Clouds without Rain

by P. L. Gaus

  Hannah said, “Shore. Crist just doesn’t see what good it will do, already.”

  “I understand that Larry is at Aultman Hospital,” Branden offered.

  “Yes. We drove him there after Mr. Weston brought him home,” Hannah said.

  “How?” Branden asked.

  “We used old Bishop Yoder’s van,” Hannah said. “He used to keep one, you know. He even had a driver. Now we just keep it at one of our houses, and people who need it can use it. Anyways, when Larry came here yesterday afternoon, he was crying and pounding his head with his fists. He was drunk real good, and he kept moaning about a horse. Anyway, our oldest son, Elmer, drives, so he got the van from a neighbor and drove us all to Larry’s psychiatrist in Wooster. He told us to take him to Aultman. The emergency doctors there sent him up to the psychiatric ward, and we drove home. That’s when we got your message off the machine out front.”

  Branden asked, “What was it he said about the horse?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t suppose any of us could tell you, outright. Something about how sorry he was that the horse got killed. Or that he shot it. It didn’t make too much sense. Mostly he mumbled, cried, and tried to hurt himself. Crist had to force a knife out of his hand when he started cutting his arms.” She stared sadly at her fingers for a moment longer and asked, “Can you look in on him for us?”

  Branden gave his assurances and asked, “Where did he cut himself?”

  Hannah drew a finger several times across the outside of her upper arm and said, “Here.”

  “Do you know what his mental troubles are?” Cal asked.

  “Manic-depressive is what they say.”

  “Is he on lithium?” Branden asked.

  “Supposed to be,” Hannah said. “But he drinks a lot. Mr. Weston has been trying to help him, but I don’t think he’s been able to do much good.”

  Branden asked, “Are you certain he only cut his upper arms? Not his wrists?”

  “Just his upper arms,” Hannah said. “Does that mean anything?”

  Branden said, “People like Larry try to get the pain out that way. He probably wasn’t trying to hurt himself badly. Not really trying to kill himself.”

  “He’s tried that, already,” Hannah said. “My husband is worried he’s got a head like Benny. Crist has a brother in the mental house in Massillon, and he’s afraid it’s got into Larry and Benny, too. The doctors say it’s the genetics.”

  Branden nodded his head slowly, wondering if there would ever be a chance to interview Larry Yoder himself.

  “Why did the horse bother him so much?” Cal asked.

  Hannah shrugged and said, “The horse just got stuck in his head, somehow. He’d be like that, sometimes. Couldn’t stop thinking about things that troubled him.”

  Branden said, “I gathered that you spoke to your new bishop about this.”

  “Yes. Because Crist was so uncertain about calling you. We both went to see him. The bishop said we should tell you everything.”

  Cal helped himself to another slice of bread and apple butter, and Branden said, “John Weaver is tied up with your son somehow?”

  “It’s roundabout,” Hannah said. “John used to be active in the congregation. Lately, he wasn’t. But back when he was active, he helped several of the boys get started on their farms.”

  “Larry knew about that?” Branden asked.

  “Oh yes. Everybody did. It was good, then. The young men got their land with no down payments.”

  “Are you aware,” Branden asked, “that those lands are now being sold off for housing developments?”

  “Our Larry told us that was going to happen, about a month ago. He was angry that John Weaver was tryin’ to swindle people out here. Anyways, it was a good deal back then. John R. owned most of the land hereabouts, and our district was growing too fast. He sold at a fair price, and let the boys pay it off as they could. Our Elmer was one of them.”

  “They had leases, with options to buy after fifteen years,” Cal said.

  “We’re coming up pretty close to that, now,” Hannah remarked.

  “And you haven’t heard about Weaver’s sell-off?” Branden asked.

  “The bishop said something like that could happen, already. I won’t believe that Amish would do that to Amish. Won’t believe it until I see the sheriff out here movin’ families off their land.”

  “You also said Larry seemed to know something about this, almost a month ago.”

  “He did.”

  “How?”

  “Surveying, I guess.”

