Bonegrinder

by John Lutz

  He decided to spend the next hour or so reviewing the file on each Bonegrinder death, hoping to strike the key that would clarify the thing that was hazy and undefined on the edge of his consciousness, and to forget his conversation with Kelly.

  Wintone was just pushing himself up out of his swivel chair with a downthrust of his powerful arms when the office door opened and old Bonifield came in. He stood for a while framed in the open doorway, chewing his tobacco with a stern-jawed intensity that matched the excitement in his blue eyes.

  “Shut that damned door!” Wintone told him, standing all the way erect.

  “Ain’t no need to get het up,” Bonifield said, closing the door with deliberate, slow care.

  “Ain’t no need to stoke this place up like a furnace, either,” Wintone said.

  Bonifield walked slowly, casually about the office, studying individual objects as if they were pricetagged. He had some bit of information so precious that he hated to let it go.

  But he would let it go; that was why he had come here. Wintone was patient. Nothing ever entered Bonifield’s mind that didn’t eventually find its way out through his mouth.

  “Thought you might oughta know they found Cheryl Peterson floatin’ in the lake,” Bonifield said.

  Wintone walked out from behind the desk.

  “Who found her?”

  “Couple’a fellas from Branson,” Bonifield said, shifting his egg-sized wad of tobacco to his left cheek. “Body’s down at the doc’s now.” He grinned at Wintone, walking to the door and opening it to spit tobacco into the street. He took his time about closing the door.

  The telephone rang and Wintone answered it, still looking at Bonifield.

  “Doc Amis here, Billy. The Peterson woman’s been found.”

  “I know,” Wintone said. “I’m on my way.”

  Bonifield held the door open for him.

  THIRTY

  WINTONE STOOD WITH DOC Amis over Cheryl Peterson’s body. The time in the lake water had taken its toll, and Wintone swallowed back the hollow revulsion that climbed his throat.

  “She died when the back of her head was crushed,” Doc Amis said, motioning with a forefinger toward the now bloodless injury amidst the tangle of drying hair. The forefinger moved with Doc Amis’s words. “She’s also got these deep slash-marks on her face, neck and shoulders. The rest of what you see is the result of her being so long in the lake.”

  Wintone turned away from the body, knowing he’d have no difficulty recalling details. “You sure it’s her?”

  Doc Amis nodded. “Reasonably so. What you see here would have fit her description.” He pulled a white sheet up over the pale form on the table. “You’ll have to get the husband to make a positive identification.”

  “I know,” Wintone said. “He heard yet she’s been found?”

  “Not to my knowledge. You better tell him before somebody else does.”

  Wintone walked from the small, cold room, Doc Amis behind him. The reception room was empty, Sarah’s desk bare.

  “Where’s Sarah?” Wintone asked the doctor.

  “She’s off today. Some personal business to tend to.” His arms straight, hands gripping the desk edge, Doc Amis sat on the end of Sarah’s desk. “She gave me her notice earlier this week.”

  Wintone felt the coolness again that he’d felt in the room with Cheryl Peterson. Something dead. “Didn’t know that.”

  Doc Amis nodded. “Going to Chicago with that Craig Holt. Can’t blame her for giving up on things here, this little town … She’s not going to be easy to replace.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “You driving out to pick up Peterson now?”

  “Sure.”

  “You okay, Billy?”

  “Heat,” Wintone said. “Just the damn heat.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt you to rest awhile,” Doc Amis said, standing up straight. “Nobody I know of ever got used to looking at what’s in the next room.”

  “You ain’t met the exception in me,” Wintone said. He pulled a red print handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face, saw Doc Amis staring at him with concern. “Just the heat,” he assured the doctor again. He folded the damp handkerchief and returned it to his pocket. “I’ll be back in a short while with Peterson.”

  “I’ll be waiting for you,” Doc Amis said, “but I won’t be looking forward to it.”

  “Seems like there ain’t no easy jobs,” Wintone said as he went out. He tried to ignore the sensation of loss that was gaining its grip on him.

