Minutiæ

Turn­ing left off of State Route 76, you’d be hard-pressed to find much of any­thing going on in the stoic fields and dusty back roads that sur­round Thurber, Nebraska, pop­u­la­tion 17,481. Cows graze lazily, sin­gle trees act­ing as sen­tinel among the oth­er­wise unin­ter­rupted wheat fields and ruddy plains.

After three miles of loose wire fenc­ing and Old West reminders, Thurber and all of its rel­a­tive big city charm expands from the hori­zon. There’s the old gas sta­tion with the rusty Citgo sign dan­gling life­lessly by a few links of chain. There’s Mama Dell’s, the road­side diner where, for an extra $2, Mama her­self will throw any entrée on the menu into a pie crust and bake it until golden brown. There’s Cadil­lac Jack’s, a saloon-style drinkery com­plete with old wooden floor­boards and an ace of spades play­ing card with a bul­let hole through the center.

Thurber isn’t just the most pop­u­lous city in this open cor­ner of north­west­ern Nebraska, it’s also the Reynolds County seat. Polit­i­cal deals for agri­cul­tural sub­si­dies are made over cups of cof­fee at Dink’s Donuts. The Amer­i­can Red Cross oper­ates the only blood bank for two hun­dred miles out of an old laun­dro­mat that sits on the town square. Vot­ing hap­pens here, at Fel­low­ship Church, where mis­chie­vous kids like to sneak in and des­e­crate Jesus on the cross with trucker hats that read ‘Got Er Done’. Parades chock full of trac­tors and smil­ing chil­dren scav­eng­ing for Toot­sie Rolls come through town three or four times a year to cel­e­brate this wheat har­vest or that national hol­i­day. Oth­er­wise, things stay mostly quiet and mostly dusty, a thin film of which shel­lacs on to any beast or build­ing in just a few days time.

Every spring, though, this rusty lit­tle ham­let has itself a Pretty Woman moment. The quiet des­per­a­tion mas­querad­ing as who­r­ish indif­fer­ence dis­ap­pears, replaced by illus­tri­ous affec­ta­tions of pride with a new­found met­ro­pol­i­tan air. This is Grain Days, a three-day spring fling of sorts, with an end­less com­bi­na­tion of fried foods, board­walk lights, late nights and danc­ing under the moon. The day­time hours are fully loaded, with itin­er­aries includ­ing craft­ing ses­sions, dairy com­pe­ti­tions, a buck­ing bronco show and a demo­li­tion derby at sunset.

All of this farm­land flour­ish is pre­text for the main event: the Sun­day night Grain Days Beauty Pageant, a whirl­wind of cos­mopoli­tan expec­ta­tions, sad­ness, tri­umph and con­spir­acy the­o­ries. Hearts have been bro­ken here, minds have been lost, and more than a few friendly neigh­bors have found them­selves on oppo­site sides of a Grain Days pageant vic­tory. It’s not hard to see why this real life show is so pop­u­lar; you’d need the full cable pack­age to find any TV drama this compelling.

By Tues­day evening, young ladies from every stretch of the county glide into Thurber to pre­pare for beauty bat­tle, bring­ing with them a small army of moth­ers and aunts to act as styl­ists, han­dlers and cheer­lead­ers. Come Sun­day night, the beastly masses of Reynolds County stand on rock­ing feet at the steps of the Muriel Perkins Memo­r­ial Library, the only build­ing struc­turally sound enough to accom­mo­date such a large crowd. It’s also the most archi­tec­turally styl­ish build­ing in an oth­er­wise unmem­o­rable town square, with tan bunting bil­low­ing from every avail­able win­dow frame. In short, it’s the only place in all of Thurber decent enough to crown the Reynolds County Grain Girl in.

It’s also the only place in all of Thurber where pageant win­ner Dar­lene Mof­fitt has been murdered.

Dar­lene never fit the pro­file of a true Grain Girl. Her shoul­ders weren’t broad enough, her freck­led cheeks too promi­nent. She couldn’t hop a fence in farm boots and had a pen­chant for quot­ing Kurt Von­negut nov­els. She’d take any oppor­tu­nity to bring up her home­town of Manok­ifer, two hours east. “They’ve got a Denny’s there,” she’d smirk, before plung­ing in the small town dag­ger: “A Chili’s, too.”

