Bonnie & Clyde’s was jumping. Thursday night is close to the weekend for a reason, was the saying. At least that’s what they were saying at the bar. I needed a crowd of people around me, so this was ideal. I wanted a vodka cranberry, but that meant that I would have to swallow some Clitherall ice, and besides, Ruby would probably have to go to the store to get the cranberry juice. I settled for a shot of tequila and a beer and leaned against the bar, wondering if people could tell where I had been. Something as dramatic as Lartel’s little doll shop of horrors should leave a mark.

“Hey, girl, drinking two days in a row! Welcome home!” Gina was loud enough to be heard from ten feet away, but nobody turned to look. Yelling was expected here. She pushed her ample girth through the crowd, her platinum hair glowing in the smoky light.

“Gina! Come with me,” I said urgently and pulled her toward the back.

“Hey, hey, heeeyyy now! Where’s a hi?” slurred a voice next to me.

“Hi, Hal.” I waited until we were in the relatively quiet recreation area, then told Gina what I had done. Spock looked down at me sagely from the back of the pinball machine as I filled her in. “I swear, Gina, it was the creepiest thing you’ve ever seen. Dolls everywhere, and they were doing stuff. I think I even saw a doll massage parlor in the corner of the room.”

Gina’s eyes were perfectly round. “Jesus H. Christ. You know, there’s been stories about Lartel, but he mostly keeps to himself.” She smacked my arm. “I can’t believe you snuck into his house! If you do that again, I’m going to fucking kick your ass.”

“I didn’t even tell you the worst part. There was a doll dressed up like a football coach, holding the hand of a cheerleader doll, standing over a murdered football player doll. Lartel used to coach Jeff in football in high school, and Karl told me Kennie used to be a cheerleader. What does all this mean?”

“I think it means he’s a freak,” Gina said. “And I’m a nurse, so that’s a medical diagnosis. Shit. He must have had something going on for Kennie back in the day. Were there any recent pictures of her?”

“None.”

“He must have coveted her pants right off.” Gina did a full body shudder like only wet dogs usually do. “You know who you should talk to is Bev Taylor. She works mornings at Ben’s Bait, and she used to be a cheerleader in the eighties. She for sure knows Kennie, and there’s no love lost between those two, so she could fill you in on all the dirt from back then.”

I was beginning to calm down, soothed by the safety of numbers. Lartel’s house started to feel like something I had imagined, light years away from the sounds of beer mugs clinking on tabletops, pool balls clacking together, and raucous bar laughter. “I wouldn’t mind making some sense of this.”

Gina nodded understandingly. “So you’re pretty sure Lartel had something to do with Jeff’s death?”

“I don’t know. His voodoo room is the definition of suspicious, but I don’t know how he could have, unless he came back from Mexico, killed his cousin, and then ran back to the beach.”

“Maybe he never went.”

I looked at her, but she was leering off in the distance, her eyes bouncing off her husband to the back end of the man he was talking to. “Do you see that tight ass on Tony? Too bad he still wears acid-washed jeans.”

“Do you think Lartel is still around, Gina?”

“I was just kidding, Mir. I’m sure Lartel went to Mexico. Why would he lie about that?”

“So he’d have an alibi while he killed Jeff.”

“How could he know Jeff was coming? Nobody knew.”

“But Lartel was family. Jeff might have told his family. For all I know, he’s the reason Jeff came to town. He had been looking up some info on Trillings online.”

“Maybe,” Gina said doubtfully. “But Lartel has been planning this trip for months. That’s why they hired you, you know. It’s the first vacation he’s taken since he started at the library. Besides, why would he want to kill his own cousin? Playing with dolls doesn’t make him a murderer.”

“I don’t know, Gina. Obviously he’s unstable, and he’s got a thing for Kennie. Maybe his perpetual jealousy finally snapped. Or maybe he is holding a grudge because Jeff wouldn’t play in the last football game at state.”

“A high school football game is not a reason to kill, Mira. Tony’s ass, on the other hand . . .” A smile played at the corner of her mouth.

I rolled my eyes. Gina had expended all of her available serious attention.

“Hey, Gina, you’re up!”

“Oops, back to darts. You wanna play?”

