Sunny’s doublewide was small, a cozy nine hundred square feet. The front space was a permanently wallpapered living room with woodsy furniture, and behind it was the kitchen, with a white and brown speckled vinyl floor, particleboard cupboards, and green-topped counters. To the left was the master bedroom, with its own bath, and to the right was a spare bedroom, an office, and another bathroom. By the time I arrived, Sunny had moved all her personal stuff into the office, and she was waiting outside with Rodney, both of them playing with her beloved dog, Luna. After a too-quick exchange of information and hugs, they were out and I was in.

The first order of business was finding a job, and I took Sunny up on her suggestion to try the library. It was rare for a town this size to have its own stationary book collection, but a wealthy benefactor had provided the money to get it running, and city funds kept it going.
I slipped into an assistant librarian position pretty easily after I lied about my knowledge of the Dewey decimal system. I was working on my master’s in English, sort of, so they didn’t ask many questions. At just over minimum wage, they were happy to have a warm body. They probably wouldn’t have been so quick to hire me if they had known about the murder following just one step behind me, ready to pounce once everyone settled in.

I learned my job and settled into the town—hooked up with my one local friend, Gina, filled the fridge with fresh foods from Larry’s, and read a lot of books I’d been meaning to get to. Meanwhile, the snow melted, the gray receded, the air started to smell fresh like cucumbers, and the buds on the trees and seeds in the dirt trembled and hummed until they exploded in splashes of color so bright green they were almost yellow. Spring in Minnesota happens scary fast. When Sunny called to check up on Luna and me, I told her confidently that things were going to happen for me in Battle Lake. I could feel the buzz in the air like the hum of bees.

Once the head librarian, Lartel McManus, saw I had a knack for the library job, he flew to Mexico on a three-week vacation he said he had planned for months. Friday, May 1, was to be my first official day alone at the Battle Lake Public Library. May Day had always been one of my favorite holidays. When I was ten, my dad sneaked into my room and left a foam cup decorated with pastel ribbons and filled with waxy Tootsie Rolls and cherry-flavored Dubble Bubble gum. I pretended I was asleep until I heard his footsteps on the creaky stairs. The note read “Happy May Day! You know I love you.”

I wondered about the power of small gestures as I woke up without an alarm clock on May Day, and I actually whistled as I slipped out of bed. The night before, I had ceremoniously dumped out all the bottles of liquor in Sunny’s house, and I arose reborn. I decided to go to town early to open a savings account with my sixty dollars cash. Call me an optimist. The seven-minute ride to town was beautiful, with young morning fog webbing the low spots by the sloughs. The air had that waiting-for-the-school-bus smell, and through some cosmic wrinkle, I could actually tune in the good radio station out of Fargo. Sheryl Crow commiserated melodically with me as I pulled toward town.

There were short stretches of road where I couldn’t see any houses, just oak and sumac pressing against the air. It brought to mind the research I had just finished for the second part-time job I had landed as an on-call reporter for the Battle Lake Recall, the local newspaper. The library job alone didn’t pay enough to cover my student loan payments and buy gas and groceries, and besides, I needed to keep my English muscle in shape for when I went back to grad school.

For my first article, I wrote a retrospective piece for the Battle Lake Lady of the Lakes celebration, the first festival of the year. It marked the end of winter and the beginning of the farming season and involved an all-town garage sale, a parade, and a dance at Stub’s. The celebration wasn’t until Memorial Day, but the chamber of commerce wanted to get the word out so they could sign up people for the parade. On the surface, Battle Lake was your average Minnesota town with a population under a thousand—most of the residents were farmers or blue-collar workers, most radios were tuned to the country music station, everybody ate their lunch at the Turtle Stew Café, and the whole area bloated with tourists in search of the perfect fish every summer. My piece delved below the surface, however. It was a full-page article, complete with photos, on the official founding of Battle Lake on Halloween Eve 1881.

As I drove into town, I cracked my window and sucked in some fresh air, thinking how similar it may have smelled a hundred years ago. I stopped near the curb in front of First National Bank, which was tucked on a corner of Main Street. The Battle Lake Public Library, Lakes Area Dental, and a temporarily abandoned building that used to be Kathy’s Klassy Klothes occupied the other three corners. Laid out alongside each of these cornerstones were little knickknack and antique stores, a bakery, a couple hardware stores, a drugstore,
a post office, a church, and various service offices—chiropractor, accountant, Realtor. Standard small-town fare. I saw that the bank was still closed, so I pulled into the library parking lot.

