September Fair (4 page)

The line wasn’t long.
Unless you’re an addict. “What’s the hold up? How long do they take to make? How do you think they fry it without it melting?”

“Would you relax? For $5 a pop, let’s assume they’re using space technology.”

When it was finally our turn, Mrs. Berns traded the clerk an Abe Lincoln for what looked like a palsied funnel cake. “Where’s the Nut Goodie?” I asked.

The man behind the counter smiled. “We freeze it, bread it, fry it, and sprinkle powdered sugar over the top. Trust me. It’s in there.”

Not convinced, I turned away and sniffed at it. It smelled like a donut.

Mrs. Berns nudged me. “Shit or get off the pot.”

“Fine.” I bit in, expecting molten lava to sear my tongue to my teeth. Instead, my mouth was filled with warm, chocolatey, nutty, maple goodness. I moaned. “I might need some time alone with this.”

“You’re welcome.”

“No, seriously. Try this.” As she ducked her head in for a taste, I pulled the fried Nut Goodie back. “On second thought, I don’t think I can share. Maybe you should get your own.”

Mrs. Berns shook her head in disgust and took off toward the Dairy building. I followed, whispering endearments to the fried candy bar as I nibbled at it. Nut Goodies have been a part of my life for over a decade, ever since I’d bought my first green-and-red-wrapped one on a whim at a gas station. Out of the wrapper, the candy is round, brown, bumpy, and looks about as appetizing as a hairball. One bite, though, and you’ll be hooked. The first sensation you encounter when biting in is decadent chocolate, which is quickly countered by a satisfying peanut crunch, and finally, complete immersion in a blissful wave of maple candy center. I’d eaten them quick, like a naughty habit, and slow out of the freezer, but never deep fried before. The holy trinity was complete.

My private ecstasy was cut short by the horde of rubberneckers and camera crews lining Underwood Street in front of the Dairy building and curving around Judson Avenue. The chocolate that had just brought me so much joy abruptly grew leaden in my stomach as the reality I’d been trying to avoid ever since the Dairy building went black hit home. A young woman in the prime of her life had just died in front of a crowd of hundreds, and I had known her parents. The death was new, but already the front of the building was lined with teddy bears, pom-poms in Battle Lake’s signature red and blue, and small bouquets of flowers.

I swallowed the starchy taste in my mouth, chucked my licked-clean Nut Goodie stick, clipped on my press badge, and took out my pad and pen. Mrs. Berns, who was nowhere in sight, had been right: I had a duty as the only Battle Lake reporter at the fair to cover Ashley’s death.

Near me, KSTP television out of St. Paul had cleared an area around a thick and towering teenager in a letter jacket. Behind him, two young, golden-haired women were laying white flowers near the door to the Dairy building, which was cordoned off with police tape. The KSTP interviewer was speaking to her camera man. “OK. We’re on in ten.” After a countdown and a signal, the light on the camera snapped on. “Hello! I’m Angela Klein, reporting live from the Minnesota State Fair. Today, in a tragic turn of events, Ashley Pederson, Battle Lake native and recently crowned 54th Milkfed Mary, Queen of the Dairy, died.

“In a time-honored State Fair tradition, Ms. Pederson was inaugurating the fair by posing as her head was carved from butter. She and the sculptor, Glenda Haines, were sitting in the rotating, refrigerated booth supplied by the Midwest Milk Organization when the lights temporarily went out in the building. When power returned, Ms. Pederson was discovered dead in the booth. At this time, police have not ruled out foul play.”

A weight, heavy as a gravestone, pushed down on my shoulders. The announcement brought the image of Ashley’s slack face and her brightly colored skin back into my head, and I’d been trying hard to erase it. I sighed. As much as I wanted her death to be from natural causes, it was time to face facts. Someone was to blame. Eighteen-year-old beauty queens with their lives in front of them didn’t just keel over and start glowing like a cherry lollipop. I was involved, like it or not.

“Here with us is Dirk Holthaus, Ms. Pederson’s boyfriend. How did you find out about her death, Dirk?”