“No thanks. I think I’ll go home, take a shower with some steel wool and lye, and get some rest. I suddenly feel very exhausted.”

Gina gave me an impulsive hug. “Promise me you won’t go back to Lartel’s house. And you know, you should probably tell the police what you know.”

“Yeah, probably.” I gave her a wan smile. For all I knew, Gary Wohnt had made the death threat against me. I was going to lie low until I had something more substantial, something that I could take to the real
police.

“Bye, chickie!” Gina started to wander back into the writhing mass of beer-greased hormones, but I remembered something important and pulled her back.

“Not so fast, chickie.” I looked her in the eyes, and hers were bloodshot. “Don’t you want to know how my date with the Moorhead prof went?”

She didn’t even have the grace to act sheepish. “I know he wants more head.” She put her hand over her mouth and giggled.

“I think he’d have to ask his mother first. Do you know he mentioned her eleven times over lunch? And he talked about the diet he was on? What sort of man diets? He was not right.”

“Hmm. You’re so judgmental, Mira. Most people wouldn’t even notice that stuff. He’s a college professor, for gawd’s sake, and it’s not good for you to wallow in depression. Anyhow, you’ll have a chance to let him down easy over lunch on Saturday. He’ll pick you up at work at noon.” She winked at me, and as she walked away, she said over her shoulder, “He really likes you, Mir. You should see the e-mails he sent. You must remind him of his mother.”

I imagine she was cackling, but I couldn’t hear her over the bar din. I thought about navigating through the crowd to pull her hair, but I suppose this was my instant karma. I should have told Professor Jake that he wasn’t my type when I had the chance, and that would have been that. I pulled out Jeff’s field book and put “dump professor” on my Saturday to-do list.

I bought a bottle of vodka on my way out.

“Hello?” I had the cordless phone in my hand before I was fully awake. There was no immediate answer on the other end, and I felt a surreal jolt as I tried to place myself. For a second I thought I was still jammed to the thinly carpeted floor in Lartel’s house, struggling to pull myself upright. The obnoxious sound of birds singing, coupled with the squeaky springs of my bed, assured me that I was safe in Sunny’s doublewide. “Hello, hello, hello!” I said. I hate crank phone calls and usually just say my one hello and wait. It always throws freaks off. Their kick is altering the norm, so if you do it first, they have nothing left.

“You are still answering the phone, eh Mira?”

I sat back on the pillows. “Hi, Ron,” I said, recognizing the voice of the Battle Lake Recall’s editor in chief.

“Hello, Mira! So how about it? ‘Murder in the Midwest’? ‘Former Star Battler Loses the Big Game’?”

“Hunh?” I looked at the digital clock next to my bed. It wasn’t even six a.m.

“Your article! What are you going to call your article on the Wilson murder? It’s a scoop, you know. I have papers as far away as Duluth asking me what I know, asking to run whatever story we write.”

I ran my fingers through my hair until I got to the snarls. I must have tossed and turned all night. “I’m working on it, Ron. I’ve got some leads I’m following up on.”

“I have to have something by tonight for the Monday paper, Mira. We need to get something in the paper, some details. What luck, that you interviewed him before he died, and then his body turned up at your work! What luck!”

I scowled. “With luck like that, I should stay in bed most days, Ron. I’ll have something for you by tomorrow, ’kay?”

“OK,” Ron said, “but no later than tomorrow. I’m saving half the front page. And get me another recipe. That phony abalone was
delicious!”

I hung up without a goodbye. Ron wasn’t much for small talk and neither was I, which suited our relationship but didn’t really help us as reporters. Fortunately, the Recall was just a small paper. I thought about the article I was working on appearing in newspapers around the state. It didn’t excite me. At this point I needed to find out what happened for peace of mind.

I stretched and heaved myself out of bed. I hadn’t actually taken a shower last night because Lartel’s dolly land had rattled me enough that I didn’t want to be naked for a while. I still felt that way this morning, so in lieu of a shower I splashed water on my face and pulled my hair up and back in a ponytail bun. I darted a toothbrush over my teeth, dabbed some sandalwood oil in my armpits, got dressed, grabbed a banana, and was out the door.

