t work, but she had designer clothes and her own car. I think she was captain of the dance team.”

  The taller girl spoke. “That sounds like her. I’m Christine, and this is Brittany, by the way. Our chaperone told us to come down and act busy around the flowers. I think they want to make things look good.”

  “Make what look good?”

  Brittany interjected in her slide-whistle voice. “Everything. The Milkfed Mary pageant is a big deal. A Queen has never died before, not at the State Fair. I guess they don’t want the whole industry to get a bad name. We were told to stay as long as there’re cameras around.”

  “That’s pretty cold.”

  Brittany shrugged. “It’s the beauty pageant world. It’s a lot about appearances. Hey, you’ve got something on your face. Right here.”

  She pointed at the corner of her mouth, but once I started licking around mine, I realized she was being kind. If my tongue was any judge, I had a perfect rim of Nut Goodie chocolate circling my lips with a little powdered sugar thrown in for good measure. “Thanks,” I mumbled, pulling a tissue out of my purse. Eager to change the subject, I asked them what they knew of Ashley while I wiped.

  Christine spoke up. “We’re only supposed to focus on the good stuff, you know? It’s part of the Milkfed Mary creed.”

  “OK, what good stuff did you know about Ashley?”

  The both squinched their foreheads as if trying to remember the procedure for splitting an atom.

  “She was pretty,” Brittany offered. Christine nodded.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  Christine glanced around. No one was paying any attention to us. “Look. We didn’t like her much. She was stuck up. She made fun of dairy farms and people who worked on them. And she stole things.”

  “Like what?”

  The girls looked quickly at each other and then Brittany found her shoes very interesting. “Ask Lana,” Christine said.

  “Lana?”

  “That’s all I can say. Really. We’re supposed to be putting on a united front.”

  “One more question. Do you think she died of natural causes?”

  Christine leaned in grimly. “I’ve lived on a farm my whole life. I’ve seen animals born and I’ve seen them die, but I’ve never seen anything drop that fast and turn red as a stoplight. I was right up front when her body was carried out, and she looked like she’d been dunked in blood. Me and some of the other girls think she was poisoned.”

  There it was, my worst fear given voice. Ashley Pederson had been poisoned. Someone had murdered Battle Lake’s Milkfed Mary, Queen of the Dairy. “Well, thank you for your time. I appreciate you talking to me.” I took off into the crowd, a sugar-and-stress headache knocking at the back of my skull.

  Mrs. Berns materialized alongside me. “What’d you find out?”

  “Not much. You?”

  “Not much.”

  A glint in her eye suggested otherwise, but my headache kept me from pursuing it. “You got any ibuprofen?”

  Mrs. Berns dug in her purse and came out with two red and white tablets. As I made spit, I prayed they were over the counter. “Where are you headed now?”

  “I want to play some Midway games. Last year, I won a big Scooby Doo at the pool tables. Care to join me?”

  “No thanks. I need to find a contestant named Lana, and I think I know just where to look.”

  The Midwest Milk Organization always housed its Milkfed Mary and her runners-up in the top floor of the Cattle Barn while they were appearing at the State Fair. At least that’s what the people at the Information booth told me. The barn was a huge brown brick structure that looked like an industrial concert hall with a stretched-out A-line roof capping the solid edifice. Over the door hung the blue, white, and green words “CATTLE BARN” painted two feet high above an ornate and somber bull’s head carved from granite.

  As I craned my head to look up the bull’s nostrils, I decided that being forced to sleep in the Cattle Barn smelled like a raw deal. Cows tramped in and out, and the air was heavy with the aroma of sweet straw and gritty manure for ten feet on each side of the building. Once I stepped inside and climbed the steep, curving cement stairs to the second floor, however, I was greeted with a neat dormitory, one enormous room containing twelve beds side by side, six on the left wall and six on the right, a few vanities sprinkled around, a dowel strung to the ceiling to hold gowns, and a bathroom complete with shower, toilet, and sink. Sunlight streamed in from grand windows along the far wall constructed of sturdy glass blocks, book-sized squares of light piled one on top of the other until they were 20 feet tall. At this level, the odor was more stale bedding than cow butt, and the facilities were no worse than my digs in the trailer.

  Two closed doors led off the far side of the gigantic main room, one marked “Chaperone” and one marked “Office.” Since the place was currently uninhabited, I strode across the expanse of the dormitory to try both doors. They were locked. I considered snooping in the dresser drawers, but since most girls no longer embroidered their names on their underwear, I didn’t think it’d do any good as I was up here solely to verify the name of one of the contestants. I guessed that the Lana who had been mentioned was a Milkfed Mary. How else would Christine, Brittany, and Ashley, all from different sides of Minnesota, know her? But there were easier ways to find out than rifling through underwear drawers. I had just come to satisfy idle curiosity, to keep busy so I didn’t have room in my head for the image of Ashley’s dead eyes. I was on my way down the curved stairs when I heard footsteps coming up from below.