  “Surveying?”

  “Larry worked for the Weston Company, as a surveyor.”

  “I was just out at Jim Weston’s offices,” Branden said. “They told me Larry got himself fired.”

  “It’s true,” Hannah said and sighed. “But, if you really want to know, it was Brittany Sommers’s company. Larry told us Weston owned only 40 percent.”

  “Where was Larry surveying?” Branden asked.

  “All around Walnut Creek.”

  “North?”

  “North and south. He’s been working the same areas for the last month or so.”

  “How do you know that?” Cal asked.

  “Larry visited a lot,” Hannah said. “Likes to take his suppers here. We all thought it was pretty strange work, but he said he was cutting out small tracts of land for houses over near Wines-burg, and that he was supposed to start doing the same thing near Walnut Creek, pretty soon.”

  19

  Saturday, August 12

  8:45 A.M.

  BRANDEN sat at his desk in his corner office on the second floor of the old history building at Millersburg College, reviewing the manuscript changes that his executive assistant, Lawrence Mallory, had penciled into their latest paper. Branden’s desk was backed up into the angle in a corner of the office, where the oak-trimmed windows of two walls gave him a view of the commencement Oak Grove, with its tall oaks and distinguished maples. He laid the manuscript on his desk and turned his desk chair to face the windows. His gaze wandered across the lawns and the flower beds, where, each spring, his seniors celebrated after commencement, still not participants in the workaday world, but no longer simply college students, either.

  After a few peaceful memories, Branden’s eyes lost their focus on the scene below, and his mind returned to the puzzle of facts in the Weaver/Sommers cases. Time passed, and he let his thoughts, mere suspicions that flickered lightly into consciousness, carry him randomly through the case without the need or inclination to organize, sort, or ponder specific facts.

  In time, Mallory spoke from his desk in a vestibule at the front of the office. “Doc,” he intoned. “I don’t think you’re working on our manuscript anymore.”

  Branden swung himself away from the windows, took another page of the document, and tried to focus his thoughts on the soft pencil additions and corrections that Lawrence had made in a delicate hand. As with the other pages, each editorial suggestion Lawrence had made was sensible and helpful, improving the writing by adding a touch here and there of the smooth and graceful prose that Branden had learned, over the years, to expect from Mallory. If Lawrence had penciled something into the text, it was because it needed to be there. If he had taken something out, it was because it was superfluous.

  Branden gathered the pages together, stacked them on edge, started across the room and said, “It all looks good to me, Lawrence.”

  “Did you read it all?” Lawrence asked, with mild insistence, from behind his desk.

  “Almost everything,” Branden said and smiled.

  “Mike, sometimes I think ...”

  Branden interrupted. “It’s all excellent, Lawrence. Everything. You know what we’re after with this one.”

  Mallory laced his fingers together on top of his desk and said, “Hoped you would like it. Especially that new lead into our analysis of the action at Resaka.”

  “It’s very fine, indeed, Lawrence,” Branden said and droppe
d the pages onto Mallory’s desk. “Make your changes and send it off. Let’s try a different editor this time.”

  “Maybe Schoefield?”

  “That’d be fine.”

  Lawrence took up the pages and arranged them fastidiously beside his computer. Without looking up, as he began work on the document, he said, “I see you’ve finished with the Hall carbine.”

  “It’s a nice piece,” Branden said. “Are we going to be able to use it, or should I send it back to the owner?”

  “It’ll go well in our early Civil War period.”

  “There weren’t that many Halls in the Civil War.”

  “Enough,” Lawrence said. “They were issued to the Eighth New York Cavalry. The model 1843s were all over. First and Second North Carolina Cavalry, and Second Florida’s, too.”

  Branden congratulated Mallory with a broad smile and a military salute and said, “Lawrence, you’ll be having my job, someday.”

  “Just say the word,” Lawrence quipped.

