by P. L. Gaus
“It will hurt Abigail if our trust is misplaced.”
Cal nodded. “Yes, but what of his vows?”
“I saw him take the vows, it’s true,” Raber said. “But you’re asking me to buy a sack full of kittens, without looking into the sack.”
Cal seemed uncertain.
Raber explained. “I’m going to look in the sack, Pastor. Wait to be sure about David Hawkins.”
As they sat together and talked softly on the porch swing, the crickets came out and bordered them around in a blanket of peaceful sounds. There was the muffled stamping of horse’s hooves on straw, their whinnies in the barn, and the low voices of the cows in the nearest fields. The tensions of city life drifted out of Cal Troyer, and he stopped trying to wrestle with the puzzle of David Hawkins. Then, toward nine o’clock, Mike Branden came hiking over the hill where the windmill stood.
The professor wore blue jeans, a light green Millersburg College jacket, and a flat-brimmed, Amish-black hat. Over his hiking boots, ankles, and shins, he had strapped yellow and blue nylon hiking gaiters. He paused to slip them off before coming around the porch to Cal and Raber Sr.
“Mr. Raber,” Branden said. “My name is Mike Branden. I would be hoping to talk with you, and the pastor here, about David Hawkins.”
Cal remained silent and, somewhat taken by surprise, curiously watched Branden pull briars off his jeans where the gaiters had failed to protect him.
Branden explained, “I hiked in across the bottoms about a mile and a half. Had to park over on County Road 229 in order to lose what I think was Bruce Robertson’s tail.”
“You thought they’d follow you here?”
“Ricky Niell was kind enough to tip me off,” Branden said and looked to Mr. Raber and back to Cal.
Cal apologized and said, “Herman Raber, I’d like to present Professor Michael Branden. He’s the one who spoke to Abigail.”
Raber gave a little nod and lit his pipe without comment. Branden came onto the screened porch and pulled up a short, unpainted wooden chair beside the swing.
Cal said to Branden, “Mike, Hawkins is set up here about as nicely as a person could want. Mr. Raber has given Abigail the original farmstead and fifty acres for the day when they’re to be married. David’s got everything he’s wanted, and I’ll not readily believe he’ll trade it all in for nothing.”
“Cal, I saw what he’s got stored away in his back basement room,” Branden said and pointedly eyed his friend.
“And you saw that everything was there, in its place,” Cal asserted. “Hawkins hasn’t touched the stuff in months.”
“I also saw that he’s made a recent entry in his logbook. Only three days ago,” Branden countered.
Cal swallowed hard and tried to cover his surprise. Mr. Raber eased forward on the swing and seemed interested.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Cal said.
“Do you know he’s a long-range marksman?”
“It doesn’t mean a thing,” Cal said again, sounding exasperated.
“Do you know that he can drill the heart out of a walnut at 200 yards?” Branden asked and glanced at Raber to see what reaction that would produce.
“That’s only a hobby,” Cal said.
The senior Raber said, “Hobbies don’t put food on the table. Hunting does, so we hunt. But, killing people est verboten.” Then he knocked out his pipe as if there were nothing more to be said on the subject, and retired to the little Daadihaus, leaving Branden and Troyer alone on the breezeway porch.
“Hawkins is not just another Vietnam veteran,” Branden said. “He was U.S. Army Special Forces. CIA.”
“Ex-Special Forces,” Cal interrupted. “Ex-CIA.”
“Whatever. But, he’s that and also a long-range sharpshooter with a secret basement armory.”
“I know all of this, Mike.”
“He’s a gun nut, Cal!”
“He likes to punch holes in paper targets.”
“You’re not worried even a little bit?”
“Not a fraction.”
Branden realized that Cal would not soon change his mind about David Hawkins, so he stood and motioned for Cal to follow him to Cal’s truck. “It’s about time we got home, Cal,” he said.
