Bonegrinder (13 page)

“There are details that aren’t necessarily mentioned in autopsy reports.”

Wintone leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. “Doc Amis’d be the man to see about that. He’s the town doctor and the M. E. for this area.”

“I saw his office, low brick building near the edge of town.” Holt walked to the door, seemed to brace himself against going out into the heat. “I’m staying at Higgins’ Motel, in case you want to get in touch.” He smiled and opened the door.

“Obliged,” he said again, and was gone.

Wintone sat watching the blinds swing in a shorter and shorter arc until they stopped tapping the window frame. He didn’t know exactly what to make of Craig Holt.

He did know later that day that Holt had taken his advice about talking to Doc Amis. And apparently he’d done some talking to Sarah Ledbetter. Wintone saw them entering Turper’s Grill from where he was standing on the other side of the street, giving directions to some magazine writers from Saint Louis.

An hour later Wintone walked past Turper’s and happened to glance in and see them still sitting over coffee in one of the booths along the wall.

Holt was talking rapidly, tapping a long forefinger on the tabletop, and Sarah was leaning forward attentively with both hands around her coffee cup.

W
HEN
H
OLT DROVE
S
ARAH
home from Turper’s Grill that night, he drew her to him and kissed her as they sat in the Jeep in her gravel driveway. Sarah was expecting his move and returned the kiss, with definite promise.

Holt grinned at her, ran the backs of his knuckles along the side of her slender, warm neck. “To be continued indoors.”

“No,” Sarah said, “not on a few-hours-old acquaintanceship.” Her eyes shone in the feeble light. She wanted to take him inside the house with her, he could tell.

“Hell, Sarah, this isn’t twenty years ago.” He laughed to demonstrate that he was amused rather than angered at this quaint eccentricity of hers. And at this point he was amused.

“This is Colver, though,” she told him. A cricket began to chirp nearby as if in confirmation of her statement.

“You said you lived for six years in Kansas City. If we were there wouldn’t you invite me in?”

“If ducks had fur they wouldn’t need feathers.”

My God, Holt thought, she means it. Even though she could probably wring out her underpants. “I have a feeling you’re being evasive, Sarah,” he said mockingly.

“I guess that’s about the only feelin’ you’re gonna get.”

Holt shrugged in exaggerated hopelessness. She really was an old-fashioned girl, an anachronism. He was intrigued.

This was back country. Holt would bide his time, observe the ritual, if that was what it took. He kissed her again, feeling the eagerness and warmth of her lean body even as she pulled away from him. After she’d got out of the Jeep and walked up onto the porch of her frame home, he called a good night to her and started the engine.

On the third night, with a charming reluctance, she invited Holt inside. The interior of the small frame home was clean and faultlessly neat, and he realized that she’d probably cleaned house this morning or afternoon, knowing then she would give in this far to his advances.

They sat on a large and comfortable early-American sofa, sipping ready-mixed whiskey sours and watching the late news on television.

“It’s got to be a lonely life for you,” Holt said, “a small town like this.”

“Loneliness is somethin’ you get used to.”

“I don’t think so, Sarah. What made you return here from Kansas City?”

“I got involved with someone …”

“And it didn’t work out?”

“For him, not for me.”

Holt sipped his drink and settled back into the soft cushions. “Painful to talk about?”

Sarah smiled and shook her head. “I wish it was. But it wasn’t that deep.” She pointed toward the TV screen, where a violently gesticulating man was talking to a newscaster. “It was like that … like it was happenin’ to someone else an’ I was watchin’, uninvolved. An’ if I didn’t like what I saw, there was nothin’ I could do about it, no way to turn it off.”

“So you came back here … for what?”

“Sanctuary.”

“There’s one big problem with sanctuary,” Holt told her. “It becomes a bore.”

He moved closer to her, gliding his right hand along her thin shoulders. He would have to go slowly with her, not because she was cold or inexperienced. She simply required a certain courting procedure, a time-ordered sequence. In this country the pendulum seldom swung far in either direction, and it swung with the regularity of life and death. Maybe she knew what she was doing; he wanted her all the more for it.

