Bone Harvest (11 page)

July 7, 1952

Louise Schuler was sitting on the floor in her bedroom, showing Elisabeth how to put clothes on a paper doll. Louise didn’t really like to play with them much anymore—she was almost too old for that—but she loved to cut them out.

She heard a loud bang downstairs in the kitchen and then Arlette cried for a moment and then another bang and the baby stopped. Louise stood up. It must mean something, that noise. It nearly sounded like a gun. She hoped it meant it was time for dinner. Usually her mom hollered out the front door to tell them to come in and eat. Maybe she was trying something new. Or maybe her dad had dropped something.

She hoped he hadn’t dropped the birthday cake. Mom had let her help frost it and she had dipped her finger in the frosting when her mom wasn’t looking. It was so delicious her mouth watered just thinking about it.

Louise stood up and told Elisabeth to put her paper dolls away. It was time to go eat.

“I didn’t hear Mom.”

“Mach schnell,”
Louise said, imitating her mother. She didn’t know many words in German, but her mother said those words all the time. It meant, Make it snappy; be quick about it.

Elisabeth couldn’t do anything fast. She carefully put her paper dolls back in their folder and put all their clothes away. Louise decided to practice her pirouettes in the middle of the floor. She was wearing only her stockings, so she could turn better. She wanted to take ballet lessons but her mother said they didn’t have enough money.

She heard some steps coming down the hall and stopped turning around, but her head was still dizzy from all the spinning and she couldn’t walk straight. A third loud bang happened, only this time right outside the door. Elisabeth fell down on the bed.

Louise stood very still, her arms stretched out for balance. The fourth time the gun went off she didn’t hear it.

CHAPTER 13

Meg sat out on the front steps in the shade of the crabapple tree. Another hot day. Too hot to even think about being productive. All she felt like doing was going down to the beach. But it didn’t look like the day was shaping up that way.

She wanted to have her life be the way it was supposed to be: her mom with the day off, Rich and her mom smiling and happy, her visit to her grandparents’ not for a few weeks yet. Instead her mom had woken her up early this morning and helped her pack a suitcase. Now she was sitting on the front steps, waiting for her grandparents to pick her up.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like her grandparents. They were great, even if they tried too hard. She always felt like they were trying to make up for their son, her father, being dead. They always gave her toys and took her to movies. They did some kind of major activity every day—went to the science museum, took a bike ride—but sometimes she found it exhausting.

It was hard to adjust when things changed so rapidly. She needed to get her mind ready.

She wasn’t bored with summer yet. If it were the end of summer, she would be ready to go and stay with them, but she still could think of so many things to do. She wanted to stay home. But looking at her mom’s face, she knew a tantrum would do little good. Claire was bustling about at top speed, making sure Meg hadn’t forgotten to take anything. Rich was nursing a cup of coffee and pretending to read the paper. But it was yesterday’s paper and he wasn’t turning the pages.

Meg decided to go along with the plans. She had a feeling her mom and Rich needed to have it out, and it might be easier for them to do that if she wasn’t there. She wanted to have Rich as the permanent guy-dad in life, but she wasn’t the one who had to marry him and pledge for better or for worse. She could only give her mom so much advice on these matters and then she was on her own.

Meg walked into the house and let the screen door slam behind her. A small protest. “Mom, how long am I staying for?”

Her mom stopped what she was doing, turned her head, and then said, “What?”

Meg knew the
What?
wasn’t a real one. It was a stalling
What?
She sat down on a porch chair and just looked at her mom, waiting for her to provide a real answer.

“How about a week?” Her mother looked over at her with her face slightly crinkled.

“That’s a little long.”

“Maybe it will be shorter.”

“You just want me out of here, don’t you?”

Her mom wiped her hands on her pants and walked over and sat down next to Meg. “In a way. I’m not going to lie to you. You know this job of mine is demanding sometimes.” She flicked back a strand of Meg’s hair. “We’ve talked about this. I need to focus on this case. People got hurt last night.”

“Poisoned?”

“It appears so.”

“Did anyone die?” Meg had to ask the question she had been framing since she woke up.

“No, just got very sick.”

“God, Mom, you almost drank that stuff.”

Her mother’s head jerked up. “Meg, don’t say that word.”

Meg clamped her hand over her mouth. How had that word come out? She had only said
God
a couple of times in her life, and then it had been around friends. But she knew she should never have even tried out the swear words. Once your mouth got used to saying them, you never knew when they might pop out. Words had a life of their own.

