by John Lutz
“No,” Wintone said. “The ground was soft, though, and sometimes it’ll play tricks.”
“Not tricks like this. I’ve done enough hunting in my life to know. Mind if I send a photographer around later today to get a few shots of this?”
“I guess not.”
The distant motorcycle engine continued to drone lazily as McKenna reached out a surprisingly smooth, unblemished hand and ran his fingers over the contours of the plaster cast. He glanced up suddenly at Wintone and withdrew his hand, as if he’d been interrupted with a woman.
“I’m interested in any ideas you have on the matter, Sheriff.”
“My idea is that it’s done and best forgotten.”
McKenna smiled his lumpy smile and shook his head. “It won’t be, though. Maybe it would have been, but Charles Jenkins was a well-known man in Saint Joseph, and his death brought attention to the circumstances of the Larsen boy’s. You’re dealing with news, Sheriff. Not big news, but news nonetheless. You might as well be aware of it. It might be good for the town.”
“That’s what some are sayin’.”
McKenna contorted a chunky arm to tuck in his damp shirt at the small of his back. Wintone noted the play of muscle beneath the thin material. The reporter wasn’t as soft as he first appeared.
“How long you been a county sheriff?” McKenna asked.
“Nine years.”
“All here?”
“Every one of ’em.”
“I suppose you’re not used to all this activity.”
“Things’ll die down.”
“Everything does eventually,” McKenna agreed. “You hear of anything else, you call me. I’d appreciate it. I’m at the Rest Away Motel on the main highway.”
“Sure,” Wintone said, watching the heavyset man move toward the door as if reluctant to return to the outside heat. “You got any ideas yourself, Mr. McKenna?”
“Ideas?” McKenna clucked with humor and shook his head. “It’s not my job to formulate ideas, Sheriff. It’s facts that concern me. Our work is more similar than you might think.”
After McKenna had closed the door behind him, Wintone stood at the blinds and watched the stocky form of the reporter make its way across the street, then walk south on the other side. Even some three feet away from the window, the sheriff thought he could feel heat radiating inward from the plate glass. The office seemed cool but confining, stonily silent. Wintone realized he could no longer hear the drone of the distant motorcycle engine.
Much as he disliked the idea, Wintone decided to talk to Mayor Boemer. A glance at his watch told him that it was barely past two. The mayor would still be in his office, where he’d taken to spending more of his time during the past several weeks. Mayor Boemer was only just beginning to discover his own political importance.
It was a short walk from the sheriff’s office to the mayor’s office, which was situated above an abandoned and boarded-up shop that had once sold harness ware. Wintone was sweating when he got there, but the office itself was cool; after a few minutes, uncomfortably cool.
Mayor Boemer pretended to finish whatever he was pretending to be doing. It was all an excuse to make Wintone wait and to establish an aura of importance about the mayor. The office was small, not clean but meticulously, symmetrically arranged. A chintz-shaded lamp sat precisely in the center of a round pie-crust table, and a row of books was aligned by height on a shelf behind Boemer’s desk. The mayor himself was a plump man in middle years, with a ruddy complexion, a ski-jump nose and once-black curly hair gone white and grown long about the collar to lend him a revolutionary-era countenance that he no doubt cultivated. He had narrow blue eyes, calm and vaguely mean. The mayor’s eyes were calm, Wintone often told himself, because there was little going on behind them.
“What’re you up to, Billy?” Mayor Boemer asked with his wide and practiced smile.
“Man came to see me,” Wintone said. “Reporter named McKenna.”
Boemer leaned back, still smiling, and made a pink tent with his stubby fingers. “Yeah, I talked to him myself.”
Wintone pulled a wood chair away from the wall, flipped it to face away from Mayor Boemer’s desk, then straddled it to look at the mayor, his folded arms resting on the chair back. “I’m thinkin’ maybe we oughta play down these two deaths,” he said to Boemer. “The truth’s all that’s necessary, without all this speculation an’ whistlin’ up a hollow log.”
