Bone Harvest (21 page)

“We’ll start writing it up immediately. Whatever you’ve got.”

Claire looked at him. “Who do you think might have been the other diner at the Schulers’ that night?”

Harold didn’t have to think too long. “The person that immediately comes to mind is Bertha’s sister, Louise Wahlund. But she’s dead.”

“I talked to Carl Wahlund already. Would he have known?”

“Maybe. I think the person to talk to is her daughter, Arlene. She lives close by her dad. I can give you the address. She and her mom were mighty tight. As I recall, she was born right around the Schuler murders. Maybe her mother told her something.”

CHAPTER 26

“I don’t think it could have been my mom,” Arlene Rendquist told Claire. She had insisted that Claire and Tyrone sit down at her kitchen table for a cup of coffee. They had to have a piece of coffee cake that had just come out of the oven, she said. Claire blessed her. A cup of coffee and a piece of coffee cake would keep her going for another couple of hours.

After setting down steaming mugs of coffee in front of each of them, Arlene poured herself a cup of coffee and added a good slug of milk to it and then a heaping teaspoon of sugar. She saw Tyrone watching her production and she broke out into a big smile. “I like to make my coffee a full meal.”

She cut them both big pieces of coffee cake and then a smaller piece for herself. “I’m watching my figure,” she explained. Claire liked this woman who told you what she was doing and why she was doing it.

“But back to your question of who had dinner with the Schulers that night. My mom wasn’t feeling too good, at least that’s what I’ve been told. Having me was hard on her. In those days, women still gave birth at home, especially when they lived on a farm and the hospital was a good half hour away. But Mom was having such a hard time of it that Dad brought her in to the hospital. I’m pretty sure she and I were still there on the day that the Schulers were killed.”

Claire took a bite of the coffee cake and found it to be absolutely delicious, a slight taste of cinnamon. She had to bring her mind back to her questions. “This is excellent coffee cake. Thanks again. What about your dad? Might he have gone over there to eat—considering that your mom was in the hospital?”

Arlene shook her head. “I don’t know a lot about what went on, but from what I can gather my dad and Otto Schuler didn’t get along. My dad didn’t like Germans. He made a slight exception for his own wife, but not always. I remember as a kid him yelling at her if she tried to talk German to any of us. Makes me mad now when I think about it. But the war was hard on everyone. They taught him to kill Germans, and it’s hard to not hate them for a while, I guess. Him and Chuck Folger were thick as thieves in those days.”

“Did they do anything in particular to Mr. Schuler?”

“The way my mom told it to me when I was old enough to understand, they hounded him. Bad-mouthed him around town. Didn’t help him out when he was harvesting. My poor mom. It must have made her feel awful that her husband wouldn’t help out her brother-in-law. I know she loved her sister very much.”

“Did your mom ever suspect your dad had anything to do with the murders?”

Arlene picked up her spoon and stirred her coffee. “She might have. My dad has always been quite closemouthed. Mom might not have been able to get anything out of him. And I’m sure she figured she needed him. She had no skills, except as a farmwife; she had no money, except what he gave her. The land they had inherited went right into the farm. I doubt she could have taken that away from him if she had even thought of divorcing him. Plus, they were Catholic. Divorce was unheard of. My mother found her happiness in her children. In the end, my parents tolerated each other.”

“Was your dad happy to get the Schuler land?”

“Yes, a farmer’s always glad to get more land. Because it was contiguous with his own, it was easy for him to handle. But he let the house just about fall down. I was so happy when he decided to let someone live in that old place. Another few years and it wouldn’t have been worth much.”

Claire thought of the Daniels family living in the house and farming some of the land. “What made him change his mind?”

“My mom died. It made me think that he had done it for her. Kept the place empty so she wouldn’t have to see another family grow up in it. Maybe he was more thoughtful than I would have guessed.”

Meg was glad to hear from her mom. This was the third day of her visit with her grandparents and she was having a good time, but part of her was all the time thinking about her mother. Not exactly worrying, but a niggle was always there. Like a little song that went on and on in her head.

When she heard the phone ring, she stood up from the game she was playing and waited to hear Grandma get the phone, have a little conversation, and then holler, “Meggy, it’s for you.”