The yellow brick structure was a relatively new addition to the town, built twenty years ago, when William T. Everts had bequeathed his entire estate to create it. The library’s inside smelled like slick magazine paper and recycled air, as it had every morning since I had started working there over a month ago. I walked past the rack of new arrivals, sniffing at Deer Hunter’s Digest, Good Housekeeping, and Bow and Arrow World. The irony, I thought, of magazines created for hunters. It was like having a stadium for agoraphobics.

I peeled off my favorite suede jacket on my way to the library’s front desk, the spring air of lilacs and green melting away from me. After a little fumbling in all of my pockets, I found a damp piece of cinnamon gum, hidden under a glow-in-the-dark fish from a twenty-five-cent machine, a crushed Jägermeister cap, and a tattered fortune cookie strip that said, “You enjoy the fun” above my guaranteed winning lottery numbers. I draped my coat on the back of the swivel chair behind the desk and chewed tentatively on the gravelly Trident.

I flicked my dark, disheveled hair over my shoulder, settled in the captain’s chair, and clicked on the front desk computer. I was now the mistress of this domain. I considered creating a new printing sign. The “NO COLOR PRINTING!!!!! BLACK AND WHITE 10¢ A PAGE!!!!” had way too many exclamation marks and seemed rude with all the caps. I made a mental note to get to that later. Pushing back from the desk with a little whirring sound that propelled me the fifteen feet to the front entrance, I flipped the sign to Open, unlocked the single glass door with my keys-on-a-spiral unit, grabbed the four books resting askew in the overnight dropoff bin and the newspapers off the ground, and scooted back.

For a small-town library, it was pretty well stocked. The new fiction section was kitty-corner from the front desk, next to the newspaper and magazine racks. On the other side of the reading carrels were the metal turning displays stuffed with paperback romance and mystery books, so popular with the tourists and the elderly. Twelve tall wooden bookshelves were filled with the more scholarly works: the Dickens, the Hemingway, the I’m Not Crazy, I’m Angry: How to Cope with a Bad Temper.

The reference section was tucked into a dark spot near the storage room. The children’s area, with its Lilliputian blue and yellow chairs, ratty stuffed animals, and big-lettered books, was parked in a cozy corner under the windows. This was my favorite spot, because of the sunlight and because the kids always got so excited about the books. It was comforting in my current situation—single, barely employed, and mildly superior with no one to appreciate it. You see, I now considered myself a cosmopolitan gal. It was easier to pretend that I was biding my time and finding my wings in a small town rather than to face that I had failed in the big city.

I finished the setup routine as Lartel had taught me—put away the books, make sure sufficient pencils are lined up on the counter, dust the tables—and then settled in behind the counter. The cheery chime of the door opening revved my heart up a little, I’m ashamed to say. Here I was, a city girl excited about dealing solo with my first library patron. I turned to see who the eager reader was but also reached for a magazine so we could both pretend I wasn’t snooping. The library can be like a doctor’s office. Patrons reveal deeply personal information about themselves by what they choose to read, and discretion is a must, especially in a small Minnesota town. The married mother of four who checks out The Joy of Sex paces nervously, paging through the new fiction section until the gas station owner has left, himself shoving Prozac Nation between a book on fly-fishing lures and Chilton’s latest. I loved looking inside people’s windows, so to speak.

And speaking of love, it just so happened I was wondering if I was going to get any in this town I was tied to, at least for the summer. My only hope was the massive tourist population bringing in some dark-haired male who knew that the word “seen” couldn’t be used without a helping verb, as in “I seen the biggest buck in the woods today!” Maybe I was shooting too high.

I studied today’s first solo library patron out of the corner of my eye and corrected myself. Here was a stranger with brown hair that curled around his ears, late thirties, and I swear his green eyes reflected intelligence. I crossed my legs to keep a whistle from escaping between my thighs. If practice makes perfect, I’m pretty good at judging people, and I judged him to be worth further examination. Of course, desperation does lend a certain graciousness to my opinion.

“Good morning.” His voice was mellow, cheerful. “I need information on the history of Battle Lake. Where do you suggest I start?”

