Broken English

by P. L. Gaus

  Branden acknowledged his friend with a nod, folded his arms, and gazed out the window for a few moments without speaking. Robertson shuffled papers on his desk and blushed slightly. Branden said, “OK, let’s hear it again,” and sat down beside Robertson’s desk to listen.

  Robertson stalled a moment, and then seemed pleased. He wheeled around and punched play again, and they listened to the ballad of Stormy the mighty bronc, out on the Milk River Ridge.

  Branden heard it through and remembered the playgrounds after school. Even then, Bruce Robertson had managed unquenchable spells of soaring enthusiasm and exhilaration. He could still be that way, even now. Then, too, there had been the downward spirals into depression, when Robertson would seem to topple into an abyss of untouchable gloom. He was the most changeable and also the most personable man the professor had ever considered a friend. The only other one who could equal the rotund sheriff in steadfastness, loyalty, and trustworthiness was Cal Troyer. And when the professor had found the one woman who was the equal of these two in heart and soul, he had married her.

  But something important in Bruce had died with Irene Cotton. Somehow he had lost his hold on one of the capacities of life. Cal was tangled in it, Branden knew. Cal had sat with her in the hospital as she lay dying. Bruce, however, despite his love for her, perhaps even because of it, hadn’t allowed himself to understand how gravely ill she had been, and he had been out working a case when she died. Now, Branden realized, most of the real trouble between Cal and Bruce arose from the guilt that had torn a corner loose in the sheriff’s big heart.

  “Bruce, I want to talk to you about Cal.”

  “What’s there to say?” Robertson said, suddenly grouchy.

  “I think there’s more to the murders of Janet Hawkins and Eric Bromfield than you’ve let on.”

  “Hawkins did the Bromfield kid,” Robertson said, “and he’s setting up for Sands. Cal knows where Hawkins is, and he’s not talking. If Sands takes a bullet, I’m going to arrest Cal Troyer as an accomplice to murder.”

  “Even Sands, himself, doesn’t think Hawkins is gunning for him.”

  Robertson shot back, “You’ve talked to Jesse Sands?” He knew that Branden had, but had planned to use such a moment to squeeze Branden hard when he had him on the defensive.

  It didn’t work. Branden understood the transaction instinctively and coolly said, “You know I have, Bruce. Niell would have told you.”

  Robertson looked smug and said, “And I told Niell to let you in to see Sands if you ever asked.”

  Branden stood again, stretched his legs, and ambled over to one of the north windows looking out on Courthouse Square. As he watched pedestrians in the square, he asked, “Then don’t you think Sands could have meant something important by telling Hawkins that someone else actually had killed his daughter?”

  Robertson pushed himself away from the desk, got up, and walked over to the coffeepot that Ellie had left on the credenza, and said, “Look, Mike, this is a simple case.” He stepped out of the office and came back directly with a carafe of water. As he poured it into the top of the coffee maker, he said, “You’ve been all over this case, and so have we. Janet Hawkins was killed because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. True, it was her own home, but still she was in the wrong place. Bromfield was killed because he knew the wrong thing. True, it was his job, but he still knew the wrong thing. The things he knew about Hawkins would have tipped us off to what Hawkins intends for Sands.” He snapped the switch on the coffeepot, and added, “It’s as simple as that, Mike, and you know it.”

  “Then why do I feel that none of that can be right?” Branden asked from his spot in front of the window.

  “Beats the tar out of me,” Robertson said, and sat back down behind his desk.

  “You think all we can do is wait it out?” Branden asked.

  “That’s what I’m going to do,” Robertson said as he sorted and opened his mail. “Guards around the clock. Move Sands over to the courthouse ahead of schedule. Hold him there until his trial starts. Stay awake and ready until the judge pronounces sentence. When Sands has been turned over to the state penal authorities, I’ll be able to work the Bromfield murder the way it deserves.”

  “Sands goes to trial next Friday?”

  “Right.”

  “There’s nothing scheduled before then?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he needs a doctor.”

