Clouds Without Rain

by Gaus, P. L.

  Wilsher called Ricky Niell over and said, “Bag this and then see if you can find any other files or letters like this, on the hard drive or on any of these other disks.”

  In the living area behind them, Wilsher pointed out a stack of brown paper grocery bags next to a faded, brown-and-red-checked sofa. Branden looked the room over and saw other bags cut open to lie flat, as rectangles. Several of these were spread out on a long, marred, wooden coffee table, and more had been wadded into large brown balls and tossed into a corner next to an easy chair with fabric to match the sofa. A box of children’s crayons had been dropped on the worn, gray carpet, and Branden knelt to pick it up. Inside were the nibs and stubs of broken black, blue, and brown crayons. The other colors were missing.

  While kneeling, Branden began studying the crayon drawings on the brown paper sheets arranged on the coffee table. On each heavy sheet, he found more or less the same sketch. There would be either a rectangle or a square, drawn in black crayon. Black or brown strokes carved the outer shape into sections with lines that had been pressed hard onto the paper, sometimes breaking a crayon and leaving a splotch or a veering line on the page. In what seemed to be a separate group of papers, the boxes and their dividing lines were carefully drafted. In others, which seemed to have been drawn with greater force, the dividing lines were more like slashes of crayon repeated over and over again, line after line, giving thick swatches of brown or black from crayons that had been flattened or broken, the anger in the crude drawings evident from the force that had been employed.

  Wilsher watched Branden sort through the brown paper canvases and then retrieved two of the wadded balls of paper from the corner. He sat in the easy chair and unfolded one on his lap. The edges of the paper had been torn, not cut with scissors. The powerful strokes with crayon were more brutal than the ones Branden had found, but there was still the same rectangle, cut into sections by the flat stub of a crayon in an angry hand.

  “There’s a lot of rage in these drawings,” Branden said.

  “Out of control is what I’d call it,” Wilsher said. He stood and started toward the hall leading to the back of the trailer. “I’d like you to see the bedroom, Mike,” he said.

  They found an unkempt room with empty whiskey bottles strewn here and there. The bed was unmade, and its sheets and covers were stuffed into a corner beside the headboard. Dirty dishes and the remains of several take-out meals lay on the stained mattress. A small television rested on a stand in a corner at the foot of the bed. It was an old black-and-white set, with a rotary dial for thirteen channels, plus UHF. The wire antenna was draped with crumpled sheets of aluminum foil. Branden used his handkerchief to turn the set on and got a hazy picture of an evangelist, Brother Dave from Canton, making a vigorous point about the scriptures that lay open in his hand.

  Branden pushed the button off and helped Wilsher open the drawers on the two dressers in the room. They held an eclectic assortment of summer and winter clothes, and in one drawer there was also a stack of hunting photos, strapped together with a rubber band. Wilsher, wearing gloves now, removed the rubber band and starting leafing through the stack of photos. “Weaver, Weston, and Yoder, hunting out West,” he said and laid the photos on top of the dresser.

  Branden studied the photographs. One seemed to duplicate the photo that Newell had described to him, hanging on a wall in J. R. Weaver’s study. Yoder, holding the 30-06 rifle beside an enormous elk. Wilsher gathered the photos together and dropped the lot into an evidence bag.

  “That’s a curious set of photos,” Branden said. “It’s curious that they’re here.”

  Wilsher shrugged, not quite sure what to make of them at the moment. In the bathroom, they found broken glass bottles, a shattered mirror over the sink, and lotions, liquid soaps, and what was left of aftershaves splattered on the walls and in the toilet. On the floor they found a white powder scattered around a crushed brown plastic prescription bottle. Branden lifted the cracked plastic bottle with Wilsher’s pen and managed to straighten the curled label enough that they could read the contents, Lithobid, 300 mg. Wilsher used a business card to shovel some of the powder into a bag and said, “If he wasn’t taking his lithium, there’s no telling what he’s been like the last couple of weeks.”

