September Fair (2 page)

As I snapped photos
of Battle Lake’s newest butter queen rotating in the crazy refrigerated booth, I wondered at the circuitous route by which I found myself back at the Minnesota State Fair for the second time in my life. After graduating from Paynesville High School, I’d moved to the Twin Cities to spend the next ten plus years haphazardly pursuing an English degree, escaping the accumulated demons of my small-town past, and generally drinking too much. A wake-up call and possibly the cat-clawed hand of fate had steered me to Battle Lake this past spring. The relocation came with a doublewide trailer and a dog, both of which I was responsible for caring for while my friend Sunny fished the waters of Alaska with Dean, her monobrowed lover. The house and dog-sitting were only supposed to have lasted through the summer, a fact I had rejoiced in once the dead bodies started blowing into town like ghoulish tumbleweed. Murdered dead bodies, to be exact, and they had all been connected to me.

It was odd because my beginning in Battle Lake had actually been auspicious. I’d strolled into an assistant librarian position which coincidentally opened up a week after I’d moved to town. It didn’t pay great but was full-time, and life became financially comfortable after I supplemented that income with a part-time reporting gig for the
Battle Lake Recall
. Emotionally comfortable, less so, especially after I found a corpse in the library my first solo day on the job, another in a 100-year-old safe a month later, yet another at an isolated cabin in July missing part of his scalp and all of his pulse, and a final one in a gully just a few weeks ago with a bloody hole through her teenage spine.

You know those people who always win stuff? Radio call-in shows, door prizes, pull tabs, scratch offs—they can’t help but get lucky? Well, I’m the yin to their yang, the shadow to their light. Their luck brings them money, concert tickets, and fruit baskets, and mine brings me corpses. I figured my karma must be off. Maybe my chi got dinged a little somewhere along the line. Or, my planets were misaligned. Whatever it was, I had recently vowed that there was no way I was going to get involved in another murder investigation as long as I lived. I was only a librarian and part-time reporter, after all. Slain bodies weren’t in my job description.

My initial instinct, once the cadavers had started lining up, had been to ditch Battle Lake. That was the same bail instinct that had kept me out of serious relationships and in the bottle for the last decade or so, following in the footsteps of my father, one Mark James, prolific drinker and real-life crash test dummy, who ended up killing himself and another person in a head-on collision before my junior year of high school. After that, I was a pariah in Paynesville and only too happy to leave the second I graduated.

A series of events had convinced me to stick it out in Battle Lake despite the bodies piling up with freaky irregularity, however, and as much as it scraped and chafed, that was what I was going to do until I got my head on straight. It was a new idea, this sticking-it-out approach, and it looked good on paper. At least that’s what I thought until the lights flat-lined in the Dairy building at the exact moment I noticed something odd about Ashley through the viewfinder of my camera. I pressed the shutter button just as the room went inky black, not sure what I had seen.

The initial assignment had seemed pretty cherry, offered to me by Ron Sims, publisher, editor, marketer, layout director, and chief reporter at the
Battle Lake Recall
. The paper was small, and except for his wife, who functioned as receptionist and occasionally wrote a column or two, I was his only staff. Even though I was a part-time reporter, he acted all-the-time bossy.
Go to St. Paul and cover the Milkfed Mary pageant. Write about all the Battle Lake farmers showcasing their work. See what the 4-H kids are up to. We’re having a special State Fair issue, and it’ll be chock full of your articles.
He had sweetened the pot by offering me his camper trailer, which I could park on a State Fair lot paid for by the Battle Lake Chamber of Commerce.

Without a good reason to turn down an all-expenses-paid week at the State Fair, I had established Mrs. Berns, my recently reinstated assistant librarian, to run that show, coaxed my friend Jed to stay with my cat Tiger Pop and Sunny’s dog Luna at the double-wide, and driven the camper to a site in the campground located at the northeast end of the fair. I’d arrived early enough to snag a spot underneath the water tower, near where the bathrooms and showers were housed. I’d set up camp yesterday afternoon, feeling like it wasn’t a bad deal. That is, until the Dairy building went black, compressing my highest-pitched fears into one tight package.

I am mortally terrified of being trapped in dark spaces, specifically haunted houses, but a Dairy building would do in a pinch. This fear is my Achilles’ heel, my soft underbelly, the chink in my otherwise considerable armor. I know dark spaces and particularly haunted houses are supposed to be scary, and that it’s all right to be frightened of them, but my terror lurched to a bowel-loosening level when they were so much as mentioned. I knew from whence the fear arose, but that didn’t help to mediate it.

Right before my sophomore year of high school, Jenny Cot had invited me to the State Fair with her family. My dad was still alive and by this point in my life, his drinking had affected most of my friendships; I couldn’t have people over and so they eventually stopped including me in their lives outside of school. Jenny’s invitation was an unexpected treat, a thrilling opportunity for a fifteen-year-old to leave her dysfunctional family and travel to glamorous St. Paul. No one would drink and then expect me to get in the car with them, the adults wouldn’t fight on the trip down and back, and people would actually care where I was going and when I was going to return. It was a slice of TV-ready perfection that I was at pains not to screw up.

In fact, I hadn’t slept the night before, twisting in my sheets as I imagined all the ways the trip to the Cities could be thwarted: Jenny could change her mind about me in the middle of the night and choose to bring a closer friend. Even if she still wanted to bring me with, I might say something inappropriate in the driveway and make her parents realize they’d rather not bring me with. Or, my dad would stumble out drunk and shame us both, and the Cots would drive away without me. The list was endless, spinning and growing in my brain and striking down hope wherever it was hiding. When Jenny and her family came to pick me up the next morning, I was bone-tired and edgy. I gritted my teeth when my dad went out to meet them, still sure he was going to mess it up somehow. But he didn’t. And I got to go.

