Bone Harvest - Mary Logue [38]
“Have you called Sheriff Talbert?” Stewy asked.
“No. Could you do that? I need to organize people here. We’ve got a couple of patrol cars.”
“I’ll call the sheriff and the lab.”
“Thanks.”
“Claire, what’ve we got going on here?”
“Possibly some kind of vendetta.”
Stewy heard her hang up. He had to call Dan Talbert. But he needed to breathe for a second. He would drive down to the park as soon as he got off the phone with the sheriff. He’d brush his teeth and gargle with Listerine so the evidence of his beer would be washed away. But first he turned to the dictionary that perched on top of the bookshelf in the living room. It was always left opened to the last word he looked up.
He looked up vendetta. The first definition read, “a feud in which the relatives of a murdered or wronged person seek vengeance on the wrongdoer or members of his family.” The Schuler family were the murdered people.
Stewy called the sheriff, trying to sound alert. “You know what a vendetta is?” he asked.
“Yes,” Talbert answered. “Why?”
Stewy pressed on. “And do you know if there’s anyone left in the county who is related to the Schuler family?”
“Stewy, where you going with this? Why?”
Then Stewy told him why.
CHAPTER 12
Earl was hammering the last nail into a stool he was fixing for Stella, his next-door neighbor, when he thought he heard something. It took him a few moments to figure out that the phone was ringing. He dropped the hammer. A call this late scared him to his bones.
When he picked up the phone and heard Marie’s voice, his hand flew up to his heart. In Tucson it was eleven at night, so he knew it was one a.m. in Wisconsin. He knew the only reason she would contact him at this hour would be about something bad.
“Why are you calling me?” he asked, his voice shaking.
“Earl, I’m at the hospital.”
“What happened?” he yelled. “Tell me.”
“They think Andy was poisoned. Maybe pesticides.”
“What did he do? Was he mishandling them? What was he doing using pesticides this time of year?”
Marie raised her voice, saying firmly, “Earl, calm down and listen to me. It wasn’t like that. Someone put it in some lemonade he drank.”
He didn’t comprehend what she was saying, but that wasn’t important right now. “Is he going to be all right?”
Her voice deepened. “The doctors aren’t sure. They’re using charcoal to get it out of his system. One doctor talked to me a few minutes ago. He said that they should know in a few more hours if he’s going to make it.” Suddenly her voice broke and she wailed, “Earl, I can’t lose him. I won’t be able to stand it.”
He wasn’t going to argue with her. She was one strong woman, but no one could stand to lose a loved one. He still missed his wife every day.
“Marie,” he said soothingly, “start at the beginning.”
So she explained that she and Andy had gone to see the fireworks and that Andy had bought some lemonade. “They think there was something in it.”
Then she explained what the sheriff had told her, that a crazy person had stolen some pesticides and was going around the county using them for destructive purposes.
“Seems to be tied in with the Schuler murders,” she said in conclusion. “That’s what they think.”
The irony. It didn’t matter how far away he went, that damn murder case was going to haunt him all his life.
“Was anyone else hurt?” he thought to ask.
“Yes, four other victims. One of them was a little girl. But she’s all right. She spit it right out. The mother doesn’t think she swallowed much. They sent her home an hour ago. The other three are in worse shape, but all of them seem to be recovering. They figure Andy drank half his glass in one gulp. Man, I’ve always told him he has a big mouth.” She started laughing and then she was crying again.
Earl knew what he was going to do. He wasn’t going to tell Marie, because he didn’t want her to dissuade him. “He’s a strong man, Marie. He’s not going to let this stop him. You can count on him to come back