Her grandparents called her Meggy and she let them. She figured they were too old to change their ways, and also she thought it was nice to have special names for people. They were the only people who called her Meggy and that worked for her. She would hate that name if everyone called her it. It sounded like a name for a little kid, and that was probably what she would always be for her grandparents.

“Hi, Mom, where are you?”

“Hi, Meg. I’m at work.”

“Figured. How’s it going?”

Her mom didn’t say anything for a moment, and Meg knew she was working too hard. She could hear it in her voice, the way her mom sounded tight and tense, her words coming out in bursts.

“Not bad.” Her mother tried to be cheerful. “I bet you’re having a great time.”

“Not bad,” Meg mimicked her mom. They could both play this game. But she was having a good time. “We went to the zoo yesterday.”

“What did you see?”

“Everything. We even went on the elevated train and saw all the animals out in the wild. I liked that the best. We were enclosed in glass and the animals got to run free. It seems more like the way it’s supposed to be. I even got a cupcake on the train. One of the kids was having a birthday party and they had an extra cupcake.”

“A birthday party?” her mom said, as if she were waking up from a nap.

“Yeah, you know, a celebration when it’s your birthday.”

“That might be it, Meg. A birthday party. Another kid.”

Meg was getting worried. Her mom was rambling. “Mom, what are you talking about?”

“I think I just figured something out.”

“Good.”

“Listen, sweetie. I gotta go. This is going to be over soon, I hope. I’ll talk to you tonight or tomorrow.”

“Love you, Mom.”

“Me, too. Bunches and bunches.”

After noon, Deputy Watkins had called Harold and told him it couldn’t have been Arlene’s mother, as she had been in the hospital. She told him that she was thinking it might be a kid, and that made Harold remember a strange conversation he had had with an odd little boy not too long after the murders. He mentioned it to Claire and told her he’d call her back if he could remember the kid’s name.

Harold remembered the conversation so well because he had told it to Agnes and then he had even written it down. He had thought of turning it into a piece for the paper, but it had seemed too dark, considering how recent the Schuler murders had been, so he had never done anything with it. He was pretty sure he had thrown the piece away in one of his cleansings that happened every few years.

The conversation had happened at the cemetery, when the Schulers were being buried. Harold was standing way toward the back and had started to walk away when he noticed a young boy staring in the opposite direction from the service. The boy, who must have been around six or seven, asked Harold if he knew that there were 236 gravestones in the cemetery.

Harold said, “No, how do you know that?”

The boy stared at him unblinking and then said, “I counted them. Do you know why they have gravestones?”

Harold had thought he knew, but he decided he was more interested in hearing the boy’s thoughts on the subject. “Why?”

“So the bodies don’t fly away. The gravestones pin them down like bugs.”

Harold asked him if he had ever played with the Schuler kids.

The boy spit out, “Never. My dad says no. Krauts, he calls them. I’m no kraut lover.”

The nasty words seemed so strange coming from a young child’s mouth.

“They seemed like nice people to me.”

“But they died.”

“Yes, that was too bad.”

“Maybe they’ll come back,” the boy had suggested.

“I don’t think so.”

“Do bones ever grow new bodies?”

Harold hadn’t thought too much about the question. At the time, Harold had just assumed that the odd child was thinking about the buried bodies all around them. “Not that I know of.”

What Harold couldn’t remember was who the boy had been. On the way home from the cemetery, he told Agnes about the incident and had described the young boy, and she had known him. She might remember. He called her from his desk.

“Peabodys’,” she answered the phone.

“Agnes, do you remember that strange little boy I talked to?”

“Hello, dear. Nice of you to call. Which strange little boy? There’ve been so many in your life.”

“You know, after the Schuler funeral. I told you about our conversation. And you thought you knew who I was talking about.”

“Remind me a bit.”

“I asked him if he had played with the Schuler kids and he said never, that his dad didn’t want him to be a kraut lover.”

“Vaguely. What did he look like?”

This was where Harold ran into trouble. He could remember words much better than physical appearances. “He was a youngster, kinda skinny. Wearing shorts and a bow tie.”

“Oh, yes. The bow tie. That would have been Paul Lindstrom.”

