by Jess Lourey
I glanced over at the copy of the Recall I had saved for him, folded over on the passenger seat. The article had come in too late to fit anywhere but the second to last page. That was lucky, because otherwise the mug shot I had taken of him Friday morning by a tree would be staring back at me.
It had turned out to be a fairly short article because there was a lot I didn’t know, more than I thought. It mentioned his name, his profession, and that he worked as an archaeologist for Trillings Limited. I wrote that Trillings employed Jeff to investigate the Jorgensen property, which had been rented out or rested under the government’s CRP plan since Ella Jorgensen passed away seven years earlier. I referred vaguely to Trillings’s “development plans” for the area. Out of fairness to Jeff, I had mentioned the number of jobs it would bring to the community and how it would offer more family-oriented activities.
Ron had been happy to run my article because the bowling alley had pulled its full-corner ad at the last minute, the reason being that Liza Klohn, the owner of Bowl Me Over, had heard that the newspaper was going to start charging the Lutheran church for its bingo advertising. It was Battle Lake’s version of an economic embargo. My article fit perfectly in the hole.
As I watched the night-clouded trees whisk past, I thought about being back in a small town, and I was a little disturbed by how quickly I had fit back in. The nearest town to the hobby farm I had grown up on with my mom and sometimes dad was one of those two-bars-one-church-and-a-post-office settlements that make up the Minnesota landscape. Everyone knew each other, at least enough to gossip, and most of the boys worked at the turkey farm, and the girls worked at the Dairy Queen. We’d all converge on summer Saturday nights to pour our pilfered liquor into a big garbage can with some ice and Kool-Aid. We called them “wop” parties, and we’d get drunk, dance to Top 40 tunes, and end up making out with someone. When I was in high school, we picked up dates like you pick up cockleburs. If they stuck, they were yours for a while. At least, that’s how it was until I became Manslaughter Mark’s daughter, a social pariah at sixteen. After that, no boy dared get close to me, even under the cover of night. I told myself that I didn’t go to the parties anymore because I was in track and it would blow my chance at placing in regionals.
I met my friend C.C. the fall I started at the U, and we had been drinking friends ever since. She was the roommate who introduced me to Sunny, who had gotten me to Battle Lake. I felt some pull toward this slow life, as much as I mocked it. Besides, in my pre-life crisis there was something comfortable and soothing about returning to a small town for a while—it was like visiting the people I used to be.
And Sunny’s farm was beautiful. It was a house in a box—just add water—but it was new and clean and it looked out over Whiskey Lake. The hundred-plus acres were covered with hardwood forests, rolling hills, and wildflowers. A person can get used to waking up with hummingbirds outside her window and apples trees blooming on her lawn.
I was still only slightly above tourist class to locals, but the more they saw me, the more they got used to me, especially since I was a friend of Sunny’s, whose open smile and relaxed attitude had made her a town favorite. It was all starting to feel pretty comfortable, and having Jeff in the picture only helped.
But now, I discovered he had lied to me by omission and he had stood me up. I wondered if it was because I had slept with him on the first date. Popular culture holds that this is a turnoff to men, the thrill of the chase being over and all that. However, in a farming community where bars and churches are the main entertainment, sex becomes more of a welcome distraction than a taboo, accepted but not acknowledged. Of course, Jeff likely was not recently familiar with the customs of the region, archaeologist or no. I sighed as I pulled into the long, rutted driveway.
Oh well, I thought, I was no worse off than before he had arrived. I was pretty sure I loved him, though. He was funny and well read and laid back, and he noticed the little things that made me happy. He was an exceptional lay, too, in a way that only men in their late thirties can be. Maybe he would show up and have an explanation for everything, I told myself as I parked the car. He could have gotten in a car accident, banged his head terribly, and forgotten about our week together until he found the picture of me I had snuck in his wallet and then realized I was the one, for example. Could be he was shopping for a ring right now. I got out and stretched in the temperate night air and decided to do some gardening to clear my mood.
The house was unlocked, as usual, and I traded my white tank top and Levi’s for gardening clothes. This unusually warm spring had goaded me to plant early despite the warnings of locals. I planted vegetables to have an excuse to pull weeds, anyhow. Weeding always relaxes me. Something about the quiet ripping sound makes me feel in control. And when I’m done, and I inspect my clean, straight rows of hairy little carrot sprouts, store-bought tomatoes, and zucchini leaves peeking out of the ground, I believe there must be some sort of order in the universe. Tonight was no exception.
After the weeding was done, I pruned any third sprouts at the forks of my tomato plants and built up the mulch at their bases. I used newspapers covered with grass clippings to keep the weeds out and the moisture in, and as I straightened them, I scared up the unique smell of rotting newspaper—musty, fertile, and brown. Next, I arranged the seeking baby arms of my hardy new squash plants so they would have room to spread. I was careful not to disturb them where their tendrils had grasped the ground.
