September Fair (18 page)

When one of the riders chose a sheep, she or he pasted a number on their back that matched the canvas number on the sheep. Then, they moved to the sidelines to await the beginning of the competition. No sheep could be chosen more than once, and when they were all claimed, “We Will Rock You,” blared over the speakers.

I wondered how an event this large and noisy could ever be a secret. People walking past the building had to hear the hubbub, though muted, emanating from the walls. As if in answer to my question, Kate Lewis appeared across the floor. She wore a brown hoodie and was hunched over, but she was still recognizable. She got the attention of and then whispered fiercely to a young cowboy, who leaned against the ring and generally ignored her until she slipped him something. He looked at his hand, nodded once without looking at her, and she took off. I couldn’t see what they had exchanged, but I had a hunch.

When Mrs. Berns returned, her beautiful, wrinkled face flushed, I asked her if people gambled on the Mutton Busting.

“Of course. We’re Minnesotans, not Mormons.”

Gambling. It made sense that Kate would be betting on the show if she were in serious debt, as implied by her embezzling. That was one mystery solved. I turned to watch the action. An emcee strolled to the middle of the ring, microphone in hand. Just then, I had a second thought which cancelled out the first. “Mrs. Berns, do the sheepboys here have access to bulls, too?”

“You betcha. Rodeos, mutton busting, cow-roping. All that good stuff goes together.”

I knew that I had never been the target of the escaped beast today. Wild, charging bulls weren’t exactly precision instruments, and there were easier ways to hurt someone. Besides, I couldn’t think of a single reason for anyone at the fair to want to attack me. So why was the bull released? It could have been an accident, but could Kate have had a hand in the “accidental” releasing of the bull? It would bring more attention to the fair, and as Chaz had told me, there was no such thing as bad attention when you were trying to make money.

If my hunch was correct, I hadn’t just seen Kate place a bet on a sheep. I’d just seen her pay off the guy who’d released the bull. On impulse, I asked Mrs. Berns to save my seat and hurried over to the cowboy Kate had just spoken with. “Hi.”

He didn’t look up. He took his laconic, lone rider image very seriously. “Who’s your money on?”

“Number 23,” he said, indicating a little man with blue cowboy boots and a matching hat who was circling his sheep. “He’s won the last two competitions.”

“Thanks for the tip. Say, if I wanted to release a bull into the State Fair and make it look like an accident, who would I talk to?” His eyes, visited by fear and then settled by anger, gave me all the answer I needed. He pulled his hat low and marched off, never having looked me full in the face. I returned to my seat next to Mrs. Berns, feeling satisfaction at having solved one small mystery. And my discovery established that Kate was a desperate woman, one willing to go to extreme measures to attract attention to the fair. I’d need to track her down and ask her some questions.

But no time for that now. The mutton busting was about to begin, and Kennie was prancing into the ring in all her clown glory. The crowd went wild.

In the end, I decided one Mutton Busting event a lifetime was more than enough. Turns out sheep don’t really like to have people on their backs, no matter how skinny they are. It scares them, and they poop when they’re scared. The longest anyone stayed on a sheep was thirty-three seconds, and it wasn’t number 23, who got bucked and indignantly bleated at three seconds into his ride. Kennie was magnificent though, working the audience like a natural. Because the sheep weren’t dangerous, she didn’t need to distract them as real rodeo clowns did with bulls. Instead, she spent most of her time flirting with the men in the front row and circumventing poop piles. The crowd, thinking she was hamming it up for their entertainment, loved her, and she loved the attention.

Throughout the event, Mrs. Berns was making all sorts of backdoor deals as Kennie’s manager and appeared to be in her element. I had no doubt Battle Lake’s mayor and resident geriatric spitfire had found their calling. I expected the town would be feeling the ripple effects of this discovery when the fair ended.