  Branden laughed and strolled back to stand behind his desk. With his hands in his pockets, he studied the lawn outside his windows. Early as it was, the morning sun came in through the windows with the intensity one expects only in the Southwest. Branden, accustomed to the cool woodlands and cloudy skies of northeastern Ohio, squinted at the light, and thought of the drought that had settled onto the farmlands of the county. The temperature outside was climbing into the nineties again, and the glaring light made the professor nervous.

  After a while, Lawrence stopped typing and said, “I hear you’re working the Brittany Sommers disappearance.”

  “Also the Weaver murder.”

  “That wasn’t an accident?”

  “The coroner pulled a .30-caliber bullet out of the horse.”

  “Do you know who did it?” Lawrence asked.

  “Can’t say for sure,” Branden said, “but Larry Yoder, an Amish fellow gone English, looks like a good suspect.”

  “That’s the Larry Yoder up in the Aultman psych ward?” Lawrence asked.

  “You know about that?”

  “Gossip is king in this county, Professor.”

  “Well, then, yeah. Larry Yoder looks good for the Weaver murder right now.” Branden added, “I’ve got to get out to Sommers’s house now. Then there’s still Larry Yoder to see, and Bruce Robertson later at the Children’s Hospital burn unit in Akron. You sure you’re all squared away on that paper?”

  “No problem, Mike,” Lawrence said. “If there’s anything you need, just let me know.” Then Mallory added, “Larry Yoder might be a handful, Doc.”

  “You know something, Lawrence?”

  “He’s some kind of trouble, is all. Anyway, there are rumors.”

  “About the shooting?”

  “No, earlier. Maybe he’s out of it now, but back in his Amish days, Larry Yoder was into some foul stuff. At least that’s what I heard at the time.”

  “Like what?”

  “Something about rituals,” Mallory said, with a distasteful expression.

  “Good grief, Lawrence, he used to be Amish.”

  “It’s just what I hear.”

  “I guess I’m not all that surprised,” Branden said, and left, thinking of the obvious connection to two goat’s-head masks.

  At Sommers’s house, Branden parked off the drive in the stand of pines where he had parked during the fire. There was a sheriff’s black-and-white cruiser in the driveway, and Ricky Niell’s distinctively large, black 4x4. Around back, Branden stepped over the scattered shards of glass on the patio and opened the back door to the kitchen. Inside, he found Dan Wilsher and Ricky Niell. Wilsher was using a Polaroid camera, and he had a 35 mm outfit strung back over his shoulder. Niell held an aluminum tripod, on top of which was an intense lamp. A battery pack for the lamp rested below, on a shelf within the legs of the tripod. The odor and sting of smoke was pervasive.

  Wilsher snapped a shot of char patterns on what was left of an interior wall, and then swung the 35 mm camera around and took several more shots with a close-up lens, while Niell held the light on the spot. Wilsher pulled the 35 mm camera back over his shoulder, said, “Newell said you’d be coming out,” and shook Branden’s hand. “Not sure how much you can see. Electricity’s been off since the fire.”

  Niell and the lieutenant were dressed in old work clothes and wore high rubber boots. Their clothes were sooted with black smudges from the burned timbers and blackened debris of the scene. Niell’s hands were also black, and there were sooty marks on his face.

  “The state fire marshal’s office was out here yesterday and ruled it was arson,” Wilsher continued. “Niell, there, can fill you in. Andy Shetler’s on vacation, so I have to take these photos.”

  Niell followed Wilsher around the room, training the light on each area the lieutenant pointed out for a photograph.

  To Branden, Niell said, “The fire chief and his crew will serve as expert witnesses that there was gasoline, a lot of it, on the scene, but I took some samples out of the floor crevices for Taggert. I guess she’s got a way to test for gasoline.”

  “What do you mean by ‘a lot of it’?” Branden asked.

  “There’s swirling char patterns everywhere,” Niell said. “On the floors, the furniture, file cabinets, counters, and walls. There’s also a trail of swirling burns outside on the patio, leading back toward the woods. The windows are blown out pretty uniformly. So, whoever it was pulled papers out of the filing cabinets in the study, doused them all, and everything else for that matter, opened most of the windows, poured himself a fuse out onto the patio, and touched her off from out there. The fumes had saturated the rooms, and when the fuse burnt to the door, the flames erupted almost everywhere, at once, blowing out the glass in the top panes. Then also, all the charring patterns, like alligator skins on the uprights, are fairly uniform, meaning the fire burned evenly, everywhere at once. There wasn’t an identifiable point of origin.”

