Bone Harvest (8 page)

The letter had been in the paper today. Now everyone would know what this was about; everyone would be thinking about it. The collective energy of the county would be on the old Schuler murders. This next step would start the talking. Everyone would be talking about it, and the truth, like the juice from the pulp of a fruit, would squeeze out.

It could be held inside its skin no longer.

The truth could save them all. If it would come in time.

The last step. He took out his special box, the one he had made when his mother died, and he opened the lid. A pile of delicate bones like links on an ivory chain were arranged inside. Gently he lifted out the smallest bone—Arlette’s, probably—and put it next to the jar. He was ready.

CHAPTER 9

Originally, Claire had asked Rich to come over and spend the day. She had promised to make everything for their holiday feast—a real American celebration: grilled chicken, potato salad, and rhubarb pie. She had asked Rich to pick up a six-pack of beer and just bring himself.

It was his idea of the perfect Fourth of July—complete with fireworks at the end. He had great hopes for this day and set the engagement ring out on his chest of drawers so he wouldn’t forget it.

But this morning, when the phone rang before nine, Rich had a bad feeling. Sure enough, when he picked up the phone, it was Claire.

She started right in. “Plans have changed. I have to go in to work. I’m taking Meg with me. I won’t stay long, but let’s keep it simple. How does wieners and potato chips sound?”

“Fine.”

“Sorry, I know you were looking forward to my potato salad.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Did you see the letter in the Durand paper?”

“Yeah. Kinda cryptic.”

“I think this guy is nuts. I just hope we catch him soon.”

“Do you think he’s going to do something today?”

Claire didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “I hope not.”

Because her hope sounded rather fragile, he decided not to push the subject. “What time do you want me to come over?”

Claire paused, then asked, “Can I call you?”

He hated the idea of waiting the whole day for her to call. “Give me a guesstimate.”

“No later than seven.”

There went their day together. He had finished his chores first thing in the morning, assuming he would meet her around noon. “Fine.”

“I’m sorry.”

He was peeved, but he didn’t feel like discussing it with her. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m worrying.”

“You’ve got enough on your mind.”

“What do you know about the Schuler murders?”

“I was only a toddler.”

“I know. I want a full report tonight. Love you. ’Bye.”

He liked how easily and casually she had said she loved him. As if it were that much a part of her life. That felt good. So she had to work. Big deal. Maybe he would wander down to the beach. He hadn’t spent any time looking for arrowheads in quite a while.

But before he did anything, he would call his mother. She expected him to at least check in on holidays.

“Happy Fourth of July. Beatrice Haggard here.”

“Hi, Mom.”

“Oh, Rich, I’ve been waiting to hear from you. What did she say?”

“Who?”

“Claire. Did she say yes?”

Shoot, he had forgotten to call his mother and tell her what had delayed the proposing. Since he had gotten the ring from her, he should have known she would be waiting on tenterhooks, as she might say. “Oh, I haven’t asked yet.”

“Why ever not?”

He didn’t need his mom to get all nosy on him. “Hasn’t come up.”

“Rich, what’s going on?”

“Nothing. It’s no big deal. It will happen and you will be among the first to know. Claire’s been busy with work. I wanted to pop the question at the right moment.”

“Of course, that’s important.”

“I’ll let you know.” He decided it was time to change the subject. “Hey, Mom, what do you remember about when that farm family—the Schulers—were all murdered? You were living down here at that time, weren’t you?”

“Yes, I was, and it was just awful. Why do you want to know?”

“Well, it’s a long story, but it’s come up in Claire’s work, and she was asking me about it.”

“Well, that was right after I married your father. I had just moved out to Fort St. Antoine to live on the farm. And I was scared to begin with, having been a city girl and all. Everything scared me—the animals, the thunderstorms, the trains at night—you name it. I was so young.” His mother’s voice faded off.

“Then this horrible massacre happened and I was petrified. They never found out who did it. Can you imagine? All I could think of at night was that he might take it into his head to come and kill us all at the Haggard farm. Wasn’t so very far away from where the Schulers lived. Everyone was scared.”

“Were there any rumors about who did it?”

