Bonegrinder (3 page)

“Somethin’ bad,” Bonifield said, “real bad….”

“Animal?” Joe James ventured.

Bonifield spat. “Animal, hell! Boy said it come up outa the lake at him, said that ’fore he died.”

The sun seemed to be getting hotter by the second, and already an unpleasant odor was rising from the bed of the truck.

“Take the remains on to Doc Amis, Joe,” Wintone said. “Take Bonifield, too. Sonny, come on into the office. Cool in there.”

Sonny Tibbet was a shade over Wintone’s six foot two, even a shade huskier, but not as hard a man. He owned the sawmill his dad had owned before him, and he had Wintone’s respect. They went back a way together, back to when they were in school.

Sonny squinted and yanked at a lock of curly black hair. Old habit. “Is cool in here,” he said, settling down into the hickory chair opposite Wintone’s desk.

Wintone sat and rolled a ball-point pen back and forth between his thumb and little finger over the scarred mahogany desk top, trying not to think of what he’d seen in the pickup bed. He leaned back in his creaking wood chair and got right to official business. Cold facts were best for burying nightmare images. “What all happened down at the lake, Sonny?”

“We was goin’ down to inspect our trout lines we put out last night. Old Bonifield had some lines out, too, an’ me an’ Joe James met him on the path to Lynn Cove.” Sonny bunched his body in a way Wintone didn’t like. “That’s when we heard the screamin’, an’ another sound, like splashin’ an’ a kind of groanin’—real low, not the boy groanin’. We run there fast as we could an’ found the boy pretty much like you saw him but alive. He was ravin’, said he was fishin’ an’ somethin’ come up outa the lake an’ got him, somethin’ big an’ dark. Joe pulled me aside, said he figured the boy wouldn’t live long enough for us to get Doc Amis an’ bring him back, so we decided to bring him on in with Joe’s pickup. We put an old blanket an’ some rags in back so’s to soften the ride, but I knew the boy was dead when we loaded him in—too much blood lost.”

“Know who the boy was?”

Sonny shook his head, yanked unconsciously at his hair. “Wasn’t any identification on him. We thought he must be the son of somebody in that bunch stayin’ at Higgins’ Motel.”

Wintone’s insides seemed to twist and he cringed. He would have the unpleasant task of checking that out and notifying the boy’s family. “What was it you think got him?” he asked.

Sonny shrugged. “That comin’ up outa the water business’d be the boy’s imagination. He was ravin’, busted up the way he was.”

Bonifield had come back from Doc Amis’s and was standing leaning against the wall near the cork bulletin board. “Doc Amis says he ain’t seen nothin’ like it … jaws an’ claws, is what he says … boy been put through a grinder.”

Wintone thought about running Bonifield out of the office but decided against the effort. Besides, he might have some questions to put to the old man.

“Tell the good sheriff ’bout the footprint,” Bonifield said. “Though it weren’t no footprint, nor paw, neither.”

Sonny nodded. “There was a print, Sheriff, leastways one clear one, on the bank near where the boy was layin’. Rest of the ground was soft an’ all churned up.”

“So,” Wintone said, “what kind of print?”

Sonny hesitated and shook his head. “No kind I ever seen.”

“Big, though,” Bonifield said. “Six, eight inches across. An’ deep, like the thing were somethin’ heavy.”

Wintone grunted. “How ’bout goin’ back up there,” he said to Sonny. “Make sure nobody messes things up around where it happened. I got some people to talk to an’ I’ll be along.”

After a moment Sonny nodded. “I’ll get Joe James to go with me. We’ll take his truck.”

“I’m goin’ down to Mully’s an’ get a drink,” Bonifield said.

Heat rolled in before Sonny and Bonifield slammed the door behind them, rattling the blinds. On the warm windowpane a bluebottle fly crawled across the loop of the
R
in
SHERRIFF.
Wintone picked up the phone like it was something slimy.

Lil Higgins answered the telephone, and Wintone had to wait awhile for Luke to come in from where he was working on one of the cabins. Then he told Wintone that the couple in cabin eight, the Larsens, had been inquiring since morning about the whereabouts of their eleven-year-old son, Dale. Higgins confirmed that the boy was blond—that was really all the description that Wintone could give him. Wintone told Higgins not to mention the phone call to the boy’s family and said he’d be on his way up there shortly.

Wintone stood wearily and strapped on his holstered .38 revolver. He ran broad fingers through his brown curls, pulled the leather holster strap tight and adjusted the weight of the pistol on his hip. Then he went out into the heat, careful to shut the door tight behind him, and set out walking toward Doc Amis’s.

