Knee High by the 4th of July (11 page)

I was pissed. Off.
I was mad at Johnny for not being in love with me, even though he was turning out to be a sneak, and I was furious at Dolly for horning in on my territory. The argument could be made that she didn’t know I was interested in Johnny, but I wasn’t in the mood for generosity. Mostly, though, I was mad at myself for falling for another guy. Love always ended badly for me. I couldn’t even fall for a fiberglass statue without it ending poorly, for the love of Betsy.

I was so caught up in my dark mood that I didn’t notice Brando stroll out of the woods, and I walked smack into him.

“Oh! Sorry.” This was my first face-to-face encounter with him, and based on the carnivorous once-over he gave me, he seemed to be enjoying it a great deal more than I was.

“Not a problem. Where are you going in such a hurry?” He grinned and winked.

“I’m not a big fan of fireworks.”

“Mmm.” He beckoned over my shoulder. “See anything interesting back there?”

From where we stood, I could see the outlines of hundreds of people staring up at the sky over by the beach, but there was no foot traffic near us, and the closest blanket of people was a few hundred yards away. Feeling slightly uneasy, I swatted at a mosquito and went from defense to offense.

“Just bright lights in the sky. What about you? What are you doing back here?”

He laughed and held out his hand. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Brando Erikkson. I’m in town for the festivities.”

I shook his hand reluctantly, noting his smoothly manicured nails and strong fingers. “Mira James.”

A light of recognition flared in his eyes. “Sure. You’ve got that column. Kennie mentioned you.”

I’ll bet. “So,
you
see anything interesting back there?”

“Not much. There’s a path down to the lake, but some young lovers were making the most of the night, so I turned back.”

Ouch. “Well, it was nice meeting you.”

“Some of us are having a party after the show. You should join us.” He laid a light hand on my shoulder. “Maybe you could do an article on me.”

“Yeah, maybe.” I pushed his hand off my shoulder and stomped off. The party would probably be a good place to gather more information on the missing Chief, but I was in no mood. I located my car without spotting any law enforcement and rolled home.

I fell into a funky sleep right away and awoke to a bright, shining fifth of July, my head pounding from a broken-heart hangover. I didn’t feel like eating breakfast, or cleaning, or watching TV, or gardening, or doing anything else I normally do to pull myself out of a dark mood. That left only mowing the lawn, all one and a half acres.

I don’t enjoy the actual act of mowing the lawn, but I love the clean smell of fresh-cut grass and the soft, trimmed carpet of green afterward. I strolled down to the outbuilding where I stored the mower, listening to fuzzy bumblebees the size of peanut M & Ms buzzing against the petals of my summer flowers. I gassed up the old Snapper rider, checked the oil, and yanked the whipcord. The engine fired immediately, and I began the bumpy job of trimming the grass. I divided the lawn into segments. First, I mowed the area between the silo, barn, and two sheds. Then, I trimmed the strip running parallel to the mile-long driveway and the tiny beach area down by the lake, and I finally cleared off the wide section circumscribing the house, ducking low to avoid the branches on the far perimeter.

As I mowed, I let my mind drift. My world had been turned upside down in less than a week. The strangeness had come with this intense, portentous heat, and there was no end in sight. First, Kennie had come back from hush-hush training the middle of last week, which I now knew had been her radical cheerleading camp. Then, at the planning meeting the next day, Dolly and Les interrupt the proceedings with their crazy talk about getting rid of Chief Wenonga. Lo and behold, the next morning the Chief disappeared and someone left behind a bloody chunk of head. That very day, an angry Gary Wohnt showed up at the library looking for me, a first.

Throw into that mix a missing Native American impersonator from yesterday’s parade, and it all became too weird for words. Dolly and Les were the most likely suspects, but I didn’t like the smell of Brando Erikkson on the scene, especially since he was somehow connected to Les. I knew where those two were at the time the Indian mascot disappeared, though, so that put Dolly on the hook as suspect number one. I experienced a cheap thrill at the idea of pinning her as the culprit, but it was too easy. If you’re going to steal two Native American representations, why announce your position at a very public meeting? If it were a publicity stunt, she would have claimed it by now—unless she had something else planned, like an Indian-stealing trifecta.

I returned to my other burning question: how does a twenty-three-foot statue disappear under the cover of night? I knew that the Battle Lake police officers trolled the main drag at least once every hour, so whoever took Chief Wenonga must be a pretty quick statue dismantler, which would point the finger squarely at Brando. But why would he steal the statue? He had a whole pile of ’em back in Wisconsin. It made more sense that Les, who made a name for himself flouting authority, would have removed the Chief. He certainly had access to the big equipment I would imagine was necessary—his brother owned a construction company in Perham.

Two hours of mowing, and I had a hot-sticky body but no answers. It wouldn’t be easy, but I would have to find the Chief to find his abductor, and that’s all there was to it. A good place to start would be to interview the people who lived in the handful of houses around Halvorson Park to see if they had seen or heard anything suspicious the night the Chief was stolen. That would be my next step. After that, I would visit Johnny’s cabin, though the idea unsettled me. What game was he playing, asking me to watch his cabin, lying about leaving town immediately, and meeting up secretly with Dolly at the fireworks?

I parked the mower and walked on shaky legs back to the house. I considered taking another shower before I left but decided there was no point. Johnny had moved on. The Chief was gone. Who was I trying to impress? I hosed the grass flecks off my legs, turned the spray on the garden to refresh my vegetables, rinsed my face and hands in the chute of water, and hopped on my bike. The smell of gasoline lingered on me and became cloying in the concentrated heat of the midday sun, but I couldn’t pedal fast enough to escape it. By the time I reached Halvorson Park, I was sweaty and flushed. The good news was that the 5K race was scheduled for today, so there were a lot of sweaty and flushed people around as well as a crowd to provide me cover.

