Bonegrinder (18 page)

“He’s the one you want to talk to, Sheriff.” Alan Greer had spoken. He was standing to Wintone’s left with his camera in his hand, the empty leather case slung about his neck.

Wintone nodded and walked over to the man beneath the tree, placed a hand on his shoulder and felt spasms of weeping play beneath his fingertips. The man’s back expanded as he breathed in to gain control of himself and stood up straight with his arms limp at his sides.

“Melanie?” he said, his eyes darting.

Wintone withdrew his hand and stepped back.

“She’s okay,” someone said from the group of people that had moved with Wintone toward the man. “She’s over here.”

Turning, Wintone saw an older woman comforting a girl of about ten who appeared to be in shock.

“Best if you went and phoned Doc Amis,” Wintone said to the man in the sleeveless white T-shirt. Then he turned to the man who’d been supporting himself against the tree, a medium-height, regular-featured man in his late thirties, eyes red-swollen and moist in his fleshed-out but still handsome face. “Melanie your daughter?” Wintone asked.

The man nodded.

“She’ll be taken care of,” Wintone said. “What’s your name?”

“Peterson … Bill Peterson.”

“What happened, Mr. Peterson?”

The man’s eyes widened but seemed to focus on nothing. “My wife … it killed Cheryl …”

“What killed her, Mr. Peterson?”

“Bonegrinder, is what.” Old Bonifield spoke out from where he was standing next to McKenna.

“Work hard at bein’ quiet,” Wintone advised him.

“We were out there, in the boat,” Peterson said, pointing toward a distant part of the lake.

“The three of you?”

Peterson shook his head. “Just Cheryl and I; thank God we’d let Melanie out on the bank to fish. We were just drifting, talking, when we heard a sound, like someone swishing their arm through the water … Then something surfaced next to the boat, on Cheryl’s side …”

“Somethin’ like what?”

Pressing his right fist into his thigh, Peterson seemed to seek adequate words, find none. He spoke anyway, haltingly, in a hoarse whisper. “It was dark-colored … with a long neck, but thick … more like a lizard than a man … but somehow like a man only bigger. Cheryl screamed and hit at it with an oar, and something like a clawed flipper came up out of the water and slashed her arm and shoulder. Then she was gone … just gone without another sound over the side of the boat … and the lake was quiet again …”

“What did you do then?” Wintone asked.

“I called for her, waited for her to surface. But she never did. I started the boat’s motor and got out of there. I should have dived in after her … I should have done that.”

“No, Mr. Peterson, not many would’ve.”

The older woman was slowly walking the young girl up the rise away from the bank, to wait for Doc Amis by the road. Wintone watched them till they disappeared among the trees, then he turned and looked out at the lake, at the fraction of it that was its surface. Almost touchable silver ripples of sunlight glimmered there as if projected from below. These things couldn’t happen, didn’t happen. Yet people were dead and an explanation of sorts was demanded.

“It shouldn’t have happened,” a sobbing Peterson said helplessly. “We hadn’t been getting along … we were going to separate. Then this morning we decided to try to make things work out. It’s as if certain things aren’t meant to be …” He began to beat at the unyielding tree trunk with the flat of his hand, his eyes clenched shut. Wintone caught his right arm on the backswing, held it near the shoulder. Another man stepped forward and gently took Peterson’s other arm and they moved him away from the tree, held him until his body stopped quaking and he was breathing evenly. His strength had left him.

“C’mon away from here an’ we’ll talk,” Wintone told him.

“Mr. Peterson,” McKenna said, “who saw Bonegrinder first, you or your wife?”

Peterson appeared surprised, a man roused from a dream. “Why, both of us at the same time, I guess …”

The man in the brown suit had been taking photographs; he was turning a knob on his camera while staring at Peterson. The camera made a soft, ratchety sound.

“Did either of you say anything when you saw it?” McKenna asked.

“She screamed,” Peterson said. “Cheryl screamed. But it made noise when it broke the water and we both saw it.”

“Enough now,” Wintone said. He gripped Peterson’s elbow and guided him away from the bank.

“Mr. Peterson!” McKenna said again, but Peterson didn’t answer.