I gardened in the moon-colored dark, a contented Luna at my side, until the cool air made my fingers stiff and the toothless bugs of spring became annoying. I went inside to shower and took the edge off by mowing through an economy-sized bag of dill pickle potato chips and watching Fried Green Tomatoes. I was trying not to take my date’s disappearance personally. I was a nice person. At least Tiger Pop and Luna thought so, when they weren’t too busy harassing one another. I headed to bed early, wondering what sort of day it was going to be at the library tomorrow.
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 mo
ve 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.
The library was officially closed for the rest of the day while the state police investigated and then the local janitorial service sanitized the building. Actually, the local service was just Mr. Bethel, who cleaned cabins and businesses during the summer, and I wondered if he had the proper dead-removal products. He wouldn’t need much. There was very little blood on the scene, including Jeff’s clothes. Before Chief Wohnt left, I asked him what he thought of that.
“I think he was shot somewhere other than the library, his clothes changed, and then his body brought here.”
That Gary Wohnt was going to make detective yet. After he drove away and I was convinced I was alone, I went to my car and yanked the envelope out of my waistband. “For Your Eyes Only,” embossed in an elaborate green script, were the only words on the creamy envelope. I pulled out the silver card inside and flipped it open, surprised to find that it was an invitation. A smaller version of the ornate script scrawled out this message:
You are invited to a Class of ’82 party to be held on Friday, 15 May. Come masked. You cannot enter without this invitation. One invitation per person. Go south of Battle Lake on 78, east on Eagle Lake Road 2.7 miles. On left, blue house, white mailbox. C U there!
I did a little math and had a tickling at the back of my brain. This card was telling me something, and I wasn’t going to let the English major in me be distracted by the annoying, vanity-plate-cute “CU there!” on an otherwise elegant invitation to a masquerade being held in three days. Try as I might, though, I couldn’t make sense of it, so I stuck it in my glove compartment for later study.
Suddenly, I felt lost but couldn’t think where I wanted to be. I craved a huge drunken bender, but I’d been doing so well curbing my drinking. I settled for a chocolate binge, and I knew just what kind I needed.
To the uninitiated, the Nut Goodie isn’t much to look at. The frenetic pine-green and clown-red wrapper yells of old-fashioned candy stores where you could dig your hand into a jar and pull out ten waxy pop bottles for a dime. The Nut Goodie itself looks like a rubber gag toy, the kind you wouldn’t want to find next to your cat. The whole bar is as big as the palm of a grown woman’s hand and consists of a domed sugar-maple center with peanut halves sprinkled on thick. Then, there is brown, waxy chocolate spilled over it all and hardened in a free shape around the outside. It looks like the unfortunate result of a bad meal, but it tastes like heaven.
If you’re a Nut Goodie newbie, I suggest you start with one of the chocolate lips that has spilled off of the whole. It’s just chocolate-covered peanuts, and it’s a good way to get your feet wet before biting into the so-sweet-it-makes-you-cry maple center. The maple concoction is the magic in a Nut Goodie. It’s not gooey like caramel. It’s a nice, staid, Minnesota middle, the texture of thick buttercream frosting—one bite would kill a diabetic. The Pearson’s Company first started creating them in St. Paul in 1907 and hasn’t looked back.
I’m addicted to the Nut Goodie, but I’m a controlled addict. I only allow myself one in times of stress or joy, and then I always let the chocolate and maple bites melt in my mouth until the peanuts are the only solid before I chew. I savor them, feeling the maple center get under my fillings and into my brain, enjoying the tingling s
ugar rush that follows, the clarity of vision and purpose that can only be induced by a Nut Goodie high. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Pearson. Of course, there’s a price to pay. The Nut Goodie come-down is rough, with an accompanying pain similar to an ice cream headache. I needed a Nut Goodie now, God help me maybe even two. I barged into the gas station, fisted them, paid for both at the counter without making eye contact, and returned to my car. I ate the first like a starving rat, and it calmed me enough to suck on the second slowly. As I felt the soothing buzz hit, I had an idea of what to do with myself.
I needed some physical action to offset the heavy feelings that were threatening to smother me. Returning to Sunny’s trailer seemed too confining, and the stares I was already feeling around town told me I didn’t want to hang out here. I decided to to buy some shoes and go for a drive. Twenty minutes and a pair of cowboy boots later, I found myself at the old Jorgensen farm, the Nut Goodie magic maple center still corroding my teeth. I parked and walked out toward the spot Jeff and I had visited the Friday before.
Strange how death gives a person ownership over the life of the deceased. I had spent a week with Jeff, but now that he was dead, we had a permanent relationship. What could have been if we had had more time? We were obviously compatible. He was the most interesting person I had met in a long time. I felt cheated and was starting to feel a little scared. I was a murder victim, once removed.