  In the shower stall, Branden found an uncrushed tablet, and Wilsher bagged that too. The floor of the shower stall was stained dark brown from rust in the water, and the shower head had been forcefully bent up at a sharp angle so that it couldn’t be used, even if the water were turned on. Branden opened the cold water valve, and there was gurgling and hissing before a burst of brown water sprayed out of the bent shower head, onto the ceiling.

  Ricky Niell, at the computer table, called them back into the living room and displayed a letter on the screen. Branden and Wilsher bent over to read, and discovered it to be an early letter to Weaver, saying Yoder knew what Weaver was up to, by the surveying he had been doing for Weston. The letter carried a stern warning against dividing up the land of Yoder’s relatives.

  Another file with a later date repeated the warning. Ricky had opened four files in total, but Branden asked about the one that was in the printer’s out-tray. Ricky nodded and switched from the hard drive to a disk in drive A. There he clicked on “Untitled-1,” and the letter in question appeared on the screen. “He’s got an automatic ‘save’ when a file is closed,” Ricky said.

  Branden bent lower and took the mouse. He clicked on Summary Info under the File menu, and then chose Statistics. The Created line displayed the date, 11:17 A.M., and the revision number was 1. Under Last Printed, it read 11:19 A.M. Branden performed the same tasks for the other letters and found the next most recent letter to have been dated almost two weeks earlier than the one in the printer’s tray.

  Wilsher said, “I’m going to need printouts of all those letters, with their statistics,” and Niell squared up to the keyboard and began working. Wilsher led Branden out to the carport.

  The deputy had finished fingerprinting the trunk and was now working inside the cab, on the steering wheel and the door panels. Wilsher walked slowly up to the car and said, “I’m glad you didn’t see her, Mike. She’s been here a while, and with the heat . . . ”

  “She was a good friend, Dan, thanks.”

  “The guys took her out real careful. She was puffy from the heat, but it looked to me as if she’d been strangled. There was a line of deep bruising all around her throat.”

  “Call Missy,” Branden said. “Get a time of death.”

  “She knows to call me as soon as she has it, Mike.”

  “It’s important. Larry Yoder has been in the hospital since late afternoon last Thursday.”

  “He could have done this as easy as anyone. Set fire to her house, too,” Wilsher said.

  “The timing is not gonna fit.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Last week, Yoder should have been depressed and drunk, not manic.”

  “Those drawings are as manic as they come, Mike.”

  “We don’t know when they were done.”

  “Don’t know when Britta was murdered, either,” Wilsher said.

  Branden shrugged and let the matter drop. “Is there anything else here, Dan? Behind the trailer?”

  Branden started around the carport, and Wilsher followed, saying, “There’s junk piled out back.”

  Deputy Armbruster appeared from around the back corner of the trailer, holding up a stick. Mounted on its end was a dirty, faded, rubber mask, a goat’s head with horns.

  Wilsher took the stick and held up the mask, frowning with disgust. “Yoder’s tied in with everything, it seems.”

  Branden stepped close and studied the mask on the end of the stick. “This is an old one, Dan. Could have been from long ago.”

  “Or well used,” Wilsher countered.

  “It also could have been planted here, like anything else. The rifle. Those cartridges.”

  Wilsher handed the mask on the stick t
o Armbruster and said, “That goes in, along with everything else. Don’t shake it any more than you have to.”

  Armbruster nodded and headed for the front of the trailer.

  Said Wilsher, “That does it for me, Mike. Yoder’s our man. The mask ties in with Ricky’s shed, and the mask robberies go all the way back to J. R. Weaver. I figure he did Sommers too, because of the land swindles.”

  “That’s too easy, Dan,” Branden replied.

  “It’s as easy as that, because it’s as simple as that.”

  “Yoder’s parents never mentioned anything about the occult. They would have known.”

  “Maybe he got out of it a while back, Mike.”

  Branden turned toward the back of the trailer and said, “More likely, it was planted by someone who knew Yoder well.”

  Wilsher followed, saying, “I’m still going to give it to the captain that Yoder did it all.”