Yet whatever had happened in Kansas City had changed her, made her frightened of herself. The vulnerability was there, had to be. Holt could always sense it. She was one of those women with a thin protective shell that needed only to be cracked, that would mend slowly if at all. She knew that as well as he did.

He pulled her to him and she leaned against him without resistance. Working his right arm down to the small of her back, he encircled her slender waist, inserted his hand beneath the front of her slacks, down the surprising smoothness of her stomach. He explored with the hand until he found her moisture, her warmth, her trust.

Holt decided his stay in Colver would be at least mildly interesting.

Sarah and Holt were seen together often as the days passed. They went for walks along the lake road, picnicked together, and Sarah introduced Holt to many of the townspeople so he could interview them about native superstition and folklore with his portable recorder.

Holt had a way of ingratiating himself with people, getting what he set out after with a minimum of fuss and bother for everyone concerned. And by telling him about Bonegrinder, the people in the Colver area seemed to talk out some of their fears into the recorder. Not only did they cooperate with Holt, sometimes they sought him out.

It became common to see Holt and Sarah having dinner together at one of the better restaurants on the main highway, and Wintone one sleepless three
A.M.
noticed Holt’s canvas-topped Jeep driving the route from the small, yellow frame house where Sarah lived to Higgins’ Motel.

Wintone shouldn’t have been concerned with the Sarah-Holt relationship, but he was. He tried to analyze what he felt. Vague stirrings of what? Jealousy?

He was stunned by the idea, then appalled.

“N
OW THIS IS POSITIVE
action,” Mayor Boemer said, slapping down a quarter-folded newspaper on Wintone’s desk. “Have you seen this issue of the
Call?”

“Not as yet,” Wintone said. He picked up the local newspaper, the
Clarion Call,
and his eyes fixed on the black print that shared the headline space:
LOCAL MAN OFFERS $10,000 REWARD FOR BONEGRINDER
.

Winton read on to learn that Baily Howe, “described by some as a wealthy eccentric,” had put up the reward for the body, dead or alive, of the thing known as Bonegrinder.

Howe was eccentric or crazy, however you happened to view it. His family had made a fortune in lumber, and he’d inherited it all at an early age and misused it as it multiplied. He was a dilettante scientist in several often-unrelated fields. About six years ago he had indulged in what were said to be bizarre ESP experiments at his rambling and luxurious split-log home, some five miles out of Colver atop a tall bluff overlooking a green valley.

After the ESP experiments Howe had suddenly departed on a South African safari which he’d financed to investigate rumors of some living link with primitive man. What he’d returned with was a mild venereal disease and a penchant for expensive firearms. He had bought a huge parcel of land near Hawk Point and opened a gun club, where the regional skeet-shooting tournaments were held, and where it was said that for a fee almost anything could be hunted.

“That goddamn Baily Howe!” Wintone said.

Boemer appeared astounded. “You should thank him for what he’s done. We can be confident now that this thing’ll be resolved. If nothing’s turned up within a few weeks people’ll feel it’s safe to come here again, an’ if by chance some miscreation is destroyed people’ll know they’re safe.”

“The only thing likely to be killed is people,” Wintone said. “Do you know how many screwballs an’ otherwise are gonna be crawlin’ all over an’ around this part of the lake? All greedy for ten thousand dollars an’ armed with who knows what? I can tell you it’ll be too many, an’ it’ll be dangerous.”

“You’re exaggeratin’,” Mayor Boemer said, “becomin’ overalarmed.” But he didn’t appear too sure of his words.

That evening there were a few boats in view on the lake from where Wintone stood overlooking the mouth of Lynn Cove. The setting sun distorted the flat plane of water, laying shimmering changes of light and color along its surface. Heat lingered in the calm, humid air, and there was a stillness about the lake that seemed somehow to emanate from below.

Wintone squinted into the angled light to make out the nearest boat, drifting in glimmering hues of red and green. There were two men in the boat, and Wintone saw that they weren’t fishing. They were sitting patiently, cradling high-powered rifles.

