October Fest

The ring of the phone woke me like a slap. Outside my window, the morning was gray, either indicating a crazy early hour or a cool and rainy day. I peeked at my clock before the phone rang a second time: 8:34 a.m. This was a perfectly reasonable time to call, and if it weren’t for my head cold, general exhaustion, and the overcast day, I would have been up and about. As it was, I just wanted another ten minutes in bed. Too bad the person on the other end of the phone line didn’t know this.

“Hello?” More frog croak than birdsong, but the best I could do.

“Mira James?”

“Yes. Who is this?”

“Glenn Vanderbrick.”

Why did that name sound familiar? I wished I wore glasses so I could slide them on now and make the whole world clear. Unfortunately, this was as good as it was going to get. “I’m sorry, who is this?”

“Glenn Vanderbrick. You e-mailed me, asked me to call?”

Now I remembered. He was the guy who’d reserved the room at the motel where Bob Webber’s body had been found. I rushed out of bed and into the kitchen for a pen and paper. “That’s right! Sorry. Thanks for calling.”

“No problem. Did I wake you?”

“Nope.” Hardly counted as a lie if it kept someone from feeling bad. “Mind if I ask you a few questions about Bob Webber?”

“I figured that’s what this is about. So you’re a reporter at The Recall?”

“You’ve heard of us?”

“Not exactly. I picked up a copy of the paper when I was in Battle Lake. Looked good for a small operation.” His voice was mellow and deep.

“I’m a part-time reporter.”

“Doing a story on Bob?”

“No,” I said truthfully. “I was staying in the room next door-next door to the room you were in the night before-and was one of the first people on the scene when he was found. I want to know who killed him.”

“The Jacuzzi suite?”

I blushed. “Yes. Any idea how Bob ended up in your room?”

“The police asked me the same thing, and I’m afraid I’m clueless. Bob and I worked on some articles together because we had similar interests and wanted to share research, but we lived in different towns and hung in different circles.” His voice grew even deeper. “He was a nice guy. We’d had a drink Friday night and sat next to each other at the Saturday morning debate. That’s the last time I saw him.”

I replayed the debate. Vanderbrick was the reporter Webber had been talking to after he made his comment about one of the candidates drinking. “Did he say when he was leaving Battle Lake?”

“He said he was checking out Sunday morning. I told him I was staying until Saturday around eight because I had a lead that Glokkmann would make official her future run for governor that night. When he caught wind of that, he booked his room for another night. She never did, of course, and I left for home around 6:00 that Saturday. Never saw Webber that whole day after the debate.”

That explained Webber’s length-of-stay alteration on the cleaning lady’s room list. He was the one who had changed the date of his stay and likely the motel staff had modified the list. “So Bob hadn’t even been in your room when you were there?”

“Nope. Nor I in his.”

Another dead end. “Not to be rude, but you have a witness for where you were Saturday night?”

“About 300,” he said. “There was a gaming convention in the Cities that I was at that night. We played Magic: The Gathering all night.”

Pretty airtight. What was I missing? “Any idea who might have done Bob in?”

“I don’t like to make accusations I can’t support, but I do know that Representative Glokkmann wasn’t running for president of his fan club. Other than that, no idea.”

“I checked out The Body Politi c. Why was Bob the only one in the media to pick up on Glokkmann’s dirty dealings?”

“ Was is the operative word there. He had a source on Glokkmann’s campaign, don’t know who, and that person gave him the dirt. Nothing he could prove, though, and it wasn’t ever a big enough story for the straight news to risk a libel case over. That was until he got killed. Now everybody with a computer and two fingers is digging into Glokkmann’s business. If Bob was right about her taking bribes and drinking herself into an early grave, his murder is the worst thing that could have happened to her.”

That jibed with what my instincts were telling me. Glokkmann didn’t kill Webber. She might be small-minded, but she wasn’t stupid. Whoever killed the blogger did it to hurt her, and I could think of four people right off the top of my head who’d like a piece of that pie: Swydecker, Swinton, Kenya, and Randy Martineau. Swydecker was the most obvious suspect. Glokkmann stood in the way of his fulfilling his life dream. And, he’d just tried to kill himself, which was the action of a man with tremendous guilt. Swinton must have a great deal of inner conflict working for Glokkmann while sleeping with her opponent, too, but was it enough to kill? I thought it more likely that she was Webber’s informant, though maybe that entanglement had led to murder.

Kenya did not strike me as mentally well, but if she wanted to hurt her mom, there were much easier ways than committing murder. She surely could gain access to Glokkmann’s financial information as well as her personal secrets. Randy Martineau was a wild card. He was in the motel parking lot the morning after the murder, and he had an axe to grind against Glokkmann. I couldn’t see a guy switching from murder to tomato-throwing, though. Too inconsistent. And I hadn’t even thrown Bernard Mink into the mix. I still didn’t know why he hadn’t liked Webber, but I did know he had a hot temper. So who’d killed the blogger?

“It makes sense that someone out to get Glokkmann would have killed Webber. You know she’s in jail, right?”

“Again, was ,” he said, not unkindly. “Her lawyers sprung her last night. The case against her was weak.”

“Oh.” Must be nice to be a real reporter who actually knew stuff.

“Anything else you want to know?”

“Yeah. How can you bloggers afford high-end motel rooms?”

He laughed. “It’s the future of news. You should look into it. Do some freelance work. You can actually make money.”

“I might take you up on that. Can I call you if I have more questions?” He said yes, and we exchanged information and said our goodbyes.

I returned the phone to its cradle, nursing a feeling that the only way to find the killer would be to discover why Bob Webber was in room 19 Saturday night. But how to do that? I couldn’t ask Webber, obviously. I also didn’t know anything about his family and didn’t feel comfortable tracking them down to bother them in their time of grief. I could always scour his blog one more time searching for a clue among his posts, maybe an in-progress investigative piece that I hadn’t read closely enough. Anything that would have called him to room 19 of the Big Chief Motor Lodge would have been related to Battle Lake. Had I been overlooking something in focusing on the political candidates because the room Webber’s body was found in was on the same floor that Swydecker, Swinton, and Glokkmann were staying on? What if Webber had met someone at the Octoberfest celebration and they had rendezvoused in a room that Webber knew would be empty, and their illicit activities had taken a dark turn? Dangnabbit, I’d have to call Kennie again to find out what else she knew. It seemed like I was missing something obvious, and I still felt that way when I pulled into the library to start my Friday shift. At least my head cold seemed to be clearing.

I squeezed my sleuthing to the side to prepare the library for children’s hour, my most favorite library event of the week. Some days up to a dozen kids showed, from diaper-bound toddlers to preschool-aged. The boys inevitably smelled like farts and stowed at least one plastic toy in each pocket. The girls were bossy and cute. Although it didn’t give me much hope for the procreation of the species, it was glorious to bask in the open and honest joy of the children.

They loved when I employed different voices to tell the stories. When I dropped to all fours to act out a wolf sneaking up on a sheep, they squealed. If the book had a joke that involved someone’s pants falling down, they