  “He doesn’t.”

  “Any other trials before that one?”

  “None that involve me. If it weren’t for Sands and that Greyson thing, I’d be on vacation,” Robertson said.

  “What Greyson thing?” Branden asked and turned from the window.

  “The mayor wants a little ceremony next Wednesday morning to give Greyson a commendation. ‘Retired guard captures felon’—that sort of thing.”

  “A commendation.”

  “Courthouse steps, next Wednesday morning, at nine.”

  “And that’s all you’ve got coming up on your calendar?”

  “Thought I might move Sands to a north-facing cell so he can watch Greyson,” Robertson said, sarcasm mixed with grim satisfaction.

  “Have you talked with Greyson at all?” Branden asked.

  “Once or twice. He’s washed up,” Robertson said offhand. “Too many nights walking a beat. Mike, give it up.”

  As Branden walked out of the red-brick jailhouse, he thought to himself that likely he would do just that. Give it up. Wait it out like Robertson. And he would, he told himself, soon enough. Just as soon as he had nosed around the three places Robertson had neglected to push for answers. Uncharacteristically, Robertson had left three strings dangling. First, there was the girlfriend of Eric Bromfield. Robertson hadn’t mentioned her, but Marty Holcombe had. Then there was the rifle range where David Hawkins had won his marksmanship trophy. Last, there was New Jersey, where Eric Bromfield seemed to have uncovered something notable the day before he came home. The day before he had taken three .22 slugs to the head.

  22

  Friday, June 13 11:00 A.M.

  NANCY Blain bent over to the viewfinder on her black Nikon camera and studied the image of a wagonload of boisterous Amish kids rolling along in the distance behind two stolid Belgians. She touched a light finger to the focus ring atop the long zoom, and fired off a string of shots as the wagon turned into a lane in front of a large Amish farmstead. After the motor drive had fallen silent, she held her eye to the viewfinder a while longer, pulled the lens up toward a strip-planted field of hay and corn, and refocused on a fence line at the far edge of the field.

  “We were lovers,” she said at last. “We were going to get married.”

  The short sleeves of her T-shirt were rolled up high on her arms. Her black jeans were fashionable, and beltless. Her worn and scuffed hiking boots could recently have come off the Blue Ridge trail. Her dark blue Cleveland Indians road hat was turned around backwards, and her black hair was cut severely short. She stood back from the camera’s tripod, turned around, and looked at the professor sadly.

  “Eric was a great guy. About the greatest guy you could find these days. We met in college.”

  “At Ohio University?”

  She nodded yes and turned back to her camera. A high, white cloud drifted across the tranquil sky and shaded the hill where her lens was focused. Contrast and light seemed good to her, and she took a shot of the corn that ran in swirling rows, up to the fence line on top of the rise. The soft, arching rows of green led the eyes to the sharp, horizontal line of wire, and from that border, the gaze ascended into a gentle blue sky, patched out to the horizon in every direction with lumbering puffs of white.

  Branden sat in the grass on the bank beside the tripod, knees pulled up to his chest. “Marty Holcombe says Eric phoned him the night he was coming home from New Jersey.”

  She popped a pair of sunglasses over her eyes, sat down close to him on the bank, and looked out over t
he Amish valley. Then she turned to him, and intently said, “He called Holcombe, Professor, but he didn’t call me. We had a date the next night.” She fell silent.

  Eventually, Branden said, “There’s a nice shot of a manure spreader,” and pointed toward the saddle between two planted hills.

  “I’ve got a thousand of those,” Nancy said offhandedly.

  “One would think you’d have plenty of all of these shots on file,” Branden said circumspectly.

  “Marty wants fresh shots for a feature. Warrior turns Amish —Hawkins, before and after. The mystery man of Holmes County. Turned in his swords for a plow.”

  “So Holcombe’s going to run Bromfield’s stories about Hawkins?”

  “Wouldn’t you?” she asked, surprised.

  “I don’t know,” Branden said. “I really don’t know.”

