Bone Harvest (10 page)

CHAPTER 11

Claire felt herself splitting into pieces as she tried to determine what to do. She had to help the man who had fallen. She had to stop what was happening. She had to find out who had done it. It was too much. Her greatest fear was that whoever had stolen the pesticides was at work again.

The first thing was to ask for help. Rich had told her that he thought it was the lemonade that had made the man sick.

“Rich, you gotta stop them from selling any more of that lemonade. Go up and talk to the owner. Don’t let anyone drink it.”

As Rich ran to the stand to shut it down, Claire turned to help Harold Peabody, who was about to collapse under the big man’s weight. They held him together and then gently lowered him to the ground.

“Who is he?” Claire asked.

“Andy Lowman,” Harold said as they settled him on the dirt. He was trying to hold Andy steady, as the afflicted man held his stomach, twisting and moaning in pain.

“What happened?” Claire asked Harold as she pulled out her cell phone. Harold shrugged. She knelt by Andy and, as she punched in the numbers of the station, she tried to reassure him. “Andy, you’re going to be all right. We’re right here. I’m calling for help right now.”

Harold leaned him forward and encouraged him to hang in there, but Andy was fading. His face was pallid and he seemed to be having trouble breathing.

Claire needed to get help for him immediately. Her call was picked up by Judy. Thank God, she was one cool cucumber.

“I think we’ve got a poisoning in Fort St. Antoine. The park. At the fireworks. Send the ambulance and tell them we may have a case of Parazone or Caridon poisoning. Tell them to refer to my memo. And make sure they do it.”

“Got it,” Judy said back to her.

When Claire clicked off the cell phone and turned her attention back to Andy, she remembered what Bridget had told her about what the pesticide could do. As she knelt by the man, she started to check him over. He was sweating and salivating profusely, gagging reflexes shaking his whole body. All these responses were what she would expect to see in someone who had ingested one of the pesticides. Andy barely seemed conscious, and she shook him gently. His eyelids lifted slightly.

“Let’s try to keep him awake and keep him partially sitting up so he doesn’t choke,” she said to Harold.

At her words, a spasm of nausea hit the man. He leaned forward and vomited on the grass.

A woman came running up and tried to fling herself at him, but Claire moved to block her. “I’m his wife,” she told Claire. Then the small, dark-haired woman turned to her husband. “Andy, what’s the matter with you?” she screamed as she reached out a hand to touch him.

“God, help me,” Andy managed to get out, and then he passed out, sprawling limp on the ground.

Andy’s wife tried to pull him into her arms and Claire had to be a little rough with her to let him go. “Ma’am, you need to let me take care of him.” The woman looked at her with horror in her eyes as Claire pushed her away. “I’m sorry. I need to help him.”

Harold Peabody put an arm on the woman and pulled her back, saying, “Marie, let the deputy do her job.”

Claire knelt down by the big man and started to arrange him in the recovery position. He was already prone, so she turned his head to the side, making sure he was breathing; then she put an arm up on that side to give him some support and pulled up the leg on that side too. She had learned in her latest Red Cross class that this was the safest position for victims who were unconscious but breathing—as long as they hadn’t been seriously injured.

Rich came to get her. “Another person, a little girl, is throwing up.”

Claire turned to him, horrified.

He guessed her thoughts. “Meg is fine. She’s still at the swings.”

“Watch her,” Claire begged him, then turned back to Harold and Andy’s wife. “Can you take care of him? I need to check on someone else. Watch him. Make sure he’s breathing. Try to keep him from vomiting until we know what it is. The ambulance should be here in moments.”

Claire went to minister to the girl, an eight-year-old blonde named Shawna whose mother told Claire that she had taken only a sip of the lemonade. The young girl was lying with her head in her mother’s lap.

“Shawna,” Claire said, bending over the child. “What happened when you drank the lemonade?”

“It made my throat feel dusty.” The young girl clawed at her tongue, trying to get the drink out of her mouth. “It tasted like grass.”

Claire worried that such a small child would suffer much worse effects. But she was relieved that Shawna seemed more alert than Andy.

By the time the ambulance arrived, four people were sick with whatever had been in the lemonade. The emergency technicians took over and examined the casualties before loading Andy into the first ambulance.

