Bone Harvest - Mary Logue [32]
His wife had not come with him to the park. She did not like crowds, she did not like noise, and she hated fireworks. That was fine with him. He had not encouraged her. Always a homebody, she let him wander around at will. She asked very little of him, but liked him to be home for supper. Her perception of him was that he was a busy man, going about his business. That suited her fine. She liked to be a housewife—cooking and cleaning—and she watched her soap operas for company.
He had the flask with him, tucked into his bib overalls. He patted it from time to time, just to make sure it was there. As he continued his walk down to the park, he said howdy to many people: friends and neighbors, folks he had known all his life. He meant them no harm. When the truth came out and washed all the sins away, he hoped they would understand that he had to do this. He had a job to do, which meant he had to be watchful. There would be an opportunity and he would take it.
As he got down close to the lake, he could see the crowds of people setting up chairs on the beach. The smell of the lake came to him, not unpleasant—sweat and seaweed. He swatted his arm as a mosquito found him. He had said hello to twenty people. He liked numbers that were divisible by ten. It was a good sign.
The fireworks would go off straight across the lake from Lake City and everyone in Fort St. Antoine would have front-row seats. Families laid out blankets; kids ran to the edge of the water, lit off firecrackers, and threw them up in the air. Small bursts of noise, screams of delight and terror rose from the crowd.
He had always figured that fireworks were just another way for the country to get its people ready for war. If the boys came to have pleasant associations with loud bangs, then maybe when they marched off to war, it wouldn’t frighten them so much. Another lie the country perpetrated on its people.
He knew how evil war was. It had destroyed his father. He had never been able to stand any loud noises and so had imbibed far too much to calm his nerves the rest of his life. His mother had always been shushing him, telling him to be still, whispering to him, “Do not startle your father or we both will pay.” He had learned to move quietly.
The sun was close to setting. Another fifteen minutes and it would fall into the lake at the northwestern tip. Just on the other side of the summer solstice, the length of daylight shortened by about three minutes a day. This time of the year the sun set way to the north. Seagulls soared over the lake, white dashes in the darkening sky.
He walked to the water’s edge and stared down at the shoreline. Zebra mussels encrusted rocks and shells, black snarls of crustaceans. They were taking over, slowly clogging up the waterways, destroying the clam beds that had once thrived in the river. They were a small evil that was impossible to fight. He patted the vial in his pocket. You needed to fight the ones you could.
Then he turned back and started to walk toward the concession stands. He counted his steps. They mattered. It all mattered. How you did everything. The smallest change or deviation could change the course of everything. He knew. He had seen it happen. Look at the Schuler murders. He had to get the truth to come out so everyone would know what had happened that day when the sun set a few minutes sooner than it would this day.
Harold strolled up from where his wife, Agnes, was sitting on the beach in one of the folding chairs they had brought with them. Agnes didn’t want to walk around. She said the sand got in her shoes. She’d stay put. The people would come to her. He needed to get up and move through the crowd and see who was there. It was part of his job and it was all of his life.
The letter in the paper had not stirred up as much talk as he thought it might. Possibly because it was the Fourth of July, everyone was too focused on family and eating to give a prank letter in the paper much thought. Harold had thought of little else.
Even last night in bed, he had wrestled with it. He hoped it meant