I almost had no choice now but to sneak into Jeff’s motel room. I had decided to take the long way home from Bonnie & Clyde’s, driving past big, strong Chief Wenonga. I was starting to get a thing for him. He was cute, he wouldn’t cheat on me, and he couldn’t die. I actually considered pulling over to hang out by his feet to clear my head like some sort of groupie for tall, dark, and unattainable men, when I caught the faux-log-cabin Battle Lake Motel out of the corner of my eye. The owners had redone the front in a blonde, Lincoln Log–style siding along all seven rooms. People driving by could see the original green siding on the back and sides of the building, but I wasn’t driving by just yet. I knew fate had led me here. The police may already have checked the room, but then again, maybe I was the only one who knew exactly where Jeff had been staying.

I parked my car in the lot for the lake’s public access boat landing, just up the road from the motel, and walked back over the crunching gravel. Another car in the motel parking lot probably would not have aroused suspicion, but I knew what I was about to do was illegal, and I wanted as little evidence of my visit as possible. Some friends and I had snuck into a local church and stole pickles from the basement refrigerator one night once when I was in my early teens, but otherwise I was no criminal.

The motel’s seven units were all set out in a strip like a really long trailer. I could hear the lapping of Battle Lake behind me as I neared door number six, and I glanced over at the tall chief, who stood shadowed in the streetlights about a block from the motel. He surveyed the lake impassively. “Watch my back, OK?” I whispered in his direction. I looked back at the door and peered in the window. The cheap canvas shades were drawn, but I could see in the cracks around the edge. The room was dark, of course. I tried the knob. Locked. What had I thought was going to happen? I considered some elaborate lie to get a key from the clerk, but I doubted she would believe that I had left my inhaler under the bed when I stayed in the room last week.

I put my hand on the cool glass and listened to the soft whomping of moths flying into the streetlight. On the right side of my peripheral vision, I thought I saw a hint of a shadow move against the glass of Jeff’s room. I jumped back, visions of his zombie body waiting for me pillaging my brain. Why deer stare at the headlights of approaching death was no longer a mystery to me. I couldn’t move. I forced myself to take deep breaths and count the passing cars. Safety was close.

A shadow flickered against the glass again, the same time as a soft wind lifted the hair at my neck. It had just been a breeze, and if it had moved the curtains inside, there must be an opening. I slid my fingers across the shiny surface and dug them into the lip of the window, into the hairline crack where it had been left unlocked. The window slid open. Jeff may have moved to the big city, but inside he had still been the boy who grew up in a small town where people left their windows open at night and didn’t lock their doors when they went out. I stared at the curtain in front of me, able now to make out the print of flying ducks.

My heart was hammering so loudly it sounded like it was skipping beats. I pushed the curtain aside, the material rough against my fingers, and hauled one leg over the waist-high sill. When no icy hand grabbed my ankle, I did the same with the other leg. I closed the window behind me and made sure the shade was completely shut before I turned on the flashlight I had nabbed from the emergency winter kit in the back of my car.

It didn’t look like the police had been here. It didn’t look like anyone had been here, actually, including Jeff. The bed was made and the coffee cups on the TV counter were still wrapped in plastic. My heartbeat dropped as I considered the possibility that I had snuck into the wrong room. I flashed my light to the telephone and made out the “Room 6” typed on the calling directions. I was in the right room, but where were Jeff’s belongings? I swung my light toward the corner and caught a lumpy shape. I felt the characteristic icy rush of fear. I had found another body. It happened once, it could happen again.

I forced my fear-stiffened legs over and made out a bundle of extra bedding sealed in a plastic bag. The blood moved in my toes again. I unzipped the bag and looked inside, holding the flashlight between my teeth. The television in the room next door came on with a muffle of canned laughter and I squeaked, then felt a wash of relief to be back in the human world. Part of me had expected to find monsters in this room, and nothing dispels monsters more quickly than safe, reassuring television.

I found nothing in the bag of bedding, and nothing in the bathroom, and nothing in the drawers or the cabinets. The room had been completely emptied out, and I wondered again if the police had already visited the room. From my limited knowledge of police business in the case of murders, it seemed to me that if they had been here, they would have put up police tape. Either the police had already been here and found nothing, Jeff had checked out before he died, or whoever killed him had also cleaned out his room. Suddenly, the air felt crackly and I wanted to be anywhere else. I used my shirt to open the door handle, which was foolish considering the amount of time I had already spent in this room with Jeff, and shuffled quickly to my car.

I could hear Jeff’s voice, and I was so happy! He really was alive. I went into the next room to tell him about my terrible nightmare, but when I reached the voice, I saw it was my father pretending to be Jeff. As I turned to go, a hand grabbed me. I looked down and saw a bony claw, and I screamed and pulled away. I ran, too afraid to look behind me and see if I was being chased. I ran so fast that I didn’t see the dropoff open in front of me, and I slipped over the edge of a cliff and fell, the ground racing to embrace me.

I sat straight up in bed, early morning sun streaming down on me. It had been a while since I had had the chasing dream. Right after the tumult caused by my dad, I had run in my dreams every night. Sometimes I would wake up only to fall asleep and run again. After a while, it didn’t happen as much, maybe once a week. The last time I could remember being chased in my sleep was right before I moved to Battle Lake.

I lay in the white wrought iron bed Sunny had left, the blankets tangled around my feet and my hair fuzzy from constant shifting. The house still had the residual odor of all the cigarettes smoked in it in the years Sunny had occupied it. The funny thing about cigarette smoke is that it never goes away, even if the cigarettes do. It transforms itself into a composting, almost fresh question of a smell, but it’s always undeniably there.

