Page 8 of The Girl from Devil’s Lake (Joanna Brady Mysteries #21)

Fertile, Minnesota

Not that Steve himself was. Early on, he had figured out that he was different from other boys.

Most of them were interested in girls. Steve wasn’t, and boys who were interested in boys were constant targets for bullying and derision.

In actual fact, Steve wasn’t interested in boys, either, but he was smart enough to choose the path of least resistance.

He pretended that he liked girls in the same way he had acted sad at Grandma Lucille’s funeral.

Steve was a fair baseball player for Fertile-Beltrami High School.

He didn’t do so often, but once he connected with a ball, he could run like the wind.

That meant that at school, he hung out with the jocks, whistling and making rude comments about passing girls right along with the rest of them.

He smoked and drank and did his fair share of sissy bullying, too.

All that served to entrench him as one of the guys, and as a card-carrying member of the in-crowd.

It also made him an attractive target for girls.

Of those, Mindy Peterson was by far the most persistent and, ultimately, the most challenging to shake off.

She was a cute little blonde, one of the cheerleaders, and a straight-A student.

In the spring of their junior year, she was also Steve’s date for the prom.

That night, however, she was far more interested in making out than she was in dancing, and she was more than a little annoyed when Steve took exception to her idea of their “going all the way.”

“You don’t have to worry,” she pouted when he objected. “My mom got me a prescription. I’m on the pill.”

“I said no, and I mean it,” Steve had told her. “I’m a virgin, and that’s what I want to be on my wedding night.” Not that he ever intended to have one of those.

At that point, however, Mindy had gotten out of his car (Gramps’s new Buick, really) and flounced off across the parking lot where she caught a ride home with someone else. Word about his refusal spread quickly because, by the next week, guys at school started calling him “Steve, the Verge.”

He put up a good front, telling them all in no uncertain terms to go screw themselves, adding that, “I’d a whole lot rather be a virgin than a daddy.”

Eventually it became apparent that Mindy had lied to him about her being on the pill.

Shortly after the prom, she started dating Wilbur Morton, the Fertile-Beltrami Falcons’ lead quarterback.

Wilbur was good enough that he probably would have ended up with a full-ride athletic scholarship, but by the time graduation rolled around, Mindy was several months pregnant.

They married two weeks after graduation.

Steve was already at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul when his mother sent him a clipping of the birth announcement that had shown up in Polk County’s weekly newspaper, the Polk County Register .

As soon as Steve saw the clipping, his heart was flooded with gratitude.

Thank God I dodged that bullet , he told himself.

But the incident with Mindy still had consequences.

In the week following the ill-fated prom, the voices had all chimed in again, because being called “Steve the Verge” pissed them off every bit as much as it did Steve.

On Friday, May 25, 1962, a week after it happened, he told his mother that he and some of his buddies were going to spend the weekend fishing at a favorite spot at Detroit Lakes.

After packing up his fishing and camping gear, off he went—entirely on his own.

Instead of heading southeast, he took Highway 2 in the opposite direction—northwest. After crossing the state line into North Dakota and driving through Grand Forks, he continued west. Just beyond the entrance to Grand Forks Air Force Base, he spotted a hitchhiker standing on the shoulder of the road.

At first he couldn’t tell if the person was male or female, but as he pulled over, he was relieved to see an attractive young woman wearing a Levi jacket, jeans, and a pair of worn cowboy boots.

Her straight black hair was pulled back in a sleek ponytail, and her tanned skin and prominent cheekbones told him she was most likely Indian.

Steve leaned over and rolled down the passenger window. “Where are you headed?” he asked.

“Devil’s Lake,” she answered.

“That’s on my way,” he said. “I’ll drop you off. Hop in.”

She climbed in, pulling the door shut behind her. Steve noticed she wasn’t carrying anything at all—no purse, luggage, or backpack.

“Day trip?” he asked.