The sheriff found himself wishing it would rain, or that the heat would break. Anything to change the pattern of madness that seemed to grip the area. As he watched, a large bird, possibly a hawk, passed near the boat but high over the lake. The man in the stern of the boat raised his rifle and a shot cracked like an echoing hammer blow across the flat lake water. The bird changed direction and winged toward the opposite shore.

Wintone was uneasy the rest of the evening, and he barely slept that night.

He had coffee and toast the next morning at Turper’s Grill, and instead of the usual emptiness of the past few weeks there were half a dozen customers. Talk was of the reward.

Two of the men, seated at a table near the counter, Wintone recognized as reporters. They ate their ham and eggs slowly and seldom talked except to add a word to keep the conversation going.

“Ain’t much I can’t do with ten thousand dead presidents,” one of the men at the counter said. He was a big man with a sunburned neck and rough, sun-darkened hands. There was a lazy power to the slope of his wide shoulders.

All four men at the counter wore tight, grimly satisfied expressions that somehow linked them in Wintone’s mind, though he didn’t know if they were together.

The bell above the door jangled flatly. Two men in their early twenties, wearing Levi’s and sleeveless shirts, entered and sat in one of the far booths along the wall. One of the men began studying a small black notebook while the other studied a menu.

“Why, all the pussy in the world’d be mine,” the big man at the counter continued. “At least for a while. But that’s as long as I want it.”

In the laughter that followed Wintone saw Velda’s henna hairdo pause behind the high serving counter, then continue. She emerged to walk to the rear of the restaurant and take the order from the booth. The big man at the counter, then the three beside him, turned their heads with feigned nonchalance to look at her with varying degrees of appreciation, speculation.

“Do you think you really have a chance for that money?” one of the reporters asked whoever wanted to answer.

A man at the counter wearing an amazingly shapeless gray fishing hat over long hair swiveled slowly on his stool to face him. “Good a chance as any, better than some.”

The reporter twisted his lips and nodded as if forced to agree. “What about the element of danger?”

“That’ll make the reward all the sweeter,” the big sunburned man said. “How ’bout a warm-up on the coffee, sugar?” he called to Velda. “Or any kinda warm-up.” He grinned. Velda poured the coffee and looked at him as if he were junk at an auction. The big man cleared his throat uncomfortably.

“I’m curious,” the other reporter said. “How do you intend to go about finding Bonegrinder, then dealing with him when you do find him?”

The man in the shapeless hat grinned secretively. “I got my methods, all thought out.”

“A thirty-aught-six rifle is how I intend to earn my money,” the big man said. “Special bullets.”

“You gotta find somethin’ to shoot at first,” Shapeless Hat said.

“First you should determine if your bullets will have the desired effect,” one of the younger men in the back booth said. He was the one who’d been studying the notebook. “We’re dealing with an unknown quantity, as it were, and the first step should be to acquire some knowledge of what we’re seeking.”

“And how do you intend to do that?” one of the reporters asked.

The young man in the back booth took a sip of his coffee before answering. “Instrumentation and analysis.”

The reporter stood and walked back to introduce himself to the man.

Wintone finished his buttered toast, exchanged glances with Velda and left.

He returned to the lake to find that the surface was now dotted with boats.

Wintone stood and watched from the same high spot where he’d stood the evening before, and though he’d expected something of this sort he was surprised at the number of boats. Mostly they were flat-prowed Jon boats, though out in the deeper areas of the lake there were a few larger boats, a metal pontoon boat glinting in the sun, even a few cabin cruisers. A small speedboat snarled as if trying to escape its rooster-comb wake as it passed to the left of Wintone, a man with a rifle slung on his back standing to peer over the windscreen. Because of the shallowness, the reeds and the underwater tangles of growth and jagged stumps, none of the boats could get close to shore.

But along the shore where it curved away to Wintone’s right, he saw a few signs of activity at the edge of the woods, heard distant, shouting voices. He lifted his binoculars and focused them in time to see two men with backpacks disappear into the woods toward a rise of land. Sweeping the binoculars across the lake, he saw that most of the boats contained more than one man, there were even a few women, and most of the men were armed in one way or another, with weapons ranging from high-powered hunting rifles to side-arms. Mounted on the prow of one of the boats was a device that resembled a harpoon gun.