Clouds Without Rain

by Gaus, P. L.

  “Weston owns a surveying company,” Robertson said.

  “He’s surveying those high-end housing developments,” Wilsher added.

  Robertson grunted. “How about folk in the buggy?”

  “Only one, a something ‘Weaver.’ Taggert pronounced him at the scene. He was turning left into his own driveway when the buggy was hit. The truck driver is dead, too.”

  “You figure it was the semi?” Robertson asked. He gave out a couple of groans and asked, grousing, “Hey, Doc. You sure you’re using morphine?”

  The doctor came around to the front of the bed, leaned over, and asked, “You’re not comfortable?”

  Robertson barked, “No!” and tried to lift his arms to register his dismay.

  “We’ll push some more,” the doctor said and gave the order to the nurse.

  Because of his large size and the intense pain, Robertson had worked through the initial doses of morphine quickly. Now the latest dose added its effects, and Robertson began to grow drowsy. Deputy Ricky Niell arrived in a neatly pressed uniform, eyed the sheriff’s back, made a pained expression for Wilsher, and took a seat next to the lieutenant. Robertson noticed the uniform and waved his hand feebly to urge Niell closer. Then he let Niell and Wilsher talk, while he struggled to follow the conversation.

  “You got second statements from the witnesses?” Wilsher asked Niell.

  Niell tapped a finger on his creased uniform breast pocket and said, “Got it all right here,” followed by, “How’s the sheriff doing?”

  Robertson muttered something, but it was muffled by his face mask. Wilsher said, “Fine,” obviously not meaning it. He drew close to Niell’s ear and whispered, “Nothing yet about Schrauzer. Understand?”

  Niell nodded and said, “Sheriff, the skid marks from the semi cab are not that long. And from the hilltop where the professor was, there wouldn’t have been more than three, four seconds reaction time, as fast as that truck was going. We figure he hit the buggy at close to forty-five, maybe fifty-five miles an hour, even jackknifed like he was.”

  Wilsher asked Niell, “The Amishman’s name was Weaver?”

  “Right. John R. Weaver. I think he’s connected up with Melvin Yoder’s bunch.”

  “Weaver would have made that left-hand turn into his drive a thousand times. And it only takes a few seconds to swing one of those ponies off the road, buggy and all.”

  “So you’re wondering why the buggy was standing there long enough to be hit,” Niell said.

  “That, and why Weaver didn’t know a truck was coming.”

  “There’s only about sixty yards from the hilltop down into the low part of the road where Weaver’s lane cuts in. That doesn’t leave much time for a reaction, even when traffic is slow.”

  “Then we’ll be citing the truck driver for unsafe speed, in any case,” Wilsher said.

  “Posthumously,” Niell said. “Still, you gotta figure the buggy had better odds than just to sit there and get hit like that.”

  Wilsher thought a while and then asked, “Do we know the point of impact? Some buggy parts were thrown back at least thirty yards.”

  Robertson tapped his fingers on the metal legs of the hospital bed to get their attention and said, “Cab pushed, kept on.” He stalled under the influence of the drugs. “I mean going. After. Twenty yards. Maybe more. Buggy parts at the drive. Parts, Dan.”

  Wilsher turned to Niell and asked, “Are there any crashed buggy parts right at the turn onto the lane?”

  “There are buggy parts everywhere,” Niell said, “but the first ones are there, yeah. At the turn onto the lane. The cab came on ahead after the crash and rolled over the point of impact.”

  Robertson nodded weakly and tapped the legs of the bed insistently. In a faint, muffled voice he asked, “Why jackknifed?”

  Wilsher shrugged.

  Niell said, “The road curves as it crests there. At high speed, that would have brought the trailer around beside the cab somewhat. Jamming the brakes would have started the jackknife.”

  Robertson said something like “Umph” and let his head drop. Wilsher made an entry in his notebook.

  There was a knock at the door to the small emergency room, and, still dressed in his Amish costume, Professor Branden asked, “All right to come in?”

  One of the doctors motioned for Niell and Wilsher to wait in the hall, and then he waved the professor in.

