I slid across the booth from Karl, grateful he had agreed to meet me for lunch. I was surprised at how hungry I was. Fear and confusion must burn a lot of calories. There was some consolation in that. If I was going to be a stupid chicken, I was at least going to look good in a swimsuit this summer.

“You don’t look so good, Mira,” Karl said.

“Thanks, Karl.”

“Really, Mira. Have you been sleeping lately?”

“I guess so, as well as a person can sleep with one eye open. Jeff’s murder just has me walking on eggshells.”

“You two got to be pretty close over that interview.” It was a statement, not a question, and I was grateful that I wasn’t going to have to explain my unflagging interest in solving his murder.

“That, and Ron’s asked me to write a story on it. So far all I have is some high school gossip on Kennie, Jeff, and Gary Wohnt. Oh, and let’s not forget Lartel.”

Karl snapped his menu closed and leaned close to my face. “Mira, if I can give you any advice, it’s to steer clear of Lartel. He’s not a good person.”

“Well, it’s kind of hard to avoid your boss,” I said. “Anyways, he’s still in Mexico.” I thought about what Kennie had said about Karl’s “special relationship” with Lartel. “How well do you know Lartel,
exactly?”

“Back in high school, I was the football team gofer. I got to know him as well as anybody. Now, I’m his banker.”

“Why haven’t you ever brought him up before? You know I work with him.”

“Nothing to be done about that, Mira. I didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily. He seems to be fine in the public eye. It’s when he’s alone that the problems start.”

“What have you heard?”

“Things that I wouldn’t repeat, ever. But enough to tell me he’s not a person you want to associate with. I do business with him because I have to, but if it were up to me, he never would have come back to town. And I’m not the only one who feels that way.”

“Why did he come back to town?”

Karl rubbed his thumb on an imaginary spot on the table. “People say he didn’t really have anyplace else to go. I suppose he figured the scandal he caused back in the old days had blown over. He hadn’t done anything illegal, so why not come back to the town he had grown up in, the town where he had once been a hero?”

I didn’t buy it. There was more to the Lartel story. “Have you heard if he’s coming back from vacation early?”

“No, nothing like that. And it’d be around pretty quick if he was.”

I studied Karl. He looked the same as always—bland and kind. Kennie must have exaggerated his relationship with Lartel. It wouldn’t be the first freaky thing she’d ever done, that’s for sure. “He’s not the only wacko in this town, you know. Kennie stopped by the library today and gave me the third degree about Jeff. I’m starting to wonder what everyone thinks I know.”

“Kennie’s harmless, Mira. Like I told you before, she’s just harboring some jealousy.”

“You might be right.” I shook my head. “So how’s the sale of the Jorgensen land coming without Jeff in the picture?”

“It’s coming. They’re going to send someone out next week to sign the papers, and it should be a done deal. This time next year, we’ll have a new attraction at Battle Lake.” Karl didn’t sound any more excited about it than me. “You know,” he said, “people are saying that Jeff was killed by a homeless man. They’re holding him in Otter Tail County Jail.”

“What? Why haven’t I heard this?”

“He hasn’t been charged yet. But he had the right kind of gun on him, and he has no alibi.”

I shook my head. No. No, it wasn’t a homeless man who had killed Jeff. It made no sense. Why would a homeless man kill him and put his body in the library? This couldn’t all be over so quickly, could it?

Before I could speak, our waitress sidled up to the table. “What can I get you, Karl?”

Karl smiled up at her. “Hi, Chrissy. I’ll take a patty melt and a salad, and twenty dollars worth of pull-tabs. What’re you hungry for, Mira?”

I found my voice, and with it, my appetite. “I’ll take a grilled chicken sandwich with fries, and what’s your soup?”

“We have chili, navy bean and ham, or Wisconsin cheese.”

“A cup of navy bean and ham, please, right away.”

Karl laughed quietly. “You’re not eating for two, are you?”

I gagged on my own spit. Talk about being dragged from one emotion to another. “I better not be. That’s all I need right now. Nope, I’m a good eater, always have been. I’m going to the bathroom—be right back.” I scurried to the restroom. Once in there, I felt my boobs and my stomach. They felt normal, both sticking out about equally far from my body. I splashed water on my face and walked out.

I took my time getting back to the table. On the way, I overhead snatches of conversation: “. . . the blackest beaver I ever seen. I never skun a beaver before, but it was easy as pie until I got to the feet . . .”
“. . . you betcha, that’s the last time I ever let a Watermeller girl babysit my kids . . .” “. . . really hot last night . . .”

I was starting to feel faint. When I got back, my soup was waiting, and I dug into it as a distraction. Karl and I visited about this and that and managed to stay away from the equally toxic topics of murder, pregnancy, and high school. He bought for us, I left the tip, and we both headed back toward work.

When he was out of sight, I ducked into the Apothecary. I was hot, dizzy, and ill, and I recognized the symptoms—I-might-be-pregnantitis. Thanks for putting it in my head, Karl. That would explain why people were being so weird to me, though. They could smell a breeder in the herd. I shuddered. It would take more than both hands to count the number of pregnancy tests I’d bought in my life. I was mostly really good about using protection, but I heard on some morning news show that an alarming number of condoms have pinholes in them. All it takes is one tenacious sperm.

