by John Lutz
Then, at the edge of the windshield, Wintone did see something on the lake’s sunshot surface, perhaps half a mile out, moving against the hazy line of the opposite bank. He got his binoculars from their leather case and trained them on the object. A boat, two men in it. One of the men was wearing a green-striped T-shirt with denim shorts and was smoking a pipe. Wintone didn’t know the man’s name but recognized him as one of the people from some organization or other that was interested in Bonegrinder. Neither of the men was speaking. They were too busy worrying over some piece of equipment in the stern of the boat. Something trailed on a cable behind the boat, probably some kind of data-gathering instrument. Wintone expected to see more of that sort of thing in the near future.
He scanned the purplish line of trees on the opposite bank, then slipped the binoculars back into their case and started the car engine. He realized where he was going, where he’d unconsciously intended to go when he walked from his office.
Within ten minutes Wintone turned the patrol car onto the rutted gravel drive to the Borne farmhouse.
Helen Borne must have seen him drive up and park in the shade of the lone cottonwood. She was waiting at the screen door of the neat, white frame house when Wintone got out of the car. He felt heat roll against his legs from under the car, and he heard the engine ticking loudly and metallically behind him as he walked toward the house.
“I am sorry, Helen,” he said as she opened the door. The door spring made a sound between a crack and a whine. A forlorn sound.
Helen Borne nodded to Wintone. She was a once-pretty, gray-haired woman in her fifties who’d married off her youngest the summer before. Her eyes were red-rimmed now, too, the way Wintone remembered them from the wedding.
“This house is a lonely place now, Sheriff.”
“I expect.” Wintone stood awkwardly, feeling oversized in the tiny, quiet living room with its dainty furniture and shelves lined with knickknacks. He asked the new widow a few meaningless questions before he got to why he really came.
“A cider jug was found near Claude’s body, Helen. Do you know … how much he’d been drinkin’ before he went fishin’?”
She looked at Wintone, puzzled for a moment, then she gave a sad smile. “It weren’t hard cider, Sheriff. Sweet cider was all Claude drank the past year. Doctor’s orders. All Claude made or drank was sweet cider that he’d had to have drunk a gallon of to get even feelin’ good. That I know for fact.”
“Then he couldn’t have been …”
“Claude left here that night sober as a judge, like he’s been for a year.”
“Then don’t tell anybody otherwise,” Wintone said.
“Ain’t about to, Sheriff, ’cause there ain’t no otherwise.”
Wintone thanked Helen Borne and left.
Some of her sadness seemed to cling to him, and he was glad for once to be back out into the heat.
FOURTEEN
THOUGH THE NARROW ROAD to Colver climbed, dipped and twisted, it seemed to Craig Holt that his Jeep was always headed into the sun. The heat seemed to intensify as it passed through the windshield, causing his eyes to ache behind tinted glasses and his perspiring hands to slip occasionally on the wheel.
While he was aware of his discomfort, it didn’t greatly concern him. Some discomfort was to be expected in his job. He often told himself that what was obtained easily usually wasn’t worthwhile.
Holt was a tall man, twenty pounds underweight but broad-shouldered, wearing faded corduroy slacks and a white shirt open at the collar. He was in his early forties, and he had one of those regular-featured, handsome faces if bony and a bit bushy-browed. His dark but graying eyebrows matched the color of his hair, which was slightly wavy and beginning to thin drastically at the crown.
He geared down the bouncing Jeep for a sharp turn, tasting for a moment the grit of rising dust. He’d heard this part of the country was experiencing a drought, and the evidence of torrid heat, cracked earth and dry woods confirmed it. A large snake, what was called a blue racer in this part of the country, lay limply coiled and dead in the road ahead. According to local superstition, a snake crossing the road signified rain. Not in this case. Even the snake appeared dehydrated, as void of all moisture as its surroundings. Holt felt nothing as the Jeep’s wheels passed over it.
Shifting down and slowing the Jeep abruptly, Holt glanced over to check the crinkled map on the leather seat beside him. The Jeep’s fuel gauge was under the quarter mark, and it appeared that Holt had some distance to drive before the winding, hilly road intersected a main highway. He had an emergency gas can strapped to the back of the Jeep, but he didn’t want to have to go to the trouble of using it.
There was little sign of habitation along the dusty road, an occasional glimpse of a shingled roof through the trees, now and then a private, partly overgrown road, unmarked and leading off into the woods.
Holt was babying the accelerator pedal, running in a higher gear than he would have normally, to conserve gas, when he saw a crudely lettered sign on the right shoulder of the road: GAS—EATS AHEAD. His foot went from accelerator to brake and he stopped the Jeep next to the sign, leaned so he could see it more clearly out the right side of the windshield.
The hand-painted sign was wood, fashioned from a single cut of cedar, still rounded on the back and covered with bark. It was nailed to a cracked and rotted cedar fence post.
Holt got his camera from the back of the Jeep where he had his luggage and photographed the sign before driving on.
A mile down the road was a scattering of buildings, and just beyond them a low frame structure with a long wooden porch. There was a faded metal Pepsi-Cola sign nailed to one of the porch posts, and another sign proclaiming the place to be Weller’s Restaurant and Service Station. Holt saw no indication of a gas pump.
