by Mary Logue
Her mother poured the pancake batter into pools on the cast-iron pan and while it was forming bubbles she showed him the paper. “I don’t know if you’ve heard us talk about the Schuler murders, but there’s a letter in the paper that troubles me. I’ve been trying to get hold of your father. It might have to do with the pesticides that got stolen, too.”
“Huh?” he said.
“The Schuler murders—so horrible. Whole family killed. I was only a little girl, but I can still remember my mom crying and holding me. All those children. Just awful.”
He stared at the pancakes. They were almost ready. She followed his eyes and flipped them over. Perfect.
“But you probably don’t know a thing about it.”
Actually he did—thanks to Chuck Folger, the agronomist at work. The murders were like an obsession with the guy. Folger had a whole scrapbook about it in a drawer in his office: newspaper clippings, photographs, even a plat map showing where the farm was. Sometimes, when it was slow in the store, Ray would go visit with him and he would talk about the murders.
His mother carefully stacked up the three pancakes and plopped them on his plate. “How many can you eat?” she asked.
“About twelve.”
His mother turned and poured out three more pancakes, then looked off in the distance. “The oldest boy was ten,” his mother said.
Ray looked at his mother as if she had lost her mind. What was she talking about? What boy?
“Denny Schuler. He was just ahead of me in school. He got teased because he was German. I sure thought he was cute. I couldn’t believe that he had died. Mom wouldn’t let me go to the funeral.”
“So you had a crush on him?”
His mother laughed. “Nothing that serious. I just thought he was cute.”
Ray wondered if he would still be here in the kitchen, eating pancakes, if that kid had lived. Maybe his mother would have married Denny instead of his father and he would never have been born. Odd to think those murders so long ago might have changed the course of his life. He poured syrup all over his pancakes. Flooded them.
“Ray!” His mother slapped his hand with the spatula and surprised them both.
As Ray dug into his pancakes, he thought that maybe he should mention Chuck Folger’s obsession to his father. Maybe not. Probably didn’t mean a thing.
At first glance, it was an innocent enough photograph, an old black-and-white eight-and-a-half-by-eleven, showing a table set for dinner, seven plates spaced around the table with silverware and napkins, but it broke Claire’s heart.
She had pulled it out from the Schuler file and then couldn’t stop staring at it. A large platter with a big slab of meat was set down at one end, a bowl of potatoes in the middle of the table, and at the other end of the table was a cake with one single candle stuck in the dark frosting. One white candle.
Claire closed her eyes for a moment. She wondered if they would ever know what had happened to that family. How was the murder linked with the pesticide incidents? Claire had come into work late that morning to check on the pesticides robbery. As an investigator, she had to put in more time when the cases called for it. Not a bad trade-off for a steadier lifestyle.
Claire didn’t think the sheriff was taking the whole matter seriously enough. He was hoping these recent incidents were merely pranks. She hoped so, too, but doubted it.
No new news. Nothing from Eau Claire about the forensic work that was being done on the bones. All she had heard was that, after a preliminary glance, the pathologist had said, “Human bones. Fingers.”
After looking through the Schuler file, she realized this was the link that might connect the pesticide attacks with the murders in 1952. It was not common knowledge because the sheriff’s department had kept it under wraps, but each member of the murdered family had had a finger cut off. The fingers had never been found. She wasn’t sure that Sheriff Talbert knew about the missing fingers. He hadn’t lived in the county at the time of the murders.
It drove her crazy that the forensic work was taking so long. She needed to talk to the sheriff about the possibility of digging up the Schulers’ bodies—if, in fact, this latest crime was related to those murders. They could get a DNA match on the bones. It would be a positive link between the two cases, and it might give them the lead they needed to solve the theft of the pesticides.
Claire decided to call the sheriff at home. She would keep her voice down so that Meg wouldn’t hear the conversation. Mrs. Talbert answered and said it would take her a minute or two to fetch her husband.
She glanced over at Meg, who was sitting in a chair at another deputy’s desk, reading a book. One of the Harry Potters. The ultimate child fantasy. Your cruel parents are not your real parents. What child doesn’t dream of that? And you are the only one who has the power to save the world. When kids fantasize, they do it big.
When Meg had first started reading the series, she had complained because the main character was a boy, but she was halfway through the third book and seemed totally lost in it, oblivious to the world around her.
When Sheriff Talbert came on the line, Claire told him what she had discovered. He didn’t say anything for a moment. “Wish it wasn’t a holiday.”
She decided she’d better push him on this. “Can you call the forensic lab and ask for a rush?”
“I think I’d better.”
“I’m taking the file home with me. I’d like to meet with you in the morning and go over anything else I discover.”
“Yeah, I think I need to study up on this one too. Good work, Claire.”
After she hung up, she looked back at the old photograph and felt tears well up in her eyes.
What broke her heart wasn’t at first obvious; it only showed slightly under the lip of the table: a small hand stretched out on the floor, tiny fingers curling up as if reaching. The baby had fallen under the table. Just one short year in the world. And one of the fingers was missing.