He blinked and adjusted his letter jacket, which must have been an XXXL. The medals sewn on the front jangled, and I squinted, trying to figure out what sports he was in. “I was in the building when it happened. I saw the ambulance take her away. Her mom was there, too.”

“What can you tell us about the circumstances surrounding her passing? Did she have a heart condition, or was she in some way predisposed to premature death?”

He seemed to struggle, whether with the length of the words or his recent loss, I didn’t know. I also didn’t recognize his name or face, which meant he wasn’t from Battle Lake. It was odd for an Otter Tail County girl to date an outsider, though summers brought vacationing families from the Cities to the region, so maybe that’s how the two of them had met. I wrote down his name and placed a question mark next to it.

Dirk responded. “I don’t know anything.”

There was an edge in his voice that made me wonder how long they’d been dating. He didn’t seem broken up at all. Rather, he acted peeved, like he’d been interrupted in the middle of a
Guitar Hero
session. I wrote his behavior off to shock, and watched as the camera crews finished interviewing bystanders before packing up. I couldn’t help but notice that behind the commotion, the two blondes had been retrieving and then placing the same bouquets near the entrance of the building since the cameras had started rolling. If my guess was right, they were Milkfed Mary runners-up and might give me some quotes I could use in an article. I wasn’t coldhearted enough to interview Dirk, even though he didn’t seem like he’d mind, hanging around the door of the Dairy building as he was.

When the crowd dissipated to regular fair size, I strode up to the girls, both of whom had apparently come from the same Pretty Blonde Girl™ mold. “Hi. I’m Mira James. From Battle Lake. Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

Their expressions changed slightly at the mention of Battle Lake, but they overall looked exhausted. They both had lines under their eyes, and their mouths were droopy. “Sure.”

“I can’t help but notice that you’ve been moving the same flowers around for a while. What’s up?”

They exchanged glances, and the shorter of the two spoke in a high-pitched, almost childlike voice. “You said you’re from Battle Lake?”

“Yeah. I’m a reporter for the paper there.”

“Did you know Ashley?”

“I’d never met her. I knew her reputation.”

This interested both of them, judging by the light it ignited in their faces. I continued, improvising based on what Ron and Mrs. Berns had told me. “I got the impression that she didn’t have a lot of friends at school. I took it she was one of the bossy girls. She didn’t work, but she had designer clothes and her own car. I think she was captain of the dance team.”

The taller girl spoke. “That sounds like her. I’m Christine, and this is Brittany, by the way. Our chaperone told us to come down and act busy around the flowers. I think they want to make things look good.”

“Make what look good?”

Brittany interjected in her slide-whistle voice. “Everything. The Milkfed Mary pageant is a big deal. A Queen has never died before, not at the State Fair. I guess they don’t want the whole industry to get a bad name. We were told to stay as long as there’re cameras around.”

“That’s pretty cold.”

Brittany shrugged. “It’s the beauty pageant world. It’s a lot about appearances. Hey, you’ve got something on your face. Right here.”

She pointed at the corner of her mouth, but once I started licking around mine, I realized she was being kind. If my tongue was any judge, I had a perfect rim of Nut Goodie chocolate circling my lips with a little powdered sugar thrown in for good measure. “Thanks,” I mumbled, pulling a tissue out of my purse. Eager to change the subject, I asked them what they knew of Ashley while I wiped.

Christine spoke up. “We’re only supposed to focus on the good stuff, you know? It’s part of the Milkfed Mary creed.”

“OK, what good stuff did you know about Ashley?”

The both squinched their foreheads as if trying to remember the procedure for splitting an atom.

“She was pretty,” Brittany offered. Christine nodded.

“Anything else?” I asked.

Christine glanced around. No one was paying any attention to us. “Look. We didn’t like her much. She was stuck up. She made fun of dairy farms and people who worked on them. And she stole things.”

“Like what?”

The girls looked quickly at each other and then Brittany found her shoes very interesting. “Ask Lana,” Christine said.

“Lana?”

“That’s all I can say. Really. We’re supposed to be putting on a united front.”

“One more question. Do you think she died of natural causes?”