  My heart started hammering. A woman had been murdered this morning, and here I was snooping around her dormitory. It wouldn’t look good, and this is exactly why I shouldn’t have gotten involved. I couldn’t escape without going past whoever was coming toward me, and there were precious few places to hide upstairs unless I wanted to cower behind a rack of off-the-shoulder taffeta gowns. I settled for slipping back up the stairs so I could walk back down more nonchalantly. After all, who doesn’t get lost in the cattle barn? My foot was on the first step descending for the second time when I heard the sniffl
ing. Whoever was coming up was crying. Shoot. I wasn’t good at dealing with criers. Actually, I wasn’t a fan of any emotion. If I had my way, any sort of honest interaction would involve hand puppets.

  I tried making myself invisible, but as soon as the woman ascending the stairs rounded the corner, I knew that would be impossible. It was Carlotta Pederson, mother to the recently deceased 54th Milkfed Mary, Queen of the Dairy, and she looked like she’d been smacked by a train.

  “Mira? Is that you? Ron said you’d be at the fair. He said I should look for you. I just talked to him, to tell him about …” Her voice cracked. Tears rolled down her face, settling in lines that hadn’t been there last time I’d seen her. “I suppose you heard.”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but closed it when I spotted the two police officers bringing up the rear. They were followed by the woman in the red power suit whom I had seen trying to calm the sculptor earlier this morning. I moved to stand closer to Mrs. Pederson, hoping the woman wouldn’t recognize me.

  While I had never socialized with Mrs. Pederson without her husband or Ron, I felt an immediate connection to her in this moment. Her daughter may have been a snot, but seeing Carlotta’s swollen face was a painful reminder that no one adores you like your mom, and no amount of love was insurance against loss. Those were two lessons that I had paid a dear price to learn last month.

  “We’re here so I can point out Ashley’s things. You’ll stay with me, won’t you, honey?” She moved past me as she talked, her voice seeming to come from far away. We didn’t know each other well, but I must have been her only familiar face at the moment and so had become her touchstone in grief.

  “Of course.” I followed her into the dormitory. There was no point in asking her how she was doing. She was moving as if her spine had been crushed and she was only staying upright out of habit.

  She rambled to the nearest vanity and reached for a hairbrush with an ornate silver handle. She held it toward the sunlight streaming in from the windows, and the light played off the blonde strands captured in the bristles. “I gave Ashley this brush for her first Communion. I used to comb her hair with it before she went to bed. A hundred strokes on each section.” Her voice was eerily detached.

  “I’m sorry,” I croaked, feeling her pain despite my best efforts. I knew that level of agony, that bottomless falling, the elevator plummeting to an end that never comes. I had spent part of my childhood and all of my teen years wishing my dad out of my life, and then when he did disappear in a screeching crash of metal, I felt as lonely as an abandoned cardboard box. The scariest part was not the grief but the emptiness left in its wake. I wanted to somehow comfort her, but I was afraid to touch her. She trembled with sadness. It crawled on her skin like bugs, parted her hair, leaked out her ears.

  Guilt drove me, though, and I stepped to her and tentatively patted her shoulder. She turned, fell into my arms and sobbed, her disconnection cracking. “She’s dead! My beautiful baby. How could this happen? Why her? Why can’t anyone tell me what happened?”

  The uniformed officers shifted their feet uncomfortably behind us. They both looked fresh-scrubbed, maybe five years younger than my thirty. One of them hadn’t been shaving long.

  “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Pederson,” I said. “Do you have someone at the fair with you? You shouldn’t be alone at a time like this.”

  She clung to me. “My husband is on his way from home. You’ll help me, won’t you, Mira? You’ll help me find out what happened to my baby. Won’t you?” She pulled back and locked eyes with me. Her expression was etched with a wild fierceness, leaving me only one answer.

  “Of course I will.”

  “Promise me. Promise me you’ll find out what happened to my little girl.”

  Those were the words people spoke when unimaginable pain befalls them. They’re crazy words, a kettle hot to bursting letting off necessary steam. Most listeners would write them off to extreme grief. Me, the prisoner of guilt, tattooed them to my heart. “I promise.” And with those two words, my personal vow to avoid all future murder investigations shattered like a mirror.

  She let me go and cradled the hairbrush as if it were an infant. “My sweet baby. My poor, poor baby.” With the help of the police officers and the staid but keen-eyed woman I guessed was the Milkfed Mary chaperone, Mrs. Pederson made her way around the dorm, pointing out her daughter’s duffel bag and gowns. Their location and contents were photographed, as was the entire room, from every angle. Mrs. Pederson wasn’t allowed to remove any of her daughter’s belongings. Rather, the police officers collected them with their gloved hands and carried them out, even gently peeling her daughter’s brush from Carlotta’s hands before leading the way down the stairs.