They both had business to attend to after the event, so I ambled back to the trailer on my own. Since no one was around I settled for firing up my computer and researching one Aeon Hopkins, cow rights activist. I couldn’t help but wonder how anybody knew anything before Google as I sorted through the 323,000 hits displayed after punching in his first and last name. I narrowed the search, slapping a pair of quotation marks around his name, and was rewarded with a manageable twenty-four hits.

The first site pulled up was the home page of Mad Cows, Mad People (MCMP). The page layout and graphics were rudimentary, bright and garish colors competing against horrific animations of tottering, terminally ill cows being led to slaughter. I clicked the “About Us” link and was brought to a description of an organization which opposed everything Bovine Productivity Management represented:

“The goal of MCMP is to fight to have animals and the earth treated with respect. We believe that allowing animals to live natural lives in protected areas is their right, and that animals have worth in and of themselves and are not on the earth for human gain. MCMP believes civil disobedience, protests, referendums, and force are all acceptable means of spreading our message.”

According to the staff page, Aeon Hopkins was the director. I returned to the Google search page and discovered that the next three hits were far less flattering. All of them linked Aeon’s name with ecoterrorism, the first tying him to the bombing of a California lab that experimented on monkeys, the second covering a trial where Aeon was charged with breaking windows and spray painting “Puppy Killers” all over a college building that housed beagles used for invasive testing, and the third connecting him to the liberation of calves being raised for veal, though that escapade apparently backfired as the calves were too weak to walk once they were sprung from their narrow stalls. Only one article delved into Aeon’s past.

Apparently, civil disobedience was in his blood. He was the son of Chandra Hopkins and Chad Jacobs, the founding members of GreenFreedom, an international group legendary for their outrageous animal and earth freedom acts. The most famous incident was chaining thirty people to the deck of an oil rig out at sea until the company agreed to pay retribution for a recent oil spill that destroyed miles of coastline and killed thousands of seabirds, but there were hundreds more examples.

The rest of my research didn’t reveal anything else remarkable, but I couldn’t help ruminating over the relative mildness of picketing a state fair. Aeon’s gig here seemed tame for someone of his counterculture stature, unless there was a grander scheme, say the murder of a Milkfed Mary? I pushed the thought away as soon as it appeared. Aeon had saved me from a bull goring today.

In an effort to find likelier suspects, I yanked out my notebook and flipped to the page with Linda Gerritt’s number. It was almost nine o’clock, and I hoped I wasn’t calling too late. She picked up on the second ring.

“Hello?”

“Hi. You don’t know me. My name is Mira James, and I’m covering the Minnesota State Fair for my local newspaper, the
Battle Lake Recall
. Do you have time to answer a question or two?”

“I suppose, but I’m not there this year. I broke my right arm.”

“That’s what I’m calling about. This is the first fair where you haven’t been the head carver, right?”

She clucked. “It’s true, and what a year to miss. That poor Pederson girl died right in the booth.”

“Yeah, I know. I talked to your replacement, Glenda, today. She’s still pretty shook up.”

“I know. But she’s doing a good job. I stopped by today to look at her first two carvings. Beautiful work.”

“I agree,” I said, crossing my fingers. I just wasn’t an appreciator of butter art. “Can I ask you how you broke your arm?”

“No suspicious circumstances, if that’s what you’re wondering. I fell off my shoe crossing the street. Damn clogs.”

Well. That was about as innocent a way to incapacitate yourself as there could be. “Sorry to hear that. Thanks for talking to me, though. I hope you heal soon.” With my phone still in hand, I decided to follow up on another lead. Three rings, then four. Then five. I looked at the digital clock across the trailer. It was after ten p.m. in Florida. I hoped I wasn’t calling too late.

“Hello?” The connection was scratchy, and it sounded like the woman speaking was in a crowd. “Hello?”

“Hi. Is this Shelby? Shelby Spoczkowski from Minnesota?”

A pause. “Hold on.” When she came back on the line, there was still some static, but the crowd noises had disappeared. “Who is this?”

