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SADIE
My walk to meet Kobie was a short one, but still gave me plenty of time to stew in my anger. The nerve of that guy. Get off my porch, come stay with me, let me touch you with my deliciously callused hands, don’t leer at my hot bod while I’m half naked. Where did he get off with the hot-and-cold act?
Whatever. Screw him. I needed to home in on the task at hand anyway. Talk to this Kobie lady about the festival and dig for some dirt on Axel Everett.
The historical society was housed in a two-story brick Italianate building in a neighborhood a few blocks from Main Street.
A tiny, hunched-over woman who looked like she’d been here when the building was constructed in the eighteen hundreds greeted me from a small reception desk. “You must be Sadie. Kobie is working back in the vault. Let me show you the way.” I thought I could actually hear her bones creak as she slid off the wooden stool she was perched on.
An awkward laugh escaped my lips. “How did you know I wasn’t a regular museum visitor?”
“Oh, sweetie.” She looked over the top of her horn-rimmed glasses at me. “Your reputation precedes you.”
“Reputation?” I scoffed as I followed her.
“Nothing bad. Anyone who can break through that Evans boy’s shell is all right by us.”
Not sure I’d broken through his shell. If anything, I’d managed to get him to raise his shields higher after our little interaction, but I kept that thought to myself.
“And his neighbor saw you leaving this morning. She’s a bit of a busybody, so I had a reliable description.” She winked at me over her shoulder.
I got the impression Kelly Bay was chock full of busybodies.
We shuffled through a room lined with floor-to-ceiling display cases full of creepy porcelain dolls, into a small hallway that opened up to a massive set of black metal doors. The door on the right had a combination lock and a big brass wheel.
“When you said vault, I didn’t think you meant an actual vault.”
“Don’t worry, dear. It’s just the record room. We put windows in with the last renovation,” she said as she swung the huge door open. “Kobie,” she sang, “you have a visitor.” She slipped out of the room once she’d announced my presence.
A petite blonde in a blue polka-dot fifties-style dress popped up to greet me. Someone less confident than me might have felt underdressed in comparison in black skinnies and a white denim shirt. I’d expected someone a little more…matronly, but Kobie looked about my age.
“You must be Sadie.” She reached out and shook my hand. “I’m so excited you’re going to be writing up the Bay Days Festival. I’m happy to do anything I can to be of service.”
So far, everyone in this town besides Drew seemed eager to talk to me or lend me a hand. But that was probably just the shiny veneer they showed for tourists. Surely everyone couldn’t really be this friendly.
“Thanks for taking the time to speak with me.” I peered around the room filled with open shelves covered in dusty boxes. The banquet table Kobie rose from held an ancient-looking computer, stacks of DVDs, camcorders, and a few digital cameras. “What do you have going on here?” I picked up one of the camcorders and inspected it. “They still make these?”
“They don’t.” She rolled her eyes. “Can you believe that up until last year our town historian had been taking new archival footage and burning it onto DVDs? I’ve told him a million times, Greg, people have been carrying around tiny computers in their pockets for over a decade.”She plucked a phone out of a side pocket hidden in her flared skirt and waved it around. “You’ve got to put this stuff in the cloud. But does he listen to me? No. So now I’ve inherited this project.” She waved her hand toward the pile of outdated electronics.
“Wow. Sounds…tedious.”
“Someone has to do it. Otherwise, what would happen to the documentation of all of our town’s significant events?” Her words held zero acrimony.
“I’ve got to give it to you, that’s some dedication.”
She smiled and pulled a chair out of the corner. “Mind if I keep working on these while we talk? It’s just a few clicks and then waiting around.”
“Sure thing.” I made myself comfortable.
Kobie slid one of the DVDs into the computer and it rumbled like a small airplane barreling down a runway for liftoff. “Do you have specific questions, or should I start with the basic history of the festival?”
“Let’s start with the history and go from there.” Maybe after making her comfortable with a discussion about the festival, I could segue into talking about Axel Everett.
She proceeded to regale me with close to thirty minutes of history about Bay Days. Forget an article. I could write an entire book about the festival with the amount of information this woman knew about a single town fair. She worked her way through several DVDs worth of footage in the process. Images of fairs, weddings, parades and ribbon cuttings flickered across the screen as we chatted.
“And since Fletcher Kelly spent so much time and effort domesticating these geese for his wife, he had all these birds he couldn’t release back into the wild. So he created a traveling show and took it all over Michigan in the late eighteen hundreds, showing off the tricks he’d taught them. When the town decided, in the nineteen sixties, to start the Bay Days Festival, his traveling sideshow provided inspiration for many of the festival games. It was meant to be a celebration of both the town’s heritage and its aspirations.”
“Aspirations? That’s where the…” I consulted my copious notes. “Lord and Lady of Fidelity, Love Queen, and Valor King come into play?”
