September Mourn

by Jess Lourey

Aeon had the only flashlight, which he’d need to use sparingly given the number of windows on this side of the building. Fortunately, the moon was nearly full and the streetlights outside reflected through the floor to ceiling windows, giving me enough faint light so I could see around the interior of Janice’s office well enough to read the letters on her desk.

  That’s not what I had come for, though. I was after something bigger and stranger.

  I took stock of my surroundings. The office was small, no more than ten feet by ten, and it was dominated by a huge, old wooden desk placed in the center. Two metal filing cabinets as tall as me stood beside the desk, pushed against the wall Janice’s office shared with Lars’. On the opposite wall was a door that must lead to a closet. To my right, a dull leather couch hugged the cheap paneling, leaving only a ten-inch channel between it and the desk.

  I rifled through the drawers of the desk and the filing cabinets, but that search yielded only paper. There wasn’t anything untoward behind or under the chair or couch, or in the cushions.

  That left only her closet.

  Pulling open the creaky door, I stared at a spare power suit that looked an awful lot like a hanging body in the shadowy light. I squelched my fear and pushed the outfit aside. Nothing in back, including no secret door, which I always checked for when searching places I wasn’t supposed to be. My pulse hammered with the urgency of my search. If even one of the princesses came back early and discovered Aeon and I snooping around here, we’d be in deep trouble.

  My last hope was the top shelf of the closet, which was stacked with shoeboxes, each with a year written on the end in thick black marker. I couldn’t quite reach the bottom of the shelf, and so hopped and pulled, hopped and pulled, until I wrenched a box loose, this one marked “1999.” One more hop and it was out, but it slipped from my hands while I was hauling it down.

  The top came off, and an explosion of jewelry and human hair showered down on me.

  Thirty-Five

  “Ew! Ew!” I danced around, shaking off the disembodied hair. The chunks landed on the ground with soft thuds, like mice falling from the sky.

  “What is it?” Aeon asked, running into the office. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Well, something, but nothing I didn’t expect. Janice has boxes of trophies in her closet.”

  “Come again?”

  I knelt down and began gingerly tucking the earrings, bracelets, and other baubles back into the box. I was less eager to touch the hair. Each chunk was taped at one end, making it look like a homemade paintbrush. On the tape, Janice had penned information about the source of the hair. I currently held “Alicia, 1999, 4th runner-up” in my hands.

  “Earlier this week, I was talking to some of the Milkfed Marys. Megan, one of the runners-up, mentioned that one night she had woken up to see Janice leaning over Ashley’s dormitory bed. At first, I thought it was connected to Ashley’s murder, but then I noticed that three of the Milkfed Marys were missing a small strand of hair from their heads. Janice, too. See?” I held up another brown-hair packet, this one labeled, “Janice, 1999, No grays yet!”

  “Jesus. So all these boxes are full of hair and jewelry she stole from past Milkfed Marys? That’s messed up.”

  I shrugged. “And mostly harmless.” I didn’t mention Janice’s rough life or that I’d lost my dad about the same age as Janice’d lost her sister. If she needed tiny baubles and hair trophies to keep her sane, who was I to judge?

  Glancing back at the stack in the closet, I pointed out to Aeon that they started in 1978. “I’m pretty sure Janice stole my camera after I let slip last Saturday that I had photographed something odd about the back of Ashley’s head during her ceremony. I realized yesterday that the oddness I’d captured had been a piece of hair missing from Ashley’s head, and that the only person who wouldn’t want that known was Janice. She must have broken into the trailer, snatched the camera, deleted the photos, and then returned it.”

  “Weirder and weirder.”

  I shrugged. “She is an odd duck, but in a world where grown women don swimsuits and twirl a baton for strangers, collecting contestant hair as a memento doesn’t seem that odd.” I finished repacking the box, using two pieces of paper to slip the hair in without touching it.

  “Here, let me help you.” He grabbed the shoebox from me and slid it back in its chronological spot. “As much as I’d like to further plumb the psyche of this woman, we need to get what we came for.”