  “Give it more time, Dan,” Branden encouraged.

  Wilsher shrugged and followed Branden to the rear of the trailer.

  Behind the trailer, near the woods, there was an overturned black charcoal grill, its four rusted legs up in the air. Several garbage cans were stuffed to overflowing, and one had tipped over and spilled out its reeking contents. A stack of weathered lumber leaned against the back of the trailer, and a battered lawnmower was parked nearby. A dirt bike lay in the dust on its side, at the head of a trail that led into the woods.

  Branden lifted the bike onto its wheels and unscrewed the gas-tank lid. He rocked the bike back and forth and heard gasoline sloshing inside. He screwed on the lid, mounted the bike, and kicked down on the starter several times. Soon he had the engine growling and crackling as he worked the throttle back and forth, and he popped the clutch and whirled several doughnuts into the dried grass. He shut the engine off and said, “Had one of these as a kid.”

  Wilsher laughed and shook his head. “There’s more to do inside.”

  Branden said, “I’m going to follow a hunch about this trail,” and restarted the bike. Wilsher turned toward the trailer, and Branden took the bike into the woods.

  The trail rose east and crested on a knoll behind Yoder’s trailer. From there it descended sharply into a ravine and crossed a dry stream bed. Up again on the other side, it let out into a high pasture of brown grass and clover. It skirted the pasture along the tree line and circled around to the north, where it followed a ridge for several hundred yards. Eventually, the trail began a slow descent through stands of pine and oak, to a low point where a blackened field edged Route 515. Across the burnt field, for almost a hundred yards, Branden had an unobstructed view of the spot on 515 where Weaver had turned his buggy into his driveway for the last time.

  27

  Monday, August 14

  8:35 P.M.

  “I FOUND the place,” Branden said to Taggert, “where Yoder waited to take his shot at Weaver. And a dirt bike to get him there and back.”

  Missy wasn’t paying attention. Robertson lay on his back in the burn unit at Akron Children’s Hospital, eyes closed in the dim room.

  “Please don’t wake him up,” Missy said, and left.

  Branden kept vigil at Robertson’s bedside for nearly an hour before the sheriff spoke.

  “It’s still hot outside?”

  Branden nodded. “Upper nineties for the most part.”

  “What about the fire at Britta’s house?”

  “That’s all set up to look like Yoder did it. Killing Britta, too.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you buy it.”

  “Not completely,” Branden said. “It looks as if he would have had the time to kill Britta. But in his state of mind, after shooting Weaver’s horse, I don’t see it.”

  “Why?”

  “Can’t say for sure, Bruce. But it’s too much to do. For Yoder, I mean. Try to kill Weaver, and hit the horse instead. Then strangle Sommers, and burn her house up. I don’t see Yoder having the wherewithal to do that before he showed up at his parents’ house Thursday afternoon.”

  “Then how ’bout,” Robertson said and halted. He waved his hand weakly, squeezed his eyes closed to think, and said, “You know. Britta’s ex. Dobrowski.”

  “He’s a wife beater, Bruce, and therefore a coward. Hasn’t got the stones to kill anyone.”

  “We ought to check on it anyway.”

  “Let me see what Bobby’s doing about it,” Branden said halfheartedly and studied the sheriff’s face.

  Robertson’s eyes closed, and Branden said into the room, “I’m working on it, Sheriff.”

  Later, in a whisper, Robertson said, “You were right about Missy.”

  “I’m glad to see you’ve finally caught on.”

  “I think I’ve always liked her. Figured it was respect. You know, the girl who can do everything. But it’s more, Mike.” He shifted awkwardly on his back and groaned softly.

  “You’ve been thinking about her for a long time,” Branden offered.

  “Can’t think of anything else,” Robertson said, labored. “When she’s here, I feel like I can handle anything. When she’s gone, I feel like a radio program with a long stretch of dead air.”

  Branden nodded and watched the sheriff.

  Robertson squeezed his eyes shut, and whispered, “I want you to get me a new pair of cowboy boots, Mike.”

  “Boots?”

