Bone Harvest - Mary Logue [30]
“Do you want to get up?”
What a question. “No.”
She was quiet. Then she said, “I’ll make you some breakfast.”
He knew that she was lonesome. He was the last kid at home, and his dad was gone a lot, working at the co-op. She loved to cook and look after everyone and now they were all gone. Except him.
He crawled out of bed, opened his bedroom door, and yelled down to her, “I’m coming.”
“Do you want pancakes or French toast?”
“Either.”
She was quiet again. That wasn’t the right answer. She really did want to know what he wanted.
“Pancakes sound good.”
He threw on an old Farm Feed T-shirt, a band that he had seen in Milwaukee, and pulled on the jeans he had worn last night. After stopping in the bathroom to pee and rinse his mouth out, he went downstairs, taking the steps two at a time.
“Raymond,” his mother admonished him, but with no sternness in her voice.
He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat at the counter, where she had already set out a plate for him.
“What time did you come in last night? I didn’t hear you.”
“Not that late.”
“I was up till twelve.”
“Maybe about one.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Mom, it’s a holiday. I’m going to be a senior. We were just goofing around.”
“Were you with that Tiffany?”
“No.” He didn’t have to lie about that. She had gone up to Chicago with her folks for the holiday. That was why he had been in such a needy condition this morning. Missing her.
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