  Branden said, “You’ve done some studying, Ricky.”

  “Just got a lecture from the fire marshal, yesterday,” Niell said. “Anyway, the marshal says it was torched by an amateur.”

  Branden’s eyes questioned.

  “He didn’t pour a long enough fuse,” Ricky explained.

  Branden asked, “And how do you know the fire spread through gasoline that had been splashed all around? You said even on the walls.”

  “That was the fire marshal’s call,” Niell said. “There are two types of charring patterns on the walls. Some near the floor that burned up inaVshape. Then others higher on the walls, that burned in an inverted V shape. There was also thorough burning in all the open file cabinet drawers, and on all the furniture. Like the fire started all throughout the back two rooms, pretty much simultaneously.”

  Branden considered that as he followed Niell to a new location for a photograph and then said, “Who spotted the fire, Ricky?”

  “A Millersburg cop. Bill Hadley. Coming in that morning for his shift.”

  “Did he describe the fire?”

  Niell said, “He saw tall plumes of dense, black smoke, found the rear of the house engulfed, and called it in.”

  Branden said, “The black smoke fits with the gasoline.”

  They stepped over scattered debris in the kitchen and started taking pictures in the study. A wooden desk was charred and blackened, the desk chair blown over backwards onto the floor. The metal filing cabinets had sagged from the heat of the flames. The drawers, all opened, held tangled wads of burned and water-logged papers. Branden stepped to the drawers and found all of the pages blackened to the bottom, where thin white edges that had been protected from the heat stood out against the black at the top of the papers. Branden tried to lift several pages from various drawers, but they crumbled as he pulled on them. Giving up, he came back to Niell and watched the photographic work for a while.

  After studying the debris that had been scattered by the explosion, Branden said, “It looks as if stuff is blo
wn in about every direction. Just scattered randomly. No apparent direction of blast.”

  Niell said, “The fire marshal said that happens with low-order explosions.”

  “This was a low-order explosion?” Branden queried.

  “Yeah,” Ricky said. “Compared to what you’d get with gun-powder or plastique.”

  Branden nodded, satisfied with what he understood now about the fire. He said, “I had hoped to search for some documents here.”

  Wilsher shot a Polaroid and stood up. “There’s nothing left to see, Mike. Taggert has the papers that were laid out on the floor to burn, but there’s little more than ash.”

  As Wilsher started to pack up his cameras, Branden asked, “Do you mind if I have a look through the rest of the house?”

  Wilsher thought it over, said, “No,” and added, “but take Niell with his light there. The department turned off the electricity during the fire, and all the curtains were pulled before the fire. I’d like them to stay that way for now, so the whole house is dark.”

  Branden passed through the kitchen and into the living room, Niell trailing with his portable light. “Sommers evidently isn’t much of a housekeeper,” Niell observed.

  In the living room, laundry was piled on a sofa, and magazines were strewn across an end table and on the floor around the table. In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet was disorganized, and the countertops were scattered with an array of toiletries, some bottles spilled over onto their sides. The wastebasket was surrounded by a pile of tissues, cast haphazardly onto the floor. In the bedroom, the drawers and closets were open, and clothes lay in tumbled clutters, some still on hangers from a dry cleaners, others dangling out of drawers. Shoes spilled out of the closet onto the floor. The bed was unmade, and the sheets were pulled off, as if Sommers had intended to change them. The mattress had slipped a little off-center from the box springs.

  Outside, Branden helped Niell pack the lamp, pole, and battery into their carrying case in the back of Niell’s 4x4. Then he thanked the deputy and said, “Something’s not right, Ricky.”

  Niell rested his elbows on the side of the truck bed and said, “The house looks torn up.”