“I just don’t want you to worry,” her mother said.

“That’s stupid to tell me not to worry. It makes me know there’s something to worry about.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, Mom. It’s okay. Will you promise to call every day?”

“Yes, I will.”

“Will you promise to let me come home as soon as I can?”

“Yes, the very moment.”

Meg felt her mother’s arms fold over her the way the wings of a mother bird covered her young. But she didn’t sink into the embrace and close her eyes and cuddle. She kept watching—because there was something out there that was trying to get them all.

Five people were poisoned in the Fort St. Antoine park as people gathered to watch the Fourth of July fireworks. It appears that the lemonade sold at one of the concessions had been spiked with a toxic product, possibly a pesticide. The sheriff’s office believes there might be a connection to the pesticides that were stolen on July first.

“How’s it coming?” Sarah popped her head in his office door. They were on a tight deadline. Usually they didn’t have breaking news that needed to go above the fold on the front page. It meant a major reordering of all the other articles.

“I’ll have it done,” Harold promised.

With that, Sarah returned to the outer office.

Harold paused in his typing. Maybe he should have let Sarah write the lead article. He could work on layout and she could interview him as a material witness. Harold still remembered the weight of Andy Lowman as he fell into his arms. It was urgent that this piece get finalized in the next hour, but Harold felt his mind wander into the past to another Fourth of July celebration.

Sitting at his desk with a pile of old papers in front of him, Harold remembered the first time he had seen Bertha Schuler. She had been Bertha Ostreich then. Eighteen years old and brimming with life. Blond hair down to her waist, green-blue eyes that called to any man, a full figure, and strong arms. She was a farm girl. Even though she was born in Wisconsin, she had a bit of a German accent left over from her parents.

He had seen her at a dance. He had been only fifteen, but he thought of asking her to dance. He mentioned it to one of his friends, Danny Swenson, who had laughed at him and slapped him on the shoulders, saying, “don’t dance with her. don’t you know she’s a kraut?”

Harold had thought to tell his friend that he, too, had German blood in him, but decided not to bother. He didn’t really know how to dance well enough to have the courage to ask her. Watching her spin around the floor in the arms of one older man and then another had been good enough for him.

Two men had vied for her attention: Carl Wahlund and Otto Schuler. Wahlund had gone off to the service a few months later, and Bertha had married Otto Schuler that same year. Harold had finally danced with her for a short moment at her wedding.

Years went by. He had hardly thought of her again until the murders.

He had gone off to Madison to the university and had met his lovely Agnes there. He had brought her back home and started working at the paper.

Two years later, the Schuler family had been murdered and he had written about it in the
Durand Daily
. He picked up an old issue, dated July 8, 1952.

The headline read:
FARM FAMILY MASSACRED, NO SUSPECT

Last night the Otto Schuler family, five children and their two parents, were found shot to death on their farm outside of Fort St. Antoine. A young deputy sheriff discovered the bodies at about seven p.m. when he returned a saw he had borrowed. No one was at the scene when he arrived. The house had not been ransacked and the table was still set for dinner. It is assumed the killings took place in the late afternoon.

Sheriff Runsfeld said he had never seen anything like it. “It’s been five years since Leroy Kent was shot to death in a bar in Durand. That was the last murder we had in Pepin County. Now we have seven deaths on our hands.”

Harold stopped reading and took off his glasses. Made him tired to read about it. At the time he had been excited to the marrow of his bones. Driving out to the crime scene, he couldn’t wait to get there. The sheriff’s men had blocked everyone from going into the house, but he had seen the feet of the oldest son sticking out from under a blanket in the barn.

At the time he had thought this story would be his ticket out of rural Wisconsin. His writing was being picked up by newspapers all over the country. There was something about a farm killing, the isolation of it, the supposed idyllic nature of farm living, that got urban readers going.

When it had changed, when the story had hit him full in the chest, was when he had gone to the funeral. The size of the coffin for Arlette, the littlest girl, the baby of her family, had thrown him. Too small. No one should die that young.

Then all the coffins lined up. A whole family wiped out. What they might have done in the world gone. Agnes had not been able to stop crying through the whole service. They had gone home and gone to bed and he had held her gently all the night long. In the morning she told him that she was glad they couldn’t have children.

“I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to them,” she said. “We’re fine the way we are.”