He was in front of Lige Thompson’s Ozark Used Furniture store and already sticky with sweat when a low red sports car slowed to keep pace with him. There were two men in it who looked to be in their middle twenties, each with a flowing dark mustache, and several fishing rods were lashed to a chrome carrier on the car’s roof.

“Hey, Marshall,” the driver called, “is there anyplace to buy bottle liquor in this metropolis?”

Wintone kept walking. “Colver Liquor and Tobacco Shop, three blocks over.”

“How about that dive over there?” The man extended his arm from the car to point toward Mully’s.

“No carry-out liquor there, nor hard liquor at all,” Wintone said, “only bottle beer in mugs.”

“Bottle beer in mugs …” the driver repeated as if in disbelief. The sports car suddenly seemed to drop six inches and the engine hummed louder as it sped away. It occurred to Wintone that there was no speed limit posted anywhere in Colver except where the little-traveled alternate highway cut through the town’s center.

When Wintone arrived at Doc Amis’s, he noticed that the twice-lightning-struck, huge cottonwood tree that shaded the low brick building looked as if it might be dying from the drought. Its leaves appeared wilted and had taken on a dull brownish hue out near the ends of the long branches.

Doc Amis’s nurse and receptionist, Sarah Ledbetter, didn’t look up as Wintone entered. A thin, almost skinny, woman with close-cropped blond hair, pretty in an intense way, she was busy at her desk entering something in a large black-bound record book, and her hands were unsteady. When she did glance up and saw Wintone in the small, comfortable anteroom, she smiled and laid the pen in the crease of the open book’s binding.

“Didn’t hear you come in, Billy.”

“Didn’t make much noise.”

She gave him a flickering up-and-down glance with almost a mother’s concern in wide blue eyes that were penetrating in their sensitivity. “You look worn down.”

“Worn down’s what I am. Doc keepin’ you busy, Sarah?”

“Busier’n I wanted to be today.”

Wintone smiled a bit of sadness and nodded. He was at ease in Sarah’s company. They had gone together for over a year when they were in their teens, when touching each other had been a bona fide black-sky sin instead of something like shaking hands the way it was now. Wintone sometimes wondered which attitude was worse.

A horizontal frown-line appeared on Sarah’s forehead, softened but stayed when she stopped frowning and looked up at Wintone. “I haven’t seen anything as bad as that boy for a long time.” She had spent three years as an RN in Kansas City after nursing school, and Wintone was surprised to see her upset. But then a person’s capacity to endure a sight like the boy’s remains probably lessened if the senses weren’t kept dulled by frequent similar sights. Wintone could understand that; he remembered the dead return gaze from the back of Joe James’s pickup truck and almost shivered.

A door behind and to the left of Sarah opened, and Doc Amis came into the anteroom and nodded a hello to Wintone. The doctor was a tall, hawk-nosed man in his late sixties, very erect and very gray. It seemed that every year he got some straighter in the back and some grayer, but never older.

“That boy looks like he’s been put through a threshing machine,” the doctor said. “What happened to him?”

Wintone crossed hamlike forearms. “Somethin’ attacked him down at Big Water Lake.”

“Something big, judging by the slashes and tooth marks.”

“What do you figure it was? Pack of dogs?”

“Not dogs. Something bigger. Hard to say just what.”

“What was the cause of death, Doc?”

Doc Amis snorted. “Take your pick, Sheriff. Without going into unpleasant details, it could have been anything from shock to loss of blood.”

“The men who got there right after it happened said the boy told them somethin’ came up out of the lake after him while he was fishin’.”

Sarah, who had been intently following the conversation, looked questioningly at Wintone.

“Could it have been a bear?” Wintone asked Doc Amis.

“No bears around here.”

“Cougar?”

“Definitely not. I’ve seen the work of cougar on a man. All I can say, Billy, is whatever it was had the tools to do more damage than a cougar. It’s hard for me to believe the boy could have lived long enough to tell anybody anything, but it happens.”

“And it’s not good when it happens,” Sarah said.

Wintone caught the undertone of helpless compassion in her voice, wanted to ease her mind but didn’t know what to say. “See if you can do something with what’s left of him,

Doc. I’ll be sending his folks in from Higgins’ to officially identify him.”

“They know yet?”

“On my way to tell ’em.”

Doc Amis shot him a gray look of understanding. “Don’t let me keep you, Sheriff.”

