Until You Are Dead Steven Truscott's Long Ride into History

Chapter 8 Trapped By Friday evening, a tumultuous week was coming to an end in Clinton. As much as they could, the children and adults in the PMQs around the air force station tried to follow life's normal pursuits. Steve was looking forward to some fun and adventure over the weekend. Some fishing, some baseball, maybe another trip into the woods to work on the tree house. As the sun dipped in the horizon, Steve headed over to one of his favourite places around the base, Lawson's farm unaware that he was about to spend his last hour of liberty for the next ten years. *** It looked like rain, Bob Lawson thought as he rushed to finish the evening chores a godsend after the crop-scorching heat all week. Lawson was eager to get a little haying done. "If you start the lawn mower, I can cut the grass," suggested his mother, Alice Lawson. Bob was in the barn with the cows when he heard a loud, clanging racket. A fifteen-foot metal chain attached to the farm dog had somehow got tangled up in the mower and was slowly dragging the terrified mutt toward the sharp, spinning rotors. Lawson knew he was too far away to get to the mower in time. He caught sight of Steve rushing up the driveway to the farm. Fortunately, the mower stalled, and the chain stopped only a few feet before the dog would have had an unappetizing encounter with the rotors. Laughing, the boy began to untangle the chain from the lawn mower. Still, the Lawsons felt that Steve was more reserved than usual. "Steve seems a little quiet this evening," Alice Lawson told her son. Perhaps Lynne's death had shaken the boy, Bob thought. The day before, Steve had dropped by the barn and appeared to be bewildered by events: "I heard they found Lynne in the bush," Lawson remembers Steve telling him. "How did she get there?" With the Lawsons' dog safe from the marauding mower, Steve hopped on Lawson's new Ferguson 35 tractor. "He loved being on that tractor," Lawson recalls. "I would often let him ride on it. Steve was good with machines." The lanky boy stood on the tractor's floorboard, leaning against the fender, while the farmer rode across his land. When they got to the edge of the crops, Steve jumped off and perched himself on a large rock. For safety reasons, Lawson never let Steve stay on the tractor when he hooked it up to the harvester. As Lawson began haying, Steve rested on the rock, gazing out at the paths and trails where the children played hide-and-seek and picked berries. He saw the thick expanse of Lawson's bush where only a few weeks earlier he and his friend Leslie had built a tree house. "He was sitting on that stone, but next time, when I turned the tractor around and came back, he was gone," Lawson recalls. "I guessed he had walked back to the barn." Bored, or perhaps anxious to get home for a bite to eat, Steve headed back down to the county road. He never made it home. *** At the Goderich OPP station, Inspector Harold Graham had made up his mind. Jocelyne's story about a date and the phone call with the results from the laboratory analysis of Lynne's stomach contents pointed the finger at the Truscott boy. "At ten minutes to seven, I had him picked up," Graham said. He sent out Const. Donald Trumbley to bring in the boy preferably without his parents' knowledge. "I asked the constable to try and get him away from home." The OPP cruiser pulled up to the gateway at the Lawson farm. "Would you get into the car and come with me? We want you to read over your statement," Trumbley explained, referring to Steve'sSher, Julian is the author of 'Until You Are Dead Steven Truscott's Long Ride into History', published 2002 under ISBN 9780676973815 and ISBN 0676973817.