by Gaus, P. L.
In time, she had built a decent morgue and laboratory in a basement corner of the hospital, and with the right kind of steady pressure on the county commissioners, she had even managed to upgrade her duties, to something more along the lines of a medical examiner. Now, after several years with Bruce Robertson’s help, she had built what could be regarded as an excellent forensics lab, in a county where life could be as simple as an afternoon game of horseshoes.
Branden smiled and remembered what Robertson had extracted from her, in exchange for his help over the years—a guarantee of her support when it came time to move the sheriff’s office out of the little red brick jail next to the courthouse and into a modern facility on a hillside north of town. Using his own money, Robertson had hired an architect in Wooster to render an artist’s sketch of how the facility might look on the hill he had chosen near the County Home, and without making a noticeable point out of the matter, he had hung the drawing in his office in the red brick jail. When people asked about it, he would reply, “Just doing some dreaming, is all. Just a little dreaming.”
When Branden pulled free of the traffic snarl in Berlin, he continued into Millersburg on 62, circled the courthouse square, and parked one block north on Monroe Street. He walked into the county recorder’s office, in an old converted grocery store, and at the front desk, he spoke briefly with the recorder. He took what he learned to one of the computer terminals and began a search for any land transactions involving Holmes Estates. After some effort, he concluded that no such transactions had been recorded.
Branden paused at the computer, thinking, aware now that neither Sommers nor Weaver had filed the land sale with the recorder yet. Then why not Holmes Estates? They should have filed by now. Another thing. Who would handle the transaction with Sommers missing and Weaver dead? Perhaps the new trustee of the Weaver estate. Would there have been copies of the land purchase agreement at Sommers’s house? Or in her office at the bank? Why wouldn’t the trust officer have filed on behalf of Weaver’s estate by now? Why hadn’t Brittany Sommers filed the papers herself?
At the front counter in the recorder’s office, Branden found the recorder’s assistant, an attractive, middle-aged woman, sorting papers at her desk behind the counter. She glanced up from her work, straightened the papers briefly, stepped to the counter, and said, “Yes?”
Branden said, “Mike Branden, working for the sheriff’s department,” and displayed his badge.
“You’re that big professor up on the hill,” she said and smiled genially.
Branden said, “Yes,” blushed slightly as she continued to smile at him, and asked, “Can you tell me how long it usually takes to file a land sale?”
“It varies,” she said. “Sometimes they bring it in right away. Sometimes it takes a week or more.”
“I would expect this to be a big sale, and thought it would have cleared by now.”
“The big ones get stalled in the map office,” she said and nodded her head in the direction of the map department, next door.
“But you get them all, eventually?” Branden asked.
“Every last little thing,” she replied. “They all go into the computer the same day that we get them.”
Branden thanked her and walked absently out of the building, wondering how big the Weaver/Sommers deal really was. He realized he and Ricky Niell had made only a rough estimate of the thing. As he crossed the street to his truck, he phoned the bank, inquired fruitlessly about Britta Sommers, and got the name of the trust officer who was now handling the estate of John Weaver. Once transferred to the right secretary, he made an appointment for 10:00 A.M. Monday. Leaning against his truck, he dialed Cal again at his church, and got him there on this try. As he slid behind the wheel and started the truck, Branden said, “Hi, Cal. Are we still on for tonight?”
Cal answered, “9 o’clock. I’ll pick you up at your house, if that’s OK.”
“That’ll be fine,” Branden said. “You’re the one who knows where we’re going.”
“I haven’t seen Caroline in a while,” Cal said. “Maybe I ought to come for dinner.”
“She’s not home, Cal. Been in Arizona with her mother. She won’t be back for a while yet.”
“Does she know about Bruce?”
“I call her every night.”
“Tell her I said Hi.”
“Sure thing. You still want to come for dinner?”
“I’m a better cook than you are, Professor,” Cal said and gave a little chuckle.
“Then you bring dinner.”
“I’ll buy a couple of pizzas.”
“That’s what I thought. You say you can cook, but it’s always carryout.”
“Pizzas at seven, Mike.”
“Pizzas at seven,” Branden repeated, and switched off.
As he drove for Pomerene Hospital, Branden dialed Ellie Troyer on the front desk at the jailhouse. When she answered, he said, “Ellie, this is Mike Branden. Is Bobby Newell in?”
Ellie said, “I’ll connect you, but have you heard about Sheriff Robertson?”
Branden said, “No, I’ve been out all day.”
“He’s worse, Professor. A whole lot worse from the way I understand it.”
“What’s wrong?”
“He’s got an infection that they’re having trouble with. Something about his antibiotics. Melissa Taggert is with him now. His doctors, too.”
“I’ve been trying to reach her.”
“She’s been tied up with Bruce all day,” Ellie said. “Anyway, I thought you would want to know. Here’s the captain.”
“Hello,” Newell said, “Captain Newell.”
“Bobby, it’s Mike Branden. Have you heard anything from Britta Sommers?”
“No.”
“It’s not like her to have run off, Bobby.”
“What can I say? Maybe she doesn’t want to be found. She probably set fire to her own house, Mike. You ever think about that?”
