Stars for Lydia

by P. L. Gaus

  “No,” Robertson said. “They don’t match. It wasn’t Herbeck who handled that note.”

  “OK, did you find a gun at Herbeck’s house. Or in her car?”

  “Why, Mike? What’s going on?”

  “Well, either I just witnessed an amazing display of bravado, or Louise Herbeck is completely innocent.”

  “No gun, Mike. She didn’t have one.”

  “That gun could be anywhere, Bruce.”

  “Yes, but none of the prints on the suicide note match any of her prints. So Herbeck’s a dead end for that issue.”

  “OK. Thanks. It’s just that Herbeck seems a bit too forthright to me. Like she’s bluffing it through.”

  “I don’t think so,” the sheriff said. “Now tell me, what did you think of the Culps?”

  “Decent folk, I guess. They wanted to help, but Mary just never showed up.”

  “That’s pretty much what Ricky told me.”

  “So, where is she?” Branden asked, perplexed. “Why is there no trace of her?”

  “Don’t know, Mike. Maybe she’s not with us anymore.”

  Chapter 21

  Thursday, August 31

  7:25 PM

  The professor parked his truck that evening on TR 606, at the head of John Yost’s farm lane. He was beside the culvert where Ricky Niell had left his cruiser Monday afternoon, with its lights flashing.

  Here, Bishop Yost was working a team of draft horses near the road, cutting the outermost stalks of corn around the perimeter, to open the field for harvesting. Once opened like that, the feed corn would stand under the autumn sky until the harvest, when the families of the church would join to bring in one family’s crop and then another’s, until the corn of the entire congregation had been loaded into the wood and wire corn cribs that stood on every Schwartzentruber farm.

  Branden climbed out of his truck and called out to the bishop. They spoke together there at the edge of the field, and Branden secured permission to walk the farm. As he explained it to Bishop Yost, he wanted to see again where Lydia had died on the bridle path, and he wanted to see the farmhouse where the family lived. The bishop pronounced it a strange request, but Branden said in pleading his case that, “I want to help find Mary and Esther. I want to know why Mary left, and I want to talk with her about bringing Esther home.”

  The bishop nodded his appreciation and said, “We have nothing to hide, Professor. Just do not bother the people who are working here. There’s been a lot of neglect here, and we’re trying to get the place straightened up. Everyone is helping, but they have their own farms to tend, and I want them finished here, in time to do that.”

  “I’ll stay out of the way,” Branden promised. “I just want to walk the farm. It’ll help clear my head. I hope we can still find Mary and Esther.”

  Pointedly the bishop asked, “Are you also hoping that John can come home from the hospital, to his children?”

  “Of course. Why not?”

  “That Social Services lady – your Miss Shewmon – has been a bother to us. She is not sympathetic.”

  “I have no desire to break apart the family, Bishop Yost.”

  Yost frowned with obvious skepticism. “Are you not the one who gave Lydia that scholarship?”

  “I think you know that I am.”

  Yost considered that for a moment and shook his head. Then sternly he said, “Just see that you keep yourself out of the way. We have work to finish this evening. If all you want to do is look around, then I can’t see any harm in it. But don’t interfere with the people who are working here.”

  Branden asked, “Why didn’t you want Lydia to go to college, Bishop Yost?”

  The bishop’s reply was quick and stern. “She left her church, her family, and her brothers and sisters of the congregation. She’ll never have a chance to join the Amish church. You pretty much saw to that with your scholarship. But the failure is mine. She’s a lost soul, and it is my fault.”

  Branden considered that for a moment, and then he said to the bishop, “Lydia can’t be your only loss in the church. Surely other people have gone out into the world.”

  “None, Professor. None since I have been Bishop. I am charged by God to safeguard the souls in my church. Lydia has been my only failure.”

  “Do you really think that she . . . “

  “Professor!” the bishop cut in. “I can see that you don’t understand. Now you can walk the property, if you still wish, but please leave us all alone. We have work to do, and we are all burdened by our loss. So please do not bother any of my people tonight.”

