Bone Harvest

by Mary Logue

  “Are you sober enough to drive?”

  “I will be by the time I lock up.”

  “Come right home.”

  “Yes, dear.” After she hung up, he stood up and wandered around the empty office. He was getting too old to be running a newspaper. Maybe he’d go right from running a full-time business to addleheaded in a nursing home. If he didn’t get home soon, Agnes would divorce him and he would be forced to go to the nursing home.

  Nothing had happened today. He had heard no reports of anything amiss. Maybe this whole thing would blow over. The Schulers could go back to being dead and buried. Poor family! What had they done to deserve any of their misfortune? But then, what have any of us done, he thought.

  He checked the back door. It was locked. He couldn’t always count on Sarah to remember to lock up. She was a bit flighty.

  He gathered up his lunch box and his briefcase. Silly of him to be dragging a briefcase back and forth, but it had been with him more years than Agnes and had held up nearly as well as she. It was part of him. He put his calendar in there and a copy of today’s paper. Agnes, poor woman, was always a day behind on the news.

  He turned off the lights in the back office and walked out to the front.

  He almost missed it.

  He walked out the door and then turned back to make sure it was locked. That was when he saw it, the letter, lying on the floor in the office. He must have walked right over it. Another letter.

  Quickly he unlocked the door and picked it up. He set his briefcase down on the counter and put the letter down next to it. Deputy Watkins had left him some plastic gloves. He found them under the counter and put them on. Holding it carefully, he cut through the top of the letter. The same handwriting. A longer note, it read:

  The day is almost here. The day of reckoning. When the truth will come out or the people will pay for it with their lives. Just as the lives of the Schuler family have been poisoned, so will the water be poisoned. Let the truth be known or the innocent will pay.

  I mean it.

  Wrath of God

  Harold read it through a couple times and thought of the water that ran through their lives. Poisoning the water would be horrible. It could ruin everything in the county. How did this guy think that he could get at the water supply in an area where most people had their own wells? The water-holding tank in town? He needed to call the sheriff and let him know about the letter.

  They didn’t find anything. Claire hadn’t thought they would. There were trails going from the fields off into the woods, but they were deer trails. All someone had to do to camouflage their steps would be to follow those paths.

  At midnight the sheriff called the search off. He said he would send some more officers over tomorrow to look more carefully in daylight. Scott Lund volunteered to stay the night at the Danielses’ in case the man showed up again.

  Claire drove down the hill to Fort St. Antoine a little more slowly.

  When she got in the door, she decided to make one more call. One more try to reach Earl Lowman. It was only a little after ten down in Tucson; maybe he’d come home from wherever he’d been all day long. The phone rang five times and she knew what would happen next.

  The answering machine picked up. Earl Lowman’s gravelly voice said slowly, “Don’t seem to be here at the moment. I’d like to know you called. Please leave me your name and number. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

  Claire wondered if it would be soon enough. “Mr. Lowman, this is Claire Watkins again. I very much need to talk to you. It’s an emergency. Please call me no matter when you get this message.” She left her home number and the number at the sheriff’s office, adding, “You might still remember this number. I don’t think it’s changed since you left. Thanks.”

  That was all she could do. She hung up.

  She wished Rich were waiting for her upstairs, but she couldn’t even think of calling him. Their dinner hadn’t gone too well. She needed to think about what she had to tell him, but she couldn’t do it now. Hard to have a life when you were trying to work a crime of this breadth.

  She just hated feeling so jangled. She knew she’d have trouble getting to sleep. She thought of having a nice big glass of wine, but in the long run it wouldn’t help that much either.

  Instead she went down to the basement and folded a load of wash and brought it upstairs to her room and Meg’s room. She set the piles of clothes on Meg’s bed. Meg liked to put her clothes away herself. She had a special system. She had tried to explain it to her mother once, but Claire was glad to let her take care of her own things. Meg was growing up.

  Claire sat on the edge of her daughter’s bed and thought about what had happened with Jilly. The pesticide guy could have done something awful. He could have taken the little girl, but he hadn’t. If Jilly hadn’t been sitting outside, Claire was guessing that he might have just left the tobacco tin with its bones on the Danielses’ doorstep, where they might not have discovered it until morning. Still a creepy thing to do, but not so threatening. What did he want, and what was he willing to do to get it?

  July 7, 1952

  Schubert sneaked out to the hallway to see what was going on, but there was no one there. Loud shots had exploded in his sisters’ room. Firecrackers? Balloons? That was what they had sounded like.

  He could hear someone doing something in there, but he couldn’t hear his sisters talking or laughing anymore. They had been playing together and talking. He had been waiting to hear his mother call them for dinner. The cake was what he was really waiting for. Arlette’s birthday cake.

  His birthday had been in April. He had turned six. There had been balloons and they made a loud noise when they popped. But maybe the loud bangs had been something else. If it had been balloons, his sisters would be laughing, and he couldn’t hear them doing anything at all. It made him feel nervous. He didn’t want to go any closer, because he felt so nervous.

  If only he knew what had made that noise.

  He didn’t know who was in their room. Maybe it was Denny, playing a joke. Where was his father? Where was his mother? Why didn’t they want to know what was happening? Why didn’t they come?

