I stepped out of the shower into the sauna of my bathroom, wrapped a towel around my wet hair, and crossed the house to flick on the morning news. The droplets of water on my naked body felt deliciously cool against the heavy morning air.
Rinnng.
A phone call while the sun is still pinking the horizon never bodes well, particularly for someone like me who was lucky enough to have been within two feet of one fake corpse and two real ones in as many months. I let down my hair and rubbed it, stirring up the spicy smell of rosemary ginger shampoo.
Ring.
I tossed the towel over the back of a chair and reached for a pair of tattered jean shorts.
Ring.
I threaded the button fly and reached for a midnight blue tank top with a built—in shelf bra to rein in the booblets.
Ring.
My answering machine clicked over, and whoever was calling hung up.
Must not have been important.
I unclenched my shoulder blades and went to brush my teeth. I squeezed out a peasized glop of Tom’s of Maine cinnamon toothpaste, trickled a little water on it, and started scrubbing.
Ring.
Shit. I ran through a list of people I knew who could be dead or hurt, of money I owed, and of anyone who might be mad at me.
Ring.
The sigh came from the bottom of my soul. I was gonna have to answer that phone. A few years ago, I could have ignored it, but the older I got, the less reliable my denial mechanism became. I wondered what other cruel tricks my looming thirties had in store for me. That simultaneous wrinkles—and—pimples one was my favorite so far. “Hello?”
“Mira James, please.” The male voice had an East Coast inflection and a monotone delivery, as if he were reading off a card.
“Speaking.”
“Hello, Ms. James!” I could almost see the exclamation point quivering in the air. “How are you today?”
“I’m fine. How are you?”
“I’m good, thank you! Tell me, Ms. James, has love found you?”
I pulled the cordless phone back from my head, studied at it, found no hidden cameras, and pressed it back against my ear. “What’s this about?”
“It’s about helping you find love. Are you single or married?”
“Who is this? Are you asking me out?”
I heard a rustling of pages, a quiet second of reading, followed by tinny laughter. “Why no, Ms. James. I’m calling to find out if you’d be interested in joining Love—2—Love, the new online dating service from Robco. We have thousands already entered in the system, and one may be your soul mate!”
Cripes. I needed a soul mate like a monkey needed a bikini wax. “Yeah, no thanks.”
“Registering is free and easy, Ms. James! Save yourself from a lifetime of loneliness. Let me read you a testimonial from some of our newest customers.”
“Do you know it’s 7:30 am in Minnesota?”
“This is from Becky Rafferty, West Virginia: ‘Before Love—2—Love, dating was a tedious process that involved many hours of picking through unsavory men in the hopes of finding one good egg. Now, Love—2—Love chops that time in half!’”
“Nothing personal. I know this is your job, but I’m really not interested.”
“Check out what Dr. Alan Rotis of Pennsylvania had to say. ‘Like you, I was suspicious of online dating. That was before I met my beautiful wife, Lora. Thanks, Love—2—Love!’”
I wondered what hellacious karma debt had placed my name on this phone list. Had I smashed a bunny on my way home from work? Cut off a nun in traffic? Accidentally killed someone? Ooh. Maybe this was payback for leading on the professor I’d been set up with in May. Man, somebody somewhere was keeping a close eye on the score. “I have to go to work.”
Another riffling of papers. “I understand, Ms. James. You’re happy without love in your life, with no one to take romantic walks with at night or to smile into your eyes as you wake up. Could I give you our web address in case you change your mind and decide you don’t want to die alone?”
“Sure.”
“Do you have pen and paper?”
I had my car keys in one hand and the doorknob in the other.
“Yup.”
“OK, it’s www.love2love.com. The ‘2’ is written as a numeral.”
“Got it. Bye.”
“Thanks. And rememb—”
I clicked the “end” button, tossed the phone on the couch, let out my calico kitty, Tiger Pop, and Luna, my German Shepherd—mix foster dog, and was out the door. Nobody likes to be told they’re in for a lifetime of loneliness, but for me, the issue was especially painful. I had formally filed love in the junk drawer of my mind two months ago, right about the time my erstwhile boyfriend, Jeff Wilson, turned up murdered in the Pl–Sca aisle of the Battle Lake Library, a bullet hole drilled through his forehead. There’s nothing quite like finding your man dead at work to turn a gal off dating for a spell.
The downside to this out—of—sight, out—of—mind philosophy of mental health and romance was that when I finally found someone worth opening the junk drawer for, it was going to be messy.
