Bone Harvest - Mary Logue [61]
Quickly he unlocked the door and picked it up. He set his briefcase down on the counter and put the letter down next to it. Deputy Watkins had left him some plastic gloves. He found them under the counter and put them on. Holding it carefully, he cut through the top of the letter. The same handwriting. A longer note, it read:
The day is almost here. The day of reckoning. When the truth will come out or the people will pay for it with their lives. Just as the lives of the Schuler family have been poisoned, so will the water be poisoned. Let the truth be known or the innocent will pay.
I mean it.
Wrath of God
Harold read it through a couple times and thought of the water that ran through their lives. Poisoning the water would be horrible. It could ruin everything in the county. How did this guy think that he could get at the water supply in an area where most people had their own wells? The water-holding tank in town? He needed to call the sheriff and let him know about the letter.
They didn’t find anything. Claire hadn’t thought they would. There were trails going from the fields off into the woods, but they were deer trails. All someone had to do to camouflage their steps would be to follow those paths.
At midnight the sheriff called the search off. He said he would send some more officers over tomorrow to look more carefully in daylight. Scott Lund volunteered to stay the night at the Danielses’ in case the man showed up again.
Claire drove down the hill to Fort St. Antoine a little more slowly.
When she got in the door, she decided to make one more call. One more try to reach Earl Lowman. It was only a little after ten down in Tucson; maybe he’d come home from wherever he’d been all day long. The phone rang five times and she knew what would happen next.
The answering machine picked up. Earl Lowman’s gravelly voice said slowly, “Don’t seem to be here at the moment. I’d like to know you called. Please leave me your name and number. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
Claire wondered if it would be soon enough. “Mr. Lowman, this is Claire Watkins again. I very much need to talk to you. It’s an emergency. Please call me no matter when you get this message.” She left her home number and the number at the sheriff’s office, adding, “You might still remember this number. I don’t think it’s changed since you left. Thanks.”
That was all she could do. She hung up.
She wished Rich were waiting for her upstairs, but she couldn’t even think of calling him. Their dinner hadn’t gone too well. She needed to think about what she had to tell him, but she couldn’t do it now. Hard to have a life when you were trying to work a crime of this breadth.
She just hated feeling so jangled. She knew she’d have trouble getting to sleep. She thought of having a nice big glass of wine, but in the long run it wouldn’t help that much either.
Instead she went down to the basement and folded a load of wash and brought it upstairs to her room and Meg’s room. She set the piles of clothes on Meg’s bed. Meg liked to put her clothes away herself. She had a special system. She had tried to explain it to her mother once, but Claire was glad to let her take care of her own things. Meg was growing up.
Claire sat on the edge of her daughter’s bed and thought about what had happened with Jilly. The pesticide guy could have done something awful. He could have taken the little girl, but he hadn’t. If Jilly hadn’t been sitting outside, Claire was guessing that he might have just left the tobacco tin with its bones on the Danielses’ doorstep, where they might not have discovered it until morning. Still a creepy thing to do, but not so threatening. What did he want, and what was he willing to do to get it?
July 7, 1952
Schubert sneaked out to the hallway to see what was going on, but there was no one there. Loud shots had exploded in his sisters’ room. Firecrackers?