Blood of the Prodigal

by P. L. Gaus

  Last was the vest. He tried a dark denim jacket with snaps, but it worked against his memory of Jonah Miller in the ditch. Then a dark blue vest with buttons. Still not right. And Millie shrugged, stepped into an adjoining room marked “Employees Only,” and brought out an exact duplicate of the one Jonah Miller had bought, saying it was the last. She had been saving it for him, but—well, now he wouldn’t need it, would he?

  It was made of black cloth. Midnight black, Millie said. It had no collar and no sleeves. There was no fancy stitching anywhere on the fabric. Instead of snaps or buttons, it closed with hooks and eyes. Branden put it on and left it hanging loosely open.

  Last came the hat, and finally they stood together in front of the mirror, studying the perfect picture of Amish propriety in dress.

  “Just shave around your mouth, Michael, and even Bishop Miller would have trouble recognizing you,” Caroline said to her husband. She gave him a gentle nudge, moving him closer to the mirror.

  Out in the sales area, Branden exchanged the straw hat for a broad-brimmed, black felt hat with a flat, three-inch brim and a plain, round, five-inch dome. Then he found Dravenstott behind the cash register, waited his turn bedecked in black, and asked how much for the entire outfit, including both the straw hat and the black one. A family of tourists gathered out front on the sidewalk and stared at him, chattering and pointing. A flashbulb popped white light through the window, but when he turned around to look, they were gone.

  Millie rang it up from memory, looked at the paper slip and gave him the total. He picked out a straight razor, shaving cream, a little green bottle of Mennen Skin Bracer, and paid for it all.

  “Could I use your washroom a bit longer?” Branden asked, gathering up his purchases. Millie checked the store for customers, nodded, and stepped down from her crate.

  In the back room, after customers had cleared the store, Branden questioned Millie again about the clothes. “You’re certain this is the outfit you sold to Jonah Miller?”

  “Except for the black felt hat. I didn’t sell him one of those at first,” Millie said.

  “At first?”

  “Yes. As with the vest that you are now wearing, Professor, he asked me to set aside certain items. Said he’d ride back for them if everything worked out.” She thought a few seconds, eyeing the vest, and then craned her neck to look up to Branden and added, “The little boy agreed. So I kept a few things aside for him.”

  Caroline gasped, “He had a child with him?”

  “Yes,” Millie said, puzzled. “He called him ‘Little Jerry,’ or something like that.”

  Branden turned to look in the mirror and asked, “The boy was dressed like this?”

  Millie considered for a moment and looked up sideways at Caroline with an expression of growing curiosity. Then she said, “Yes, but somehow different.”

  “Please,” Caroline said, “we’re trying to find ...”

  Branden cut her off. “We’re trying to find what became of Jonah Miller after they left your store,” he explained.

  “I’m not quite certain,” Millie said, perplexed.

  “Did they leave together?” Branden asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did they drive?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Buggy?”

  “Not as I recall,” Millie said. Then she looked anxiously back into the store, excused herself, and hurried with small, swinging steps to the front of the store, where she worked the cash register expertly from atop her overturned crate.

  In the back room, Branden told Caroline, “We mustn’t let her know anything about our looking for Jeremiah.” She appeared eager to argue the point, so he explained. “There’s still a day and a half before I have to explain any of this to Bruce Robertson. I gave Miller my word. Now, the only thing we can do, while the police do their work, is to trace Jonah Miller’s path home. He bought clothes here, and as I said last night, that’s very significant. Now we’re going to stop for supper and then show up, out at the Miller’s place, and let them know what we know. They all knew it too, on the day that Jonah was killed. If anyone in Miller’s district is mixed up in this, perhaps we’ll put enough pressure on to flush them out. The whole thing hinges on the fact that everybody out there knew what it meant that Jonah was dressed Amish.”

  “And if that doesn’t work?” Caroline asked.

  “Then whoever has Jeremiah has got to be a thousand miles away by now,” Branden said grimly. “At least we will know that.”

  “And?”