Christine leaned in grimly. “I’ve lived on a farm my whole life. I’ve seen animals born and I’ve seen them die, but I’ve never seen anything drop that fast and turn red as a stoplight. I was right up front when her body was carried out, and she looked like she’d been dunked in blood. Me and some of the other girls think she was poisoned.”

There it was, my worst fear given voice. Ashley Pederson had been poisoned. Someone had murdered Battle Lake’s Milkfed Mary, Queen of the Dairy. “Well, thank you for your time. I appreciate you talking to me.” I took off into the crowd, a sugar-and-stress headache knocking at the back of my skull.

Mrs. Berns materialized alongside me. “What’d you find out?”

“Not much. You?”

“Not much.”

A glint in her eye suggested otherwise, but my headache kept me from pursuing it. “You got any ibuprofen?”

Mrs. Berns dug in her purse and came out with two red and white tablets. As I made spit, I prayed they were over the counter. “Where are you headed now?”

“I want to play some Midway games. Last year, I won a big Scooby Doo at the pool tables. Care to join me?”

“No thanks. I need to find a contestant named Lana, and I think I know just where to look.”

The Midwest Milk Organization
always housed its Milkfed Mary and her runners-up in the top floor of the Cattle Barn while they were appearing at the State Fair. At least that’s what the people at the Information booth told me. The barn was a huge brown brick structure that looked like an industrial concert hall with a stretched-out A-line roof capping the solid edifice. Over the door hung the blue, white, and green words “CATTLE BARN” painted two feet high above an ornate and somber bull’s head carved from granite.

As I craned my head to look up the bull’s nostrils, I decided that being forced to sleep in the Cattle Barn smelled like a raw deal. Cows tramped in and out, and the air was heavy with the aroma of sweet straw and gritty manure for ten feet on each side of the building. Once I stepped inside and climbed the steep, curving cement stairs to the second floor, however, I was greeted with a neat dormitory, one enormous room containing twelve beds side by side, six on the left wall and six on the right, a few vanities sprinkled around, a dowel strung to the ceiling to hold gowns, and a bathroom complete with shower, toilet, and sink. Sunlight streamed in from grand windows along the far wall constructed of sturdy glass blocks, book-sized squares of light piled one on top of the other until they were 20 feet tall. At this level, the odor was more stale bedding than cow butt, and the facilities were no worse than my digs in the trailer.

Two closed doors led off the far side of the gigantic main room, one marked “Chaperone” and one marked “Office.” Since the place was currently uninhabited, I strode across the expanse of the dormitory to try both doors. They were locked. I considered snooping in the dresser drawers, but since most girls no longer embroidered their names on their underwear, I didn’t think it’d do any good as I was up here solely to verify the name of one of the contestants. I guessed that the Lana who had been mentioned was a Milkfed Mary. How else would Christine, Brittany, and Ashley, all from different sides of Minnesota, know her? But there were easier ways to find out than rifling through underwear drawers. I had just come to satisfy idle curiosity, to keep busy so I didn’t have room in my head for the image of Ashley’s dead eyes. I was on my way down the curved stairs when I heard footsteps coming up from below.

My heart started hammering. A woman had been murdered this morning, and here I was snooping around her dormitory. It wouldn’t look good, and this is exactly why I shouldn’t have gotten involved. I couldn’t escape without going past whoever was coming toward me, and there were precious few places to hide upstairs unless I wanted to cower behind a rack of off-the-shoulder taffeta gowns. I settled for slipping back up the stairs so I could walk back down more nonchalantly. After all, who doesn’t get lost in the cattle barn? My foot was on the first step descending for the second time when I heard the sniffling. Whoever was coming up was crying. Shoot. I wasn’t good at dealing with criers. Actually, I wasn’t a fan of any emotion. If I had my way, any sort of honest interaction would involve hand puppets.

I tried making myself invisible, but as soon as the woman ascending the stairs rounded the corner, I knew that would be impossible. It was Carlotta Pederson, mother to the recently deceased 54th Milkfed Mary, Queen of the Dairy, and she looked like she’d been smacked by a train.