Page 15 of The Girl from Devil's Lake
“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 hewas 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.
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 oncethe 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 theRamsey 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.
