by Jess Lourey
His grip was firm.
“My name is Mira James,” I said, “and I’m writing an article for the Recall. I was told that you could answer some questions about the history of Battle Lake for me.”
Curtis looked at me with clear blue eyes, that startling cerulean shade so vivid those born with it look otherworldly. “I’ve lived in this town for ninety-three years, most of my life spent as a hired hand. I did construction, farm work. Jack-of-all-trades. You get to know a lot of people and a lot of things when you work that way.” His eyes faded a little as he thought to his past. “I’ll tell you what I know, but it may not be what you want to hear.”
“I can decide that, Mr. Poling. I specifically want to know about the Jorgensen land.”
Curtis sucked air in his mouth, an effect made more dramatic by his sporadically intact teeth. “Lots of people want to know about the Jorgensen land lately. Just answered questions for that nice Wilson boy the other day.”
A fist punched through my chest and squeezed my heart. “So Jeff was here! What’d you tell him?”
“I told him that if you want some psychic unrest, you go to the Jorgensen land. There’s Indian burials all round this town, enough to give you bad luck for two lifetimes. But at the Jorgensen farm, you can touch it. Drive a man straight crazy out there. I think Mrs. Jorgensen died just because she couldn’t think of no other way to deal with that land. She didn’t leave no heirs. You mess with that land, you got the devil to pay. It’s bad luck from now until the end of time. That’s what I told him, and now I’m tellin’ it to you.”
I felt a little ill. Curses carried a lot of weight with me due to my generally high paranoia level, and there seemed to be pretty stiff evidence to support this one. Jeff was dead, and not long after having been warned about the land. “Did you tell him anything else, Mr. Poling?”
“What two men talk about may not be any of your business,” he said, his loquacity stemmed by the talk of the Jorgensen land. The subject had that effect on people.
“So is the curse why everyone shuts up when I try to talk about the Jorgensen land?”
“You don’t call someone’s name unless you want them to find you. Same thing with a curse.” He signaled to the ladies standing near the door, and Ida ran over with a lit cigarette for him. “People been around long enough know what happened there. So many Jorgensen kids dying of croup, Jorgensen mothers dying in childbirth, Jorgensen fathers dying in freak farming accidents. No one likes to talk about that, or they might bring it on themselves. That’s why the land is bare right now. Ella didn’t want to pass it on to anybody she loved.” He set his shoulders and blew out a perfect smoke ring. “It’s no mystery. Just no one around here wanna associate themselves with the Jorgensen land or name, that’s all.”
I was thinking I might want to be added to that list. “Well, thank you for your time, Mr. Poling,” I said. I had heard enough. None of it was particularly enlightening, but all of it was scary. “One more thing. Do you know if Jeff Wilson has any family around here?”
Curtis took a bottomless drag off his cigarette and looked deep into my eyes for the first time. Despite my best intentions, I felt a little sparkle of electricity and thought I might know what the old broads were attracted to. Then I felt my stomach fizzle. I wasn’t willing to let teeth become a negotiable requirement in a partner. “He was an only child, and his parents left town about the same time he did. The only family he got around here is his second cousin. You should know him, missy. He’s your boss over at the library. Lartel McManus.”
I didn’t know if I was more surprised that Curtis Poling knew who I was or that he had just told me my boss was related to my murdered lover. I didn’t see the resemblance, as Lartel had struck me as a fairly creepy loner, which suited his job perfectly. I had no idea he had any family, particularly not a dashing young archaeologist cousin. Besides, Lartel was on vacation in Mexico for another week. Another dead end. I sighed. “Well, thank you, Mr. Poling. It’s been nice talking to you.”
He raised an eyebrow, and for a second I was sure he was going to goose me, too. “You know where to find me.”
I nodded and walked off, halfway to the door before I heard him say something so soft I might have imagined it: “Thanks for the fish.”
I tipped my head glumly toward the ladies at the door and didn’t notice when Ida and Freda followed me. I was almost out the front when Freda tugged at my shirt. I turned to look at her, and she pointed to Ida.
