Page 1 of The Girl from Devil’s Lake (Joanna Brady Mysteries #21)

Fertile, Minnesota

The voices had been with Steve for as long as he could remember.

They had been friendly at first. When he was a little kid, living with his divorced mother in a mobile home behind his grandfather’s house on a farm in Minnesota, the voices would tell him stories when it was time for him to take a nap or go to bed, and they’d still be there talking to him when he woke up.

His mother worked as a waitress at the little café in town.

She’d be gone in the morning before Steve got out of bed, and she didn’t come home until almost suppertime, so most of the time he was stuck with his grandmother.

In the fairy-tale books Steve’s mother read to him at bedtime, Cinderella had an evil stepmother, and so did Snow White.

As for Stevie Roper? He had an evil step-grandmother.

His mother’s real mother, Grandma Joanie, as Gramps called her, had died of breast cancer while his mom was still in grade school.

Grandma Lucille, as Steve was taught to call her, was Gramps’s second wife.

Steve’s mother, Cynthia, and his father, Jackson Roper, had been high school sweethearts.

When they learned they were pregnant, they married without either one of them graduating from high school.

Grandma Lucille had despised Jackson the first time she saw him, and the fact that Cindy and Jackson “had to get married” hadn’t improved her opinion.

Jackson had proved her right by running off with another woman when Steve was less than a year old.

At that point, Grandma Lucille had hit the roof, but Gramps had sprung into action.

He had purchased a used mobile home and moved it to a pad on his farm so his daughter and fatherless grandson would have a place to live.

Gramps was a good man. He took Steve in hand.

He taught the boy how to drive a tractor and how to fish for bullheads in the small lake on his property.

He taught him how to carve and how to build things with Tinkertoys and Lincoln Logs and how to fly a kite, and although Steve’s father never paid a dime’s worth of child support, Gramps never said a mean word about him.

Grandma Lucille, on the other hand, had plenty to say about Jackson Roper and about Steve too. As far as she was concerned, Jackson was a no-good, worthless punk. She was forever telling Steve that he was “the devil’s spawn.” If spawn were baby fish, did that mean Steve’s dad was also the devil?

Most of the other kids had mothers and grandmothers who wore housedresses or maybe capris.

Not Grandma Lucille. Except for church on Sunday—which she never missed—she wore Oshkosh overalls and a pair of lace-up boots.

That’s what she wore at home and that’s what she wore to the post office or grocery store.

Kids at school, mostly the boys, teased Steve, saying that his grandmother wore GI boots. Unfortunately, it was undeniably true.

Grandma Lucille was old-school. She believed that children in general and Steve in particular should be seen but not heard.

Nor did she subscribe to sparing the rod and spoiling the child.

In that regard she preferred using a flyswatter rather than a rod.

And she told him more than once that if he didn’t behave himself, she was going to snap his head right off.

Steve believed Grandma Lucille on that score. She raised chickens—not only for the eggs but also for food. She could snap a rooster’s neck and chop his head off in the blink of an eye.

What all that really meant was that whatever time Steve had to spend with her—from when the school bus dropped him off until his mother got home—was absolute hell.

But then, as soon as Gramps came in or his mother got home, Grandma Lucille did a complete about-face.

The mean looks and disparaging words vanished, and suddenly she was nothing but sweetness and light.

But all along, Steve’s voices kept talking.

They told him stories about a magic owl named Hoot who watched over him day and night.

The eagle he called King Kong also kept an eye on Steve and spoke to him from time to time, telling him things he needed to know.

That’s how Steve learned that a dog named Charlie, who lived on a neighboring farm, was really a werewolf in disguise and not a bluetick hound.

Some of the voices were smarter than others, and they bickered a lot among themselves, but the thing they all agreed on was that Grandma Lucille was a witch and had to go.

Grandma Lucille had told Steve often that he was dumb as a stump, but he was smart enough to know that if he was going to get rid of her, he had to make it happen without being caught.

