Bonegrinder by John Lutz Page B

Ferrill’s place to investigate some vandalism, he’d looked down on the rolling green carpet of woods beneath where the gravel road dropped away. But for snaking roads and the rooftops of scattered buildings, he saw nothing to give a sign of human presence. Only when the patrol car had crested the hill and Wintone descended into the scene he’d admired, did he see the sometimes unpleasant marks of man.
    Near Hap Ferrill’s, off the side of the road, Wintone saw the dark, rusty ruins of a huge hay baler, its voracious razor-edged blades dulled by corrosion. He recalled the old story about the farmer who’d fallen into a hay baler during harvesting, of how a funeral was impractical if not impossible, so the family and church congregation held a service and burned the bale of hay. A tall tale, maybe, but no taller than some Wintone had been hearing lately.
    Mayor Boemer continued to show Wintone the big-city papers, and the story based on the two deaths continued to run strong. Experts seemed to volunteer their weighty opinions from every corner, and the speculations grew more sensational. After reviewing the facts of the Larsen boy’s death, the press had taken to calling the burgeoning figure of Ozark legendary fear Bonegrinder. Of all the epithets, that was the one that stuck.
    It made for good melodrama, and it pleased Mayor Boemer.
    But Wintone kept seeing McKenna’s lumpy, practical face, marked by years of hard-nosed digging for hard facts, and he kept hearing McKenna’s irrefutable words: “Something killed the boy.”
    What was beginning to bother Wintone was, with the continuing influx of people throughout the area, the chances that someone else might be killed kept increasing.
    And every day brought more people, from farther away.

NINE
    T HE P ETERSONS LIVED IN Saint Louis, over three hundred miles northeast of Colver. They made their home in a low, gray, brick-and-frame ranch house with an attached two-car garage, centered on a quarter-acre of weedless, mowed green punctuated by small trees and square-trimmed shrubbery. They had a tomboyish ten-year-old daughter named Melanie who wore glasses, and they had a Ford station wagon and a dented Toyota. Their house was in a sprawling subdivision that for a hundred dollars a year provided them membership in a club that made accessible a swimming pool, tennis courts, yearly club parties and a small playground which Melanie had outgrown.
    Bill Peterson was a draftsman for an aircraft design company. He was thirty-nine, a year older than his wife Cheryl, who stayed home to tend house and child. In the past few years Cheryl had acquired a worn-at-the-edges sort of prettiness that made her more attractive, in Bill’s mind, than when he had married her.
    The Petersons spent much of their free time entertaining neighbors on their patio, working in the yard, going to movies, PTA meetings and grocery shopping together. They were unhappy.
    Lately the low, gray ranch house had been the scene of desperate discussion.
    “You’re the one messing things up,” Bill said with uncomprehending bitterness as he sat at the Spanish-styled dinette set after dinner. He’d had an unusually troublesome day at work and didn’t know if he really wanted the argument he was instigating. But he couldn’t restrain himself; it was as if some pressure were being exerted on a nerve that brought about an automatic response.
    “No one’s messed up anything,” Cheryl said patiently, with a resignation that showed plainly she thought she’d never be able to make her husband understand. “Things just got messed up by themselves. Nobody’s to blame.”
    “Maybe that’s your way of justifying what you’re considering.” Peterson studied his wife with careful objectivity as he spoke. She was still an attractive woman, with a lean, supple figure, small in the bust but with perfect long legs. Impending middle age had given her sallow-cheeked face, framed by still grayless black hair, a