Claire stepped back from them all for a moment and looked around for her daughter. She saw that Rich was standing at the swings, pushing Meg into the sky. She wanted them to go home and lock the door. She wanted her daughter out of here, away from this danger.

She took a deep breath and headed toward the lemonade stand to find out what had happened there. As she approached it, a large bang went off and she jumped. Then glowing lights filled the sky. The fireworks blazed from the far shore of the lake, seemingly arising from another, more peaceful country—a country where it was still a holiday.

When the man came charging up, yelling at them to stop selling the lemonade, Dot decided to shut down completely. It could kill her business if someone got sick from something she served. She was racking her brain, trying to imagine anything she’d done wrong, but she knew she had meticulously followed the state’s thorough guidelines. She hoped that it wasn’t botulism or E. coli.

She thought of taking a sip of the lemonade herself to test it, but then she saw a man stretched out on the grass, throwing up. She didn’t need that.

Remembering something, she checked the lid on the big silver cylinder that contained the latest batch of lemonade. She had seen something there when she had moved the new lemonade dispenser into the trailer to start selling it, but had been too busy to stop and see what it was. Sales had been brisk. It was a nice hot evening and everyone had eaten too much and needed something to drink to wash it all down.

She had been hoping to make enough money from this event to make the last payment on her trailer. When Guy had left her last year, telling her he couldn’t sleep with a woman (actually he had said
cow
) when she weighed more than he did, he had left her with all their bills to pay. Since he had left, she had tried to lose weight, hoping he might show up again, but the harder she tried, the more weight she gained. It didn’t help to be working with food.

Just as she had remembered, there was a small white plastic joint under the handle on the lid. She didn’t touch the lid or the cylinder. She had watched enough TV to know that you don’t touch anything. But she bent her head down and stared at the little plastic piece.

Maybe it wasn’t plastic. It was off-white and looked like a small tube or joint or something. She looked closer.

It was a bone. A small bone like from the leg of a bird or a frog. A delicate ivory bone.

She felt the urge to pick it up and feel it, but she resisted.

It might mean nothing. It might have been dropped from the tree that was above the cart in the park. Those cottonwoods were notoriously messy. Maybe a bird cleaning out a nest. The remains of a fledgling that didn’t make it.

When the woman deputy came running up to ask them about the lemonade, she asked who was the owner of the stand. Dot looked her over. Pretty woman, nice dark hair, great teeth. Probably smart, too, weighing well within the normal range. Dot hated her on principle.

Dot stepped forward. “I am.”

“Did you make the lemonade?”

“Yes, I made it last night.”

“Could it be contaminated in any way? Did you leave it sitting out overnight?”

“I didn’t. And I don’t think lemonade contaminates. I follow the rules that the state told me to follow. I do everything just the way it should be done. You can ask anyone. I’ve been doing this all summer and never had a problem.”

“Where did you keep the lemonade right before you were serving it?”

“Out behind the trailer.” Dot pointed to the refrigerated area that attached to the back of her trailer.

“You don’t keep it in the trailer?”

“There’s not enough room.”

“So anyone could have had access to it?”

Dot realized what the woman was saying. “I guess.”

“Shit,” the woman said.

Dot was surprised to hear a deputy sheriff swear, especially this pretty woman. Dot decided that she should tell her what she found. “I don’t know if this means anything, but I found something on the lid of this particular canister.”

“What?” The deputy lifted her head.

“A small bone.”

Stewy had been pretending to watch TV with his eyes closed. It was too early to go to bed, only nine o’clock, still light outside. But probably he was tired because he had gotten up early to mow the lawn. Really, he should blame it on the three beers with dinner. He didn’t drink much anymore. Just couldn’t keep functioning when he did. A couple of beers made him fall asleep. Sad state of affairs.

But a sharp, insistent ring kept nudging him awake. As he opened his eyes and saw someone shoot someone on TV, he realized that he was hearing his cell phone. Where was the blasted thing? What could be so important on this summer night that work would call?

Then he remembered the pesticides, the letter. He bolted up in his chair and the thing folded up on him, the footrest sliding under him and the back pushing him down. Couldn’t move fast in that chair. It could kill you. He managed to extricate himself from it and he looked down at a pile of newspapers and realized the phone was in there someplace. Scrambling through them, he could still hear the ringing.