  “I’m with you. You got Lars’ office open?”

  “Come see for yourself.”

  I gave Janice’s office a quick visual sweep to make sure it looked as it had when I’d arrived, locked the door behind me, and padded over to Lars’. The space was a mirror image of Janice’s, down to the couch, desk, filing cabinets, and closet door on the opposite wall. Aeon was already inside, elbow-deep in the filing cabinets.

  “Find anything yet?”

  “Haven’t had time. It looks like this place is mostly a storage room for past pageant materials, though. Check his desk.”

  All the drawers were unlocked. I opened them one by one, removing everything—pencils, erasers, paper clips, notepads—and giving it the once-over before returning it. “Nothing. Did you check his closet?”

  “I’m on it. You look in the garbage and the couch cushions while I search the closet.”

  “Okay, but it might help if the note told us exactly what sort of report we’re looking for.”

  “It’s about an inch thick, spiral bound.”

  My heart grew heavy and icy. “What’s that?”

  “A spiral-bound report. About an inch thick.”

  “Aeon, how do you know that?”

  He looked up from the closet, where he was digging in the back. In the shielded glow of his flashlight, his expression was confused, and then calculating, and then, as if he hadn’t ever had a thought before this moment, completely ingenuous. “That note. It said we were looking for a report that would incriminate Lars.”

  “But it didn’t say how big the report was, or how it was bound.”

  “Oh, my bad. Must be my overactive imagination.”

  As he returned his focus to the rear of the closet, the enormity of my blunder fell swiftly and heavily from the sky, making it difficult to move my body toward the open door of Lars’ office, even though escape was so close.

  Here I was, a wily woman on the trail of a murderer, and I’d gotten into bed with the enemy. I was so caught up in Kate’s embezzling and Lars’ philandering and Janice’s weirdness, that I’d let Aeon lull me into complacency with his kindness.

  If he had access to bomb-making materials in his past, he could certainly get his hands on cyanide now. And he clearly had the skills to access Ashley, or the people serving food and beverages to her. As to why? For the same reason he vandalized the college, or freed the cows, or bombed the lab: to bring attention to the cause of animal liberty.

  What better target than a Milkfed Mary, Queen of the Dairy, representative of the entire Midwest dairy industry?

  I squeezed my eyes shut and visualized moving. It worked, and my right leg shuffled a little, followed by my left. I was two inches closer to the door.

  Aeon backed out of the closet. “You wanna come help me? I think I found something back here, but my hand is too big to squeeze in. Mira?”

  He turned, and our eyes locked. I saw instant comprehension dawn. He straightened quickly, and his movement freed me from paralysis. I dashed to the door and was halfway through before a leg shot out and tripped me.

  “You looking for this?”

  I stared up into a new set of eyes that were in a face that was attached to a neck that was linked to an arm that was holding a one-inch thick, spiral-bound report.

  Thirty-Six

  Delrita bent down to offer me a hand, but I brushed her away. When you don’t know who your friends are, treat everyone like an enemy.

  “I’m fine,” I said, rubbing the knee I’d skinned on my way
down. “Where’d you get that report?”

  She hugged it to her chest. “First, tell me who he is.” She nodded at Aeon, who was balancing between the office door and the dormitory, shifting his weight anxiously from one foot to another. He couldn’t take his eyes off the report.

  “Aeon Hopkins. He helped me break into the office.” I stood and flexed my knee. “You wrote us the note?”

  “I wrote you the note,” she corrected.

  As much as I was on her team when it came to being suspicious of Aeon, there wasn’t time. Something big was happening here, and I needed to know what it was. “Where’d you get that report?”

  “Lars’ office.”

  “And how’d you get the key to Lars’ office?” I backed up surreptitiously, enough so I could see Aeon on my right, still in the doorway, and Delrita on my left, each about five feet away.