  “Yeah. Dancing boots. Go over to my place and get that old pair out of my closet.”

  “Cowboy boots?”

  “They’re in the closet in my bedroom. Stuffed way in the back.”

  “Then what?”

  “I want you to get me a new pair just like ’em. Smooth ostrich skin. Twelve and a half, extra wide. I like Dan Posts. They used to have them down at Trail’s End, just north of Delaware on Route 23.”

  “OK, I can do that,” Branden said, and waited.

  Sadly, Robertson said, “Renie and I used to go country-western dancing a lot. There’s a nice little dance hall over by Brewster—The Red Lantern Barn. It has a good wooden floor, and they give lessons through the week. Then you go there on Saturday nights for the big dances.”

  “You’re gonna take Taggert dancing?”

  “I’m going to ask Missy to start taking lessons with me.”

  “A date.”

  “More than one.”

  “People will talk,” Branden teased, worried about the sheriff’s state of mind.

  “Don’t care, Mike. No one has made me feel like this since Renie died. No one but Missy.”

  “All you want me to do is get your boots?”

  “No. There’s more. I want you to find out what size Missy wears and buy her a matching pair.”

  “Then what?”

  “Get them wrapped, Mike. Bows, ribbons, everything. Before I leave this hospital, I want to give them to her as a present.”

  “Before you leave.”

  “I’m gonna do that, Mike.”

  “I know. What makes you think Missy will take up western dance?”

  “Missy can do just about anything, Mike.”

  “But what makes you think she will want to?”

  “You just get the boots, buddy. Let me handle the rest.”

  28

  Tuesday, August 15

  9:20 A.M.

  “HE’S GOT a trail, Bobby,” Branden said to Captain Newell in the sheriff’s office at the old red brick jail. He held up an empty coffee cup at the credenza, and Newell waved him ahead. Branden poured a cup, walked across the big room to Robertson’s desk, and sat in front of it, in a straight-backed, gray metal office chair.

  Newell waited behind the big desk for additional information, but Branden sat quietly, taking little sips of the hot brew.

  Newell asked, “How about the dirt bike Wilsher said you rode?”

  “Took it down the trail behind Yoder’s trailer. It led straight to J. R. Weaver’s farm. Yoder had an ideal position for rifle work.”

  “That’s all we’re gonna need, Mike. We�
�re charging Yoder with everything. Weaver, Schrauzer, and the others. Britta Sommers, too.”

  “I told Dan I wasn’t sure about Britta,” Branden said, uneasy.

  “He had means, motive, and opportunity.”

  Branden appeared unconvinced.

  “Missy Taggert says Sommers died of strangulation sometime early Thursday morning,” Newell said. “Yoder wasn’t on his way to the hospital in Canton until late that afternoon.”

  Branden said, “I’m working on a different angle.”

  “We’ve got the letter Yoder intended to send to Weaver after he shot up his buggy.”

  “Anyone could have produced that letter,” Branden said. “Could have reset the date on his computer in order to make it appear that the letters had been written before Weaver died.”

  Ellie Troyer appeared in the doorway and ushered in a man and a woman, announcing them. “Captain Newell, this is Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Parents of Brad Smith.”

  Newell came out from behind his desk and greeted them, shaking their hands. Branden rose and said, “I hope you’ve had some luck with Bill Keplar.”

  Lenora Smith crossed the room to Branden and took up his hand in both of hers. “We have, Professor. Thank you!”

  She turned back to Newell and said, “We’ve hired a PI, Captain, and you’re going to be surprised by how much we have learned about the crash that killed our son.”

  Newell seated them in chairs in front of his desk. Branden stood at the left side, and Newell sat behind the desk and asked, “A PI, Mr. Smith?”

  “Please, it’s Denny. And yes. We’ve hired a private investigator in Chicago to look into the truck driver and his company. We know why our son died, and we know who’s going to pay for it.” He turned to Branden and added, formally, “Thanks to Professor Branden here.”

  Newell gave a curious glance toward Branden and asked, “Can we lay charges against the driver?”