Whiskers of the Lion

by P. L. Gaus

  Irma held the dress to herself, with the apron displayed in front, and again the Amish women spoke dialect. Lance understood only that they were asking questions of each other about the dress.

  “I gather this won’t do,” Lance said, embarrassed. “It seems that I’ve missed the mark.”

  “It’s a little too short,” Irma said. “And the stitching is much too fancy.”

  “And there aren’t the proper number of pleats,” Fannie added, checking the display on her phone. “Plus it’s not gathered at the shoulders correctly.”

  “According to whom?” Lance asked, smiling now, aware that the women had made mild sport of her. “Who decides about dresses?”

  “The bishop decides, of course,” Irma said. “Each district has its own way. It’s the bishop who decides.”

  “The number of pleats in a dress?” Lance asked, curious now more than embarrassed.

  “Pleats in front,” Fannie said, phone tumbling in her agile fingers.

  “And on the rump,” Irma added. “They’ll be different.”

  “The rump?”

  “In back,” Irma said. “The rump. What do you call it?”

  Still wrestling with the notion of the bishop’s actually approving dress styles, Lance asked, “Are you saying that a bishop decides how many pleats are to be sewn into a woman’s dress?”

  “Who else?” Fannie asked. She punched several buttons on her phone, seeming distracted by worrisome thoughts.

  Detective Lance took note of Fannie’s detachment, but she was more concerned at the moment with what the two Amish women had been saying about fashion. She arched a brow and shook her head disbelievingly. “And the stitching is also approved?”

  “Of course,” Fannie said. She put her phone in her pocket and seemed to gain some focus on Lance’s questions. She advanced a step toward Lance. “The style of a hem, Detective Lance. And the length of a dress, the cut of a sleeve, and the colors, too. The bishop decides what is approved and what is not. We can tell a lot about your bishop by the way your clothes are made.”

  Irma came forward to stand beside Fannie, and both women moved closer to Lance, as if to encourage the detective. Irma reached out delicately to take Lance’s hand. In her other hand, she held a measuring tape and a thimble, which she had drawn from the pocket in her apron. “We make our own dresses,” she said with a smile. She released Lance’s hand and explained, “No proper Amish woman would wear a store-bought dress.”

  “How would I have known that?”

  Together the Amish women shrugged.

  “Then do you have something I can borrow?” Lance asked. “I really need to wear a proper outfit.”

  Irma held up her tape measure. “We’ll make a dress for you, Detective Lance. It shouldn’t take any time at all.”

  “OK, but I guess I’ll need an apron, too.”

  “We have some of those already,” Fannie said. “And your Kapp is fine. It’s just that your dress would never work outside the bedroom.”

  Irma paused with a thought, and a soft blush appeared in her cheeks. Delicately, she stepped into the adjoining bathroom. With the door closed behind her, she called softly to Fannie in Dietsch, and Fannie smiled. It was the first unguarded and genuine smile Lance had seen on Fannie since she had arrived that afternoon.

  “What now?” Lance asked, expecting that she had overlooked some additional arcane trifle in proper Amish attire.

  Fannie continued to smile as she turned her gaze to the floorboards. “Detective Lance, Irma has asked if you will be expecting to return your dress to Walmart.”

  Not understanding the intent of the question, Lance answered, “I gave the receipt to my sheriff. I thought I’d be reimbursed for the expense.”

  Fannie brought her eyes up to Lance and cocked a brow, with a hint of guile giving soft curvature to her smile. “I don’t think Irma wants the dress to be returned, Detective Lance. Perhaps, she is thinking, you will not have need to keep it?”

  • • •

  In the Daadihaus, Professor Branden was on the phone with the sheriff. While he talked, Caroline sat with Reuben Gingerich and Abel Mast in the corner of the open room, at a round dining table near the kitchen door. Watching for the arrival of the FBI, Branden talked into his phone while standing on the other side of the room near the front window. The three at the table listened to his end of the call until it ended.