“Why does the bow tie make you remember who it was?”

“I don’t know. I just remember thinking how cute he looked in his little bow tie. His mother always kept him well dressed. She rather coddled him. The father was not a very nice man, but his mother took care of the boy.”

“Paul Lindstrom. Yes, it would have been Paul Lindstrom. He still lives there in that same farmhouse that he grew up in, doesn’t he?”

“I believe so. He and his wife. A pair of odd birds. They keep to themselves. Why? What has he done?”

CHAPTER 27

Claire left Tyrone and Lowman staring over the plat map, trying to see where there was a water supply the pesticide guy could pollute. She had told them she was going out to the Lindstroms’, to call her if they came up with anything. This trip was probably a long shot. Harold Peabody had called her back, all excited about some conversation he remembered that he had had with Paul Lindstrom when Lindstrom was a little boy.

But it could pan out—Lindstrom was the right age to have played with the Schuler children, and he lived so close by. She had explained that she had already talked to the man once, but said she would go out and talk to him again. After that, she planned on driving around the farms that were close to the Schulers’. Maybe she’d see something.

When she drove up to the Lindstroms’ it looked pretty quiet. She got out of her squad car and walked up to the house. She knocked on the screen door, but no one answered. She could hear voices coming from inside, so she knocked again. Nothing. She pushed the door open and yelled inside, “Hello? Anybody home?”

The voices didn’t even pause. That was when Claire realized she was hearing a television. Maybe Mrs. Lindstrom had it on so loud that she couldn’t hear her knocking. She walked farther into the house.

The messiness of the kitchen surprised her. It wasn’t horridly messy, but dishes were strewn on the table and left in the sink. When she had been to the house before everything had been so spotless. Maybe Mrs. Lindstrom wasn’t feeling so good.

She looked into the living room, but no one was there and the television was off. She could still hear the sound of a television, and when she walked back into the kitchen, she thought it was coming from the door by the pantry.

Claire opened the door and looked down a set of stairs. The sound was obviously coming from the basement.

“Hello?” she shouted down the stairs.

No one answered.

This was all making her uneasy. Something wasn’t right here. It was lunchtime. Where were the Lindstroms? Why was the television on in the basement?

She patted her gun, then felt silly for doing it. Maybe they had gone into town and left the television running. She’d just check out the basement and leave them a note, asking them to call her when they returned.

Cautiously, she started down the basement stairs. And when she turned the corner at the bottom, she saw the television set. And then noticed there was someone sitting in a chair in front of it.

“Hello?” Claire said, but the person didn’t turn at her voice.

When she got closer, she could tell it was Mrs. Lindstrom. Her wispy brown hair was out of the curlers and hung down to her shoulders. Her head was tipped forward. Claire walked around to see her. It looked like the woman was sleeping.

When Claire reached forward to shake her, she saw that Mrs. Lindstrom was tied into the chair she was sitting on. She was wearing the same housedress that she had been wearing when Claire had seen her last. One of her hands was clasped inside the other. This was all very bad.

Claire prayed the woman still had all her fingers.

“Mrs. Lindstrom?” Claire shook her shoulder.

Someone on the television talked about the problem of hemorrhoids and told you how to cure them.

The woman stirred and looked up at Claire. In a whisper she asked, “Where is he?”

“Who, your husband?”

“Yes, is he here?”

“I haven’t seen him.” Claire knelt down by her side and asked, “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

Mrs. Lindstrom uncurled her hands and reached out to Claire. “We’ve got to find him. He’s acting so crazy.”

Claire asked her, “What did he do?”

Mrs. Lindstrom raised her hand to her mouth, remembering. “He cut his finger off. After he tied me up down here, he took a hatchet and lopped it off. He did it right in front of me. He said he needed a witness, but didn’t want me to tell anyone. He said he’d be back to untie me. What’s wrong with him?”

Claire felt a deep shiver go through her whole body. With shaking fingers, she started untying the woman from the chair. “Why did he do that, Mrs. Lindstrom? Did he tell you what he intended to do?”