“Good grief, Bobby, her place is all burnt to pieces, and she’s missing. You really think she did that?”
“It’s a theory.”
“Well, it’s not a very good one.”
“So you say, Professor. Have you heard about the sheriff?”
“Ellie just told me.”
“I think it’s fairly serious.”
“I’m driving over there now,” Branden said, and switched his cell phone to the other hand. “In the meantime, I think you should reconsider the Sommers thing. Let’s go out to Britta’s place. See what we can find.”
“Like what?” Newell said.
“I’d search through documents in her study. She’s supposed to have signed an agreement on a land sale, and I need to know what else she might have signed before she disappeared.”
“Her study is toast, Mike. We haven’t been able to identify any documents at all. None in her desk and none in her filing cabinets.”
“I thought they got the fire out quickly,” Branden said and turned into the hillside parking lot of the small hospital.
“Whoever torched the place opened all of her drawers and doused all of the papers with gasoline before starting the fire,” Newell said, as Branden pulled into a parking spot. “There aren’t any papers left to look at.”
Branden thought about the obvious importance of that as he got out of the truck and said, “I’d still like to look it over, Bobby.”
Newell hesitated and then said, “I guess I don’t see any problem with that.”
“OK,” Branden said, standing outside the emergency room doors. “I’ll try to set it up for tomorrow morning.”
“Not a problem,” Newell said. “Let me know how Robertson is doing. By the way, did you know Missy Taggert pulled a .30-caliber bullet out of the left flank of Weaver’s horse?”
Branden smiled in satisfaction and said, “I figured she might.”
“You figured.”
“Right. I asked her to take a look.”
“That’s a strange bit of figuring,
Professor.”
“I just had a hunch. Hey, look, Bobby. I’ll come by as soon as I can and explain that to you.”
Newell changed the subject. “You still going to work on those buggy robberies for us?”
“When I can,” Branden said. “I figure Weaver and Sommers take precedence.”
“You know, I called that ward in Nashville where her son lives. They haven’t heard from her. We’re also checking airlines and car rentals. And Mike, I’ve checked back through our records on the robberies those kids are pulling. Turns out it was our John R. Weaver who filed the first complaint, about nine months ago.”
“Weaver was robbed by those kids?”
“He was the first we knew about. Took his whip to ’em and beat them off. He told us later that he was carrying twelve hundred dollars at the time. His report also states that he saw one of their faces. The kid was nervous and hot under his mask, and took it off. Weaver told us he could recognize the kid if he ever saw him again.”
“Hey, I’ll call you back. I’m going into the hospital now,” Branden said and switched his cell phone off.
On the third floor, Branden found Melissa Taggert leaning against the door frame to Bruce Robertson’s room, talking quietly with a doctor in a white coat. The doctor recognized Branden and said, “No visitors tonight, Professor.”
Branden looked to Taggert, and she confirmed it with a brief nod of her head. She led him quietly by the elbow, away from Robertson’s room, and they took seats in a small waiting room at the end of the short hall. Taggert had her long white doctor’s coat on, with a stethoscope looped around her neck, and latex gloves on her hands. She snapped the gloves off, and then took a blue cloth face mask from her neck.
“It’s the infection,” she said, sitting on the edge of her chair. “There’s been some trouble with his antibiotics line. His lungs are filling up with fluid, too, and the infection is a strain that is not responding to the normal protocols. I’m worried it may be a resistant strain. That means we have only a few antibiotics we can try, and for that, I’m going to transfer him to Children’s Hospital in Akron. They’ve got one of the nation’s best burn units there, and they take adult patients. They’ll consult with an infectious diseases expert.”
“When?” Branden asked.
“Tonight. We’re using Life Flight out of Columbus,” Taggert said, obviously worried.
“Why so soon?”
“It’s a bad infection, Mike. If it gets into his blood, we won’t be able to stop it. Even as it is, he’ll need continuous IV treatments with antibiotics that still work on resistant strains. There aren’t that many that still work.”
“But that’ll do the job, right?”
“I can’t tell,” Taggert said, a vast concern evident in her eyes. “I’ll get him up there tonight. It’ll take a day or two to run the cultures. Then, they’ll start him out on the strongest antibiotics that his kidneys and liver can tolerate. It’ll take time to run screens, but if his kidneys can’t take the pressure, or if the strain is vancomyacin-resistant Staph a., then it’s not good at all.”
“Are you saying he could die?”
Melissa looked steadily for a while into Branden’s eyes and then turned her gaze down. After a quiet and awkward interlude, she whispered, “There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for him.”
Branden looked away momentarily and turned back to Taggert. “Akron is the best place for him?” he asked softly.
“I think so.”
“What are his chances?”
Melissa looked down at her hands, folded lightly in her lap. The shadows of her eyes gave the look of quiet sorrow. She began to speak again, but couldn’t. Her eyes grew moist, and she cleared her throat with difficulty. Then she looked into Branden’s eyes and said, “You know we spend a lot of time together on the job.”
Branden nodded, “Yes.”
“He’s a hard man to nail down.”
