by Mary Logue
“That’s great.”
“Yeah, sometimes it breaks your way and sometimes it doesn’t.”
Watkins came back in with three bottles of water and handed them around. “So you were just walking into the kitchen.”
“Yes. You know what I saw if you’ve seen the photographs from the crime scene.”
“Let’s hear you describe it.”
“Well, first I saw Bertha Schuler. She was a lovely woman. Beautiful plain face, wonderful smile. Everyone fell in love with her. She was lying on the floor. Someone had shot a hole the size of a fist in her chest. Not too far from her was the baby. They were dead. There was no question of that. I called the sheriff’s office. Told them what I found.”
“Did you look around?”
“Not right away. I was sick, I was scared, I didn’t know what to do. I wanted someone else to be there with me. I had never seen anything like what was in front of me and have never since.” He took a sip of water.
“And then?” Tyrone nudged.
“I was outside, breathing the air and trying to figure out what to do, when Mr. Schuler walked out.”
Tyrone’s pencil dropped on the table. Claire set down her water bottle. They both said, “What?”
“He had a gun in his hands.”
“Was it aimed at you?”
“No. I think by then he felt like he had done his work. He looked at me and said, ‘I killed them. ’‘All of them? ’I asked. He said yes. I asked him why. He stood above me on the steps and said, ‘I can’t make it work. We shouldn’t be here. Lindstrom is trying to take our land. I cannot fight him. Folger and Wahlund are threatening to run us out of town. It has been too hard and I wanted my family all to be safe. Now they will go to heaven and I don’t have to worry. ’He handed me the gun. ‘You have come along in time, my friend. Will you please shoot me? ’“
“He asked you to shoot him?”
“Yes.”
“Did you?”
“Not at first. I tried to talk to him. But it became clear that his life was over. He had killed everything that had meant anything to him.”
“Did he tell you why he cut off their fingers?”
“Yes, he said to keep them with him. He wanted to have part of them with him because he said he would not be going to heaven. He knew that.”
“Then did you shoot him?”
Earl felt tears come to his eyes. This was the hard part to describe, but he would try. “He asked me so nicely. Calmly. He told me what a favor I would be doing him. He said he was going to go hang himself in the barn or shoot his own head off, but now I could save him that. I told him I couldn’t. He looked at me sadly and then he turned and started to walk toward the barn. I had the gun in my hands. I turned and saw Bertha lying on the floor, her hand reaching out toward the baby. I watched Otto for a moment and then I shot him in the back.”
“By this time the sheriff was coming?”
“Yeah, as soon as I shot Otto Schuler, I knew I couldn’t tell anyone what I had done. They wouldn’t understand. I hardly did. I threw the gun down into the cistern.”
“What about the fingers?”
“When I came back, they were gone.”
“What? The fingers were gone? What had happened to them?”
“I never figured that out. All I could think was that maybe an animal came and got them.”
Watkins said, “Or maybe someone took them.”
Earl looked at her. “Who?”
“I think someone else was at the farm, someone who had come for dinner, and they got away.”
“Who could that have been?”
Watkins went over what he had said. “You said you had your uniform on and they saw you shoot Otto Schuler. Maybe they thought you had killed everyone. No wonder they wouldn’t come forward if they thought a deputy had killed the family. Maybe they didn’t feel safe telling the sheriff.”
Tyrone jumped in. “Did you tell anyone what happened?”
“My wife. I finally had to tell my wife. She understood, or she said she did. When she was dying, she wanted me to tell the sheriff what I had done, but I wouldn’t. My son learned about it and he turned against me. We fought over it after my wife died and didn’t talk for many years. I’m ready to take what I deserve.”
“Why should we believe this version?”
Earl knew they would ask him that. “I didn’t have to come forward. I could have stayed living peacefully down in Tucson. You’ll find the gun in the cistern. And you can ask my son.”
Harold got to the newspaper office early. He hadn’t slept well at all. Agnes shook him awake several times in the night, telling him he’d better start breathing again. She was on him all the time, claiming he had sleep apnea and that occasionally he quit breathing entirely in his sleep. “Doesn’t bother me,” he’d tell her.
He got to the office early, but he didn’t feel very rested. He decided he’d have another cup of coffee. Agnes had him on a restricted diet of one cup of coffee in the morning. She thought that might help reduce his sleep apnea. But he missed guzzling away at coffee all morning. Another cup wouldn’t hurt.
He went out to help himself to the pot that Sarah had started when she got in. She was going over some copy and looked up as he walked by. “What’s going to happen today?” she asked.
“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.” When he saw her puzzled face, he realized he was talking like an oldster, using expressions that she wasn’t familiar with. But he was an oldster. “Water, the note said. He’ll poison the water.”
“I saw the deputies by the water tower.”
“I know. I’m not sure that’s where he’ll go. I thought maybe the river, but I just don’t think that would do much. Plus, it would all flow away. He wants to do something we won’t forget.”
When he looked up from talking to Sarah, he saw that the deputy Claire Watkins had walked in with an African American man in a suit. Handsome guy. Wonder what he’s doing here? She introduced him as working for the Wisconsin crime department.