“We overheard your conversation with Curtis,” Ida said. “We thought you ought to know that Kennie Rogers was also out here asking questions about the Jorgensen land. She was with Curtis, in his room, for nearly an hour.” Ida seemed indignant, obviously thinking Kennie had brought her own brand of tuna to the table.
“When was that?” I asked.
“Saturday sometime, because it was the day Freda and I got our hair set, and we always get it rinsed and set on Saturdays.” Freda nodded vigorously in agreement, looking at her shoes. I was thinking that old people in nursing homes made great narcs. If only they could get some sort of network set up, they’d be a secret force to be reckoned with.
“Thanks, Ida,” I said sincerely. I scribbled down my phone number on the corner of the sign-in sheet, ignoring the attendant’s skimpy-browed glare. “Call me if you think of anything else, OK?”
“OK,” Ida said happily, turning with a swish and walking back down the hall. That swish was beginning to grow on me.
As I walked out the door and toward the Village Apothecary, the May sun shining warmly on my head, I struggled to fit all this together. The Jorgensen land was cursed, Jeff was dead, and Kennie was asking questions, hot on Jeff’s heels. I didn’t know when Jeff had talked to Curtis, but it had to be Saturday because he was with me Friday and hadn’t mentioned it then. So Kennie visited shortly thereafter. And she could have been the mystery woman Jeff met Saturday night. Yuck. I didn’t want to go there. It was much more palatable imagining Jeff had screwed around on me with a glamorous, big-city type than a former-prom-queen-cum-mayor who couldn’t let go of high school.
I walked into the Apothecary, a stock-two-of-everything drugstore, hoping they sold costumes. I was pleased and a little surprised to find a wide selection of masks in the corner. They weren’t cartoon-emblazoned kids’ masks either, although I was disappointed that I couldn’t be Wonder Woman, replete with glittery tiara and bullet-
repelling bracelets. Instead I found tasteful Mardi Gras half-masks with embroidering elaborately sewn around the eyeholes, or full masks with Harlequin faces. I picked a full mask because I didn’t want to be remotely recognizable and headed up front to pay. “You have a great selection of masks,” I said to the teenage cashier. “Why so many?”
“Because we sell lots.” She snapped her gum, the unspoken “Duh” hanging between us, looking for a source and a place to land. She had dishwater blonde hair hanging in strings around her face, and her cornflower blue eyes were intolerably bored.
“Don’t you think it’s weird that you sell lots?” I asked, making my eyes as big as hers.
She looked at me, her face saying, “Don’t you think it’s weird that you’re asking me stupid questions?” She rang up my purchase, and I fought the petty urge to ask for a pack of condoms from behind the counter. It would be a wasted effort at making her feel inferior, because I knew I wasn’t going to get laid and she could probably guess. In fact, she was probably having better, more frequent sex then me. I exhaled noisily, took my change and my bag, and trudged back to the library.
The after-lunch crowd was pretty brisk considering that the summer people hadn’t arrived in full force yet and the locals didn’t normally set much store by recreational reading. As an unfamiliar group of people browsed, I realized I was witnessing a continuation of the library ambulance chasing. There were older men in feed caps, bills perfectly straight, hats barely resting on their heads. A good number of housewife types had also appeared, some brazen enough to
bring their children as cover, and even some of the rare breed known as “young male professional” were around. They were considered exotics in this town. All in all it was a full and diverse crowd, everyone drawn by a need to solidify their lives by verifying death.
“Minnesota nice,” that uniquely Midwestern quality that keeps natives from confronting anything directly or expressing any emotion deeper than a kind smile, stopped most of the women and younger men from asking me any outright questions, so I appreciated it when two men in feed caps invited me into the local information dance.
“I remember that Jeff Wilson playing football with my son back in the day. Heckuva good ball player, and an even nicer kid,” began a man with a brown and used-to-be white Cenex hat, leaning his elbow on my counter. His hands were clean, but I could smell car grease on him.