  “Well, he’s not going to print them until after the trial, because that’s the way Robertson wants it. But they’ll run in three parts when Sands is gone.”

  She lifted her ball cap, ran a flat palm over her short hair, and replaced the cap. Her light skin sparkled with a sheen of perspiration. The sun came out from under the cloud and hit them there on the little bank near the gravel road. She turned her cap around frontways and pulled the visor down low over her eyes. Then she lay back in the grass, crossed her legs, and locked her fingers behind her head. Eventually she sat up and studied the little valley where her camera was aimed. Then she stood up abruptly. “Looks like I’m done here, Professor. Heading back in.”

  Branden stood, brushed off the seat of his jeans, and asked, “Have you read any of Eric’s stories?”

  “All of them. Each draft, every version,” she said. She lifted the Nikon off the tripod, unscrewed the zoom lens, fished a cap out of her front jeans pocket, and fit it onto the camera body. She carried the two pieces back to her red Bronco. As she bent over in the back seat to stow the gear, Nancy said, “I can’t believe he’s really gone.” Then she straightened up, glanced at Branden, and walked to the tripod. “He had me read all his stuff before he gave it to Holcombe.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Eric was a lousy writer. I scrubbed his copy before he let anyone read it.”

  “You didn’t mind?”

  “We were a team. I read all of his papers in college, too. Normally, he couldn’t have written his way out of a paper bag.” She teared up a little in the corners of her eyes, and explained, “I liked helping him, OK?”

  Branden lifted a camera bag and carried it to the Bronco. “Could anything in those stories have been a reason for Hawkins to have killed him?”

  She opened the driver’s door and climbed up. She started the engine and rolled down the electric windows. Branden stepped around to the passenger’s side, dropped the bag onto the front seat, and leaned in toward her. “I need to know what Eric knew that wasn’t in those stories.”

  She shut the engine down and stretched her arms straight out against the steering wheel. After a few seconds thinking, she relaxed her arms and said, “There’s nothing in them that Hawkins can have been worried about. Besides, didn’t most of his friends already know?”

  Branden acknowledged that wordlessly and said, “Eric must have gotten hold of something he wasn’t supposed to know.”

  She shrugged and asked, “Like what?”

  Branden pushed back from the Bronco and came around to her side. “Can you tell me where Eric went to get his story?”

  “All over.”

  “Like where?”

  “I know he went to New Jersey.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Jesse Sands.”

  “Prison?”

  “Right. Also to Fort Benning.”

  “That’s a new one.”

  “The Special Forces sniper teams train there. It’s called the U.S. Army Marksmanship Training Unit. Did you know Hawkins was an instructor?”

  “No.”

  “Well, Eric went to Fort Benning and got that angle. It’s part of the story Holcombe’s waiting to run.”

  “Anywhere else?”

  “D.C.”

  “Why?”

  “The Vietnam Memorial, and to check on things at the Veteran’s Administration.”

  “Did he get anything there?”

  “Not really. Hawkins just up and quit the forces one day, and walked away. Two years later he showed up in Millersburg. The VA tried to contact him about a pension, but he turned them away for the first year or so.”

  “Then where’d Eric go next?”

  “Last I had heard, he was in New Jersey.”

  “Marty says he got a call from Eric that night.”

  “Like I said, Professor, Marty did, and I didn’t.” She started the engine again. “The way he tells it, Eric had something new that changed the whole Hawkins matter. But what it was, I honestly couldn’t tell you.”

  After she had driven off, Branden sat on the little grassy rise and gazed out across the valley. The lad with the manure spreader had his team headed back to the barns for another load. The wagon of kids had emptied out onto the front lawn at an Amish house, where they bounced, in their long dresses and little vests, on a giant trampoline. A lady in a dark purple dress and black bonnet was hanging a line of clothes behind her house. The colors hung straight in the quiet afternoon sun. Lilac, surf turquoise, lavender, rose, aqua, and a gentle mauve.