And they
had
been fine. Surprisingly, they never left Durand. A couple of offers had come in, but Harold hadn’t accepted them for varying reasons. They had settled back into their lives. The Schuler family had stayed dead, and no one else had been murdered for years.

After Harold bought the paper, he gave up on his idea of ever leaving the area. He gave up on some of his lofty ideas about what a real newspaper should do for a community. He had come to see, unlike his college professors who had never written for a small-town newspaper, what his community actually wanted from the paper: a chance to have their names on the front page for baking the best oatmeal cookies at the state fair, the honor-roll list from the high school every quarter, the weddings, the funerals, the births, the swap meets. A minor skirmish at the school board meeting was enough excitement for them.

When he bought the paper, Harold was in his late forties and he understood his readers better. He cared about them more. It seemed to him they wanted life to go on in a calm and gentle way—for it to appear understandable and controllable. When you were trying to grow soybeans for a living, you didn’t necessarily want the paper to challenge your way of life.

And now he was faced with the second big story of his life and he was seriously thinking of handing it over to Sarah Briding. Maybe it would be her way out of town and he would see her byline in the
New York Times
in years to come. Everyone deserved a chance.

“Sarah, could you come in here please?”

The girl—woman, he supposed he should call her—appeared in his doorway. She reminded him a little of Bertha all those many years ago. Hair was a little darker blond, but she was equally full of life. It was all ahead of her.

“Yes, Harold.” After her first month of working at the paper, he had been able to persuade her to call him by his first name, but it still rolled uneasily off her tongue. “What can I do for you?”

“The park poisonings, the Schuler murders . . .” He pointed at a nearby chair, then paused. Where to start? “Come in here and let me tell you everything I know.”

“Human for sure?” Claire asked, holding the phone wedged between her shoulder and her ear so she could take notes.

“Quite sure.” Sarah Morgan, the forensic anthropologist, cleared her throat, then added, “Although the small bones could be from a bear.”

“Really?”

“Well, I don’t think so, but bear bones are the ones that most closely resemble human and they resemble them especially when they’re young. And most of these bones are from younger humans.”

“How many people?”

“Hard to tell exactly. From their varying sizes, I’d say there’s a good chance that the bones are from four to six different people. One’s pretty small. Baby-sized.”

“Well, there was a baby involved. Can you tell what bones in the body they are?” Claire had told her nothing about the Schuler murders. She wanted to see if she would match it or not.

Sarah said, “All the bones are phalanges or digits.”

“Translate, please.”

“Fingers. Probably baby fingers.”

“That’s what I wanted to hear. Can you tell me the sexes?”

“No, nor can I tell you anything about their ethnicity.”

“One last queston. Can you tell how long they’ve been dead—so to speak?”

“I can tell you they weren’t dismembered yesterday or even three months ago. But they could be a year old or they could be fifteen hundred years old. Until they get old enough to do carbon dating, I can’t tell you much more.”

“But they could be fifty years old?”

“Yes.”

Claire told Sarah she would be sending her another bone. Sarah said she’d fax her the full report when she had finished with the tool-mark analysis.

“What’s this about?”

“A family was murdered here about fifty years ago.”

“With a baby?”

“Yes, it was her first birthday.”

Two hours later, the sheriff called a meeting with everyone to go over all that was known about the poisonings. He reported that four of the poison victims had left the hospital. Andy Lowman was still in critical condition. He sent off a crew of deputies to go back to the park and scour it for anything they might have missed last night. He told Claire he wanted her to be on hand to take the forensic reports as they came in and to coordinate all activities from the office. Among all the deputies there was a sense of urgency and a more pronounced sense of not knowing how to protect themselves or the community from what was happening.

“We have to understand what has led to this,” Claire stated.

The sheriff nodded. “I want you to work on that.”

Since the meeting, Claire had been at her desk, poring over the Schuler case. She read every report, looked at the file inside and out, stared at the photographs. Seven people killed. Five in the house and two outside.

When she lifted up her head to clear it, she thought about Rich. He had asked her to marry him, as she thought he might. But she hadn’t said anything definite, just put him off. They had agreed to talk again in several days. She had awakened in the night and felt his body sprawled against hers. She would lose him if she couldn’t commit to him. He wouldn’t stick around for long. Why did she have to be so unsure? It should be easy to link up with this gentle man.

“I’ve called in reinforcements,” the sheriff told Claire, standing over her desk like a totem pole.