May Day (18 page)

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.

I walked the mile
to the high school, taking the long route and running my hands along the edges of the lilac bushes on the way. Hidden water drops slipped onto my fingertips. If the Chief had an invitation to the party, that meant I hadn’t found his invitation in the library. Maybe nobody had lost their invitation; maybe it had been intentionally left there to get me to the party. I was going to find out one way or another in a few hours.

By the time I got to the Battle Lake High School, it was almost five. The original architect must have had a bomb shelter in mind when he built it. The whole structure cried out, “I’m sturdy, not pretty!” Fortunately, a wealthy patron and 1954 Battle Lake graduate—the same one who had sponsored the library—had donated a million dollars to the school a couple years back, and an innovative art center, library, and new gym had been added on. That section looked like something out of Epcot Center, but it was all done in the same shade of puce for
continuity.

There weren’t any people out front of the pale building, so I went to the doors of the original section. There must have been some sort of extracurricular practice going on, because the green doors opened with a sigh. My hair lifted up slightly as a gust of pheromones, fish sandwiches, freshly copied paper, and some syrupy Calvin Klein imposter cologne kissed my cheeks. Aaah, the smell of high school.

The front lobby had a few vending machines, recycling bins, and droopy ficuses. This space was the bottom leg of a T, with the head being a gigantic trophy case and the arms row upon row of gray lockers. The entire layout of the trophy case was set up to display the crucified green and white football jersey with the number 17 emblazoned on the back, underneath the name WILSON in all caps. The fallen football player effigy in Lartel’s creep room had been Jeff.

I walked closer to the case and was alarmed and validated to find a group shot of Lartel, Kennie, Karl, and Jeff. Karl and Lartel had on coaches’ clothes, Jeff was in full football uniform, and Kennie was a cheerleading princess. Their arms were on one another’s shoulders, and the caption read, “The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Beautiful. Division Football Championship Game, 1982.” I wondered which one was which, and where Gary Wohnt had been when that picture was taken.

I eyed the halls to my left and then to my right. They were identical except for an open door at the far end of the right hall. I thought I could hear faint processional music coming out of it, and I walked in that direction. My soft shoes made no sound on the tiled floor. I smiled at the sameness of all small-town high schools. The lockers were papered with “Go Team!”–type stickers, and there were cheerleader-painted pep posters on the open walls—“We’ve got spirit, yes we do, we’ve got spirit, how about you!”

It brought me back to my high school days. I had always gotten along OK with my classmates, but I hadn’t made any lifelong friends. The people I thought I knew the best faded after my dad’s accident.

In my senior year, a new doctor moved to town and brought along his large Irish Catholic family. His oldest daughter was in my grade, and she was in track with me. She had red curly hair, glasses, sporadic acne, and cool clothes. We happened to sign up for job search on the same day and both ended up in the closet of a room set aside for determining our future. The file cabinet was full of career likeliness tests, and the walls were lined with Occupational Outlook handbooks.

While I was cracking some joke about what a waste of time it all was, Mary sneezed and farted at the same time. We both laughed so hard it hurt. I went to the bathroom to get some Kleenex, and when I came back, a girl whom I had gone to school with since kindergarten was in my seat whispering to Mary. They both got quiet when I walked in, and I knew they had been talking about my dad. It rotated between me being the daughter of a drunk or the girl whose dad had killed a mom and her baby. It didn’t really matter what they called me. It all worked the same. Mary didn’t have much time for me after that. Manslaughter Mark strikes again, this time from the grave, to devastate his daughter’s life. Having a dead person tied around your neck is a horrible way to live.

The gray Battle Lake High halls probably had their own stories to tell, probably housed their own broken kids. Thank God high school lockers can’t talk. As I got closer to the door I could hear music coming out of, I had an
Alice in Wonderland
moment. The closer I got, the smaller the door got. I was fifteen feet away before I realized it was one of those miniature access doors that usually lead to a furnace room or utility space.

This doorway was about three feet high, and the actual door was thin metal with an indent in lieu of a handle. The siren song of curiosity tapped at me. I looked quickly over my shoulder at the empty hallway, pushed the door open all the way, and crawled in. I felt my way over empty boxes that smelled like mothballs. There was enough light slitting through to show me that I was in some sort of theater storage room and that all the boxes contained costumes.

I inched my way forward to a little barred window. I looked down and realized I was in a storage room attached to the old gym, which now served as the theater for school performances. I knew there must be a way to get from where I was down to the gym, but I couldn’t see it in the darkened space.

The music was much louder where I was, and I could see it was coming from a boom box down by the stage, about thirty feet from my hiding spot. The black stereo scratched out a tinny version of “Love Lift Us Up Where We Belong.” I wondered what play was being rehearsed, and I was about to leave when I realized I was listening to the class of ’82’s theme song. I looked back through the slits and was unsurprised to see Kennie emerge from the cheap-looking velvet curtains that covered the stage.

She wore a tight, peach-colored chiffon gown, floor length and strapless. I could see pointy heels snaking out from underneath, and they were dyed the exact color of her dress. Her makeup was visibly thick, even from this distance. She had a glittery tiara on her head and a “Miss Battle Lake ’82” banner over her shoulder and wrapped around her waist. She walked strongly from one end of the stage to the other, her chin tipped forward and a brilliant smile on her face.

At first I thought she was waving the parade wave to an imaginary crowd, but then I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I pressed my face against the cold metal bars, but I could only see the right shoulder and what looked like a head with a hat on. I was clearly looking at a man, but I didn’t know which man.