  Peterson hadn’t struck Wintone as the sort who would break down and sob; he was more the type who either angered or kept his deepest emotions inside himself. But he had sobbed. Of course, who could predict how anyone, even oneself, would react to what Peterson was put through?

  After the identification Wintone drove the silent man back to his motel cabin and left him there with the final reality of his wife’s death, left him there to live with the persistent image of what he’d seen.

  On the drive back to Colver, something stalked again at the edge of Wintone’s mind. It was like a rustle of movement in the deep shadows of a barn, probably just a field mouse or barn owl, but maybe not.

  When the sheriff got back to his office, old Bonifield was lounging outside as if disinterested. Wintone walked past without acknowledging him and went inside.

  For over an hour Wintone sat at his desk, painstakingly reviewing the file on each Bonegrinder death. He was staring at the photographs of the site of the Larsen boy’s death, hunched forward in his chair, when he sat up straighter and rubbed his chin.

  There was one thing all the deaths had in common—at least, one thing they might have in common.

  Cautioning himself not to put too much stock in his theory, Wintone returned the photographs to their file folder. Chickens didn’t necessarily mean eggs.

  Wintone left the office and locked the door behind him, flipping a fifty-cent piece into the air as he stepped down into the street.

  “You, Bonifield, buy yourself a beer!”

  The old man caught the glinting coin with a look of amazement. Wintone got into the patrol car and drove out of town. He had to talk once more to Bill Peterson.

  Peterson seemed to have recovered from the initial shock of viewing his wife’s corpse. He’d known all along she was dead, after all, and perhaps now his grief was tempered by the relief of having found the body so that the episode of her death itself could be ended. He agreed readily to go with Wintone to the point on the bank where he had grounded the rental boat after the attack.

  He stood with Wintone on the bank, a man visibly weighted by circumstance. They were in the shade, and a slight breeze came off the lake and rippled the pearl gray, silky material of the pullover sport shirt Peterson was wearing. Wintone unfastened the top buttons on his uniform shirt, hoping the breeze would bring rain.

  “What I’d like, Mr. Peterson,” Wintone said, “is for you to try to point out the exact spot on the lake where the attack took place.”

  Peterson put his hands on his hips, squinting out at the lake’s sun-touched surface. His shoulders as well as his chest rose and fell regularly with his breathing.

  “Imagine a line from this point to the center of that rise on the opposite bank,” he said. “It happened on that line, about … three hundred yards this side of where that piece of land juts out.”

  “That far off the bank? Are you sure?”’

  “Positive. It’s not something I’d forget.” There was an unsteadiness to Peterson’s voice. His regular, squared features appeared haggard in the late afternoon light.

  “Can you remember exactly what you had with you in the boat?” Wintone asked.

  “What we had with us? … You mean, besides fishing gear?”

  “Including fishing gear. Anything might be important.”

  Peterson continued to stare out at the lake, as if projecting himself back in time and out onto the water, in the gently bobbing Jon boat again with his
wife.

  “There was my tackle box,” he said, “a cooler with some beer in it, our two fishing rods …”

  “What was in your tackle box?”

  Peterson shrugged. “Everything you’d expect to find in a tackle box. Fishing lures, line, lead sinkers, pliers, a knife with a fish scaler …”

  “Any bait?”

  “Only artificial lures. Cheryl wouldn’t use worms, so we left the worm can with Melanie on the bank.”

  “Any food in the boat?”

  “No, we’d just eaten breakfast when we started to fish.”

  “What was in your pockets?” Wintone asked him.

  “Oh, I can tell you that exactly,” Peterson said. “Not that I see how it can help. I had my key case, my wallet, some loose change and a pair of sunglasses.”

  “How about your wife’s pockets?“

  “Cheryl’s? … Well, nothing. Do women usually carry anything in their pockets?”

  Wintone had to concede that they didn’t.

  “She’d left her purse in the car,” Peterson explained.

  “Can you think of anything else that was in the boat?” Wintone asked. “Anything at all, small or large.”