“I’m a reporter covering the murder of Ashley Pederson, recently crowned Milkfed Mary.”

“I’d heard about that.” A click followed by an inhale came down the line. She’d lit a cigarette. “You’re reaching pretty far back for a story, though. I haven’t been connected to the pageant since the Seventies.”

“You moved to Florida afterward?”

“Not right away. I stayed around home till I met my husband. He moved us to Florida and then dumped me for a Barbie doll with fake boobs. I didn’t know a soul out here.”

“You didn’t remarry?”

“No reason to buy the cow when you can get the milk for free.” She chuckled, which turned into a cough. “But you didn’t call to ask about my personal life.”

“No. I called to ask what you know about Janice Opatz.”

“The only Janice I know was Janice Klepper. She was involved in the Milkfed Mary pageant the same year as I was.”

“Are you still in touch with her?”

“Not really. Is she in trouble?”

“No, not at all. I just want to make sure I get the facts straight on everyone. Janice was your first runner-up?” There was more wheezing on the other end of the line, and it took me a second or two to realize she was laughing. “What’s so funny?”

“Oh, you had to have been there, I guess. Janice wasn’t first runner-up. She wasn’t even a contestant.”

My heart picked up its pace. “What?”

“Janice’s older sister was the first runner-up the year I won. Barbara Klepper. Blonde, blue-eyed, the whole package. Too bad she was a snake. Slept around with everyone’s boyfriend, including her sister’s. Janice idolized Barbara, followed her everywhere, begged her way into being a gofer for the pageant chaperone so she could spend more time in her sister’s shadow. She refused to believe it when she found out her sister had done the dirty with her boyfriend.”

“How’d Janice find that out?”

Shelby paused in her smoking, and I heard a stamp and a click as she put out the first and lit a second cigarette. “I told her. I felt sorry for her. She was a bit of an ugly duckling and had the strangest quirks. For example, she’d rub her hands together endlessly when she was agitated, like she was washing them but there was no water. She just about wore her skin off her hands when I told her about Barbara. She wouldn’t hear it, of course, and she was so ticked off at me for badmouthing her sister that she put warm Nair on my eyebrows that night while I was asleep. I never felt a thing, and when I woke up and washed my face, my eyebrows came off with the water.” She started her wheeze-laugh again. “It felt like the end of the world at the time. Funny what’s important to you when you’re young.”

“How’d they know it was Janice?”

“They found the bottle under the extra bed in the dormitory where the chaperone was letting her stay. Janice was never the brightest bulb.”

“Did she get fired from her gofer job?”

“She didn’t own up to it until after the incident. By then, everyone was feeling too sorry for her to punish her.”

“The incident?”

Another drag off the cigarette, this one deeper than the previous ones. “Her sister, Barbara? She hanged herself the day after we all got crowned. There was a rumor she was pregnant and didn’t know what to do, but that might have just been a rumor. You know how those things go.” Her voice trailed off.

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. The pageant directors felt so bad for Janice they let her stay on. I heard she ended up as the chaperone a couple years later, after the original one retired.”

“Yeah. Crazy world.”

“Yeah.” I could hear Shelby’s thoughts tumbling on the other end, reminiscing.

“Well, that’s about all I needed to know.”

“I can’t have been very helpful.” She took a final drag off her cigarette. I didn’t hear her light another.

I was still reeling. “It’s actually been nice to talk to a woman with some perspective on the Milkfed Mary pageant. I appreciate your time.”

“No problem. Take care.”

“You too.” I put down the phone, trying to figure out where this information about Janice fit. It seemed like it was an important piece in the puzzle, but really, it just told me that she’d had a hard life and was unstable in her past and a liar now. That wasn’t much to go on. I clicked over to my e-mail in an effort to rid my brain of negative thoughts, and it worked. I was greeted with a sight that made my heart beat with both trepidation and excitement: I had another e-mail from Johnny.