I had quit smoking myself in the past year, and like all quitters, I couldn’t stand the smell of my past mistakes. I had burned incense, sprayed the bizarre magical potion named Febreze, and placed fans in windows, but the smell still hung around like an awkward silence. This morning my mood made the quiet stench a little more aggressive, and it pushed itself up my nose as the “what-cheer, what-cheer, birdie, birdie, birdie” call of the cardinal that I had been feeding knocked at my skull.

For me, birds fell in the same category as snakes—weird, dirty, and to be avoided—yet I fed them obsessively, kind of an offering to the bird kingdom to keep them pacified. If all the birds banded together, humans would be in some kind of trouble, and I wanted to be on the right side of that fight. This respect/disgust relationship I had with birds actually resulted in me being pretty knowledgeable about them. Know thine enemy. I had coaxed some song sparrows, a goldfinch, a couple rose-breasted grosbeaks, and I think maybe even a brilliant orange oriole to the backyard via various birdfeeders, a birdbath, and
orange halves nailed to a tree. To the casual observer, be she bird or human, I looked like a supporter.

The bird noises pushed me out of bed well before my alarm went off. I had to go back to work today, I knew, and my stomach was heavy at the thought. I hadn’t been back since I found the body yesterday morning. The anger I had felt at the thought of Jeff meeting another woman and the exhilarating fear of breaking into his hotel room had turned to tart depression. Before I learned about his Saturday night rendezvous, his death had been tragic and our love destined. Now, he was just another guy I probably shouldn’t have slept with.

But depression, along with most other extreme emotions, spurs me to action, so after a hot shower and a breakfast of vanilla soy milk over 100% Whole Wheat Total, the cereal of the gods, I was ready to figure out what exactly was going on in this town. Where before I was Mira the Stricken Lover in search of answers, I was now Mira the Righteous in search of truth.

The message from Ron Sims, the editor of the Recall, that was waiting on my machine when I got home last night had only paved my path. He had asked me to write a full article on Jeff’s death for the front page. Now I had a justification to be nosy.

I set out a plan for the day. I would go to work, spray some Lysol to get rid of dead body germs, conduct online searches to find out what it was I had seen on the Jorgensen farm, call Karl at the bank to find out what he knew about the Jorgensen land and consecrated ceremonial grounds, and, at lunch, go fishing with Curtis Poling. Somewhere in there I’d need to track down Gina to find out what she knew about our esteemed mayor and our police chief.

While digging through my disorganized closet, I recognized the need to feel attractive today. There’s something about the death of someone you had sex with that makes you feel like you have to prove something. Plus, there was another woman out there I was competing with, even though our prize was dead.

I wasn’t much for makeup, because I noticed that women who wear it regularly experience some sort of face drain. This is most obvious when you catch them without their makeup. They look pasty and much like fetal pigs in a way that non-makeup-wearers never look. Makeup is the great body snatcher of our time, some sort of addictive, living substance that preys quietly on the heads of its victims. This is not to say I was above some serious chick-in-an-MTV-video eye work, base, blush, and lipstick on a good night out. But every day? No way.

Since I wasn’t changing the face, it had to be all about the clothes. The proper uniform for this battle would involve my faded button-fly size 32 Levi’s, which were almost comfortable after a couple hours’ wear, a sports bra under a tight white T-shirt to insinuate breasts, and my brown cowboy boots. I was still getting used to the boots. They had looked cool in the store yesterday, but wearing them always seemed like too much of a statement, somewhere between high heels and farm work, and I didn’t fit in that spectrum. I topped it off with my raggedy brown suede jacket.

I left my hair as is because I never combed it wet. Tim Veeder, the “new boy” back in my seventh grade, whispered once to me in class that Victoria Principal, star of Dallas and the woman he loved, never combed her hair when it was wet. She swore it destroyed the hair’s natural state. Since Tim was the boy I was going to marry that month, what with his black Irish good looks and not-from-around-here mysteriousness, I decided it best that I model myself after Victoria Principal to make following fate’s plan for us that much easier on him. That single habit was my only carryover from that female-norming period called junior high, thank God.

On the way out the door, I remembered I didn’t have any earrings and went into the bedroom to grab my favorite pair of silver Bali hoops. One slid out of my hand and rolled under my bed. I got on my knees and felt around, my fingers quickly running across the cool metal. The hoop caught on something when I pulled it out. Once in the sunlight, I could see it was a notebook. Jeff’s field book. I recognized the worn leather cover, and when I held it to my nose, his smell whispered out—laundry soap and cedar. It must have fallen out of his knapsack when he was last here. This was the gold mine I’d been hoping to find in Jeff’s motel room the night before.

I paged through the dated notes, stopping at the first mention of Jorgenson. On a page dated April 12, Jeff had written, “abstract, Jorgensens sold the land by U.S. government in 1877, R. B. Hayes, President, and B. L. Lang, Secretary. Land passed through various hands over the years, all of them Jorgensens. It’s a gamble.” My brain lurched back to Kennie and Gary Wohnt’s conversation. “This town isn’t ready for gambling,” the Chief had said. Had Jeff uncovered a plan by Kennie to bring illegal gambling to Battle Lake? Would that be enough reason for her to murder him?

I paged forward to May Day, the day Jeff and I had met. On the sheet, he had written land measurements and flower names in his chicken scratch, and on the bottom of a page full of scribbles, he wrote “beautiful woman.” I smiled in spite of myself, and then stuck my tongue out as I realized maybe I wasn’t the woman he was referring to.

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.