Page 12 of The Girl from Devil’s Lake (Joanna Brady Mysteries #21)

Fertile, Minnesota

In Miss Holt’s health ed class Steve’s senior year, everyone was supposed to do a research paper on some member of their immediate family.

Since Steve’s “immediate family” was composed of exactly two people, he wrote the paper about his mother, Cynthia Hawkins Roper.

Part of the process called for actually interviewing the person he was writing about.

During the interview, his mother was thrilled to be able to tell him about her happy childhood, growing up on the family farm with Gramps and Grandma Joan, but Steve noticed that, after the death of her mother, Cynthia tended to gloss over a lot of details.

She said very little about having Grandma Lucille as her stepmother, but Steve knew enough about the woman to understand that if Grandma Lucille had been in charge, his mother’s teenaged years had been anything but a bed of roses.

No wonder she had taken to Jackson Roper, the first kid who ever asked her out.

Details about that relationship were notably absent as well.

Steve’s mom didn’t come right out and admit that neither she nor Jackson had actually graduated from high school.

Steve had to track that detail down on his own by checking school records, and she was equally vague about the reasons for their subsequent divorce.

However, Steve already knew the basics on that, because Grandma Lucille had spilled those beans to him time and again.

Single mothers weren’t exactly in vogue back then, but Cynthia was understandably proud that she had managed to raise her son on her own, and she was equally proud of the fact that, although she had waited tables for years, she was now the sole owner of the restaurant where she had once been employed.

In Fertile, Minnesota, that counted as a success story.

In Steve’s retelling of the story, he didn’t pull any punches.

He included the sordid details about his mother being knocked up shortly after her sixteenth birthday.

Steve also managed to track down the divorce records in which he discovered that the divorce was granted due to her husband having an adulterous affair with a woman named Verna Slocomb of St. Cloud, Minnesota.

Grandma Lucille had always said his father had run away with a godless slut, but until Steve saw the divorce papers, said girlfriend never had an actual name.

Steve didn’t show his paper to either Gramps or his mother, but Miss Holt had given him an A+.

By then, however, Steve’s interest in his father had been piqued.

He’d been given a partial scholarship to the University of Minnesota and had already been accepted there.

Shortly after high school graduation, he explained to his mother that he wasn’t wild about living in a dorm and wanted to go down to St. Paul for a few days to see if he could scout out a possible apartment arrangement.

On that particular trip, however, Steve didn’t make it any farther than St. Cloud.

Arriving in town in his shiny Bel Air, he stopped off at the first phone booth he saw, grabbed the phone book, and went looking for the name “Slocomb.” After finding seven listings for Slocomb, Steve dialed the number for the first one—Amos.

“Hello,” a male voice answered.

“Is this Amos Slocomb?”

“Yes, who’s this?”

“My name’s Steve. I was hoping to locate Verna Slocomb. Do you happen to know her?”

“Of course I knew Verna,” Amos said impatiently. “She was my first cousin, my uncle Vernon’s daughter.”

“Was?” Steve ventured. “Is she...deceased?”

“She’s dead,” Amos said bluntly. “Murdered by that no good bastard husband of hers. He’s doing twenty-five to life in the Minnesota Men’s Correctional Facility right here in town, and I hope he dies there. I pray that SOB never again sees the light of day. Now who did you say you are again?”

I didn’t say , Steve thought, and I’m not going to . Aloud he said, “Sorry to bother you.” Then he hung up.

After that, he stood in the phone booth for several long minutes, wondering what to do next.

Finally, he made up his mind. Since he was already parked at a gas station, he went over and asked the attendant for help.

He was told the prison was located on Minnesota Boulevard and was given directions as to how to get there.

Steve’s first glimpse of the massive edifice made of hand-quarried granite made him think of ancient castles somewhere in Europe.

Once there it took lots of talking to worm his way inside, but Stephen Roper had been born with the gift of gab, and he made it work.

He came up with a sob story about how his mother had just died, and it wasn’t until she was on her deathbed that she had finally told him the truth about his father.

