Separate from the World

by P. L. Gaus

  There was a shout, “Let him go!” and a snarl from another voice, “Take your hands off me!” Someone barked, “No cops!” and several voices repeated the cry.

  Professor Newhouse spoke a few calming words to try to settle his students down as he moved among them, asking for more restraint. But Newhouse’s students had taken his course about “The Sixties” to heart. The chant rang out: “NO COPS! NOT HERE! NOT AGAIN!” Newhouse persisted, however, and with great effort he was able to prevail. The protesters fell momentarily quiet. As they stood in place, eyeing Niell with evident scorn, one of the sheriff’s deputies took up a position too close to the protesters, and scuffling broke out again.

  Seeing the anger rising, Niell hustled his bare-chested prisoner over to his cruiser and pulled the back door open, stuffing the boy inside. The shouts from the crowd peaked when Niell closed the door of the cruiser, with the senior Eddie Hunt-Myers struggling awkwardly in the back, hands pinned behind him, a dazed confusion frozen on his face.

  Robertson waded into the crowd like a bulldozer, pushing people back from the paramedics, who were struggling to load the dead girl’s body onto their gurney. College security officers arrived on foot and helped move the most vocal and irate critics back several steps. And the mob fell suddenly silent when tall, lanky Ben Capper, the chief of security for the college, barked through a megaphone, “Stand back! Right now! I’m not going to tell you again.”

  Capper had a fierce glare in his eyes, and his bony fingers were locked onto the grip of his megaphone as if he were strangling a rattlesnake. The muscles in his face clenched and bunched over strong cheekbones and a cleft chin. His black hair, cut to a military style, was standing up on end, as if he’d just waxed it into place. He was a military man in a boring job, looking for purpose, and his eyes promised trouble for anyone who would defy him.

  The crowd of students and professors responded to the intensity of his command, seeming to back-pedal a half-dozen steps while still holding together as a loose mob. Their postures promised that they were ready to surge again.

  Niell walked over from his cruiser, took the megaphone from Capper, and announced calmly but sternly, “This is your friend here on the gurney. Show some respect.”

  Newhouse stepped forward and said, “Your work is done, here, Sheriff. You need to leave. We want no cops on our campus.”

  One fellow in the crowd shouted, “No cops!” and others took up his lead, chanting, “NO COPS! NO COPS!” as if it were an antiwar rally over Vietnam, or Iraq.

  Professor Newhouse raised his hands for everyone to see and silenced the crowd. Again he said to Robertson, “You need to leave, Sheriff.”

  Robertson started to address the man, but Branden came up behind him and said, “You need to move your people off campus with the ambulance, Sheriff, and let this guy burn himself out on adrenalin. He’ll whip up this crowd, if you let him bait you like this. He hates police. He’s gonna try to make this a civil rights issue, and you don’t want that.”

  Disliking it intensely, Robertson nevertheless took Branden’s advice. He gave Niell a hand signal, took hold of the side rail on the gurney, and started the paramedics back toward the ambulance with the dead girl’s body. Once she was loaded, the deputies got into their cruisers and followed Niell out of the oak grove and down off the college heights into town.

  With the sheriff’s people gone, the crowd lost heat quickly and began to thin out. Newhouse corralled the remnant, saying quietly, “I’ve seen all this before. Cops have no business taking one of us away in handcuffs!”

  A student at his side shouted out again, “No cops! No cops!” but Newhouse laid a strong hand on his shoulder and caused him to stop, saying, “We’ll be back at the courthouse this afternoon for our Iraq protests. That’s the time to deal with our sheriff. In the meantime, study the tactics of the police in arresting the Chicago Seven. Study up on this. I want you to appreciate what it is you saw here.”

  Aidan Newhouse was one of the most senior professors on campus. His gray hair was tied back severely into a thin ponytail, and his skin was pasty white and mottled with old acne scars. He had an angular jawline that accented his ire when he struck a stubborn or disgruntled pose. Most of the time he was angry about one thing or disappointed about another, and he harbored an animosity toward police that he was quick to explain to anyone who would listen. He’d spent several nights in a small-town southern jail in his college years, arrested during protests in the sixties.

