Bone Harvest (3 page)

He checked his watch again. Time to get in place to do the next step. This was step two. He had thought about it and this needed to be the second step. Everyone would understand when they knew the truth. It would all make sense.

He drove the truck up the hill on the west side of town, away from the Chippewa River. No one even passed him on the road. He drove past the sheriff’s department, kept going up the hill, then pulled over on the shoulder for two minutes. There were three cars parked in front of the building. He would have to risk it. It would only take him one minute. He had practiced.

He drove back to the sheriff’s department and parked right in front. That way if someone drove by, they would think he was there on business. For this run he was driving an old truck he had put in storage and he had rubbed mud on the license plates so it would be hard to read. Better to be cautious.

After taking the pump out of the back of the truck, he put on his gloves and sunglasses. He kept the pump hidden in the brown-paper grocery bag with just the nozzle sticking out. He walked around the side of the building and came to the front stairs.

In front of the building, next to the stairs leading up to the doors, was a big flower garden. He knew the names of all the flowers because of his mother: petunias, roses, snapdragons, pansies. Allysum encircled the others. He loved the smell of that small white flower. Intoxicatingly sweet.

He had to be careful not to breathe.

He looked at his watch: 12:07.

He took a deep breath, then held it. Seven passes over the garden, a thick mist coming out of the end of the nozzle.

There had been seven of them. He wanted no one to forget that.

CHAPTER 3

Had there been a frost last night? Debby Lowe wondered as she stared at the remains of the flower bed. For a moment she could think of no other explanation for what was in front of her eyes. She was standing outside the Pepin County office building that included the sheriff’s department, where she worked as a receptionist.

Friday afternoon, when she had left work, the flowers had looked fine—the allysum mounding up nicely, the snapdragons taller than she had ever seen, the marigolds full of bright orange flowers and many buds. She had been using Miracle-Gro and it was doing the trick. She watered them religiously, checking on them often.

Debby had planted all the flowers herself after consulting with the design person at the garden center. The sheriff had let her take on the job of planting the garden as part of her normal workload. She couldn’t believe her luck that she was going to get paid to garden. She loved it more than anything else in the world and dreamed that someday she might be able to take classes and go into landscape design.

Debby remembered her last glance at the flowers—they had filled the bed with their bright colors. This morning they looked blasted. Dried, shriveled, straw-colored growths. Had they been through some sort of small nuclear winter?

What could have happened to her flowers?

Had someone done something to them? Sprayed them with weed killer? Why would anyone do such a mean thing? She felt like sitting down on the sidewalk and howling; then she got mad.

She ran up the steps with determination. She would not let someone get away with this awful act of vandalism. The deputy sheriffs weren’t the only ones who could solve a crime.

She walked up to her desk and stopped only long enough to drop her purse on top of all her work. Judy gave her a look, but Debby didn’t want to talk to her. She was going to take it right to the top. She strode through the department and knocked on the door to the sheriff’s office.

His voice boomed through the door, “Come on in.”

When she pushed into the room, she was surprised to see four faces turn her way: the sheriff’s, two deputies, and an older man she had seen before around town, but whose name she didn’t remember.

Debby felt her lips quiver. She wasn’t accustomed to all this attention. But the flower bed was her responsibility. Gathering herself together, she thought of what her bed of flowers looked like now—not even good enough for compost. All her work for the last two months destroyed.

“Debby?” The sheriff rose from behind his desk as he said her name. His face was full of concern for her. Everyone in the room seemed to be staring at her.

She tried to say something, but the words stuck in her throat. They were all waiting for her to speak.

Such a horrible little act, killing the flowers in the bed in front of the sheriff’s office. It worried Claire. It felt bigger than what it appeared. She sensed a terrible anger behind the devastation.

A group of people gathered around in front of the flower bed as if standing at a funeral. Debby sobbed and Judy tried to comfort her. As soon as they could determine that the bed wasn’t still lethal, they should pull up all the plants so Debby wouldn’t have to look at them anymore.

Claire wondered how long it would be before the ground could be planted again.

Ron Sorenson crouched, examining the destroyed flowers. “It could be our guy. Hard to tell by looking. But the desiccation is consistent with Parazone. I don’t know what else would work this fast or this effectively.”

“If it is Parazone, is it still dangerous?” she asked, not knowing if that was the right term to use.

“Well, this product has an REI of at least twelve hours. Do we know what time this happened?”

“All I can tell you for sure is it happened after dark and before morning. What do you mean, REI?”

“Sorry. Restricted-entry interval. Depending on how heavy it was sprayed, people should stay away from it for twelve to twenty-four hours.”

“So should we all be standing here?” she asked him.

“Probably not.”

Claire relayed the information to the sheriff and he shooed everyone back into the building, except Claire and Sorenson. They stepped back from the garden and continued to look at it.

“What can you tell me?” Claire asked.

Sorenson pulled on his nose and stared at the devastated flower bed. “Whoever it was knew what he was doing. He covered the whole bed and he did it pretty evenly. The desiccation is thorough and complete. That’s how Parazone works. It dries up all the green plant tissue. I figure he used a pump sprayer to do such a small area and to get such an even application. He didn’t get much on the lawn. The grass around the bed doesn’t look bad at all. He was very careful.”

Claire was amazed, as she often was, by what an expert could tell you about a subject you knew nothing about. She would have noticed little of what Sorenson had seen. “So he knows what he’s doing.”

Sorenson nodded.

“I’m not sure that makes me feel better,” said Claire. She handed him a pair of plastic gloves. “I thought we both might need these.”

“I’ll pick a plant and give it to our agronomist. He should be able to tell for sure what pesticide was applied to this bed.”

After pulling on her plastic gloves, Claire reached into her pocket for a plastic bag. “I’ll be doing the same with the crime bureau.”