“Well, the Schulers weren’t very well liked. Otto Schuler was a recent immigrant from Germany, and anti-German sentiments were still running high after the war. His English was very bad and he wasn’t a very good farmer. Most everyone liked Bertha, but Otto was too proud to ask for help. I think they were deep in debt. Close to losing their farm. Then all the kids. Although everyone had a lot of children in those years. As far as who did it, I never heard of particular accusations. Although I’m not sure I would have. I was still pretty new to the community.”

“Well, if you think of anything else, let me know.”

“Well, if you propose tonight, you let me know.” With that, she hung up.

Ray Sorenson woke up with a boner. He ached with desire but he was alone in his twin-sized bed and he could hear his mother down in the kitchen, putting the pots and pans away loud enough to wake him up. He didn’t think he should do anything about it.

First he looked at his watch, which he always wore except when he took a shower. Ten o’clock—not so late. Then he lifted up the sheets, stared at his “soldier,” as Tiffany liked to call it, and apologized to it for having to ignore its demands.

He shouldn’t have thought of Tiffany. He ached all the more. She was one hot girl, or
woman
, as she wanted to be called. He had heard of guys who had to beg their girlfriends to even touch their privates. Tiffany was different. She had shown him what it was all about, giving him a blow job in the custodian’s closet when they stayed after school one day. When she had decided it was time to go all the way, she had brought the condoms. Plural, because she said he was such a stud.

She had moved here from Chicago and explained that the kids were all doing it there. She wouldn’t tell him how many guys she had been with before him. “What do you care?” she would say. “I’m with you now.”

Sometimes he actually felt a little used. She said she thought he would be good in bed because he had such nice, strong hands. Tiffany made no bones about the fact that she was leaving Pepin County—and wouldn’t be looking back—as soon as she graduated. “I don’t belong here,” she would tell him. “I’m not sure which coast I’m going to go to.”

The first time she said that he hadn’t realized she had been talking about New York or Los Angeles. He thought she meant she wanted to live by the ocean. He had learned to not talk too much around her. She liked him quiet and ready. He never knew when she might want his services.

His mother’s voice reached him. “Ray?”

He sat up in bed, knowing he’d better answer her or she’d come up and barge into his room. That thought caused his soldier to go “at ease.” He hollered back, “What do you want, Mom?”

“Do you want to get up?”

What a question. “No.”

She was quiet. Then she said, “I’ll make you some breakfast.”

He knew that she was lonesome. He was the last kid at home, and his dad was gone a lot, working at the co-op. She loved to cook and look after everyone and now they were all gone. Except him.

He crawled out of bed, opened his bedroom door, and yelled down to her, “I’m coming.”

“Do you want pancakes or French toast?”

“Either.”

She was quiet again. That wasn’t the right answer. She really
did
want to know what he wanted.

“Pancakes sound good.”

He threw on an old Farm Feed T-shirt, a band that he had seen in Milwaukee, and pulled on the jeans he had worn last night. After stopping in the bathroom to pee and rinse his mouth out, he went downstairs, taking the steps two at a time.

“Raymond,” his mother admonished him, but with no sternness in her voice.

He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat at the counter, where she had already set out a plate for him.

“What time did you come in last night? I didn’t hear you.”

“Not that late.”

“I was up till twelve.”

“Maybe about one.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“Mom, it’s a holiday. I’m going to be a senior. We were just goofing around.”

“Were you with that Tiffany?”

“No.” He didn’t have to lie about that. She had gone up to Chicago with her folks for the holiday. That was why he had been in such a needy condition this morning. Missing her.

Her mother poured the pancake batter into pools on the cast-iron pan and while it was forming bubbles she showed him the paper. “I don’t know if you’ve heard us talk about the Schuler murders, but there’s a letter in the paper that troubles me. I’ve been trying to get hold of your father. It might have to do with the pesticides that got stolen, too.”

“Huh?” he said.

“The Schuler murders—so horrible. Whole family killed. I was only a little girl, but I can still remember my mom crying and holding me. All those children. Just awful.”

He stared at the pancakes. They were almost ready. She followed his eyes and flipped them over. Perfect.

“But you probably don’t know a thing about it.”

Actually he did—thanks to Chuck Folger, the agronomist at work. The murders were like an obsession with the guy. Folger had a whole scrapbook about it in a drawer in his office: newspaper clippings, photographs, even a plat map showing where the farm was. Sometimes, when it was slow in the store, Ray would go visit with him and he would talk about the murders.