Since that show, I usually ended up taking the pregnancy test right in the Kmart, Wal-Mart, Target—you name it—bathroom the next day. This obsessiveness was certainly a sign of a mental illness. How many women peed on a pregnancy stick in a store bathroom? Multiple times? It’s always a humbling experience, but so far I was batting a hundred, and I figured a little self-respect was a small price to pay for immediate peace of mind.

I wasn’t too excited about buying an EPT at the Apothecary since certainly I would see someone I knew in there, and the whole town would be buzzing with the news by the end of the day. “Jeff Wilson lives on!” But once I had it in my head that I was pregnant, it was best just to take the test and turn off the voices before they really got to me.

I walked straight to the front counter and was not pleased to find the teenage girl who had sold me the mask the day before, her dishwater hair in a ponytail. Why couldn’t they have the decency to sell pregnancy tests in bathroom vending machines, like tampons and condoms? My culture had always taught me that anything related to the vagina was not supposed to be talked about or acknowledged in public, and here it was letting me down. “Hello!” I said. I wished I had come in disguise.

“Hello,” she said, flipping the page on US Weekly.

“I need one of those EPTs.”

“Those what?”

“The pregnancy tests. Behind you.”

She turned around. “Which one you want?”

“The EPT one. It has the letters ‘EPT’ on it. On the front. That one.”

She put her hand on the generic one. “These are cheaper.”

“Right. The EPT, please.” Like I was going to trust my urine and my entire future to a generic brand.

She smacked it onto the counter and rang it up. “$16.99.”

It never failed to amaze me how expensive these were. I suppose silencing crazy voices in your head doesn’t come cheap. And of course, if I was sane I would just rely on the fact that Jeff and I had used a condom every time and that my period wasn’t even late. If I was sane. I handed her a twenty and waited for change.

On my way out, she called after me. “I like your coat, hey.”

“Thanks.” Unplanned pregnancy—the great unifier of females across all ethnic, age, and attitudinal boundaries.

I scuttled back to the library, peed on the stick, and was relieved to find no pink line. I knew perfectly well that it was probably too early to tell if I was pregnant, but I didn’t humor my psychosis that much. I got back to work, and my first job was to snoop in Lartel’s desk.

It was one of those cool roll-top numbers, all the wood glossy and deep red. It was locked, but I had come to see locks as a negotiable inconvenience in the last couple days. About twenty minutes with a metal nail file slid the top off, and once the top was open, all the side drawers opened, too. I wasn’t surprised to find a doll catalog amidst all the library-related papers. After all, a grown man in swishy pants can only buy so many dolls in person before his motivation is rightfully questioned. Actually, the only surprising thing I found was a letter to Karl. It was so smooth it looked like it had been ironed. It featured the letterhead of the Shooting Star Casino, a gambling club on an Indian reservation about a hundred miles north of Battle Lake. The letter was short and politely worded:

Dear Mr. Syverson:

I’m afraid your credit has been extended as far as we can allow. Your $59,000 debt to our company is payable immediately. Please contact our financial counselor at extension 4536 for
assistance in making payment arrangements.

I felt witch fingers on my lower back. A debt that large in a town this small could really start people talking. If one was a banker, it could end one’s career. Lartel must be blackmailing Karl, which would explain Karl’s deep dislike and distrust of him and why Kennie fingered Karl during our encounter in the library. Whatever was going on, my friend wasn’t looking so good anymore. In fact, I was wondering if there was anyone left in town I could trust.

I put the papers back where I had found them and carefully closed and locked the desk. I went to the computer to write the article on Jeff. As soon as I started typing, I could smell the faint cedar of his soap and feel the warmth of that soft spot under his earlobe that he loved to have kissed.

On our second date, he had come over to the doublewide and showed me how to bake vegetable lasagna. We laughed and drank Chianti, and as he baked, he sang “That’s Amore” and talked in a corny Italian accent. The food was delicious, and afterward, as he washed and I dried the dishes, he told me funny stories about his travels in Europe.

I remembered thinking that I could listen to him forever. Instead, I was writing a combination murder investigation and eulogy. My eyes got cloudy, and I decided it was time to switch to some low-impact recipe hunting. Too bad no one had put recipe ideas into the envelope I had put out. As I went to Google, I speculated about what reporters and researchers had done before the advent of the Internet. I couldn’t get my head around it. After a brief search of online Minnesota cookbooks, I had my two candidates for the tasty Battle Lake recipe of this week.

The first contender was “Fluffy Fish Tacos,” Minnesota style. The “taco” was actually white bread, toasted and buttered. On top of that, one spread the fish of choice, sautéed in butter with parsley. The two ingredients that actually would make this dish Mexican—chili pepper and salsa—were blessedly optional. It was simple and weird. It was Battle Lake.

