Pretty Girl Gone Page 10

  “A few blocks away. She never made it. Her parents were worried, but they didn’t contact the police until after two.”

  “Did anyone leave the party just before or after Elizabeth?”

  “No one remembers after all these years, and like I said, I can’t get access to the police reports. All I know is what was reported in the newspaper at the time. They found Elizabeth’s body at Milepost Three early the next morning. There was no sign of a struggle. Apparently, she had been dumped there. That’s what Bohlig said—one of the few things he said for the record.”

  “How was she killed?”

  “Manual strangulation.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What does ‘hmm’ mean?”

  “Strangling someone with your bare hands is considered an intimate way to commit murder. Profilers will tell you that it usually indicates the killer had a personal relationship with the victim—usually, but not always.”

  Salisbury stared at me for a moment.

  “Who are you?”

  “What was the condition of the body?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was she dressed, was she . . . ?”

  “Fully clothed. Boots, coat, purse nearby.”

  “Not raped. Was she robbed?”

  “She only had a few dollars in her wallet, but it was still there. A locket was missing. Apparently she wore it around her neck on a silver chain, wore it everywhere, but that could have come off when she was strangled.”

  “Not robbed or raped.”

  “So where’s the motive?” Salisbury asked as if the question had just occurred to him.

  “What did the ME’s report say?”

  “Don’t know. I never saw it. No one did. Bohlig said that releasing it would compromise the investigation. That’s what he said during the investigation. Later, he wouldn’t even tell me that much. I tried to get a copy from the county—the Nicholas County ME did the autopsy—but I was stonewalled.”

  “Was there any other evidence gathered at the scene?”

  Salisbury shook his head.

  “There’s always something,” I insisted, before reminding myself that the crime was committed over thirty years ago. That was practically the Dark Ages compared to today’s forensic achievements.

  “Who covered the original story?” I turned my attention to the ancient newspapers, found the byline William Gargaro. “Can we talk to him?”

  “Conversation might be a little one-sided.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I wanted to talk to him, too, only Billy’s been dead for like twenty years. Most likely, though, everything he knew he put in the paper. That’s what my editor said.”

  “Okay.” I packed up my notes.

  “What are you going to do?” Salisbury asked.

  “Make a nuisance of myself. Oh, one thing. I want to add a codicil to our agreement.”

  “Which is?”

  “You don’t know me and you don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “That’s true enough.”

  6

  Victoria Area High School overlooked the Des Moines River. It was a comparatively new building—the date 1988 was carved into a cornerstone—with a football stadium on one side and a baseball stadium on the other. There was an empty field between the school and the river, and by the way the snow was trampled, I guessed that it was a popular place with the kids.

  I parked my Audi in the lot behind the school. I had a difficult time finding a space because of all the cars there. I guessed that most of them belonged to the students—so much for Salisbury’s theory of kids in Victoria hoofing it when they needed to get around.

  The doors to the school were unlocked. I walked in and began wandering the halls, looking for the main office. No one stopped me; no one challenged my right to be there. I had to wonder if the school board had made a considered decision to operate its school like a school instead of the armed camp found in so many other schools in so many other towns, or if they were just being careless over security. Then I met the three women in the office and realized it was carelessness.

  I asked for the names and whereabouts of any teachers who might have taught at Victoria when the Seven won the tournament, and they were happy to tell me—without checking my ID or, for that matter, even asking my name.

  “Oh, you want to see Suzi Shimek,” one woman told me.

  “Where is Suzi?” the second asked.

  “She has a free period, Room 238,” answered the third after consulting a schedule pinned to the office wall.

  I was given directions, yet no escort, and none of the women asked why I wanted to see Suzi.

  Small towns seem never to believe they have a problem until the problem hits them square between the eyes, my inner voice concluded.

  I eventually found Suzi Shimek hunched over a desk grading papers. Auburn hair fell along the side of her face and she pulled it back with her free hand and tucked it behind her ear. A pair of glasses sat on her head like a tiara. She was a well-made woman and my first thought was that when she was younger she must have had a difficult time keeping the minds of the teenage boys in her class on their work. Even now I could believe half of them would be in serious lust over her.

  I introduced myself gently and Suzi assured me that she welcomed my interruption. She said she would love to chat about “those heady days when the Victoria Seven ruled the earth. Besides,” she added, “after grading the same essay question on sixty-two tests, any break in the routine is a blessing.”

  Suzi offered coffee in a way that made it impossible for me to refuse and led me to a teacher’s lounge near the second-floor stairway. I had never been in a teacher’s lounge before and was disappointed to discover that it was little more than a small lunchroom. There was a large round table, chairs, vending machines, coffeemaker, refrigerator, a CD/AM/FM stereo cassette recorder on top of the refrigerator, microwave, a bulletin board loaded with flyers, calendars, and memos, and two battered, but comfortable, sofas placed at a forty-five-degree angle to each other. Next to the sofas was a bookcase containing yearbooks as well as textbooks and other volumes. After pouring coffee, Suzi took one of the yearbooks from the shelf and began paging through it. Her spectacles were still perched on top of her head and I wondered if she wore them to see or strictly for show.