“Yup,” his John Deere friend said. He switched his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other while he fiddled with the short pencils on my desk. I looked at his yellowed fingernails, each thick enough to unscrew a rusty bolt.
“Damn shame,” Cenex continued, “especially in a small town like this. We don’t have room for murder.”
I wondered how many animals he had killed in the past year. Murder is a sanctioned sport in Otter Tail County. As a meat eater, I appreciated my hypocrisy as well as his. I was having a hard time staying out of the conversation, though. I had learned the unspoken rules of this game from the social table at the Turtle Stew: they were trading me what they knew for what I knew. I just had to pick the right time to jump in, because once I entered, I would stop receiving any information and would have to start supplying.
“Lartel is going to be surprised when he comes back, then,” John Deere said.
“Oh ya,” Cenex shook his head sadly. “His star player killed in his library.”
“What do you mean, ‘his’ star player?” I was in.
Cenex had the good grace not to acknowledge how little prompting it had taken for me to cash in. He acted like he just noticed I was there. “Lartel was the football coach back in the days Battle Lake was good. They went to state that year with Jeff. 1982. Would have won, too, if Jeff had played. Yup, Lartel stopped coaching that year.”
“Hunh,” I said, sitting back in my tall chair. Lartel’s name sure was coming up a lot today. When I had applied for the library position, he had been the picture of politeness, yet there was something slightly off about him, some smell or color that hinted at food about to go bad. It wasn’t his shiny head or his swishy pants, either, though those didn’t help.
Come to think of it, those swishy pants were a red flag. Of course he had been a high school sports coach. No other adult male wore swishy pants. Although his demeanor pegged him more as the wrestling coach type, what with the sport’s promise of leotards and constant touching, I supposed football would make sense, too.
I realized I wasn’t holding up my end of the conversational bargain. “Jeff didn’t talk about his football career when I interviewed him.” Both men relaxed slightly. “Why didn’t he play that last game?”
Cenex sucked something invisible out of his front teeth. “Depends who you ask. Everyone agrees it had something to do with Gary Wohnt, though. He was a good player, but it was hard to tell with Jeff shining so hard. Yup, that Jeff Wilson could play ball.”
“Like I said, he didn’t mention his ball playing when I interviewed him. He just talked about the Jorgensen land and the theme park they were thinking of building here. We were supposed to meet Monday night so I could, um, interview him some more, but he never showed up. And then I found his body here Tuesday morning.”
“That finding a body can be tough,” John Deere said, twirling his toothpick with his tongue. He was a regular oral circus attraction. “I found my grandma in her bed when I was about eleven. I can still see her lying there, Reader’s Digest stuck in her hands . . .”
I would never understand this Norwegian relish for conversation. I knew these men would talk all day about everything and nothing if I encouraged them, and anything up to and including picking my nose would be seen as encouragement. Personally, I’d rather be alone with my thoughts. I mustered my best “sudden library emergency” look, directed it over their shoulders, whispered, “Oh, darn!” under my breath, and excused myself from behind the counter.
I escaped down the nearest aisle, hoping for privacy so I could sort through what I had just heard. Lartel McManus was my boss, and I had learned more about him in the last two hours than I had since I started the job. He was Jeff’s cousin. And he had been Jeff’s football coach back in the glorious eighties. And he was on vacation in Mexico while his star football player had been murdered, said player’s body turning up in the S section of his library. It occurred to me that I had no proof that Lartel had actually gone to Mexico, nothing but his word.
I was thinking it might be time to call Lartel back early. Unfortunately, he had not left an emergency contact number, which I suppose made sense. This was a library in Battle Lake. The closest thing to an emergency here had been years earlier, when the one copy of V.C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic had not been returned, setting the waiting list back weeks.
“Excuse me,” a voice behind me said.
I turned to see one of the semi-suited young men I had noticed before. “What?” I said.
“I was wondering if I could check this out.” He held a large paperback toward me.
