Page 9 of The Girl from Devil’s Lake (Joanna Brady Mysteries #21)
Only when he was back behind the wheel did he finally remove the tourniquet.
Luckily the bleeding had stopped. In Grand Forks, he ventured into a Rexall drugstore where he told the clerk that he’d been in a car accident.
Ignoring the clerk’s suggestion that Steve should probably stop by the ER for stitches, he bought a package of bandages.
He also visited the local JCPenny and replaced his bloodied jeans and shirt, once again claiming that he’d been in a wreck when a deer had smashed into his windshield.
When it came time to leave Grand Forks, however, he didn’t go the way he had come.
Instead he headed straight south to Fargo and then cut over to Detroit Lakes where he set up camp.
Steve’s arm hurt like a son of a bitch that night, and he didn’t get a wink of sleep.
The next morning, he went out early and caught a few fish so he wouldn’t come home empty-handed.
Before leaving Detroit Lakes, he bought some snacks at a local country store, conveniently leaving the printed receipt in the pocket of his new jeans where his mother was bound to find it.
Somewhere along the way, he stopped off in a secluded spot and used the shovel he kept in the bed of the pickup to attack the windshield, turning the spiderweb of cracks printed on the inside of the glass into a jagged hole from the outside.
When he got home, he told Gramps and his mother the same story he’d told everyone else—the one about the deer hitting the windshield.
“Must have been one hell of a buck,” Gramps commented upon observing the damage to the truck. “Good thing he jumped over the hood. If you’d hit him head-on, you’d probably be dead, too.”
Steve nodded in agreement. “An eight-pointer,” he said. “Ended up tearing hell out of my arm.”
Opening the door, Gramps studied the bloodied seat. “Looks like you bled like a stuck pig.”
“I did,” Steve agreed.
“Well, sir,” Gramps said after a pause. “Summer’s coming on. You can try cleaning that seat till the cows come home, but once the weather heats up, all the blood you can’t see is going to stink like crazy.”
After that, Gramps walked all the way around the pickup, kicking the tires and examining the spots where rust had eaten through the metal. Finally, he stopped inspecting the vehicle, put his thumbs through the straps on his overalls, and turned back to his grandson.
“Saw a cute little blue-and-white Chevy Bel Air over at the Gus Elkins’s dealership this afternoon,” he said. “Looks like it might be just the thing for a young man like you to use to drive himself from Fertile here down to St. Paul to go to the university.”
Steve’s jaw literally dropped. Recently Gramps had sold the farmhouse and the other farms he’d bought after Lucille’s death for a surprisingly large amount of money.
He still wore his customary overalls, not because he lived on the farm, but because they weren’t worn out yet.
With some of the proceeds, he’d purchased and remodeled the house in town where he and his daughter and grandson now lived.
The house just happened to be within walking distance of the Country Inn, the restaurant where Steve’s mother had once waited tables.
With Gramps’s help, she now owned the joint.
“Wow,” Steve said at last. “You mean it? A brand-new Chevy Bel Air?”
“I certainly do,” Gramps said. “You’ve always been a good boy. Now you’re a fine young man who’ll be going off to college in the fall. I think you’ve earned it.”
“Thanks, Gramps,” Steve said. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything at all,” Gramps said. “Just keep on doing what you’ve been doing. Now how about if we go inside and have your mom cook up that batch of fresh fish.”
That’s what they had for dinner that night. When it was time to go to bed, before Steve Roper laid himself down to sleep, he did his best to clean the blood off the blade of his newly acquired, ivory-handled switchblade. Then he stowed it in his trusty cigar box.
As for the girl whose body he’d dumped in the Turtle River?
He never heard word one about her. For people living in western Minnesota, what happened in neighboring North Dakota could just as well have happened in a foreign country.
Then there was that other thing. Turtle River Girl was Indian.
In a part of the country where people like Gramps were still known to say, “The only good Indian is a dead one,” stories about missing or murdered Sioux women didn’t get much traction—not with the press and not with law enforcement, either.
For Steve Roper in Fertile, Minnesota, that was all to the good.
Over in Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, however, the murder of Amanda Hudson was big news in the Ramsey County Gazette :
On Saturday, May 26, the body of Amanda Marie Hudson of Grand Forks, North Dakota, was found in a shallow pool of the Turtle River, twenty miles west of Grand Forks. Investigators from the North Dakota Highway Patrol are treating her death as a homicide.
Miss Hudson, age 21 and a 1959 graduate of Devil’s Lake High School, is the daughter of Elmer and Bonnie Hudson of Devil’s Lake.
According to a Highway Patrol spokesman, the victim had been dead for approximately twenty-four hours at the time the body was found, and the cause of death was determined to be manual strangulation.
Some blood evidence was located at the scene, but there was no sign of a struggle.
The body was fully clothed at the time it was found, and there was no sign of a sexual assault.
The North Dakota Highway Patrol is asking for anyone who might have information concerning this incident to please call their local hot line.
After graduating from Devil’s Lake High School, Miss Hudson moved to Grand Forks where she was employed as a nurse’s aide at Grand Forks General Hospital on a part-time basis while working toward a nursing degree at Grand Forks University.
The eldest of two children, she is survived by her parents, Elmer and Bonnie Hudson, her younger brother, Lucas, and her maternal grandmother, Madeline Running Deer.
Miss Hudson’s funeral will be held at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, June 2, at the Devil’s Lake Methodist Church. Burial will follow at Devil’s Lake Memorial Cemetery.
The investigation that followed Amanda Hudson’s death was cursory at best. No suspicious vehicles had been spotted at the scene, and no suspects were ever identified.
Within a matter of months, Turtle River Girl’s homicide case went cold and, like Cotton Candy Boy’s death in nearby Fertile, Minnesota, it stayed that way.