Stars for Lydia

by P. L. Gaus

  Branden studied the closed door to Susan and Lydia’s room. “Are you locked out, or something?”

  “Or something. The cops are here. They’re going through all Lydia’s stuff. They said that I have to wait out here. But I have a class, and I need my backpack.”

  Branden smiled with a sympathetic nod of his head. It registered with him that her cops had come out a little too flippantly. He knocked on the door and opened it. Pat Lance and Ricky Niell were in the room. Lance was paging through some documents at one of the student desks, and Niell was standing beside one of the twin beds that were raised up on lifters, with boxes and laundry baskets stacked beneath them. At the door, Branden asked, “Can Susan have her backpack?”

  Pat Lance looked up from a term paper she had been reading. “Ricky?” she said over her shoulder, and Ricky, with two backpacks opened on the bed, asked, “Red or black?”

  Susan Randall said, “The red one,” and Detective Niell zipped it closed.

  He carried the backpack out to Susan and said, “We’ve been through it, Ms. Randall. We’re done.”

  Seeming to Branden to be anxious, Susan Randall took her backpack and swung it over a shoulder. Her nervous fingers went back up to her eyebrow stud. “Did you take any of my stuff?” she inquired of Niell.

  Ricky smiled. “No, it’s all there.”

  Susan gave out a sigh. “I’ll know if you took anything,” she scolded, and she turned to walk down the hallway.

  “Mike,” Pat Lance called out from inside the dorm room. “Is this one of your course books?”

  Branden stepped into the room. Lance was holding up a thick, paperback tome by Tyndall. The professor shook his head and recited the title as he remembered it. “Slave and Owner Mentalities, with Emphasis on Slave Cultures in the Americas.”

  “One of yours?” Lance inquired again.

  Branden took the heavy book from her. He noticed that it was a library copy. “No,” he answered thoughtfully. “This is a graduate level text. It’s the kind of book I use for background reference, when I’m teaching my class on Slavery in the Americas. Was Lydia reading it?”

  “I think so,” said Lance. “She had been taking notes.” She held up a blue spiral notebook. “Very extensive notes.”

  “Well, it’s at the graduate level,” Branden replied.

  “Are you surprised, Professor?”

  “A little. Lydia was asking me about something related to this, the last time I spoke with her. It was yesterday morning, actually, after class. She asked about births of slave babies.”

  “There are some entries here about that kind of thing,” Ricky said. “In her diaries.”

  “How many diaries did she have?” Branden asked.

  “Maybe fifteen,” Ricky said.

  “Was she using email?”

  Lance answered. “Not very extensively. A few friends on campus. Some emails to Light-Path Ministries.”

  “That’s Ed and Donna Schell,” the professor mused aloud. “How about Facebook? Twitter? Instagram? Pinterest?”

  “Nothing that I could find,” Lance said.

  Ricky said, “She had several notebooks in her backpack.” He held up three, in different colors, with frayed edges and spiral-wire bindings that were sprung and pulled out a few inches, straight at their ends. He wrangled them all into a black backpack, and he folded the loose wire strands in after them. Finished, he came away from the bed and offered his hand to Branden.

  The professor shook it and said, “How’s the family?”

  “I think Ellie misses the job,” Ricky said. “She stays at home all the time, with the twins, I mean.”

  “Twins OK?” Branden asked.

  From her seat at the desk, Lance quipped. “Don’t get him started, Professor.”

  Ricky’s face took a blush, and he said, simply, “They’re all fine. Great, really.”

  Lance stood up and offered her hand, too. “There’s nothing here of interest, Professor. Everything is here, like you’d expect it to be. Clothes, books, toiletries, music on her CD player.”

  “What did she listen to?” Branden asked.

  Ricky reached in front of Pat Lance to push down the play button on Lydia’s CD player. Branden heard a wild run of guitar cacophony.