  Suzi sat next to me on the sofa. Her eyes were soft blue and candid. I didn’t think she’d be good at keeping secrets.

  “They told me when I was going for my teaching certificate that I would always remember my first class, and they were right,” Suzi told me. “I remember my students quite vividly. The Seven, of course, the ones I actually taught at least. Beth Rogers. I had a kid named Paulie who could juggle five balls simultaneously, and a girl named Rachel who threw up during midterms and eventually dropped out because she was pregnant—ah!”

  Suzi turned the yearbook so I could see the page she found. There was a black-and-white photo of a young woman with dark hair that fell to her waist leaning against a classroom door with her arms folded across her chest. She was wearing bell-bottom jeans and a loose-fitting peasant blouse adorned with flowers.

  “Now be honest, don’t I look like I’m sixteen?”

  “This was you?” I blurted.

  “It’s hard to keep order in the classroom when you look younger than your students.”

  Suzi turned the book so she could look at herself some more.

  “How did you manage it?” I asked.

  “Oh, I didn’t,” Suzi replied. “I was an awful teacher my first couple of years. Just terrible. I didn’t realize that at the time, though. I thought I was better than Mr. Chips. I thought I was hipper than Sidney Poitier in To Sir, With Love.”

  I decided I liked Suzi. Anyone who described herself in relation to movies nearly always got my vote.

  “Here’s another one.” It was a photograph of her and a second woman just as young. “That’s me and Monte, Grace Monteleone, but everyone called
her Monte. We were both first-year teachers and we kind of gravitated toward each other out of self-defense. We became quite good friends. Now be honest, weren’t we just the cutest things?”

  I had to agree. She and Monte had looked like they were manufactured in the same factory—long hair, long legs, short skirts, and thin waists—although, while Suzi’s face was open and exuberant, Monte’s was guarded and had a sad kind of smile that reminded me of the painting of the ballerina hanging in Mr. Muehlenhaus’s lobby.

  “What became of her?” I asked.

  “Monte didn’t care too much for Victoria. She did at first. She seemed to love the town, seemed to welcome living here after growing up on the north side of Minneapolis. That changed around the beginning of February at just about the time people were getting excited about the Seven and started making heroes out of the kids. Jack Barrett had been one of her pet projects. He was ungodly smart. He would have been an honor student in any school in the country and Monte was determined that he go to college. Except, suddenly, it was all basketball, basketball, basketball and forget about school. Coach Testen lectured her for giving the boys homework and when she brought it to the principal, he sided with Coach. I think that took a lot out of her.

  “Besides, look around. It’s Victoria, Minnesota, for God’s sake. Back in those days it wasn’t even half as big as it is now. The school was this broken-down barn on the other side of town. Enrollment—we had ninety-two students, total. That’s why the basketball team was so small. Seven kids played basketball and eleven played hockey. There was talk of closing the school and sending the kids to Windom. That ended after the Seven won the championship. Nobody wanted to be the one to say let’s shut it down after that. Plus, we started getting industry. The lawn equipment people moved here. That generated 350 jobs. The meatpacking plant came two years later. That was another 475 jobs. The town was saved, the school was saved. We now have an enrollment of nearly six hundred. The Seven had a lot to do with that. They brought a lot of positive attention to Victoria at a time when the town badly needed it.”

  Suzi smiled broadly.

  “Still, we were both twenty-two, Monte and I, single and pretty and living away from home for the first time, and we couldn’t get a date with anyone who used vowels when they spoke besides eh! There was a sexual revolution going on out there and we were missing out. It didn’t bother me so much. I was excited to be a part of it all, the Seven, the resurgence of the town. Monte—at the end of the school year, she moved to Mankato.”

  “Did you keep in touch?”

  “Not at first,” Suzi said. “I heard she got married, had a child—heard that her husband was killed in Vietnam. We didn’t talk again until a few years later and I saw her name. Monte was conducting a seminar at a teacher’s conference. She had kept her maiden name, which was a radical thing for a married woman to do in those days, but she was always a bit of a feminist. I saw her name and looked her up and we’ve been fairly close ever since.”

  “What about the other teachers that were here back then?”

  “Gone. Some died. Some moved away. There weren’t that many of us. As far as I know I’m the only one from back then who’s still teaching.”

  “Maybe you can answer some questions for me.”

  “About the Seven?” Suzi asked.

  “Yes, but mostly about Elizabeth Rogers.”

  Suzi thumbed through the yearbook, found a page and turned the book for me to see. The photograph covered nearly the entire page. It was the same shot that appeared in the newspaper, only in color. There was a black border around the photograph and beneath it Elizabeth’s name was printed along with an epitaph.

  God gives us all love. But someone to love he only lends us.

  “Beth,” Suzi said. “She was what they used to call ‘a dish.’ ”

  I hadn’t thought much about her when I first saw Elizabeth’s faded black-and-white photograph in the newspaper. Just a pretty girl now gone. It was only her death that had held interest for me. Yet seeing the photograph in color, that changed. Elizabeth’s face was smooth and gold tinted, her hair was a lustrous shade of gold that only nature could create, and her eyes—had they really been that brown, or was it merely a publisher’s trick, a mixing of ink?