In the meanwhile, I really was happy with myself, and it didn’t hurt that I had a good, detachable showerhead and reliable water pressure. I also had been attending a Community Education class early Saturday mornings taught by Johnny Leeson, local horticultural hottie. The next class was called the Second Sowings of Lettuce and Beets, but what was more pressing was Johnny’s curling golden hair, strong hands, and the smell of sun—heated black dirt and spicy greens that followed him. Something about his organic quality turned me into an idiot in his presence, so I admired from a distance, keeping my junk drawer tightly closed.
When thoughts of Johnny weren’t enough to keep me company, I took emotional isolation to a whole new level with Chief Wenonga.
Aah, the Chief.
If he had been in the Love—2—Love system, I might have joined.
The Chief visited many a dream of mine, all strong and silent, sporting a full headdress, sixpack abs on a half—naked body, tomahawk in one hand, and the other hand raised in a perennial “How.” He was twenty—three well—sculpted feet of dark alpha male forever guarding the shores of Battle Lake. The Chief was the perfect man, if one overlooked the blatant racist stereotyping.
That, and the fact that he was a giant fiberglass statue.
The Chief, or at least his statue, had been in Battle Lake for exactly twenty—five years this July. The Battle Lake Chamber of Commerce had originally commissioned the figure as a tribute to the flesh and blood Chief Wenonga, an Ojibwe leader who gave the town its name in 1795 in honor of a fierce battle with the Sioux.
The Chief was my favorite part of summering in Battle Lake. Or at least that’s what I would call what I was doing if I were rich. Since I wasn’t, I called it house sitting for my friend Sunny and holding down one job running the Battle Lake Public Library and another as a reporter. The newspaper I worked for, the Battle Lake Recall, came out every Wednesday and sold for fifty cents.
Matter of fact, I had just gotten promoted and now wrote my own column, “Mira’s Musings,” which was a nice addition to the weekly recipe feature, “Battle Lake Bites,” that I also penned. My new column ran on the back page of the Recall. There was even a tiny black—and—white photo of me that ran with it. It was so fuzzy that my long brown hair looked dark gray, my freckled skin looked light gray, and my gray eyes looked black. It didn’t really matter because as far as I was concerned, no headshot was going to show my best qualities—my brain and my ass.
I was granted “Mira’s Musings” because news seemed to find me in Battle Lake, first in the shape of Jeff, whose lifeless body I discovered in the library in May, and then again in June when I uncovered the mystery of the disappearing jewels on the shore of Whiskey Lake. Ron Sims, Recall editor, hadn’t asked for any specific content when he assigned me the weekly column ten days ago, but I assumed he wanted me to write about murder and money when I could find them and gossip and garage sales when I couldn’t.
It was because of this position as star reporter that my first stop today was the Chief Wenonga Days final planning meeting. Every July, to celebrate the man who had named the town and the coming of his statue a couple hundred years later, Battle Lake hosted a three—day festival. It was always scheduled the weekend closest to the Fourth of July so the town could double—dip on the tourists.
Wenonga Days perennially included Crazy Days and a street dance on Friday; a kiddie carnival with turtle races, a parade, and fireworks on Saturday; and a bike race, pet and owner look—alike contest, 5K run, and all—town garage sale on Sunday. The planned revelry this year would be extraordinary, though, because the Chief statue was twenty—five years old.
The festival happenings weren’t in the hands of the citizens of Battle Lake, however.
The Wenonga Days final planning meeting was only a formality designed to make the entire town feel involved without letting them actually have any say. Kennie Rogers, the town mayor and resident busybody, was the mastermind behind the festivities, and she wanted to keep it that way. I knew for a fact that she had organized the entire weekend last summer, including booking a country group for the street dance and signing up local high school bands and organizations like the Girl Scouts for the parade.
Normally, she opened the final planning meeting to the public two weeks before Wenonga Days so that there was a semblance of town involvement without enough time to actually change anything. This year, however, Kennie had been out of town until late yesterday to receive some hush—hush training, and she’d refused to allow the Wenonga Days pretend planning to begin until she returned. I suppose I could have skipped the meeting, particularly because the paper wouldn’t come out until Monday, the day after Wenonga Days was over, but I’d promised Ron I would cover it.
I sniffed at my armpits as I drove my rusty, light brown 1982 Toyota Corolla to the meeting in town and wondered if the unrefined rock deodorant I had picked up at Meadow Farm Foods outside of Fergus was going to hold back the floodgates.
The Channel 7 news, the only station that came in clearly at my double—wide in the woods, was predicting the hottest July in history. The humid, sticky weather made the whole state feel like a greenhouse, or the inside of someone’s mouth. As a direct result, people who had to work were cranky, people on vacation were ecstatic, and crops were growing like a house on fire.
Farm mythology declared that if the corn was knee high by the Fourth of July, it would be a bumper crop. We were two days shy of that date and the corn was already shoulder height on a grown man.
That strangeness should have been a warning to us all.