I was in my car before I remembered that I hadn’t filled the bird feeders since last weekend, and here it was Friday. Now was not the time to let the bird kingdom turn against me. I walked back to the feeders, the frost-tipped grass crunching under my feet. I could actually see my breath this morning.

My poor garden. I had gambled that there wouldn’t be another freeze until fall, and I had lost. Tonight I would have to do some serious green nurturing.

Once in back of the house, I took the brick off the garbage can that held the feed and seed mix and hoisted the bag up to fill the feeders. I envisioned the birds watching me in the trees, Godfather-style, shaking their heads.

Back at my car, I had to use the side of my hand to scrape the rime off the window. I had an ice scraper in the back somewhere, but I was not going to use it out of principle. It was not unheard of for there to be a last frost or two in May, even snow in June, but I wasn’t going to legitimize it with an ice scraper.

My radio turned over with my engine and startled me. I must have left it cranked when I shut the car off last night, and now Robert Plant was trying to convince me that he really did have a whole lotta love.
I believed him, but I wasn’t in the mood. I clicked the radio off and headed out the driveway. I was actually just being proactive, as my radio has a tendency to pick up screeching static pockets on cold mornings, usually just as I envision myself slinking to the beat in a cat suit through an admiring crowd. I cranked the heat, putting the still-icy hand I used to scrape the windows in front of the registers.

It was early enough that I hoped I could catch Bev Taylor at Ben’s before she got busy. It was still a week shy of fishing opener, so the bait business would be pretty slow, but Ben’s rented videos and sold newspapers, tourist trap toys, T-shirts, souvenirs, and fishing and hunting gear, so they appealed to a diverse crowd. The danger of coming here over my lunch break was that the front would be lined up with old-timers or part-timers telling stories, and I didn’t want an audience for my questioning.

Fortunately, the only car in the parking lot when I got there was a battered Chevy pickup, the rust accenting the original green paint surprisingly evenly. I assumed this was Bev’s truck. I pulled my old Toyota in next to it, thinking the two vehicles would have a lot to talk about if they could get past the language barrier.

The bell tinkled merrily as I entered, and the unique and inviting smell of bait welcomed me. Fish stink; bait smells like a warm, clean aquarium. It’s one of the mysteries of Minnesota. I walked straight over to the bait tanks and peered at the wriggling sacrifices. The little minnows were my favorite. I couldn’t look at them without feeling a tickling flutter in my hand. Holding a minnow is like holding a butterfly with the lease to its life. I strolled to the end of the bait tanks, the denizens getting progressively larger until the bait began to look like keepers to me. I should have come here for Curtis Poling’s fish.

I always wondered what people caught with the big shiners. I looked around at the mounted fish lining the store, the muskies snapping their razor teeth into perpetuity, the walleye so big they looked like googly-orbed sea monsters, and even some sunnies that seemed ready to explode with their own superfish girth. I had never seen fish this big actually caught, so I preferred to view them as illusions to titillate the tourists, similar to the jackalopes at Wall Drug in South Dakota or the uni-goat at the Renaissance Festival. These glandular mounted fish, I surmised, were just the biggest bait in the store, set up to catch vacationers.

A short, solid woman in her late thirties with black hair cropped close to her ears, thick glasses, and a questioning smile came up from the back room. “Can I help you?”

If this was Bev, I bet she was always at the bottom of the cheerleading pyramids. They always stuck the chick with glasses at the bottom. “Are you Bev?”

“Ah-hunh. What can I do for you?”

I considered asking her what she thought of the name Norman’s Baits for a bait shop, but sometimes my humor only served to make people uncomfortable, which was the opposite of what I was after. “My friend Gina Sorensen said I should talk to you. I’m looking for some information on Kennie Rogers.” I figured I’d start out small.

Bev dragged a stool underneath her, plopped herself on it, and put her elbows on the cracked glass of the counter. She rested her chins in her hands and looked at me eagerly. “What do you want to know?”

I could tell this woman and I were going to get along just fine. “I’m not sure exactly. I’m doing a story on Jeff Wilson, and I know he and Kennie dated back in the day. I also know that he had some conflicts with Gary Wohnt and his coach back then, Lartel McManus. And people say Kennie and Gary are ‘together’ now. I just don’t know any details or how to piece it all together.”

