“I need to tell you a couple of things,” Chase said softly, coming up beside him.
He gave her a doubtful look but stood still to listen.
“I was thinking that Madame Divine’s turban could be a good hiding place for the collar.”
“We had the same thought a few days ago. She was quite upset we made her unwind it.”
“Oh.” They had been more thorough that she would have been.
“Any more ideas?”
She leaned even closer. “The travel agents next door? The blonde one, the tall one, loves jewelry, and she’s missing.”
“What do you mean? Has anyone made a police report?”
“No, her partner said she hasn’t shown up yet. They have a jumble of boxes at the back of their booth. Those would make good hiding places.”
“Believe me, we’ve been through every box and searched all the exhibitors.”
She remembered the quick search of their own boxes and the pat-downs. “I know. It’s just . . . We need to find that collar.”
“I would like to. But I would like to nail the murderer even more. Do you have thoughts on that? Any new ones?”
She wished she did.
The crowd disappeared from the midway as the queue was gradually let into the butter building. After half an hour or so, she heard clapping.
“They’ve awarded the prizes,” Anna said. “Maybe one of us should have gone. I wonder who won.”
Had Detective Olson gone to the judging? Would knowing who the winner was provide any leads?
There were three browsers in the booth, eyeing the Harvest Bars. Anna could handle those. “I’ll go see,” Chase said. She ran toward the door of the building. People were streaming out, so she had to wait to the side for them to clear. She could have asked who’d won, but she wanted to see with her own eyes.
She wandered back toward the booth beside the butter building, the jewelry booth, intending to browse their wares. Instead, as she reached the opening between the two, Detective Olson brushed past her with two uniformed policemen and a fair security guard, into the opening. They disappeared behind the jewelry booth. They had all been so intent, in such a hurry, she wasn’t sure Olson had even seen her.
No one else seemed curious, but she had to see what was going on back there, behind the booths. The opening was barely wide enough for an average-size person. Someone hefty would find it difficult to squeeze through. Every other booth was set up with a similar passage. The Bar None booth was up against the travel agency booth, with an opening between Bar None and Harper’s Toys.
When she reached the back of the jeweler’s, she stopped. An official-sounding murmur came to her. She stuck her head around the corner. Detective Olson was kneeling on the ground beside someone. He looked up at one of the policemen.
“What do you think?” he asked. “Strangulation?”
The policeman nodded.
Then Olson saw her. He was at her side in two seconds. “Chase, get out of here.”
“Is someone dead? Murdered?”
“Get out of here. This doesn’t concern you.”
She left, but not before peeking around him and catching a glimpse of blonde hair fanned out on the grass and a gleam from the rings on the travel agent’s outstretched hand.
Then she ran, blindly, until she was at the food court. She stumbled to the window of the nearest vendor.
“Are you all right?” the avuncular man asked, concern on his face.
She realized that tears were streaming down her face. “Something to drink, please.” Her words came out in a strangled tone. With shaking hands, she paid for a cola, then sat and sipped it until her breathing and heart rate returned to normal. Poor Sally.
There was another murder! And this time the victim had been strangled. Her mind worked furiously. Were the two related? Who would murder both Larry Oake and Sally Ritten? Had they even known each other? She didn’t think so. It was a stretch to believe that there were two murderers at the Paul Bunyan Fair, though. It had to be the same killer. Didn’t it?
Slowly, she tossed her half-empty cup into the trash and started walking.
She got back to the midway and saw that the crowd exiting the butter building was thinning. Paralyzed by indecision, she didn’t know whether to hurry back to tell Anna what she’d seen or to go ahead and find out what had gone on in the sculpture contest. One thing she definitely did not want to do was to let Holly know what had happened before the authorities did. She couldn’t bear to be the one to tell her. She would zip into the contest, then get back to the Bar None booth. Maybe, by then, Holly would have been told what had happened to Sally.
Another consideration was whether or not she and Anna were in even more danger now. She would have to be very careful for the rest of the day. She felt an overwhelming sense of relief that today was the last day of the fair. There would be safety in the crowd at the butter contest, so she moved toward that building quickly.
She squeezed inside between two people who were coming out the door. For the first time, the door was propped open. A small cluster of spectators remained, taking pictures, around the woman with the beautiful North Star. Chase smiled. She was glad the woman had won and that she’d come to the butter building after all. She would get back to the booth as soon as she could to warn Anna, but first she wanted to stick around to see if she could find out anything else. It shouldn’t take long. Chase slipped past some other contestants on her way to congratulate the winner.
However, she found she had to pause at the Minskys’ table on the way. Mara stood quietly weeping and trembling as her father gouged chunks out of their sculpture and flung them into a trash barrel.
“Daddy, don’t. Please don’t,” she whispered.
Chase watched, horrified, as the man seemed to grow more and more angry, hurling bigger and bigger pieces of their creation into the garbage. She looked around to see if any other sculptors were destroying theirs. The man who had carved the lifelike gopher was taking pictures of his. The man who had carved the Vikings football team was walking away. She caught him.
“What happens to the sculptures?” she asked.
“The maintenance people will clean up,” he said. He frowned at Karl Minsky. “At least that’s what most of us do: leave them here to be disposed of.”
Chase steered around the Minskys on her way to the North Star woman. The anger radiating off the man was almost palpable. It was frightening his daughter, and it frightened Chase almost as much.
On an impulse, she stooped and picked up a bit of the straw with a tissue, then stuck it into her pocket.
Once again, she admired the detailed work on the woman’s sculpture. A blue ribbon had been pinned into the butter. She wondered what it would be like to create something like this, to work so hard, and to have it turn out so well, then to see it destroyed. Or to know, from the beginning, that it would be. Butter sculptures couldn’t last long, she was sure. She snapped a cell phone picture of it, just because everyone else was photographing it.
Several people had gone around to the back of it and were taking pictures there, too, so she followed suit and took a few of the back side. She was sure Anna would like to see it.
The detail there was equally as exquisite. While the front captured the route of the Mississippi through the state, the back depicted the Twin Cities with the most prominent buildings in relief. The IDS Tower shot up next to the Capella Tower, with its distinctive round top. The Wells Fargo Center nestled between them. The waterway between the two burgs was sketched in, and the state capitol building stood by itself near the big river bend.
Chase’s cell beeped for an incoming text message. She glanced at it. The message, from Mike Ramos, read, “So s.” He must have started to send something and gotten interrupted. She turned her attention back to the contest winner.
The sculptor, whose name tag said she was Astrid, beamed and posed beside her creation. She didn’t look like she would tire of this any time soon. Chase couldn’t blame her. That amount of prize money would have made her glow for a few hours, too.