Hold on; I’m coming,
he thought.

As he stirred around in the newspapers, the phone popped out of the comics section. He grabbed it and pushed the right button the first time around. He hated having a cell phone, but the sheriff insisted.

“Hello,” he said.

“Stewy, it’s Claire. We’ve got several poisonings down in the park at Fort St. Antoine.”

“Bad food?”

“I’m not sure. I think there’s a chance it might be the pesticide guy using some of the stolen goods.”

He hated to ask the next question. “Any fatalities?”

“Negative. Not so far. But the ambulance from Maiden Rock just took two people out of here, and the ambulance from Pepin is loading up. Five people in all were affected. A little girl is one of them.”

“What happened?”

“I think something was put into a vat of lemonade that was being served from a refreshment stand here.”

“Why do you think that?”

“All the victims had just consumed the lemonade.”

She paused. He didn’t like the way this incident sounded. Then she added what turned out to be the clincher for him. “A small bone was found on the lemonade container.”

Stewy caught himself on the verge of swearing. The words came out too easily. Now that he had grandchildren, he was trying to curb that impulse.

“Have you called Sheriff Talbert?” Stewy asked.

“No. Could you do that? I need to organize people here. We’ve got a couple of patrol cars.”

“I’ll call the sheriff and the lab.”

“Thanks.”

“Claire, what’ve we got going on here?”

“Possibly some kind of vendetta.”

Stewy heard her hang up. He had to call Dan Talbert. But he needed to breathe for a second. He would drive down to the park as soon as he got off the phone with the sheriff. He’d brush his teeth and gargle with Listerine so the evidence of his beer would be washed away. But first he turned to the dictionary that perched on top of the bookshelf in the living room. It was always left opened to the last word he looked up.

He looked up
vendetta.
The first definition read, “a feud in which the relatives of a murdered or wronged person seek vengeance on the wrongdoer or members of his family.” The Schuler family were the murdered people.

Stewy called the sheriff, trying to sound alert. “You know what a vendetta is?” he asked.

“Yes,” Talbert answered. “Why?”

Stewy pressed on. “And do you know if there’s anyone left in the county who is related to the Schuler family?”

“Stewy, where you going with this? Why?”

Then Stewy told him why.

CHAPTER 12

Earl was hammering the last nail into a stool he was fixing for Stella, his next-door neighbor, when he thought he heard something. It took him a few moments to figure out that the phone was ringing. He dropped the hammer. A call this late scared him to his bones.

When he picked up the phone and heard Marie’s voice, his hand flew up to his heart. In Tucson it was eleven at night, so he knew it was one a.m. in Wisconsin. He knew the only reason she would contact him at this hour would be about something bad.

“Why are you calling me?” he asked, his voice shaking.

“Earl, I’m at the hospital.”

“What happened?” he yelled. “Tell me.”

“They think Andy was poisoned. Maybe pesticides.”

“What did he do? Was he mishandling them? What was he doing using pesticides this time of year?”

Marie raised her voice, saying firmly, “Earl, calm down and listen to me. It wasn’t like that. Someone put it in some lemonade he drank.”

He didn’t comprehend what she was saying, but that wasn’t important right now. “Is he going to be all right?”

Her voice deepened. “The doctors aren’t sure. They’re using charcoal to get it out of his system. One doctor talked to me a few minutes ago. He said that they should know in a few more hours if he’s going to make it.” Suddenly her voice broke and she wailed, “Earl, I can’t lose him. I won’t be able to stand it.”

He wasn’t going to argue with her. She was one strong woman, but no one could stand to lose a loved one. He still missed his wife every day.

“Marie,” he said soothingly, “start at the beginning.”

So she explained that she and Andy had gone to see the fireworks and that Andy had bought some lemonade. “They think there was something in it.”

Then she explained what the sheriff had told her, that a crazy person had stolen some pesticides and was going around the county using them for destructive purposes.

“Seems to be tied in with the Schuler murders,” she said in conclusion. “That’s what they think.”

The irony. It didn’t matter how far away he went, that damn murder case was going to haunt him all his life.

“Was anyone else hurt?” he thought to ask.

