by Mary Logue
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.
Claire stood up, not liking the way he was towering over her. “I’m all for that.”
CHAPTER 14
A plat map of the county covered Claire’s desk. The date was 1950, two years before the Schuler murders occurred. The drawings were in black and white with dotted lines for the roads, doubled lines for the sections, and single lines for the property divisions. The names of the owners of each property were written in a clear, slanting print. Names like the Vogl brothers, John Green et al., and Paul & Martha Moody explained relationships.
Claire let her eye follow the road up the bluff from Fort St. Antoine. Turning a page, she continued her descent and curved around the road as it meandered between streams and farmland.
There it was—the Schuler place. An L-shaped, sixty-acre piece of property right next to the Carl Wahlund farm. That name sounded familiar to her. She’d have to see if he was still alive.
“What you poring over there, Claire?” Scott Lund, another deputy, leaned over the desk next to her and stared down at the map.
“Do
you know this area, Scott?”
“Sure.”
“Is Carl Wahlund still alive?”
“Alive and kicking. Last I heard he was still farming.” Scott reached down and traced the edge of the Wahlund property and then followed it around to encompass what had been the Schuler property. “He’s farming all that piece of land.”
“He now owns the Schuler property? How’d that happen?”
“Well, he inherited it. He married Bertha Schuler’s sister. When the whole family was killed, they were the closest of kin. I guess you could say that his wife inherited it. She died about ten years ago. Nice woman. But Carl ruled the roost.”
“But I thought that was the Daniels farm?”
“Naw, they just rent from Carl. I think they rent the farmhouse and about five acres right around the homestead. He farms the rest of it.”
“Who’s back here?” Claire pointed to the farm behind the Schulers’.
“That’s the Lindstrom place. Theo Lindstrom is dead now. So’s his wife. But their son, Paul, is working the farm. He’s a nice, quiet guy. Married. You see him around once in a while.”
“How old is he?”
Scott thought for a moment. “Jeez, I’d guess about fifteen, twenty years older than me. Don’t really know.”
“So in his late fifties, which would have made him pretty young when this all happened. But he’s probably worth talking to.”
Scott stared at the map and then pointed his finger at a swampy area marked by slash lines on the property to the west of the Schulers’. “You ever been up here?”
“I don’t think so. What is it?”
“It’s that trout farm. You can go up there and fish. They’ll fillet your fish and send you home with them ready to fry up. I took my nephew up there once. He thought it was great.”
“I bet Meg would like it,” Claire said, and felt her heart lurch slightly at the thought of her absent daughter. How she missed her when she was gone, like an amputated limb that continued to tingle.
“Let me know if I can be of more assistance,” Scott said before he walked away.
Claire continued to study the map. This is where it all happened, she thought. This piece of land at the top of the bluff. It was pretty up there. She had always admired it when she had gone up to get eggs from the Danielses. She’d have to ask them if she could come up and walk around, get more of a feel for the place.
She wondered what it was like for them to be living in a farmhouse where such vicious murders had taken place. She’d have to ask Celia Daniels if she had ever heard any gossip on what had really happened that day. One of the old-timers might have let something slip when they came over to buy eggs. It was worth a shot.
Just as she was about to close the map, she noticed a marking at the top of the Schuler land, right next to the Lindstroms’. A circle with a line bisecting it. What did that mean? She turned to the legend and read aloud, “ ‘Well or cistern or spring. ’“ This country was dotted with springs that dug coulees out of the sides of the bluffs on their way down to the lake. Water was plentiful.
Arlene wiped at the kitchen counters and wondered what she should make for lunch. It was still the big meal of the day for her men. She could count on her dad coming to eat today. She had seen him out in the field, baling the hay he had cut a couple of days ago. It was a good day for haying—hot and dry. If the weather went right, he’d get another harvest out of the fields. It could be a good year.
He had been out there bright and early, considering that she had seen his pickup truck drive past their house at eleven o’clock last night. How unlike her father. He usually tried to watch the news if he managed to stay up that late, then went right to bed. Maybe he had gone to see the fireworks.
She didn’t think her husband would be back in time for lunch. He had told her he was off to Eau Claire to get a piece of something to fix the mower. She hadn’t really listened. She’d put something aside for him to eat when he got in.
Arlene went to the fridge and took out a pound of hamburger. She could always do something with hamburger. Once in a while Dad liked meatballs. That was one dish her mother had made that was German—meatballs in a sour-cream gravy. She checked and she had a little sour cream left in the container, enough to stir in and make it work. Seemed kind of hot to make the dish, but Dad always wanted something that would stick to his ribs.
