Jess Lourey - October Fest

The sixth book in the Murder-By-Month Mystery series, 2011

If I was a dog, I would have smelled the murder coming. I’d have caught its scent on the breeze, a hint of rotten death weaving through the chill fall air, lacing around the shedding trees, creeping over the light morning frost on mouse footsteps. Hunting me.

But I wasn’t a dog. I was a thirty-year-old woman who hoped but did not believe that she could get a fair shake in life’s casino of love, success, and self-acceptance. The tables felt decidedly stacked this morning even though the October sun sparkled, covering me like a blanket against the still-crisp air clinging to the low ground. Ron Sims, my boss at the Battle Lake Recall , had ordered me to cover the Octoberfest inaugural event-a political debate-which is why I was mincing my way across the high school football field on this chummy Saturday morning, the scent of rotting leaves in the air and my sweet new shoes cutting at my heels. I’d never attended Battle Lake’s premier fall festival, but Sunny, the woman whose house I was sitting, had informed me it was a beer-soaked, polka-driven, sausage-and-potato-embracing celebration. Frankly, it didn’t sound wildly different than your average weekend in this part of the world.

My newspaper reporting gig didn’t consume much of my time usually. Ron, who was the owner and editor-in-chief of the Recall , required a weekly food column and four full-spread articles a month, some of them investigative. In return, he paid me $25 a week and I had an outlet for my itchy curiosity. I wasn’t blind to the slave wages, though, and channeled my resentment directly into the culinary column, which I’d renamed “Battle Lake Bites” when I took it over in May.

The column was Halloween-themed this entire month, and instead of simply rounding up recipes with spooky names, I’d gone whole hog. My week-one column had featured instructions for creating Haunted Head Cheese. The “cheese” in the title is a misnomer; the “head” is not. Ask a German. And last week I’d offered instructions on creating Bitter Blood Sausage. All meat sausage contains some blood, you say? Not a quarter cup per serving, intentionally added. For the upcoming column, I was debating between Three Fried Mice (turns out you need to marinate rodents in ethyl alcohol to kill the plague and whatnot before frying) and Fearsomely Frightening Fish Chili, which I thought some locals might actually enjoy. It called for fresh fish plus their “juice” (a term which made me giggle and then feel ill), a little dill, some kidney beans, diced onions and garlic, chili powder, and voila! Frightening.

Come to think of it, if I picked that nearly edible recipe over the freakier alternative, maybe Ron would assign me fewer early morning jobs. I wasn’t a big follower of politics and figured this beat to be his punishment for dedicating the Bitter Blood Sausage column to him. Any dish that depends upon a delicate balance between cream, lard, and fresh pork blood is probably best left unascribed. I’d need to find a stealthier way to exercise my passive aggressiveness, I decided, as I neared the carnival-sized main tent with the red flag perched on top.

The main tent housed this morning’s event, a public debate between the two lead candidates campaigning for Minnesota’s 7th District congressional seat. Arnold Swydecker was running against the incumbent, Sarah Glokkmann. Glokkmann had gone to school just up the road from Battle Lake and was garnering a lot of national press for her habit of slamming her foot in her mouth. Last week, around a mouthful of lefse, she’d confided to a Daughters of Norway gathering that it was her firm belief that all immigrants should be shipped home, toot suite, so real Americans could reclaim their country. Local camera crews had been in attendance, and the footage went viral. Ron was hopeful that today I could scoop her saying something particularly incendiary and drive up newspaper sales. In the meantime, the election was three short weeks away, and the candidates were neck and neck in the polls. I may only be a transplant, but I knew this race was important to a lot of people.

I’d relocated to this tiny, west-central Minnesota burg this past March to watch my friend Sunny’s place and dog so she could accompany her monobrowed lover to Alaska. She was Battle Lake born and raised, inheriting 200 acres of rolling heaven bordering a pristine lake on the edge of town when her parents died in a car accident. She’d returned to the property after high school, spending part of her inheritance to replace the rundown farmhouse with a double-wide. She’d been happy living on the land and waiting tables until she fell in love with Dean, a furry, silver-tongued salmon fisherman who was hitching through town on his way back to the Great White North. She bought his and hers plane tickets, made me promise to guard her possessions for the summer, and flew into the sunset.

I’d found a full-time job running the library after the head librarian disappeared under mysterious circumstances. I was shamefully unqualified for the job, but there’d been so many deadly upheavals since then that my lacking the necessary degree and experience had taken a back seat in terms of Battle Lake’s priorities. The town was reeling from a rash of murders, far too many for such a beautiful little burg. I stumbled through my workdays, spending my off time lurking on librarian blogs and reading library science textbooks so I didn’t make a full-dress fool of myself. I’d signed on to the part-time reporting gig to supplement my anemic city-issued library paycheck. Overall, I made enough money to pay my bills, dine out once a week, and every now and again squirrel away a few nuts into my Get Outta Dodge fund. Then summer had passed, and Sunny had decided she didn’t want to leave Alaska around the same time I decided I didn’t want to leave Battle Lake. I didn’t know if it was a decision so much as a lack of options, but I wore it the same.

I entered the tent and was greeted by the smell of musty canvas and trampled grass. The structure housed at least 50 people, though the crowd seemed Lilliputian within the enormous tent, rows of cafeteria tables ready for tonight’s blowout festival. Not With My Horse, a local band featuring my ex, had been fine-tuning their “polka fusion” music for a week. This included, I’d heard, the keyboard player acquiring some phat accordion skillz. The Rusty Nail would serve beer, and Stub’s Dining and Saloon would be catering sausage, chicken schnitzel, fried potatoes, and their famously fresh and warm four-style bread rolls. My stomach growled thinking about it. I’d left the house this morning with only enough time to grab a peanut butter granola bar and a bad attitude.

I hadn’t decided if I’d join tonight’s festivities or not. Newly dry, I was feeling vulnerable to be exposing myself to so much easy liquor. I decided to decide later and studied the gathered audience before choosing a prime spot. Only one person did I recognize as a local at a glance: Tanya Ingebretson, wife to the richest man in Battle Lake, on every city committee, in charge of every church function, and shallow as a grave. She’d been trying to get me fired from the library since I’d taken over, saying I lacked the credentials and didn’t reflect the values of the town. The fact that she was right didn’t make me like her any more. It didn’t surprise me that she’d expand her political pie-fingering to the national level.