Wintone had Doc Amis drive Melanie into Colver, so Peterson could be questioned in the patrol car without the girl being present. As Wintone pulled out onto the road and accelerated, he passed Holt’s canvas-topped Jeep going the other way, saw Sarah sitting in the passenger’s seat. No doubt Holt would fall in behind the other cars trailing the patrol car back to town.

Wintone didn’t press Peterson during the drive into Colver; there was little point. Peterson repeated exactly the short and incredible horror story he’d told at the lake. Then he sat with his head bowed, his body limp, and seemed to lapse into a sad withdrawal where he could be alone with his grief. His damp and muddy clothes gave off the sharp scent of the lake.

After parking the patrol car behind Doc Amis’s, Wintone led Peterson in through a rear door. A minute later Sarah came in the front way, looked at Wintone briefly, then went to tend to the girl. The sheriff left Peterson with Doc Amis, after making sure the grieving widower knew Wintone wanted to talk with him later.

“What now, Sheriff?” old Bonifield asked, as Wintone was trudging back to the patrol car.

Wintone didn’t answer, but caught himself wondering if there was some way he could arrest Bonifield.

“Mr. Bonifield asked a fair enough question,” McKenna said, leaning against the sun-warmed dusty fender of the patrol car.

Wintone knew the reporter was right. He stood and backhanded the perspiration from his forehead and eyebrows. “Now we search for the body,” he said. “And I examine the boat.”

There was no shortage of body-searchers, but Wintone was left alone with the metal Jon boat. He worked his legs into his black rubber wading boots, then moved slowly through the still water to where he could grasp the half-inch rope that lay snaked from the boat’s bow.

Empty, the light, flat-bottomed boat drew very little water, and Wintone towed it up onto the sloping bank easily, feeling the metal bottom skim soft submerged mud. Stenciled in black on the side of the boat was the name of a rental dock located farther north on the lake.

The boat’s metal was almost too hot to touch from time spent in the sun. There was a large, light gray tackle box beneath the middle bench seat, one oar lying in the inch or so of water that sloshed in the bottom, two fishing poles and a fiberglass rod and reel, its line baited with a yellow-feathered lure. In the stern of the boat was a Styrofoam cooler containing a few unopened cans of beer resting in the still-cool water of melted ice.

Wintone examined the painted surface of the boat. There were the usual nicks and scratches, but none of them appeared fresh. The inside of the large tackle box revealed only the wide assortment of lures and fishing equipment that might be the property of any avid fisherman.

After carrying the contents of the boat to the patrol car, Wintone loaded them into the trunk to be returned to Bill Peterson. Then he walked back down to the lake, stood away from the bank so he could be in the shade, and looked across the blue-green water to where Peterson had said the thing had surfaced and attacked.

There were three boats out there now, moving in slow circles and dragging the depths with grappling hooks. They weren’t being too methodical, but Wintone didn’t know if the men in the boats were afraid or overeager. Even from this distance he could see the rifles in their arms, the tenseness of their bodies. As if to mock their search for Cheryl Peterson’s remains, a light, directionless breeze played over the lake, momentarily rippling the bright water as if to reveal the darkness below.

Winton turned away from the lake and walked through ankle-clutching weeds to the patrol car. After returning to Colver and phoning the rental dock to tell them where they could recover their boat, Wintone joined the search for Cheryl Peterson’s body.

She hadn’t been found when darkness fell, nor had she when darkness fell the next night. Wintone suspected then that the body wouldn’t turn up for some time, if at all. Either it was still on the dark lake bottom or had drifted to some reed-grown or brush-secluded spot near the bank. The less responsible newspapers were discussing the obvious, more gruesome possibilities. Wintone wondered if Mayor Boemer and some of the others regretted now all the publicity they’d sought for Colver.

Peterson had become the focal point of the press. He was cooperative at first, repeating his brief story so they could embellish it and speculate on it. But as the endless stream of questions became more personal and probing, the strain on Peterson began to show. Wintone heard that there had been arguments and antagonism, and that now Peterson was trying to avoid the press.

At the end of the week, when he came out of the afternoon heat into Wintone’s office, the strain of his predicament seemed to have drawn Peterson’s face thinner, etching deep lines about the corners of his mouth. He tried a smile as he nodded hello to Wintone, then moved halfway between the door and the sheriff’s desk. His hands were unsteady and he slipped them into his pants pockets with exaggerated casualness.