Bev played with the masking tape holding one of the bigger counter cracks together and studied the reels in the case below her. They needed dusting. I could see a smile push at the corners of her mouth, and I knew she had been waiting a long time for someone to ask her this. She was going to tell it right. A waxworm peeked at me out of its sawdust container by the cash register and then tucked its shiny slug body back under. I looked away and pretended not to be nauseated.

“Where to start?” Bev asked the waxworms rhetorically. “Well, Kennie was a royal bitch. She had that perfect blond curled hair, perfect teeth, perfect blue eyes, perfect little body. That was fine—she couldn’t help what she was born with. She just let it go to her head, is all. First day of cheerleading practice, she told all the big girls that they best get used to being on their knees.”

Mmm-hmm, I said to myself. Big girls with glasses on the bottom. This is why I had avoided cheerleading in high school. I was never overweight, but I was never particularly popular either, and five pounds one way or the other could make or break you if you were in the fringe crowd. No reason to exploit myself even further by putting on a short skirt, tight sweater, and fake smile once a week. Part of me always bought into the myth of the cheerleader mystique, though. Thank God I could hide it under my natural sarcasm.

“But that was a long time ago,” Bev said, as if reading my mind. “I try not to hold grudges. Jeff, on the other hand, was the nicest guy in the world. I don’t know what he ever saw in her beyond her good looks. I think he saw a potential in her, some real person under all the makeup and hair, and figured he could help her. They just kind of fell in together when they were freshman and stayed together after that. It made sense, what with him becoming a star football player and her being the beauty queen.”

“Did she really do all that beauty pageant stuff?” I was grotesquely fascinated.

“You know it. Her mom carted her off to all the local contests. She had a regular makeup chest that she carried everywhere, and I hear she got real good at twirling a baton.” Bev let out a raucous laugh. “She did pretty well, too. Got as far as Miss Teen Minnesota the year before we graduated.”

“Did Kennie have any other admirers?” I asked, thinking of Lartel.

“Just every guy in school and most of the gals as well. Gary had a real thing for her, though, moping around after her, sending her ‘secret’ love notes.”

“Gary Wohnt?”

“But Gary ‘Will’ for Kennie,” she said, laughing again. “That’s what we always used to say.”

“So Gary and Jeff were rivals?”

“That’s just it. Jeff was too nice a guy for that. He always bent over backward to be nice to Gary, inviting him out and to parties or whatever. Shit, he even bowed out of the last high school football game of his life so Gary would have a chance to shine.”

“That’s why Jeff didn’t play for the state title in ’82? Because he wanted Gary to have a chance to play?”

“Gary would have played regardless. He was a real good running back, it’s just you couldn’t tell with Jeff doing everything better than right. Jeff knew he already had a full ride to college, he knew it was just a high school football game, so he pretended he was sick so Gary would have a chance to shine out of his shadow.” Bev tapped the side of the waxworm container and Sleepyhead, or it could have been Sleepybutt, looked out at her again. “Everyone knew he wasn’t sick, though. Everyone knew why he did it. McManus was furious.”

Ick. Hearing that name made me feel like I had just found a blond hair in the last bite of my supper. Make that a yellow toenail. With a piece of Band-Aid stuck to it. “So Lartel and Jeff weren’t real close at the end?”

Bev looked at me. “How much do you know about Lartel
McManus?”

“I know he was Jeff’s second cousin and football coach, and I know he is one weird dude.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” she said. “He’s related to Jeff, and really wasn’t much older than us back when he was coaching. He was our math teacher, too. He was hell on wheels as a coach, and I saw it when we would practice our cheers while the players were practicing. We used to call him ‘Lartel McMeanest.’ He just couldn’t control his temper, or his eyes.” She paused for dramatic effect.

“He had a wandering eye?”

“I wouldn’t say it wandered. It always landed pretty good on Kennie. After that last football game, he just lost it. They didn’t win, of course, not without Jeff. Lartel was furious and rode home alone. He stopped coaching and teaching end of that year. The official word was that he quit, but everyone knew he was let go. We just didn’t know why. It had something to do with Kennie and Jeff, though. Jeff moved away right after graduation, and Kennie stayed behind. She was supposed to go with him, to some cosmetology school out East, but she never went. She started hanging out with Lartel, of all the people in the world.”

