Clouds without Rain (6 page)

“Still is, from what I hear,” Wilsher said, leading.

“Like I said, junior prom queen and then senior court the next year. She was my eighth-grade sweetheart, but she threw me over for a football player. Little Jimmy Weston. If I remember right, she and Weston stayed together even after she left for college. They never married, though. She found someone better after college. At least she thought he was better.”

Wilsher sat and thought for a moment, studying the trust papers. Then he said, “I guess Sommers has got some work to do, then. Now that Weaver’s dead, I mean.”

“You going to call her out here?” Branden asked. He took the leather trust folder from Wilsher and leafed idly through the pages.

Wilsher took the folder back, folded the leather pouch, snapped it shut, and said, “I’ll start by running these into Millersburg.”

“Let me do that,” Branden said, and held out his hand for the folded leather pouch. “I know Britta Sommers well, Dan. I’m going back to town for an afternoon conference, but I can get the papers to her first thing in the morning.”

Wilsher smiled mischievously and asked, “What are you long-hairs doing today? Debating who really won the Civil War?” There was a wide grin on his face as he dropped the trust papers into Branden’s hand.

“Actually,” Branden said, amused, using a professorial tone, “if you take the long-term view, you might argue that the eventual loss of the big manufacturing industries in the North and the resurgence of Southern life that we’re seeing today ...”

Wilsher cut him off with a wave of the hand and quipped, “Oh, brother. Why’d I even ask?”

When the two had walked back through the house to the front, they found Deputy Armbruster arguing with a man in a baggy suit. The squat little man complained, “I’m supposed to be the first one to go over the scene,” as Wilsher and Branden walked up.

Wilsher asked, “We got a problem here, Stan?”

The man in the suit turned to Wilsher, took in the lieutenant’s gold bars, and said rancorously, “I’m Robert Cravely. Insurance. And you’ve moved all of the buggy parts, Lieutenant.”

Wilsher responded calmly, “We’ve merely laid them out beside the road to clear a lane for traffic.”

Cravely removed a wallet badge from his inside suit pocket, displayed it briefly, and said pompously, “I am a specialist in buggy crashes. I’ve been retained by the insurance carrier for the furniture company that owns that truck over there. I study debris scatter. Impact analysis. And you should not have moved anything until I had a chance to go over the scene.”

Branden touched Wilsher’s arm, and, holding back a laugh, said, “I’m gonna take these papers to Sommers in the morning.”

Wilsher nodded and turned back to the insurance agent. As Branden walked away, he could hear the lieutenant explaining, somewhat indignantly, why he thought it more important to clear a lane for traffic than to have expert analysis of buggy debris, considering that they had three solid witnesses who had observed the crash firsthand.

At his truck, Branden tossed the leather pouch onto the passenger’s seat, climbed in behind the wheel, hit the ignition, and swung around on the pavement. As he climbed back up to Walnut Creek, he used his cell phone to call Melissa Taggert in her coroner’s labs. He told her what he had discovered about the horse, asked her to have a look herself, and then explained why, and what he thought she would find in her inspection.

5

Tuesday, August 8
2:55 P.M.

 

 

CAL Troyer walked among the pews of his little church house, laying down one-page outlines for Wednesday night’s Bible study. He finished and sat down in the last pew, remembering earlier days when he had known Andy Weaver as a single Amish-man from the Melvin P.’s, a prosperous district mostly to the north of Walnut Creek, in the Goose Bottoms and the hills beyond. Although many things had happened to precipitate a crisis in the district, the central problem had been, in Andy Weaver’s opinion, that Yoder was an increasingly liberal bishop, and Weaver hadn’t liked it then at all. As the new bishop, he surely didn’t like it any better now.

But such had always been Andy Weaver’s convictions—that a conventional, Old Order lifestyle was the best possible life for a family. Living close to the land. Far from a city’s temptations.

And so there had been a falling out when Bishop Yoder’s rulings had grown too liberal for Weaver. Lights. Electric tools. Printers and computers. Fax machines. All in the businesses at first, but inexorably moving into the homes as well. And when Andy R. Weaver had had his fill, he broke away and moved his family to a more conservative district in Pennsylvania.