  A core of a dozen people, students mostly but some faculty too, formed a circle around their leader and kept vigil while he lectured about cops, Vietnam, and “the movement.” This was grand theater to him—the true classroom. It was a teachable moment, served up to him more perfectly than he himself could have devised. It was a true pity about the girl, he thought, but he would no more waste this moment than he would surrender his professorship. He’d taught about the sixties for many long years, and as he spoke, he felt the intense and dynamic emotions of a true believer, set free at last to answer the call of his generation.

  Chief of Security Ben Capper watched the crowd disperse until there remained only Professor Aidan Newhouse and six students. As Newhouse droned on about the sixties, Capper listened at a distance and knew that here was real trouble.

  “Aidan Newhouse” was a file as thick as a dictionary in Ben Capper’s security office, and Capper knew that Newhouse would do just about anything to relive the glories of his youth. He was a shrill anti-Iraq war protester, and the clear leader of the groups who had taken to marching down at the courthouse square. Capper knew them all too well.

  He knew the protest songs they played over their loudspeakers —Jimi Hendrix, doing Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” That Neil Young group doing “Four Dead in Oh Hi Oh.” The Doors. Jefferson Airplane. Janis Joplin. He knew the songs, and he knew the chants. He’d seen all their signs and placards before, when he came home from Vietnam. Ben Capper had been here before. These were the people who had spit on him when he got off the plane from Saigon. He knew what these people could do.

  But Ben Capper knew Aidan Newhouse best of all. He was the worst—a Marxist instigator. An America hater. A flag burner. And many times now, Capper had promised himself that if that hippie professor ever burned an American flag on the campus grounds, he’d club the insufferable toad into paste.

  The trouble was, Newhouse was the worst sort of person to provoke, and if he ever found out that Capper had been keeping a file on him, he’d organize, that very day, a hundred grungy students to protest in front of President Laughton’s residence, demanding the chief of security’s resignation. Newhouse was that detestable type of bully who, if given even half a chance, would end Ben Capper’s career over a trifle.

  Mike Branden stood alone in the oak grove, several dozen yards away from Professor Newhouse, and again found himself unable to move. He was vaguely aware of the problem, but could not respond to it. Or perhaps he was unwilling to respond. Unwilling to move. He did not know for sure. He was stunned like a soldier in the fog.

  He did not have to hear Newhouse’s words to understand what the psychology professor was saying. The two of them had debated the issues of the sixties enough to be able to recite one another’s very thoughts. Newhouse was born to be a dissenter. He was bred to be an activist. He had been annealed to an academician’s life by the events of his youth, and he truly and everlastingly believed the things he taught. Branden found himself smiling weakly and shaking his head as he realized how perfect this moment was for Newhouse the teacher—an authority despiser since the days of teargas and police dogs on the nation’s campuses.

  But Cathy Billett was dead, Branden’s student Eddie Hunt-Myers was down at the jail, maybe still in handcuffs, and the professor couldn’t get his mind to work for the second time that day. His contemplation of retirement and his weariness with his profession had now been washed through with a cleansing rinse of shock and sorrow, making all of his dissatisfactions
seem trivial. Cathy Billett had died within view of his office windows. Which of his disaffections mattered now?

  Though his heart was wet with tears, and his feet were cased in lead, he managed somehow to turn and start moving. He had only a distant notion that he should go somewhere, and after a few steps, he found he was headed home. He did not care where he was going, really. He merely followed his instincts to move forward in his sorrow, still in the fog of shock.

  In slow, irregular steps, he moved through the oak grove to the curb. His eyes were focused inward, but when he turned toward the parking lot behind the history building, he saw the dwarf Enos Erb guiding a buggy out of the lot. Branden’s vision seemed focused only on Erb and his buggy. His sight was tunneled, and the rest of the world around him was a blur.

