Bone Harvest - Mary Logue [39]
Marie had gone silent on the other end of the line. She sniffed and blew her nose. “Thank you for saying that, Earl. I needed to hear it. You’re right. If anyone can make it through this, he can.”
“Are you going to stay there all night?”
“Where else could I be? I can’t leave him. What if he wakes up? I need to be with him.”
“Of course. Listen, give me the number there and let me call you in the morning. It can be on my nickel.”
Marie did as he asked.
“Thank you for calling me, Marie. It means a lot.” His voice was trembling and he needed to get off the phone. He needed to move.
“You’re welcome.”
They both hung up. Earl sat for a moment, fighting back the urge to kick or punch the wall, knowing it would do no good. He would just end up with a broken hand or a bruised leg—might even put a dent in the wall.
He walked over to his coffeemaker. The timer was set for six in the morning. He turned off the timer and turned on the machine. It made a small gurgling that he found reassuring. He would need to tank himself up on caffeine if he wanted to get to Wichita by tomorrow night. Then it would be another day’s drive to get to Pepin County.
If he could stand to fly, he would do it, but he hadn’t been able to get on a plane since he was twenty—when the first and only plane he had ever boarded had felt like it was going to fall out of the sky.
He hoped he would still have a son to talk to when he got to the hospital in Wisconsin.
The frogs in the slough alongside the lake were so loud that they sounded like they were screaming themselves hoarse. Claire was sure that their calls were something about love, but she didn’t want to think about their yearning.
Sitting by herself at a picnic table in the park, she watched the last patrol car pull out onto Highway 35. Claire knew she should stand up and go home and try to sleep for a few hours, but she wanted to sit for a moment. She needed this time of stillness to gather herself together. Over the last few hours, she felt she had flown into fragments.
A small prayer had pulsed through her as she worked with everyone on this crime scene: Please let no one die. A few minutes ago she had called the hospital to learn that they had released the little girl; that news had lifted her spirits. However, Andy Lowman’s condition had been given as critical. The nurse told her that the other three were stable.
The lemonade stand, with police tape wrapped around it, had been shunted off to the side of the road that led down to the lake. The lab hadn’t wanted the stand to be moved, even though they took half of the poor woman’s equipment with them.
The ambulances had left first. The interviews had gone on until after midnight. The sheriff had gotten right in with the rest of them, asking questions, writing down names. They had needed all the hands they could get.
Out of the full sheriff’s department of twenty deputies, ten had been in the park, transcribing the testimony of eyewitnesses. At first questioning, no one had seen anything suspicious.
There must have been over two hundred people in the park when the poisonings occurred. How many of them were men? How many of them had a farming background? They could start narrowing all this down in the morning.
However, she couldn’t be sure that the pesticide had been put in the lemonade while it was in the park. It could have happened at the woman’s workplace. More to check on.
Claire desperately hoped this incident didn’t escalate into a murder investigation. When she had seen the five victims off into ambulances, four of them had looked pretty good. But not Andy Lowman. Apparently he was the one to worry about.
This whole scene reminded her too much of the street dance she and Rich had gone to last summer—a festive gathering of people that was blown apart by violence when a man had been stabbed to death. This wasn’t supposed to happen out in the country.
She slumped over the picnic table. It was after two o’clock. She had to go home. She hoped Rich was sleeping. She didn’t want to rehash everything with him. Not that he