  “That’s Pearl Jam,” Ricky said, switching it off. “It’s hard-driving grunge rock for the most part. It’s not what you’d expect from a Mennonite girl, with the guitars grinding out like that. Plus, it’s quite a bit dated. But it certainly isn’t Mennonite.”

  “I suppose not,” said Branden. “Really? I’m surprised.”

  “It’s in her diaries,” Ricky said. “She loved college. She loved music, and she really loved the old songs. Rock and Roll. Country. R&B. She embraced it all. More than the average student, I think. She called it freedom. Liberation. Her class notes are detailed. Her diaries are extensive. It’s like she was soaking it all up, here at college. Soaking up freedom.”

  “Every teacher’s dream student,” Branden said softly, mournfully.

  Lance asked, “You talked with Bruce? He said he was going to show you one of her diaries.”

  “He did,” Branden said. “Where is he now?”

  Niell shrugged. “He was going to talk with you.”

  “He did that.”

  “Then he was going out to TR 606,” Lance said. “To find the bishop.”

  Branden stroked a thought across his chin. “He’ll stop off at the Yost farm, again.” He glanced to Lydia’s desk. “Is that Lydia’s computer? The laptop?”

  “Yes,” said Lance. “She was searching the internet. She has several dozen bookmarks on Firefox/Bing.”

  “Like what?” Branden asked.

  Lance sat back down at the desk and clicked with the mouse.

  “No password?” Branden observed.

  “No,” Lance said, as she turned the screen so that Branden could read it. “Like here. She bookmarked an internet document about slave populations in South Carolina.”

  Branden leaned in and read a few lines on the screen. “That’s an old census,” he said. “A census of slaves and their owners in Clarendon County. It’s an historic document. Someone will have scanned it from an original. They probably found it in the basement of an old courthouse.”

  “She has a couple dozen of these bookmarks,” Lance observed. “They’re all about slavery.”

  “That’s what she wanted to know about,” Branden said. “Births to slave women. Census records of new births, I think.”

  “Why?” Niell asked.

  Branden made a wrinkled smile, showing a measure of consternation. “I’m not sure.”

  Softly, Lance said, “The way I understand it, Mary Yost is due.”

  Branden nodded. “Did you talk at all with the roommate, here?”

  “She wasn’t very talkative,” Niell answered. “But she was clearly upset about Lydia. And she was probably nervous about the weed she had in her backpack.”

  “A joint?” Branden laughed.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you take it?”

  “No,” Ricky said, smiling. “I figured it wasn’t worth the paperwork.”

  Branden smiled. “OK, what about the phones? Lydia’s and Meredith’s. Any luck yet with one of those?”

  “No,” Pat Lance said, standing up. “They are each key-code protected. Six digits for each of them.”

  “OK, what about Meredith Silver’s suicide note?” Branden asked.

  “Missy sent it to the BCI labs for handwriting analysis,” Ricky said. “We sent samples of her handwriting from her house, for comparison.”

  “It looks like a match to me,” Lance said, “for what that’s worth. I think it’s her handwriting.”

  “But there are definitely two different fingerprints on the paper,” Ricky offered. “Someone other than Silver did handle the note.”

  Branden stroked his whiskers. “That’ll be the someone who took the gun away,” he said.

  Lance said, “Missy
does have something on the bullet fragments. They add up to something just short of a 110-grain bullet. So that’s likely a .38 Special. A 110-grain lead wad cutter.”

  Ricky spoke up. “Missy has something going on with her gun-shot residue tests on Meredith Silver. She’s calling it a radial differential test for gsr. She’s testing Silver’s face around the entry wound.”

  Branden shook his head. “That’s a bad way to go – shot in the face like that.”

  Ricky Niell said, “Missy is trying to determine if Meredith really did shoot herself. She thinks the gsr pattern around the entry wound will tell how far away the gun was held when she was shot.”

  “Seems reasonable,” Branden commented. “There’ll be gsr on her hands, too, if she shot herself.”

  “Well, there isn’t,” Lance said. “But you know Missy. She’s going to test everything. From every angle. Before she’s done, we’ll probably know how long Silver had been home, before she was shot.”

