Harmless as Doves: An Amish-Country Mystery

by P. L. Gaus

  “Did he make a lot of money doing that?”

  “Not really. That wasn’t the point.”

  “Why didn’t he farm the land himself?”

  Shetler took off his black felt hat and wiped his white brow with a bandanna from the side pocket of his pants. Holding his hat at his thigh, he looked up at the blue sky and then across the wide pastoral valley to the eastern horizon. Brown fields of tall corn and soybean stubble stretched as far as the eye could see. On the horizon, a tall red barn stood out against the blue sky. The wavy line of a creek bed wandered through the valley, and on all of the hills, between the fields, there blazed the red, yellow, and orange of autumn leaves. Looking back to Wilsher, Shetler replaced his hat and said, “Glenn wasn’t really interested in farming.”

  “Then what did he do with himself?”

  “He kept to himself, mostly. Sunday meetings were a little bit like that, too. I mean, he kept to himself.”

  “So, other than Billy Winters, he didn’t have any close friends?”

  “I guess not. Jacob Miller spent some time over here, but that’s about all.”

  “Did he have any enemies?”

  Shetler seemed surprised by the question. “Certainly not.”

  “Well, Bishop, after all, he was murdered.”

  “Crist Burkholder was not his enemy.”

  “No, I guess not. Except that he beat the man to death.”

  Shetler shook his head and did not reply.

  Wilsher pointed out the empty horse shed and asked, “Where are the buggy horses?”

  “I arranged for one of the Detweiler boys to take them.”

  Shading his eyes, Wilsher asked, “Did you arrange to have anything else taken away?”

  Shetler blushed. “The horses need to be looked after, Chief Deputy.”

  “But nothing else was taken?”

  “No.”

  “Who will get the farm, Bishop?”

  “I haven’t decided. One of the young couples. Someone who needs a farm, if they’re going to get married.”

  “Where are his bank accounts?”

  “I don’t think he has any.”

  “That’s strange, don’t you think?”

  “Not really.”

  “OK,” Wilsher said, “he has no natural heirs, and he’s left everything in his will to you.”

  “Did you find his will?”

  Wilsher nodded. “All of his papers were in a box in his bedroom closet—up on a high shelf. And we’ve read through everything. So far as we can tell, he hasn’t got a bank account.”

  Shetler nodded. “He shouldn’t have needed one.”

  “Maybe. But he also hasn’t got any credit cards. No bills at a store. No charge accounts.”

  “He wouldn’t need those,” Shetler said evenly, putting his hat back on his head. He stuffed his bandanna back into his side pants pocket and added, “Glenn Spiegle always paid cash.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a bit strange, Bishop?”

  “Why? What’s strange about an Amishman using cash?”

  Wilsher studied the short man, smiled, and said, “Because, Bishop, if he always paid cash, where did he keep his money?”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Bishop, we haven’t found any money.”

  “Well, I know he always had plenty of cash.”

  “OK, but where is it? We’ve searched the house, the barn, everywhere. Unless he’s got it buried in cans out in a field somewhere, we can’t find any evidence that he actually had any money.”

  Shetler shrugged an honest uncertainty, lifted his palms, and said, “I don’t know.”

  “Can you tell me why Spiegle came up here, Bishop?”

  “He wanted peace,” Shetler said. “He said he wanted to hide away in a peaceful place, and forget about his past.”

  “How’d he choose Holmes County?”

  “Billy Winters brought him up,” the bishop said, starting around the back corner of the house.

  Wilsher followed and said, “We know what he did, Bishop. We’ve checked.”

  The bishop stopped in the shade beside the house and looked up at Wilsher. “The cruelest torture in life, Chief Deputy, is remorse.”

  Wilsher nodded. “He killed a young girl, Bishop. DUI Vehicular Homicide, and he spent eighteen years in prison for it.”

  “That’s why he was here. He wanted forgiveness. He wanted to learn how to forgive himself.”

  “He could have done that in Florida, Bishop.”