His mother carefully stacked up the three pancakes and plopped them on his plate. “How many can you eat?” she asked.

“About twelve.”

His mother turned and poured out three more pancakes, then looked off in the distance. “The oldest boy was ten,” his mother said.

Ray looked at his mother as if she had lost her mind. What was she talking about? What boy?

“Denny Schuler. He was just ahead of me in school. He got teased because he was German. I sure thought he was cute. I couldn’t believe that he had died. Mom wouldn’t let me go to the funeral.”

“So you had a crush on him?”

His mother laughed. “Nothing that serious. I just thought he was cute.”

Ray wondered if he would still be here in the kitchen, eating pancakes, if that kid had lived. Maybe his mother would have married Denny instead of his father and he would never have been born. Odd to think those murders so long ago might have changed the course of his life. He poured syrup all over his pancakes. Flooded them.

“Ray!” His mother slapped his hand with the spatula and surprised them both.

As Ray dug into his pancakes, he thought that maybe he should mention Chuck Folger’s obsession to his father. Maybe not. Probably didn’t mean a thing.

At first glance, it was an innocent enough photograph, an old black-and-white eight-and-a-half-by-eleven, showing a table set for dinner, seven plates spaced around the table with silverware and napkins, but it broke Claire’s heart.

She had pulled it out from the Schuler file and then couldn’t stop staring at it. A large platter with a big slab of meat was set down at one end, a bowl of potatoes in the middle of the table, and at the other end of the table was a cake with one single candle stuck in the dark frosting. One white candle.

Claire closed her eyes for a moment. She wondered if they would ever know what had happened to that family. How was the murder linked with the pesticide incidents? Claire had come into work late that morning to check on the pesticides robbery. As an investigator, she had to put in more time when the cases called for it. Not a bad trade-off for a steadier lifestyle.

Claire didn’t think the sheriff was taking the whole matter seriously enough. He was hoping these recent incidents were merely pranks. She hoped so, too, but doubted it.

No new news. Nothing from Eau Claire about the forensic work that was being done on the bones. All she had heard was that, after a preliminary glance, the pathologist had said, “Human bones. Fingers.”

After looking through the Schuler file, she realized this was the link that might connect the pesticide attacks with the murders in 1952. It was not common knowledge because the sheriff’s department had kept it under wraps, but each member of the murdered family had had a finger cut off. The fingers had never been found. She wasn’t sure that Sheriff Talbert knew about the missing fingers. He hadn’t lived in the county at the time of the murders.

It drove her crazy that the forensic work was taking so long. She needed to talk to the sheriff about the possibility of digging up the Schulers’ bodies—if, in fact, this latest crime was related to those murders. They could get a DNA match on the bones. It would be a positive link between the two cases, and it might give them the lead they needed to solve the theft of the pesticides.

Claire decided to call the sheriff at home. She would keep her voice down so that Meg wouldn’t hear the conversation. Mrs. Talbert answered and said it would take her a minute or two to fetch her husband.

She glanced over at Meg, who was sitting in a chair at another deputy’s desk, reading a book. One of the Harry Potters. The ultimate child fantasy. Your cruel parents are not your real parents. What child doesn’t dream of that? And you are the only one who has the power to save the world. When kids fantasize, they do it big.

When Meg had first started reading the series, she had complained because the main character was a boy, but she was halfway through the third book and seemed totally lost in it, oblivious to the world around her.

When Sheriff Talbert came on the line, Claire told him what she had discovered. He didn’t say anything for a moment. “Wish it wasn’t a holiday.”

She decided she’d better push him on this. “Can you call the forensic lab and ask for a rush?”

“I think I’d better.”

“I’m taking the file home with me. I’d like to meet with you in the morning and go over anything else I discover.”

“Yeah, I think I need to study up on this one too. Good work, Claire.”

After she hung up, she looked back at the old photograph and felt tears well up in her eyes.

What broke her heart wasn’t at first obvious; it only showed slightly under the lip of the table: a small hand stretched out on the floor, tiny fingers curling up as if reaching. The baby had fallen under the table. Just one short year in the world. And one of the fingers was missing.