The second contender was the disturbing “Deer Pie.” The crust of this pie was meaty ground venison sprinkled with rice and salt and scalloped at the edges like real piecrust. Into this bloody shell, one placed a layer of thin potato slices, a layer of Velveeta cheese, another layer of thin potato slices, another layer of Velveeta, and finally, as decoration, coins of venison sausage. Cook the whole pile for forty-five minutes at 375 degrees, take it out and garnish it with parsley for those health nuts who like some green with their woodland meat, and you have a feast worthy of a caveman. The whole concept and the name were clearly some hunter’s wife’s plea for help. I couldn’t save her, but I could introduce her gory invention to the masses. Deer pie it was.

As I was finishing up my shift, I decided I needed to do a little more sleuthing before I went to the class of ’82 party. I was feeling exposed, and I needed to find out who my friends were, or at least clarify my list of enemies. I was going to the cop shop to feel out Gary Wohnt, and then to the high school to verify that it was Jeff’s number I had seen bloodstained in Lartel’s creephouse of a bedroom.

When I walked out of the library, worn field book in one hand, flashlight in the back pocket of my jeans (even though it was still light out), I realized I was starting to feel like an actual sleuth. Before I started to buy into my own myth, I went back to the lost and found and retrieved the horrific doll. It wasn’t as scary as when I first found it, but it was definitely disturbing.

I had the urge to fashion a noose and hang the doll out front of the library as sort of a reverse warning, but nobody had ever taken the time to teach me knot making. Besides, it might turn off the clientele. I decided I’d take the high road and dash over to the nursing home while the library was empty. I set the cheerleader outside the front door. I was sure some old person would take her in and give her a nice home. Out of sight, out of mind.

The cop shop was a block up from the Senior Sunset, located directly behind the municipal liquor store. It was a red brick slug of a building that you could huff and puff and still not blow down. I didn’t know what Wohnt’s hours were, but I assumed he was around all the time. I had this vision of the law as omnipresent. It was only four o’clock on a Friday, so I was hoping to catch him inside.

Sure enough, when I walked in he was at his gray metal desk, staring at the product of two overhead projectors. They each displayed a four-foot thumbprint on the far wall. This passed for technology in Battle Lake. I stared at the bristly side of his thick neck and swallowed hard. The blue uniform and gun belt didn’t help me relax any.

“Chief Wohnt?”

“Yah.” In lieu of turning around, he leaned over and turned the knob on the right projector, clarifying the fuzzy whorls of the far thumb.

I realized I didn’t have a plan for talking to him. I really wanted to ask him if he was one of the bad guys, but I had to find a stealthy way to do it. “I was wondering if you’d found anything more about Jeff’s death?” I shifted my weight from my right foot to my left.

The Chief rubbed his eyes and turned to stare at me. He looked like two miles of bad road. “No, Ms. James, we haven’t found out anything more. Do you have some more information to give me?”

“I just heard that you had arrested someone, a homeless man.”

He stared at me sideways with his sharp eyes until I had to look away. “Do you have some more information to give me, Ms. James?”

Except for the shiny lips, this was not the loquacious man who had interviewed me immediately following Jeff’s death. He had seemed very animated then; now, he looked like he was fighting some serious demons.

I shook my head. I suddenly didn’t feel like a grown-up. I heard the radio cackle out some numbers in the next room and saw the Chief’s back stiffen. He stood up, grabbed his blue jacket and hat, and strode toward the door. “You’ll have to excuse me.”

Abruptly, I was alone in a police station. Weren’t there prisoners or something who needed guarding? I tiptoed to the back room with the radio and saw it was a standard break room—dorm-room-sized fridge, hot plate, crusty coffee pot, and filing cabinet upon filing cabinet. I tried the top drawer of the closest one out of spite. It was locked. I went back to the main room and tried the two other doors. One was locked and the other was a dingy bathroom. I glanced over my shoulder, certain I was being watched. The room was still empty.

I looked at the Chief’s gray desk and felt my bad judgment kick in. I slid the top drawer open. I pulled it harder than I needed to and caused an avalanche of paper clips and pencils inside. I pushed the detritus around and saw nothing of importance. I had my hand on the cool grip of the left uppermost drawer when I heard a heavy foot outside the front door. I snapped the drawer shut and jumped down to my knees.

“What in the hell are you doing?” The Chief’s frame ate up the doorway and spilled inside. Every heavy breath he wheezed pumped him up a little bit larger, and if I didn’t say something smart real soon, he was going to explode all over me.

“I’m tying my shoe.” Jesus. Thank God I was wearing shoes that actually had shoelaces, my recently washed tennies, a fact I hadn’t bothered to verify before I bald-face lied.

I felt the air move as he swung his head from side to side, looking for something to disprove me. His body had stopped expanding, and now only his neck was swelling. He reminded me of one of those African lizards that run at the National Geographic camera, legs splayed and gills flying.

“Get out of my office. Now.”

“Good idea,” I said. I had slammed the drawer shut before he had charged back into the room, but not before I saw the silver invitation with the words “For Your Eyes Only” embossed in green on the front.