I had to see who had come to watch Kennie’s disturbing beauty pageant for one. I leaned back and looked at the vent. In the slit of light from the open door behind me, I saw that only one Phillips head screw held it in at the top. I pulled out the Swiss Army knife attached to my key chain and used the tip of the nail file to turn the screw lefty loosy. I turned slowly and quietly, my movements lost under the music blaring from Kennie’s stage.

The screw was out three-quarters of an inch when I realized that the loosened vent was falling into the gym, not onto my lap as planned. It clattered the twenty feet to the floor and froze Kennie in mid-wave. She stared right into my eyes, and I was halfway down the hall before I realized there was no way she could see me in the half-lit space.

I finished running outside and through a couple alleys before I forced myself into a walk. I didn’t want Kennie or her mystery audience to discover my spying. Who was watching her, besides me? Right now, I figured it was Gary Wohnt or Lartel, but it could just as well be Karl, the way the cards were stacking. I got to my car unaccosted but couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being followed. I decided my safest time passer would be to go home and wait for the class of ’82 party. I had a feeling I would find familiar faces at the gala event.

On my way home, I stopped at Swenson Nursery to pick up a flat of annuals. I needed to relax and clear my head, and gardening was my drug of choice after liquor and Nut Goodies. The spicy green scent comforted me on my drive.

When I walked in my front door, Luna at my heels, I did an extra careful eyeball and nose scan of the place. I wanted to make sure there were no dolls or fish waiting for me. The front room was just as I had left it. There was a sectional couch in early tacky-cabin print, a small color TV that got channels 7 and 29 if I had the rabbit ears and tinfoil just right, a bookshelf high on the wall and another on the floor, and plants lining the windows. I didn’t like clutter. The more you had, the more you had to clean.

The kitchen was divided from the front room by an island counter. My spices and oil neatly lined the countertops, and there was no bad smell that I could discern. I strode to the fridge, its front covered with pictures of people I knew and places I had been, and reached in for some string cheese. I moved to the table to read through the mail I had grabbed on the way in and saw that it was two bills and the community newsletter. I paged through the newsletter. It was mostly community ed classes—volleyball, computer basics, lefse making.

I walked over to the office and spare bedroom, which I normally kept closed. Both rooms were stacked wall to ceiling to wall with Sunny’s stuff, and both appeared untouched.

I stepped over to my bedroom and was gratified to see Tiger Pop sprawled on the bedspread in a fading sunbeam. When I was five, my dad told me I could be anything I wanted to be when I grew up. “Then I want to be a cat,” I said. My cat reminded me daily why that had been one of the best ideas I’d ever had. I ran my fingers over his sleek calico fur, pausing to scratch his favorite spot by his tail. The rest of the room was in order—a dresser, a closet, a mirror, and a nightstand.

The main bathroom looked good as well, except for the telltale rust stains made permanent by well water. I wondered what that orange would do to my hair over a period of time if it stained plastic and porcelain so profoundly. I could also smell Tiger Pop’s litter box. I was thinking about training Luna to be one of those poop-eating dogs to take care of that problem. If you pass a problem off for long enough, it sometimes really does fix itself.

I stripped off my clothes into a pile on the floor and pulled on a gray T-shirt from a bluegrass festival over a bikini top and some weathered jeans, their knees permanently freckled with dirt. It was time to garden, and Tiger Pop followed me outdoors. Outside, I knelt in the sun-warmed dirt, hands on knees, and closed my eyes. I shut out Jeff, I shut out the birds, I shut out my dad, and I shut out fear.

When I felt myself fully in the moment and the dirt, I dragged my fingers through the spongy soil and released the rich smell of the earth. First, I would weed. This was mostly cosmetic, as few of the bad guys had had time to grow since I was last here. The little sprigs I did find were so close to the earth yet that I had to dig my fingernails down and hook them at the base to pull them out whole. They came up smoothly, their roots white and tender. I laid them on the dirt to be sacrificed to tomorrow’s sun. If it was cruel to let them die slowly, so close to the salvation of the moist dirt, I didn’t think about it. There would be order in my garden.

Despite its appearance, gardening is rigorous work if you do it right. I was sweating from the concentrated activity, and stripped off my T-shirt. The sinking sun felt purifying, and the dirt was warm and solid in my hands. When pictures of Kennie’s disturbing beauty pageant began to sneak in, I moved from vegetables to flowers. I cleaned out the twelve scattered flower/weed beds that Sunny had started last spring and never really followed through on. This gave the late tulips and daffodils a new blush and allowed me to plant the eight packs of annuals I had bought on my way home.

My heart started to triphammer at the thought of crashing the party tonight, so I moved to planting, patting down the cooling soil around the spicy orange and gold marigolds, white alyssum, and sweet red and deep purple petunias in the well-lit areas. In the shade gardens I planted wax begonia, impatiens, and coleus. The red and white begonias made excellent edging with their glossy bronze and green leaves. The impatiens were pink and lavender and framed by the greens, whites, and burgundies of the coleus leaves. I also dug down to worm level to plant dahlia bulbs and scraped the earth to seed some zinnias.

When the sun began to set around eight, I realized I had been in the dirt for a couple hours. My hands were rough, and I knew it would be at least a week before I got all the dirt from under my fingernails. I smiled at my cat, who was sucking up the last bit of sun next to me, eyeing the dog warily. I patted his side, leaving little dirt balls to irritate him. I rolled my stiff shoulders and pulled myself up, my legs creaking from all the time kneeling. My two gardening tools—a little dirt fork and a hand spade—went back to their home by the front steps. After my outdoor cleanup was done, I sat on the front porch, which was really a splintery reddish picnic table with some steps built into it. I put my chin in my hands and looked down at the lake, and then back at the very neat rows of flowers I had planted. My mind, body, and heart were reconnected.