He was about to park in front of the restaurant when he saw a dull red gas pump down the road about a hundred yards, beneath a Self-Service sign that had obviously been lettered by the same unsteady hand that created the cedar roadside sign. Holt twisted the steering wheel to get the Jeep back onto the road and coasted the distance to the solitary gas pump.
There was no one in sight. Holt got out of the Jeep, raised the hood and checked the oil. It was a quart low. But there seemed to be no oil around, only the ancient red pump. He inserted the nozzle of the gas hose into the Jeep’s filler pipe and watched while the pump’s meter ran noisily up to ten dollars. The smell of the gasoline seemed especially strong in the hot, humid air.
After replacing the nozzle Holt drove the Jeep back to park in front of Weller’s Restaurant. He got out of the Jeep, but before entering Weller’s he drew a flat-bowled pipe from his shirt pocket. He packed the pipe bowl with tobacco from a leather pouch, then clamped the stem between his teeth and went through the pipe smoker’s puffing ritual of getting the tobacco burning freely.
The inside of Weller’s fulfilled the depressing promise of the outside. There were no booths, only a small counter and two tables surrounded by too many chairs. Behind the counter was a grotesquely fat woman wearing a stained yellow waitress’s uniform with the name Billie stitched over one straining breast. She looked to be in her fifties, and there was no trace of hair around the blue scarf she had wrapped about her head.
“You’re the third one in today,” she said.
“Am I?” Holt smiled at her and sat at the counter. “Coffee, black.”
From a glass pot on a burner she poured him a mug of steaming coffee and carried it over to the counter. Despite an old window fan that kept the air circulating, the inside of Weller’s was hot, and Holt immediately regretted ordering the coffee. He sipped at it and regarded the woman, who lowered her bulk onto a stool near the cold grill on the other side of the counter.
“Been at this job long?” he asked.
She nodded, dabbing at her perspiring face with a wrinkled handkerchief. “Some twenty years.”
“You’ve lived in these parts some time, then.”
The woman grinned, a grin strangely undersized on her broad face. “All my twenty-one years.” She wadded the handkerchief and reached around with surprising ease to pat the back of her neck.
“What do you make of this Bonegrinder?”
“This what?” She raised thin eyebrows in puzzlement, touched her ear to indicate that she hadn’t heard plainly.
“Bonegrinder. You know, in the papers …”
“Heard tell of it. Ain’t read a paper in a while. Killin’ folks, is it?”
Holt nodded, took a sip of his coffee, which was very good. “Any idea what it could be?”
“Not a whit.”
“In the years you’ve been here, ever heard of anything like it?”
She squinted at him, perspiration glistening on the folds of her neck. “How come you’re so interested?”
“I’m here to investigate, for the government. And I do research on folklore.”
“Folk what?”
“Folklore. Stories, beliefs, legends passed on from generation to generation.” He smiled at her again and raised his half-empty but still-steaming coffee mug to her. “Craig Holt.”
“Billie Weller,” she said. “Don’t know nothin’ about this Bonegrinder. My grampa used to tell me stories when I was young. Can’t recollect any of ’em, though. That’s my memory—good, but it’s short.”
Holt finished his coffee and stood. “By the way, I owe you for ten dollars’ worth of gas as well as for the coffee.”
Billie nodded, raised herself up from the stool and moved down the counter toward him.
“That pump’s a long way from here,” Holt told her. “Anybody ever take advantage and underpay you?”
Billie accepted his money, and as she gave him his change she crooked a thick finger, then pointed down at the other side of the counter. Holt leaned forward and saw a gas-pump meter mounted on a wood shelf. It read ten dollars.
“I trust most everybody,” Billie said with a grin, “but not entirely.”
Holt returned her grin and pocketed his change. “Incidentally,” he said, “I needed oil, too, but I didn’t see any near the pump. Could I buy a quart here?”
“Dale Hollis, ’round in back, will sell you some,” Billie said. “Can’t miss him. We don’t keep oil by the pump ’cause it’s had a way of disappearin’, what with all the traffic through here of late.”
Holt thanked her and went outside. He walked around to the back of the building to find three overall-clad men seated in rusted metal lawn chairs near a corrugated aluminum storage shed. As Holt approached, they stared at him with that blank hostility that often can be shattered with a friendly word.
“Dale Hollis here?” Holt asked.
“Nope,” one of the men said, concentrating on the hard ground.
Holt squatted down on his haunches to show that he wasn’t going to leave without gaining some information. “Where’s he at?”
“Went out to shit an’ the hogs et him.”
The three men laughed as if they’d never heard that one before, and a stooped old man with a weather-worn face limped around the corner of the shed. He had large, gnarled hands and wrists as thick as Holt’s ankles.
“Pay ’em no never mind,” the old man said. “Brains like piss ants!”
The three men laughed harder, and one of them kicked at the ground.
“I need some oil,” Holt told the old man, “Thirty weight.”
“I’m Dale Hollis,” the man said. “I’ll fetch it for you.”