CHAPTER 10
He could not hide in this place, he thought as he walked down the gentle incline to the park by the river. Everyone knew him. That didn’t matter, he told himself. They didn’t really see him. People nodded and helloed him on either side, but no one stopped to talk. No one would ever think of him. They never did. He could come and go and no one would ever notice. That was the kind of man he was: insignificant.
He liked being insignificant. It was another way of being safe. He had studied being safe all his life.
Darkness would come soon. It would fall over the land, a sort of blanket of unseeing. Then he would really be invisible. That was how he had been saved. He walked slowly down toward the lake.
His wife had not come with him to the park. She did not like crowds, she did not like noise, and she hated fireworks. That was fine with him. He had not encouraged her. Always a homebody, she let him wander around at will. She asked very little of him, but liked him to be home for supper. Her perception of him was that he was a busy man, going about his business. That suited her fine. She liked to be a housewife—cooking and cleaning—and she watched her soap operas for company.
He had the flask with him, tucked into his bib overalls. He patted it from time to time, just to make sure it was there. As he continued his walk down to the park, he said howdy to many people: friends and neighbors, folks he had known all his life. He meant them no harm. When the truth came out and washed all the sins away, he hoped they would understand that he had to do this. He had a job to do, which meant he had to be watchful. There would be an opportunity and he would take it.
As he got down close to the lake, he could see the crowds of people setting up chairs on the beach. The smell of the lake came to him, not unpleasant—sweat and seaweed. He swatted his arm as a mosquito found him. He had said hello to twenty people. He liked numbers that were divisible by ten. It was a good sign.
The fireworks would go off straight across the lake from Lake City and everyone in Fort St. Antoine would have front-row seats. Fa
milies laid out blankets; kids ran to the edge of the water, lit off firecrackers, and threw them up in the air. Small bursts of noise, screams of delight and terror rose from the crowd.
He had always figured that fireworks were just another way for the country to get its people ready for war. If the boys came to have pleasant associations with loud bangs, then maybe when they marched off to war, it wouldn’t frighten them so much. Another lie the country perpetrated on its people.
He knew how evil war was. It had destroyed his father. He had never been able to stand any loud noises and so had imbibed far too much to calm his nerves the rest of his life. His mother had always been shushing him, telling him to be still, whispering to him, “Do not startle your father or we both will pay.” He had learned to move quietly.
The sun was close to setting. Another fifteen minutes and it would fall into the lake at the northwestern tip. Just on the other side of the summer solstice, the length of daylight shortened by about three minutes a day. This time of the year the sun set way to the north. Seagulls soared over the lake, white dashes in the darkening sky.
He walked to the water’s edge and stared down at the shoreline. Zebra mussels encrusted rocks and shells, black snarls of crustaceans. They were taking over, slowly clogging up the waterways, destroying the clam beds that had once thrived in the river. They were a small evil that was impossible to fight. He patted the vial in his pocket. You needed to fight the ones you could.
Then he turned back and started to walk toward the concession stands. He counted his steps. They mattered. It all mattered. How you did everything. The smallest change or deviation could change the course of everything. He knew. He had seen it happen. Look at the Schuler murders. He had to get the truth to come out so everyone would know what had happened that day when the sun set a few minutes sooner than it would this day.
Harold strolled up from where his wife, Agnes, was sitting on the beach in one of the folding chairs they had brought with them. Agnes didn’t want to walk around. She said the sand got in her shoes. She’d stay put. The people would come to her. He needed to get up and move through the crowd and see who was there. It was part of his job and it was all of his life.
The letter in the paper had not stirred up as much talk as he thought it might. Possibly because it was the Fourth of July, everyone was too focused on family and eating to give a prank letter in the paper much thought. Harold had thought of little else.
Even last night in bed, he had wrestled with it. He hoped it meant little or nothing, but he had a very bad feeling, and as old as he was, having seen as much as he’d seen, when he had a bad feeling he paid attention. Just as bones might ache from cold, his psyche seemed to ache from evil. He smelled it. He sensed it.
Once or twice he had thought of calling Deputy Watkins to discuss possible scenarios, but he kept deciding to wait, to give his mind time to sort through all he knew of the case history.
The night was a perfect July evening—enough humidity in the air so that smells floated easily on the water molecules—and what he smelled made him hungry. A cheese-curd stand was set up near the middle of the park, but much as he might lust after a greasy bag of that delicacy—plasticky leftovers from some cheese-making process, dipped in batter and fried in a tub full of grease until the cheese turned molten—he knew that he and his wife would suffer all night long if they ate a bag: he with indigestion and she with his thrashing.
But just beyond was a lemonade stand. Agnes liked lemonade. He was feeling slightly parched. It sounded like a good idea. He made his way and stood in line.
As he waited, he noticed Andy Lowman walking his way, carrying a large plastic cup full of lemonade. He hadn’t seen Andy in a few years. Since Andy’s mother died and his father was down in Tucson, Harold had no reason to get together with the younger Lowmans.
