May Day (10 page)

The next page had the information I was looking for: “Petroglyphs? Call Trillings v.p.” and a phone number. The following page had the words “Interview C. Poling.” That was the second time in twenty-four hours I had heard that name. I was more certain than ever that I had to visit the Senior Sunset. The rest of the pages didn’t offer up anything beyond doodles and measurements, and a thorough search of the bedroom assured me that Jeff hadn’t left anything else. I stashed the important pages in an ornamental tin and then popped the field book into my pocket and the hoops into my ears.

I slid behind the wheel of my Toyota, wet hair stiff from the cool morning air, cheeks baby-naked, and clothes an hour and a half away from being comfortable. When I arrived at the library door, the first thing I noticed was that the police tape was gone. Say what you will, that Gary Wohnt was one efficient cop. I pictured his shiny lips and hair, intimidating bulk stuffed in a uniform, and the overall darkness of his aura. He might have some Native American blood in him by his coloring, but his attitude was all small-town authority. It occurred to me that Wohnt was about the same age as Jeff and had grown up in Battle Lake as well. It might be worth my while to deal with him head on and find out why he thought Jeff had been killed. If nothing else,
if he knew it was me spying on Kennie and him last night, I would rather seek him out than have him hunt me down. In my experience, the more aggressive a woman is, the less guilty she seems. Or maybe it’s the guiltier an aggressive woman is, the less rational she becomes. That’s a hard thing to judge from the inside.

I pulled Jeff’s field book out of my back pocket. I opened up the book to the first clean page, pulled out some paper tails stuck in the spiral coil, and wrote “talk to Wohnt” on my to-do list. I was a pretty good multitasker, but the combination of a new relationship and a death had handicapped me. I thought it best to write stuff down. Besides, it made me feel cool, organized,
and
secretive.

The pages I had pulled out verified that Jeff had gone back to look at the carvings. Petroglyphs, he called them. They must have been so important that he contacted a colleague immediately, perhaps a chick like Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, who had met him at the Jorgensen farm that night. That’s who Scott the Bait Boy had seen him with.

This colleague corroborated Jeff’s findings, probably screwed him in an exotic and mutually satisfying way that a native Minnesotan could only dream about, and then killed him so she would get credit for the find. Or some competing company sent in a female assassin so they could buy the land and its treasure of authentic Indian carvings right out from under Trillings.

Or something like that. I was hoping Curtis Poling could fill in some blanks for me, because I was pretty certain the mound was connected to Jeff’s death. I needed to know why it was such a big deal, and the library would provide answers. I just had to figure out how I was going to talk myself into entering the building where I had found Jeff’s body twenty-four short hours earlier.

I had my ghost-feelers
out as I approached the front door of the library. Except for the guided tour Mrs. Berns was leading for her fellow old-homies, everything seemed in order for a Wednesday morning.

“And here is where I first heard about the murder,” Mrs. Berns creaked as she pointed at the spot on the sidewalk where our paths had crossed about this time yesterday.

“Are milk or rolls included in the cost of the tour, honey?” an old woman in the back of the group asked, her arm raised, revealing dangling, old-lady chicken wings waggling out of her short sleeve. She wore a pink paisley-print dress under a yellowed sweater, an apron, knee socks, and sparkling white tennis shoes.

Mrs. Berns adjusted her sun visor, causing the hand-lettered “Murder Guide” card to fall to the ground. I picked it up and handed it to her. “Good morning, Mrs. Berns.”

“When you gonna open the door?” she asked, eyeing the apron-wearer in the back.

“At opening time, Mrs. Berns,” I said, tapping my finger on the sign on the other side of the glass. “It shouldn’t be more than fifteen minutes.”

“Well, I’m going to need you to speed it up,” she said, fists on hips. Her liver spots brawled for sun space on the back of each hand.

Normally, I’m a stickler for rules that allow me freedom or control over others, but I was in no hurry to be alone in the library today. “OK, Mrs. Berns, you can all come in now, but you can’t check out books until I get the computers up and running, and don’t expect to get in early every day.”

Mrs. Berns snorted but didn’t want to risk losing her in by stating the obvious—crowds weren’t a real 911-type problem at the Battle Lake Public Library.

I inserted the key, rolled the lock back on the tumbler, shoved the door open, and paused a moment. I expected there to be a distinct odor fingering my nose, maybe a mausoleum tang, but between the pungent smell of cleaning supplies in front of me and the push of old folks behind me, there wasn’t much out of the ordinary I could sense.

I stepped back to let the crowd pass and flicked on the lights. I sucked a deep breath, turned on the computer and printers, and performed assorted library stuff, surprised to find the routine soothing.