“You can have it,” I said. I walked away from him and down to the next aisle so I could do some more thinking.
“Really?” he said, following me into the next aisle. “I’ll need to get a library card first.”
I wanted to assemble this new information, and I was irritated at his interruption. I put my fists on my hips and stared at the poor man while I tapped my foot impatiently.
The man looked at the paperback in his hands and back at me. “Um, I’m not from around here. I just moved to town and was hoping I could get a library card and check out a book or two on my lunch hour so I’d have something to do tonight. Are you the librarian?”
I rolled my eyes and snatched the book from his hand, walking toward the counter. “Of course I’m the librarian. I’ll need two forms of picture ID.” I hoped I turned fast enough that he couldn’t see me blush. I was pretty sure I had a special kind of Tourette’s that made me be rude to perfectly nice people when I was on a mental bender and then rendered me incapable of apologizing. It was a tough cross to bear.
I was happy to see the front area empty. John Deere and Cenex had moved on to greater distractions. I stepped behind the desk, punched the enter key on the library computer’s keyboard, and then looked at the screen, expecting to see the flashing sign-in prompt. Instead, a note had been taped there, an ominous message written in large, slanting pencil:
STOP SNOOPING. UR GOING TO FIND
THE SAME TROUBLE AS WILSON.
I read it twice. I was pretty sure it was a threat, but my skin was crawling so loudly that it was hard for me to concentrate. I sat down hard on my chair and tried to make some spit.
“Are you all right? Ma’am, are you all right?”
I turned my head to the noise and found myself looking at the young professional. He had called me “ma’am,” which was way worse than being called “lady.” I had never been called “ma’am” before, and short of finding myself at a point in my life where my boobs brushed my knees and you could see my pink scalp like some cloud-covered ant farm through my thinning white hair, I thought it was completely uncalled for.
“You know what, I’m not all right. I just got laid right for the first time in my life by a guy who could actually converse and was sensitive, and the next thing I know, he’s dead. And now I have a threatening letter on my computer. And the icing on this cake is that you just called me ‘ma’am.’ So no, I’m pretty far north of all right.”
He looked at me like I was something itchy he had found in his pants. I stood up on my chair and cupped my fingers around my mo
uth. I figured it was time to take the bull by the horns before I started yelling at kids and pulling hair. “Library closed! Everyone out!” I was not discouraged by the surprised glances. “Out! Out! We will reopen at the same time tomorrow.” Still nobody moved. “OK, people, I didn’t want to have to tell you this, but there is going to be a private viewing for the deceased this afternoon, and we need to start setting up. Come back
tomorrow.”
This drew understanding nods, even from the out-of-towner I had just verbally accosted. These people understood funerals. Anybody who chose to live in a place where the wind chill could reach sixty degrees below zero without causing a hitch in the daily giddy-up respected the great circle of life. Plus, funerals were another opportunity to talk about other people, or nothing.
As the crowd filed past me, I studied them for beady weasel eyes. I was sure anyone who made death threats must have clear and shifty animal features, but no such luck. For the most part, the looks I got were reassuring or sympathetic, all the eyes clear blue or brown.
When they were all gone, I locked the door and went back to the note. I imagined the police could have it fingerprinted, but I didn’t think they really did that stuff around here, and if they did, it would take a really long time. Besides, at this point I had suspicions about Chief Wohnt since discovering he had known Jeff pretty well back in high school.
I ripped the note off the screen and looked at it closely. Nothing telltale except the cutesy “UR” in place of “you are.” Stuff like that bugged me. If you’re going to threaten someone’s life, you should probably take the extra twenty seconds to spell out all the words. Jesus.
All this was really starting to get my goat. I had felt I was to blame for Jeff’s death. The article I wrote came out the day before I found his body, and I was worried that somehow the article had killed him. At first, it scared me. Now I was getting pissed. Wasn’t it enough that the murderer had taken away the one man I was starting to trust, not to mention the only decent recreation I’d had in longer than I cared to remember? Now they were threatening me directly.