In years gone by, Earl Lowman and Harold had been friends. Not close friends, but they had both started at their jobs around the same time—Earl as a deputy sheriff and Harold as a cub reporter on the Durand paper. They would often have coffee together at the drugstore in town, Harold picking Earl’s brain for the latest crime, Earl using Harold as a sounding board for what was going on in town.
Earl was a decent fellow. Andy had been a good son until right before his mother died. Then the two of them had gotten into it and, as far as Harold knew, hadn’t talked since. Such a shame. To have children and not have a relationship with them . . .
Harold had wondered about their quarrel; he had speculated about the reasons why they might have argued; and what he had come up with was that they had argued about Florence, Earl’s wife, Andy’s mother. She had been very sick near the end, dying of cancer, and there had arisen the issue of whether to tube-feed her to keep her alive. They had chosen not to do this.
Earl had told Harold about their decision over coffee. “Flo had just about stopped talking to us. It happened fast. One day she could hold a normal conversation and the next she could hardly say a word. Well, you know Florence. If she can’t talk, what good was life?” He rubbed at his eyes.
Harold had thought it a good decision—Florence had had a good life. Why make her suffer at the end of it? But he feared that Earl had not wanted to tube-feed and Andy had disagreed with him. As husband, Earl would have had the final say. So sad to see a death split people up rather than bring them together as it should. As far as he knew the two had not talked since. But he would ask.
“Andy, how’re the crops looking?”
“Hey, Harold. You’re looking mighty spruced up.”
Harold was wearing a light linen shirt his wife had bought him. It was perfect for this hot weather, but not many men in Pepin County wore linen shirts. He had undone the button at the neck and rolled up the sleeves, but it still looked rather dressy. “The wife,” he said. “She keeps me in clothes.”
Harold was surprised how Andy had aged. Now in his forties, Andy had lost his hair and weathered significantly from the constant sun that he got farming. He was wearing an old football jersey with the arms cut short and a pair of jeans. “The corn looks good. The soybeans are doing fine. Think it’s going to be a good year, except it’s going to be a good year for everyone, so nothing’ll fetch much.”
Harold decided to not beat around the bush with Andy. “How’s your father doing? I haven’t heard from him in a while.”
Andy turned and looked toward the lake as if he were hoping there might be fireworks starting and he wouldn’t have to answer the question. When he turned back to Harold, he said, “Dad’s fine, I guess. He called today and talked to Marie.”
“Still in Tucson?”
“I guess.”
“You still aren’t talking to him?”
Andy shrugged. “Not so’s you’d notice.”
“I should send him the paper. I think he’d be interested in that letter I printed today. Had to do with the Schuler murders. Did you see it?”
“Yes, Marie pointed it out to me. In fact, I was thinking I’d talk to you about that. About what actually happened. Dad would never say much about it, but I think he knew more than he’d let on.” Andy took a swallow of his lemonade.
“Well, he was the first one on the scene,” Harold started to say, when he was stopped by an odd look on Andy’s face.
First, Andy looked like he had bitten into a lemon, which made sense, since he was drinking lemonade. Then he looked like he had had a lemon forced down his throat. Then he looked like the lemon was choking him. Andy’s arms went up to his neck and he tried to speak, but no sound came out except a gasp for air. Harold stepped forward as Andy fell into his arms.
As they walked down to the park, Rich was reminded of this same walk only a few days ago and how that had ended—Claire running off to work. He hoped that the only excitement tonight would be the fireworks.
Meg tugged at his arm. “Can I have a piggyback ride?”
Claire, who had seemed a bit snappish all evening, said, “Leave Rich alone, Meg. You’re too big. Yo
u can walk.”
He thought of stepping in and contradicting Claire, but quickly reconsidered. Let her calm down, he told himself. In the meantime he simply tugged on Meg’s arm, and when she looked up at him, he gave her a wink. They had started this communication between the two of them; it meant: Wait a while; she’ll get better. Then we’ll get what we want. Meg burst out into a big smile and started to skip next to him.
“I love fireworks,” she announced to the night air.
“Noise and fire—what’s not to like,” Claire said, but with a tug of a smile.
“But Mom, they’re beautiful. Sparkles and flashes of color and pictures sometimes even.”
“Yes, I know, honey. They are beautiful.”
Rich chimed in. “Almost as good as northern lights.”
“Oh, Rich, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen them,” Claire said. “Probably ten years or so. I was driving to Fargo, on a case. I was alone in the car, heading north. It was late at night.”
“How old was I, Mom?”
“You were a baby.”
“Where was I?”
“You stayed home with Daddy.” Claire rubbed the top of Meg’s head and then continued, “I noticed something off to my right, which was north, and when I took my eyes off the road and looked into the sky, I almost drove off the road.”
Meg giggled. “Mom.”
“Meg, you have to see them. We should go up north this summer, Rich. Up to the Boundary Waters. Stretch out on our backs on a dock by a lake and stare up into the heavens. I’ve seen them where they look like white water swirling down a drain in the middle of the black sky. But that night, driving to Fargo, they were like green curtains undulating.”
Meg repeated the word. “Undulating, undulating.” Each time she spoke it, she did a small belly dance to illustrate what the word meant. Rich was choking back laughter. What a kid she was.