He unlocked the metal storage shed, went inside and returned with a can of thirty-weight Mobil oil.
Holt paid him. “How far to Colver?” he asked.
“’Bout thirteen miles,” one of the seated men said. “Blink an’ you’re past it, though.”
“I won’t blink,” Holt said. He nodded to them and walked away, tossing the oil can from hand to hand.
“Want that can spouted?” the old man asked behind him.
“Thanks,” Holt said, “I’ll punch a hole in it with a screwdriver.”
After pouring the oil into the Jeep’s engine, Holt arced the slippery empty can onto an overflowing barrel of trash. As he stood wiping his hands on a grease-stained red rag, he wondered what Colver would be like—a town that wasn’t on some of the area’s maps.
Then he tossed the wadded rag onto the floor of the Jeep, climbed in behind the steering wheel and drove back out onto the dusty road.
FIFTEEN
FROM THE BORNE FARM Wintone drove to the lake and walked to where Claude had died.
Wintone remembered setting down the cider jug at the water’s edge, but now the jug was gone. Shaking off an uneasy sensation whenever he turned his back to the lapping water, Wintone searched the brush but found nothing.
He stood with his large fists on his hips, looking out at the opaque lake surface. Then he walked back to the patrol car and drove to Hooper’s Dock, where he borrowed a fourteen-foot wooden Jon boat with a five-horsepower outboard motor.
Wintone used the sputtering motor to return across the lake surface to the scene of Borne’s death, then he closed the throttle and in silence used the oars to maneuver the flat-bottomed boat as close as he could to the bank. He moved the boat parallel to the bank, doing more poling with the oars than actual rowing, scraping bottom occasionally on underwater rises or stumps. With the glistening, empty expanse of lake at his back, Wintone concentrated on the wavering waterline along the bank, peering into the shadows of overhanging brush or decaying tree stumps. The sun glancing off the lake behind him seemed to draw the sweat from him, molding his tan uniform shirt to his broad back.
The overgrown section of bank was a shadowed graveyard of floating debris. Wintone saw a faded brimmed cap adorned with barbed lures, a broken piece of styrofoam picnic cooler caught nearby in the weeds, a splintered oar. And ten minutes later he found Claude Borne’s cracked cider jug, half-concealed by an overhanging growth of vines and gently bobbing upside down with the crack above the waterline.
Wintone got the boat in as close as he could and worked the jug over to him with an oar. What liquid was left inside was still thick and golden, mostly undiluted cider. The sheriff uncorked the jug and sniffed at its contents, then he tilted it with the crack away so he could wet a finger to touch to his tongue. Sweet cider, without a trace of alcohol.
Wintone laid the glass jug carefully in the bottom of the boat, then worked with the oars, half-poling, half-rowing for some time until he was in water deep enough to put the motor down and use it. He felt the prop bite into the lake as the bow rose high.
When he got back to Hooper’s Dock, he wrapped the jug in an old blanket and propped it at the right angle in the trunk of the patrol car, wedged against the spare tire so it couldn’t move. Then he drove back into Colver and went directly to Doc Amis’s.
When Wintone entered the otherwise empty waiting room, Sarah was on the telephone arranging an appointment. Though her voice remained professionally serious, her lips shaped a smile around her words as she saw Wintone.
“I guess you’re here about Claude Borne,” she said when she’d hung up the phone. She looked tired, and the slightly wilted red chrysanthemum pinned to her white uniform did little to add color to her pretty but haggard features.
“Claude’s what I’m here about,” Wintone confirmed. He felt he should apologize to Sarah for his anger at their last meeting, yet he still resented her intrusion into his most private thoughts. He figured it best to let the matter lie.
“It was like the Larsen boy …” Sarah seemed to blanch even paler. The red flower on her dress was like a splash of blood. “The same kind of horrible injuries … the lower bone in his right arm was crushed almost flat. Doc Amis said he’d never seen that sort of injury except in industrial accidents.”
“Is the doc in?”
Sarah nodded, pressed an intercom button. “Billy Wintone is here.”
Doc Amis’s voice said over the intercom that he’d be right out.
“Is slow right now,” Sarah said. “In a town this size where you know most everybody, you’re glad to see it slow.”
Wintone smiled at her. “Same way with my business.”
“Maybe things’ll slow down even more for you with all those tourists an’ such leavin’ the area. Leastways you’ll only have this Bonegrinder thing to take up your time.”
“Way it looks, it’s gonna take up a lot of my time. I really figured it’d be over with the Larsen boy … one of those unexplainable things that just happens every so many years somewhere or other.”
Sarah seemed to look into herself, shook her head in a series of quick little tremors as if cold. “Lord, what could it be?”
“Everybody has a theory,” Wintone said, “but what they want is some real live late-night horror-show creature bent on killin’. Or that’s what they wanted till a few days ago, when it looked like they got their wish.”
“Claude Borne described it, didn’t he?”
“As best he could.”
Sarah appeared thoughtful. “Nothin’s ever been spotted in the lake before, but then this end of the lake’s been left pretty much alone. An’ the country’s wild, frightening.”
Wintone was surprised to hear her say that; she’d been raised here.