  Erb drove a black buggy of regular size, hitched to a brown Standard Bred horse. He sat on the seat with his legs out straight, balanced like a bowling ball on a porch swing. Erb turned his horse in Branden’s direction, came up to him slowly, and stopped his buggy at the curb beside him. There was both sorrow and alarm in his eyes.

  Erb whispered, “Is that poor girl really dead?”

  Branden nodded.

  Erb studied his hands on the reins for several beats and then asked, “If sex is free, Professor, then what is left to cherish in marriage?”

  Branden tipped his head, but provided no answer.

  A long pause lay between the two men, and then Erb said, “Professor, that girl was young.”

  Branden nodded. He had no words to offer.

  Erb asked, “Do they really live together? Do they know each other like the bumps on their own heads?”

  “I suppose,” Branden said, feeling weariness at the core.

  “We hear about these things,” Erb remarked, aware of the professor’s sorrow. He shook his head and added, “I’ve never seen a dead girl like that before. You know, a suicide.”

  Because Branden could think of nothing better to say, he responded simply, “I’m sorry you saw that, Mr. Erb,” and added in a whisper, “She was my student.”

  Gently, Erb said, “I’m sorry for you, Professor. I am truly so very sorry. I don’t know what to say. Our children die, too, you see. We lose them to diseases and highway crashes with cars. There are sometimes accidents on the farm. Yes, we know death well, even the death of children. But not like that. Not suicide, Professor. I can’t tell you that I know anything about suicide.”

  Branden said nothing. His eyes were focused on the pavement, and he could not think what reply he might make to this simplest of men. He could not think how any reply could be adequate. How anyone could understand what had happened. Really, he couldn’t think at all. He was still in the fog.

  5

  Friday, May 11 10:00 A.M.

  IT WAS TWO short blocks to the Brandens’ brick house on a cul-de-sac near the college, but it took the professor twenty minutes to walk it. He unlocked the front door with a surreal mechanical fumbling, stepped inside, and walked down the front hallway to the kitchen, where he found a note on his wife’s stationery. He ran his eyes over the handwritten letters several times before the words came into focus:

  You’ll be done soon, Sweetheart.

  Try not to be morose.

  I know you don’t like commencements anymore,

  but Monday will come and go as quickly as ever.

  Cal has news.

  I’m down at his church.

  Love,

  Caroline

  Branden let Caroline’s note slip back onto the table, and he took a cleansing breath. His eyes found the wooden bench at the end of their long backyard, and he remembered the dwarf’s words: “I think my brother was murdered.”

  At the hall closet, Branden got out of his sandals and padded into the living room. The soft carpet was cool on his feet, and he discovered that he could think clearly about that. About the cool carpet. Just that for now, but it was enough. It was familiar. The soft carpet registered with him reassuringly. He dropped into a swivel rocker and looked around at the familiar room. Here is where he sat to read—in this soft chair. There is the couch where Caroline read each night. The photographs on the wall were scenes he recognized, beach scenes from Michigan and red barns and farm fields from the Holmes County countryside. With the thought, “This is home,” his mind cleared partially, and he thought about Eddie Hunt-Myers. He thought about the handcuffs. He remembered his duty to his student, and he rose, walked back to the hall closet, and slipped back into his sandals.

  As he walked through the laundry room to the garage, he covered his T-shirt with a yellow windbreaker. He backed his small white truck out onto the street and drove down to the courthouse, thinking of Enos Erb saying—“Then what is left to cherish in marriage?”

  The professor parked his truck in the courthouse alley behind the red brick jail and hurried around to the north entrance, past the tall Civil War monument. Inside, to the right, he found Ellie Troyer-Niell behind her wooden counter, seated with her back to him, clicking the mouse on her computer. When he said, “Hi, Ellie,” she turned around and said, “I hear you had trouble up at the college.”

  “One of my students,” Branden said softly, hating the sound of his words. “Evidently a suicide.”

  “I’m sorry, Mike. I didn’t know she was your student.”

  “In my history class,” Branden said. “Bruce brought in her boyfriend?”