  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

  Branden realized that he had been dismissed, so he tipped a curt nod, locked the doors on his truck and started north on foot, walking along the wagon lane. The bishop returned to his labors.

  Branden found that most of the high spots in the dirt lane had dried since Monday. But in the deep cuts of the wagon wheels, brown water still stood. Even in the shallower hoofprints and tracks of car and truck wheels, the soil was still somewhat pasty with mud. Branden negotiated the irregular ground of the lane toward the woods at back, and he discerned the wider tracks of the ambulance and then the knobby tracks of the tow truck that Robertson had sent to retrieve both his Crown Vic and Lydia’s red Escort.

  As he progressed down the lane, on Branden’s left, the corn stood tall, with its tassels fluttering in a warm evening breeze. On his right, there was open pasture, where cows were grazing under a westerly sun. Most of the cows were facing homeward, forming something of a line, and behind the line, two Amish men were walking with long sticks to encourage the animals forward. It was nearly time for milking, and the cows were heading slowly and ponderously back to the far corner of the pasture, grazing continuously along the way. There must be other Schwartzentrubers coming, the professor thought. To milk so many cows.

  The sky overhead was pale blue, but clear. The temperature was up, well over eighty degrees, the professor judged. The sun was baking the muddy soil into hard, rigid forms. It would be easy to find the prints in the bridle path where everyone had stood around Lydia’s body on Monday night.

  The far bend in the lane took Branden left, to head west. Soon he had reached the spot where Lydia Schwartz had died. He found the ruts where the ambulance had turned around and backed in to retrieve her body. He found the depression in the mud where Lydia’s body had fallen. He also found the rock on which Lydia had struck her head.

  Without any particular intent, Branden started pacing along the lane toward the farmhouse. John Yost? he thought. Dangerous? Or was he just depressed? Was that the extent of it? Untreated depression? Well, unmedicated depression, anyway. Just like his brother, Daniel. There were bound to be other brothers and sisters from that Yost clan, born to the same Yost parents. Make a note, the professor told himself. Find out about the other Yost siblings of John, and Alva and Daniel. And ask Evelyn Carson. Is a susceptibility to depression an inherited disorder? Can John Yost be quickly stabilized with medicine? If Daniel Yost had been willing to take modern medicine, or to use modern doctors, would he still have his family in Indiana?

  Branden followed the curve in the lane, south toward the barnyard with its hand-pump well standing in the center of the graveled yard. At the pump, a lady in a black dress and bonnet was working the pump handle vigorously, to bring water up into a pail. Another lady stood aside, waiting to take her own turn at the pump.

  On the screened back porch, a young girl was working with a broom and dust pan to sweep the floorboards. Beside her, two women were bent over galvanized tubs, washing clothes by hand in sudsy water. Clothes that had already been washed were being pinned to a clothesline that ran on a pulley system, slanting from the front corner of the house, up to the peak of the milking barn’s roof, on the other side of the barnyard.

  Branden stood with the horse barn to his left and the milking barn to his right. Men were working in each of them to fork manure into heavy iron manure spreaders, and other men w
ere hitching horses to the tongues of the boxy red machines. In the loft of the hay barn, a boy with a long-tined fork was casting fresh straw down to replace that which was being taken up with the manure.

  Then beside the house in the family garden, two ladies in black were bent over to pull weeds. They had worked nearly half of the garden at that point, and a little girl was walking the rows to take up the weeds into a basket. A boy of a similar age was carrying another basket of weeds out of the garden rows, to dump them in a heap at the far edge of the garden.

  A swing set stood beside the house, and two small children were playing there on the swings. A clanking windmill towered over it. Branden crossed the graveled ground of the barnyard, and he stood back at the corner of the house to watch the people work. One of the women at the wash tubs took note of him, and she stepped inside the house. Soon a man in charcoal denim came out to challenge him, saying, “What do you want here?”

