by Jess Lourey
I followed the driveway to the back of the house and was pleased to find that there was a little turnaround where I could leave my car. I knew I wouldn’t be visible from the road even in front of the house, but I didn’t want to take any chances. When I got out of the car, the thick buzzing of frogs surprised me. There must have been a slough or swamp nearby. I put one hand on my knife and the other on my flashlight for reassurance and took a deep breath of the untainted air.
The sound of my feet chewing the gravel brought on a wave of reality. If Lartel was in his house, or if there was evidence of him having been in his house recently, he was either weird enough to lie about going on vacation or a murderer, and I would be dragging my clumsy fly body right into his web. Knife or no, I was just a librarian in black clothes with a big attitude. Before common sense could get the better of me, my brain flashed me a picture of my unremarkable lunch with the droning professor and then kindly supplied previews of hundreds of lame dates with faceless men lining my future. I had a strong feeling Jeff had been my one chance at happiness, and I wasn’t going to take his death lying down. My vision narrowed, and I concentrated on my mission.
I swiveled my head and counted the outbuildings. This had been a farmhouse once, but the barn and silo had long been removed, leaving two smooth cement surfaces, one rectangular and one round. Two sheds, both painted white and green to match the house, stood on each side of the cement slabs. There was no garage.
I walked toward the house on the balls of my feet, noticing that the cement path that led to the door didn’t have a single dandelion poking up through it. The grass was trimmed perfectly on each side and up to the house. I hadn’t even mowed mine yet, and here Lartel’s looked like a golf course green. I first peeked in the back windows, the play of light and shadow making it hard to see anything beyond the kitchen I was looking at. The table I could make out in the center of the room appeared spotless.
As I crept toward the side windows, I heard a twig crack in the woods a hundred or so yards behind me, and every other one of my senses melted away as I froze and tuned in to that one sound, waiting for the second snap that would indicate deliberate movement. My hair was the first thing to acknowledge fear, followed by my body and soul. My physical focus became superhuman at the cost of my mental ability. I looked at my car, closer to me than the woods, and then I peeked at the white and green house alongside me. The dwelling suddenly seemed malevolent and cocky. “Don’t run,” my brain whispered in my ear. Or maybe it was the house talking. I waited for more input, but none came. No more sound broke from the woods, and as my peripheral sense returned, I once again registered the noise of cars on the tar miles away and the melody of frogs and crickets. My breathing slowed. I walked the remaining sides of Lartel’s house and saw no sign of recent inhabitance. I had to go in.
When I returned to Lartel’s back door, I looked for the telltale faux key rock. He had one “hidden” at the library, so I figured he would have one by his house also. Sure enough, the big, exotic-looking lava rock was behind one of the two bushes guarding the rear door, a bright silver key clipped neatly into its underside. I unlocked the door and returned the key; I wanted to be primed for a quick, undetected getaway should it be necessary. My short hairs were telling me it would be, and adrenaline rushed into my fingers.
It was thrilling to enter his house, the same way it is thrilling to be kissed when you have to pee really bad. It was the same combination of excitement and restraint, and it made my breath come shallowly. It was a bright night, but I kept the flashlight on and took in the perfectly ordered kitchen. There were no just-washed glasses or plates in the dish-drying rack, and a glance into the fridge showed condiments lined up like lockstep soldiers but nothing with an expiration date. The room had the faint but reassuring smell of Lysol and sugar cookies, and I wondered if I’d prematurely judged Lartel.
Maybe he wasn’t hiding anything and really had just gone on vacation coincidentally at the same time his second cousin was coming to town, and maybe he had been looking Trillings up online for some completely unrelated reason. He could very well just be a quirky bachelor, reliving his glory days in his head while he freaked out the younger generation. Of course, that would make me the freak for breaking into his house. Better I find something incriminating.
I glanced around the shadowed kitchen with its white ruffled curtains and blue-and-white-trimmed cupboards and was relieved to see that there was no basement door. Old Minnesota farmhouses often had root cellars, but you usually had to go outside to access them. And a basement would have been just too creepy. If I stayed in the main part of the house, I could pretend I was on an adventure, secret spy chick for a night. If there was a basement, I would have to consider that I might be in a Friday the 13th movie.