“I can’t agree,” Boemer said, “but there ain’t any sense even discussin’ it. The story’s already in all the big-city papers.” He reached beneath his desk and lifted several folded newspapers from the floor. “Look here, Billy.” One by one he spread the papers out before Wintone, identifying them by city. “Little Rock, Saint Louis, Kansas City, Atlanta … even Chicago. The story makes good copy an’ lots of it.”
Wintone laid the newspapers in his lap and leafed through them. Mayor Boemer had all the pertinent columns outlined in red ink. The big-city papers were making the most of the situation. Many of the news items were full of inaccuracies and lurid descriptions, THE BIRTH OF ANOTHER GRISLY OZARK LEGEND, one paper headlined its account of the two deaths.
“I wish it’d die down,” Wintone said, laying the stack of newspapers back on Boemer’s desk.
“It will, Billy, but in the meantime we gotta make the most of it. Sure it’s tragic, but because we got the cloud’s no reason to turn away the silver linin’. This ain’t scarin’ people off. Tourists an’ fishermen are flockin’ down here thicker than before. There’s truth, an’ then there’s public relations. We’re damn fools if we don’t make the most of what we got dumped in our laps.”
Wintone looked past the mayor out the window at the leaves of a tall maple, green and motionless in the still heat. He didn’t like the idea of capitalizing on the death of an eleven-year-old boy.
Boemer’s ruddy, expansive features were flushed with the excitement of his glimpse of a prosperous future. “I think we need to construct some kind of display,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe a memorial to the Larsen boy on the spot where he died. That oughta be a future point of interest we could feature in our color brochures.” Mayor Boemer looked at Wintone with sudden sobriety. “This really is beautiful country, you know.”
Wintone and Boemer were in accord on that. The lush, wooded hills were beautiful in a primal yet gentle way, green and alluring and mysterious; it was a beauty that cloaked the grim struggle of nature with an aura of leafy and graceful tranquility.
And the country was a part of Wintone that he didn’t want to see changed, neither its sunny places nor its shadows. That was where he and Boemer differed.
“Tourists an’ fishermen can be the lifeblood of the Colver area,” Mayor Boemer said earnestly. “That’s the aim we oughta be workin’ toward. Al Kingsford’s thinkin’ of openin’ up a souvenir and antique emporium downstairs in the old harness shop. I think it’s a good idea.”
“Could be,” Wintone said, in one motion standing and gently flipping his chair to where it had been against the wall. He could see any further conversation with Mayor Boemer would be useless.
Boemer stood also behind his desk. He seemed relieved and somewhat surprised that Wintone was leaving, as if he’d expected some sort of trouble or argument from the sheriff. Boemer was a retired government clerk living on a fair pension, and the office of mayor neither paid nor meant much. The influx of tourists and fishermen, with their money, might change all that and Wintone was the only one who seemed to look on the situation with disapproval. Mayor Boemer could always remove Wintone from office, but he knew that without a good reason that would be awkward. Knowing Wintone, it might even be dangerous.
“I’d be interested in any ideas you have, Billy,” Mayor Boemer said as Wintone was leaving.
Wintone nodded and closed the door behind him.
On the walk back to the office, Wintone was stopped near the Colver General Merchandise store by Luke Higgins. Higgins’s usually unshaven, rou
nd face was smooth and scrubbed, and he was loading some cartons and a shiny new wheelbarrow into the trunk of his old Dodge. The car had been recently washed, and flaking rust around the headlights and doors stood out like cancerous sores on the white paint.
“I admit it, I was wrong,” Higgins said, tying down the trunk lid with a knotted length of brown twine. “I thought people’d be scared away by those creature stories, but instead they’re flockin’ like chicks at feedin’ time. I shoulda know’d folks like bein’ scared. Hell, they pay to go on roller coasters.”
“They like to be scared only so much, though,” Wintone said.
Higgins took off his rimless glasses and polished them on his shirttail. “Appears we scared ’em just right,” he said with a grin.
“Work to do?” Wintone asked, motioning toward the wheelbarrow handles protruding from the lashed-down trunk.
“Gotta do some landscapin’,” Higgins said. “Gotta pretty up the place so I can compete. Location ain’t everything.”
