by Mary Logue
“We have one more thing to talk about.”
“We do?”
Rich took the box out of his pocket. “The ring. Even though we’re not getting engaged to be married, I’d like to give it to you.” He walked over to Claire and knelt next to her. “Would you like to wear my ring?”
“I would love to.” She held out her hand and he slipped the small diamond on it.
They kissed and for a moment Rich was sure he smelled the sweet scent of roses in the air.
July 7, 1952
She made him get down on his knees on the floor of her bedroom and promise to never tell anyone else what he had told her. “They’ll get us, Pauly, if you tell. They’ll come and kill us, too.”
“What about Dad?”
“Never tell your father anything. He would be so angry, who knows what he would do.”
She cried and held him in her arms and rocked him and called him her baby. “You’re all I’ve got, Pauly. You’re the only person I’ve ever loved.”
When she finally let him go, they ate dinner and he went upstairs to bed. But he couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened, about the dead children laid out on the floors of their house. He had to do something. He had to try to save them.
After he heard his mother go to bed, he sneaked down the stairs and went outside. It was a warm summer night with a big full moon. Fireflies twinkled in the long grass and over the fields.
He walked around the barn and found his special hiding place. The red tobacco tin was right where he had left it. He knew what he had to do.
He went to the edge of the field and he made six holes. Then he opened the lid of the container and put a finger in each hole and covered them over gently with dirt. Maybe bones grew people like seeds grew corn. All he could do was hope that they would grow into the people they had once been.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have owned a house in Pepin County for going on fourteen years, and I must acknowledge and thank all my neighbors and friends who have made my time there so satisfying. Also, thanks to Pepin County Sheriff’s Department for their excellent job of safeguarding the citizenry.
Two writing groups must be mentioned for all the good advice they’ve given me. In Arizona: Elizabeth Gunn, Sheila Cottrell, Earl McGill, J. M. Hayes, and Margaret Falk. In Minnesota: thanks to Becky Bohan, Joan Petroff, Tom Rucker, Margaret Shryer, Jean Ward, and Deborah Woodworth.
Then there’re my usual supporters: Ray DiPrima, Robin LaFortune, Dodie Logue, Mary Anne Svoboda, and the great man by my side, Pete Hautman.
NOTE: The two pesticides I mentioned throughout this book are not real, but are based on research I did on existing products.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARY LOGUE, an award-winning poet, lives with writer Pete Hautman in the Wisconsin bluffs country that is the setting for her Claire Watkins series.
Bone Harvest is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2004 by Mary Logue
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Ballantine and colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is
available from the publisher upon request.
eISBN: 978-0-345-47842-9
v3.0