  Chapter 14

  Tuesday, August 29

  5:20 PM

  Branden had an appointment with a student at 3:45, and office hours from 4:00 until 5:00, so it was late in the afternoon before he arrived at the Schells’ Light-Path Ministries church building and boarding house. Still August, it had been hot and humid, but afternoon shadows were starting to reach out under the trees and taller buildings, and the evening promised a quiet and peaceful end to the day. What little rush-hour traffic there was in the village had dissipated. Most folks were already home from work.

  Professor Branden sat in his truck with the air conditioner running, and he rehearsed in his mind the list of questions he had for Pastor Ed Schell. There were several questions, to be sure, but one question. One particularly vexing question. A telling question. He doubted that he would be satisfied with the answer.

  The professor entered the double doors of the church – a square and squat metal pole building – and then traversed the back of a small sanctuary with gray industrial-grade carpet and folding chairs with padded red seats. The chairs were set into arching rows, with an aisle down the middle that led to the front of the sanctuary. Behind a small wooden lectern, Branden could see the deep immersion baptistry, with overhead lights making bright sparkles on the pool of baptismal water.

  After passing down the center aisle, he turned left at the lectern. A wooden door in the corner was labeled OFFICE, and the professor knocked on the door. A voice called out in a throaty tone, “Come on in,” and Branden recognized it as Ed Schell’s voice. The professor entered as the tall Schell was standing up behind a black metal desk. “Come right in,” Schell said with his hand stretched forward over his desk.

  In no time at all, Schell had them seated in upholstered armchairs in the corner of the office. A pedestal table sat between the chairs, holding up a gilt-edged, leather-bound Bible, with black finger indents marking the Books inside. On the wall behind his desk, Schell had pinned up a map of Holmes County, with small areas marked by patches of yellow high-lighter. Beside each yellow patch, he had written in a man’s name.

  Branden started directly, as he was settling into his chair. “Pastor, have you heard from Mary Yost?”

  “Nothing,” Schell said. He fluffed the top of his parted black hair and smiled, first amiably and then with some concern. “We’ve been making phone calls, to hospitals all over northern Ohio.”

  Branden nodded and held his focus on Schell’s eyes. “Do you know anything about her daughter Esther? She’s supposed to be about a year-and-a-half old.”

  “No,” Schell said, with hesitation drawing out the word. “What about Esther?”

  “She’s Mary’s youngest child.”

  “Oh, I know. What about her?”

  “She’s not at home with the other children,” Branden said.

  A deep sigh came forth from Schell. His eyes shifted right, as if he were composing an answer. “Well, she was with Mary,” he said eventually. “Thursday and Friday. Donna said they both got on the bus in Wooster.”

  “Can you tell me again how that worked?” Branden asked.

  “Well, like we told you last night, Mary showed up here Thursday afternoon. She was worried, but otherwise she seemed fine to me. As I remember it, she did have Esther with her. We put them on a bus Friday afternoon. Well, Donna put them on a bus.”

  Branden asked again about Mary. “How close to her delivery do you think she is?”

  “I’m not really sure. Donna would know.”

  “And, you’ve learned nothing from any of the hospitals?”

  “No, but I’ve been thinking,” Ed said, shrugging his shoulders. “Mary would probably ask a midwife for help in her delivery. If not a relative, then she would surely use one of the Amish midwives.”

  “There are dozens of those,” Branden observed.

  “In Holmes County, alone,” Schell agreed.

  “But Mary has been gone from home for over three weeks,” Branden said. “Why was it only last Thursday that she showed up here?”

  “Don’t know, Professor.”

  Branden pressed more questions forward. “If Mary gives birth to her child at a midwife’s house, who would know about it?”

  “That’s a strange question, Professor.”

  “Not really. Lydia was asking about something like this. Who would be obliged to report private deliveries by Amish women? If she uses a midwife, I mean.”

