Clouds without Rain. P. L. Gaus
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remains of the carriage of the buggy sat off to one side, in the field where it had landed on impact. Several Holmes County deputies were walking slowly over the field, eyes down, gathering the smaller buggy parts to the side of the road. The sheriff’s forensics photographer, Eric Shetler, worked slowly there at the berm, taking photos of the debris that had been recovered. As Branden walked in the morning light, the sun was strong from the east, warm on his face and neck, promising another hot and rainless day.
The treads of his boots left waffle patterns in the heated blacktop. The heat reminded him of summer days in Phoenix. Caroline was there now, visiting her mother, a long-standing vacation that had risen to the status of an obligation. Branden had gone with her several times in earlier days, but had been glad, almost relieved, when Caroline had released him from that duty. Now, given the circumstances, he wondered if he shouldn’t have gone.
At the site of the impact, a sheriff’s deputy had rolled a backhoe down from its trailer and was working with the bucket to move the dead horse farther away from the pavement. A trooper was measuring the length of skid marks with a rolatape, and another trooper was bending into the cab of the semi, studying the gearshifter.
At the backhoe, Branden called up to the deputy and asked him to settle the horse on its left side. He knelt beside the flank of the horse and examined the crushed and lacerated hip and leg. The right hind leg had been torn viciously loose upon impact with the semi, and now it lay back, in line with the horse’s tail, almost completely detached, the severed flesh covered with buzzing flies and gnats. The eviscerated bowels of the horse had poured loose from a gaping tear in the belly.
Next, Branden asked to see the horse laid on its right side, and the deputy on the backhoe started working the scoop under the belly of the horse. After several attempts to roll the horse, the best they could manage was to set the forequarters of the horse on its back, its front legs stiff in the air, with the broken spine of the animal twisted, so that the hindquarters lay reasonably flat. Branden knelt beside the horse again and made a careful inspection along its flank, back toward the hip. The damage here was less severe, but there were deep scratches and skid wounds gouged into the skin so that the horse hair was torn loose in patches, showing pink underneath. The various wounds and road abrasions were laid down as raw, elongated streaks, encrusted with blood.
When Branden stood up from the horse, the deputy on the backhoe shut it down and scrambled off the machine. He walked slowly to Branden and asked, “What are you looking for, Professor?”
Branden held out his hand and said, “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
The deputy shook his hand and said, “Stan Armbruster. Newest deputy in the department, which I guess you can tell by the fact that I’m the one out here shoveling dead horse parts off the road.”
“Well, Deputy,” Branden said, “they say that horse halted in its turn into the lane, and that’s what caused the semi to strike the buggy. I was just curious why some of the witnesses would say that it looked like the back legs of the horse seemed to give out, halfway through its turn.”
“Find what you were looking for?” Armbruster asked.
“Not at all sure,” Branden said. “But I’d be a whole lot happier if we didn’t let anybody ship that horse to a fertilizer plant for the time being.”
“I’ll mention it to the LT,” Armbruster said.
“Who’s in charge this morning?” Branden asked.
Armbruster scoffed, “The ‘flying tires’ think they are, but Lieutenant Wilsher’s in the house.” He made an unfriendly gesture toward the state troopers, and shook his head with the exaggerated disdain typical of rookies.
Branden smiled, thanked Armbruster, reminded him about the horse, walked down the drive to the front porch of John R. Weaver’s house, and entered through the screened door. He found himself in a long hallway that led back to a kitchen. The wide floorboards were painted a muted gray. The walls were plain white, and the hallway was trimmed liberally with fine cherry wood.
The kitchen was fitted with a wood stove, a large metal sink with a hand pump for water, and a small wooden table and chair. There were dirty dishes scattered haphazardly about the counters and the sink, and the doorless pantry shelves seemed equally disorganized, stocked with a bounty of dried goods, canned foods, condiments, chips, flour, salt and pepper, herbs, and a couple of dozen two-liter bottles of pop. In one corner, there was a small icebox made of heavy wood, trimmed and bound with ribbons of thick black iron.
Branden glanced through the other doorways off the hall and found a bedroom, a dining room, and a sitting room, all done in the traditional plain Amish fashion of the hallway—gray floors, white walls, and rich cherry trim, the furniture old and unadorned.
Passing back through the kitchen, Branden walked out onto a wide screened porch and found a surprisingly large, boxy addition attached to the back porch, electric lights showing through the windows. An electric line ran to a corner of the addition, and a telephone line came in underneath. There was also a cable TV service wire. The roofline ascended to a peak that was even with the top windows of the second floor of the main house, and, through the tall windows of the new addition, Branden noticed a soaring, vaulted ceiling.
Inside, Branden found Dan Wilsher, in uniform, seated at a modern, black lacquer desk and computer console in the single large room. The console held a monitor, a keyboard, a color printer, and a phone/fax machine. There was also a TV set and a VCR in a far corner, with an easy chair.
The lieutenant was a tall man, somewhat overweight, about fifty years old. He was serious on the job, but handled his duties as lieutenant with a quiet ease that the deputies respected. Out of uniform, he had a reputation as a jokester, and several times he had arranged practical jokes on the sheriff, leaving Robertson to guess who had put the younger deputies up to it. This, too, Branden reflected, had made Wilsher popular with the deputies.
The latest had been one of Wilsher’s best, with Phil Schrauzer “walking point.” Even with Schrauzer gone, Branden remembered it happily. Phil had backed his car up to the Brandens’ garage on a night shift, and he and the professor had off-loaded several boxes containing the sheriff’s entire collection of Zane Grey novels, even the first-edition Harper & Brothers. Then they had met all of the other deputies, corporals and captains alike, at the jail, each bringing several old volumes scavenged from garage sales, attics, used book stores, neighbors, grandparents, even the Internet. The gag had taken the better part of a month to prepare, but the next day, on the shelves where the sheriff’s prized Zane Greys normally stood, Robertson found twenty-seven hardbound Nancy Drew mysteries. For as long as he could, he studiously ignored them.
Some days later, when he could contain himself no longer, he started in on the deputies one at a time. It took a week and a half, and it was Schrauzer himself who finally broke. Branden delivered the Zane Greys from his garage to the sheriff, and Robertson cleared out Schrauzer’s locker and glued the Nancy Drews together into a tight, immovable pack in the empty space.
Wilsher came out of his reverie, turned to Branden, waved an arm to indicate the whole of the room, and said, “Pretty amazing, don’t you think?”
Branden stepped into the room and turned in place to see what Wilsher had indicated. On three of the walls behind him, high up in the vaulted space, there were large game trophies, North American for the most part, but several from Africa, too. There were deer, elk, moose, bear, and a cougar, plus kudu, wildebeest, steenbok, and warthog. As they hung with their eyes looking down into the room, they seemed to press in on Branden like guards in a private art gallery, making the unwanted visitor nervous by their unpleasant attentions.
Beneath the trophy heads, along two of the walls, there were wooden shelves, crammed with books, travel guides, and hunting magazines. The room was paneled in dark walnut and finished with a luxuriant blue carpet. In each of the four angled ceiling lines of the vaulted room, there was a large skylight.
Branden stared at the massive heads, feeling vaguely uneasy. Wilsher said, “Come over here and have a seat. It doesn’t spook you quite so much when you’re sitting down.”