  Peterson sucked in his lips, narrowed his eyes in thought. “There were the two oars, of course, in case the motor went out on us, a couple of life jackets we probably should have been wearing … that’s all. I’m positive.”

  Wintone’s face creased in a picture of disappointment, puzzlement. He thanked Peterson for his cooperation, then drove him back to the motel.

  The sheriff was still in low spirits when he returned to Colver. He felt like a man trying to piece together something in the dark without any assurance that it was possible.

  That night Wintone carried his beer to a booth in Mully’s, which wasn’t his usual fashion, and sat sliding the mug back and forth to make damp patterns on the tabletop. It was the Peterson death that puzzled him, everything about the Peterson death.

  Mully brought Wintone another beer, set it smoothly on the table and scooped up the empty bottle.

  “They say it rained some up north,” he said.

  Wintone nodded, looking ahead. “That don’t help us none here.”

  Seeing that the sheriff wasn’t conversational, Mully carried the empty bottle back behind the bar.

  Wintone settled farther into the booth, resting a shoulder against the wall.

  By the time his second beer was half drunk, he found himself thinking of Etty, thinking of Kelly Greer and of Sarah. They were all together in his mind, their faces, voices and bodies merging into meaningless words and gestures. He took another pull of beer and considered Sarah and Holt together, wondered if Holt had promised marriage. Doc Amis hadn’t mentioned marriage in Sarah’s plans, so probably neither had Sarah when she gave notice. Sarah and Holt … together in Chicago…. Wintone told himself it didn’t matter; it was no business of his. Not now. A sadness almost akin to desperation engulfed him. He had another beer for a nightcap and stood up from the booth to leave.

  When he was halfway to the door, old Bonifield entered. He grinned his tobacco-misshapen grin when he saw Wintone.

  “I did mean to thank you fer the price of a drink,” the old man said, “ ’cept you run off the way you did.”

  The beer wasn’t setting right on Wintone’s stomach, and the appropriate blast of hot air that had followed old Bonifield in sent a lightness and dizziness through him. He held onto the bar for a moment, then waved a good night to Mully, told Bonifield he was welcome and walked on to the door.

  “I will say the sheriff seems a mite jug-bit,” old Bonifield said behind him in a mock whisper. “I will say, maybe we’re seein’ a trueness now that ain’t exactly a revelation.”

  When he reached the office, Wintone stepped in out of the heat, breathed deeply of the cool air and felt his stomach settle to the point where he knew he’d soon feel better.

  He sat on the cot in the back room, removed his boots, then stretched out on his back, closing his eyes to invite sleep. But his mind was a silent tumbling of unpleasantness. The cot groaned as Wintone rolled onto his side. He lay there recalling word for word his conversation with Bill Peterson.

  An hour passed without sleep. Somewhere in the dark and quiet room a mosquito droned in a lilting, monotonous rhythm. The rhythm seemed to feed on itself, to grow until the whole room pulsated. A cricket began to trill nearby outside.

  Wintone sat up on the cot, raked thick fingers through his hair. He turned his wrist to look at the luminous hands of his watch, green cat’s eyes in the darkness. Then, despite the lateness of the hour, he went into the office and sat before the telephone.

  He called an old friend of his who lived in Springfield and owned a sporting goods store. After a brief conversation Wintone went back to bed and slept soundly.

  THIRTY-ONE

  WHEN WINTONE RETURNED FROM Springfield late the next afternoon, he saw Sarah from the patrol car, walking in the direction he was driving. As she heard the car approach her, she turned, and something in her face made Wintone press his foot to the brake, stopping a hundred feet in front of her.

  He sat, his heart beating time with the idling engine, and she opened the right-hand door and got in beside him. There was a scent of jasmine about her. Unfamiliar.

  “I was on my way to see you,” she said.

  “I figured.” He reached forward and twisted the ignition key. They sat in the silent aftermath of the turned-off engine. The heat began to move in.

  “Doc says he told you I was leavin’,” Sarah said.

  “Mentioned it.” Wintone toyed with the key ring dangling from the steering column.

