This small town crime story was never in any newspaper. It’s about a diner on a bus route in western Nebraska, three passengers who got off for pie and never got back on, and the man our town blamed for it. My mother waitressed at that diner for eleven years. She told me the rest of it last winter, when she was eighty-one and finally ready. It reads like one of those horror mystery short stories, except my mother was there.
The town was called Orland. It’s mostly gone now, the way a lot of those towns are. In the 1970s it had about six hundred people, a grain elevator, two churches, a school that went up to eighth grade, and June’s Cafe.
June’s sat right on the state highway. The intercity bus line from Omaha to Denver stopped there twice a day, once each direction, for thirty minutes, so the passengers could eat and stretch their legs. June Halvorsen ran it. She was a widow, round and pink and loud, with reading glasses on a chain around her neck. Everybody called her Mama June. She made the best sour cream raisin pie in the state, and everybody in Orland would have told you so.
My mother started working there in 1971 when she was nineteen. I was born in 1974. I grew up in the back booth of that diner, coloring on placemats.
The Passengers Who Didn’t Get Back On
The first one was in 1975. A young man traveling alone, going west. The bus pulled in at 2:40 in the afternoon, the passengers went into June’s, and at 3:10 the driver honked. The young man didn’t come out. The driver waited ten minutes, then left. That happened sometimes. People change their minds.
The bus company reported it a week later when his family called asking where he was. The county sheriff came out and asked around. Nobody remembered much. A skinny kid with a duffel bag. He’d eaten pie. That was it.
The second was in 1977. A woman in her thirties, going east, also alone. Same thing. Went in for pie. Didn’t get back on.
The third was in 1979. An older man, a salesman of some kind. Same.
Three people in four years. Orland was a small enough place that everybody knew the details, and it became the kind of thing you talked about at church suppers. People said the bus route was cursed. People said the travelers were runaways who’d planned it. People said a lot of things.
And then people started saying Lonesome Pete.
Lonesome Pete
Pete Dvorak lived in a one-room shack behind the grain elevator. He’d come back from Korea wrong, my mother said, and never got right. He talked to himself. He didn’t bathe much. He walked the highway shoulder every afternoon, back and forth, picking up cans to sell. He was usually walking past June’s right about when the bus pulled in.
The kids were scared of him. I was scared of him. He’d wave at you with his whole arm, too hard, and say “Hello, hello, hello.”
After the third passenger went missing, some men from town went out to his shack one night. My mother never told me who. She said “some men” and I knew what that meant. They didn’t find anything in the shack. They hurt him anyway. Not enough to kill him. Enough that he left Orland a week later and never came back.
No more passengers went missing after that. So everybody decided that settled it.
I grew up believing Lonesome Pete took those people. Everybody did. When I was a teenager, we told it as a ghost story at sleepovers. The man who walked the highway looking for travelers.
Here’s a detail I’d forgotten until my mother reminded me.
Mama June had a habit. When a traveler came in alone, she’d sit with them for a minute. She’d ask where they were headed. And she always asked, real friendly, “You got somebody waiting on you at home?”
If they said yes, she’d smile and give them a slice of pie in a wax paper bag. “For the road.”
If they said no, she’d tell them to come back to the kitchen. She’d say she had a whole fresh pie cooling and she’d cut them a big piece to take on the bus. Back past the swinging door. Back past the stove. Back toward the storeroom and the back door to the gravel lot.
My mother saw her do that a hundred times. A thousand times. It never meant anything. It was just Mama June being sweet.
What My Mother Found in June’s Office
Mama June died in 1988. She left the diner to a nephew in Kearney who sold it for the land. My mother was asked to clean out the office before the sale.
In the bottom drawer of June’s desk, under a stack of old menus, there was an envelope. Inside the envelope were three bus tickets.
Not used tickets. The other half. The part you keep for the rest of your trip. One to Denver, from 1975. One to Omaha, from 1977. One to Cheyenne, from 1979. Each one had a passenger’s name on it. My mother recognized all three names. Everybody in Orland knew those names.
She said she sat on the floor of that office for an hour. She said she thought about Pete. She thought about the men who went to his shack. She thought about Mama June asking every lonely traveler whether anybody was waiting for them at home.
And then she put the envelope in her purse and took it home and hid it in a coffee can in our basement, and she never told anyone.
I asked her why. I was angry. I’m still a little angry.
She said three things.
She said when my father left in 1976, it was June who paid my mother’s rent for six months so we wouldn’t lose the house. She said when I had pneumonia at four years old, June drove us to the hospital in North Platte in a snowstorm and paid the bill. She said June was the best person she ever knew, and the tickets didn’t change that, and she didn’t know how both things could be true, and she still doesn’t.
The second thing she said was that June was dead. There was nobody to arrest. Telling would only hurt the people who loved June, which was the whole town.
The third thing she said quietly, looking at her hands.
“And if I told, they’d have to say they were wrong about Pete.”
The men who went to Pete’s shack were still alive in 1988. They were deacons. One of them was the school principal. They’d been telling themselves for nine years that they did a hard, ugly thing to stop a monster. My mother said she didn’t think the town could survive finding out they’d beaten an innocent man half to death while the real answer was handing them pie.
So she let them keep believing it. For thirty-six years.
Who Was This Small Town Crime Story Really About?
The diner was torn down in 1990. They never dug up the gravel lot. Nobody ever had a reason to.
I tried to find Pete Dvorak last year. A veterans’ records search turned up a Peter Dvorak who died in a VA hospital in Wyoming in 1994. No family listed.
My mother gave me the coffee can before she went into assisted living. The three tickets are still inside. I’ve thought about calling someone. The state police, maybe. The families of those three people, if there’s anybody left.
I haven’t. I keep picking up the phone and putting it down.
Because if I call, I’m the one who tells Orland, what’s left of it, that Mama June was a monster and they ran off an innocent man for her. And if I don’t call, I’m doing exactly what my mother did. Keeping the peace. Keeping the pie sweet.
I don’t know which one of us is wrong. I don’t know if it’s both of us.
What would you do with the coffee can?
For more horror stories for adults about towns that got it wrong, read the small town horror story about the Tuesday fires, a small town Halloween story about the porch pumpkins in Vermont, or one of our haunted hospital stories from a night shift in Duluth.
Do you know a small town crime story nobody talks about?
Some towns decide who the villain is early and never change their minds. If you grew up with a small town crime story that the whole town got wrong, or scary short stories for adults that your own family only told you years later, share them in the comments below.
How scary was it?
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