  Branden replied, “I have permission from your bishop to have a look around.” He displayed his badge. “I was here Monday evening to help with Lydia, and I thought if I could just walk the grounds? Well, maybe I could help find Mary and Esther.”

  That brought a belligerent stare from the Amish man. “We don’t have much use,” he said, “for English visitors. You should be moving along. Unless you want to help with the chores. Otherwise, I don’t think you should stay. I think it was time you were leaving.”

  The professor knew it was. He walked to the side of the house and turned the corner to leave along the lane that ran out to the road. It would put him out on TR 606, some hundred yards west of his truck.

  They are peasants, he mused as he reached the front corner of the house. He paused there, thinking. Peasants yes, but peasants for a purpose. For an ideology. For religion, to be sure, but also just for the sake of tradition. For the simple-minded task of ‘keeping the old ways.’ And here were all the old ways on display. Families of the church, helping another one with a need. Community. Belonging. The bonding of families under the leadership of the bishop and the commonality of the scriptures. The actions of faith on clear display. These were the peasants of faith. They were peasant farmers to be sure, but they were not unsophisticated. They were simple, but not simpleminded.

  As he took a seat on the front steps of the house, a team of Standardbreds came down the lane with a livestock wagon clattering along behind it. As it passed by the professor, the driver gave a stern and wary look at Branden. In the wagon there was a caged pig. The driver passed by Branden without making comment.

  Behind him, the front screened door opened on creaky hinges, and Junior Yost came out of the house to sit beside Branden on the steps. Junior took off his hat, and he wiped out the inside of the brim with his handkerchief. He didn’t speak at first, but seemed content just to sit beside Branden in the warm evening air. Eventually, though, he spoke.

  “The bishop isn’t happy with us, Professor. He thinks father has let the place run down, and so it’s my fault for not stepping in as the oldest son.”

  Branden put a hand briefly on Junior’s bent knee. “You’re getting help now, Junior. If fault is to be found, we can ask your bishop why he hadn’t been keeping a closer watch on the condition of your family.”

  Junior snorted. “Fat chance. He’s been trying to find our mother.”

  “He could have stopped in here from time to time.”

  “No, it really is my fault. I should have kept after the other kids to help.”

  “They’re young, Junior. They’re just too young.”

  “Anyways, Professor, why are you out here? People inside are grumbling a bit about you.”

  “Oh, really? I don’t mean anything by it.”

  “They don’t see it that way.”

  “No, I suppose not. I don’t know, Junior. I thought if I had a look around, it’d help me understand why your Aunt Lydia had to die. Why Meredith Silver died. Why your father is so depressed. I guess I just needed a place to walk and to think, and this seemed like as good a place as any.”

  “So,” Junior led. “Why did Aunt Lydia have to die?”

  “I’m afraid it was more than an accident. Meredith Silver wrote in her note that she gave Lydia a shove while they were running down the hill in the rain.”

  “Note?”

  “Apparently Mrs. Silver left a suicide note.”

  “She shoved her?”

  “Yes, Junior. There is a faint bruise over Lydia’s shoulder blade. Where she was shoved. That’s what made her fall.”

  Junior shook his head sadly. “An argument? They had some kind of stupid argument?”

  “That’s what it seems like.”

  Junior laid his head over into his hands. He made a lamenting growl and seeming embarrassed by it, he straightened up and made a show of clearing his throat. “This is about my mother, again. This was an argument about die Maemme.”

  “Probably.”

  “The bishop tells me I can’t, but I’m starting to get quite angry with Die Maemme. I know it was bad here. I know it was bad for her. But this bad? And why was she citing scriptures to my father? What did they tell her at those bible studies in Dithy’s house?”

  “I don’t know, Junior. It’s a good question.”

  Junior rose to his feet and stepped up onto the porch. “If you ever find out, Professor, please don’t tell me. Right now, I really don’t think I want to know.”

  Branden reached up to catch Junior’s hand, and he said, “Sit back down a bit, Junior. Please. Let’s just take a minute more to talk.”

