Bone Harvest - Mary Logue [43]
He had seen her at a dance. He had been only fifteen, but he thought of asking her to dance. He mentioned it to one of his friends, Danny Swenson, who had laughed at him and slapped him on the shoulders, saying, “don’t dance with her. don’t you know she’s a kraut?”
Harold had thought to tell his friend that he, too, had German blood in him, but decided not to bother. He didn’t really know how to dance well enough to have the courage to ask her. Watching her spin around the floor in the arms of one older man and then another had been good enough for him.
Two men had vied for her attention: Carl Wahlund and Otto Schuler. Wahlund had gone off to the service a few months later, and Bertha had married Otto Schuler that same year. Harold had finally danced with her for a short moment at her wedding.
Years went by. He had hardly thought of her again until the murders.
He had gone off to Madison to the university and had met his lovely Agnes there. He had brought her back home and started working at the paper.
Two years later, the Schuler family had been murdered and he had written about it in the Durand Daily. He picked up an old issue, dated July 8, 1952.
The headline read: FARM FAMILY MASSACRED, NO SUSPECT
Last night the Otto Schuler family, five children and their two parents, were found shot to death on their farm outside of Fort St. Antoine. A young deputy sheriff discovered the bodies at about seven p.m. when he returned a saw he had borrowed. No one was at the scene when he arrived. The house had not been ransacked and the table was still set for dinner. It is assumed the killings took place in the late afternoon.
Sheriff Runsfeld said he had never seen anything like it. “It’s been five years since Leroy Kent was shot to death in a bar in Durand. That was the last murder we had in Pepin County. Now we have seven deaths on our hands.”
Harold stopped reading and took off his glasses. Made him tired to read about it. At the time he had been excited to the marrow of his bones. Driving out to the crime scene, he couldn’t wait to get there. The sheriff’s men had blocked everyone from going into the house, but he had seen the feet of the oldest son sticking out from under a blanket in the barn.
At the time he had thought this story would be his ticket out of rural Wisconsin. His writing was being picked up by newspapers all over the country. There was something about a farm killing, the isolation of it, the supposed idyllic nature of farm living, that got urban readers going.
When it had changed, when the story had hit him full in the chest, was when he had gone to the funeral. The size of the coffin for Arlette, the littlest girl, the baby of her family, had thrown him. Too small. No one should die that young.
Then all the coffins lined up. A whole family wiped out. What they might have done in the world gone. Agnes had not been able to stop crying through the whole service. They had gone home and gone to bed and he had held her gently all the night long. In the morning she told him that she was glad they couldn’t have children.
“I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to them,” she said. “We’re fine the way we are.”
And they had been fine. Surprisingly, they never left Durand. A couple of offers had come in, but Harold hadn’t accepted them for varying reasons. They had settled back into their lives. The Schuler family had stayed dead, and no one else had been murdered for years.
After Harold bought the paper, he gave up on his idea of ever leaving the area. He gave up on some of his lofty ideas about what a real newspaper should do for a community. He had come to see, unlike his college professors who had never written for a