Sorenson looked over at her. “A word of warning—when you get near the plants, try not to breathe.”

“Okay.” She pulled on her gloves, inhaled deeply, and went in for a plant. She tugged at a large marigold that was right in the middle of the patch. It must have had roots that went down to China. She was almost ready to give up on it when it came loose from the soil and she landed on her butt.

That was when she saw the hint of white in the flower bed. She needed to breathe, so she stuffed the plant into her bag, stood up, and backed off again.

Sorenson had his plant in a bag and he appeared ready to leave.

“Wait a minute. I think I see something.” Claire pulled another plastic bag out of her pocket and, again, took a deep breath. She walked in toward the flower bed, ducked her head down so she was on the level she had been when she was sitting, and examined the white object again. She inched up to it, put her gloved hand in the bed, and came out with a white bone the length of a matchstick.

No way of knowing if it was human or not until the lab reported on the bones she had already sent in to them.

She looked over at Sorenson and held up the bone. “I think it’s our guy.”

Harold Peabody loved coming in to work on Sundays. It was so quiet in the newspaper office. He had worshiped at his typewriter for many years. The town shut down and his office on Main Street was his private sanctum. Neither of his two reporters ever bothered to show their faces on Sundays. They were young and probably off gallivanting.

The missus understood. She never bothered anymore to ask him if he wanted to go to church. He went on Easter and on Christmas. If the choir was putting on a special performance, he might go. He liked singing the hymns, the old hymns. God and he had an understanding: God could watch over the world and Harold Peabody would watch over Pepin County.

Harold had been working on the
Durand Daily
for fifty-one years. It had truly been a daily when he first started writing as a cub reporter in 1950. Old Mr. Lundberg owned it then. Harold had bought it from him in 1970. After ten years, he stopped publishing the Saturday and Sunday editions. They had changed from Linotype to offset press shortly after that. Saved a lot of money, but he missed the smell of the hot type being spit out by the machine, and reading the paper upside down on its metal bed.

He didn’t figure he’d be at it much longer. He wondered if he put the paper up for sale if anyone would even buy it. Revenues weren’t high, but he had his steady customers who advertised every week. The community counted on his paper to tell them who was getting married, who had died, and who was having a rummage sale. In this rural community an announcement for a wedding was often made in the paper rather than the couple sending out individual invitations, since everyone in town was usually invited.

Maybe he’d retire in the next year or two and start to work on his memoirs. That Frank McCourt had done so well with
his
memoirs. Americans found terrible Irish childhoods so romantic and exotic. Would they feel the same about a tough Wisconsin childhood? He remembered his family trying to make it through the Depression years. Many nights they ate beans. Some nights they didn’t eat. Harder to look at your own poor. Nothing romantic about that. But he didn’t think the young people of today realized how tough it had been during those years. It might be worth trying to write about it so that the Depression wasn’t completely forgotten.

He had been one of the lucky ones. He had been sickly, so he couldn’t help out that much in the fields. And he had been bright. His mother had fought for him and kept him going to school, years after most children quit. He had been the first child in his family to graduate from college at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

He was working on his usual Sunday-afternoon project—the column called “Fifty Years Ago Today.” It was his excuse to spend hours looking through the archives, remembering the past, studying it.
How little we seem to learn from it,
he thought. And yet, there had been no big world wars for nearly sixty years now. That was something to be thankful for.

Agnes and he were childless. After they found out they couldn’t have children, they talked about adopting, but they just never got around to it. To be truthful, he figured they liked their lives the way they were. But sometimes, on his Sunday afternoons, when he was paging through a century’s worth of news, he wondered about the future. He felt oddly adrift from it. Because he had no progeny, he felt he didn’t really care what happened to the world. He heard so many people go on about the sacredness of human life, and yet every day some small creature, the end of a species, was dying. No one did too much about that. He thought the world might be just as well off without any humans. Such egotistical critters. Who knew what wonderful being might come to take their place?

This was one of the reasons he didn’t go to church. Everyone there seemed to want to believe that God, the so-called higher power, was a kind of father. Harold didn’t buy it. He did believe in a power, but it was beyond words. In the day, he would stare into the blueness of the sky and dive into it. At night, he fell into the stars. Both movements of falling gave him the same feeling he had when he tried to imagine the vast extent of this power.
So beyond us. Yet we try to reach it with our minds.
Harold figured it was good exercise and did it often, but felt like most religions tried to bring God so close to humans that the word lost everything it might mean.

The clock on the wall struck the hour and his mind came back to the office. Every wall lined with bookshelves, every bookshelf filled to the point of collapse. Agnes didn’t dare set foot in the place. She was afraid that a pile of books might fall and bury her.

More and more often he felt himself leaving the world around him to dwell in the landscape of his mind. At least he had seen no evidence of Alzheimer’s. He just tended to drift off frequently.

He didn’t believe one could think too much. As he got older, he felt his mind enlarge. Not the real shape of it, but its ability to sense how large everything was and take it in. He loved this feeling. The universe was bigger than human beings. That was all there was to it. They could come or they could go, but the universe would endure forever. That was as close to religion as he got.

He pulled himself back to the task at hand. He needed to get the column done. What had gone on fifty years ago this week? The Korean conflict was just heating up. McCarthy was beginning to make his presence felt, and wasn’t it a shame he was one of the senators from Wisconsin. Even though he hadn’t voted for him, Harold had always felt bad that his home state had inflicted that madman on the country.

Harold pulled out a stack of papers and started reading through the ones from the first week in July 1952. One article jumped out at him. He leaned closer and read it through. It had been the biggest crime that had ever taken place in the county. He remembered the incident well. Reporters had descended upon Durand from all over the country to get the news. It had horrified the state for many months. It had never been solved.