“Yes, four other victims. One of them was a little girl. But she’s all right. She spit it right out. The mother doesn’t think she swallowed much. They sent her home an hour ago. The other three are in worse shape, but all of them seem to be recovering. They figure Andy drank half his glass in one gulp. Man, I’ve always told him he has a big mouth.” She started laughing and then she was crying again.

Earl knew what he was going to do. He wasn’t going to tell Marie, because he didn’t want her to dissuade him. “He’s a strong man, Marie. He’s not going to let this stop him. You can count on him to come back to you.”

Marie had gone silent on the other end of the line. She sniffed and blew her nose. “Thank you for saying that, Earl. I needed to hear it. You’re right. If anyone can make it through this, he can.”

“Are you going to stay there all night?”

“Where else could I be? I can’t leave him. What if he wakes up? I need to be with him.”

“Of course. Listen, give me the number there and let me call you in the morning. It can be on my nickel.”

Marie did as he asked.

“Thank you for calling me, Marie. It means a lot.” His voice was trembling and he needed to get off the phone. He needed to move.

“You’re welcome.”

They both hung up. Earl sat for a moment, fighting back the urge to kick or punch the wall, knowing it would do no good. He would just end up with a broken hand or a bruised leg—might even put a dent in the wall.

He walked over to his coffeemaker. The timer was set for six in the morning. He turned off the timer and turned on the machine. It made a small gurgling that he found reassuring. He would need to tank himself up on caffeine if he wanted to get to Wichita by tomorrow night. Then it would be another day’s drive to get to Pepin County.

If he could stand to fly, he would do it, but he hadn’t been able to get on a plane since he was twenty—when the first and only plane he had ever boarded had felt like it was going to fall out of the sky.

He hoped he would still have a son to talk to when he got to the hospital in Wisconsin.

The frogs in the slough alongside the lake were so loud that they sounded like they were screaming themselves hoarse. Claire was sure that their calls were something about love, but she didn’t want to think about their yearning.

Sitting by herself at a picnic table in the park, she watched the last patrol car pull out onto Highway 35. Claire knew she should stand up and go home and try to sleep for a few hours, but she wanted to sit for a moment. She needed this time of stillness to gather herself together. Over the last few hours, she felt she had flown into fragments.

A small prayer had pulsed through her as she worked with everyone on this crime scene:
Please let no one die.
A few minutes ago she had called the hospital to learn that they had released the little girl; that news had lifted her spirits. However, Andy Lowman’s condition had been given as critical. The nurse told her that the other three were stable.

The lemonade stand, with police tape wrapped around it, had been shunted off to the side of the road that led down to the lake. The lab hadn’t wanted the stand to be moved, even though they took half of the poor woman’s equipment with them.

The ambulances had left first. The interviews had gone on until after midnight. The sheriff had gotten right in with the rest of them, asking questions, writing down names. They had needed all the hands they could get.

Out of the full sheriff’s department of twenty deputies, ten had been in the park, transcribing the testimony of eyewitnesses. At first questioning, no one had seen anything suspicious.

There must have been over two hundred people in the park when the poisonings occurred. How many of them were men? How many of them had a farming background? They could start narrowing all this down in the morning.

However, she couldn’t be sure that the pesticide had been put in the lemonade while it was in the park. It could have happened at the woman’s workplace. More to check on.

Claire desperately hoped this incident didn’t escalate into a murder investigation. When she had seen the five victims off into ambulances, four of them had looked pretty good. But not Andy Lowman. Apparently he was the one to worry about.

This whole scene reminded her too much of the street dance she and Rich had gone to last summer—a festive gathering of people that was blown apart by violence when a man had been stabbed to death. This wasn’t supposed to happen out in the country.

She slumped over the picnic table. It was after two o’clock. She had to go home. She hoped Rich was sleeping. She didn’t want to rehash everything with him. Not that he wasn’t a good sounding board—he was. But she was weary from thinking about what might happen next.

However, before she went home, she was going to make one more phone call. She took out her cell phone and dialed a number she knew by heart.

A sleepy man answered. The tone of his voice reminded her of the man she had loved for most of her adult life. Steven’s dad sounded so much like her late husband that she couldn’t say anything. He said hello again.

“Sorry, Thomas. It’s Claire.”