  His mother didn’t call and there had been two bangs and he felt like he was going to wet his pants. He went back and stood in the middle of his room, trying to think what he should do.

  Schubert felt like he was playing a game they played at school called Statues, where someone would twirl you around and then let you go and you had to stay perfectly still, like a statue.

  Maybe if he stayed perfectly still, nothing would happen to him. Maybe whoever was in the next room, moving things around and making odd noises, would go away and they could have dinner and eat the cake.

  Schubert was afraid that he would never get to eat the cake. He heard footsteps leaving his sisters’ room and coming down the hallway toward his room.

  Dropping to the floor, he lifted up the blanket edge and tried to crawl under the bed. He had to get away and hide. He should have done it before. But there were too many toys stuffed under his bed. He couldn’t get under it far enough. He heard the footsteps stop close to him.

  “Dad, please, Dad,” Schubert yelled into the darkness under the bed.

  He heard a loud blast and his leg burst into flames and then he didn’t know anything more.

  After the second shot, the boy was pulled out from under the bed and his hand placed down on the floor. It didn’t take much effort to cut off a finger with a hatchet. Just the way he’d take the head off a chicken.

  The man stood and knew he was nearly done. He walked out of the room.

  The room was quiet. The boy lay stretched out on the floor, a bloody pool around his hand.

  Then the clothes in the closet moved.

  CHAPTER 19

  When Mrs. Lindstrom answered the door, Claire felt as if she were looking at a woman from the fifties. Mrs. Lindstrom’s hair was up in curlers and she was wearing a snap-down-the-front housedres
s. Claire couldn’t remember the last time she had seen a woman wearing curlers, but at least she wasn’t out in public. Mrs. Lindstrom was thin and pale, hunched over as if she were cold in the midsummer heat. Her hair was a light brown without much gray in it, but she looked close to sixty years old.

  “I wasn’t expecting anyone,” Mrs. Lindstrom said, her slight hand flying up and patting at her curlers.

  “Sorry, I called and talked to your husband. Didn’t he tell you I was coming?”

  “Paul isn’t much of a talker. I think he’s out in the barn. Let me call him in.” Instead of walking out the door and heading toward the barn, Mrs. Lindstrom went back into the house. Claire stood on the steps, as she hadn’t been invited in, and watched the woman push a button on an intercom in the kitchen.

  “Paul,” Mrs. Lindstrom yelled, not counting on the intercom to carry her voice adequately. “Paul, there’s a woman in a police uniform here to see you.”

  Claire had nearly brought Tyrone with her to interview Paul Lindstrom. She wondered how Mrs. Lindstrom would have described him—a black man in a business suit? That was what happened when you were in the minority—you were seen only for your difference.

  “I think he’s coming.” Mrs. Lindstrom came back to the screen door and pushed it open. “Please come in. He won’t be a minute.”

  Claire walked into the kitchen and sat down at the kitchen table. It was definitely from the fifties—metal legs with a yellow Formica top. Very cheery. The kitchen was painted yellow, and a red rooster ceramic plaque crowed on the wall above the stove. Everything was clean, but a little worn-looking.

  “Can I help you with anything?” Mrs. Lindstrom asked.

  “I need to talk to your husband about the Schuler murders.”

  Mrs. Lindstrom looked blank, then said, “I haven’t heard about anyone being murdered. When did this happen?”

  “About fifty years ago.”

  “Oh, are you still trying to solve it?”

  “More like again. Have you heard about the pesticides that were stolen from the co-op?”

  “No.”

  Paul Lindstrom walked in the door. “My wife isn’t from around here. She doesn’t follow the local news much.”

  Mrs. Lindstrom stood by the sink, hovering with a dish towel in her hands. Lindstrom sat down and turned to his wife and said quietly, “Why don’t you go read one of your books, honey. I’ve got to talk to this deputy woman and none of it has anything to do with you.”

  Claire noted that he didn’t say it meanly. He was just clearly telling Mrs. Lindstrom what to do. His wife seemed relieved and scurried out of the room.

  Lindstrom settled into the chair across from Claire. Like his wife, he was on the thin side. He had clear dark eyes, high cheekbones, and an aristocratic nose. If he had been an animal, he might have been a mink—dark, handsome, and a little furtive. Farm work had made him wiry.

  She pulled out a notebook. “Do you know about the stolen pesticides? The poisonings in the park?”

  “Yes, the fellas down at the Kum and Go are talking about it. Gives them something to chew on while they drink too much coffee.” He stated it as fact.

  “Well, we feel that these incidents are tied into the Schuler murders. I wanted to ask you about your father.”

  Lindstrom jerked as if she had given him a slight shock. “My father? Whatever for? He’s been dead awhile.”

  “I’ve heard that he didn’t care much for the Schulers.”

  Lindstrom snorted. “What’s that got to do with anything? They weren’t anyone’s favorite people after the war. You know, the father had just come over from Germany before the war broke out. He could hardly speak English.”

  “Did your father argue with the Schulers?”