Funny, Cal thought, how different the older brother had turned out. John R. Weaver had taken to modern things as if he were born to the electronic age. Land had been his obsession, and land aplenty he had. For him, it hadn’t been enough to tend a single farm. Or to raise a family. His business dealings had become a wife to him, and his land holdings were like his children. But that was all gone, now, with J.R.’s untimely death.

Two brothers, then. One enticed by Melvin P. Yoder’s flirtation with the modern world. The other repelled by it. Now, Andy R. Weaver was going to try to straighten out the whole sorry mess in his district north of Walnut Creek.

Cal pushed up from the wooden pew and gave a final look around the sanctuary. Everything was ready for Wednesday services. The lesson would teach itself from his outline. He walked out, locked up, and pulled the doors open on his truck, to let the heat out.

While he waited there, a plain black buggy pulled into the gravel parking lot, and Andy Weaver got out and tethered his horse to a light pole in the corner of the lot. He came slowly over to Troyer, lifted his hat off, and wiped his brow on his shirt sleeve. Cal closed up his truck and motioned Weaver into the little story-and-a-half brick parsonage beside the church. In the kitchen, cooler with the shades drawn, the two sat at a little formica table and shared a half pitcher of iced tea that Cal had made the day before. Cal waited for Weaver to make some mention of his troubles.

Andy fished out a wedge of lemon and bit into it, puckering as he chewed. “Lost a family this morning,” he confided after a pause.

Cal drained his tea, poured more for himself and Weaver, and waited.

“I had three of the men together to rule on electric lights, and one balked. I told him he could find a liberal group up east of Trail.”

Cal whistled.

“Make an example of one, you see,” Andy observed.

“You think the rest will hold tight?”

“I believe so. I had plenty of nominations from the people, and they all saw me draw the lot to become Bishop.”

“It’s almost asking too much, Andy,” Cal said without guile. “You’re taking them backwards, and most of them are sticking with you.”

“You’d have expected otherwise?”

Cal nodded quietly.

“You’re right,” Weaver sighed.

“If you can keep 80 percent, that will be good.”

“This morning I am only two for three,” Weaver said, distantly.

“There’s still the two men who stayed with you,” Cal encouraged.

Weaver managed to produce a wry smile. “They came into town with me this afternoon. Down at the light company, telling them to take out the electric wires.”

“A victory, then,” Cal said.

“For now.”

“You knew you’d lose a few, Andy.”

Andy paused and changed the subject with a distasteful look on his face. Heavily, he said, “I’ve made no progress identifying our cultists, but some families seem afraid of their teenagers.”

Cal’s forehead wrinkled as his eyebrows lifted questioningly. To lighten the mood, he asked, “You remember Mony Hershberger’s Ben?”

A brief smile broke out on Weaver’s face, and he laughed softly. “Mailboxes.”

“I’ll bet he busted up twenty before they caught him,” Cal added.

Grinning, Weaver said, “Mony’s Ben was always a little ‘touched in the head,’ Cal.”

“Just a little?”

“You remember that barn fire his father had?”

“That was Ben?” Cal asked, surprised.

“He didn’t mean it. Just trying to light a pipe, was all,” Weaver said. He smiled, looked out the kitchen window for a spell, and then appeared to slump in his chair. “You know my older brother died Monday in a crash in front of his house?”

“J.R. Yes. I’m sorry,” Cal said.

“I wish I could say the same,” Andy blurted. “I didn’t mean that,” he added instantly. His frown was heavy, and he shook his head slowly back and forth.

Cal sat motionless.

Weaver peered directly into Troyer’s eyes and said, “It looks like my brother swindled eight of my men, Cal.”

Cal appeared skeptical.

“Truly,” Weaver asserted. “Eight men got letters yesterday canceling the notes on their farms.”

“That’s not possible,” Cal said.

“I’d have agreed with you. But there’s something about some ‘Lease to Own’ contracts, and I’ve got to sort through to the bottom of it all in less than a week.”

Cal leaned back a ways in his chair, clasped his fingers behind his head, and blew out air, saying, “Whew!”