Mrs. Lindstrom shook her head and her face crumpled. She started to sob and spoke brokenly through her tears. “He’s been a good man. I know that he has odd thoughts, but he’s not mean. He said he had to find out the truth. He said maybe they needed another finger; maybe that would make it right. I didn’t understand why he was doing it. I tried to stop him, but he left me here. He left me and he hasn’t come back. He said he would go to the well.”

“The well?”

“I’m afraid he’s going to kill himself.”

“I know what that is. I’ve been looking at it and looking at it, trying to remember what was there.” Lowman snapped his finger down on the map. “That’s a reverse well.”

Tyrone looked down at where the man was pointing. He could see a circled X on Schuler’s land that was near the edge of the Lindstrom property. “That mark right there?”

“Yes, that means a well, and as I recall that was a reverse well.”

Tyrone had to admit his ignorance. “What is that?”

Lowman lifted his grizzled head. The man had been going over the whole map with Tyrone, explaining all he knew. “Just what it sounds like. Instead of bringing water up out of the ground it takes it into the ground.”

“Why?”

“To drain the land. To make it fit for farming. Doubt it’s used anymore.”

“Could it be used?”

“I would expect so. Unless they filled it in. But if you wanted to poison a whole group of people, especially all those living right around the Schuler homestead, that would be a nifty way to do it. Just dump the pesticides down the well and it would go right into the aquifer.”

Tyrone gave Lowman a look.

Lowman explained, “The water table. All these farms, as I mentioned to you before, are on wells. They all draw their water out of the same body of water under the ground. It’s pretty far down there, because they’re up on the bluff. They probably had to dig about three hundred feet to get to the water table, but it’s there. And if the pesticides were dumped into it, it might poison a whole group of wells.”

“Sounds like what we’ve been looking for.”

Tyrone’s cell phone rang. When he answered he heard Claire’s voice. “Lindstrom. It’s Lindstrom. That was his own finger he cut off. He tied up his wife and left her in the basement.”

“Shit. Where is he?”

“Mrs. Lindstrom told me that she thought Paul had gone someplace not too far away. She said something about a well.”

“Yeah, I think we’ve located it. I’ll put Lowman on and he can give you directions. We’ll meet you there.”

“I hate to leave her, but I think I’d better try to stop him before it’s too late.”

Lowman got on the phone and told Claire where she would find the farm road that led to the reverse well. Then he handed the phone back to Tyrone.

“Listen,” Claire told him. “This guy is crazy, but I don’t think he’s armed or even that dangerous. Let’s try to bring him in peacefully. If he’s even there. I’ll meet you at the well.”

Claire parked her car on the dirt road when she saw Lindstrom’s truck up ahead. She sat in the car for a few moments and took deep breaths. Maybe this would go real easy. She could walk up on him and bring him in. She got out of her car and silently shut the door and started walking.

When she got to Lindstrom’s truck, she looked around to see if she could tell where Paul had gone. Off to her right, she could see a path leading down through a ditch. At the end of it was an opening. It looked like a cellar door going down into the ground. A strange sound came out of the hole in the ground, a clicking and then a whine. Lindstrom must have started up the pump. The noise was good; it would cover up any sounds she might make approaching the well. She hoped she was in time to stop him from dumping any of the pesticides down into the water.

After making sure she had her gun, she moved forward, careful where she was putting her feet. When she was a few steps away, she stopped and readied herself. She hoped she would see him and the situation before he would see her standing above him.

Down in the pit a metal arm was rising and lowering. She saw it and then realized it was part of the pumping system. An old system. She stepped up to the edge of the well pit and didn’t see Lindstrom down below.

She heard something behind her and then someone pushed her forward into the open pit of the well. Claire tried to grab for something and then remembered to protect her face. She hit the ground with a sickening force. Darkness swallowed her.

When she came to, she was sitting against the dirt wall with Lindstrom squatting in front of her, holding a gun in his hands—her gun—but it wasn’t pointed at her. The gun was just dangling loose in his hands. She saw that he had a bandage covering his left hand.

Claire shook her head. Her shoulder hurt, her ribs ached, her head was spinning, and her ankle throbbed. She didn’t think anything was broken, but she was banged up. She couldn’t think about her aches and pains at that moment.