“Guess not.”
“An’ I can afford some things now, load of gravel for the parkin’ lot, repairs on some of the cabins. It feels good to be able to afford things, Sheriff.”
“You got a full house at your place?”
Higgins grinned. “Every cabin’s full an’ I’m booked through the month. I hear even a few of the places that wasn’t too bad damaged on the north shore are makin’ back some of their losses.” He walked around and opened the car door. “Best make it while they can, I say.”
Wintone watched the old Dodge drive away, rocking on its worn-out springs.
Instead of returning to the office, Wintone walked down to Mully’s and had a cool beer. He didn’t stay long. Old Bonifield was entertaining two men wearing business suits, probably reporters, in one of the corner booths. When Wintone noticed Bonifield lean across the table and lower his voice and the two men glance over at him, he quickly finished his beer and left. He’d had his press conference for the day.
But half an hour later the two men were in his office, asking the same questions McKenna had asked, getting the same answers. Only these two were more persistent than McKenna, and Wintone had to stand and almost bodily force them from the office when they began baiting him and trying to provoke him into a newsworthy statement.
More press people, more tourists and more fishermen descended on Colver during the next week. Though the drought held, and the heat, the streets were no longer empty at midday. Cars passed Wintone’s office window several times an hour, and men and women in tourist apparel strolled Colver’s “rustic” streets with cameras and asked questions about whatever had killed Dale Larsen.
Wintone was kept busy, though most of the inevitable trouble fell within the jurisdiction of the State Patrol. Still, he listened to his share of complaints, calmed his share of disturbances, worried over his share of paperwork.
The lake surface had never been dotted with so many fishing boats, nor the deep green woods invaded by so many campers and hikers. Yet the soft, yielding, but uncompromising countryside seemed to make room for them, to absorb them. When Wintone had reason to drive up to Hap Ferrill’s place to investigate some vandalism, he’d looked down on the rolling green carpet of woods beneath where the gravel road dropped away. But for snaking roads and the rooftops of scattered buildings, he saw nothing to give a sign of human presence. Only when the patrol car had crested the hill and Wintone descended into the scene he’d admired, did he see the sometimes unpleasant marks of man.
Near Hap Ferrill’s, off the side of the road, Wintone saw the dark, rusty ruins of a huge hay baler, its voracious razor-edged blades dulled by corrosion. He recalled the old story about the farmer who’d fallen into a hay baler during harvesting, of how a funeral was impractical if not impossible, so the family and church congregation held a service and burned the bale of hay. A tall tale, maybe, but no taller than some Wintone had been hearing lately.
Mayor Boemer continued to show Wintone the big-city papers, and the story based on the two deaths continued to run strong. Experts seemed to volunteer their weighty opinions from every corner, and the speculations grew more sensational. After reviewing the facts of the Larsen boy’s death, the press had taken to calling the burgeoning figure of Ozark legendary fear Bonegrinder. Of all the epithets, that was the one that stuck.
It made for good melodrama, and it pleased Mayor Boemer.
But Wintone kept seeing McKenna’s lumpy, practical face, marked by years of hard-nosed digging for hard facts, and he kept hearing McKenna’s irrefutable words: “Something killed the boy.”
What was beginning to bother Wintone was, with the continuing influx of people throughout the area, the chances that someone else might be killed kept increasing.
And every day brought more people, from farther away.
NINE
THE PETERSONS LIVED IN Saint Louis, over three hundred miles northeast of Colver. They made their home in a low, gray, brick-and-frame ranch house with an attached two-car garage, centered on a quarter-acre of weedless, mowed green punctuated by small trees and square-trimmed shrubbery. They had a tomboyish ten-year-old daughter named Melanie who wore glasses, and they had a Ford station wagon and a dented Toyota. Their house was in a sprawling subdivision that for a hundred dollars a year provided them membership in a club that made accessible a swimming pool, tennis courts, yearly club parties and a small playground which Melanie had outgrown.
Bill Peterson was a draftsman for an aircraft design company. He was thirty-nine, a year older than his wife Cheryl, who stayed home to tend house and child. In the past few years Cheryl had acquired a worn-at-the-edges sort of prettiness that made her more attractive, in Bill’s mind, than when he had married her.