“Claire, what’s the matter?” His voice rose at the question.

“Not anything to do with us. Meg and I are fine. But we’re having some problems down here, and I know you and Beth said you’d like to have Meg for a week or so this summer.”

“Yes,” he said, and waited.

“Could you come and get her bright and early tomorrow morning?”

“Of course. Is nine okay?”

She hated to do this to him, but she knew she would need to get to work before then. “How about eight?”

“Eight will be fine. We’ll see you then. Go to sleep, Claire.” He hung up.

He was a good man. Asked no questions. Did what he could. His son had been like him. Talking to Thomas made her miss Steven more than usual.

Rich hated this. He knew he would always hate Claire’s work demands: the waiting, the worrying, the putting the kid to bed alone, the attempt to sleep, the attempt not to sleep. It stank.

Here it was nearly three o’clock in the morning, the fifth of July, and Claire still wasn’t home. He was sitting on the edge of her bed, in her house, holding his head in his hands and feeling mad.

What would she have done if he hadn’t been there to take care of Meg? He knew he didn’t dare ask because she would only get mad and tell him she could manage without him. One of the things he liked most about Claire was how independent she was. It also drove him crazy.

He wondered if she could manage without him. He wondered if she had any suspicion that she couldn’t.

But he couldn’t do anything about that. Claire had to resolve those things herself. What he needed to work on was his own attitude. If he were going to marry this deputy sheriff, then he needed to learn how to be a supportive, understanding, calm partner—not always typical male characteristics, and certainly ones he needed to improve on.

He had been angry when he climbed the stairs to go to bed. He had left all the dirty dishes piled next to the sink. Washing dishes was good for the soul, his grandmother used to tell him.

Rich stood up from the bed and pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt. He felt a bulge in his pocket, and when he patted it, he remembered he had slipped the box with the ring in there just in case. With Claire deep into a new case, he wasn’t sure when he’d ever have the chance to propose. What did all this say about their relationship?

He walked down the stairs quietly, so as not to wake Meg, and started running hot water into the sink.

And that was how Claire found him—elbow-deep in warm, soapy water, digging the last few utensils out of the bottom of the sink.

She walked in, gently closing the door behind her. She leaned against the door, then saw him. “Oh, you’re up.”

“Couldn’t sleep. I tried. Thought of going down to the park, but knew that wasn’t a good idea.”

“Oh, Rich, you wouldn’t have wanted to be there.” She walked in to the kitchen and stared at all the dishes stacked in the drainer. “Thanks for cleaning up.”

“What happened?”

Claire looked exhausted. When she got tired, her hair seemed to get messier, out of control. Wisps of black hair had come loose from her ponytail and floated around her face. She had a smear of dirt on her cheek that looked like a blurred beauty mark. Her eyes were red-rimmed.

She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t really know. We talked to everybody. Nobody saw anything that we know of yet. Maybe when we go over all the notes tomorrow, something will jump out at us.”

Rich knew that Claire had thought she would have the next day off and had no day care set up for her daughter. “You want me to watch Meg for you tomorrow? I’ve got some errands, but she can come along with me.”

“No, that won’t be necessary. She’s going to stay with her grandparents. It’s all set up.”

This was the first he had heard about Meg’s going away so soon. When had Claire arranged that? “Oh, that works out well.” He hated the edge he heard in his voice.

“Well, I know you’ve got your work to do and I just didn’t want to have to worry about her.”

“I don’t mind watching her.”

“I ask enough of you already, Rich. I need to save you for special times.”

“Special times—what a load of crap! What does that mean? You don’t have to save me for nothing.”

“I don’t?” Claire looked up at him with trepidation. “What does that mean?”

He decided to be very clear. He pulled out the box with the ring and handed it to her. “I want you to marry me.”

“Oh!” Claire held the box out in front of her as if it might explode.

Rich knew he was deep into it now and there was no way to go but straight ahead. He plunged forward.

“I want to be next to you when these things happen. I want to have a reason to get so worried about you. I want to know that if anything happens to you, I’ll be the first person to be notified. I’m in love with you and I want to make a life with you. Will you marry me?”

Claire opened the box and saw the ring. Then she sat down in a chair at the kitchen table and burst into tears.