September Fair by Jess Lourey Page B

you on Neil night. Deal?”
    “You don’t need to bribe me. How about I just don’t tell her?”
    Mrs. Berns peered at me doubtfully, but she let go of my arm. “When you’re sleeping. Remember.” She walked back into the main room. “We agreed, Kennie. I’m the old lady, I get the back bedroom. I need my sleep, you know, and I snore like a buzzsaw. The two of you can take the fold-out beds in this main room.”
    Kennie looked from me to her, not trusting us. She understood squatter’s rights, though, and replaced her look of doubt with a broad smile. “Fine. Isn’t this going to be fun? Just like a slumber party.”
    And those words were the last I heard before I entered the third circle of Hell.

It should come as no surprise that Mrs. Berns and Kennie Rogers were appalling roommates. First, Mrs. Berns was not exaggerating about her propensity for snoring. Her presence in the trailer at night was like trying to fall asleep in the middle of a rip-roaring lumber camp. And there was no silence during the day. Oh no. Turns out Kennie Rogers has some sort of disorder which requires her to hum when she’s not talking. I’d never been around her where she was quiet for any length of time so I hadn’t noticed before. The next morning, when I tried to piece together the little I knew about Ashley’s death into an article, there she’d be: Hmmmmmm hmmm hummmm . It was toneless, tuneless, and a prescription for making a quiet gal insane.
    I thought Kennie was giving me a reprieve when she left the trailer to find breakfast, but in an apparent effort to make our “slumber party” a multisensory experience, she had vomited on the front steps on her way back. A breakfast of corn dogs and deep-fried Twinkies followed by a ride on The Scrambler had been her undoing. Mrs. Berns wasn’t silly enough to go on any rides, but she did love the cheese curds, which gave her farts that could slice through metal. That, combined with the heat of the day transforming the metal Airstream into a Dutch oven, made the morning unbearable.
    Fortunately, a phone call from Ron Sims right before lunch saved me. He had forced the cell phone on me, and as his was the first call I had received on it, I was startled by the ringtone, a jarringly tinny rendition of Barry White’s, “I’m Qualified to Satisfy You.” Had he given me his wife’s phone? His insurance agent’s? I snapped it open to end the song. “Hello?”
    “What do you know about Ashley?” He had never been a loquacious man, but his speech was even more clipped than usual.
    “It’s terrible, isn’t it? But I don’t know much, probably less than you. All I know for sure is that she died yesterday in the booth. I did run into Carlotta, right after Ashley was … right after Ashley was found. That poor woman looked terrible.”
    Silence at the other end. A cough. “Carlotta and Gary are not doing well. We have to find out what happened to their daughter. I need an article before tomorrow.”
    “What? How am I supposed to find out how she died by tomorrow?”
    “Press conference. In an hour, at the Dairy building. They’re announcing the cause of Ashley’s death. Get me the story.” Click.
    I was left with a lot of bluster and nowhere to aim it. I hadn’t even had a chance to ask him whether he thought Ashley had been murdered and who might have done it. A raucous rumbling from the back room pulled me out of my funk. Mrs. Berns was waking from her nap, and I didn’t want to be sitting here when the smell caught up with the sound. I snatched my notebook and pen, shoved them in my big embroidered purse along with my press pass, threw my camera around my neck, and took off toward the Dairy building.
    The day was bright, the sun at its zenith. It was one of those dog days of summer that was so hot, you wished your skin had a zipper. I pulled out my oversized sunglasses and plowed through the crowd, snagging bits of conversation about the rides, or the baby animal