Bone Harvest - Mary Logue [87]
Claire prayed the woman still had all her fingers.
“Mrs. Lindstrom?” Claire shook her shoulder.
Someone on the television talked about the problem of hemorrhoids and told you how to cure them.
The woman stirred and looked up at Claire. In a whisper she asked, “Where is he?”
“Who, your husband?”
“Yes, is he here?”
“I haven’t seen him.” Claire knelt down by her side and asked, “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”
Mrs. Lindstrom uncurled her hands and reached out to Claire. “We’ve got to find him. He’s acting so crazy.”
Claire asked her, “What did he do?”
Mrs. Lindstrom raised her hand to her mouth, remembering. “He cut his finger off. After he tied me up down here, he took a hatchet and lopped it off. He did it right in front of me. He said he needed a witness, but didn’t want me to tell anyone. He said he’d be back to untie me. What’s wrong with him?”
Claire felt a deep shiver go through her whole body. With shaking fingers, she started untying the woman from the chair. “Why did he do that, Mrs. Lindstrom? Did he tell you what he intended to do?”
Mrs. Lindstrom shook her head and her face crumpled. She started to sob and spoke brokenly through her tears. “He’s been a good man. I know that he has odd thoughts, but he’s not mean. He said he had to find out the truth. He said maybe they needed another finger; maybe that would make it right. I didn’t understand why he was doing it. I tried to stop him, but he left me here. He left me and he hasn’t come back. He said he would go to the well.”
“The well?”
“I’m afraid he’s going to kill himself.”
“I know what that is. I’ve been looking at it and looking at it, trying to remember what was there.” Lowman snapped his finger down on the map. “That’s a reverse well.”
Tyrone looked down at where the man was pointing. He could see a circled X on Schuler’s land that was near the edge of the Lindstrom property. “That mark right there?”
“Yes, that means a well, and as I recall that was a reverse well.”
Tyrone had to admit his ignorance. “What is that?”
Lowman lifted his grizzled head. The man had been going over the whole map with Tyrone, explaining all he knew. “Just what it sounds like. Instead of bringing water up out of the ground it takes it into the ground.”
“Why?”
“To drain the land. To make it fit for farming. Doubt it’s used anymore.”
“Could it be used?”
“I would expect so. Unless they filled it in. But if you wanted to poison a whole group of people, especially all those living right around the Schuler homestead, that would be a nifty way to do it. Just dump the pesticides down the well and it would go right into the aquifer.”
Tyrone gave Lowman a look.
Lowman explained, “The water table. All these farms, as I mentioned to you before, are on wells. They all draw their water out of the same body of water under the ground. It’s pretty far down there, because they’re up on the bluff. They probably had to dig about three hundred feet to get to the water table, but it’s there. And if the pesticides were dumped into it, it might poison a whole group of wells.”
“Sounds like what we’ve been looking for.”
Tyrone’s cell phone rang. When he answered he heard Claire’s voice. “Lindstrom. It’s Lindstrom. That was his own finger he cut off. He tied up his wife and left her in the basement.”
“Shit. Where is he?”
“Mrs. Lindstrom told me that she thought Paul had gone someplace not too far away. She said something about a well.”
“Yeah, I think we’ve located it. I’ll put Lowman on and he can give you directions. We’ll meet you there.”
“I hate to leave her, but I think I’d better try to stop him before it’s too late.”
Lowman got on the phone and told Claire where she would find the farm road that led to the reverse well. Then he handed the phone back to Tyrone.
“Listen,” Claire told him. “This guy is crazy, but