Lartel, the head librarian, had hired and trained me in, being the only other employee of the library. He was a tall, thick man with eyes green and busy like bottle flies on the dark meat of his face. In his early forties, Lartel was bald except for one of those weird rings of hair bald men refuse to shave off. It started above one ear and wrapped around his head to directly above his other ear. It was like his head wore a mini mink stole to keep it warm. Despite his build and the constant white noise of his wind pants, he managed to fit into the library environment. He had a strong sense of order and talked only when necessary.

“Unlocked the door?” he asked me on my first day on the job.

“Yup.”

“Turned on the computer?”

“Yup.”

“Then walk the aisles.”

This was his term for “shelf reading”—going up and down the rows, book by book, and making sure no one had defiled the memory of Melvil Dewey by slipping out an H347.23 to glance at the cover and sliding it back into the H347.12 spot. I walked the aisles a lot under Lartel’s fleshy gaze, and sometimes, when he wasn’t looking, I marched down them like a soldier.

I stumbled through pretty well during my three weeks of training with him. It wasn’t that hard to be a librarian’s assistant, really. Type an author or title in the computer, and if it comes up, you got it; if it doesn’t, you don’t. If the book is available, you walk over to the appropriate aisle and hunt till you find it. I had always had a gift for finding things, probably because I was so good at hiding. My favorite part of the job was putting away the books. It had a sensory appeal, the smooth and colorful hardbacks sliding cleanly into place, a little bit of the world falling in order.

I tuned out the chicken chatter of Mrs. Berns’s tour as I gathered up the books from the overnight dropoff. The bin had been empty when I left the crime scene yesterday, but it was nearly full today. I suspected the unusual number of returned books was more a product of ambulance chasing than a sudden surge in civic duty. I must have been in a mini-trance, because Mrs. Berns and her group were at the front desk all of a sudden.

“Where’s the mess?” Mrs. Berns demanded.

I focused my eyes and grimaced. “It’s all cleaned up, Mrs. Berns.” Then I paused. “Right?”

“Riiiight,” Mrs. Berns said, wagging her head and drawing out the word. “It’s all cleaned up and we’ve wasted our time. I promised a tour, and everyone is terribly disappointed that there is no murder evidence here.”

I looked past her blue hair to the group of six waiting behind her. Actually, they all looked pretty pleased just to be in a new building. They also all were starting to look a little birdlike, and I wondered if I was going to have to start putting out old-people feeders to appease them like I was doing with the feathered population. I dismissed the idea as too expensive—bridge mix and date bars didn’t come in bulk like thistle seed. So I did the best I could given the circumstances.

“He wasn’t shot in the library, Mrs. Berns, so there wasn’t really any blood here. But the police did find a bunch of pencils on him, and we’re giving them away as souvenirs to our first visitors of the day.” I reached below the counter and pulled out the box of omnipresent library mini-pencils. I had always wondered why libraries didn’t just buy regular-length pencils that would last longer, but now that I worked at a library, I knew there were some things you didn’t question. That’s just how it was.

Mrs. Berns eyed the box suspiciously but didn’t have any options left if she wanted to keep the crowd happy. She grabbed the container out of my hand, passed it around, and dumped what was left into her purse. “Come on!” she said and marched toward the door.

They were almost all out when a thought occurred to me. “Wait!” I yelled.

The Apron Lady in the back stopped and turned to me, smiling kindly. “Yes, dear, you don’t have to yell.”

“Sorry,” I said, walking over to her. “Do you know Curtis Poling?”

She blushed and looked down at her pristine tennies. “Yes, but you should ask Mrs. Berns about him. They’re an item, you know.”

Super, I thought. Even the octogenarians were getting some around here. “I don’t need to know anything personal,” I said. “I just wonder if you think he would be around about eleven o’clock today. I wanted to ask him some questions about the town’s history. For an article I’m writing.”

Apron Lady smiled. “Curtis is always around,” she said. “Around lunchtime, he’ll be out fishing.”

“Thank you,” I said. She opened the door and twirled out. I hoped I could still twirl when I was her age. I turned my attention back to the library and realized that I should go check out the place where I had found Jeff’s body. I wasn’t going to have anything sneak up on me. I strode purposefully toward the aisle and turned to look down it. Nothing but fresh, clean, tight-weave Berber.

Out of curiosity, I went back to the reference section. All the encyclopedias were accounted for and in order, even the
L.
Around the encyclopedias were two unusual displays Lartel had told me were from his own personal collection: on the top shelf, his stuffed fish collection, and on the bottom, his array of Battle Lake High yearbooks, starting in 1953 and going right up to last year. On a hunch, I kneeled down and traced my fingers across the annuals’ green faux-leather spines and slipped out the book for 1982, the text of the invitation I had found by Jeff’s body imprinted in my mind.

