Bone Harvest - Mary Logue [88]
Claire parked her car on the dirt road when she saw Lindstrom’s truck up ahead. She sat in the car for a few moments and took deep breaths. Maybe this would go real easy. She could walk up on him and bring him in. She got out of her car and silently shut the door and started walking.
When she got to Lindstrom’s truck, she looked around to see if she could tell where Paul had gone. Off to her right, she could see a path leading down through a ditch. At the end of it was an opening. It looked like a cellar door going down into the ground. A strange sound came out of the hole in the ground, a clicking and then a whine. Lindstrom must have started up the pump. The noise was good; it would cover up any sounds she might make approaching the well. She hoped she was in time to stop him from dumping any of the pesticides down into the water.
After making sure she had her gun, she moved forward, careful where she was putting her feet. When she was a few steps away, she stopped and readied herself. She hoped she would see him and the situation before he would see her standing above him.
Down in the pit a metal arm was rising and lowering. She saw it and then realized it was part of the pumping system. An old system. She stepped up to the edge of the well pit and didn’t see Lindstrom down below.
She heard something behind her and then someone pushed her forward into the open pit of the well. Claire tried to grab for something and then remembered to protect her face. She hit the ground with a sickening force. Darkness swallowed her.
When she came to, she was sitting against the dirt wall with Lindstrom squatting in front of her, holding a gun in his hands—her gun—but it wasn’t pointed at her. The gun was just dangling loose in his hands. She saw that he had a bandage covering his left hand.
Claire shook her head. Her shoulder hurt, her ribs ached, her head was spinning, and her ankle throbbed. She didn’t think anything was broken, but she was banged up. She couldn’t think about her aches and pains at that moment.
She held out her hand. “Don’t do anything,” she told Paul Lindstrom.
“Like what?” he asked, genuinely wanting to know.
“Make anything worse,” she finished lamely.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I just came out to talk to you about some new information we had on the Schulers.”
“How did you find me?”
Time to lie, Claire thought. It wouldn’t help the situation for him to know she knew what he had done to his wife. “I saw your truck go down this way so I just followed you.”
He nodded. Seemed to buy it. “What new information?”
“Well, we have evidence that shows that someone else was at the Schulers’ the day they were murdered.”
He nodded again. She needed to get him talking. An outright question might do the trick. “Were you at the Schulers’ when they all were killed?”
Lindstrom didn’t say anything at first. She could tell he was thinking pretty hard because his eyes moved down to the ground. “I can’t say.”
Claire decided to step around that question. She felt that he had been programmed not to reveal that part of what had happened. She decided to just assume that he was there. “We know there was another plate set for dinner and it was Arlette’s birthday. Were you invited to the party?”
At the word party, he lifted his head. “My dad told my mother to never let me play with the Schulers. He said they were bad people. But he was gone. He went to Milwaukee. I begged my mother. I wanted to go to the birthday party. I was good friends with Schubert and we never got to play together.”
“Do you want to tell me what happened that day? What you saw happen at the farm?”
“I didn’t see much at first. Just heard the gunshots go off. Then the man came upstairs and shot all the other children.”
Claire let those words sink in. He had been there when they were murdered. “Where were you?”
“I hid in the closet.”
“Good for you.”
“I was used to hiding when my dad got mad.”
“It saved