  Nodding a silent greeting to the officers as they passed, Branden took one of the two seats at the head of Robertson’s bed and asked, “You going to make it all right, Bruce?” He was smiling, but vastly concerned.

  He stood up briefly to evaluate the efforts of the doctors and sat back down heavily. Memories of an emergency room long ago surfaced in his mind, from a day in the seventh grade when Robertson had rolled a homemade go-cart on a dirt trail. Branden had been standing on the frame of the go-cart, bracing himself on Robertson’s shoulders. He was thrown clear when the go-cart flipped sideways, but Robertson was wedged under the hot lawnmower engine. Branden had fought desperately to lift the heavy engine and wooden frame while Robertson struggled to pull his broken arm out from under the sputtering engine. The burn that day had been bad enough, a patch roughly five inches wide on the back of his arm. The burns today looked like that ugly wound a dozen times over. The seventh-grader had healed quickly. This would be another matter entirely.

  Again Branden asked, “Are you all right, Bruce?”

  Robertson mumbled, “Drugged,” and lightly nodded his head.

  Branden looked up to the doctors, and one of them said, “First- and second-degree burns on his back and arms. Several areas of third-degrees, too. We’ve got most of the shirt cut loose now, and we’ve had to lance some of the tissue because of the swelling. Mostly, now, we’re fighting dehydration and infection, but if I were guessing, I’d say he’ll be fine. A smaller man and it’d be a different story, burns as extensive as they are. We figure it’s fourteen percent by the body chart system. Now, it mostly depends on how well he cooperates with his recovery regimen.”

  The professor said, “Oh, brother,” and winked at Robertson, well knowing how stubborn the sheriff could be. He leaned over, studied his friend’s face, and concluded the sheriff was out with the drugs. Then he said, “Hang in there, Sheriff,” and stepped out into the hall to confer with Niell and Wilsher. To them he said, “He got burned up pretty good, once, when we were kids. He’ll be fine.”

  “The nurses say he’ll be okay,” Ricky said, and added, “They say Bruce was up on the hood of Schrauzer’s cruiser, trying to pull him back through the windshield.”

  “It was a bundle of poles or something,” Branden said. “They got Phil out through the driver’s door.” After reflection, Branden added, “Does Bruce know Phil’s dead?”

  “No,” Wilsher said, “and I’d like to keep it that way for now.”

  “It looked to me like the eighteen-wheeler knocked the buggy into next week and jackknifed onto the car,” the professor said.

  Niell said, “That’s about it.” Turning to the lieutenant, he delivered his report. “We talked again to the three witnesses. They all say the same thing, to a point. The buggy was stopped to make the left turn. The car was stopped behind it, plus Schrauzer in his cruiser, and up came the two other pickups and the produce truck. Then the accounts have it in different orders, but essentially they were all waiting in line when the buggy started its turn, and the back legs of the horse gave out. Two of the witnesses say they also saw Schrauzer backing his cruiser up at that point, and two also report hearing an engine backfire then.”

  Branden asked, “How would Phil have known to back up that soon?”

  Niell shrugged and Wilsher made a note in his book.

  Niell continued. “I think it was the produce truck. That back-fired, I mean. Anyway, they all saw the semi appear at the top of the hill, hit its brakes, trailer started around, the cab smashed into the buggy, and the trailer hit the car sideways and overturned.
The impact threw the car back a ways, and the fire started under it. Probably the gas tank.”

  Wilsher asked, “What about Weaver?”

  “He was crumpled up in what’s left of the buggy. About thirty yards back and off to the side in a field.”

  “Have you laid out most of the buggy?” Wilsher asked. “That’ll be important.”

  “All that we could find so far. We’ll use floodlights tonight,” Niell said. “What’s left, we’ll get tomorrow.”

  Wilsher made another entry in his notebook and asked, “Can either of you figure why Schrauzer was backing his unit up before anybody saw the semi coming over the hill?”

  From the end of the hall, Ellie Troyer said, “I’ve got a better question for you, Dan.” Just coming off her shift at the dispatcher’s desk in the jail, she was dressed in a black skirt of conservative length and a white blouse. She walked briskly down the hall, hooked an affectionate arm into Niell’s, pulled him close, and asked, “How’s the sheriff?”