“I know,” Branden said and leaned forward, his face scant inches from hers. He whispered, “I also know, as well as anyone, Missy, that he’d be a hard man to love.”
Melissa coughed a little, fought a constriction in her throat, and said, “Tonight or tomorrow, whenever he’s first awake enough to talk, I’m going to make certain that he knows how I feel about him.”
Branden didn’t ask her to finish the thought. He didn’t need her to. He knew it went something like, “because that may be the last chance I’ll have to tell him.”
18
Friday, August 11
9:20 P.M.
AS TROYER and Branden turned into the gravel drive at the Yoder farm, a floodlight out near the road illuminated stubby brown stalks of corn in the dry field that skirted the lane. Beside the lane, there was a small red building about the size of a one-seater outhouse, and a telephone line came into it from a pole out on the road. The temperature lingered near ninety degrees, despite the fact that the sun had slipped below the horizon. The last soft light of evening suffused a cloudless summer sky.
At the house, they stepped out of Cal’s air-conditioned truck, and the dry heat assailed them. On the front steps, there was a teenager in Dutch costume, sitting alone with his ear bent low to a battery-powered radio. Cal spoke to him in dialect, and the boy vigorously shook his head, replied briefly, popped up, and darted around the corner of the house.
As they mounted the steps, Branden asked, “What was that all about?”
Cal said, “I asked him if he liked rock and roll.”
“And?”
“He said he was just listening for the weather,” Cal said, and laughed softly.
A young man with a wild look in his eyes burst through the screen door and grabbed Troyer’s hand, pumping it rapidly up and down, shouting “Vie Gehts! Vie Gehts! Vie Gehts!” He switched to Branden, grabbed his hand and forearm, and pumped it too. “Vie Gehts! Vie Gehts! Vie Gehts!”
Hannah Yoder came out in a rush and took hold of the man, wrapping her arms around him, pinning his hands to his side. “OK, Benny. That’s enough, already.” She seemed to bring him under control with her voice, and by rubbing softly on the top of his head, and then her husband came out and took Benny inside.
Hannah shrugged sadly and let them in. “Benny has a screw loose,” she said, and led them into a large kitchen. “We have refreshments.”
A single kerosene lamp sat glowing on a kitchen counter. In the center of the room stood a square cherry table with chairs for twelve. On the table, there was a cherry lazy Susan, almost half as wide as the table itself. The polished lazy Susan held a pitcher of water, two glasses, a bowl of chipped ice, slices of a fruit-nut bread, and apple butter in a canning jar. Two places were set with plain china, and the Senior Yoder curtly invited Branden and Troyer to “take seats, and help yourself.” Then he walked into an adjoining pantry and tuned to a weather station on a little radio there.
Hannah Yoder, obviously embarrassed, followed her husband into the pantry, and the two began talking.
Cal shrugged, took a slice of the bread and laid on a thick covering of apple butter from the lazy Susan. Realizing that the conversation in the pantry concerned them, he whispered a translation for Branden.
“Dadscht du’s laube, Crist?”
Will you permit it, Crist?
“Der bishop haut tzaud es ist gut.”
The bishop has said it’s OK.
“Des vher dau allebescht vague fah ein helfa.”
This is the best way to help him.
“Hannah, der English Docktoro haut Larry nichts gut favischt.”
Hannah, the English doctors have been no good to Larry.
“Aahr ist in druble, Crist. Favoss kenna meah net helfa?”
He is in trouble, Crist. Why can’t we help him?
“Favoss tzellaama der Sheriff tza va ein?”
Why tell the sheriff about him, now?
“Larry braucht tzei medicine.”
Larry needs the medicine.
“Aahr muss tzrich kumma un sa
fasprechen nemma, ist alle.”
He needs to come back and take his vows, that’s all.
“Aahr braucht tzei medicine, Crist.”
He needs his medicine, Crist.
“Est du tuscht ein mai drubble macha.”
This will only get him into more trouble.
“Aahr ist uscht grangt. Der kupf Doctor in Wooster saught aahr braucht tzei medicine.”
He is sick, is all. The psychiatrist in Wooster said he needs to take his medicine.
“Aahr nemtz net medicine. Vass kenna ma du?”
He won’t take his medicine. So what can we do?
“Der Doctoro haut ein ferschlossa in da hospital in Canton. Aahr musst medicine nemma.”
The doctors have him locked up in the hospital in Canton. He has to take his medicine, now.
“Cis net’s medicine es aahr bracht.”
It’s not the medicine that he needs.
“Crist, Aahr ist fahudelt.”
Crist, he’s touched in the head.
“Aahr muss landschaffe. Aahr set bauede.”
He needs to farm. Work the land.
“Es dad ken schaude du fada Professor saah vas meah vissa.”
It won’t hurt to tell the professor what we know.
Last of all, Crist Yoder said, “Aahr kumt vedda in druble mit der Sheriff,” and walked outside. Hannah Yoder came back slowly into the kitchen and, a little flustered, took a seat opposite Branden and Troyer.
She said, “My husband doesn’t understand about mental diseases.”
Cal asked, “Will it be all right if you talk, now?”
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.