  The three of us followed, me with a hand on the shaky Mrs. Pederson. The chaperone trailed at a distance. She had an icy demeanor, but inside she must have felt terrible. Talk about a profoundly bad job looking after someone. “Keep your charges alive” must be the bare minimum requirement on her contract, and this woman had blown it. I couldn’t imagine it was her fault, but that was probably empty solace.

  The police officers waited for us at the bottom of the stairs. “Mrs. Pederson, we need to go to the station now.”

  “I’ll go with,” I said. In for a penny, in for pound.

  “I’m sorry. You can’t ride in the police car.”

  I stopped. That meant unhooking Ron’s pick-up truck, my immediate means of transportation, from the Airstream, and I had no idea how to do it. I could figure it out, though, even if it meant reasoning with a crowbar. “Can you give me directions?”

  Mrs. Pederson shook her head. “It’s okay, Mira. Gary is meeting me there. You’ve met my husband? He’ll take care of me.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  She squeezed my arm. The fervor that had struck her earlier had dissipated. “Pray for me, Mira. Pray for me and my girl’s soul.”

  The police led her away, supporting her as they walked. The chaperone followed for a few feet before turning back to me. There was a pleasant non-expression on her face, but it tightened into something darker when she neared. “You were the girl who tried to get into the booth after Ashley died.”

  “Not me.” I met and held her gaze.

  She studied me for five difficult seconds, apparently coming to the conclusion that I didn’t abandon my lies easily. She changed tactics. “What were you doing in the dormitory just now?”

  Defensive was my normal posture, but my brain was so thoroughly rooted in sympathy that it took me a moment to jump tracks. “I was looking for Mrs. Pederson.” You lie enough, your fibbing muscle becomes as toned as a weight lifter’s bicep.

  The chaperone mulled this one. From a distance, one might describe her as attractive in a motherly way, but up close, she had a Nurse Ratched vibe. A lot of that was due to her hair and clothes, which were stiff and perfect, but she also had iron behind her eyes. She unsettled me a little. “How’d you know Mrs. Pederson would be here?”

  “I didn’t. I was hoping.” Before she came up with a counter-question, I threw one back at her. It’s Subterfuge and Camouflage 101. “What’s your name?”

  “Janice Opatz. I’m the Milkfed Mary chaperone.”

  I raised my eyebrows just enough to indicate it had occurred to me how lousy she was at her job, and then continued my offense. “That’s your room off the dormitory above?”

  “Yes …”

  “And your office is the one next to it?”

  “No, that’s …” Some instinct drew her up short. If her age was any indicator, she was a veteran chaperone, which meant she’d have a juiced-up shit-sniffer herself. “I think we’re done here. I didn’t catch your name.”

  Now that I’d promised the impossible to Mrs. Pederson, I figured I better do my best to keep all avenues open. “Mira James.” I put out my hand. “I’m from Battle Lake.”

  Janice shook it, giving me a Switzerland smile. “I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

/>   “I’m sure.” She resumed following Mrs. Pederson and the police, and I headed to the Midway to search out Mrs. Berns. My head was full and I needed someone to help me sort everything out. I was so deep in my muddied thoughts that I barreled right into a very tall young man with a sign on a stick.

  “Oh! I’m sorry.”

  He regained his balance, allowing me to read his placard, which said, “Free the Cows!” I looked over my shoulder into the cattle barn I had recently exited. Inside, the cows appeared more comfortable than most humans at the fair—they had fans blowing on them, they got brushed, fed, and watered regularly, and they could poop right where they stood and someone else cleaned it up. I knew a lot of men and more than a few women in Battle Lake for whom, if you threw in a working television, that would be the definition of paradise.

  Twenty or so other protestors milled around, their signs also denouncing some aspect of the dairy industry. It made me exhausted just to read them, so I strode off without any further interaction. I cruised to the Midway and sought out the games area, which was lined with stalls—balloon darts, frog fishing, basketball, skeeball, ring toss, break-a-plate or whack-a-mole, rubber duck grab—probably fifty stalls in all ringing the sides of the game area with more in the middle. I noted as I walked that either my black mood had affected my senses or I had stumbled into the seedy side of the fair. Likely, both. The carnies in the game booths cajoled me to buy three darts for $5, or try my luck with a basketball. The crowds were thin here, and so the carnival workers were aggressive, insulting me when I walked by without acknowledging them, catcalling and hooting.

  “Hey baby, you wanna pump my gun? Every girl’s a winner at this booth!”

  “Where you going? Spend some time with a lonely carnie! I promise I won’t bite, sweetheart.”