Bone Harvest - Mary Logue [89]
“I didn’t see who shot the children because I closed my eyes. When the noise was done I went downstairs, and that’s when I saw the deputy kill Mr. Schuler. He shot him in the back.”
“Did you take the fingers?”
He nodded.
“Why?”
Lindstrom shook his head as if it were too hard to say, too hard to explain his actions.
“You want the truth?” she asked him. “We have Earl Lowman at the sheriff’s office. He was the deputy you saw at the Schulers’. He’s told us everything that happened that day. Things you’re not aware of. Do you want to talk to him?”
“It’s too late,” Lindstrom said, gesturing toward the bags of pesticide that were sitting next to the well shaft. “I’m through waiting. They all need to be punished.”
“I think you need to hear what he has to tell you. I think it will make you feel better about what happened that day. You’ve been blaming someone who really didn’t do everything you thought he did.”
“Lowman?”
“You never knew who he was?”
“I didn’t see his face. All I knew was that he was wearing a deputy’s uniform. And that he killed them all.”
“He didn’t.”
“Who did?”
Claire didn’t know what he wanted to hear. She would have told him almost anything to get him out of the well pit and headed back to town. “Who do you think killed them?”
Lindstrom shook his head as if he were weary from thinking about it. “I was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Somehow I knew it was my dad’s fault. Even though everyone said he was in Milwaukee, I thought maybe he had paid the deputy to kill them.”
“Why?” Claire asked.
“Because he hated them so much. He did such mean things to them. He killed their animals. He poisoned their crops. I couldn’t stop him. He wanted them to leave, to go away. He made their lives hell.” Paul Lindstrom shook from the rage that he had held in for so many years. “My father made life hell for my mother and me.”
Claire realized that Paul Lindstrom had actually seen the bigger truth all along. His father had probably had a huge hand in the murders of the Schuler family—driving Otto Schuler to do what he had done. “Well, I don’t think your dad helped matters at all, but he didn’t kill them or ask the deputy to do it. It was actually Otto Schuler who killed everyone in his family except himself.”
“Schubert’s father? But he was a nice man.”
“He probably wasn’t well and he was scared that he was going to lose his farm. He didn’t think he could take care of his family anymore. We’ll never know what caused him to kill his family, but I don’t think he did it out of any meanness.”
“Why did the deputy kill Mr. Schuler?”
“Because Mr. Schuler asked him to. He didn’t want to live after what he had done. I’m not saying that what Deputy Lowman did was right, but he didn’t come to the farm intending to do anything like that. You are the only witness. Would you be willing to testify about what Lowman has done?”
Lindstrom got up and appeared to be agitated. “I couldn’t do that. I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
There was something odd going on. Sometimes Paul Lindstrom acted like an old taciturn farmer and then sometimes he seemed more like a young boy. “Who told you that?”
“My mother. She made me promise.”
“I think it would be okay. Everyone knows what happened now. You wouldn’t be telling on anyone.” Claire could see he was close to going along with her. She decided it was time to play mom with him. “Paul, I think you need to have someone look at your hand. Does it hurt?”
He looked at her and she could see tiredness and pain in his eyes. He nodded his head.
“Do you think you could help me up?” Claire put her hands down on the ground and tried to stand. Her ankle felt like it wouldn’t hold her. She started to fall.
Lindstrom ran toward her, holding out the gun.
Then she heard a noise above her. When she looked up she saw Tyrone looking down at them. In an instant she knew what he was seeing: Lindstrom with a gun in his hands coming toward her.
She yelled to Tyrone to stop but at the same time the sound came out of her mouth, Tyrone shot his