I walked into the room off the kitchen, disregarding what looked like a pantry. I wanted to see pictures of Jeff and Lartel together, and I wanted information on what sort of terms they had parted on. If I was lucky, I could also find some dirt on Chief Gary Wohnt. I figured any guy who had a yearbook section in his library must have a decent-sized scrapbook or two in his house.
With that in mind, I cruised through the living room that went off one door of the kitchen and made only a peripheral inspection of the dining room at the front of the house. Both were immaculate and spartan, like the kitchen, the only decoration a multitude of live plants in all sizes and shapes. The lack of TV on this floor was the only thing that stood out. I admired Lartel’s housekeeping. My mom always taught me to clean my house when I went away because the only thing worse than coming home after a vacation was coming home to a dirty house after a vacation.
The stairs led off the dining room and were breakneck steep, so I had to make an effort not to bump my knees on each riser as I ascended. The creak of the third stair started my heart yammering. I really wasn’t supposed to be here, and even an empty house carries the energy of the people who’ve occupied it. It’s a scary thing to amble through, and years of media conditioning were screaming that something was going to jump out and grab me.
I slid my spider knife from my belt and held the reassuring weight in my hand. When I got to the thirteenth step, I felt a whisper at my neck. It was that essence that had turned me off of Lartel since the first day I met him, and if it was a smell or sound, it was just below my radar. Maybe it was only that I was on the second floor now, and getting away would be harder. Or maybe it was because the second floor is always the personal floor, and I finally felt like I was trespassing. Whatever the reason, I felt my nipples get hard in a bad way, and I had to fight the urge not to turn tail and run. For a moment, my breath came fast and loud enough that it echoed in the stairwell, the sound of two animals hunting each other.
When I planted my foot on the top step, I saw that I had guessed right about the layout of the house—there were three rooms up here. The one to the left looked like a bedroom, the one straight ahead looked like a den, and the one to the right had a closed door. Outside shadows from the trees played across the floors and walls, making it difficult to focus on the solid details of the house.
I forced myself into Lartel’s bedroom directly off the landing and clicked my eyes at the ruffled bed buried under dolls. My head turned farther to the right, and I saw a doorless closet full of dresses, all swimming in moonlight. I had a moment of vertigo as I tried to remember where I was. I looked behind me and saw the stairs I had just come up, the corner of the reassuringly masculine wood dining room table visible from my perch. I shuffled my feet toward the bed and touched one of the dolls. They were all alike, all of them cheap little Ben Franklin dolls decorated by the same kind of ladies who baked fruitcake and had knickknack shelves.
I willed myself to relax and move on. Obviously this wasn’t Lartel’s bedroom, so I had no reason to look further in here. He must have a niece or some other relative who visited him regularly. Maybe he had a lover who had her own room in his house. I shook off the sweet-sick feeling and headed into the ne
xt room. It was a sparse den dominated by a computer and a couch. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen any bookshelves yet. A librarian without books in his home would be a strange creature.
There was one room left in the house, and I knew it was the room I had come to see. It must be Lartel’s bedroom, and I was sure that I would find the box I was looking for under his bed or in his closet, or maybe there would be a whole shelf of clues. I returned my spider knife to my belt and shined the flashlight on the doorknob, an old-fashioned glass knob with ornate clusters of flowers etched in metal around it. Protruding from the keyhole was a highly wrought skeleton key, which I grasped and turned. I took a breath and pushed, ready to use my flashlight as a weapon if need be.
I expected the door to creak like the stairs, but I wasn’t surprised when it didn’t. Everything about this house called out high maintenance and cleanliness. When I stepped in the room, I was confused by the sudden darkness around my flashlight. A black shade had been pulled over the one window, and no moon or starlight shone in. This was good, because it also meant no flashlight leaked out. I closed the door behind me and panned the room with my beam. A bile of pure horror rose in my throat as my eyes processed the spotlit vignette.
The room was a shrine to the past, but not the sort I had expected. The same dolls I had seen in the bedroom took up all available shelf and floor space, but in here they had a purpose. It was a tiny city populated by cheap, soft-bodied Shirley Temple wanna-bes. Every doll had an activity, and all were dressed for it.