Claire asked Harold if they could go into his office and pick his brain.
“Best to do it in the office,” Harold said. “Less messy that way.”
When they all sat down, she told him about the pointing finger that had been dropped off at the sheriff’s department. The coffee turned in his stomach. She told him about how she had counted the plates on the Schulers’ table and had found one too many. He cursed himself for not ever noticing that. Then she told him that Earl Lowman was back in town.
“His son is recovering. He came out of his coma.”
“Thank the Lord for small blessings.”
“Lowman says that the killer was Otto Schuler,” Claire told him, then continued, “and he said that he shot Schuler because Schuler asked him to. He’s kept this secret all these years. Hard to believe.”
“I’m supposed to say that,” Harold reprimanded her. “Where does that leave us?”
“I think it leaves us with someone out there who wants to know all this and no way to get the information to them in time. Can you print a special edition of the paper?”
Harold thought about it for a moment, calculating what it would take. “We could do a one-sheeter that would hit the streets by late afternoon.”
“Let’s try it. We’ve decided to go public with everything. Lowman’s role in the killings, the fact that we know someone else was at the dinner.”
“We’ll start writing it up immediately. Whatever you’ve got.”
Claire looked at him. “Who do you think might have been the other diner at the Schulers’ that night?”
Harold didn’t have to think too long. “The person that immediately comes to mind is Bertha’s sister, Louise Wahlund. But she’s dead.”
“I talked to Carl Wahlund already. Would he have known?”
“Maybe. I think the person to talk to is her daughter, Arlene. She lives close by her dad. I can give you the address. She and her mom were mighty tight
. As I recall, she was born right around the Schuler murders. Maybe her mother told her something.”
CHAPTER 26
“I don’t think it could have been my mom,” Arlene Rendquist told Claire. She had insisted that Claire and Tyrone sit down at her kitchen table for a cup of coffee. They had to have a piece of coffee cake that had just come out of the oven, she said. Claire blessed her. A cup of coffee and a piece of coffee cake would keep her going for another couple of hours.
After setting down steaming mugs of coffee in front of each of them, Arlene poured herself a cup of coffee and added a good slug of milk to it and then a heaping teaspoon of sugar. She saw Tyrone watching her production and she broke out into a big smile. “I like to make my coffee a full meal.”
She cut them both big pieces of coffee cake and then a smaller piece for herself. “I’m watching my figure,” she explained. Claire liked this woman who told you what she was doing and why she was doing it.
“But back to your question of who had dinner with the Schulers that night. My mom wasn’t feeling too good, at least that’s what I’ve been told. Having me was hard on her. In those days, women still gave birth at home, especially when they lived on a farm and the hospital was a good half hour away. But Mom was having such a hard time of it that Dad brought her in to the hospital. I’m pretty sure she and I were still there on the day that the Schulers were killed.”
Claire took a bite of the coffee cake and found it to be absolutely delicious, a slight taste of cinnamon. She had to bring her mind back to her questions. “This is excellent coffee cake. Thanks again. What about your dad? Might he have gone over there to eat—considering that your mom was in the hospital?”
Arlene shook her head. “I don’t know a lot about what went on, but from what I can gather my dad and Otto Schuler didn’t get along. My dad didn’t like Germans. He made a slight exception for his own wife, but not always. I remember as a kid him yelling at her if she tried to talk German to any of us. Makes me mad now when I think about it. But the war was hard on everyone. They taught him to kill Germans, and it’s hard to not hate them for a while, I guess. Him and Chuck Folger were thick as thieves in those days.”
“Did they do anything in particular to Mr. Schuler?”
“The way my mom told it to me when I was old enough to understand, they hounded him. Bad-mouthed him around town. Didn’t help him out when he was harvesting. My poor mom. It must have made her feel awful that her husband wouldn’t help out her brother-in-law. I know she loved her sister very much.”
“Did your mom ever suspect your dad had anything to do with the murders?”
Arlene picked up her spoon and stirred her coffee. “She might have. My dad has always been quite closemouthed. Mom might not have been able to get anything out of him. And I’m sure she figured she needed him. She had no skills, except as a farmwife; she had no money, except what he gave her. The land they had inherited went right into the farm. I doubt she could have taken that away from him if she had even thought of divorcing him. Plus, they were Catholic. Divorce was unheard of. My mother found her happiness in her children. In the end, my parents tolerated each other.”
“Was your dad happy to get the Schuler land?”
“Yes, a farmer’s always glad to get more land. Because it was contiguous with his own, it was easy for him to handle. But he let the house just about fall down. I was so happy when he decided to let someone live in that old place. Another few years and it wouldn’t have been worth much.”
Claire thought of the Daniels family living in the house and farming some of the land. “What made him change his mind?”
“My mom died. It made me think that he had done it for her. Kept the place empty so she wouldn’t have to see another family grow up in it. Maybe he was more thoughtful than I would have guessed.”
Meg was glad to hear from her mom. This was the third day of her visit with her grandparents and she was having a good time, but part of her was all the time thinking about her mother. Not exactly worrying, but a niggle was always there. Like a little song that went on and on in her head.