  “I’m going to Chicago, with Craig Holt.”

  Wintone nodded thoughtfully. “Can’t blame you. Not much here for you, Sarah.”

  She rubbed a taut hand across the top of her thigh, as if she’d just burned her palm. “I have to go, Billy. I feel that.”

  He breathed out hard. “About the fight I had with Holt …”

  “It’s nothin’ like that makin’ up my mind, Billy.” Her voice was tighter now, forcing its way from her. But it was a sure voice.

  Wintone flicked at the dangling keys.

  “It’s the waitin’, is what it is. I can’t wait forever, not even knowin’ for what. Sometimes I hear time goin’ by me, Billy, roarin’ in my ears. I’m on the downhill, an’ I need a handhold.” She turned her head to look squarely at him. “You don’t understand that, do you?”

  “I do an’ I don’t.”

  She laughed a sad laugh that forced its way from her throat like her words. “That’s the way I feel.”

  “I knew you was pulled two ways.” Wintone rested both hands on the steering wheel that seemed now to be coated with a light, oily film. “He gonna marry you, Sarah?”

  “I don’t know, Billy. Don’t care.”

  “Time to take your chances then, is it?”

  “Past time.”

  “You need luck then, Sarah, and I wish it for you.”

  She thanked him. But it wasn’t as if the air had been cleared between them, or ever would be. Her right hand, long-fingered and pale, somehow restful, went to the chrome door handle, pulled it but didn’t open the door.

  “What are you gonna do, Billy?”

  “If I’m not sheriff any longer?”

  “Or if you are.”

  He shrugged. “What I been doin’, I guess. What comes my way.”

  She tried a smile. It caught and held, but barely. “Like as not, things’ll work out for you, for both of us.”

  “Like as not.”

  She opened the car door now. She was leaving. Wintone didn’t know whether to kiss her or shake her hand, decided shaking her hand would be absurd and kissed her lips lightly, a cool, parting kiss.

  Sarah got out of the car, closed the door softly behind her and walked away not looking back. Wintone caught sight of her for a second in the rear-view mirror, then looked quickly away, as if he’
d caught himself spying on her.

  He wouldn’t think about Sarah. Not for a while. He made up his mind to that. There was no reason he should think about her.

  Quickly he started the engine.

  Instead of parking in front of the office, Wintone drove to the rear of the building and parked the car by the wooden storage shed, its rear bumper near the padlocked double doors.

  Standing next to the car, he breathed in and arched his back, stretched his legs. He was stiff from his time behind the steering wheel, road-weary, but he still had a lot to get done. He walked to the storage shed and unlocked the steel padlock, swung out the squeaking double doors. A large wasp droned angrily out of the heated dimness, circled a few times, then disappeared behind the shed.

  Wintone’s Jon boat was inside the shed on its boat trailer. There were several cardboard cartons stored in the boat, and after removing them and stacking them in a corner, Wintone wheeled boat and trailer outside into the sunlight. He checked the five-horsepower outboard motor, then went into the shed and got a dented red gasoline can and set it in the boat.

  After hitching the boat trailer to the bumper hitch on the patrol car, Wintone closed and relocked the storage shed. Then he drove toward the lake.

  The afternoon was clear and hot, with a humidity that could almost be seen. Leaves on the trees along the road seemed to droop from their branches as if burdened by the weight of the atmosphere. Insects flitted about clumsily above the road’s dusty surface, seemingly hindered by the thick air, striking the patrol car’s windshield with regularity. The boat trailer swayed slightly behind the car and bounced more than was good for it. The rest of the way to the lake Wintone kept an eye on the flat wooden bow of the boat in the rear-view mirror.

  Before putting the boat in the water, Wintone opened the patrol car’s trunk and got out the scuba-diving equipment he’d brought back from Springfield. He checked the equipment and loaded it into the boat.

  Then it occurred to him that he’d need an anchor. There was plenty of rope in the car, and he searched around and came up with a good-sized heavy rock that could be held firmly by a knot.