  “It shouldn’t be too much longer,” Branden said, closing his phone. “The FBI knows where we are.”

  Gingerich stood and paced in the large room, ignoring the professor. He was lost in thought, his concern for Fannie showing in the troubled creases around his eyes.

  Abel Mast, from his seat at the table, asked the professor, “Will they let her have any visitors?”

  “I don’t know, Abel,” Branden said. He crossed the room and took the chair that Gingerich had vacated. “Really, I doubt it. They probably should not permit her to have any visitors.”

  “But we are all Amish,” Abel argued.

  “I know,” Branden said. “I’ll speak to them about it.”

  As Gingerich paced in front of the window, Caroline asked him, “Reuben, are you prepared to wait? It might be weeks. And they might move her around a lot.”

  Reuben answered a simple, “Yes,” and paused to stare out the front window at the gray weather. A steady and cool rain was spattering puddles on the gravel drive, where the Brandens’ sedan and the detectives’ patrol cruiser were both nosed up against the back porch. Through the pane, Reuben could hear the rain pinging insistently on the metal roofs of the cars. It was a tinny racket to which he was not accustomed.

  Reuben turned to stare out over the fields beyond the gravel drive. A cover of fog was starting to collect over the pastures beyond, as the cool rain was lifted as vapor from the rich earth and the sun-warmed crops, producing damp aromas that held the hint of autumn weather, despite the fact that it was still only August.

  Worried about Fannie, Reuben let his gaze wander to the back corner window of the main house. A lantern had been lit there, in the sewing room adjacent to the kitchen. Through the gray mist of the rain, Reuben could see Fannie and Irma both at work in the sewing room, Irma seated at the treadle machine, Fannie cutting fabric from a bolt of cloth in the standard color of dusty rose.

  Reuben turned away from the window to address the professor. “Is Fannie just supposed to sit by herself in some lonely hotel room?”

  “It’s the best thing for now,” Branden said.

  “Will she have books? Her sewing? Anything that is hers?”

  “A television, I suppose.”

  Reuben snorted disgust. “Television is a hideous circus spectacle,” he declared with rare heat. “Americans are addicted to circus spectacles. They indulge themselves in grotesque spectacles of the most insidious kind, and they don’t even have to leave their living rooms to do it.”

  “I wouldn’t argue with you,” Branden said. “Maybe some of the TV channels are not so bad as that, but really Reuben, I wouldn’t argue with you at all.”

  Tires crunched the gravel outside Reuben’s window. He turned back to peer out and saw a black panel van with no markings turn in at the corner of the main house. The van rolled to a stop behind the cars, and two men in dark suits got out of the front seats and opened large black umbrellas. The sliding door opened, and two more men got out at the side of the van. One of the black umbrellas was handed to the second pair of men, and together the four men crowded under the two umbrellas to confer. The men were dressed so similarly that they might have been wearing uniforms.

  “They’re here,” Reuben said disdainfully. “I’m going out to talk to them about books. They’ve at least got to let her have some books.”

  • • •

  While Fannie cut fabric, Stan Armbruster crowded into the corner of the small sewing room
and pressed in against a stack of a dozen upright bolts of fabric. In the corner near the window, Irma was vigorously working the foot pedals of her sewing machine, feeding dusty-rose cloth under her needle. With her back turned to Armbruster, Fannie was bent over the cutting table using hand shears, cutting cloth from a bolt of the same fabric.

  While the women worked, Armbruster asked Fannie about the April bus trip to Florida, and about the morning when she and Howie Dent had stopped with their fellow passengers for breakfast in Charlotte. Fannie described the ride south on I-77 from Sugarcreek as uneventful and unremarkable, the small hills of the southern Ohio countryside blending gradually into the stately mountains of West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina. She recalled the curviness of the route as it wound its way between rivers and mountains in Charleston. She remembered the high mountain pass beyond Wytheville, where the fog that night had been dense. Together, she and Howie had been seated near the back of the bus, and they had talked through the night.

