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“At the party, she and Jack had a fight. Do you know what it was about?”
“Who knows? Kids fight, don’t they? I was gone by the time Beth left, anyway. We discovered that a lot of the kids had been drinking. The principal didn’t believe it was wise for us to have any part of that. We were supposed to educate against that sort of thing. But he didn’t want to ruin the party, so he asked us to leave a few at a time. Monte was the first to go. She was happy for the excuse. Monte was not a sports person. She left about, I don’t know, eight-thirty. I left around ten.”
“Were you close to the students?”
“Monte and I both were, probably because we were so close in age.”
“If Beth was upset, distraught over Jack, and wanted to talk, who would she turn to?”
“Lynn Peyer. She was Beth’s best friend.”
“Was Peyer at the party?”
“Yes.”
“When did she leave?’
“I don’t know.”
“Anyone else? Anyone she might have been going to see the night she was killed?”
“Me, I guess.”
“Except she didn’t come to you.”
“No.”
“How about Monte?”
“Very unlikely.”
“Why’s that?”
“Monte didn’t approve of Beth. You need to understand. Monte, like I said before, she was a bit of a feminist. At least she was a feminist by Victoria, Minnesota, standards. She believed women could be, should be, whatever they wanted. Only back in those days, living in a small town like this, a woman who graduated from high school either got married or left for college. Beth, to put it charitably, was not going to college.”
“Put it uncharitably.”
“Beth could talk for an hour and not say a thing. She did all her thinking with her body. A lot of girls in small towns did. Maybe big towns, too. They spent their senior years looking for the man they were going to marry, and then spent the rest of their lives wondering what went wrong. That’s just the way it was back then. Beth, like so many of the girls in Victoria, wanted only to get a ring on her finger as soon as possible.”
“She expected to marry Jack,” I said.
“Exactly. Anyway, if Beth had gone to Monte, Monte probably would given her a few college brochures and a lecture on self-esteem.”
“Would Beth have gone to anyone else?”
“No one comes to mind.”
“Chief Bohlig claims that she was killed by transients,” I said. “That she was grabbed up off the street and killed.”
“That’s what he said.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I want to believe him. I truly do. Otherwise Beth was killed by someone living in this town, someone who probably is still living in this town.”
“You want to believe him, but you don’t.”
“No, I don’t.”
There didn’t seem to be much more to say after that. After a few moments of silence, I asked to borrow the yearbook. Suzi said, “Sure.”
“You know who you should talk to?” she added. “At least about the Seven? Coach Testen.”
“Is he still in Victoria?”
“Are you kidding? Mark owns this town. He has a place near Jail Park.”
“Jail Park?”
“Central Park,” Suzi said. “Before they moved it, the county jail used to be located across the street and people called it Jail Park. Still do.”
“Will Coach Testen talk to me?”
“Try to stop him.”
Jail Park wasn’t what I had envisioned. Instead of a few trees, well-trimmed lawn, playground equipment, maybe a baseball diamond, I found what resembled a wilderness preserve. I knew it was bordered on all four sides by narrow city streets, but the streets were far apart and I was unable to estimate its depth. It could have been as vast as Sherwood Forest for all I knew. There was a wide boulevard between the street and the trees, but no sidewalk. What looked like a path began about a hundred yards from where I had parked in front of Coach Testen’s house and bent into the park, disappearing among dozens of trees and high, thick brush. There were areas like this in the Cities, too, I reminded myself. Pockets of wilderness, hidden, isolated, yet only five minutes from the nearest pizza joint.