  Elizabeth had been seventeen at the time of her murder. It must have seemed to her that all the good things in life were hers for the taking. She had only to reach out her hand.

  Did she date much? I wondered, suddenly. Date boys besides Jack? My mother didn’t have many dates when she was in high school. She told me most boys were afraid of her, afraid she would reject them. Or they had simply assumed she already had a boyfriend: someone who looked like her, of course she did. My mother had to wait for a man who was nearly a decade older than she, a man who had been with the First Marines at Chosin Reservoir in Korea, who wasn’t afraid of anything, including a beautiful woman. Did Elizabeth have that problem, too? What about the other girls? Did they resent her because she had such pretty eyes, like they did my mom? Did she ever have the chance to be anything but a girl with pretty eyes?

  Suzi turned the book around and stared at the photo for a few moments.

  “Poor Beth. I sometimes wonder what she was thinking when—when it happened. Did she know she was going to die? Did she think she would be saved at the last moment? She must have been afraid. Alone and afraid. Did she beg for her life? Did she pray? Did she . . . ?”

  Suzi closed the book and set it on the sofa next to her.

  “Life should be a pleasure for those people lucky enough to be born pretty. That’s what the poets tell us, and I believe it,” Suzi said. “Only it isn’t always so, is it? What did Shakespeare write? Alas, what danger will it be to us, Maids as we are, to travel forth so far! Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.”

  “I hadn’t thought that much about it,” I confessed.

  “I have. Far too much. For months after Beth’s death, I took every compliment as a threat, every invitation as—It was years before I felt comfortable enough to walk the streets alone, even here in crime-free Victoria. Truth is, I don’t think I have really gotten over it. It was just too close to me.

  “The sad thing, one of the truly sad things, is that we never really had the chance to mourn her. Excitement over the Seven took care of that.”

  “Were you at the party?” I asked.

  “The night she was killed?”

  “Elizabeth was dating Jack Barrett,” I reminded the teacher.

  “Beth. Everyone called her, Beth. Yes, she was dating Jack. Of course she was. The prettiest girl dates the prettiest boy. That’s the way it works.”

  “At the party, she and Jack had a fight. Do you know what it was about?”

  “Who knows? Kids fight, don’t they? I was gone by the time Beth left, anyway. We discovered that a lot of the kids had been drinking. The principal didn’t believe it was wise for us to have any part of that. We were supposed to educate against that sort of thing. But he didn’t want to ruin the party, so he asked us to leave a few at a time. Monte was the first to go. She was happy for the excuse. Monte was not a sports person. She left about, I don’t know, eight-thirty. I left around ten.”

  “Were you close to the students?”

  “Monte and I both were, probably because we were so close in age.”

  “If Beth was upset, distraught over Jack, and wanted to talk, who would she turn to?”

  “Lynn Peyer. She was Beth’s best friend.”

  “Was Peyer at the party?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did she leave?’

  “I don’t know.”

  “Anyone else? Anyone she might have been going to see the night she was killed?”

  “Me, I guess.”

  “Except she didn’t come to you.”

  “No.”

  “How about Monte?”

  “Very unlikely.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Monte didn’t approve of Beth. You need to u
nderstand. Monte, like I said before, she was a bit of a feminist. At least she was a feminist by Victoria, Minnesota, standards. She believed women could be, should be, whatever they wanted. Only back in those days, living in a small town like this, a woman who graduated from high school either got married or left for college. Beth, to put it charitably, was not going to college.”

  “Put it uncharitably.”

  “Beth could talk for an hour and not say a thing. She did all her thinking with her body. A lot of girls in small towns did. Maybe big towns, too. They spent their senior years looking for the man they were going to marry, and then spent the rest of their lives wondering what went wrong. That’s just the way it was back then. Beth, like so many of the girls in Victoria, wanted only to get a ring on her finger as soon as possible.”

  “She expected to marry Jack,” I said.

  “Exactly. Anyway, if Beth had gone to Monte, Monte probably would given her a few college brochures and a lecture on self-esteem.”

  “Would Beth have gone to anyone else?”

  “No one comes to mind.”

  “Chief Bohlig claims that she was killed by transients,” I said. “That she was grabbed up off the street and killed.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “I want to believe him. I truly do. Otherwise Beth was killed by someone living in this town, someone who probably is still living in this town.”

  “You want to believe him, but you don’t.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  There didn’t seem to be much more to say after that. After a few moments of silence, I asked to borrow the yearbook. Suzi said, “Sure.”

  “You know who you should talk to?” she added. “At least about the Seven? Coach Testen.”

  “Is he still in Victoria?”

  “Are you kidding? Mark owns this town. He has a place near Jail Park.”

  “Jail Park?”

  “Central Park,” Suzi said. “Before they moved it, the county jail used to be located across the street and people called it Jail Park. Still do.”

  “Will Coach Testen talk to me?”