Yet, last May, there was Dar­lene Mof­fitt, smil­ing com­fort­ably along­side 49 other Grain Girl con­tes­tants. A few rounds of vot­ing, then: 29 girls, then 14, then 9 other hope­fuls. Dar­lene effort­lessly maneu­vered the grow­ing stages and their match­ing crowds, shed­ding com­pe­ti­tion as she went. First the out­door tent next to the but­ter churn­ing booth, then the raised indoor plat­forms along­side the meat smok­ers belong­ing to Quizzy’s BBQ, and even­tu­ally on to the lux­u­ri­ously car­peted library stage. When the other con­tes­tants started sweat­ing from the com­pe­ti­tion, Dar­lene would lean over and offer them a tis­sue, then pull one from her padded bra. The crowds went wild.

“She was a fire­cracker, that’s for sure”, says pageant judge Rick DiMeco. “You know, those lit­tle sticks of mini dyna­mite? Well, to bor­row a metaphor, she was one of those. Tiny pack­age, lots of bang.  I guess nobody both­ered to tell her that fire­works are ille­gal in Reynolds County. Heh. I’m sort of a come­dian around here.”

Her par­ents, Jen­nifer and Wal­ter Mof­fitt, moved to Thurber after Wal­ter took a regional sales posi­tion with Rifle­man Range, a blos­som­ing startup that offers a line of DIY home gun range kits. Even with such a nat­ural ‘in’ in this rural town­ship, busi­ness and friend­ships were equally hard to come by.

“I really think this Grain Girl thing became her way to make an impres­sion”, says Jen­nifer, fight­ing back tears. By August of that first year, Dar­lene had bought out the full sup­ply of Tay­lor Swift cal­en­dars from the kiosk at the near­est mall and hung them inter­rupt­ingly all over the Mof­fitt home. Three going up the stair­case to the sec­ond floor, one next to the mir­ror in the down­stairs bath­room, two more on either side of the fake fire­place and one that flipped open when you pulled on the refrig­er­a­tor han­dle, mean­ing every time you wanted a glass of milk you had to be reminded – in a large red cir­cle around the date – that Grain Days was com­ing up.

At War­rick Mor­ris High School just beyond Stinker’s Clunk­ers used car lot, the Grain Girl pageant is such a big and unswal­low­able topic that most of the girls choked on their words just think­ing about what it. Only a few of the younger ones dared to dream about becom­ing the next great Girl, por­ing over well-worn pho­tographs of leg­ends like Patty Mor­ton or Lucy Dim­ple. The older ones, the ones who knew they’d missed their shot, spent most of each spring cut­ting classes to hang out by the junk­yard and smoke cloves. Even there, the aro­matic smoke would even­tu­ally carry con­ver­sa­tion of the pageant, tinged with talk of scan­dals and intrigue gone by.

There’s the year that Tracy Winger faked a blood­borne path­o­genic dis­ease to win the sym­pa­thy vote. Or there’s the time Cindy Grainger’s mom chlo­ro­formed a judge and then stole her cre­den­tials to try to vote for her own daugh­ter. Even­tu­ally the widen­ing rip­ples of any pageant con­spir­acy the­ory con­ver­sa­tion would wash ashore on one sim­ple, whis­per­a­ble truth: in the event of a reign­ing Grain Girl’s death, the pre­vi­ous year’s win­ner retains the title. Sure, Sue Blan­chard had got­ten her arm ripped off in a wheat mill, but she didn’t die so that doesn’t count. But what if she had, leav­ing her pre­cur­sor as the only two-year Grain Girl in Thurber his­tory? How much would that mean to a young woman, steeped in the pageant tra­di­tion and des­per­ate to hold on to her crown – at any cost?

Lacey Fin­dle remem­bers well the day that Dar­lene announced her Grain Girl inten­tions to her class­mates. “We were all shocked,” she says cooly. “You don’t just walk into NASA and decide to run for Pres­i­dent Space Mayor, or what­ever. That’s what it felt like.”

“I mean, you could smell trou­ble three fields away. Real trou­ble, too. Not just horse shit on a light breeze.”

If any­body should know, it’s Fin­dle. In a clas­sic ‘Home­town Girl Makes Good’ head­line, she became last year’s Grain Girl after most of the town told her she was past her pageant prime. Born and raised in Thurber, Fin­dle flunked out of her senior year of high school three times, believ­ing that being enrolled in school was a qual­i­fi­ca­tion for accep­tance. Halfway through her fourth year at War­rick Mor­ris, with a D– in Typ­ing and an F+ in Kine­si­ol­ogy, Fin­dle was finally appraised of the rules: there are no aca­d­e­mic restric­tions what­so­ever on the Grain Girl com­pe­ti­tion. You don’t even have to grad­u­ate at all.