When I strolled up to the house nearest to Halvorson, my bike at my side, I realized my luck was holding out. The tiny, 1950s square blue box of a house was having a garage sale. I parked my bike, sauntered up the driveway, and rummaged through a pile of old record albums, pausing to admire the bright cover of Engelbert Humperdinck’s
After the Lovin’
. Next to me were two older ladies I didn’t recognize.

“Isn’t this your cookbook?” The white-haired woman nearest me held out a worn Doubleday Cookbook roughly the size of a wheelbarrow. She used a lot of her face when she talked.

“My name on the inside cover?”

The second white-haired woman opened it up. “Yup. Trudie Johannsen, 1952.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. I sold that at last year’s all-town garage sale.”

“You want it back?”

“How much is it?”

“Two dollars.”

“Christ on a cracker! I can’t hardly pass up a deal like that. Give it over.”

The secret of the all-town garage sale was laid bare. Everyone was just recycling their stuff around town, year after year after year. I knew the high school was even selling old trophies they didn’t have room for anymore.

I grabbed a frizzed-out hair tie with a nickel sticker on it and walked up to the scowling lady sitting at the card table, a steel box full of change in front of her. “Can I buy this hair tie?”

“If it’s got a sticker on it, you can buy it.”

I handed her a nickel and shoved the band into my pocket. “It must be weird not having Chief Wenonga to look at anymore.” I gestured toward the park.

The woman glanced over at the Chief’s former home, then back at me. She adjusted herself on the chair, one enormous polyester-clad thigh creating a sucking vacuum against the other. I noticed her eyebrows were overplucked and hung over each eye like a long gray toenail clipping. “You want to buy anything else?”

I looked around and reached for a half-f bottle of perfume next to her. “How much is this?”

“Fifty cents.”

I gave her a dollar and waited for change. “I don’t suppose you saw what happened?”

“Don’t suppose. By the time I looked out, all there was to see was a girl standing there, her hands on the post.” She jabbed her thumb in the general direction of where the Chief statue had been as she stared down into her change box. “Looked an awful lot like you.”

I sucked in a quick little breath. “Really? Wouldn’t that be hard to tell from this far away?”

“I got eyes like an eagle. You wouldn’t want to buy that Vikings helmet, would you? Chris Carter wore it in 1996.”

I looked at the beaten-up purple and gold football helmet and sighed. “How much?”

“Twenty dollars. Chris Carter wore it in 1996.”

“Mmm hmm. There’s a lot of women who look like me around, don’t you think?”

“I think it depends on whether or not you want that helmet.”

“Sold.” I traded her a twenty for a helmet full of a stranger’s sweat and high-tailed it out of there before she extorted any more cash out of me.

I didn’t have any more luck at the next house over, or the next. At the fourth house I stopped at, I learned that the owner had seen a car leaving Halvorson Park early the morning the Chief disappeared. My heart soared until I was told the car was a small brown Toyota. Two people had seen either my car or me at the scene of the crime. Now I knew beyond a doubt why Gary Wohnt was after me.

Since no clues were forthcoming in this neighborhood, I hopped on my bike and pedaled out to Johnny’s cabin, which was on Silver Lake, a mile and a half north and a little west of Halvorson Park. The lake was small and clean, but the west side was swamp so only the east side had cabins and houses on it. I had never been to Johnny’s cabin, but last night at Stub’s he had assured me that his name was on the mailbox, and there’s only one way to go around a lake. I pedaled the flat stretch to Silver Lake, coasting when I reached it so I could read the mailboxes. Sweat raced down between my shoulder blades, and I vowed to invest in some aluminum-laced, heavy-duty deodorant and anti-perspirant next time I was in the Apothecary. This sweltering heat wasn’t gonna let up.

I pedaled the winding lake road once and didn’t see Leeson printed on a mailbox. It was on the second pass that I noticed the dirt road snaking up into the woods to my left, at a spot where the tar road was veering away from the lake. I followed the dirt trail that led to a handful of tucked-away rustic cabins, so close together and similar that they looked almost like an abandoned resort. The cabin farthest from the entry road and closest to the lake had a black mailbox at the end of its driveway with “Leeson” painted in bronze on it.

I parked my bike and trod carefully toward the leaf-covered mud puddles in the center of the driveway. As I drew closer to the cabin, a hot breeze kicked through the treetops, making a scary whisper in the popple leaves. It was otherwise spooky quiet back here, except for the distant drone of an Evinrude. The other cabins must be summer retreats and looked unoccupied from where I stood. I stripped off my T-shirt and used it to wipe the sweat off my neck and chest, and, standing there in a sports bra and shorts, I wondered if it was a good idea to continue. No one knew where I was, and Battle Lake hadn’t been a safe place as of late. I stood with my hands on my hips, T-shirt tucked in my waistband, and forced myself to get up some nerve. It was daylight, bright as a new penny, and nothing bad happened when the sun was out.

Seven long strides and I was at a low spot in the driveway. If it rained, this would be where the puddle would form. Right now, though, it didn’t look like it had rained in this spot. It looked like a deer had been gutted and dressed out. There were brown winter leaves, probably carted in from the woods by Johnny, and they were smeared in crusty red. I grabbed a stick and poked at the pile until I dug up a white piece of rubber, stained red—one of the balloons, and when I pulled my stick back, it was also smeared with red. Whoever had driven over the balloons had done so within the last day. Judging by the amount of splatter, Johnny’s plan had worked. The paint was still wet in spots. Whoever had been out here now had paint on their car.