by Mary Logue
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 u
p 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?”
Lindstrom got up and appeared to be agitated. “I couldn’t do that. I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
There was something odd going on. Sometimes Paul Lindstrom acted like an old taciturn farmer and then sometimes he seemed more like a young boy. “Who told you that?”
“My mother. She made me promise.”
“I think it would be okay. Everyone knows what happened now. You wouldn’t be telling on anyone.” Claire could see he was close to going along with her. She decided it was time to play mom with him. “Paul, I think you need to have someone look at your hand. Does it hurt?”
He looked at her and she could see tiredness and pain in his eyes. He nodded his head.
“Do you think you could help me up?” Claire put her hands down on the ground and tried to stand. Her ankle felt like it wouldn’t hold her. She started to fall.
Lindstrom ran toward her, holding out the gun.
Then she heard a noise above her. When she looked up she saw Tyrone looking down at them. In an instant she knew what he was seeing: Lindstrom with a gun in his hands coming toward her.
She yelled to Tyrone to stop but at the same time the sound came out of her mouth, Tyrone shot his gun and the blast in the well pit was like a sonic boom. She felt it in her body as well as heard it ring in her ears.
Paul Lindstrom fell down on his knees. The gun flew out of his hands. Claire stepped in front of him so they couldn’t shoot again. She bent over him and saw blood spurting out of his neck—and then he toppled to the dark soil.
CHAPTER 28
“I won’t quit my job.” Rich put his Red Wing boots up on the railing of the porch overlooking what he liked to think of as his spread, his family’s estate. “Good,” he said finally, as he knew Claire was waiting for him to say something.
“Do you want me to?”
“Sometimes.”
“I don’t ask you to give up pheasant farming.”
“No, you’ve never asked me to give up m
y birds.”
“I know you don’t like that I’m a deputy sheriff.”
“That’s not completely true. Sometimes I like it a lot. I don’t like worrying about you.”
Claire moved her cast-covered leg so that she could sit more comfortably in the wooden chair. “Would you get me a napkin?” she asked. “I appear to have dripped on my shirt.”
They were eating chips and hot sauce. Claire had managed to get up the stairs with her crutches, but then sat in the chair she was in and didn’t want to move again. She said her armpits were already sore from the crutches. The doctors had told her she’d be wearing the cast for a good month or so.
Rich brought her the napkin, then stood over her. “Have you told Meg about your broken leg yet?”
“Not really. She’ll see it soon enough. I didn’t want to ruin her vacation.”
“So how is Paul Lindstrom doing?”
“He’s going to be fine. He nearly bled out from that gunshot wound, but he’s a tough guy. His wife went over to see him the other day. She seems to have forgiven him.”
“What will they do to him?”
“Well, I would be surprised if a jury wouldn’t see how mentally ill he is. I would think he’ll be spending time in the psych ward.”
“What about Lowman?”
“The county attorney is going over everything. I think he’s looking at minimal time. I don’t even think they’re going to be charging him with much, maybe negligent homicide. He might serve a year or two.”
They both sat quietly for a moment; then Claire said, slapping her cast, “You won’t have to worry about me for the next month or so. They’ve got me tied to my desk. Oh, did I tell you I got a call from Ray Sorenson today?” She had told Rich about what he and his girlfriend had done in the storage area of the Farmer’s Cooperative.
He nodded for her to continue.
“Looks like they’re going to be having a retirement party for Chuck Folger, the agronomist. Ray sounded awfully glad he wouldn’t be working with the man anymore.”
