September Mourn by Jess Lourey

Author:Jess Lourey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948584135
Publisher: Toadhouse Books

The article was embarrassingly short.

Twenty

Wednesday morning, Mrs. Berns and Kennie finally caught me.

They’d stacked beer cans on the floor under my bed, and so when I tried to sneak out like I for the previous mornings, I made a huge clatter. Mrs. Berns rushed out of her room, hair askew and face smudged with sleep, and Kennie sat up in her bed across the trailer and stared triumphantly at me. Well, as triumphantly as someone can stare when one of her eyes is mascaraed shut.

“Thought you’d get away again, missy?” Mrs. Berns cackled. “Leaving before we’re awake and being asleep like a rock when we get in?”

I was counting the beer cans at my feet. “It looks like you two are doing just fine without me.”

“That’s not the point. This was supposed to be a fun ladies’ week,” Kennie piped in.

“I didn’t get that memo.”

“Consider yourself informed in person,” she said, rolling out of bed. “Mrs. Berns and I have made some exciting discoveries at the fair, opportunities very few people know about, and we’re going to show them to you today.”

I gingerly stacked the beer cans into a garbage bag to bring to the recycling bin. “Can’t. I have appointments. Some of us are working here.”

“Tonight. We’re meeting right out front of the International Bazaar at five o’clock. You’ll be free then,” Mrs. Berns said confidently.

She was right, of course. My only plans were to check out Delrita as she posed this morning for her butter carving, and then head to the tour of BPM before noon. And I wouldn’t mind hanging out with Mrs. Berns, but Kennie was a lot of work on a good day. I enjoyed my own company enough that I didn’t feel the need to socialize with people who exhausted me.

Catching my hesitation, Mrs. Berns sweetened the pot. “I found the super spiciest food on the planet right here at the fair. I’ll buy supper, and then we’ll show you what else we found.”

Ah. She knew me too well. Food so spicy that it made my eyes water and my nose feel like it had been bored with a drill dunked in battery acid was my new vice, now that liquor was taboo. I hadn’t found anything to sate it at the fair, not even the spiciest hot sauce at the Jamaican booth. And if Mrs. Berns was getting along with Kennie, who was I to judge? Besides, what choice did I have? These two knew where I lived. “Fine. Five o’clock, in front of the Bazaar.”

“You won’t be sorry!” Kennie trilled.

“I already am.” I was halfway out the door before I remembered. “Hey, which one of you pinched my digital camera?”

“Hunh?”

“My camera. I kept it under this bench, in a soft case, and now it’s gone. I scoured the whole trailer looking for it.”

“I didn’t take it,” Kennie said.

“Me neither. Last I saw it, you were coming back from Ashley Pederson’s fresh corpse, telling me about how you had seen something funky in a photo and you were going to enlarge it on your computer.

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