  “And then I’ll have to go down to the jail and explain to the sheriff why I’ve withheld evidence in his murder case.” He looked himself over in the mirror and added, “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  At the cash register, while she waited for her husband, Caroline asked, “You said little Jerry looked somehow different to you. Different from the professor, that is. Was it his dress, attire?” Even on the crate, Millie came only to Caroline’s shoulders.

  “Been thinking about that,” Millie said, and hopped down and around on tiptoes to straighten the gum and hard candies at the front of the register display. “It was his hair, I think.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “You know. Not cut right,” she said. “You get so used to seeing the kids come through the store. And they always look the same. It gets so as you’re surprised when you see something different.”

  “Go on,” Caroline said.

  “Well, with the boy, his hair was cut too short. You know, not Amish style. And with his father, it seemed like he was trying to let his hair grow out. They both ended up looking strange. Everything Amish but the hair. Hats looked OK, but you wanted to see more hair under them.”

  Caroline thought about that and glanced to the back of the store, curious. “Can you think of anything else?”

  “Just the complete change that the clothes made in him,” she said. “They both looked so plain going out. Changed completely.”

  “What do you mean, completely changed?” Caroline asked.

  “I’d have to show you. Mr. Miller came in here looking like he came from another world.”

  “You said you can show me?”

  “Suppose it can’t hurt any. I’ve still got his clothes. He asked me to save them for him too, just like with the vest. In case something or other didn’t work out.”

  “Can I see them?” Caroline asked, stepping back from the counter to clear a way.

  “Can’t see any harm,” Millie said.

  In a corner behind the large, old-style white metal meat cooler, she bent over, lifted a cardboard box nearly as big as herself, and lugged it to the checkout counter. Then she stepped around the counter, mounted her crate, and watched Caroline open the box and lift out a Dallas Cowboys ball cap, a pair of slim-cut western jeans, an elaborately stitched leather belt with a silver Lone Star buckle, and a bright green western shirt with rose embroidery. There was also a gold-plated Zippo lighter and a silver wristwatch with an elaborate turquoise band. Caroline groaned, understanding instinctively that the search for Jeremiah Miller could take them anywhere, now. Anywhere at all.

  As they stood at the counter, studying the fancy English clothes, the watchband, and the lighter, Branden emerged from the back room, grinning broadly.

  “I knew it!” Caroline exclaimed and dropped the lighter onto the counter. “Michael Branden, I can’t take you anywhere.”

  Millie leaned out over the counter, looked around the cash register toward the back of the store, and saw a plain-as-can-be Amish farmer. Flat-brimmed black felt hat. Plain black vest with no collar. White shirt with long sleeves. Dark denim trousers with cloth suspenders. Brown work boots. And a short, brown beard, trimmed Amish around his upper and lower lip where he had shaved himself clean, to resemble the corpse of Jonah Miller.

  19

  Wednesday, June 24

  4:00 P.M.

  “I HAVEN’T been able to turn up anything under the name Jonah Miller,” the
sheriff was explaining to Melissa Taggert. They were in her small office next to the coroner’s labs. Melissa sat in a swivel chair in front of her desk. Her arms were longer than the rests on the chair, and her wrists were bent over the ends. She wore a white lab coat unbuttoned at the front, with black slacks and a solid pastel green blouse. It looked to Robertson like silk.

  Melissa studied the jumbled mess on her desk and laughed. “I don’t see where you’re going with this, Bruce, but I’ve got a positive identification of the body. From Bishop Miller, no less.”

  She pulled up in her swivel chair and began to straighten the papers on her desk. “Would Ellie Troyer let you keep such a mess down at the jail?”

  Robertson reached a hand over, laid it on the papers she was shuffling, and said, “Missy, listen. I’m not actually saying it isn’t Jonah Miller. I’m saying he has not lived as Jonah Miller in nearly ten years.”