“Do you think she’ll ever be found, Sheriff?” he asked.

Wintone sat rolling a pencil nimbly between his thick fingers. “If she’s not, Mr. Peterson, it won’t be due to a scarcity of people lookin’.”

Peterson nodded, as if to demonstrate that he had no complaint about how the search was being conducted. “She has to be found, Sheriff. I couldn’t bear to know … to keep thinking about her … still out there. If you’re not a married man, maybe you can’t understand …”

“I understand, Mr. Peterson.”

“This has become an ordeal.” Peterson moved to the side with a puppetlike gracelessness, as if suddenly weary of standing, and sat in one of the cushioned hickory chairs. “I sent Melanie back to Saint Louis, to stay with her grandparents for a while.”

“Seems best.”

“It was the press,” Peterson said. “They even badgered
her.
You wouldn’t believe the questions they asked her, a ten-year-old girl who’d just lost her mother.”

“I know how they can be,” Wintone said.

“There’s one named McKenna, from Saint Louis. I think because we’re from the same city he feels he has some kind of claim on me. He’s relentless.”

“That seems to be the biggest part of bein’ a newspaperman. I know Mr. McKenna.”

“Then maybe you could suggest to him that he be a little less persistent. It doesn’t matter so much for myself, and I know that in his mind he’s only doing his job. But some of the questions he put to Melanie upset her. She’s been having nightmares as it is, crying half the night. Doctor Amis said it would be a good idea to get her away from here; that’s why I sent her back to Saint Louis.”

“I’ll talk to McKenna, but I can tell you it’ll help no more’n water on a grease fire. He’s of a breed.”

“I’d leave here myself but for Cheryl,” Peterson said. “I can’t go until she’s found.”

Wintone nodded, understanding.

“I’ve rented a cabin at Higgins’ Motel, and I intend staying here as long as I have to. I plan to isolate myself from the press as much as I can, so you’ll be able to find me at the cabin almost anytime, in case there are any developments.” Peterson stood up from the chair, supporting himself on the high wood back.

“Mr. Peterson,” Wintone said, leaning back in his swivel chair, “I don’t want to make noises like the press, but are you sure about what you saw on the lake that day?”

Peterson smiled a humorless, tired smile.

“Not now,” he said, “but I was sure when I saw it.”

T
HE NEXT DAY BROUGHT
a cooling wind carrying flecks of rain. Low gray clouds scudded in reaching forms across an even grayer sky that was lighted from time to time by silent lightning.

Returning from a late breakfast, Wintone glanced up at a sky pregnant with dark promise as he faced into the wind to cross the street. It seemed a cleansing wind, though it raised high clouds of dust which he hoped would be drummed back to earth by the rain. The material of Wintone’s tan uniform pressed cool and pleasant against the front of his body, and he was sure that today, any second, it would rain the hard, proper rain that was needed.

“Gonna come a’shower!” Rufe Davis shouted from where he was hurrying to move his outside display of merchandise into his store.

Wintone waved to him and smiled agreement. It was good to think of the rain falling in a steady tattoo on the thirsted crops, pattering and working its way down into the dark, rich earth, striking the top green leaves of the trees thick on the hills, and eventually trickling down through the drought-parched woods. The lake’s wide surface would shimmer innocently in windblown patterns of falling rain. Wintone hoped that some senseless passions would be cooled—perhaps Colver’s drab dustiness would be washed away, taking with it the ominous mood that pervaded the area.

The blare of a horn startled Wintone as Craig Holt’s Jeep passed him, then pulled to the curb in front of him. As Wintone moved toward the Jeep he could see the rhythmic vibrations of the idling engine run through the taut canvas top.

“We’ll get rain if it doesn’t blow over,” Holt said when Wintone was beside the driver’s side of the Jeep. “Anything new on the Peterson woman?”

“Somebody found a torn blue blouse half a mile south of Lynn Cove. Peterson said his wife was wearin’ a blue blouse an’ white slacks when she was pulled from the boat.”

Holt leaned forward, interested, and peered harder at Wintone. “Has Peterson identified the blouse?”

“Hasn’t seen it. I was gonna drive out an’ show it to him this mornin’.”

“Get in if you want—I’ll be glad to drive you.”