  Lindstrom looked at his hands, then rubbed them and kept rubbing them together like he was cold, but it was eighty degrees out. “ ‘Argue ’might be a little strong. It was no secret that Dad didn’t like them. Dad didn’t like any Germans. Didn’t like Catholics, for that matter, and the Schulers were both.”

  “Was there some kind of land dispute?”

  “Oh, I sorta remember that. Dad claimed that Mr. Schuler’s fence was infringing on his property. They threatened to get a surveyor, but then when the family was killed, I don’t think he did anything about it.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Well, I’m fifty-seven now. You can do the math.”

  “Do remember the murders?”

  “Of course. My mother was petrified. She was a fearful woman anyway. I thought she’d never let me go anyplace on my own again. She became so protective of me. Dad didn’t say much. I think he might have felt uncomfortable about the bad feelings between him and Otto Schuler.”

  “I heard your father was away from home when the murders took place.”

  “Yeah, that’s the truth. He left that morning for Milwaukee and didn’t get back till the next day. I expect the sheriff checked his alibi out carefully at the time. Like I said, Dad made no secret of his feelings about the Schulers.”

  “When did you find out that the family had been murdered?”

  Lindstrom tipped back in his chair and let his eyes half close while he was thinking. “Hard to think back that far. All I can remember is some neighbor—maybe Folger, Chuck Folger—coming over to tell my dad. I’m not even sure if it was that night or the next morning.”

  Claire wasn’t sure what to ask him next. It was so long ago, and he had been just a little boy. What right did she have to suggest at this late date that his father might be a murderer? On no evidence to speak of. Then she remembered the ages of the Schuler children at the time they were killed. Paul Lindstrom would have been close in age to the two boys.

  “Did you ever play with any of the Schulers?”

  He picked at the steel edge of the table, then said quietly, “At school. Schubert and I played a bit. But my dad wouldn’t let me play with them when I was home. My mother and I couldn’t have anything to do with them.”

  Claire closed her notebooks, disappointed in what she had learned. But you just had to keep asking the questions. She sat still and willed herself to devise one more. “Who did your dad think had killed them? Did he ever say anything?”

  “I can’t remember him trying to place the blame on anyone.” Lindstrom paused a moment to clear his throat. Then he continued, “The only thing I remember him saying was something about the deputy sheriff who found them. How he could remember Earl Lowman stealing a car and nearly wrecking it, and wasn’t it something that he had ended up on the right side of the law after all.”

  Harold felt oddly elated sitting at his desk. Sometimes that happened to him after he had had a little too much to drink the night before. He had realized early on that he had the potential for being a drunk, so he had put all sorts of limits on his alcohol intake. And he had married a wife who didn’t imbibe at all. But from time to time he tied one on, and occasionally that experience left him slightly euphoric. It gave him a little remove from the world and made him feel he was above it all and could see what was going on around him more clearly.

  Sarah walked into his office, holding the copy of the threatening letter that had come in last night from the pesticide guy. “How do you want to handle this? What would you like me to do?”

  “I think this time we should run something about the letter,” Harold said.

  She looked down at the letter. “This is getting pretty weird. All this biblical language, and then he ends with ‘I mean it. ’This guy’s nuts.”

  “Probably. But that might be to his advantage. He believes that what he’s doing is righteous. It gives him a kind of biblical power and authority. What have we got on the front page right now?”

  She looked at her notes. “The results of the county fair baking contest, the crop report, and the two-car accident on Deer Island last night.”

  “What happened? They can’t have been going very fast. The island’s not long enough to pick up any speed.”<
br />
  “An older woman stopped for a rabbit that was crossing the road and one of her neighbors rear-ended her.”

  “Oh, I like that. Any pictures?” he asked hopefully. “Of the rabbit?”

  Sarah giggled.

  “Keep that story below the fold, but bump the fair story onto the next page. Above the fold I want a picture of the letter, a quote from the sheriff, info on the two guys that DCI has sent out, and a short piece on the Schuler murders.”

  He patted an old stack of papers that was sitting on his desk. “Here’s most of the pieces we ran on the Schuler murders, written by yours truly. Read them all through and you’ll know most of what was known at the time—or at least everything this reporter knew. Then write up a summary of the events, leading into what is presently happening.”

  She stood up and picked up the papers. “I’ll try.”

  “Bother me whenever you need to, but I’m going to let you run with this. Get those other two pieces written up.”

  “Already done.” Sarah looked at the top paper and asked, “Who do you think was responsible for what happened to the Schulers? I’ve read a little about it. Did you ever come up with a theory?”

  Harold steepled his fingers and touched them to his lips. An affectation, he knew, but it gave him time to think. “Not really. There was something about the whole disaster that seemed off to me. I mean, I guess that goes without saying. You have a whole family shot to death on their isolated farm and something obviously went wrong. But I never felt like we knew what really went on. That there was something everyone was missing. See what you think when you read everything.”

  Sarah was a good kid. If she ever tried to buy the paper from him, he would dissuade her. No one should stay in one place so long that the mysteries of your youth come back to haunt you.

  When Claire walked in, Judy told her that most of the deputies were still over at the Daniels farm, but that Sheriff Talbert and Stewy were back in the conference room with those two DCI guys.