“Kennie and Lartel?” I was incredulous. I had never once seen them together.

“Oh, that was a long time ago. Then something must have happened, because Lartel just dropped out of sight. No one saw him for over a decade. He showed up about five years ago and started work at the library. Him and Kennie don’t interact that I can see. He doesn’t interact with much of anyone, and if you have kids, you tell them to avoid Lartel McManus like the boogeyman.”

Sound advice, I thought. “So would any one of those three have a reason to kill Jeff?”

Bev sucked on her teeth. “Killing I don’t know about. This was just high school stuff. Who hangs on to high school stuff that long?”

The doorbells jingled behind me, and in strode a gruff-looking man. “Hey, Bev. How much for some large leeches?” Apparently he was used to interrupting women, because he didn’t even acknowledge my presence.

“Same as it was last weekend, Mike,” Bev said, laughing flirtatiously. “We don’t got no leech sales going on.”

Mike winked. “A man’s got to be ready. Why don’t you give me one large.”

Bev turned to the fridge and pulled out a see-through plastic container, the kind Chinese restaurants use for carryout soup. It was full of leeches dancing their worm dance, struggling over each other’s bodies to get to the top, just to end up on the bottom again. Ah, the life of the leech. There could be something philosophical about it if they weren’t so damn repulsive.

The worst part was that during walleye season, you could find a container in most fridges around here. If you were at a friend’s house and they offered you a beer, you let them get it or risked seeing black bloodsuckers squirming next to the margarine and eggs or, worse, next to the thawing hamburger.

Mike and Bev were chatting it up, so I walked over to the candy. Ben’s Bait is a treasure chest of unique candy. My favorite was the Lemonheads. I sucked the gritty, sour yellow coating off and spit out the tasteless white ball in the center. I grabbed two boxes of those and one bag of old-fashioned Tart-n-Tinys. When I got back to the front, Mike was on his way out.

“If you hear any new gossip, Bev,” I said, lining up my purchases on the counter, “can you give me a call over at the library? Otherwise, you can call me at home. I’m staying at Sunny Waters’s farm, and I haven’t changed her phone number.”

“I thought I recognized you,” she said. “Yeah, I can call. Don’t quit your day job, though. This town has gotten pretty quiet since the murder. Don’t anyone want to believe it was one of us.”

I nodded and slid her some cash. “Thanks for your time. Say, did you get Snatch in yet?” I asked, eyeing the racks of videos.

“Nope, one of the Christianson boys took it out and hasn’t returned it. I need to give him a call. We’re going to have to order another copy if we don’t get it back soon.”

“Have a good day, then,” I said, sliding into my best Minnesota accent. On the way out the door, I popped a Lemonhead in my mouth. If I just pierced the coating with the tip of my eyetooth, I could ration the sour bursts for nearly ten minutes.

“Hey, Bev,” I said, turning as I remembered one last question. “What number was on Jeff’s football jersey?”

“That I can’t tell ya. If you stop over at the high school, though, it’d be easy enough to find out. They have his jersey framed in glass in the trophy case up front. You can see a bunch of pictures of the team, too, if you’re interested.”

The sun was shining down on my car when I got outside, and I smelled a loud hint of summer despite the late frost this morning. It was going to be a warm day, warm enough to start my farmer’s tan if I had lunch outside. I felt pretty good as I drove the half mile to the library. Some pieces had fallen into place, and everything I knew was pointing at the class of ’82. This party tonight was going to be very
illuminating.

I pulled into the library parking lot, ready to devote my day to the reading arts and starting the article on Jeff. I had some backed-up paperwork and shelving that needed my attention. Plus, the library needed cleaning and the plants needed watering. Lartel had a thing for plants, as I had seen at his house, and he especially liked the high-maintenance ones that needed regular attention. I didn’t mind watering them.

I unlocked the door and strode straight to the windows, pulling up the shades with a zip. I returned to the door and flipped the sign to Open. I walked toward the computer and nearly tripped over a doll on the floor. I shook my head. The magazine inserts were bad enough, but now kids were leaving their dolls. I picked it up and turned it over, then dropped it like a burning book. It was the cheerleader doll from Lartel’s dark room, her expression bland and her hair impeccable. I backed up to a wall and surveyed the library. I couldn’t see down any of the book rows, and the back room was dark.