The Petersons spent much of their free time entertaining neighbors on their patio, working in the yard, going to movies, PTA meetings and grocery shopping together. They were unhappy.
Lately the low, gray ranch house had been the scene of desperate discussion.
“You’re the one messing things up,” Bill said with uncomprehending bitterness as he sat at the Spanish-styled dinette set after dinner. He’d had an unusually troublesome day at work and didn’t know if he really wanted the argument he was instigating. But he couldn’t restrain himself; it was as if some pressure were being exerted on a nerve that brought about an automatic response.
“No one’s messed up anything,” Cheryl said patiently, with a resignation that showed plainly she thought she’d never be able to make her husband understand. “Things just got messed up by themselves. Nobody’s to blame.”
“Maybe that’s your way of justifying what you’re considering.” Peterson studied his wife with careful objectivity as he spoke. She was still an attractive woman, with a lean, supple figure, small in the bust but with perfect long legs. Impending middle age had given her sallow-cheeked face, framed by still grayless black hair, a vaguely noble beauty. Peterson was hurt, physically hurt, by the possiblity of losing her. The only person he wanted even more to hold onto was Melanie. And if he lost Cheryl …
Cheryl poured herself another cup of coffee, drank it standing up as she began to gather the dishes. She drank more and more coffee lately, black coffee, as if to maintain a state of nervous superalertness.
Peterson gave up waiting for her to answer him, sat and watched her as he smoked a cigarette. Contrasting her quick, sure movements refined by time and thousands of tables cleared after thousands of meals, her face was tranquil and unreadable, the face of a woman who masked things.
It all made Peterson wonder what had gone wrong. He was still not a bad-looking guy, with most of his hair and the same clean-cut, squarish features; gone a little to overweight, but who the hell hadn’t? He was faithful, reliable, and had given Cheryl more than she had a right to expect. And until recently their sex life had been more than satisfactory—at least he’d thought so. He still was, in most respects, the same man Cheryl had chosen to marry.
It occurred
to him that maybe that was the problem; she had changed and he hadn’t. He snubbed out his half-smoked cigarette in the saucer she’d left him for an ashtray, listening to the dying ember hiss briefly in the muddy brown residue of coffee.
Damn it, she hadn’t changed! Not gradually, anyway. Not until the last few months, when words between them became forced, and her features had taken on the cast of a stranger’s.
Stranger though she’d become, Cheryl was candid with Peterson. She had told him about Carl Bauer, even though he hadn’t remotely suspected anything was going on behind his back. Carl Bauer, his ex-drinking partner, ex-fishing buddy, ex-friend. They had more than ever in common now. It disturbed Peterson that he couldn’t work up the proper fury toward Bauer. He knew that was because he believed Cheryl when she’d told him she had initiated the affair. Carl was a few years younger than Peterson, divorced, ruggedly handsome and an unabashed fun-lover. No surprise that a bored woman would choose him, and that he wouldn’t resist that choice. If it weren’t with me, it would be with someone else, was the old rationale. There was truth to it.
Carl was basically a shallow person, unstable, not Cheryl’s type. Eventually the infatuation would pass, Peterson knew, and Cheryl would be his again, maybe more firmly than ever. The pain was in the waiting.
“Where’s Melanie?” Cheryl asked when the dishes were cleared and the chugging, watery labor of the dishwasher sounded faintly from the kitchen.
“She’s swimming,” Peterson answered.
He touched his lighter flame to another cigarette, got up from the table and moved toward the family room, aware that Cheryl was following him. He no longer felt like arguing, wanted only to settle into his recliner chair and read the newspaper, read about other people’s problems. The newspaper was becoming an increasingly frequent escape for him.
“I’ve decided to go away with Carl,” Cheryl said.
How simply and matter-of-factly she spoke the words that drove the breath from Peterson. There was no quaver of uncertainty in her voice, making the blow all the more lethal. Peterson didn’t answer her right away, couldn’t. He settled into the vinyl recliner chair quickly because he had to.