From that moment on, Fin­dle car­ried her­self (tucked into her sig­na­ture hal­ter top) with an air of grace and an atti­tude of supe­ri­or­ity that coasted her to last year’s crown­ing. She cried, she smiled, but most of all, she knew how hard she’d worked to get there.

“It really becomes a lifestyle, not just a title. I can go down to Dixie’s and get a scoop of pecan fla­vored ice cream any time I want, free. On. The. House.” Sit­ting in Dink’s, her fin­gers wrapped around a cup of cof­fee, the 22-year old high school dropout and pageant win­ner is all neck and eye­liner, with a lit­tle less grace and a lot more of that supe­ri­or­ity. “Some peo­ple think they’re ready for the pres­sure, but they ain’t. There’s a lot more to this than just cut­ting the rib­bon on a few new feed stores.”

It’s 9am, but as we sit, tucked into a plas­tic booth, her win­ning sash drapes across her chest. It’s back­dated by one year, of course. Since Dar­lene Mof­fitt died in hers, splayed out on the floor in the ref­er­ence sec­tion of the Muriel Perkins Library, it didn’t seem right to pass it back to Findle.

Besides, the less con­fu­sion the bet­ter. It was already more than enough that the dump­ster spec­u­la­tions had proven to be true: with Dar­lene Mof­fitt dead and buried, Lacey Fin­dle is this year’s – and last year’s – Grain Girl.

She smiles, her fin­gers bounc­ing around the ceramic mug, tread­ing water in this bliss­ful fact.

Tell me about Dar­lene, I say. After all, her death is the rea­son you’re still wear­ing that sash. Her fin­gers freeze.

In 1997 an enraged thor­ough­bred in down­town Thurber broke free of it’s har­ness and pushed Mar­vin Lerner in front of a grain truck. Wit­nesses say the mare had mur­der in her saucer­plate eyes, and even let out a lit­tle whinny when the deed was done. (They gave that horse the chair.) More than a decade later, there remains an old photo of the horse hang­ing over the bar at Cadil­lac Jack’s, and the old-timers swear on cold nights you can still hear that whinny.

Less than one year after her griz­zly Grain Girl mur­der, there are no pho­tographs of Dar­lene Mof­fitt. Not in the Grain Days flyer, not dan­gling inside some tacky frame at the library. To know any­thing about what hap­pened that night, you’ll have to dig. Into people’s lives, into the dark under­world of com­pet­i­tive pageantry, through stacks and stacks of receipts, notes, diaries and inter­view tran­scripts. Though her body was returned to Manok­ifer, Dar­lene Moffitt’s life is buried in Thurber.

“It’s hard to know what hap­pened; there’s so much going on back­stage. The ten final­ists alone fill up most of the Cre­ative Non-Fiction aisle.” Rick DiMeco was one of three pageant judges that night, along­side school­teacher Margie Rite­naur and Mayor Pat Lerner. He is a machin­ist by trade, milling out small cogs for old thresh­ers or some­times doing small engine repair to make a few extra bucks. DiMeco doesn’t exactly have the flair for pageantry that one might assume in a Grain Girl judge. Instead, he won his seat, like one third of every Grain Days judg­ing panel since it began, by fill­ing out a raf­fle ticket.

“When you’re in the library, you think it’s so big that there’s no way you could fill it up with peo­ple. But come show­time, it’s packed in like an ele­va­tor. Con­tes­tants, make up artists, show run­ners. You’d never notice if a sin­gle girl went miss­ing in there, even if she had just won the crown. It’s stand­ing room only from Zil­gar­ian to you-can-kiss-my-Asimov. Heh. There I go again, tellin’ jokes.”

A sin­gle pho­to­graph from that night cor­rob­o­rates DiMeco’s tale of sar­dine con­di­tions. It’s one of those all-and-nothing shots, where there’s no cen­tral focus and the fram­ing is awful. Some heads are cropped clean in half, oth­ers blurry from motion; only one man is look­ing directly at the cam­era. Dark suit, one hand in a trouser pocket, he stares straight ahead, into the lens, a per­plex­ing expres­sion of bland con­tent­ed­ness amidst a room full of rev­elry. In the upper right-hand cor­ner, Dar­lene Mof­fitt is mid-step, for­ever lurch­ing towards the cor­ner of the pic­ture amidst a row of books.

It’s her last pho­to­graph, and she doesn’t even know it.

Over din­ner at Mama Dell’s, I ask DiMeco who the intensely gaz­ing man in the suit is, and he almost chokes on his Sal­is­bury steak pie. He says he doesn’t know. Later, after atten­dance records don’t pro­vide a name and a few other wit­nesses come up dry, I drop in to DiMeco’s machine shop, where the din of whirring blades and crunch­ing metal seems to afford him some level of secu­rity from upturned ears.