I could smell my sandalwood-laced sweat, and one word raced through my head: Lartel.

When the library door donged open, I squealed like a pig. Kennie Rogers strode in and chuckled. “Did I catch y’all playin’ with dolls?” She walked over and took the cheerleader from the floor. “Well, isn’t that the sweetest thing. Y’all takin’ up arts and crafts? These ain’t easy to sew, these little outfits. I am plum impressed with you, Mira.” She laughed again. The good-looking get a lot of slack in our society, and though Kennie’s looks had faded, the air of privilege they had given her had not.

I was sure my eyes looked like two fried eggs, sunny-side up, and my back was still pressed against the wall. “Some kid left it.” I willed myself to relax, which at this point consisted of breathing again and releasing the wall from the vise grip my ass had on it.

It didn’t matter, because Kennie didn’t seem to be paying attention. She sauntered behind the front counter and flipped the computer on. “Whoo, y’all got a bad smell gone worse down here. You might want to empty your garbage.”

She walked back around to the front of the counter, halfway between the children’s area and me. She stretched dramatically, her arms reaching toward the ceiling and her back to me. I eyed the wolf’s head airbrushed on the back of her denim jacket. Her wide behind was stuffed into Chic jeans, which were in turn stuffed into fringed white ankle boots covered in faux-southwestern metal studs. It reminded me of a cascading pork sausage in tight casing, and when she turned around, I was sure the front of her jeans would display a perfect camel-toe. I returned my eyes to shoulder level before I was called upon to verify that.

“I used to work here, you know, Mira. Used to be the head librarian back about a coon’s age. That was before y’all came to town, even before Lartel came back. Of course, I’ve moved on to bigger and better things.” She turned back to face me with a dramatic flip to her hair. “I will just be skinned alive, Mira, you look like you seen a ghost! You keep starin’ at me like that, I’m inclined to get the wrong message from y’all.”

I closed my mouth with a snap and went behind the counter to put some physical space between Kennie and myself. I set the doll on the counter. “You know anything about these dolls, Kennie?”

She strolled back to the counter like the aged beauty queen she was. “I know you can buy ’em at the five and dime. A kid’s toy.” Her eyes glittered at me.

“I suppose. I’ll put it in the lost and found.” I feigned nonchalance and tossed the girl-Chuckie into the cardboard box overflowing with widowed mittens and ratty hats. “What can I do for you, anyhow?”

“Not much, honey chile. I heard Lartel may be comin’ back early is all, and I wanted to welcome him home.”

My blood turned cold like leech water, and I swallowed some of my own bile. Liquid burp, we used to call them in my partying days. “When did you hear that?”

Kennie smiled and shrugged her shoulders innocently, looking for all the world like Little Orphan Annie would if she had grown up in a luxury trailer park and dyed her hair platinum. I could tell she was playing with me, but I didn’t know the game. “Coulda been today, coulda been yesterday.”

I was feeling cornered, and the metamorphosis into bitchy Incredible Hulk began. “Well, you know what I heard, Kennie? I heard that you and Lartel used to date. I heard that after Jeff dumped you back in high school, you went straight into the arms of the coach and stayed there. Then he left town, too, just like all your boyfriends, and next anybody sees of him, he’s a crazy librarian. So maybe if we’re going to talk about what we heard, we should talk about that.”

Kennie’s color drained from her skin, making her peach-toned foundation and deep red blusher stand out like clown’s makeup. “Or maybe,” she purred, “we could talk about how you screwed Jeff his first night in town, you little slut.”

Shit. I was way out of my league here. I consciously relaxed my body language and changed my voice to what I hoped was a soothing tone. “I can’t help what you heard, Kennie.”

“Hmm. Does that mean you also can’t help what I heard about a Mr. Mark James, suicidal murderer and your dear, departed father?”

There is a space, after the click of the camera and before the flash dissipates, when every sight, sound, and smell is suspended. I now found myself in that space, but there was no relief coming. Mark James. Manslaughter Mark. My father. The spring of my sixteenth year, he fell asleep at the wheel driving home from grocery shopping and veered into another car. He killed himself and the driver of the other car, along with her infant son, in the head-on collision. His body had been mangled beyond identification; the autopsy revealed that he had been driving very, very drunk.

