Mel found herself back outside and glanced at her watch before she continued back down Main Street, heading south. She was a bit disappointed that Wally McNab’s teenaged assistant was on the job instead of McNab himself, but she consoled herself that it would have been too easy if the furniture salesman had been there when she first visited. But who was she kidding? An easy and fast answer would have settled her mind by now.
She passed a couple more stores, the Corner Diner which she and Stuart had stopped by for dinner the night before, a restaurant that appeared to be a family kind of establishment, and an insurance office that had pasted decorations of colored leaves and horned animals on its front window. A block further down, she finally found herself across from city hall and the town’s only church. She took a picture of city hall, amused with its rather ugly boxy style and considered heading toward the building in search of her reporter partner. But then she noticed the community center on her side of the street and the handwritten sign on the window declaring it the Harvest Festival headquarters. Glancing inside, she saw a crowd of old ladies working on decorations. The ones that were standing up and moving about weaved about with no coordination. They needed canes and walkers and medication, she thought.
Mel made her way inside the community center and found herself inside an open communal space with tables filled with decorations and chairs filled with older women. Immediately, her eyes were drawn to the closest table where she found Stuart in a plastic chair and held in place by a ghoulishly grinning woman in a floral dress who was old enough to be his grandmother. Several other women in similar dress at his table were hovering over him. A rather pudgy middle aged woman had managed to wedge her way on his other side. The middle aged woman was waving around a paper cup, her bright red lips perilously close to his cheek. The expression on Stuart’s face, revealed by his glasses which had slipped down his nose, was half horrified, half repulsed.
Mel raised her camera to her eye and took a picture.
“What? Who?” The middle aged woman whipped her head around at the sudden flash.
The old woman who was holding Stuart down glared at Mel with slitted eyes.
“Hi Stuart. Fancy finding you here.”
“Mel!” Relief tinged his voice.
The old woman retracted her claws. “Is he yours?”
The photographer fought a smile. “He drives the car. Don’t mind me, ladies. I just saw the sign saying this was the Harvest Festival headquarters and thought I’ll just take some photos of you all hard at work.”
The middle aged woman waved her cup around again, looking a bit unsteady. “Go ahead. We’ll love to be pictured in the paper.” Mel didn’t bother to make the correction that she worked at a magazine and not a newspaper; instead she discretely sniffed the air and thought she detected alcohol. Were all these women drinking themselves under the table before noon? She shook her head and began making her way across the room, snapping pictures of glassy eyed women cutting autumn symbols out of construction paper and gluing together prefabricated pieces of wood into strange sculptures of mythical animals that she had never heard of.
Stuart cleared his throat nervously as he watched Mel leisurely make her way around the room. She must be enjoying my discomfort, he thought. So much for rescuing a guy in distress. “Uh, Ms. Granger?”
“Yes?” slurred the president of the Bingo Club.
“You said something about how you organized the Harvest Festival?”
“Ah! The perfect question,” she said loudly, putting a fleshy arm around Stuart’s shoulders. No one else in the room paid any attention to the obviously drunk woman except Stuart who cringed. “The Bingo Club has organized the festivities ever since it was founded. Before that, it was more of a town effort. Of course, Gavot had a smaller population then, too, so it was easier to get everyone together too.”
He discretely checked the recorder in his pocket to make sure that it was on. “So what does the Bingo Club do for the festival besides making decorations?”
“Oh, we organize all the events. The first ones start tomorrow. We’ll have some entertainment at the square, singing, dancing, bands. We’ll have some booths set up with local craftsmen. And every day until the last day of the festival, we have competitions at Derry Pond. There are three competitions.” Petunia Granger ticked them off on her thick fingers. “Swimming, running, and climbing. The person with the best score from the combination of the three is crowned the Horned King—some people say the Horned King is so named after a god in the pagan religion of the old country. He gets to preside over the festivities on the last day and pick a consort to preside with him.”
“So the Harvest Festival is based on a pagan festival?” Stuart asked.
The woman shrugged and nearly toppled from her chair. “Gavot has had a Harvest Festival ever since it was founded, ever since the founders kicked the natives out and took over the land for farms and houses. I don’t think anyone remembers exactly where it came from.”
Mel finally finished her circuit around the room. “Well, I’m done,” she announced.
The reporter shot out of his chair in a flash before any of the other ladies of the Bingo Club could get their hands on him. “Thanks, Ms. Granger. That was very informative.”
“Any time,” the drunk middle aged woman purred. “So are you going to participate in the competitions, like swimming?” she leered.
“Stuart is an excellent swimmer,” Mel said seriously.
The women of the Bingo Club whooped at the idea that they might see the reporter shirtless. Stuart’s face turned a beet red. He wanted melt into the floor. The photographer simply gave her partner a mischievous grin and waved a goodbye to the bingo ladies before taking his arm and steering him outside.
* * *
“You are evil.” Stuart said this mildly as if the statement was the most natural in the world. “You’re throwing me to the wolves and you actually find it humorous that I’m going to be torn to bits.”
“Those women are harmless,” Mel replied flippantly. “You can’t fault them for wanting to have a little fun.”
“Fun? You call that fun?”
“It’s not every day that they can get their hands on young nubile men, you know,” she said in mock seriousness. “Most of the guys around here are probably old and married.”
They were heading back north on Main Street having decided to go to the café for lunch. Stuart pretended to be miffed at Mel’s statement. “No they aren’t. Look at those guys,” he said indicating the workers at the construction site of the festival scaffolding. “We should drag one of them to the Bingo Club.”
“Aren’t they a bit too sweaty and dirty?”
“But they can lift heavy objects. Doesn’t that impress women? I’m just a skinny nerd.”