  Wilsher said, “He’ll be all right. You said there’s a better question?”

  “Phil called in the wreck himself,” Ellie said. “How did he have the time? He said something like ‘Big wreck, Ellie. Semi. Buggy. Maybe more.’”

  From the emergency room, they heard Robertson pounding on the legs of his hospital bed and saw him waving them into the room.

  Ellie led the other three in, and she and Wilsher took the two chairs by Robertson’s head.

  Robertson’s muffled voice came through the plastic mask. “Phil called?” His head was lifted with extreme exertion, and his eyes were high in their sockets, trying to see Ellie’s face.

  She bent low so she could look into the sheriff’s eyes, and Robertson relaxed his neck. Ellie said, “Phil’s call was the first one we got on the accident. It was brief, Sheriff, but I got it down that a semi and a buggy were involved. At least that’s what I put out on the radio.”

  Robertson shook his head and mumbled. He reached over and squeezed Dan Wilsher’s hand. Softly, they heard him say, “Not enough time,” and then he let Wilsher’s hand go.

  Niell pulled Branden and Wilsher back into the hallway. “He’s right,” he said. “There wasn’t time for Phil to have called it in.”

  Wilsher frowned and rubbed at his gray hair.

  Niell said, “Come out to the parking lot. I’ve got the poles that smashed through Schrauzer’s windshield.”

  Ellie joined them and they all followed Niell out onto the blacktopped parking lot of the little hospital. Missy Taggert, in a white lab coat, was bent over the open trunk of Niell’s cruiser, studying something protruding from the well. She had a tape rule and a blood sample kit, and she was using tweezers to drop a small swatch of hair into a vial.

  Taggert’s eyes remained fixed on her work in the trunk, but she heard them approaching and said, “Somebody tell me how Bruce is doing before I go nuts out here.”

  Ellie said, “He’s bad off, Missy.”

  Niell disagreed. “He can handle it.”

  Branden, sensing great concern in the coroner’s voice, encouraged her with, “I think he’s going to be fine, Missy.”

  “Third-degree burns?” she asked, looking up.

  “In some places,” Branden said gently.

  “I’m going in,” Taggert announced.

  Branden laid his hand softly on her arm and said, “Take a minute and tell us what you’ve found.”

  Taggert looked into the trunk and then back to the professor. She eyed the door to the hospital’s emergency room and said, “Phil Schrauzer was killed instantly by the blow from this instrument.” She reached into the trunk, took hold of the object with both hands, and lifted out a heavy, three-legged surveyor’s tripod. The baseplate on top was covered in blood, and clumps of skin, hair, and glass chips were pressed onto it. She stood the tripod on the pavement in front of them. The three wooden legs were painted yellow, and on one of them, lettered in red, was the name J. R. Weaver.

  Niell said, “I’ve stood on that hill. There can’t have been more than five seconds between Phil’s seeing the semi come over the rise and the time of the impact. Three seconds would be more like it.”

  Missy said, “All I know is that this tripod came flying out of the back of Weaver’s buggy and shot through Schrauzer’s windshield before any of the soot from the fires was deposited on the hood of the car.”

  Ellie asked, “Then how did he manage to call it in?”

  Taggert shrugged and said, “I don’t know. As far as I can tell, he died too soon to call anyone.”

  Behind them, they heard a small commotion and when they all turned around they saw Bruce Robertson balancing awkwardly on a single wooden crutch, nurses scrambling to roll his IV stand along behind him, and one doctor storming down the bright hall with a wheelchair.

  Robertson balanced on the pavement and glowered at Wilsher. “You didn’t tell me he was dead.”

  Missy Taggert ran up to the big sheriff and steadied him under his free arm. “You’re not supposed to be out here, Bruce,” she said, and started shouting orders to nurses and doctors alike.

  Wilsher took a step or two toward Robertson and said, “The doctors didn’t want you to know.”

  Robertson wavered on his legs and leaned heavily off-balance. Taggert managed to steady him long enough for the professor and Niell to reach him and take hold. The doctor scooted the wheelchair under the sheriff, and Niell and Branden lowered him onto the front edge of it, taking care not to let his back or arms touch the padding of the chair.