The accident happened on Highway 23, the main road through Paynesville, and it was weeks before the black tire marks and sparkling windshield glass completely disappeared from the shoulder. Shortly after, the driving instructor at the high school landed the now-mangled car my dad had been driving, our ’73 Chevy Cordova, and installed it in the shop as a warning of what happens when people drive drunk.

My mom and I really didn’t talk about it much. We didn’t talk much, period. The overriding emotion I remember from that time is relief that school was almost out for the summer so I wouldn’t have to face my classmates. The irony was that after the accident, I no longer had a face in Paynesville. I became the countenance of a series of unfortunate events instead of a person. And now, I was at risk of that happening to me in Battle Lake. I didn’t want to be erased again.

“Is it true? Are you the daughter of a killer? Maybe the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

“Fuck you, Kennie.” There was no strength in my words. I was suddenly bone tired. “It’s none of your business. And it really doesn’t matter anymore. My dad is dead. Jeff is dead.”

“Maybe your dad is dead, little Mira the Murderer’s Daughter. Or maybe he’s like Elvis, and he faked his death. Could be he killed Jeff to protect his virginal daughter?”

Kennie was way out there, talking crazy, but like a child in a tantrum, she was oblivious to the pain she was inflicting. She tried to stare me down, alpha female to alpha female. “Did you sleep with him? Did you and Jeff sleep together?”

I shook my head and turned my face to the front door, using the time away from her stare to put my dad back in his cage. His life and death were not going to follow me to Battle Lake. It was bad enough they had chased me out of Paynesville. My voice came out neutral, that icy quiet of bridled fury. “All I care about now is finding out who killed Jeff. If you have any information on that, then we can talk.” I forced myself to pick up the returned books and walk past her. I swear she had to stop herself from sniffing my butt and growling. I started to put the books away, making surreptitious glances down each aisle as I passed it, on the alert for a sinister doll-leaver.

Kennie stood up at the front with her back to me for the whole time I put books away. I took advantage of her presence to make a quick run through the back room. All clear. Kennie and I were the only two people in the library. I returned to the front counter, bracing myself for more venom, and picked up on the bad smell Kennie had caught earlier. I turned to her, ready to defend myself. To my surprise, Kennie looked like she had been crying, her face even puffier than normal, her eyes rimmed in crimson. Maybe she was just trying not to sneeze.

“I loved that boy, you know,” she said softly, her southern accent rubbed out. “I was going to marry him, have his kids, settle down to a nice life in Battle Lake after college. That one night with Lartel was a mistake. I was just a girl, really, trying to get back at my boyfriend for letting me down in the big game, but Jeff caught us and turned Lartel in. It’s bad form for coaches to sleep with cheerleaders. Jeff left for college shortly after. He never returned one phone call, not one letter. When I heard he was back in town, it was my happiest day since high school.”

She wiped at her eyes and looked at me. “You don’t care. You didn’t even know him. I’ll give you a little bit of advice, though.” She leaned toward me, her eyes bright but her mouth slack. “I’d steer clear of Lartel if I were you. Just ask your friend Karl at the bank about him. Lartel has a ‘special’ relationship with Karl.” She turned abruptly and walked out of the library, her shoulders and head so straight I could have balanced a book on her.

I watched her walk out, surprised to feel sorry for her. That woman was one emotional roller coaster. “That’s what you get for living in the past,” I said to no one in particular.

I sighed and checked out the garbage. There was a whole but unidentifiable fish in the bottom of the canister, happily decomposing. The doll-leaver was apparently into creating a multisensory fear experience. I pulled the bag out and looked up pensively as the door chimed again.

In walked Mrs. Berns. “Whew, girl, that smells worser than week-old garbage! What do you have in that bag?”

“Somebody left a dead fish as a prank, Mrs. Berns.” I tied a knot in the top of the bag and held it at arm’s length.

“You know what’ll get rid of that smell? A bag of shit. Works every time.” Mrs. Berns cackled and walked to the magazine rack.

I smiled shakily at the back of her head. These old people were beginning to seem like the only sane ones in this whole town.