  Then Fannie described the two stops the bus had made before arriving in Charlotte the next morning. Some of the passengers had finished their trips at these early destinations, and more passengers had joined the trip, heading for Florida like the others. Fannie remembered that she got off briefly at the second stop to use the bathroom. When the bus arrived in Charlotte for breakfast at a restaurant near the highway, she and Howie had gotten off with the others, and the bus had circled around to a nearby gas station for fuel.

  “The restaurant was already crowded,” Fannie said. “So I waited with Howie in line, so he could use the men’s room. It was at the back of a hallway that led to the kitchen.”

  “He did that?” Armbruster asked. “He got a turn in the restroom?”

  “Yes, and when he came out, we turned in the long hallway to go get breakfast. But we saw some pushy men circling among the tables, looking at faces. They were rough-looking men, and Howie didn’t like the way they were staring at people.”

  “Did you think they were looking for you, Fannie?”

  “No, but Howie did.”

  “Then what? No breakfast?”

  “No breakfast. He pulled me into the kitchen at the back of the hallway. We went out the back door, between two Dumpsters.”

  “How did you get to downtown Charlotte?”

  “Howie pushed me into a cab. He wanted me to scrunch down beneath the windows.”

  “He chose downtown?”

  “No. He told the cabdriver to get us to the Greyhound station. That just turned out to be downtown.”

  Fannie hesitated with a memory. “I’m lucky I had my purse. I paid the cabdriver. All Howie had was his phone.”

  “But why did he think those men were trouble? Because they seemed to be looking for someone?”

  “I think so,” Fannie said. She measured a length of fabric, chalked it, and took up her scissors. As she cut, she said, “Really, it was Howie who was nervous about them. I wouldn’t even have noticed.”

  “Did he say anything about them, or did he just lead you out through the kitchen?”

  “No, he said, ‘That’s not right,’ or something like that. Maybe ‘They’re not right.’”

  “Do you remember how many there were?”

  “I only saw two, but Howie said four.”

  “When did he say that?”

  “In the cab.”

  “Did he recognize any of the men?”

  Fannie thought, remembered, and said, “He said he recognized the type. He said he really did not like the type of men they were.”

  “That doesn’t seem like much,” Armbruster said.

  “Well, he had been talking on the bus all the way down to Charlotte. About how those people would be looking for me.”

  “Which people, Fannie? Did he say? Did he mean someone in particular? Or someone he actually knew?”

  “He just meant the people who killed Ruth Zook,” Fannie said. “And that woman in the gray Buick who came looking for me at my brother’s house.”

  “Teresa Molina.”

  Tears welled in Fannie’s eyes, and she whispered, “They must be the same people who killed Howie.” She laid her scissors down and dried her eyes with the hem of her apron. “That must mean that Howie saved my life in Charlotte.”

  “Yes, Fannie,” Armbruster said. “In Charlotte that morning, I think he did save your life.”

  23

  Thursday, August 18

  6:30 P.M.

  SHERIFF ROBERTSON drove his Crown Vic northeast through Millersburg on SR 241, angling around the curves and hills of town, headed for Ricky Niell’s home in a new development that had been carved out of pastureland a mile beyond the city limit. It was a neighborhood of new ranch homes with uniform design and construction, where the curbs and sidewalks were new and white, and the mailboxes were matched in style. Unlike the rest of Millersburg, which seemed to sprawl haphazardly across the patchwork of steep hills east of the Killbuck marshlands, Ricky and Ellie’s neighborhood was a planned community where few trees had made a start and where several homes were still under construction. The lawns were newly sodded, and most of the fences were only partially finished. Ricky and Ellie lived in the second house beyond the main gate. It had been one of the first model homes the developer had constructed, and Ricky and Ellie had bought the home furnished. While Robertson was parking his Crown Vic at the curb in front of their house, a call rang in from Mike Branden.