  Shetler tipped his chin, agreeing. “Billy Winters once said that Shetler needed to escape his memories. That he needed to be able to make a clean start someplace where his memories couldn’t torture him. So, that’s extreme remorse operating there, Chief Deputy. That’s the kind of remorse that keeps you from being able to forgive yourself.”

  “Was he making any progress on that, Mr. Shetler?”

  “We were working on that, too.”

  “You were working on a lot of things.”

  Shetler did not respond.

  “I’m curious, Mr. Shetler. What did you tell him about forgiving himself? And if he killed a girl in Florida, why would he insist so strongly that he had to marry Vesta Miller? If he were remorseful about one girl, why would he press his interests so strongly with another girl, who plainly didn’t want him?”

  “I don’t know, Chief Deputy. I don’t understand that, any more than the next man.”

  Wilsher nodded, thought. “And the remorse? How were you helping him with that?”

  “I told him what I could,” Shetler said, and stalled, looking out over the valley.

  “Which is?” Wilsher prompted.

  “Outside of grace,” Shetler said, turning back to Wilsher, “this type of forgiveness isn’t possible.”

  “Which means what?”

  “It means that we need God’s help, if we are to find this level of forgiveness. We need His help, because outside of grace, we don’t deserve to be forgiven.”

  16

  Wednesday, October 7

  4:45 P.M.

  AT HIS small church in Millersburg, Cal finished making preparations for Wednesday evening services by setting out one-page worship programs in the vestibule. Then he crossed the gravel parking lot to the white-frame parsonage, and entered by the kitchen door. His daughter Rachel, a dwarf woman in her early forties, was standing on an elevated platform at the stove, stirring a pan of soup.

  Cal had designed the platform so that Rachel could wheel it around the kitchen and then step onto it to settle it down onto its spring-loaded pads. The rolling box had a single step, and both the step and the top of the box were painted with a black, rubberized, nonslip coating. Rachel had painted the rest of the box her favorite color—the yellow of a summer goldfinch. She had the radio turned to an oldies station in Wooster, which was playing a Rolling Stones retrospective, and Cal came into the kitchen to the loud, slow pulse of Mick Jagger’s “Satisfaction.”

  Stepping down from her box, Rachel turned the radio off and said, “Everybody’s talking about Glenn Spiegle, Dad. You been out there?”

  “Earlier,” Cal said. “Then I was down at the jail, some.”

  As Cal started to set the table for dinner, Rachel asked, “Does Burkholder have a lawyer?”

  “Linda Hart,” Cal said. “She thinks he’s innocent.”

  “Didn’t he confess?” Rachel asked.

  Round and short, Rachel showed more age than her years. Her hair was graying, her face showed long, deep creases beside her chin, and her complexion was pale and pocked in several places from childhood chickenpox scars.

  Taking water glasses down from a high shelf, Cal said, “Yes, he confessed. But Hart doesn’t believe it.”

  “Why not, Dad? It seems straightforward.”

  “Crist says he remembers hitting Spiegle only once.”

  Rachel shook her head. “Robertson’s gonna argue that he lost it, Dad. He’s gonna say Burkholder beat him to death, and he just c
an’t remember it.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Cal said. He pulled napkins out of a drawer and added, “But Hart’s not conceding.”

  “She’s not stupid,” Rachel said and mounted her box again. She brought the soup pan down from the stove, and set it on a trivet at the kitchen table. “Are his hands wrecked?” she asked and climbed up to sit on her chair.

  Cal served soup into two bowls and sat across from Rachel. “I don’t have all the details.”

  “If his hands aren’t wrecked, Dad, then someone else killed Spiegle.”

  “Could be,” Cal said and tasted the soup.

  “How’s Darba Winters taking all this?” Rachel asked. “She holding it together?”

  “Not so well, really,” Cal said. “She needs Billy to come home. Then she’ll be OK.”

  Rachel ate her soup and said, “He takes his time coming home.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “His truck is still parked at Bradenton Beach. I’ve got its GPS location on my computer, and it hasn’t moved since two o’clock.”

  Cal smiled and shook his head, and Rachel said, “You think I’d let that much cheese leave the factory without a transponder? All our trucks are tagged, Dad. I can tell you where each of them is, at any time.”

