Dontcha Know?

It is April 2013. Gen Fletcher leaves her husband behind and heads to Little Beaver, Minnesota, to complete the school year for Evelyn Pretsler, a high school teacher who has mysteriously disappeared. As a young educator who does not like being told where she can go and what she can do, Gen has already ignored the naysayers and is more than ready to embrace new experiences. But as Gen arrives in the small isolated town and checks into the Bumblebee Inn, she has no idea that she has unwittingly placed herself smack dab in the middle of a crisis.

As the newest stranger in town, Gen soon discovers that the people of Little Beaver are an eclectic group that includes a Native American, a lumberjack poet, and a sheriff unwilling to disclose the details of Pretsler’s disappearance. As Gen begins immersing herself in her six-week adventure, she learns further information about Pretsler that leaves her with more questions than answers. But when Gen is left to deal with troublesome students in her classroom, what she finds soon draws her into the murder investigation and leaves her teaching career in jeopardy.

Dontcha Know? shares the tale of a young woman’s adventure in a small Minnesota town after she agrees to take over a missing teacher’s classroom and finds herself embroiled in a complex mystery.

Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore. —The Wizard of Oz (1939)

She was called Gen by her friends, but her full name was Genevieve Grace Gorman Fletcher. She was young and inexperienced, but nobody was going to tell her where she could go and what she should do.

Spring had come late this year, so the trees weren’t fully budded out. The variety of evergreens in the thickly wooded areas along the roadside made the scenery—what you could see of it— green. The farther north she drove, the more wintery the roadsides looked. Occasionally she spied a small patch of snow nestled at the foot of a shaded patch of evergreens. It was the first week of April 2013, and northern Minnesota was still feeling the pains of winter. The paved road seemed to grow narrower the farther north she went.

The last sign of life she’d seen was two hours ago when she’d stopped at a gas station on the north side of Bemidji to fill the Ford Fusion for the last 120 miles of her trip.

“You’ll be living in the wilds with moose, deer, and bears!” Fletch had scoffed when she’d announced her decision.

Evan Patrick Fletcher had been against this move from the minute she’d gotten the phone call asking her to finish the school year for a missing high school teacher who’d been teaching in Little Beaver, Minnesota.

“I’m sick and tired of substitute teaching in St. Cloud. I hate these big towns and big schools,” Gen had retaliated. She had been born and raised in a small southwestern Minnesota farming community; small towns were her forte.

Gen and Fletch had met at Moorhead State University when she was enrolled in a secondary-education course with majors in history and English. Fletch was a business major with minors in banking and finance. His great physique, handsome features, intelligence, and soft-spoken, friendly nature had attracted Gen from the start. They’d fallen in love and gotten married the summer after they both graduated. Fletch had gotten a job as a loan officer in a large Wells Fargo bank in St. Cloud, so they moved to that bustling city after their marriage, got a nice apartment, and set up housekeeping.

Gen hadn’t been lucky enough to find a teaching job in St. Cloud, so she’d been substituting in the St. Cloud school system for almost two years and was sick of it. She felt she needed a chance to be in her own classroom, doing her own thing. She had accumulated so many ideas on how she was going to teach during her own secondary-school years and the four years she spent at Moorhead State; now she wanted to try some of them. Gen knew that if she were given the chance, she could be the world’s best teacher—but then, didn’t all starting teachers feel that way?

“Ahhhhhhhh!” Gen screamed as she slammed on the brakes to miss a young doe that had suddenly sprung out of the ditch on the left side of the road. Gen’s head glanced against the steering wheel when the car slammed to a stop in the ditch on the right side of the road.

“Ohhh,” she moaned, rubbing her head while trying to remember what had happened.

“Dang deer,” she muttered. I hope I didn’t hit it. If I wreck the car, Fletch will smirk all the more. She could see his face now, smiling his know-it-all smile. “Told you so,” he’d say.