She held out her hand. “Don’t do anything,” she told Paul Lindstrom.

“Like what?” he asked, genuinely wanting to know.

“Make anything worse,” she finished lamely.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I just came out to talk to you about some new information we had on the Schulers.”

“How did you find me?”

Time to lie,
Claire thought. It wouldn’t help the situation for him to know she knew what he had done to his wife. “I saw your truck go down this way so I just followed you.”

He nodded. Seemed to buy it. “What new information?”

“Well, we have evidence that shows that someone else was at the Schulers’ the day they were murdered.”

He nodded again. She needed to get him talking. An outright question might do the trick. “Were you at the Schulers’ when they all were killed?”

Lindstrom didn’t say anything at first. She could tell he was thinking pretty hard because his eyes moved down to the ground. “I can’t say.”

Claire decided to step around that question. She felt that he had been programmed not to reveal that part of what had happened. She decided to just assume that he was there. “We know there was another plate set for dinner and it was Arlette’s birthday. Were you invited to the party?”

At the word
party
, he lifted his head. “My dad told my mother to never let me play with the Schulers. He said they were bad people. But he was gone. He went to Milwaukee. I begged my mother. I wanted to go to the birthday party. I was good friends with Schubert and we never got to play together.”

“Do you want to tell me what happened that day? What you saw happen at the farm?”

“I didn’t see much at first. Just heard the gunshots go off. Then the man came upstairs and shot all the other children.”

Claire let those words sink in. He had been there when they were murdered. “Where were you?”

“I hid in the closet.”

“Good for you.”

“I was used to hiding when my dad got mad.”

“It saved your life.” Claire pushed him to continue. “What did you see?”

“I didn’t see who shot the children because I closed my eyes. When the noise was done I went downstairs, and that’s when I saw the deputy kill Mr. Schuler. He shot him in the back.”

“Did you take the fingers?”

He nodded.

“Why?”

Lindstrom shook his head as if it were too hard to say, too hard to explain his actions.

“You want the truth?” she asked him. “We have Earl Lowman at the sheriff’s office. He was the deputy you saw at the Schulers’. He’s told us everything that happened that day. Things you’re not aware of. Do you want to talk to him?”

“It’s too late,” Lindstrom said, gesturing toward the bags of pesticide that were sitting next to the well shaft. “I’m through waiting. They all need to be punished.”

“I think you need to hear what he has to tell you. I think it will make you feel better about what happened that day. You’ve been blaming someone who really didn’t do everything you thought he did.”

“Lowman?”

“You never knew who he was?”

“I didn’t see his face. All I knew was that he was wearing a deputy’s uniform. And that he killed them all.”

“He didn’t.”

“Who did?”

Claire didn’t know what he wanted to hear. She would have told him almost anything to get him out of the well pit and headed back to town. “Who do you think killed them?”

Lindstrom shook his head as if he were weary from thinking about it. “I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Somehow I knew it was my dad’s fault. Even though everyone said he was in Milwaukee, I thought maybe he had paid the deputy to kill them.”

“Why?” Claire asked.

“Because he hated them so much. He did such mean things to them. He killed their animals. He poisoned their crops. I couldn’t stop him. He wanted them to leave, to go away. He made their lives hell.” Paul Lindstrom shook from the rage that he had held in for so many years. “My father made life hell for my mother and me.”

Claire realized that Paul Lindstrom had actually seen the bigger truth all along. His father had probably had a huge hand in the murders of the Schuler family—driving Otto Schuler to do what he had done. “Well, I don’t think your dad helped matters at all, but he didn’t kill them or ask the deputy to do it. It was actually Otto Schuler who killed everyone in his family except himself.”

“Schubert’s father? But he was a nice man.”

“He probably wasn’t well and he was scared that he was going to lose his farm. He didn’t think he could take care of his family anymore. We’ll never know what caused him to kill his family, but I don’t think he did it out of any meanness.”

“Why did the deputy kill Mr. Schuler?”

“Because Mr. Schuler asked him to. He didn’t want to live after what he had done. I’m not saying that what Deputy Lowman did was right, but he didn’t come to the farm intending to do anything like that. You are the only witness. Would you be willing to testify about what Lowman has done?”