Near the door was an open-air café featuring a waitress doll complete with apron and customer dolls talking and eating. One even had her head thrown back in an eerie imitation of laughter. Under the covered window was a dance club full of suggestively dressed dolls cutting a rug, drinking, or just being wallflowers. To my left was a baby doll beauty pageant, and it looked like they were currently judging the swimsuit competition. To my right was a strip club diorama set inside a glittery cardboard box with “Gentleman’s Club” written across the front with a Sharpie. Inside was a walkway with tiny metal poles that looked like they were made out of knitting needles. Dolls in bikinis straddled the shiny metal, and I marveled at the intricacy of the tables in front of the stage, little martini glasses and ashtrays glued to most of them. There were even stamp-sized posters on the wall of the strip club.
In the center of the room stood a miniature football field with white chalk lines traced across the green felt surface every ten centimeters or so. This was the only tableau with men in it, and there were only two of them: the first was a Ken doll standing tall in the center of the field, a baseball cap on his head and a coach’s whistle around his neck. He held the hand of a much shorter generic female doll in a cheerleader’s uniform. They both stood over the second male, an unidentified brand of doll lying on his back with one of his legs bent under and back, wearing a football uniform with the number 17 on it. At least I think that’s what number it was—it was hard to tell with the red paint splattered all over the front.
I was willing to bet my safe bed—the very bed I wished I was in now—that Jeff had been number 17 in high school. I felt narrow sheets of ice slip between my skin and muscles as I stared around the small room, beyond the doll fantasy world clamoring for my attention.
Where the wall showed through, I could see picture on top of picture of a woman who looked very familiar. It took me two blinks to realize they were all pictures of Kennie Rogers back when she was Kennie Jensen. She looked exactly the same as she had in the yearbook, perfect doll face and perfect doll hair. Some were publicity posters from her Miss Teen Minnesota and homecoming queen days, but most were obviously taken without her knowledge. A whole series on the far wall featured her and a man who looked like a young Jeff, though it was hard to tell because he was in the shadows of any photo he was in.
My stomach was in my throat and my ass was out the door. Charlie’s Angels had not prepared me for this. I took the stairs three at a time, which is never a good idea in an old house. I clipped my head on the overhang from the landing and found myself flat on my back on the nubby carpet of the dining room. The carpeting scratched at me, and I could feel cold cement under it. I heard the sound of thousands of mouse feet scurrying toward me and away from me as I stared at the smooth ceiling above, immobilized by fear and pain. I forced my body up, dazed, and ran through murky grayness, only to realize I had imagined my escape. The floor was still holding me. Blind, clawing hands pulled me down, and I couldn’t get a scream past the dark closing in. I thought I heard a creak at the top of the stairs, but it could have been the sound of the sealed door of my hysteria opening.
I thrashed at the paralysis tying me to the floor and pictured myself standing again, and again, until finally a scream broke free of my mouth and I was on my feet and running for real. And of course there’s nothing like running to make a person feel like they’re being chased, so I ran even faster, my only thought getting to my car safely.
I flew into my Toyota and locked every door hard before I turned the engine, refusing to look at the house. I was sure I would see dolls in the upstairs window beckoning for me to come back and play, their smiles serene and their waves beauty-queen perfect. The feeling that I was being watched was tangible, ghost hands stroking my neck and laughing at me.
I peeled out of Lartel’s driveway and drove so fast down the gravel that I didn’t need lights until I got back on County Road 78 and saw the normal traffic whizzing by. My hands were still shaking, and needles of nausea pricked my body. I felt my utility belt and was relieved to see that I had the flashlight and the knife. All I needed now was a really hot shower in a really safe place. I guess I now knew why Lartel made my skin crawl. And unless he had a room in one of the sheds, that first bedroom filled with dresses and ruffled bedding was where he slept.
My boss was a creepy, cross-dressing, doll-loving, Kennie-obsessed, superclean freak of nature. And it was looking more like he was also a murderer. Good Christ. This is what desolate, solitary winters do to a person. There was only one place I could go to cleanse myself.
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.”