Gramps’s place was an old-fashioned farmhouse with a fenced yard all around it. A sunporch had been tacked onto the front of the house, and a short set of six steps with banisters on either side led up from a concrete walkway to the front door.

One day, when Steve was eleven, knowing that Gramps was in town having his tractor fixed, instead of going directly into the house after getting home from school, he stopped by Gramps’s toolshed.

Once inside, he opened Gramps’s tackle box, removed a spool of fishing line, and then used his pocketknife to cut off an appropriate length of fishing string.

Back at the house, he secured both ends of the fishing line between the two topmost porch banisters at what he estimated to be ankle height.

Grandma Lucille didn’t like most animals—she especially didn’t like dogs—but she was fond of an outdoor cat who lived in their barn, one she referred to as Kitty.

Once the string was fastened in place, Steve dashed into the house calling, “Grandma, Grandma, come quick. Kitty’s been hurt. I think a raccoon must’ve got him!”

“Where is he?”

“In the barn.”

Steve rushed back outside and down the steps, carefully clearing the fishing line on his way.

Once on the ground, he turned back in time to see the top of Grandma Lucille’s boot catch on the fishing line.

For a moment, she faltered, grabbing for the handrail, but she couldn’t catch herself.

She tumbled headlong to the ground six steps below.

She landed face down on the walkway and then lay there without moving.

Steve stepped closer, staring at her long enough to see a pool of blood ooze out from under her head and onto the sidewalk.

Before he did anything more, Steve hurried back to the steps, where he removed the fishing line and dropped it among the ashes in the bottom of Grandma Lucille’s burning barrel.

When he returned to check on her, she still hadn’t moved.

The pool of blood had widened by then, and he watched in fascination as it gradually spread across the paved walkway and seeped into the grass.

That was when Steve realized this was a moment he would always remember.

It was also when he spotted the gold band of her wedding ring blinking up at him in the afternoon sunlight.

Pulling the damned thing off wasn’t easy, but finally it came loose.

Then, after slipping the ring into the pocket of his jeans, Steve dashed up the stairs and into the house.

He ran to the kitchen where he grabbed the receiver off the wall phone.

“Number please,” the operator said.

“I need help,” Steve said breathlessly.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s my grandma,” he said. “She must’ve fallen off the front steps. She’s hurt real bad and bleeding like crazy.”

“Is she breathing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are you?”

He gave her the address.

“What’s your name?”

“It’s Roper—Steve Roper.”

“All right,” the operator said. “I’m contacting the sheriff’s department right now. It was smart of you to call for help.”

Steve went back outside and rode his bike out to the county road so he could wave down the cops when they arrived twenty minutes later.

A lone deputy showed up first followed by a speeding ambulance.

The deputy checked Grandma Lucille’s wrist for a pulse and then shook his head at the arriving ambulance attendant.

Then he stood up and walked over to Steve.

“I’m Deputy Dan Hogan with the Polk County Sheriff’s Department,” he said. “You’re the one who called it in?”

Steve nodded.

“What’s your name?”

“Steve Roper.”

“What happened?”

Steve shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. When I came home from school she was just lying there. Is she going to be okay?”

The deputy shook his head. “I’m afraid not, Steve.”

“You mean she’s dead?”

The deputy nodded.

Steve knew he couldn’t show what he was really feeling. That would give the game away. So he dropped heavily to the ground where he buried his face in his hands. “That’s awful,” he mumbled.

“Yes, it is,” the deputy said, pulling out a small notebook. “Who all lives here?”

“Grandpa and her live in the house. Mom and I live in the trailer out back.”

“Where are they now?”

“Mom’s still at work. She’s a waitress at the Country Inn in Fertile. Grandpa’s in town getting his tractor fixed. Grandma looks after me once school gets out until Mom gets home.”

“Your grandpa’s Orson Hawkins?”