  When Robertson had arrived, they had opened the files on top of the grey metal desk. Then they had sat together, pulled up to the desk, looking at Andy Shetler’s photographs and Taggert’s report on the autopsy. Now the file, the photos, the lab tests, documents, and a voice tape of the autopsy lay in a scrambled heap on top of her desk. And Melissa Taggert chuckled again at the spontaneous eruption of disorder that Robertson always managed to produce in her office. She thought to herself, “typical Class A personality—an overcompensated male.”

  Melissa Taggert was an organized and meticulous scientist. At the end of a day, there wouldn’t be so much as an unwashed beaker or a flask out of its place. As she worked, she had formed the habit of organizing even the dirty glassware that accumulated. Her instruments, tools, equipment, and samples stayed clean and organized because she worked hard to keep them that way. It was the only way she knew to do science.

  In the few years she had worked as Holmes County Coroner, she had learned to guard her labs jealously when Sheriff Robertson was around. He simply could not talk without fiddling with something. She had guessed correctly that it was because the morgue made him nervous.

  Today, she had managed to confine him to her office, but there was no way to predict when the chaotic sheriff might spill over into her labs. She watched him take a tape cassette from the top of her desk and turn it idly in his fingers. She retrieved it with a smile and teased, “Bruce, I think I must make you nervous.”

  “Missy, sometimes I don’t know what in the world you’re talking about.”

  She sighed and said, “I know.”

  Robertson looked blankly at her, not knowing what to think. She was pretty. Not too slender. And she was easy to talk to. Robertson wondered why, and decided it was because she never took a tone with him. She never had gotten rattled when he had been in one of his moods. Truth was, he told himself, she was fun, happy, friendly, and he often came here because he liked being around her. Not her labs, though. It was her. He thought briefly that there was a revelation in that somewhere, but he dismissed it, thinking that everyone who knew her surely felt the same way.

  Melissa Taggert was a keeper. He knew he couldn’t say that out on the street, times being what they were, but it was true. Melissa Taggert and Ellie Troyer were both keepers. Still, Missy was different. She flustered him. Like now. He found himself blushing when he realized, late, that she had been flirting.

  He covered his embarrassment by forcing himself back on topic. “We need something to go on, Missy.” He stared purposefully at the desktop, and then found himself looking up at her merry eyes. It unsettled him, and he said, “Maybe if you let me take that file, I could turn something up.”

  “There’s nothing there, Sheriff,” Melissa said. “You’d be wasting your time.”

  “Let’s go over it again, anyways,” Robertson said.

  Melissa shrugged.

  “There’s got to be something, Melissa. One more time. Everything you’ve got.” He had calmed himself.

  Taggert sighed and recited, “Male Caucasian. Approximately thirty. In Amish dress. Killed instantly by a gunshot wound to the head. No other signs of trauma or foul play. Also, I’m sure you’ll want to know that he smoked. Heavily, like somebody else I know. And drank. Evidently to excess. Calloused hands, probably a laborer, construction, most likely. All his clothes were new, except the boots.

  “Next, there are the powder burns. He had them, but in unusual places. On the underside of his fingers. There was an intense line of burns that even the rain and the mud hadn’t leached away. Well, at least not the burns. The powder residue is a trickier problem.”

  Robertson stopped her. “You said that he had powder and burns.”

  “He does,” Taggert said. “They’re just not displayed in the usual pattern for a suicide.”

  “You think someone killed him?”

  “The burns are more consistent with his having a grip over the barrel and the cylinder gap,” Taggert said.

  “As if he had a hold of the gun during a struggle.”

  “I think so,” Taggert said. “Also, the bullets that were still left in the gun had fingerprints that do not match Jonah Miller’s.”

  Robertson frowned and remained quiet while Missy stacked her papers into a neater pile on the desk and put away the folders and the other evidence she had gathered.

  Eventually, Robertson said, “Tell me about the boots.”

  “There’s nothing much to tell. The boots are old, worn, stained with tar, I think.”

  “Let’s see ’em,” Robertson said, interested.

