The first disaster of Tuesday morning involved urine and high-heeled, timelessly tasteless prom shoes. I was showered, dressed, and ready for work. All I had to do was slip on my black leather sandals and I’d be ready to face the day. When I reached for the sandals, however, I discovered that both shoes were glistening with liquid that smelled an awful lot like ammonia. Luna and Tiger Pop had been vying for my attention ever since I had moved in, and apparently they had stopped pussy-footing around. There really is nothing like peeing on someone’s apparel to make them notice you.

“Tiger Pop, did you pee on my shoes?”

His ear twitched, but otherwise there was no motion from the calico ball on my bed. I sighed and reached back for my tennis shoes, which I quickly discovered were hosting their own urine pool party. Now I was worried, as these were the only two pairs of shoes I owned. First Jeff stood me up, and now animals were peeing on my stuff. My morning deflated further as I realized that I wouldn’t have time to buy shoes before I opened the library, as all the stores opened the same time I did.

I scoured Sunny’s office, piled high with boxes, and could only come up with one pair of shoes: the dreaded prom/wedding/funeral pair that every Minnesota woman owned and wore in that order. They were ridiculously pointy, dyed a soft pink (goes great with taffeta!), and at least three inches high. Christ. I went back and sniffed the sandals, which were starting to go white in spots. I looked from the heels in my hand to the spotted sandals. I bet I wouldn’t even be able to smell the pee when I walked. My hoofers were at least five feet from my nose. I got my toe halfway in one before I thought better of it.
I chucked the sandals in the garbage, the tennies in the wash, and snatched up the scary feminine footwear. I slipped on the heels, thinking clown shoes would have been more fitting, and stumbled toward my car.

I could walk in heels about as well as I could swim in boots, so the short trip to my car was peppered with foot-sinking, ankle-twisting hitches. I soon realized that the trick was to not move in the hips at all and keep my toes pointed forward and my legs goose-step straight. At least that way, I didn’t fall over. And, if I pulled my jeans extra low, you could hardly even see the crusty flowers on the toes.

I was actually feeling a little OK about the shoes by the time I pulled into town, all Laura Ingalls Wilder meets Carrie Bradshaw. That’s about when I discovered the second disaster of the day, this one at least as
bad as having to wear someone else’s prom shoes to work: Tuesday was Dead Body Day at the library. When I literally stumbled across Jeff’s body in the Pl–Sca aisle, my new life broke apart and rained around my head like glass shards.

It didn’t take Mrs. Berns long to roust up the local police, and I didn’t want to open the envelope scratching at my back until I was alone. When law enforcement arrived, they placed the requisite yellow tape around the scene, snapped photos from every angle, and after what seemed like years but was actually a few hours, wheeled the body away on a gurney into a waiting ambulance.

I posted myself outside the library doors during the worst of the commotion and hated my conspicuousness. When I was nineteen, I had sneaked into a bar with a friend and gotten drunk on lime vodka sours. I started sassing a greasy biker, childishly thinking that I was six foot tall and bulletproof, and he had slapped me across the face. That’s how I felt now as I tried to assimilate Jeff’s death. I was horrified, embarrassed, angry, shocked—all these intense emotions racing through me at such a high speed that they all got stuck in a clot right behind my eyes, not one able to squeeze past and organize a reaction.

I realized I was using my pointer finger to trace infinity shapes on my thumbnail, a nervous habit I had when I was just a kid who wore long socks with her skirts because she liked how it looked. The police had told me I couldn’t go home, though, so I spent the time checking out the people who were checking me out, hoping my eyes looked defiant. I wasn’t going to be a victim twice in my life.

I didn’t see anyone who had directly impacted me since I moved to Battle Lake, though I thought I caught a glimpse of platinum-blonde hair toward the back of the crowd of twenty or so that had gathered. I dismissed the possibility that it was Kennie. There was no way she could walk by an audience like this without making a statement.

Most of the gawkers left shortly after the ambulance, leaving Chief Wohnt, the local enforcer of the law, and me. He was a large, muscular man who had become head of the police force not long before I came to town, and people talked with pride about how many speeders he regularly caught racing past Chief Wenonga on the north side of town. It had been enough for him to justify buying a new Jeep to police this one-horse burg. Word on the street, though, was that Gary Wohnt was more interested in Kennie Rogers than in catching criminals.

The police chief had a hard time suppressing an officious smile, or maybe it was a smirk, as he got my story while we sat on the stone benches behind the library. I might not have noticed the set to his mouth except for the lip balm he applied thickly when he first sat down across from me. He pulled the white and yellow pot out of his back pocket like some men pulled out chew, and tapped it once on the table. The black lettering across the top reminded me of the Carmex-induced cancer legends that had gone around my high school. Chief Wohnt screwed off the top and spread the yellow cream on deep. When he unlocked his mouth to talk, I could see slick feathered edges where it overlapped in the corners of his tight lips like a poorly frosted cake. I wondered about his self-satisfied manner as I tried not to look directly at the greased pink mouth asking me questions. I focused instead on his deep-set brown eyes, like burn holes in his tanned, pockmarked face. His hair was thick, black, and waxy, comb lines separating one strand from the next like a perfectly plowed field.

He wanted to know what I knew about Jeff and his body, and I was desperately trying to shove my independent social filter into place so I didn’t accidentally tell him too much. A murder was enough to turn this town on its ear. If I added sex to the mix, people would do something wild like turn off their TVs. I thought about Mrs. Pavechnik and her bispecies husband for the second time in a week.

I told Gary Wohnt what I knew, minus the sex. I imagine Mrs. Berns, who was pretending to tend the rock garden next to the sidewalk, would add that in later. But Gary Wohnt got the just-friends version of how I had met Jeff, and he scribbled it down faster than I could talk. At the end of the interview, he reapplied Carmex with a breadth and zest usually reserved for a smoker’s last cigarette, and I started to wonder, not for the first time in my life, if it was possible to kill someone with bad thoughts. If I could mentally do away with a father for neglecting me and a lover for standing me up, what would happen to the person who cut me off in traffic? I needed to do something, and quick.