  Delrita stared from me to Aeon and back again. She was struggling with a decision, and I let her. Finally, she sighed and plopped herself on the bed nearest the offices, crinkling the fabric of a blue crinoline dress tossed across the bedspread. “Lars gave it to me. He said he loved me, that he’d leave his wife for me. It’s the oldest line in the book, right? But my girls adored him, and I wanted to believe it, the whole package.”

  “You were dating Lars at the same time as Ashley?”

  Delrita scoffed. “Ashley was nothing, a little blonde blip on his screen. I’ve known Lars for two years. I used to be a part-time receptionist at Bovine Productivity Management. It was Lars who convinced me to run for the pageant. Said no one would find out about my daughters, that my being in the pageant would give us more time together. We got plenty of that, here in his office, until Ashley squirmed her way in.

  “That’s why I went after Dirk, that big doofus. I wanted to get back at Ashley, but she could have cared less. She had her eyes on bigger prizes, so I had to get more imaginative.”

  “And you killed her?” I asked.

  “Ha! You watch too much TV. No, I just hid in the closet in Lars’ office and filmed their last boff session with my digital camera. I was going to post it online, but then someone killed Ashley, and I didn’t have any reason to get back at her anymore.”

  Christ on a cracker. “But you still wanted revenge on Lars?”

  “Exactly.” She smiled, but there was no pleasure in it. “Hence this report, which he accidentally left in his office after that last time he screwed Ashley. And believe me, he wants it back. He’s been frantic since it’s gone missing.”

  Aeon’s voice was low, growly. “What’s the report say?”

  Delrita tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Probably nothing you’re interested in. Just a little info about ME, BPM’s best-selling product and Lars’ baby. This past summer, BPM commissioned a private study because of rumblings in the dairy community about ME’s side effects. BPM hoped to set everyone’s fears to rest, but they got bad news. The study found that using ME triples the white blood cell count in the milk, creating a salty product, and in rare cases, causes rapid and irreversible mammary growth when fed to male rats.”

  A picture flashed through my mind: the Bovine Productivity Management representative at the Cattle Barn, the guy who had appeared oddly feminine, but I couldn’t put my finger on why: he’d had man-boobs, and not just the kind fat guys get. He had actual breasts. I coughed.

  “If ME goes down, Bovine Productivity goes down with it. They’ve invested all their capital in that product.” Delrita shared this last point with all the satisfaction of a cat who’d caught its mouse. She had Lars just where she wanted him.

  “Give me the report.” Aeon held out his hand.

  Delrita looked at me.

  “I’ll take it,” I said. “I imagine BPM wasn’t going to release it to the press?”

  “This is the only copy there is. I don’t think Lars was supposed to take it off company grounds.”

  A sudden explosion made all three of us jump. The sky behind the wall of windows lit up in a spectacular spray of reds, blues, and greens. The fireworks had begun.

  “I’m going to get this to the police and inform someone I know at the Pioneer Press about it. Thanks, Delrita.”

  “My pleasure,” she said, her eyes sparkling.

  Thirty-Seven

  My brain was on overdrive. I had every reason to suspect that Aeon was Ashley’s killer, and I needed to get him out of here so he couldn’t hurt Delrita. Then, I’d lose him in the crowds of the fair.

  All my exploration of the fairgrounds would pay off. There was a police station behind the Space Tower that I’d passed many times on the way to the campground. I’d give the on-duty officers the report and let them find Aeon on their own.

  I addressed Delrita. “What’re you going to do now?”

  “My kids are waiting for me at the fireworks with my mom. We’re going to watch them as a family and then say goodbye to the fair for a long time.”

  “Perfect.” I glanced at Aeon. “After you.”

  He nodded, locked Lars’ door behind him, wiped the knob for prints, and led the way across the dormitory. Delrita followed close behind and when I stopped, she almost bumped into me.

  “What?” she asked.

  I turned. On our first meeting, I wasn’t sure if she had been missing eyebrows or if her hair was naturally so pale that they looked invisible. The knowledge I’d gained since then told me it was likely the former, but I wanted to be sure. I hated loose ends. “Can I ask you what happened to your eyebrows?”

