September Fair (24 page)

It was nearly dark
when we left the trailer, at least as dark as possible on the neon-lit fairgrounds, and I had won back most of the money I’d lost the night before. Aeon was an agreeable loser, and I got to see deeper into his laidback side, the noncrusading, knock-knock joke aspect of his personality. “What time are the fireworks supposed to start?”

“Ten o’clock sharp. The Milkfed Marys should all be backstage by now at the Grandstand, getting ready to introduce the event.”

“It does look dark up there,” I said, indicating the second floor of the Cattle Barn ahead. “Are you any good at picking locks?”

“It’s one of my many talents. My parents taught me young.”

I looked at him sideways. “You guys ever do anything normal, like go to the zoo or play on the swings?”

“Zoos are the worst kind of prisons for animals. We had a tire swing in our backyard.”

“Good to hear. You ready, Freddie?”

“Ready. This should be a breeze, by the way. Old locks are the easiest to crack.”

We sauntered into the now-familiar Cattle Barn with about 50 other people. As usual, the traffic was constant. Inside, fair workers were delivering a late meal to the farmers who had animals on display. They each received a Styrofoam container of what looked like beef stroganoff, corn, bread with a square of butter, and 2 percent milk. The cows didn’t seem to mind that the farmers were munching on their relatives and byproducts, but I realized that I would never be able to look at beef or dairy products the same after the adventure of this week.

Our plan was to nonchalantly stroll up the stairs to the dormitory as if we were expected, and that’s just what we did. If anyone was wise to our subterfuge, I didn’t notice because I was too busy trying to appear innocent.

The door at the top of the stairs was locked for the first time in my experience. Aeon directed me back down to the bend in the stairway to keep an ear out for any unexpected arrivals while he got to work. Within minutes, he had the door open. The dorm was a little eerie at night, like a strange Goldilocks fantasy where all the beds were empty but the bears might return any minute.

“Let’s make this quick,” I whispered, as we tiptoed across the expanse of the dormitory to the offices on the far side.

“You don’t have to tell me twice.”

“Wait,” I said. We were in front of Lars’ office. “Can you unlock Janice’s office, too? I need to check something.” I hadn’t tipped my whole hand to him. It just wasn’t in my nature.

“I thought we were supposed to be quick.”

I smiled, but didn’t tell him what I was after in the office. “It’ll take me a second.”

He pinched his lips but didn’t argue. I watched, fascinated, as he knelt in front of Janice’s door and brought out a soft leather pouch of what looked like metal toothpicks in various sizes. When he said that old locks were the easiest to pick, I had envisioned him flipping a tiny tool out of his Leatherman, not unrolling break-in gear as calmly as if he were pulling a tissue out of his pants.

“You always carry picklocks around a fair?”

“You and I lead different lives, Mira.”

The words felt condescending, and I reacted defensively. “Probably, but that doesn’t explain you carrying around a full set of picklocks. What else are you packing? Plastic explosives? Guns?”

He stopped in mid-pick and turned, standing to face me. He held his hands over his head, and his voice was much gentler. “You can search me. Wait, I’ve got a better idea.” He turned all four of his pants pockets inside out, revealing their contents. “I’ve got a wallet with seven bucks, some gum, a healthy dose of lint, a Swiss army knife that I’ve carried around since I was ten, and up until just now, the picklock set. I like to be able to get in and out of any place, always have, but I wasn’t lying about being a pacifist.”

We stared at each other for a few seconds, him patient and me undecided. Soon enough, I realized we had come too far to turn back, so we might as well keep working together. I trusted him less and less with each passing moment, though. “I’ll assume you don’t have any dynamite taped to your ankles. Can you open that lock or not?”

“Watch me,” he said, grinning, and sure enough, he had Janice’s door unlocked in under thirty seconds. He held it open for me and went to work on Lars’ door after I slid through.

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.

“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.”

“She is an odd duck, but hey, beauty pageants in general are weird. In a world where grown women put on 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 put 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 ya’. 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’ office. 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.