Bone Harvest (22 page)

Lindstrom got up and appeared to be agitated. “I couldn’t do that. I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

There was something odd going on. Sometimes Paul Lindstrom acted like an old taciturn farmer and then sometimes he seemed more like a young boy. “Who told you that?”

“My mother. She made me promise.”

“I think it would be okay. Everyone knows what happened now. You wouldn’t be telling on anyone.” Claire could see he was close to going along with her. She decided it was time to play mom with him. “Paul, I think you need to have someone look at your hand. Does it hurt?”

He looked at her and she could see tiredness and pain in his eyes. He nodded his head.

“Do you think you could help me up?” Claire put her hands down on the ground and tried to stand. Her ankle felt like it wouldn’t hold her. She started to fall.

Lindstrom ran toward her, holding out the gun.

Then she heard a noise above her. When she looked up she saw Tyrone looking down at them. In an instant she knew what he was seeing: Lindstrom with a gun in his hands coming toward her.

She yelled to Tyrone to stop but at the same time the sound came out of her mouth, Tyrone shot his gun and the blast in the well pit was like a sonic boom. She felt it in her body as well as heard it ring in her ears.

Paul Lindstrom fell down on his knees. The gun flew out of his hands. Claire stepped in front of him so they couldn’t shoot again. She bent over him and saw blood spurting out of his neck—and then he toppled to the dark soil.

CHAPTER 28

“I won’t quit my job.” Rich put his Red Wing boots up on the railing of the porch overlooking what he liked to think of as his spread, his family’s estate. “Good,” he said finally, as he knew Claire was waiting for him to say something.

“Do you want me to?”

“Sometimes.”

“I don’t ask you to give up pheasant farming.”

“No, you’ve never asked me to give up my birds.”

“I know you don’t like that I’m a deputy sheriff.”

“That’s not completely true. Sometimes I like it a lot. I don’t like worrying about you.”

Claire moved her cast-covered leg so that she could sit more comfortably in the wooden chair. “Would you get me a napkin?” she asked. “I appear to have dripped on my shirt.”

They were eating chips and hot sauce. Claire had managed to get up the stairs with her crutches, but then sat in the chair she was in and didn’t want to move again. She said her armpits were already sore from the crutches. The doctors had told her she’d be wearing the cast for a good month or so.

Rich brought her the napkin, then stood over her. “Have you told Meg about your broken leg yet?”

“Not really. She’ll see it soon enough. I didn’t want to ruin her vacation.”

“So how is Paul Lindstrom doing?”

“He’s going to be fine. He nearly bled out from that gunshot wound, but he’s a tough guy. His wife went over to see him the other day. She seems to have forgiven him.”

“What will they do to him?”

“Well, I would be surprised if a jury wouldn’t see how mentally ill he is. I would think he’ll be spending time in the psych ward.”

“What about Lowman?”

“The county attorney is going over everything. I think he’s looking at minimal time. I don’t even think they’re going to be charging him with much, maybe negligent homicide. He might serve a year or two.”

They both sat quietly for a moment; then Claire said, slapping her cast, “You won’t have to worry about me for the next month or so. They’ve got me tied to my desk. Oh, did I tell you I got a call from Ray Sorenson today?” She had told Rich about what he and his girlfriend had done in the storage area of the Farmer’s Cooperative.

He nodded for her to continue.

“Looks like they’re going to be having a retirement party for Chuck Folger, the agronomist. Ray sounded awfully glad he wouldn’t be working with the man anymore.”

“We have one more thing to talk about.”

“We do?”

Rich took the box out of his pocket. “The ring. Even though we’re not getting engaged to be married, I’d like to give it to you.” He walked over to Claire and knelt next to her. “Would you like to wear my ring?”

“I would love to.” She held out her hand and he slipped the small diamond on it.

They kissed and for a moment Rich was sure he smelled the sweet scent of roses in the air.

July 7, 1952

She made him get down on his knees on the floor of her bedroom and promise to never tell anyone else what he had told her. “They’ll get us, Pauly, if you tell. They’ll come and kill us, too.”

“What about Dad?”

“Never tell your father anything. He would be so angry, who knows what he would do.”

She cried and held him in her arms and rocked him and called him her baby. “You’re all I’ve got, Pauly. You’re the only person I’ve ever loved.”

When she finally let him go, they ate dinner and he went upstairs to bed. But he couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened, about the dead children laid out on the floors of their house. He had to do something. He had to try to save them.

After he heard his mother go to bed, he sneaked down the stairs and went outside. It was a warm summer night with a big full moon. Fireflies twinkled in the long grass and over the fields.

He walked around the barn and found his special hiding place. The red tobacco tin was right where he had left it. He knew what he had to do.

He went to the edge of the field and he made six holes. Then he opened the lid of the container and put a finger in each hole and covered them over gently with dirt. Maybe bones grew people like seeds grew corn. All he could do was hope that they would grow into the people they had once been.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have owned a house in Pepin County for going on fourteen years, and I must acknowledge and thank all my neighbors and friends who have made my time there so satisfying. Also, thanks to Pepin County Sheriff’s Department for their excellent job of safeguarding the citizenry.

Two writing groups must be mentioned for all the good advice they’ve given me. In Arizona: Elizabeth Gunn, Sheila Cottrell, Earl McGill, J. M. Hayes, and Margaret Falk. In Minnesota: thanks to Becky Bohan, Joan Petroff, Tom Rucker, Margaret Shryer, Jean Ward, and Deborah Woodworth.

Then there’re my usual supporters: Ray DiPrima, Robin LaFortune, Dodie Logue, Mary Anne Svoboda, and the great man by my side, Pete Hautman.

NOTE
: The two pesticides I mentioned throughout this book are not real, but are based on research I did on existing products.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

M
ARY
L
OGUE
, an award-winning poet, lives with writer Pete Hautman in the Wisconsin bluffs country that is the setting for her Claire Watkins series.

Bone Harvest
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Ballantine Book

Published by The Random House Publishing Group

Copyright © 2004 by Mary Logue

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is
available from the publisher upon request.

eISBN: 978-0-345-47842-9

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