She nodded. “It’s my grandmother’s birthday. I have to be back at work in Grand Forks tomorrow.” She sat with her left hand resting on her knee and her right elbow and arm on the armrest.

“Where do you work?”

“I’m a nurse’s aide at the hospital.”

Steve stole a glance in her direction. She was a little bit of a thing, probably no more than five four, and fairly good looking, except for a pair of very thick glasses. The poor girl had to be extremely nearsighted. That’s when he noticed the brightly colored beaded bracelet on her left wrist.

“Nice bracelet,” he commented. “Did you make it?”

“My grandmother did,” she answered. “She does beadwork.”

That was the end of the conversation. Steve knew from previous fishing expeditions with Gramps that the Turtle River, a tributary of the Mississippi, ran west to east a few miles north of Highway 2.

Figuring that was as good a place as any for what he had in mind, he immediately began looking for a turnoff.

Once he spotted one and began to slow down, his passenger reached for the door handle.

Worried she would bail out of the GMC as soon as he slowed enough to make the turn, he reached out and grabbed her left wrist. Struggling against his grip, she seemed to bend over.

An instant later he felt a searing pain in his upper right arm.

Much to his astonishment, the little bitch had pulled a switchblade out of her boot and sliced open his arm with the damned thing!

Furious, he slammed on the brakes, and the girl shot forward, slamming her forehead on the inside of the windshield hard enough to leave a circular spiderweb of cracks in the glass.

Once the truck stopped moving, Steve sat for a shaken moment, watching the blood spurt from the wound in his arm.

Then he looked at the girl. Apparently she was out cold, but there was no telling how long she’d stay that way.

Fortunately, there was no visible traffic coming or going in either direction.

Steve quickly turned onto the dirt track and headed north.

A hundred yards or so later, he stopped again.

Hurriedly he grabbed what he needed from the toolbox in the bed of his pickup—a precut length of rope and a roll of duct tape—neither of which ended up being necessary.

By the time he returned to the passenger compartment and got a good look at her, he could tell she was still breathing.

Steve knew he needed to get a tourniquet on his arm, but he didn’t dare try to do that while still parked on the side of the road.

Instead, he drove north, not stopping again until he had reached the relative seclusion of a forested area alongside the river.

There he was able to nose the pickup off the shoulder of the road and into a copse of trees.

Working with only his left hand, he managed to twist the duct tape into a tourniquet that eventually slowed the bleeding.

Of course the arm of his shirt was a blood-soaked mess and so was the cab of his truck.

By then she was starting to come to. Worried about being spotted by a passerby, Steve grabbed her by the neck and squeezed the life out of her, watching for that magic moment when the light went out of her eyes.

Once that happened, he hauled the girl out of the truck, hefted her up onto his left shoulder, and headed off.

Feeling a bit lightheaded, he made frustratingly slow progress, but eventually he reached the riverbank.

Rather than just tossing her into the water at the first available spot, Steve forced himself to keep going.

At last, just when he was almost ready to give up, he spotted what he was looking for—a place where a fallen tree had tumbled into the river.

Wading into the shallow water, he attempted to push her body under the log, expecting that being trapped under the tree would help keep her out of sight.

Just when he had her almost where he wanted, the body hit a snag of some kind.

That’s also when he heard the sound of an approaching vehicle.

In a blind panic that the driver might pull into the same sheltered spot he had used, Steve gave the girl’s face a powerful shove, forcing the back of her head into the soft earth of the grassy riverbank.

Then he loped away in such a hurry that he completely forgot about the beaded bracelet.

He had intended to take that along with him to add to his cigar box, but by the time he remembered, it was too late. Instead, he kept right on going.

As soon as he got in the truck, the first thing he saw was the white ivory handle of the bloodied switchblade, lying right there in plain sight in the passenger footwell.

He grabbed it up, knowing that this time the knife, not the bracelet, would be his trophy.

In the future it would also serve as a reminder for him to expect the unexpected.