The little country road that borders the Raber farm cuts due south toward Mt. Hope. It rises and falls over steep hills and into secluded valleys, but never turns to the right or to the left in more than a dozen miles. On a peaceful summer day, it will see an abundance of buggy traffic and a few cars. At night, the buggies are mostly parked in their barns, and cars have few reasons to be going anywhere on such a back-country road.
Tonight, Cal drove Branden to his car on a deserted stretch of County Road 229. He pushed his pickup along through the dark, with his window down and the breeze toying with his beard. He drove in silence with his thoughts, and tried to solve the puzzle of what David Hawkins might do with new bullets.
When they reached the professor’s truck, Cal pulled his old Chevy in behind it, and Branden sat pensively on the bench seat next to Cal. Off in the distance, there was the faint orange glow of a kerosene lantern through the sliding doors of an old barn. On ahead, the lights of a rare car stopped at a darkened intersection of county roads and then slipped away to the south. Cal turned the engine off, and soon the crickets started their cadence again.
“I need your help, Cal,” Branden said, staring grimly at the windshield in front of him. “Even if you’re right about Hawkins, we still need to find him before Robertson does. If nothing else, just to convince him to turn himself in.”
“I doubt he’ll do that, Mike.”
“The Rabers and Abigail haven’t seen him?”
“No.”
“Robertson still wanted him when he questioned you at the jail?”
“Yes.”
“Marty Holcombe thinks Hawkins could very well have killed Eric Bromfield to stop him from printing whatever it was that he learned in New Jersey.”
Cal groaned feebly and laid his head against the back of the seat.
Branden turned his thoughts to Greyson and said, “Nabal Greyson has been hanging around since he captured Jesse Sands.”
“That Old Testament name,” Cal mused, his thoughts somewhere distant. “It’s unusual.” With his head back, his eyes were fixed in the dark on the ceiling in the cab of his truck.
“The man himself is unusual,” Branden said. “Rather a messy old fellow with a taste for cigars.”
“I think it’s First Chronicles,” Cal said, eyes still looking up. “Maybe First Samuel. Nabal, I mean. Strange name.”
“He said Jesse Sands is to go to trial next week, and then he’ll be moving on.”
“So we’ve got until Friday to find David,” Cal said.
“Robertson wouldn’t argue with you there,” Branden said. “So, where do we start?”
“Greyson might help.”
“I got the impression he pretty much wants to stay out of it,” Branden said.
“Try Holcombe again?” Cal suggested. He sat up and gripped the wheel.
“Holcombe said Bromfield had a girlfriend.”
“She might be helpful.”
“Right. I’ll talk to her,” Branden said.
“Bromfield told Holcombe he had found something in New Jersey,” Cal said.
“Right.”
“What was that?”
“Don’t know,” Branden said.
“Does Holcombe know?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then we’ve got to get to New Jersey,” Cal said.
“I’ll do that,” Branden offered. “Seems like Jesse Sands is the key. Do you know what he said to David Hawkins that night at the jail?”
“No.”
“It had to have been something so provocative that Hawkins has decided to kill Sands.”
“If David were going to kill Jesse Sands, he’d have done it that night at the jail,” Cal said. “You know he had Ricky Niell’s gun.”
The poi
nt hit home with Branden. Then he remembered the cardboard window note. “Cal, do you know the phrase ‘It’s mine to avenge. I will repay’?”
“Sure. It’s New Testament verse. Romans. Also Hebrews. The whole thing goes: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay. And again, The Lord will judge his people. It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.’”
Branden shook his head and muttered beneath his breath.
Cal said, “Hawkins knows that verse, and he knows what it means, Mike.”
“Which is?” Branden asked.
“Plain enough, wouldn’t you say? Vengeance is forbidden to men. God himself will avenge. Besides, God is better at it.”
“Bruce’ll just say Hawkins has got himself a ‘God Complex’ or something,” Branden said.
“The verse is tied up with this?” Cal asked.
“Part of those verses was taped to Jesse Sands’s jailhouse window. Big block letters, facing inward to the cell. It said, ‘It is mine to avenge. I will repay.’”