When she heard the phone ring, she stood up from the game she was playing and waited to hear Grandma get the phone, have a little conversation, and then holler, “Meggy, it’s for you.”
Her grandparents called her Meggy and she let them. She figured they were too old to change their ways, and also she thought it was nice to have special names for people. They were the only people who called her Meggy and that worked for her. She would hate that name if everyone called her it. It sounded like a name for a little kid, and that was probably what she would always be for her grandparents.
“Hi, Mom, where are you?”
“Hi, Meg. I’m at work.”
“Figured. How’s it going?”
Her mom didn’t say anything for a moment, and Meg knew she was working too hard. She could hear it in her voice, the way her mom sounded tight and tense, her words coming out in bursts.
“Not bad.” Her mother tried to be cheerful. “I bet you’re having a great time.”
“Not bad,” Meg mimicked her mom. They could both play this game. But she was having a good time. “We went to the zoo yesterday.”
“What did you see?”
“Everything. We even went on the elevated train and saw all the animals out in the wild. I liked that the best. We were enclosed in glass and the animals got to run free. It seems more like the way it’s supposed to be. I even got a cupcake on the train. One of the kids was having a birthday party and they had an extra cupcake.”
“A birthday party?” her mom said, as if she were waking up from a nap.
“Yeah, you know, a celebration when it’s your birthday.”
“That might be it, Meg. A birthday party. Another kid.”
Meg was getting worried. Her mom was rambling. “Mom, what are you talking about?”
“I think I just figured something out.”
“Good.”
“Listen, sweetie. I gotta go. This is going to be over soon, I hope. I’ll talk to you tonight or tomorrow.”
“Love you, Mom.”
“Me, too. Bunches and bunches.”
After noon, Deputy Watkins had called Harold and told him it couldn’t have been Arlene’s mother, as she had been in the hospital. She told him that she was thinking it might be a kid, and that made Harold remember a strange conversation he had had with an odd little boy not too long after the murders. He mentioned it to Claire and told her he’d call her back if he could remember the kid’s name.
Harold remembered the conversation so well because he had told it to Agnes and then he had even written it down. He had thought of turning it into a piece for the paper, but it had seemed too dark, considering how recent the Schuler murders had been, so he had never done anything with it. He was pretty sure he had thrown the piece away in one of his cleansings that happened every few years.
The conversation had happened at the cemetery, when the Schulers were being buried. Harold was standing way toward the back and had started to walk away when he noticed a young boy staring in the opposite direction from the service. The boy, who must have been around six or seven, asked Harold if he knew that there were 236 gravestones in the cemetery.
Harold said, “No, how do you know that?”
The boy stared at him unblinking and then said, “I counted them. Do you know why they have gravestones?”
Harold had thought he knew, but he decided he was more interested in hearing the boy’s thoughts on the subject. “Why?”
“So the bodies don’t fly away. The gravestones pin them down like bugs.”
Harold asked him if he had ever played with the Schuler kids.
The boy spit out, “Never. My dad says no. Krauts, he calls them. I’m no kraut lover.”
The nasty words seemed so strange coming from a young child’s mouth.
“They seemed like nice people to me.”
“But they died.”
“
Yes, that was too bad.”
“Maybe they’ll come back,” the boy had suggested.
“I don’t think so.”
“Do bones ever grow new bodies?”
Harold hadn’t thought too much about the question. At the time, Harold had just assumed that the odd child was thinking about the buried bodies all around them. “Not that I know of.”
What Harold couldn’t remember was who the boy had been. On the way home from the cemetery, he told Agnes about the incident and had described the young boy, and she had known him. She might remember. He called her from his desk.
“Peabodys’,” she answered the phone.
“Agnes, do you remember that strange little boy I talked to?”
“Hello, dear. Nice of you to call. Which strange little boy? There’ve been so many in your life.”
“You know, after the Schuler funeral. I told you about our conversation. And you thought you knew who I was talking about.”
“Remind me a bit.”
“I asked him if he had played with the Schuler kids and he said never, that his dad didn’t want him to be a kraut lover.”
“Vaguely. What did he look like?”
This was where Harold ran into trouble. He could remember words much better than physical appearances. “He was a youngster, kinda skinny. Wearing shorts and a bow tie.”
“Oh, yes. The bow tie. That would have been Paul Lindstrom.”
“Why does the bow tie make you remember who it was?”
“I don’t know. I just remember thinking how cute he looked in his little bow tie. His mother always kept him well dressed. She rather coddled him. The father was not a very nice man, but his mother took care of the boy.”
“Paul Lindstrom. Yes, it would have been Paul Lindstrom. He still lives there in that same farmhouse that he grew up in, doesn’t he?”
“I believe so. He and his wife. A pair of odd birds. They keep to themselves. Why? What has he done?”
CHAPTER 27
Claire left Tyrone and Lowman staring over the plat map, trying to see where there was a water supply the pesticide guy could pollute. She had told them she was going out to the Lindstroms’, to call her if they came up with anything. This trip was probably a long shot. Harold Peabody had called her back, all excited about some conversation he remembered that he had had with Paul Lindstrom when Lindstrom was a little boy.