“You might be a nerd, but you aren’t skinny.”
“You think I have a beer belly?” he said surprised. He suddenly stopped and lifted his shirt and gave Mel an eyeful of muscled flesh. He patted his stomach. “Maybe you’re right. I’ve been sitting around playing video games too much.”
She slapped a hand on her eyes and groaned. “Good God, Stuart, put your shirt down. I didn’t know you were an exhibitionist.”
“Sorry.”
When Mel peeked at him from behind her fingers, he didn’t appear sorry. “The next time you try flashing me, you’re really going to be sorry.”
“Am I going to get spanked?”
Mel desperately tried to squash the image that he had planted into her mind. “Stuart?”
“What?”
“Shut up.”
He wasn’t smiling, but his eyes which were glinting behind his glasses were certainly amused.
Nearing the town square, many of the tents for the Harvest Festival vendors had been put up while they had been busy at the community center. They were still empty, though. It would only be the next morning when the vendors themselves would arrive with their merchandise and props to fill out the rest of the street.
The café that they had agreed to have lunch at was a narrow slice of the street—merely a room within a larger building complex that sprawled down the street for five businesses. The front of the café had a small green awning with the name painted in front. The Lela Café. What or who Lela was, Stuart and Mel had no idea. But a few yards away from the café, the front door opened revealing a group of leaving patrons. One person in the group was strikingly familiar in his long tied back hair and black clothes. It was the painter who was also staying at the bed and breakfast. At the moment, however, he appeared to be in deep conversation with another man in a business suit and he did not notice his fellow guests coming up the street in the opposite direction.
They made their way inside the café which was filling up rapidly as the lunch hour wore on. The first seats they spied open were a couple of rotating stools at the lunch counter which was manned by a thin man in a pristine white apron. Mel took in the menu—which was handwritten in chalk on blackboards that were mounted overhead—and quickly ordered a chicken sandwich and a vanilla shake. Stuart decided on a burger and fries combo and a fountain drink. While they waited for their orders to be filled, Mel propped her elbows up on the counter and put her chin in her hands. Her line of sight was on a shelf filled with condiments and pre-cut cake under glass, but she wasn’t examining those.
“Mad Dog would have called us by now to check up on us,” she said.
Stuart put an arm on the table and turned toward her. The stool squeaked. “Yes.” He grimaced. “And then you would have told him about how horribly I interviewed the Bingo Club about the Harvest Festival. He would have chewed my ear off.”
“You think I’m a tattletale?”
“You can do it and totally get away with it. I wouldn’t want you mad at me.”
“Mad?”
“I’ve seen you in action. You really put Glenda through the wringer before Mad Dog decided you two didn’t suit.”
“Was I that bad?”
“That and worse.”
She hunched her shoulders. “My stupid temper always gets me in trouble.”
“Hm.”
“You know,” she said musing, “I was on the verge of getting fired from The New Halis Times before Mad Dog found me.”
“Fired?” Stuart looked startled. “Weren’t you their star photographer and for some reason or other the owner of Hot Tread managed to steal you away?”
“Oh, it was pretty easy for Hot Tread to steal me away, especially since at the time I was getting into daily spats with the editorial department of the Times. It had nothing to do with my photography, of course.”
“What do you mean, ‘of course’? Wasn’t it some sort of conflict with your style?”
“No. It was something rather out of my hands, of course. You know Steve Pallard?”
“I don’t know of him personally, but I’ve heard of him. He’s the head editor for the Times, isn’t he?”
“Yes, well at the time, he was sleeping with this girl who had just gotten out of art school and she was looking for her big break. It wasn’t a secret that Pallard wanted to give her a spot in the Times. But if she got a job, someone else had to go. And that someone was going to be me. Mad Dog heard about it from the grapevine and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I owe the old biker my career.”
“That’s the first I’ve heard of the story.”
“And it will be the only time,” she added. “Mad Dog and I agreed that we wouldn’t let the little tidbit that Pallard was practicing favoritism to get out.”
“Why not? It’s unethical to do that! You worked for the position. You should not have been pushed over for a little nobody willing to spread her legs to climb up the ladder.”
She responded with a crooked smile. “Thanks, but things aren’t so black and white, Stuart. If the fact got out, Pallard would do all he could to destroy my own reputation as well as lodging some hits at Mad Dog. The editor of the Times has his fingers in a lot of places.”
“Geez. And you would think people working for newspapers would at least try to be impartial.”
The thinning man manning the lunch counter finally slid their orders in front of them. Mel sipped her vanilla shake before taking a bite out of her chicken sandwich. Unlike the usual fast food places in the big city, the sandwich tasted rich and moist reminding her of mushrooms and sautéed peppers instead of caked grease and fake oily cheese. Perhaps, she theorized, less pressure to serve more customers equaled an increase in food quality.
“My own experience in joining the magazine isn’t as exciting, I’m afraid,” said Stuart in between bites of his hamburger. “With the burst of the internet bubble, the gaming magazine I worked for also folded. Mad Dog had actually read my articles before so when I applied, I got the job.”
“Huh. I’m surprised he didn’t put you straight to work on field testing the latest games.”
“That’s what I thought too. But for some reason, he thought I might do as well in the more serious stuff. Well, as serious as a cultural magazine can get. I suppose in a newspaper like the Times, they would consider the kind of work we’re doing now as fluff pieces. But it’s a big step away from game reviews.”
“We’re not doing fluff,” Mel pointed out. “And in a way, Mad Dog helped your career out too. He gave you an opportunity to expand your writing.”
Stuart was silent for a moment, seemingly concentrating on his lunch, before he replied, “Maybe you’re right. But you’ve got to admit, sometimes he can go about doing things in a rather roundabout way.”