The yearbook’s front cover had a red-faced Indian in a headdress, a fighting “whoop” coming out of his mouth. Underneath were etched the words “Battle Lake Battlers Class of 1982.” This yearbook was from the self-involved eighties, before racism and violence were recognized as contagious. In recent years, the high school had changed its mascot to the bulldog. It was still mean, but no dogs were going to picket the choice.

I made my way to the seniors’ section and marveled at the shiny, feather-haired class of ’82. Class song: “Thriller,” by Michael Jackson. Class movie:
Zapped!, Porky’s, Gandhi
(three-way tie). Class TV show:
The A-Team.
Sad world deaths: John Belushi, Princess Grace of Monaco, Barney Clark. Class colors: green and silver. Class motto: “Love Lift Us Up Where We Belong.”

I flipped past these specs as well as the Best Smile, Best Attitude, Most Likely to Marry a Lawyer, Most Likely to Go to Jail, et cetera, results and went straight to the
W
section, which didn’t take long given the meager number of graduates in this small town. Sure enough, Jeff Wilson’s picture stared back at me, his hair shaggier and his eyes tighter but his smile still wide and generous. I felt a lurch on my heart and had to sit on my heels. He had been really cute.

I ran my eyes over the picture to Jeff’s immediate right and was satisfied to find a replica of Chief Wohnt, then listed as Gary Wohnt, his hair greased back with some sort of shiny, dirt-attracting substance, his acne fierce, and his neck muscles intimidating even in the head shot. I wondered what having a name that is a negative sentence does to a person. Turns one into a cop, apparently.

Kennie Jensen, now Kennie Rogers, was on the preceding page, actually looking beautiful in an early eighties sort of way. She could really pull off that drugstore doll appearance back then, her hair tight and curled, skin firm, blue eyes bright. I could see why Jeff had fallen for her. I glanced at the rest of the senior class, but no one else stuck out.

I closed the book with a muted thump and slid it back in its home, then went out to my car to get the invitation. It must at least be related to Jeff’s arrival, if not his death. It was too much of a coincidence that he graduated in the class of 1982 and there was an invitation to a class of ’82 party by his dead body. I suppose “class of ’82” didn’t have to refer to Battle Lake’s graduating class of 1982, but there really is a pattern and order to the universe if you look for it. Besides, the invitation was in the class colors, green writing on a silver background.

I traced my fingers over the date: Friday, 15 May. The military format of the date struck me, as did the lack of a year. Of course, since there was a day, it had to be either the day after tomorrow or a Friday, May 15, six years in the past or six years in the future.

I didn’t know whether this invitation to a masquerade had fallen out of Jeff’s clothes or been intentionally left by his killer, but there was a really good way to narrow the possibilities. I added mask shopping to my notebook list of lunchtime activities.

I returned to the front desk to check my e-mail. The only thing in my inbox was a forwarded e-mail from Gina. Apparently, she had entered her e-mail address when she created my online dating ad, and the cute Moorhead State professor had written to say he enjoyed my ad and would like to meet for coffee, considering he was only a hop, skip, and jump—eighty miles—from Battle Lake. I considered replying to her and telling her to knock it off. Then I considered replying to him and telling him it was a mistake and I wasn’t looking to date. In the end, I just deleted it. I had too much on my plate right now.

I spent the next chunk of the morning searching the Internet for “Minnesota Indian carvings.” There were 1,470 hits, but through a combination of luck and doggedness I came across one with pictures that matched what I had seen: the Jeffers Petroglyphs. The page was a link off of the Minnesota Historical Society site and informed me that the Jeffers Petroglyphs were over five thousand years old and found among the prairie grasses of southern Minnesota. According to the site, the carvings illustrated holy ceremonies and hunting rituals. The picture on the web page, like the carvings I had seen, was breathtaking in its simplicity and importance. And certainly petroglyphs in west-central Minnesota, hundreds of miles from the Jeffers Petroglyphs, would be something to write about.

It would also be something to immediately call your supervisor about if you were a surveyor for a company interested in building. Jeff had told me that Trillings wouldn’t build over Indian artifacts. When he found the petroglyphs, he must have called the company and told them that this spot was a no-go. But then why had Karl told me a rep had called him and said they wanted the land? I wondered how much Jeff really knew about the company he worked for. Apparently they had no compunctions about building on sacred ground or lying to their employees. Maybe they didn’t mind murder, either.