Bone Harvest - Mary Logue [73]
“This little joint I’m thinking of specializes in beer,” she paused, then added, “and hamburgers.”
Tyrone paged through Charles Folger’s scrapbook as Claire drove down from the bluff and into Fort St. Antoine. Nothing struck him as out of the ordinary. Even though the press clippings usually had the date on them, someone had written the date and the paper’s name below. Thorough, anal, but not that unusual. Then he found some loose photographs stuck into the back of the book.
“You see anything in there?” she asked.
“All the usual clippings, but he’s got a couple of photographs from the scene of the crime. I wonder how he got those?”
“Everyone knows everyone. It probably wasn’t too hard for him to find out who photographed the crime scene. I’m assuming they are the same photos that we have in our files?”
“They look like it.” He set the scrapbook down. “I’ll leave this with you. You can check it over tonight and bring it in tomorrow.”
After driving down through dense woodlands and dropping out of the farmland that crowned the top of the bluff, they drove into a small town that was right on the lake. Claire took a sharp turn up a hill and pointed out a white clapboard house. “That’s where I live,” she said.
It looked like a small run-down farmhouse. He wasn’t good at commenting on housing stock. “So you have a lake view?”
“I only glimpse the lake through the trees in the summer, but in the winter I see it much better.” She smiled over at him. “Do you want to drive down to the lake?”
“Hungry,” he said. “Barely able to talk.”
She laughed. “I hope you’re not a vegetarian.”
“Nope. I eat meat with the best of them.”
When they walked into the bar, Tyrone felt the cool air wave across his body. His hand instinctively reached up and undid his top button. The smell of the place was fried food, yeasty drinks, and loud laughter. Two men were playing pool in the center of the room. Two women were sitting at the bar holding beers by the necks.
“Hey, Claire” came from the window into the kitchen behind the counter.
“Hey, Clarence,” Claire shouted back.
Claire grabbed two menus from the holder by the cash register and pointed him toward a table. “By the window suit you?”
“Great.”
When they sat down, she explained, “The soup is made homemade every day. And it’s good. Everything else is frozen and fried. Burgers are not bad. The soup is written up on the board. Looks like bean with bacon. Leinenkugel is on tap.”
“You’re making this easy.”
When the waitress came, Claire ordered a grilled cheese sandwich, a cup of soup, and a beer. Tyrone went for the Lakeside Burger, which featured mayonnaise, a side of fries, and a beer. But when Claire’s cup of soup came immediately, he decided he had to have that, too.
The waitress came back with another cup of soup and set down their frosty beer mugs. Claire lifted hers and he clacked his against it. “What’re we celebrating?”
“The end of the day.” She pointed at the sun setting over the lake.
He felt it necessary to point out what came afterward. “But the beginning of the night.”
“What did you think about Folger?” Claire asked him while she crumbled some crackers in her soup.
“Are you going to eat all your crackers?” he asked.
“Didn’t you eat anything today?”
“No midafternoon snack and it’s almost nine o’clock.”
“How do you stay so slim?”
“By not eating. I just think about it a lot.”
“What about Folger?” Claire came back to her question.
“Guy gave me the willies, but seemed nonlethal.”
“Yeah, that’s how he struck me this time around. When I saw him the first time at his office he was much more belligerent.”
“The scrapbook still might tell us something. It’s worth looking at carefully. I guess it wouldn’t be uncommon for someone from around here to be fascinated by the murders, but that is also behavior we see in killers. Tracking their crime in the paper. Their fifteen minutes.”
“You going back to the office after this?”
“Yeah, the sheriff wanted me to be there ten to two. Do cell phones work here? I wonder if the pesticide guy has struck again.”
“Not well, because of