The car ride to the State Fair was exactly as I’d imagined it. Her parents even held hands and joked with each other. We played “I Spy” in the backseat for most of the trip. Outside, the sun shone warm and clear. It was the ideal fair day, Jenny’s dad, Craig, kept reminding us with a wink in the rearview mirror. Jenny and her brother told him to lay off after about the sixth time, and I pretended to laugh at him along with his kids, but I couldn’t stop looking back at the mirror to catch his occasional playful glance.
That’s how a dad is supposed to act
, I told myself.

When we entered the Cities we took the Snelling Avenue exit off of 94 and followed the signs. The State Fair abuts the St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota, Craig informed us, and is six blocks wide and eight blocks long. It takes ten minutes to circumnavigate, which we did twice before finding parking. Once inside the fairgrounds, I found myself pleasantly overwhelmed by the crowds and the smell of fried foods and the buzz of a thousand conversations happening at once. I’d never been far from Paynesville except when our volleyball team, for which I was a perennial benchwarmer, played away games. The busy, loud, and colorful State Fair environment was both scary and thrilling, and I tied the joy at discovering the largeness of the world to Mr. and Mrs. Cot, who had brought me there. I would have done anything for them that day.

They bought us food—a corndog for me and cheese curds, fries, and pizza for their kids. My stomach still rumbled after I ate the corndog, but I didn’t want them to think I was a mooch and so turned them down when offered more food.
I’m good,
I’d said.
I had a big breakfast. Thank you, though.

We walked the Midway together, and then Craig and his wife offered each of us $10 to do our own thing. Jenny’s brother was seventeen and grabbed the money and ran. I was reluctant to leave the Cots, but Jenny was excited to explore without her parents, and she was tugging relentlessly at my arm. We agreed we’d all meet up at the Space Tower in two hours.

I let Jenny lead us, and she did—straight to the haunted house. I’d never been in one before and felt a chilly apprehension like a wet lick up my spine as we stood outside the gray Victorian mansion. It was surrounded by a black, wrought-iron fence that was as welcoming as bones jutting from a graveyard. The windows of the two-story building were curtained with rotting lace, and a permanent cloud seemed to hang over the turrets that graced the second story like devil’s horns. Faint screams emanated from inside. The overall impression was of a ravenous gray monster biding its time until someone was stupid enough to walk into its belly.

Couldn’t we go on the River Raft ride
, I asked,
or check out the crazy drum music we heard walking past the International Bazaar?
But Jenny was dead set on the haunted house, and I was her guest. I took a breath and reevaluated the situation. Sure the house was maliciously terrifying, but other than that one cloud directly over it, the day was warm and sunny, and laughing groups of people stood in line waiting for their chance to get scared. I could do this. After all, Jenny was the reason I was here. I bucked it up, slapped on a brave smile, and got in line. When it came our turn to enter, we handed $5 each to the teenager working the door. “Don’t worry,” he said, raising his eyebrows at us. “No one gets out alive.”

Ignoring him, we went in as a pair, standing back until the people in front of us were out of sight before creeping along the dark hallway. The lighting was a mixture of shadows and electric candle flickers, and we clung to each other, picking our way through. The carpet felt soggy underfoot, and the air had a sinister, metallic smell, like spilled blood. Ahead, a low moan made Jenny jump and then giggle. Surprisingly, her fear made me less scared.
This is just a pretend house
, I told myself.
Relax and enjoy it
.

We soldiered on, through sticky cobwebs and feathers set near the floor to brush against our naked ankles. Mirrors lined the halls, reflecting moaning faces in excruciating pain, their eyeballs hanging out, grisly mouths gaping. The wallpaper seemed to melt and bend as searching fingers pushed through it, stopping just short of groping us. Our steps were tiny, and Jenny was nearly riding me piggyback, pushing me to go first. I turned a corner in front of her and was greeted by Jason Voorhees, bloody axe in one hand and knife in another. I screamed, my stomach and heart switching places, and grabbed Jenny’s hand. She buried her head in my back and we dashed past, catching our breath.

“What was it?” she squealed.

“Jason from the
Friday the 13th
movies.” I laughed, adrenaline pounding through my veins. “Let’s see what’s up ahead.”

“I don’t want to go any farther.”

Looking back, I should have caught the tone in her voice. She wasn’t joking any more, but I was too pumped up on my fear rush to catch her switch in mood. “They don’t let you turn back.” I dragged her along and we found ourselves in a dimly lit room the size of a large walk-in closet. Blood poured down the walls, and in the outline of a door, a dismembered skeleton dropped goopy intestines from one bony hand to another like a macabre Slinky. I was pulling Jenny toward the grody doorway, the only apparent exit, when a creak behind us announced danger. Before either of us could turn, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre guy grabbed Jenny around the neck with one hand and revved his chainsaw with the other.

The closeness of the gruesome stranger made my knees weak until I saw the Voss label emblazoned on his machinery, marking it for the child’s toy it was. I laughed shakily and reached for Jenny’s hand to haul her away from the monster and out of the room. I clasped it just as she fell to the ground in a dead faint. Her head hit the floor with a ripe thud, and in the dimness of the room, it looked like her real blood was joining the fake gore around us. I tried to drag her away from the man with the chainsaw who was suddenly remade terrifying by his inaction. He laughed in our direction and twisted to greet the gaggle of kids approaching from behind.