I smiled. It was serendipity, baby. I filled him in on the pieces I knew from my recent Recall article, focusing on the details that I thought would impress him. I explained that the village of Battle Lake was platted Halloween 1881 for Torger O. and Bertie O. Holdt. By 1885, there were 182 residents of the village, but newspaper references allude to unusual amounts of bad luck being visited on the inhabitants—mysterious plagues, crop rot, and intense weather were only the beginning. The first white settlers found Ojibwe burial mounds scattered in the region, forty-two near the lake’s inlet alone. Local legend had it that whoever took over the land that had once belonged to the Indians would be cursed.

Ninety-some years later, the settlers’ descendants, filled with church-supper-type guilt, used city funds to erect a twenty-three-foot fiberglass Indian warrior, complete with faux-leather beaded pants and brown moccasins molded onto him. They called him Chief Wenonga, after
the Ojibwe chief who originally named the town, and planted him in Halverson Park on the north side, where he forever looks northeasterly across the lake at his old battle site.

His statue looked exactly like one of those little plastic Indians that came with the cowboys in a bag of a hundred in the 1970s, but in full garish color. That, in fact, is when the Chief was built—1979. A fiberglass monstrosity popular with tourists and the trophy mentality of central Minnesota. I had splashed a photo of him—full headdress, six-pack abs on a half-naked body, tomahawk in one hand, other hand raised in a perpetual “How”—in my Lady of the Lakes article. The stereotyping killed me, but I had to admit as I snapped the photo that if I were a single, twenty-one-foot-tall fiberglass female, I’d be cutting my eyes at the Chief.

“Fergus Falls will have even more information,” I told the patron, wrapping up my story. “It’s the county seat. Or try the East Otter Tail Museum in Perham. We pretty much just carry brain candy.”

He smiled at me. I could tell by the way his eyes crinkled at the corners that my first estimate of his age had been correct—about a decade older than my soon-to-be twenty-nine, give or take a year. His teeth were strong and white, and I chose to ignore the fact that he was short, only a couple inches taller than my five foot six. He was also stocky, with a broad chest and ample arms extending from his white polo shirt. He had on the Teva-type sandals that suggest activity, and his khaki shorts revealed strong and evenly haired legs. I hate patchy leg hair on guys. You wonder what’s rubbing what. Around his waist he had tied a blue-checked flannel shirt.

I held out my hand. “My name is Mira James. Can I ask why you’re interested in the town’s history?”

He took my hand with his warm, hammy fist and shook it firmly. I’d lay money that he held it a little longer than necessary. “My name is Jeff Wilson, and I’m working for a company that wants to bring some business this way. I need to get the lay of the land, so to speak.”

“So you’re like a surveyor?” I asked, disappointed. I was hoping he was something cool, like an independently wealthy explorer or a psychiatrist who didn’t mind house calls.

“Something like that,” he said, chuckling. “I’m an archaeologist.”

Ooh. I quickly added that to my list of cool things a guy could be. “Well, this town could use some more business. And I’m sure you won’t have any trouble finding whatever you need about the town’s history. It’s pretty straightforward Minnesota stuff.”

“The paper history search is the least exciting part of my job,” he said, leaning on my counter. “The fun stuff is hiking around the area and surveying the land.”

“I bet that’s fun,” I said enthusiastically. I loved being outside in the green. “There’s some great hiking around here. What area are you going to check out?”

“A mile and a half southeast of town.”

“Over by the old Jorgensen farm? It’s beautiful over there. I just hiked in those woods,” I lied. I wanted to connect with him.

“Actually, it is the Jorgensen farm. I understand there are no heirs, and the estate can’t afford to pay the mortgage, so it’s due to go up for sale.”

“Mortgage? From the way people tell it, the Jorgensens have owned that land for years.” I hadn’t been in town long, but I had visited Sunny enough to be current on local gossip.

He shrugged. “Things happen, people need to borrow money against their property. It’s pretty common in farming communities.” He looked around the small library and back at me. “You’re welcome to come out there with me, Mira,” he said, trying out my name. “I’m doing a preliminary exam this afternoon. We could get some grub
afterwards.”

Some part of me knew better than to go out with a guy who used the word “grub” when asking someone on a first date, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt because he wasn’t from around here. How little I knew.