  From his seat, Robertson looked up to Taggert and said, “I suppose that means you, Missy. Not wanting me to know about Phil.”

  Missy nodded and said, “I’m more concerned about you, Sheriff.”

  Robertson made a dismissive gesture with his hand. The nurses turned him around on the drive, and the doctor pushed a syringe into the port of the sheriff’s IV lines.

  As they wheeled him back into the hospital, Robertson said, “No time to call. No time to back up,” and then he leaned forward and passed out, with two nurses holding him to his seat on the wheelchair.

  At the back of Niell’s cruiser, Missy said to Branden, “This surveyor’s tripod went flying with all the other debris from the buggy. It whipped through the air like everything else out there, and it came through Phil Schrauzer’s windshield before he would have had time to blink, much less do anything else. Certainly before he could have made a radio call.”

  4

  Tuesday, August 8

  8:05 A.M.

  THE next morning, Professor Branden stood on the hill where, the day before, he had turned cars back north on 515 and watched through his binoculars as Robertson had struggled to save Phil Schrauzer. Again, he studied the crash scene in the valley below him. There were several cruisers from the State Highway Patrol, and a single line of traffic had been opened on the road. Troopers were posted at each end, with roadblocks to handle the flow of traffic, first in one direction and then in the other.

  The semitrailer rig had been righted, and the cab stood on the west side of the road, the charred trailer on the east. A crew of several Amish men worked at the back of the overturned trailer to salvage light oak and dark cherry furniture, transferring it to smaller panel trucks. The blackened hulk of a car sat on its iron wheels where it had burned, and the one-way traffic passed slowly by, drivers rubbernecking at the destruction.

  The extent of the fire had been much greater than Branden had realized. The road was blackened with soot for a good thirty yards behind the burnt car, and the grasses, shrubs, weeds, trees, and crops had been burned in large, semicircular patches on either side of the road. The blackened ground ran nearly to John R. Weaver’s house, set back forty yards on the west. In the field beyond Weaver’s house, the fire had burned to a stand of timber before the firefighters had brought it under control. That stand of timber followed a dried creek bed that edged the western border of the crops and curved around behind Weaver’s place, to w
ithin twenty yards of the back of his house. On the east, the damage was less extensive, because of the easterly breeze the day before. Here, along the edges of the blackened soil, there were still a few ribbons of smoke lifting gently off the ground.

  Once down at the scene, Branden parked on the berm, well back from the investigation, and walked down the slope of the road to the point where Phil Schrauzer’s cruiser had backed up and stopped. The professor was dressed in jeans, a green and white Millersburg College T-shirt, and hiking boots. He wore a blue and red Cleveland Indian’s ballcap and a pair of mirrored sunglasses.

  He saw Schrauzer’s cruiser, blackened with soot as far back as the rear doors. On the hood and windshield, under the layer of soot, he could make out the numerous dents and cracks where the car and windshield had been pelted with the debris from the buggy. The windshield was smashed inward over the steering wheel.

  The remains of the carriage of the buggy sat off to one side, in the field where it had landed on impact. Several Holmes County deputies were walking slowly over the field, eyes down, gathering the smaller buggy parts to the side of the road. The sheriff’s forensics photographer, Eric Shetler, worked slowly there at the berm, taking photos of the debris that had been recovered. As Branden walked in the morning light, the sun was strong from the east, warm on his face and neck, promising another hot and rainless day.

  The treads of his boots left waffle patterns in the heated blacktop. The heat reminded him of summer days in Phoenix. Caroline was there now, visiting her mother, a long-standing vacation that had risen to the status of an obligation. Branden had gone with her several times in earlier days, but had been glad, almost relieved, when Caroline had released him from that duty. Now, given the circumstances, he wondered if he shouldn’t have gone.

  At the site of the impact, a sheriff’s deputy had rolled a backhoe down from its trailer and was working with the bucket to move the dead horse farther away from the pavement. A trooper was measuring the length of skid marks with a rolatape, and another trooper was bending into the cab of the semi, studying the gearshifter.