Steve nodded.

“And the tractor’s being fixed where—Cooper’s Tractor Repair in Fertile?”

Steve nodded again.

Deputy Hogan closed his notebook. “Okay, Steve,” he said. “Why don’t you come have a seat in my patrol car while I see what I can do to get ahold of your folks.”

What happened after that was a flurry of activity.

For a while, cops were all over the place.

Detectives came, and so did the coroner.

After that Deputy Hogan took Steve to the sheriff’s office in town where they had him tell his story again and again.

Eventually they took his shoes away because they wanted to see if the soles matched the bloody footprints they had found in the kitchen.

Finally, Mom and Steve were able to go back to their mobile, but Gramps, after being questioned by the detective, had to stay in a motel in town for almost a week because his house was considered a crime scene.

But much later, that first night, Steve’s mother came into his room to tell him good night.

“Are you sorry she’s gone?” Steve asked.

His mother sighed. “Not really,” she said. “I never liked her much, but I’d never say that to Gramps. She was good to him. Now go to sleep. I’m going outside to have a smoke.”

That had been one of Grandma Lucille’s rules—no smoking inside the house.

Steve’s mother smoked like a fiend. Her brand was Lucky Strikes.

Gramps smoked cigars—Montecristos. After supper in the evenings, the two of them would sit outside on the steps or, in the winter, on the sunporch to enjoy their smokes.

And every year without fail, for Christmas, Steve’s mother had given Gramps a box of Montecristo cigars.

The year Steve turned five, Gramps had handed him one of his empty cigar boxes. “Every little boy should have one of these,” Gramps had said.

“How come?” Steve had asked.

“To hold your treasures,” Gramps had answered.

“What are treasures?”

“The things you want to keep forever.”

That’s exactly how Steve used it.

Sitting in the bottom drawer of his dresser, it held his pocketknife, the hook he used to catch his first fish, some marbles he’d won at school, a lucky rabbit’s foot, a Ten Commandments bookmark from bible school, and a feather taken after shooting his first-ever pheasant.

That night, after his mother went outside to smoke her cigarette, Steve dug Grandma Lucille’s wedding ring out of his jeans, stuck it on the rabbit’s foot, and put them both in his cigar box.

On the day of Grandma Lucille’s funeral, Gramps was really upset because he suddenly noticed that her wedding ring had gone missing.

When the cops gave him an envelope with her things in it and the ring wasn’t there, Gramps hit the roof.

He blamed all kinds of people, from the ambulance attendant to the first deputy who had arrived on the scene.

“Just because they’re cops doesn’t make them saints,” he had growled.

At the funeral, one person after another stood up in the First Lutheran Church of Fertile and said what a wonderful, hardworking, God-fearing woman Grandma Lucille had been. Steve didn’t say a word. He just sat there, doing his best to look both sad and respectful.

After that things at home were challenging for a while.

From what Steve was able to overhear, at first the cops seemed to think that Gramps had been responsible for Grandma Lucille’s death because she’d had some life insurance, and he was the only beneficiary.

However, Mr. Cooper at the tractor repair shop gave Gramps an airtight alibi, saying he’d shown up with the tractor on a trailer bright and early that morning and had stayed there all day until the deputy called to say Gramps needed to come straight to the hospital.

Eventually Lucille Hawkins’s death was declared an accident.

A few months later, the insurance money came through.

Gramps used that to finish paying off the mortgage on his farm and began buying up some of his neighbors’ properties as well.

After that, as far as Steve and his mother were concerned, everything changed for the better.

Steve and his mom moved into the house to live with Gramps, while the new hired hand, brought in to help Gramps with the chores, ended up living in the mobile home.

Naturally Steve never talked about what had happened with anyone—other than Hoot or King Kong, and occasionally with Casper, Steve’s very own friendly ghost. And although that was the first time Stephen Roper got away with murder, it certainly wasn’t the last.