“You won’t find his real name, because no one knows it,” says DiMeco, while aim­lessly push­ing a belt sander across some old cop­per pip­ing. All any­one lis­ten­ing in would catch is the shrill grind of metal on metal. “He’s a ‘Ringding’, has been for years. I ven­ture the only rea­son he’s back­stage is because he lost a lot of money.”

All across Amer­ica, ‘Ringdings’ is pop­u­lar par­lance for pageant show ringers, brazen men with the skills and desire to rig shows no dif­fer­ent than the Grain Girl pageant. These smoky, back room tel­luri­ans have become as much a part of the pageant expe­ri­ence as the tal­ent por­tion or the blind­folded thresher reassem­bly. Every year the girls are dif­fer­ent, but in Thurber, the Ringdings (and their motives) always remain the same. Stakes are placed on the final ten con­tes­tants, and come show time the men find them­selves tucked inside the library just like every­one else, wait­ing for the biggest moment in Reynolds County since they inad­ver­tently got redis­tricted into Wyoming in the 1926 census.

The whole thing is a lot like horse rac­ing, really. Money changes hands as fates rise and fall through­out the evening, but one thing is con­stant: the Ringdings all came here to win, often up to $30,000 for each beau­ti­ful spec­i­men trot­ting around in front of the crowd.  The aver­age bet­ting spec­ta­tor might get lucky and pick the right long shot, but the house always wins the real money. Espe­cially when there’s an inside girl.

“I got in deep with the Ringdings last year after I put down some money I didn’t have on the sure­fire win­ner,” he says as we tran­si­tion to the high rat­tle of a 4,000 rpm steel saw.

Lacey Fin­dle, I say. No. Another girl.

“The only rea­son Lacey ever won is because the Ringdings fixed the whole she­bang. The moment she put on that sash, I knew the pageant was a fraud, and I knew I was in a lot of trouble.”

The M.O. of any pageant fixer is roughly the same: do what­ever it takes to alter the out­come favor­ably, take everyone’s money and move on. Some­times that means brib­ing a con­tes­tant to take a fall, other times… heav­ier… meth­ods can be applied to judges and influ­en­tial pageant mem­bers. What­ever hap­pened at the annual Grain Days Pageant last year, it didn’t go well for the Ringdings.

Within days, DiMeco says he was con­tacted by the man in the pho­to­graph about his out­stand­ing debts. Cries of an unfair bet­ting dis­ad­van­tage fell on deaf ears, and when he woke up one morn­ing with a mower blade stuck in his front door, he decided to strike a deal to wipe out the unpaid debt in exchange for a seat at the judges table in the next year’s Grain Girls pageant. The raf­fle would be rigged for him to win, and all he had to do was vote the way they wanted him to. Sim­ple as that.

An ego-driven Lacey Fin­dle. A des­per­ate Rick DiMeco. A face­less, money-hungry group of pageant fix­ers. Dar­lene Mof­fitt never stood a chance.

In any inves­ti­ga­tion, you learn pretty quickly that even though they can’t talk, paper receipts tell one hell of a story them­selves. In a dusty manila folder (every­thing is dusty in this town, even when it’s kept indoors), Dar­lene Moffitt’s receipts read like a walk­ing tran­script of her final days lead­ing up to the Grain Days Pageant.

Feb­ru­ary 9th: A work­out DVD titled “Fit It or Quit It.”, $14.99

March 17th: Three bot­tles of hair col­or­ing, dark brown. $29.15

March 29th: Fake eye­lashes, $8.72

April 7th: A two-hour ses­sion at Lee Nails in Dekalb Junc­tion, $32.18

April 7th: A cheesy Gordita, two soft tacos and Diet Coke, $5.27

April 11th: Cam­ou­flage four-inch pumps, $98.99

April 19th: Brute For Men cologne, $7.17

April 20th: Store credit for a bot­tle of Brute For Men Cologne, $7.17

April 20th: Brute For Women: Cologne For Women, $7.17

As the red-circled cal­en­dar date nears, the receipts become anomalous.

April 27th: A slice of spaghetti and meat­ball pie from Mama Dell’s, $8.13

And later that same night:

April 27th: A root beer float, $4.25

Bar­bara Gar­gle was wait­ress­ing the night of April 27th, and recalls see­ing Dar­lene come in once with some friends for a pasta snack, and then again later that night with a tall man she didn’t rec­og­nize. Dark suit, one hand in his trouser pocket, a quiet stare. He ordered black cof­fee (receipt unavail­able) and talked with­out mov­ing his hands, while Dar­lene mostly sat and lis­tened. What­ever it was that man was offer­ing, Gar­gle recalls, Dar­lene wasn’t inter­ested. Then, she stood up, walked to the door and left.