When Wintone stepped back out onto the street, the heat seemed to envelop him with an eager malice in a way that was strangely personal, as if the elements had conspired to infuriate him.

He tried not to think of where he was going, what he had to do, tried not to think about the heat. From horizon to horizon the sky was a shimmering blue without a single cloud, and without a single hope of rain.

W
INTONE WAITED IN THE
tiny, knotty pine-paneled office of Higgins’ Motel while Lil Higgins went to see if the Larsens were in their cabin. The motel office was so cool that the abrupt change from the outside heat had brought a nauseous, hollow sensation to Wintone’s stomach. An oversized air conditioner mounted in the wall behind the wooden counter hummed powerfully, and Wintone heard the steady drip of condensation falling into a half-full yellow plastic bucket beneath the air conditioner. There were faint spatter marks on the paneling from when the water level in the bucket had gotten too high.

The CB radio base unit on the desk was turned on, and somebody called Bulldog was laboriously giving somebody called Flatiron directions to a restaurant on the main highway. Wintone reached over and turned the unit off.

On the motel desk were a number of wire holders containing maps and travel brochures. Wintone didn’t remember seeing them there before, and on the wall was a freshly painted sign with motel rules and a new and earlier check-out time. One of the knotty-pine walls was covered with dozens of photographs of both Lil and Luke Higgins smiling and holding up prize fish or large strings of smaller fish they’d caught. None of the fish had been pulled from the south end of the lake.

Wintone hadn’t heard anyone approach, but the office door opened and the Larsens came in, fearful and eager. Lil gave Wintone a look that said she pitied everyone in the room and left them alone.

Paul Larsen was a tall man with straight blond hair neatly cut and parted to the side as if it had been flipped there to disguise a receding hairline. He had fine, elongated features and agonized blue eyes. His wife Beth was a narrow-waisted, tiny woman with dark and deep eyes that seldom blinked. Wintone wished she didn’t have eyes like that.

“Why don’t both of you sit down,” Wintone said.

Beth Larsen sat in a chrome-armed vinyl chair, but Paul Larsen said he preferred to stand. He rested his hand on his seated wife’s thin shoulder, as if posing for a photograph.

Willing the feeling part of his mind to be numb, Wintone told them what had happened.

Paul Larsen did sit down then, as if he’d been heart-shot. Beth Larsen’s dark eyes went blank, rolled back, and she closed them and bowed her head, squeezing her slender hands together as if praying, squeezing both clasped hands between her whitened knees. Her thin body convulsed with her soft sobs, as if jolts of electricity were passing through her chair.

“It’ll be necessary for one of you to drive on in to Colver,” Wintone said. “Make sure.”

“I am sure,” Paul Larsen said in a flat voice. There was a stunned expression on his face, an almost-smile of a leer that he wasn’t aware of.

Beth Larsen regained control first. “We’ll both go,” she said, reaching out a hand and touching her husband’s wrist.

“Mrs. Higgins has offered to drive you,” Wintone said. “I think it’d be best.”

Beth Larsen agreed. Her husband was still wherever he had gone inside himself.

Wintone nodded to them, feeling awkward in the curiously graced presence of their grief, and stepped to the door. The voice that stopped him was soft and controlled.

“Did you say an animal, Sheriff?”

With an effort he turned and looked at Beth Larsen’s soul in her dark eyes. “Had to be….” He nodded again and left quickly.

Lil Higgins was standing by the corner of the office. Wintone didn’t say anything to her, was barely aware of her on the edge of his vision, as he strode to his parked patrol car.

He started the car and headed toward Big Water Lake, dwelling on the idea that his job was getting harder with the years. According to Lil Higgins, the Larsens had originally intended to stay at one of the motels on the north shore of the lake, deciding after a long discussion to drive their station wagon south rather than let the northern forest fire ruin their vacation. That was a discussion they would both remember for the rest of their lives.

Wintone slowed the car and steered through a curve beneath an ancient leaning elm whose lower branches had been axed to permit passage. Then he turned right onto the narrow dirt road that skirted the lake. Rocks beat against the insides of the patrol car’s fenders and a plume of thick dust obscured rear-view-mirror vision. The green wildness that surrounded Wintone was in many places almost impossible for a man to move through, its interior guarded by brush and thick, upright sapling trunks like sturdy, impassable bars. Even ax and chain saw were insufficient to probe the woods’ depths. Through the trees to his left, Wintone could occasionally glimpse the lake’s surface, dull and flat and endless-seeming. It looked like a place that would keep its secrets.