“It gets worse,” Weaver said nervously.

Cal waited, still leaning back.

“Two families have got at least one son each they won’t talk about. There’s gossip. I told one father I intended talking to his son, and he grew nervous. Told me in so many words that that might not be prudent! Of course their wives wouldn’t say anything at all.”

“What kind of secret can anyone keep among the Amish?” Cal asked, intending no disrespect.

Weaver said, “They all know about it, all right. Just no one’s talking.”

“You’re right,” Cal said, bringing his arms down to the table. “That beats electric problems any day.”

“I think Melvin Yoder must have gone far more liberal than I realized.”

Cal shook his head.

“It’s not everyone,” Weaver explained.

“Still,” Cal said.

“Have you got a lot going this summer, Cal?”

“Just the usual.”

“You think you and Mike Branden could help on the land matter?”

“Not with the boys?”

“That will be my little problem for a while.”

“You want me to talk to Mike first, or get going on it myself?”

“I need you and Branden to come out and talk with the men.”

“Your place?”

“Yoder’s old house. Temporarily.”

“You said they all got a letter?”

Weaver nodded.

“We’ll need to see that,” Cal said.

Weaver nodded and frowned heavily. “Can you get out to the house Friday morning?”

“I’ll have to check.”

“You sure you’ve got the time, Cal?”

Cal said, “Of course—just like the old times,” and waited.

Weaver sat with an unhappy expression and eventually said, “The way those letters read, my brother sold the land out from under eight of my families just before he died.”

6

Wednesday, August 9
9:28 A.M.

 

 

AFTER a light breakfast, Branden took the leather pouch containing J. R. Weaver’s trust papers off the kitchen table and stepped into the stuffy garage. He put the garage door up, and bright light flooded in on an assaulting wave of dry heat. He rolled down the windows on his truck, backed out onto the culde-sac where his brick colonial stood near the campus, and drove down into town with the truck windows open, the temperature already showing ninety-two degrees on the bank display just south of the courthouse square. He waited for traffic to clear on Clay Street and swung into the bank lot, his tires crackling on the heat blisters in the blacktop. As he walked toward the two-story brick bank building, pavement heat lifting through the soles of his worn sandals, he held J. R. Weaver’s leather pouch under his left arm, and flipped through his wallet for the photocopy he had made yesterday from his senior yearbook—Brittany Sommers in her high school cheerleader’s uniform, captain of the squad. Britta was the smallest of the lot, the confident, scrappy little girl smiling at the camera from the top position of a human pyramid, her black hair shiny and long, the fall sweater-and-skirt uniform revealing, in the young girl, the beautiful form she would carry as a woman. He shook his head, remembering her fondly, and slid the photo back into his wallet, intending to tease her about it if he got the chance.

In the shade under the portico of the bank’s main doors, Branden used a handkerchief to dry sweat beads on his hands and arms, the back of his neck, and face. He was dressed in blue jeans and a plain yellow T-shirt. He had made the appointment yesterday, and he had stopped at Chester’s shop for a haircut and a trim. Now he used the bank window as a mirror to comb hair and beard into place. He studied his reflection in the window glass and smiled at himself, realizing that he hadn’t needed the haircut. He took out his handkerchief again, this time to dry the leather pouch he was carrying.

He lingered in the shade of the portico while a line of customers spilled out of the bank, and he noticed the brief rush of cool air through the open door. An unkempt man came out through the main doors, stopped short at sight of the professor, and stood blocking the doorway, eyeing Branden up and down with a spiteful expression, until he was forced to move aside by people wanting to get through the door. He moved closer to Branden and blurted, “Look, Branden. My ex talks about you all the time.”

“Arden Dobrowski,” Branden said contemptuously. “You’re not allowed within five hundred yards of Britta Sommers.”

“That lying tramp is trying to freeze me out of . . . ”

He would, apparently, have said considerably more, but Branden took him forcibly under the arm, spun him against the outside brick wall of the bank, jabbed two stiff fingers into Dobrowski’s chest and barked, “You’ll not speak about Britta that way.”