  Cal laughed. “The Klines didn’t know what they were getting into, when they hired you.”

  “They said they wanted to ‘get modern,’ Dad.”

  “Yeah?” Cal said, setting his soup bowl aside. “So, show me.”

  Rachel hopped off her chair and led Cal into her tech room. At the monitor, she double-clicked on Google Earth, typed in GPS coordinates, and brought up a stretch of Bradenton Beach, where a small parking lot for a water’s-edge restaurant fronted a stretch of white sand along Gulf Coast Drive.

  Standing behind Rachel, Cal studied the scene, shadows long on the ground, and asked, “So, where’s your truck?”

  Rachel put her cursor over the top of a thick stand of trees at the north end of the parking lot and said, “This is the location of my transponder.” Then with her finger, she pointed out the edge of the trees, and she said, “There’s where my truck is, Dad. Parked under the trees.”

  Cal looked and said, “I don’t see anything there.”

  “This isn’t a real-time display, Dad. It’s a satellite image that could have been made months ago. I just know where my transponder is located, and that’s where its GPS coordinates are. Right there, under those trees.”

  Little interested in the technology, Cal sat in a reading chair in the corner and said, “Darba says he goes out to that beach every time he drives down there. He sits and waits for the sunset.”

  “I know,” Rachel said, as she moved the cursor to pan up and down the beach. “Then he drives back up US 77, and stops to sleep for a couple of hours in Virginia.”

  Standing up, Cal said, “Can you let me know when he moves his truck? Maybe give me a call?” He turned for the door.

  “He never moves until after dark, Dad.”

  “OK, but will you know when he does move?”

  “Yes. His GPS transponder will show it.”

  “OK, that’d be something I could tell Darba,” Cal said. “It might help her calm down a bit.”

  “Ok, Dad, where you gonna be after church?”

  “Over at the Brandens’.”

  “Isn’t the professor on sabbatical?”

  “Yes,” Cal said. “Down at Duke.”

  “So?”

  “Caroline’s home this week.”

  “What do you want with her?”

  “I thought she’d like to go out to see an Amish couple with me tomorrow,” Cal said, turning back to the room. “Over in the Doughty Valley.”

  Rachel turned back to face her computer screen, and Cal asked, “Can you help a friend of mine learn the Internet?”

  Rachel turned back to him. “Who?”

  “You’d have to keep it a secret.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s that kind of fellow, is all.”

  “What kind of help does he need?”

  “FTP servers. Navigating sites.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “A little, yes, but he needs to know more about Internet protocols. He can’t get by with just the basics anymore.”

  “You going to tell me who it is, Dad?”

  “If you can do this without letting anyone know about it.”

  “OK, who?”

  “Bruce Robertson,” Cal smiled.

  Rachel came off her chair. “You’re kidding!”

  “You’ve got to keep it a secret, Rachel.”

  “I’ll blackmail the creep,” Rachel blurted.

  “You can’t do that, Rachel.”

  “You want me to help the giant sheriff of this whole big county learn to click a mouse through the Internet, and I can’t talk about it?”

  “Right.”

  “Can’t do that, Dad.”

  “A favor to me?”

  “Dad!”

  “No, I’m serious. Maybe he could come over here for lessons. You‘d have him fixed up in no time.”

  “Sheriff Robertson sitting here, next to a dwarf woman computer geek, and I can’t even take a picture?”

  “It has to be secret.”

  Rachel thought, ruffled her hair with her short fingers, and whistled. “Dad,” she said. “Are you serious?”

  “If he gives you any trouble,” Cal smiled, “you just show him who’s boss. A couple of stern scoldings, and I guarantee you Bruce Robertson will come apart like a cheap toy.”

  “Oh, you guarantee it, do you?”

  “Well, not me. That’s what Linda Hart says about Robertson—that he’ll come apart like a cheap toy.”

  Smiling mischief, Rachel said, “I’ll do it, if you let me tell Linda about it.”

  Cal hesitated.

  “I tell Linda,” Rachel said, “or no deal.”

  “All right, but you have to wait until the Burkholder case is finished.”