  She felt where they had been, suddenly self-conscious. “They just fell out. I think it’s the new Pill I’m taking. I need to ask my doctor to lower the dosage.”

  “I wouldn’t bother. I think Janice Naired your eyebrows while you were asleep, a move she saves for the Milkfed Mary contestants who particularly piss her off. Everyone else, she just pinches a lock of hair or some jewelry from.”

  Delrita felt the back of her head and blew an exasperated breath of air. “I should have guessed. I got out of that pageant just in time.”

  “With any luck,” I said, following Aeon down the steps, hopefully the last time I’d have to traverse them.

  Delrita brought up the rear. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she looked thoughtfully back up the stairs to the dormitory, possibly saying goodbye to a long and unhappy chapter in her life.

  I continued behind Aeon and out a side door. We had no more time to waste. We found ourselves on Underwood Street, which was less traveled then the main thoroughfares of the fair but still had foot traffic. I gripped the report tightly and kept Aeon a little forward and to my left as we marched toward Judson Avenue.

  “I know a shortcut,” he said, ducking into an alley. I took note of all the people around and decided to follow him a couple steps. He immediately stopped.

  “Wait. I forgot my flashlight in Lars’ office,” he said.

  A mental calculation told me Delrita would reasonably be out of the building by now. It doesn’t take long to say goodbye to something once you realized you never wanted it in the first place.

  “I’ll wait for you,” I said.

  Our eyes grappled. He knew I wouldn’t be here when he returned, but he had no way to back down on retrieving his flashlight without exposing himself for the liar that he was. “Thanks, Mira.”

  My mouth was tight. “You bet.”

  As soon as he was out of sight, I oriented myself toward the police station behind the Space Tower. This alleyway was disturbingly empty. I longed to be back in the safety of crowds. The darkness felt all the heavier because of the sporadic blast of light from the fireworks.

  An eerie wail sounded to my right, and my heart stopped. I had been totally focused on the clear and present danger that was Aeon and hadn’t noticed that the alleyway he’d led us into abutted the Haunted House.

  All the liquids in my body turned to ice and it felt like the ground was tipping. The horror of seeing Jenny Cot slip to the floor of the haunted house, bleeding and un
conscious, descended as I relived the moment.

  From this less-public side, the building looked battered, with siding that didn’t match the front, scrub grass all around. The unfinished appearance lent a particularly sinister element to the building, particularly as another scream emanated from inside, coinciding with an earsplitting explosion of fireworks overhead. I clenched my body and decided for the second time in a day that I wasn’t too proud to run.

  “What’s the hurry?” A deep, breathy voice whispered into my ear at the same time a hand clamped on my forearm, the grip so strong it felt like I’d caught my wrist in a drawer. Something sharp pressed into my back, and fear shot through me like poison. “A girl shouldn’t leave the State Fair without visiting the Haunted House, right? Don’t worry. I’ll come with you. No screams, though, or this ride is over.”

  My brain felt as if it had been dipped in Novocain. I wasn’t aware of walking, but my body was moving toward the deserted rear entrance of the Haunted House.

  Up close, I recognized it as the door Jenny Cot had been carried out of by the paramedics. I knew that when it opened, a wash of stale air and shrill screams would pour out. I instinctively struggled, but the person holding me tightened their grip on my shoulder and pressed the sharp object hard enough to pierce my skin. Warm blood trickled down my spine.

  “You’re doing great. Just keep walking. This could be fun.”

  The hand holding me reached forward to open the door. It was gloved, with a denim sleeve buttoned all the way to the wrist. To my left beyond the alley, walking in the brightly lit main street that seemed a mile away, people laughed and strolled, unaware of my terror.

  I screamed, and one of them, a teenaged boy, looked my way. He was momentarily confused, then smiled and gave the thumbs up when he saw I was entering the Haunted House with someone close behind me.

  I thought I saw a head of apricot fuzz peeking around behind the teenager, but his was the last face I saw before being plunged into the endless darkness.