  Melissa retrieved them from an adjacent room, and sat back in the chair in front of her desk. Robertson held the boots together at the tops in his right hand, and turned them back and forth, the toes balanced on the fingertips of his left hand. The leather tops were heavily creased and, in places, had cracked open from wear. The shoestrings did not match; one was broken and had been retied. There were a variety of nicks and gouges in both the leather and the soles. “What do you make of these black smudges?” Robertson asked.

  “It’s roofing tar,” Melissa said again. “Actually, roofing cement. It has tar in it, but it has binders, too.”

  “Did you get them analyzed?”

  “Just the volatiles, on the G.C.,” Melissa said. “It’s ordinary roofing cement.”

  Robertson studied the boots another moment and then set them, soles down, onto the floor beside the coroner’s chair.

  “Can an analysis tell us who made it?”

  Melissa was immediately intrigued. She thought rapidly as she turned her chair back and forth gently on its swivel, calculating how to make the sheriff’s request work to her advantage. Satisfied, she said, “I think so, but I’d have to analyze the solid additives, and I’d need more than a simple G.C. analysis on the volatiles.”

  “If that will tell us who manufactured the brand, let’s do it,” Robertson said.

  Melissa replied, “We need a powder diffractometer to do that, Bruce. And a mass-sensitive detector for the G.C.” She felt almost guilty because it had been so easy. A mass-sensitive detector had been on her “list” for months.

  “Can you send it out?” Robertson asked.

  “It would take a week or so at the B.C.I. labs,” she said.

  “I don’t have a week. Isn’t there another way?”

  “Not for the binders. They’re mostly inorganic solids. That’ll take a powder diffractometer. They’ve got one at the college. They’ve got a mass-sensitive detector there, too.”

  “Can you use the college stuff?” he asked.

  “They’ve got the right equipment. But do you want me doing this work up at the college? You’d owe them a favor, then.”

  “Do they have what you need?”

  “Like I said, yes. But we need our own detector for the G.C. here.”

  “You want a mass detector?” Robertson asked.

  “A mass-sensitive detector,” Melissa said. “Yes.”

  “OK, I’ll back you with the hospital board.”

  “It’ll go to the commissione
rs,” Melissa explained.

  “OK, the commissioners, too, but you get up to the college today. Can you do that?”

  To herself, Taggert shouted a quiet, triumphant YES! Then she said, “Right away,” and began to stack the files on her desk.

  “Look, Missy,” Robertson said. “I doubt the commissioners will approve it. Even if they do, it could be months, even a year, before you get one.”

  “All I want you to do is try,” Missy said.

  “All right,” Robertson said, smiling in defeat. “I’ll try.”

  20

  Wednesday, June 24

  6:00 P.M.

  “HOW YOU gonna square that Amish beard with those cheese-balls out on the hill?” Robertson teased boisterously, as he worked a hole into his mashed potatoes and happily ladled in gravy.

  Caroline encouraged the sheriff with more fried chicken.

  “You mean up at the college?” Branden asked, running his fingers over the unfamiliar smooth skin around his now-Amish lips.

  “You know exactly what I mean,” Robertson said.

  Caroline smiled at Branden on the other side of the large, round family-style table in the Das Deutch Haus restaurant. A waitress in Dutch attire cleared the dishes in front of the Brandens and asked the sheriff if there’d be enough, or should she bring out more of anything?

  “Just save me a piece of boysenberry pie,” Robertson said and slid the last of the roast beef onto his plate. He had arrived only minutes ago, as Ricky Niell and the Brandens had been finishing an all-you-can-eat family-style dinner in a corner of the county not yet generally known to tourists.

  Since early that morning, Robertson had had the deputies watching for the Brandens. It was Niell who had put Robertson onto that, by mentioning offhand that Branden had been at the Millers’ the day before. Also Niell had reported, under questioning, that he thought the professor had been working on some angle of his own. Since then, Robertson had tried to reach the Brandens at home. He had even checked at Millersburg College with Lawrence Mallory, Branden’s personal secretary. Then the sheriff had asked the deputies to watch for the Brandens’ car, and at the end of his shift, Niell had called it in. He had found the Brandens at Das Deutch Haus.