Clouds without Rain. P. L. Gaus
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did he have the time? He said something like ‘Big wreck, Ellie. Semi. Buggy. Maybe more.’”
From the emergency room, they heard Robertson pounding on the legs of his hospital bed and saw him waving them into the room.
Ellie led the other three in, and she and Wilsher took the two chairs by Robertson’s head.
Robertson’s muffled voice came through the plastic mask. “Phil called?” His head was lifted with extreme exertion, and his eyes were high in their sockets, trying to see Ellie’s face.
She bent low so she could look into the sheriff’s eyes, and Robertson relaxed his neck. Ellie said, “Phil’s call was the first one we got on the accident. It was brief, Sheriff, but I got it down that a semi and a buggy were involved. At least that’s what I put out on the radio.”
Robertson shook his head and mumbled. He reached over and squeezed Dan Wilsher’s hand. Softly, they heard him say, “Not enough time,” and then he let Wilsher’s hand go.
Niell pulled Branden and Wilsher back into the hallway. “He’s right,” he said. “There wasn’t time for Phil to have called it in.”
Wilsher frowned and rubbed at his gray hair.
Niell said, “Come out to the parking lot. I’ve got the poles that smashed through Schrauzer’s windshield.”
Ellie joined them and they all followed Niell out onto the blacktopped parking lot of the little hospital. Missy Taggert, in a white lab coat, was bent over the open trunk of Niell’s cruiser, studying something protruding from the well. She had a tape rule and a blood sample kit, and she was using tweezers to drop a small swatch of hair into a vial.
Taggert’s eyes remained fixed on her work in the trunk, but she heard them approaching and said, “Somebody tell me how Bruce is doing before I go nuts out here.”
Ellie said, “He’s bad off, Missy.”
Niell disagreed. “He can handle it.”
Branden, sensing great concern in the coroner’s voice, encouraged her with, “I think he’s going to be fine, Missy.”
“Third-degree burns?” she asked, looking up.
“In some places,” Branden said gently.
“I’m going in,” Taggert announced.
Branden laid his hand softly on her arm and said, “Take a minute and tell us what you’ve found.”
Taggert looked into the trunk and then back to the professor. She eyed the door to the hospital’s emergency room and said, “Phil Schrauzer was killed instantly by the blow from this instrument.” She reached into the trunk, took hold of the object with both hands, and lifted out a heavy, three-legged surveyor’s tripod. The baseplate on top was covered in blood, and clumps of skin, hair, and glass chips were pressed onto it. She stood the tripod on the pavement in front of them. The three wooden legs were painted yellow, and on one of them, lettered in red, was the name J. R. Weaver.
Niell said, “I’ve stood on that hill. There can’t have been more than five seconds between Phil’s seeing the semi come over the rise and the time of the impact. Three seconds would be more like it.”
Missy said, “All I know is that this tripod came flying out of the back of Weaver’s buggy and shot through Schrauzer’s windshield before any of the soot from the fires was deposited on the hood of the car.”
Ellie asked, “Then how did he manage to call it in?”
Taggert shrugged and said, “I don’t know. As far as I can tell, he died too soon to call anyone.”
Behind them, they heard a small commotion and when they all turned around they saw Bruce Robertson balancing awkwardly on a single wooden crutch, nurses scrambling to roll his IV stand along behind him, and one doctor storming down the bright hall with a wheelchair.
Robertson balanced on the pavement and glowered at Wilsher. “You didn’t tell me he was dead.”
Missy Taggert ran up to the big sheriff and steadied him under his free arm. “You’re not supposed to be out here, Bruce,” she said, and started shouting orders to nurses and doctors alike.
Wilsher took a step or two toward Robertson and said, “The doctors didn’t want you to know.”
Robertson wavered on his legs and leaned heavily off-balance. Taggert managed to steady him long enough for the professor and Niell to reach him and take hold. The doctor scooted the wheelchair under the sheriff, and Niell and Branden lowered him onto the front edge of it, taking care not to let his back or arms touch the padding of the chair.
From his seat, Robertson looked up to Taggert and said, “I suppose that means you, Missy. Not wanting me to know about Phil.”
Missy nodded and said, “I’m more concerned about you, Sheriff.”
Robertson made a dismissive gesture with his hand. The nurses turned him around on the drive, and the doctor pushed a syringe into the port of the sheriff’s IV lines.
As they wheeled him back into the hospital, Robertson said, “No time to call. No time to back up,” and then he leaned forward and passed out, with two nurses holding him to his seat on the wheelchair.
At the back of Niell’s cruiser, Missy said to Branden, “This surveyor’s tripod went flying with all the other debris from the buggy. It whipped through the air like everything else out there, and it came through Phil Schrauzer’s windshield before he would have had time to blink, much less do anything else. Certainly before he could have made a radio call.”
4
Tuesday, August 8
8:05 A.M.
THE next morning, Professor Branden stood on the hill where, the day before, he had turned cars back north on 515 and watched through his binoculars as Robertson had struggled to save Phil Schrauzer. Again, he studied the crash scene in the valley below him. There were several cruisers from the State Highway Patrol, and a single line of traffic had been opened on the road. Troopers were posted at each end, with roadblocks to handle the flow of traffic, first in one direction and then in the other.
The semitrailer rig had been righted, and the cab stood on the west side of the road, the charred trailer on the east. A crew of several Amish men worked at the back of the overturned trailer to salvage light oak and dark cherry furniture, transferring it to smaller panel trucks. The blackened hulk of a car sat on its iron wheels where it had burned, and the one-way traffic passed slowly by, drivers rubbernecking at the destruction.
The extent of the fire had been much greater than Branden had realized. The road was blackened with soot for a good thirty yards behind the burnt car, and the grasses, shrubs, weeds, trees, and crops had been burned in large, semicircular patches on either side of the road. The blackened ground ran nearly to John R. Weaver’s house, set back forty yards on the west. In the field beyond Weaver’s house, the fire had burned to a stand of timber before the firefighters had brought it under control. That stand of timber followed a dried creek bed that edged the western border of the crops and curved around behind Weaver’s place, to within twenty yards of the back of his house. On the east, the damage was less extensive, because of the easterly breeze the day before. Here, along the edges of the blackened soil, there were still a few ribbons of smoke lifting gently off the ground.
Once down at the scene, Branden parked on the berm, well back from the investigation, and walked down the slope of the road to the point where Phil Schrauzer’s cruiser had backed up and stopped. The professor was dressed in jeans, a green and white Millersburg College T-shirt, and hiking boots. He wore a blue and red Cleveland Indian’s ballcap and a pair of mirrored sunglasses.
He saw Schrauzer’s cruiser, blackened with soot as far back as the rear doors. On the hood and windshield, under the layer of soot, he could make out the numerous dents and cracks where the car and windshield had been pelted with the debris from the buggy.