  When he finished with the professor’s call, Robertson got out, locked up, and walked along the gentle slope of the drive, up to the brick path that led to the Niells’ front door. The sheriff rang the bell, and he heard Ellie sing out from inside, “It’s open.”

  The sheriff stepped inside and found Ellie stretched out on the living room couch, propped on several bedroom pillows, with her feet up and shoes off, obviously pregnant and shifting uncomfortably on her stacked pillows. By way of a greeting, Ellie said, “Hello, Sheriff. I shouldn’t get up.”

  “Stay right there,” Robertson said. He sat on the front edge of a soft recliner across from Ellie, and his weight compressed the cushion uncomfortably low to the floor, pinching his legs to an acute angle at the knees. He pushed himself farther back into the seat and said to Ellie, “You don’t look very comfortable on those pillows.”

  “Sheriff,” Ellie said with her eyes closed, “if only I could tell you.”

  “That bad?”

  “Worse. The doctor says it has to be either the couch or the bed, and I’m not to get up by myself.”

  “But you look good, otherwise,” the sheriff said, trying again for a more agreeable position on the seat of the low recliner. “I mean you look healthy.”

  Ellie laughed out a challenge. “A happy glow, Sheriff? That’s what my father calls it.”

  Robertson gave the best smile he could manage and defended himself. “I just mean it’s good to see you, Ellie. And I hope you’re going to be OK.”

  Ellie pushed up on her pillows. “I’ll be fine as soon as I can walk by myself and get out of the house. And wear decent shoes again.”

  “Can you ride in a chair? Have Ricky wheel you around the neighborhood?”

  Ellie laughed with apparent good cheer and wriggled into a better position on her pillows. “Not really,” she said and laughed again. “Picture that, if you can, Sheriff. Wheeling me around on the sidewalks. Anyway, the doctor says no.”

  “That’s rough.”

  “I’ll get there,” Ellie answered. “In the meantime, Caroline has been coming to help me every day, and Del Markely has been keeping me up to date.”

  Robertson scratched his chin with narrowed eyes. “I’m not sure Del Markely’s gonna work out as dispatcher.”

  Ellie laid her head back. “You just need to give her time, Bruce. You know you don’t like change.”

  Robertson shook his head and growle
d a little to clear his throat. “When can you come back to work, Ellie?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “But you are coming back, right?”

  “We’ll see.”

  The big sheriff found it impossible to make himself comfortable on the recliner. He also found it impossible to mask his concern for Ellie. So he held to his seat and said softly, “I can’t imagine running my department without you.” Then to dispel his embarrassment, he turned awkwardly in his chair to study the room. “Is Ricky doing the housework? Because it looks like he needs some help.”

  “Yes, Ricky’s doing all the housework. And all the shopping.”

  “That where he’s at, now?”

  “Yes. Are you offering to help with any of this?”

  Robertson cleared his throat with difficulty. “Whatever you need, Ellie. You know that.”

  “I know, Bruce. Don’t worry. We’ve got it covered.”

  To camouflage his unexpected sensitivities, the sheriff said brusquely, “OK, but when can I have Ricky back? I need everyone I can get, Ellie. You know that as well as anyone.”

  “Not for a while, Sheriff. Maybe when the doctor says I’ve stabilized.”

  Robertson nodded with an unhappy frown. “I’m really not sure about Del, Ellie. I mean really. She’s not anything like you.”

  “Ricky says the deputies like her, Bruce. You need to let her settle in.”

  “I had hoped you would be back to work before I had to do that.”

  “I won’t, Bruce. You need to give her a chance.”

  “Whatever.” Robertson rubbed anxiously at the top bristles of his gray hair. “Anyway, the Dent murder has us tied in knots.”

  Ellie rearranged her pillows to lie back more. She knew that nothing more she might say on the topic of Del Markely would prove effective with the sheriff, so instead of pressing her case, she asked, “How are Stan and Pat doing in Middlefield?”

  “Well, they’re still up there. With Mike and Caroline. Mike just called.”