Five days later, and two weeks before the pageant, another receipt crops up:

May 1st: Night­light, $6.16

Two days later:

May 3rd: Maglite flash­light, $39.99

Three days later:

May 6th: Horse-Strength Mace, $41.40

Less than four­teen days before the biggest night of her life, Dar­lene Mof­fitt spent $87.55 try­ing to pro­tect her­self from some­one. Or some thing.

At some point dur­ing that fate­ful night, under the bright lights in the front hall of the Muriel Perkins Memo­r­ial Library, things went from bad to irre­versible for Dar­lene Mof­fitt. Those who were there recall Lacey Fin­dle pac­ing just off stage, grip­ping her Grain Girl sash and tiara tightly, as if they’d fly off her body the moment she loos­ened her grip. After begrudg­ingly crown­ing Dar­lene Mof­fitt the cham­pion, she dis­ap­peared out a side door, which is why she doesn’t show up in the lone back­stage pho­to­graph. Though she had her motives, Lacey Fin­dle did not kill Dar­lene Moffitt.

Over a clam­or­ing sheet metal riv­eter in his greasy machine shop, Rick DiMeco unwinds his ver­sion of the tale. He was told by the Ringdings to throw the votes to Tracy Lamiken, an unas­sum­ing puffy-faced pageant girl whose long odds made her the per­fect can­di­date for the fix­ers to cash in big. All they needed was for Dar­lene Mof­fitt to fall. And when they couldn’t bribe her, they tried to use Rick DiMeco.

Yet, through it all, Dar­lene remained a charmed girl, largely unaf­fected by the mag­ni­tude of the forces sur­round­ing her. She had her morals, she had her fan base, and most impor­tantly she had the Grain Girl spirit. All night long Rick DiMeco threw low scores at Dar­lene, but it was never enough to break her. By all accounts, she demol­ished the com­pe­ti­tion with a dance rou­tine to “Baby Likes to Rock It” by The Trac­tors that moved Tracy Lamiken to tears. The audi­ence cheered and roses were thrown and, for a brief moment in the uni­verse, Dar­lene Mof­fitt was Thurber’s own Grain Girl, and no one could take that away from her.

“I thought the Ringdings were going to kill me,” whis­pers Rick while a spot welder arcs loudly behind us. “You don’t lose that much money in one night and let the inside man live to tell about it.” In a des­per­ate bid to save his own life, Rick agreed to take Darlene’s, a one-time hit man for hire on behalf of the Ringdings in their quest for ret­ri­bu­tion. He’s quiet as soon as the words pass his lips. Resigned to the idea of murder.

The man in the pho­to­graph, dark suit with one hand in a trouser pocket, was sim­ply wait­ing for the deed to be done. A lit­tle nod from Rick, emerg­ing from the book stacks, to indi­cate that the griz­zly crime had been accom­plished and all of his debts were paid. A moment that would never come.

The police found Dar­lene Mof­fitt in the Sci­ence Fic­tion sec­tion, clutch­ing a Kurt Von­negut hard­back open to a page con­tain­ing only the words “So it goes”. No knife wounds, stran­gu­la­tion bruises or bul­let entry wounds, just a tram­pled body cov­ered in horse­shoe prints. The escape route, lit­tered with hay, led to a shat­tered back door. By the time wit­nesses traced the route back to the bro­ken door frame, all that could be heard through the cold air was the faint gal­lop­ing of horse hooves. The old timers down at Cadil­lac Jack’s were right all along.

Dar­lene Moffitt’s mur­der is one year older now, and though there are no pho­tographs of her in the Grain Days fly­ers or the library, some­one down at Cadil­lac Jack’s has started a tally next to that photo of the horse. Two checked off – Mar­vin Lerner and Dar­lene Mof­fitt – and room for more.

Lacey Fin­dle has relin­quished her two-year tiara. Rick DiMeco’s machine shop still whirrs on into the night. At a pageant in the deep South, or per­haps out West, a quiet man in a dark suit stands patiently, wait­ing to count his money. And some­where out beyond the Thurber county line, criss­cross­ing the fields near Route 76, a ghost horse roams free, mur­der in its saucer­plate eyes, seek­ing ran­dom revenge for a death penalty sen­tence from years past.

So it goes. ✦