  Junior sat again on the porch steps beside the professor, and Branden asked, “What did you think of the college, Junior?”

  “It was nice enough,” Junior answered.

  Branden asked, “Do you know why she had to get out? Do you understand why Amish life was never going to be enough to satisfy her?”

  Junior held a long pause, thinking with his eyes closed. Then he said, “Starlight,” and he opened his eyes to turn to look at the professor.

  “Starlight?” Branden asked.

  Junior nodded and smiled with a memory. “We used to lay ourselves out on the grass at night, to look up at the stars. You can’t see them so good in your cities, because you all burn so many electric bulbs. But out here, we can see them all. And Aunt Lydia used to ask me – all the time she’d ask me – “Junior, don’t you want to know what they are? Haven’t you ever wondered what starlight really is?”

  Branden held a respectful silence and let Junior continue.

  “Well, Professor, I answered her ‘no.’ I really don’t need to know about it that much. I know they are there, and I know they are beautiful. That’s always been enough for me. But I also know that that’d never have been enough for my Aunt Lydia. Professor, I’ve known that since I was a child.”

  Simply and softly, the professor said, “I understand.”

  Junior rose to his feet. “As for college,” he said, “and about her going to college? She called it her Starlight Quest. She said she was going off to chase the starlight.”

  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

  After a spell of thought and a period of remorse, the professor got himself up on his feet, and he began a circuit around the front of the house, intending to circle around on the far side and walk back down the lane the way he had come. But at the side, just beyond the grass of the yard, he saw a path leading into the woods, and with idle despair, he entered the woods.

  The path took him straight into the timber, heading west and a little south. Oaks, walnuts, maples. Locust trees and sycamores. Tangles of underbrush and vines beneath the forest canopy. It was cooler in the deep shade as he walked along the path.

  When he came to a clearing, he saw that it had access from TR 606 beyond the trees. Here were other wagon ruts in the mud. These were the ruts of heavy wagons with wide iron wheels. There was a rustle in the brush behind him, and he turned to see a bushy blonde tail bouncing off toward the north, deeper into the woods.
A dog? He started in that direction, and he stumbled. He almost fell.

  At his feet, there was the rounded edge of a massive shoulder bone, buried just beneath the surface of the dirt in the clearing. He studied the ground where he was standing, and more bones were laying there. A femur, the size of a cow. Rib bones as large as a horse. The ground at the center of the clearing had been pawed loose, and more bones had been unearthed, some with small fragments of red flesh and white tendon still adhering to the bone.

  Coyotes, he realized. Coyotes had been digging at the dirt. Deep in the woods, he had found a slaughter pit. He had found the carcasses of farm animals that had been slaughtered for the meat. At the far edge of the clearing, he saw a deep hole, with dirt mounded beside it and a shovel stuck into the mound, handle up. So, another slaughter was scheduled for the evening. The hole had been dug for the bones of a pig.

  Branden walked a wide circle around the perimeter of the clearing where the bones of the animals had been buried, and he came back to the path he had followed from the house. Opposite that position, the path continued into the woods. He crossed over the boneyard, and he continued west and south along the trail. After about a hundred yards, the trail took a turn toward the south, and fifty yards later, it let out onto TR 606, at a position opposite Meredith Silver’s ranch house.

  The professor surmised that he had walked the path that Mary must have used to leave home for her clandestine scripture lessons at Silver’s house. Here is where she would have crossed the road. Here is where she would have crossed from the seventeenth century into the twenty-first.

  He stepped over the narrow culvert and out onto the blacktop. He turned east toward his truck at the other end of the Yost property, and as he walked, his phone toned in his pocket with a call from Robertson. He answered the call saying simply, “Sheriff?”

  “Where are you, Mike?” Robertson asked. “I’d like to come over.”

  “At the Yost farm, on 606.”

  “I’ve gotten a couple of hang-up calls from a burner phone. But she did speak once, rather briefly, and she said she was Mary Yost. She sounded nervous, Mike. She said she’d call back tonight. She clicked off before I could say anything.”