“I can’t believe it,” Cal said, disturbed.
“What is it that you can’t believe, Cal, the sign or Robertson’s interpretation of it?” Branden asked.
“Both!” Cal fell silent, drew inward, and tapped nervously at the wheel with his thumbs. His mind filled with the memories of David Hawkins’s first year in Millersburg. Hawkins had sought out Cal at his little independent church. They had become close friends over the years. And Hawkins had told him the story of the time he had first seen Cal in Vietnam. But Hawkins had changed for the better, and had worked himself steadily away from his addiction to violence, toward a life of peacefulness. Cal remembered the months he and Hawkins had invested, chiseling away at the residue of his guilt and shame from the Vietnam war. Of the struggle to piece his life together after a lifetime of cold-hearted, soul-numbing missions. After a lifetime in the company of killers. His infatuation with guns, and death. His quickness to judge and to blame. The anger and excuses he had nurtured within himself. The heavy weight of dreadful memories that had driven him to Millersburg. The burdens of the heart that had brought him to Cal Troyer in the first place. And the bond that had been woven between them in the long hours of prayer that they had shared.
But then something had snapped inside of David Hawkins. Or so it now seemed. At least Robertson would say it had. But that, Cal told himself now, was impossible. It was impossible to believe that after finding his way at last, David Hawkins would throw his life away for this. For revenge. For anything at all, now that he had found Abigail.
Yet Cal Troyer also understood, as he sat in the truck with Branden, that whatever else might still develop between David Hawkins and Jesse Sands, whatever might have broken David Hawkins that night at the jail, whether Hawkins could understand it now or not, he and Branden were the two best hopes David Hawkins had of coming out of this whole. Of walking away unharmed from Jesse Sands. From the tragic murder of his daughter. And Cal understood, at the core of his soul and heart, that he owed David Hawkins the testimony of a better way. The chance to live his life guiltless of another man’s blood. Free of the same burdens that, before, had nearly destroyed him. To walk free into his new Amish life, without the price of Jesse Sands’s murder on his head.
After a long, thoughtful pause, Cal said, “Mike, David Hawkins wasn’t just Special Forces. He wasn’t even just CIA.”
Branden turned on his seat to face Cal.
Cal said, “In Vietnam and after, before he came to me, David Hawkins was the principal trigger on an elite two-man Special Forces team.”
“He was a sniper, wasn’t he, Cal.”
“One of the best the army has ever trained.”
“I guessed as much, when I saw his arsenal.”
16
Tuesday, June 10 9:00 P.M.
WHEN Abigail Raber retired to her small bedroom on the first floor of the little Daadihaus, there was a note under her feather pillows. She held it up to the kerosene lantern on the nightstand and read its short message. With tears streaming down her cheeks, and with a consuming gratitude for an answered prayer, she gathered a shawl around her nightgown and sat down in great-grandmother’s rocker to wait.
The small bedroom was furnished with only the sparest of essentials. There were no pictures on the wall and no mirror over the dresser. The deep purple curtains were entirely plain, and they hung in long, straight pleats to the floor. The floor was made of wooden boards, painted flat gray. The bed was puffy with down but somewhat lumpy from wear. It was covered with an ornate, handmade quilt. There was a washbowl and a large ceramic water pitcher on the nightstand. Her clothes hung on a plain iron bar against one wall, and her shoes were turned upside down on a rack with pegs near the door. She sat in the worn rocker with her eyes closed, but did not sleep.
The floor all around her feet was scattered with handmade baskets and the reeds from which she wove them. A sign out near the front road told passersby that the Rabers had baskets for sale, and over the years, she had made a great deal of money selling the baskets that had kept her busy on lonely nights, when she could only have dreamed of marriage. Before the summer when she had first met David Hawkins at the well.