Gradually he worked his way up the chain of command and his patience paid off.

With a visitor badge finally slapped on his chest, he was escorted into a grim interview room deep in the bowels of the gloomy structure.

He sat there on the far side of a small stainless-steel-topped table for the better part of half an hour, waiting and listening as noisy iron doors slammed shut in the corridor outside.

At last the door in front of him opened and a shackled and handcuffed man, accompanied by a guard and wearing a black-and-white-striped uniform, shuffled inside.

Seeing his father for the first time, Steve was stunned. The resemblance between them was striking—the same blondish hair, the same narrow, elongated face, the same piercing blue eyes.

Jackson stopped for a moment and stared back at Steve in his own moment of recognition. Finally his thin face cracked into a grin.

“I’ll be damned!” he said. “If it isn’t my firstborn son finally come to visit his dear old dad!”

His momentary grin had revealed another similarity.

They shared the same crooked teeth. Steve’s mother had been told early on that her son needed braces, but in Fertile, Minnesota, in the fifties, only rich kids wore braces, and Cynthia Roper, waiting tables at the Country Inn, was anything but rich.

Later, by the time she could have afforded braces, her son wasn’t interested.

Jackson eased himself down on a chair opposite Steve. After clicking the prisoner’s handcuffs to the metal fastener welded into the tabletop, the guard let himself out of the room, slamming the heavy door behind him.

“To what do I owe the pleasure after all these years?” Jackson wanted to know.

“I just now found out where you were.”

“How’d you do that—your mom tell you?”

“I was doing a family history paper for my health ed class,” Steve answered. “I found Verna Slocomb’s name in the divorce proceedings.”

“I’ll bet your health ed teacher got a big kick out of finding out your family history included a convicted killer.”

“I didn’t find out about that until today—until I came to St. Cloud,” Steve said. “I talked to Verna’s cousin, Amos.”

“Amos, the rat fink,” Jackson muttered. “Me and him used to be good buddies. At least I thought we were, but he turned against me right along with everybody else. They couldn’t get me locked up fast enough. I’m doing flat time. I won’t be eligible for parole until I’m fifty-six years old.”

“But you did it, didn’t you?” Steve insisted. “You really did kill her?”

“Sure, I did.”

“How come?”

“Why do you think? Because she was leaving me, that’s why!”

But Steve was curious. Thinking about his own experience, he wondered if it was possible that he and his father shared far more than just physical appearance. Maybe Jackson Roper also had interior voices speaking to him and urging him to act.

“You could have just let her go,” he countered, “or was there a voice inside you that told you to shoot her instead.”

“Like a little birdie talking to me from inside my head? Good grief no! I may be a cold-blooded killer, but I’m sure as hell no nutcase!”

That remark offended Steve Roper to the very core of his being. Just because someone heard voices didn’t mean he was crazy. As far as Steve was concerned, that was it. He shoved his chair away from the table, stood up, and made for the door.

“Wait a minute,” Jackson objected. “Where are you going? I want to know what’s happening with you. Did you graduate from high school? Do you have a girlfriend? Are you planning on going to college?”

“None of your damned business,” Steve muttered as he pounded on the door, letting the guard outside know he was ready to leave.

“Will you be back?” Jackson asked.

“No,” Steve said.

Steve was still fuming as a second guard escorted him back to the visitors’ exit.

Physically, he and his father may have looked like they’d been cut from the same cloth, but obviously that wasn’t true.

Jackson Roper didn’t have any stray voices wandering around in his head, and he had a low opinion of people who did.

And although they were both stone-cold killers, there was one major difference.

Jackson Roper had been caught and thrown in prison while his son was still home free.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, you son of a bitch , Steve thought as he ripped off his sticky visitor badge and tossed it in the trash.

“Will we be seeing you again?” the smiling clerk at the check-in counter asked as he signed out on her clipboard.

“I don’t think so,” Steve replied. “This visit was pretty much a one and done.”