  “Not here, he didn’t,” Ellie said. “They’re all up at the hospital.”

  Branden nodded and turned to go.

  Ellie said, “I’m really sorry about your student, Mike.”

  “Thanks,” Branden said, and turned back to her. “You know anything about the recent murder of a Benjamin Erb? An Amish fellow?”

  “Missy ruled that accidental,” Ellie said.

  “Do you know what happened?”

  “The man fell off a ladder, is all I know. Broke his neck in a fall.”

  “OK, thanks,” Branden said, and left, remembering Erb’s directness—“I think my brother was murdered.”

  On the Wooster Road north of the courthouse, Branden turned right onto the hillside grounds of Joel Pomerene Memorial Hospital. He parked downhill from the rear entrance and walked through sliding glass doors into Melissa Taggert’s coroner’s suite in the basement.

  In the antiseptic hallway outside the office and labs, he found Ricky Niell awash in harsh fluorescent lighting, taking notes on a spiral pad while listening to Eddie Hunt-Myers, who was out of his handcuffs. Hunt-Myers still looked stunned, hair disheveled.

  He was a tall, powerfully built Floridian, with a butternut tan and bleached blond hair that suggested he’d been out in the sun on spring break. His eyebrows were blond and bushy, and the blond hairs of his chest were a tangle at the neckline of the green hospital scrubs he wore. His blue eyes roamed restlessly from place to place as he talked, and his hands worked nervously in front of his chest. Coming closer, Branden could see that Eddie’s eyelids were red and swollen—he’d obviously been crying, and there was a scattering of wadded tissues on the floor at his feet. When he saw Branden, Eddie croaked out, “Help me, Dr. Branden! I think I’m losing my mind.”

  Branden came up beside Ricky Niell and asked, “Do you have what you need for now?”

  “Think so,” Niell said. He looked at Eddie, shook his head, and asked the professor, “You knew the girl, too?”

  Eddie folded at the knees and dropped to the floor, crying, “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  Niell and Branden helped the boy up, and Branden sat on a hallway bench with him.

  Ricky asked, “You got this, Mike? Can you sit here with him?”

  Branden nodded and gave his attention to Eddie.

  Ricky said, “Then I’m going to find the sheriff,” and moved down the hall.

  Eddie started rocking back and forth on the seat and groaning while he wrung his hands in his lap. “He thinks I hurt her, Dr. Branden,” he said. “They think I hurt C
athy.”

  Branden laid his hand on Eddie’s shoulder and said, “Take it easy, now, Eddie,” but Eddie flinched at the touch, and tears streamed down his cheeks.

  Through his own sorrow, Branden said, “We’ll get through this, Eddie.”

  Eddie shouted, “I won’t! Not ever!” and jumped to his feet, punching his fists against the sides of his head as if he wanted to crush his skull, to force the images of Cathy Billett from his mind.

  Branden got up and pulled Eddie’s fists to his sides, saying, “Sit down, Eddie. Tell me what happened.” He had to wrap Eddie’s fingers in his hands to keep him from tearing at his hair.

  Eddie let the professor guide him back to the bench. With a look of utter misery, Eddie whispered, “I did this, Professor. They’re right. I killed Cathy. I might as well have thrown her off the tower myself.”

  Branden said, “Tell me what happened, Eddie,” and let go of the boy’s hands.

  Eddie wrapped his arms across his stomach and started rocking again where he sat. He looked over briefly at the professor and then fixed his gaze at the far wall. Still whispering, he said, “I told her I didn’t want us to be together anymore. I loved her, but I told her we were through.”

  “Eddie,” Branden started, then stalled.

  Eddie shot another glance at the professor and said, “It’s my fault. It’s my fault, and now she’s dead. I still love her, Dr. Branden. I still feel her. But I knew we had to break up, and I told her that this morning. That’s when she ran to the edge and jumped.”

  Sheriff Robertson stood farther down the hall, leaning his considerable bulk into the doorway to Missy Taggert’s office, and from the tone of his voice, Branden surmised that he was not happy right then with his wife.