  The puzzle of David Hawkins grew in Branden’s mind. He had been at the top of his form. An instructor at Fort Benning. Then one day he had walked away from it all.

  So, something must have happened in the two years that followed. Maybe something had happened earlier, and it had just taken two years for Hawkins to sort it out. But something had drawn him to Cal Troyer. He had set himself up on the west edge of town to live the quiet life. But, as Cal had said, that had not been enough for Hawkins. He had sought the extreme withdrawal from the world that only an Amish life could provide. He had embraced Amish thought, Amish life, and Amish restrictions, carrying his penance a step further than most. He’d hung up his guns and promised himself to an Amish family. Promised himself, on Amish terms, to the Amish ways. Promised himself to an Amish beauty of twenty-nine, who carried her life’s scars on her cheek.

  Gradually, Branden realized that there were only two ways for this all to end. Two extreme possibilities, with no middle ground, and no compromise. The dilemma that Hawkins faced could be defined in only those two ways, one the complete antithesis of the other. If what Robertson was saying was true, Hawkins was going to kill Jesse Sands, and in doing that, he would destroy the one thing in life that he had spent his last seven years searching after fervently. On the other hand, if Cal Troyer was right, this case had nothing whatsoever to do with the revenge of David Hawkins on Jesse Sands. And if that was true, then why had Hawkins prepared a 6 mm PPC load? Why had he taken his long-range rifle down off its secret basement hooks? What had Eric Bromfield discovered in New Jersey? Finally, if Cal was right and not Robertson, then why hadn’t David Hawkins made an appearance anywhere in Holmes County since the day Abigail Raber had found a pistol wrapped in blankets in the back of Hawkins’s buggy?

  23

  Monday, June 16

  FOUR phone calls to New Jersey by Professor Branden, three by Ricky Niell ostensibly, but not entirely, under the authority of Bruce Robertson, two faxes, and six hours in the offices of bureaucrats in the penal system of that state, and after a day and a half, Mike Branden had managed to pencil his name onto the desk calendar of the warden of New Jersey State Prison. Actually, he discovered, his appointment had been only with the warden’s executive secretary, and by 3:00 P.M. on Monday of the week when Jesse Sands was to come out for trial, Branden had all but given up on the hope of talking to Warden Franks.

  The red-eye from Cleveland had landed early that morning in Newark. He’d rented a car from a sleepy attendant and had driven the turnpike of the Garden State with a surge of commuters as the sun came up. He had found the stone
walls of the prison, circled around to the new brick front, and presented himself to the warden’s office by 8:30, having slept only a little on the flight. His appointment was to have been at 9:00. Trouble was, his appointment was not with the warden, and by 10:30, the warden’s executive secretary had “done all she could with Warden Franks.”

  “I’m sorry, Professor,” she said. “I have you down on my calendar from nine until nine-fifteen. I also hope that you can appreciate that the warden cannot make himself available now, and very likely will not become available to you any time today.” She said it apologetically, but firmly, in a tone that made it clear that the words were not hers.

  Branden stood in front of her desk in the large outer office and struggled to reconcile life in Millersburg with that on the East Coast. Her desk was as tidy as Arne Laughton’s, president of Millersburg College, a man more familiar with the board-rooms of corporate donors than with the offices and classrooms of his professors. Branden fought a rising frustration, read the name and title on her desk for the second time, drew in a settling breath of slow air, and asked, “Miss Falviano, please. It’s a matter of some considerable importance. Surely someone in your position of authority can help me.”

  She was an imposing woman who carried herself with a dignified air. Her clothes were expensive, a trim black suit and a white silk blouse. The brooch on her lapel hinted of old money. Her hair was tinted, with occasional lines of natural gray. Her upright posture behind her impressive desk told him she’d sat in her position for many years.

  “I’ve got a 10:45 this Friday,” she said, flipping slowly through a leather-bound scheduler on her desk. She peered up at him over the tops of her reading glasses, perched low on her nose, obviously hoping that Friday would suit him. It didn’t.