One day, a few weeks back, she had tried to make him a salad. She had seen Martha Stewart prepare it on her television show and it had looked so good. Arlene couldn’t pronounce the name of it. Salad Neeswaws—something like that. Potatoes and green beans and tomatoes. She had all that coming out of the garden, so she thought she’d try it.
Her father had looked at it and said, “Nice salad, but where’s the dinner?”
She wouldn’t fix it again.
Funny how she had gotten stuck with her father. When she was a kid, Arlene had sworn she’d leave Pepin County and never come back. Then, in tenth grade, she had started going with Larry. They had married right out of high school.
Larry didn’t want to leave the area. There was no getting around that. He wanted to live on the family farm and work for the railroad. So they moved down the road from her parents and then her mother died.
She missed that woman like a comforter on a cold night. She actually didn’t think her father was going to last without her. What was odd was that they never had seemed to get along that well while her mother was still alive. She did everything he told her to do. But there didn’t seem to be much love.
Arlene had heard through the grapevine that her father had been in love with her mother’s sister. She had never asked him about the gossip. It was so long ago, it didn’t seem to matter anymore.
Arlene felt like she was getting to the age where she had started to redefine love. Lust had gotten her and Larry in trouble. She had been sure she was going to get pregnant before they got married. But love was gentler than lust. It lasted longer. It didn’t tend to hurt as much. It was about living together and doing the chores and fighting a little and mending a lot.
From the bread drawer she took out a box of Ritz crackers, left them in the inner wrapper, and smashed them with her rolling pin. When they were all crumbs, she opened up the wrapper and poured them in a bowl with the hamburger. Then she chopped up a little raw onion, dumped in some Worcestershire sauce, and stirred in an egg. She never had to measure anything. She had done it too many times. Plus, a recipe like this wasn’t exact. It was about what you had in the cupboards.
With a big spoon, she scooped up a handful of the meat mixture and rolled out the meatballs.
She lifted out the big cast-iron frying pan and got it heating up. She cooked the meatballs slowly; they held together better if you did them that way.
Precisely at noon, her father showed up.
“Hey,” he shouted in at her from the back door.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Smells good.”
He washed up and came and sat at the table. She poured him a glass of water, which he drank down, and then she poured him a glass of milk. He drank milk with every meal.
“Where’s Larry?”
“Had to get a thingamajig in Eau Claire.”
“I don’t know if they have them there.”
A bark of a laugh came out of Arlene. Her father had made a joke. He must be in a good mood.
“Where were you last night?” she asked as she set his plate down in front of him.
He spilled his milk. “Why?”
How like him to answer a question with a question. Nothing was easy. “I just wondered. Saw you coming home.”
“What’re you, spying on me?” He started stirring his food. He always did that, and it bugged Arlene. Why couldn’t he simply lift the food off his plate with his fork and eat it? Why did he have to move it all around?
“Dad, I was washing the dishes and looking out the window. Don’t think that counts as spying.”
“Went for a driv
e.” He stabbed his fork into a meatball and ate it. He nodded his approval.
“Nice night for that.” She would leave it at that. No need to stir him up. She wished she had never asked.
Claire parked in the Danielses’ driveway and sat in the squad car, staring out at the buildings. She had studied photographs of the crime scene so carefully that she knew where all the bodies had been found on this farm. Most of them in the farmhouse, but the father and oldest son had been outside. The son’s body had been found right in among the cows, beside buckets of milk sitting out, gathering flies.
The trees around the homestead had grown up since 1951. The thicket of arbor vitae that Bertha had planted around the side of the house was as tall as the roofline, forming a courtyard. The maple, only as high as the clothesline in the photos, now towered over the house, creating a canopy of green leaves for the kids to play under.
Chickens were scratching away at the ground. One was sleeping in the hollow of the maple tree. She wondered what the Danielses had decided to do about them. According to Rich, they didn’t feel they could use them anymore as egg layers.
Why had she come up here? It didn’t make a lot of sense. There would be nothing here, after fifty years, that would help her understand what had happened. But she felt clear that she needed to look around.
As she opened the car door, the smallest Daniels came running out. What was her name—Julie, Jilly?
“Hi,” the girl said, stopping a few feet away and standing so her belly stuck out under her sunflower T-shirt.
“Hi, yourself. Your mom home?”
“Sure, she is.” The little girl waved her arms up and down. “I know you.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, you’re Meg’s mommy.”
“I am.”
The girl tilted her head and squinted at Claire. “So why are you dressed up like a policeman?”
“This is my job.”
“Oh. That’s a funny job.”
“Not always.”