At 2:30 A.M. she dressed, laced her high leather shoes, and eased quietly through the door of her bedroom. She moved carefully along the hall and out the front door near the breezeway porch. With a quarter moon low on the horizon, she made for the windmill and then dropped along a path through the bottoms where she had played as a child. Her feet found the path unerringly at night, relying on her memories. Her grandparents had lived in the cabin when she was a child, and the numberless trips she had made to that cabin gave her the way now in the dark.
The cabin stood at the edge of the woods along the easternmost Raber field. The path came over a rise, ran along the north edge of the field, dropped into the bottoms, and then skirted the woods for thirty yards. On the front porch she found the wagon her grandfather had made for her, years ago. The porch swing, where she had sat so many evenings with her grandmother, was down on the porch boards, the ropes having given out long ago. The old front door seemed as familiar to her as her very thoughts. The smells inside brought her an overwhelming, bittersweet assurance of connectedness and safety.
As her eyes sought him in the dark, he lit a match and then from it, a small candle in the corner, away from the window curtains. She crossed the room and held him passionately in her arms. They kissed by the light of the candle, and whispered “I love you” through their tears, Abigail awash in joy to be holding him again, David torn anew by her beauty and her love.
She lifted her head from his shoulder, and her eyes begged him for an answer. “David, where have you been?”
He gently pressed her head to rest again on his shoulder and whispered into her ear, “I have much to do, now, Abigail. Be patient.”
“They say you’re going to kill that man.”
He held her away, peered deeply into her eyes, and said, “Trust me now, Abigail. It will be all right, I promise you.”
“I have trusted you with my love, David. With our future. With my life. But they’ve all been looking for you.”
“I know they have, Abigail. Don’t worry. They’ll never understand. The sheriff hasn’t figured out everything, yet. When I am ready, he’ll understand it all, but not until then. When the time comes, they’ll all understand well enough.”
“You are scaring me, David.”
“You must trust me,” he said, and then, “Tell me about the professor.”
“He wants to help us.”
“What’s he like?”
“He is gentle. He looked at me with gentle eyes.”
“He’s the only one I worry about,” Hawkins said. “He, if anyone, might stop me.”
“I pray that he will,” she whispered in new tears.
“Abigail, listen to me. I promise you this will not turn out wrong. You don’t understand this any more than the rest of them do.”
“I understand only that if you kill that man, my family will never accept you.”
“I know that well enough, my love.”
“Then what are you doing, David? Why have you disappeared from us?”
Hawkins sighed wearily and sank into a chair beside the small candle. His blond Amish-cut hair and whiskers were full grown. His clothes were perfectly, properly, altogether plain.
“David,” she said, standing in front of his chair. “If you kill him, for the rest of your life you will carry the staggering burden of needless bloodshed. It’ll wear you down, crush the life out of you. You’ll be judged by God. You’ll be blamed by men.”
“You don’t understand.”
“What will become of us? Of our lives together? Please don’t let me live out my days blaming you for the death of us.”
“I know who to blame, Abigail,” Hawkins said in a tone edged with bitterness.
“I know only that Father will blame you, and that we will never marry,” Abigail whispered.
“You wouldn’t leave your family for me?” he asked knowing the answer.
She gave no response other than the quiet tears that spilled from her eyes.
As he sat there, he drew her close to him and held her around her waist, his head pressed against her. Then he gently pulled her down to the chair beside him, and began to explain.
“Listen, Abigail. Please,” he said and reached with a delicate hand to turn her eyes into his. “I will not come back until this is all finished.”
She began to protest, but he held a finger lightly against her lips.
“Abigail,” he said, in a gentle voice. “If I were to blame anyone for Janet’s murder, who would it be?”
She looked back into his eyes with a blank expression, confused by the question.
“You would think Sands. Right?” Hawkins said. “But, how about the police? After all, they answered the call too late to save her. So why not blame them?”
He went on. “How about the 911 operator? She took too long on the phone.”
He continued. “Why shouldn’t I blame Nabal Greyson? He didn’t swing that bat soon enough.
“How about Sheriff Robertson? He’s not done anything other than look for me.