  “I don’t think I can do that, Dad.”

  “That, or no deal, Rachel.”

  “OK. After the Burkholder case is finished, I get to tell Linda Hart, right?”

  “After the Burkholder case,” Cal said, “you can post it on the Internet for all I care.”

  17

  Thursday, October 8

  9:20 A.M.

  WITH CAROLINE Branden beside him the next morning, Cal drove his gray work truck up the hill and around the long horseshoe bend on Route 83 south of Millersburg. They came out of the ascending curve and dropped down off the high forest passage, traveled through several miles of open farmland, crossed lazy Bucks Run under a canopy of tall oaks and white-trunked sycamores, and turned east onto County 19, skirting the Doughty Creek. The road meandered through several miles of woodland and then came out into the wide Doughty Valley, where long stretches of field corn stood browning in the morning sun. One farm after another passed by, as Cal drove east along the curving lane—slowing at the crest of each hill, watching for the road apples that would mark the recent passage of a horse and buggy.

  Considerably taller than the pastor, Caroline sat beside Cal and brushed absently with her fingertips at the curls of her long auburn hair, wondering how they would find Sara and Jeremiah Miller to be, raising their young family on Bishop Eli Miller’s old farm. She wondered, also, how they’d find Vesta Miller to be that morning. Cal had taken Vesta out to the Millers’ farm the night before, after Wednesday evening services, and then he had stopped at the Brandens’ house to tell Caroline about the murder of Glenn Spiegle.

  Breaking into her thoughts, Cal said, “Vesta will probably want a ride into town this morning.”

  “What?” Caroline asked, as Cal swung into the Millers’ drive.

  “I think we’ll need to give Vesta a ride into town,” Cal said. “To see Crist.”

  Caroline nodded and pointed ahead, as Cal pulled to a stop on the drive. At the end of the sho
rt drive, Jeremiah stood with his uncle Isaac in front of an RV the size of a Greyhound bus.

  The two Amish men looked like a matched set of twins, their black chin whiskers round and full against their chests. Black felt hats covered identical Dutch-boy haircuts. Blue denim trousers matched their plain denim vests, hanging open in front over dark blue shirts. And side by side, the two men stood in front of the big RV wearing smiles that broke from ear to ear across their round, farm-tanned faces.

  Cal parked on the drive and got out to shake hands with the men. Caroline followed behind him, and the two Amish men nodded bashful greetings to her. Knowing Amish reservations well, Caroline suppressed an urge to give Jeremiah a hug. Instead, she asked simply, “Is Sara here?” and angled toward the front porch. As she spoke, Sara came out on the porch and waved. Caroline climbed the front steps and slipped through the front door, turning back briefly to wave to Cal.

  Once the two women were inside, Cal asked about the RV, and Jeremiah smiled, saying, “Sara’s former bishop got a lot of money from the Spits Wallace estate.”

  “So, he bought an RV?” Cal asked.

  “Bought some land, first,” Isaac responded. “Then the RV, so we could share it around.”

  “Made any trips in it yet?” Cal asked.

  Jeremiah led them over to the front porch and said, “This will be our first trip, Cal. Disney World. All of Isaac’s family, and all of mine.”

  “You know how to drive it?” Cal asked.

  “I’ve practiced some.”

  “Got a driver’s license?” Cal asked.

  Jeremiah smiled an evasive answer, but didn’t speak.

  Cal shook his head and stepped up onto the front porch behind Isaac and Jeremiah. The men took seats in hickory rockers, and as soon as they sat down, Sara toed the screened door open and asked, “Coffee?”

  Jeremiah and Isaac shook their heads, but Cal said, “Sure, thanks,” and Sara went back inside.

  Leaning forward, Cal said, “How is Vesta Miller?”

  “She took a buggy into town already,” Isaac said, shaking his head. “To see Crist.”

  Sara pushed the screened door open, came out onto the porch, and handed Cal a mug of black coffee. When she turned to go back inside, Cal noticed that her left toes dragged a little behind her leg, and after she went back inside, he asked, “Sara still having trouble from her strokes?”