  While Ed Schell considered that, Branden pressed on to another issue. “You helped Lydia negotiate her first year at college?”

  “Quite a lot. You were on sabbatical.”

  “Did she talk with you about Amish birth records? Or slave birth records?”

  Branden could see Schell making the connection behind his eyes.

  The pastor cleared his throat before asking, “Like, who would know, you mean? Slave babies and Amish babies?”

  “Precisely.”

  “We teach about the repression of Amish women and children, Professor. It’s an extremely Patriarchal society. Amish life is hard on the women and children. But we’ve never suggested that they were slaves.”

  “I’m sure,” Branden said. “But for some reason, Lydia was asking about this yesterday, after my morning class. She asked about records of births to slave women.”

  “We never got anything like that from her,” Schell said, struggling a bit nervously in his chair. He scratched above an ear, and his sight turned inward with a thought. Eventually, he said, “No, Lydia seemed fine to us. For her first year, and last year too, when she was a sophomore. She was adjusting slowly to English life, but getting along fine. She didn’t mention her family really much at all.”

  “Maybe that was a little strange, Ed.”

  “Not really. Once they’re out of the cults, they need to turn completely away from that. For a while, anyways. It’s like a relief for them. It’s liberating, to see the truth, and then to act successfully, to get themselves out of it. It’s something of a victory, to get themselves out, and then to stay out.”

  “I guess that’s what you do here? Help them get out? Is that what Mary is doing?”

  “We don’t push, Professor. We wait until they are really ready.”

  “Is Mary Yost ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is John Yost abusive? Physically abusive?”

  “That would very much surprise me, Professor. But if he was, she probably wouldn’t have told anyone. She said he was more like just depressed. Sad all the time. It was a burden for her. An extreme emotional burden. And there was some danger. She told us that his shotgun fell out of his hand, hit the floor, and shot off one of the shells. It was just birdshot, but still. Someone could have been hurt. Or killed.”

  “OK, that makes this even more important,” Branden said. “Here’s my question. Why didn’t you send Mary to a family services organization, like the Family Assistance Agency? There’s an F.A.A. office in Holmes County, and one in Wooster, too. That’s Wayne County, if you thought she needed to g
et away for a while, maybe to hide from her husband. They’re in the business of helping troubled families. Even Amish families. They know about dangerous husbands. They know how to protect families.”

  “But they don’t address the spiritual side of things,” Ed Schell said directly. “They can’t, really. That’s why we’re here. For spiritual guidance.”

  “But did you send her to one of those? Or even to the county’s Children Services? To someone like Alice Shewmon.”

  “I don’t know her.”

  “She’s a psychologist and counselor at Holmes County Social Services.”

  “I mean I don’t know her in particular. She must be new.”

  “She is. She came here from Akron University. She’s working on their case, now, while John Yost is in the hospital.”

  “Well, good. They need someone like that. Good.”

  At that, Ed Schell rose from his chair and took a seat behind his desk. Branden stood, too.

  Writing on a notepad, Schell said, “I’ll get an appointment with Alice Shewmon. How do you spell it?”

  Branden spelled it out for him. Then he asked his question again, more directly this time, and more insistently. “OK Ed, really, why didn’t you refer Mary Yost to Social Services? Or to the F.A.A. program? Or to any organization like that? I mean, any outfit where a wife could get some help for herself? Or get some help for her children? Because you had to know that the Yosts were living in a difficult environment. John Yost does not seem like a stable man. We had to take his shotgun away from him. And he’s certainly not a happy man. He’s in the hospital, with acute depression.”

  Standing again, Schell answered with somewhat of a defensive tone. “It’s simple, Professor. We focus on the spiritual side of the equation. We think that’s where the help is really needed. We think that is what is most important. Those other agencies are completely secular. They don’t address the spiritual side. Social Services is a government agency. So, they can’t. And F.A.A. doesn’t, either. Nothing spiritual.”

  The professor’s eyes moved to the map on the wall behind Schell. He studied the numerous yellow highlights. He nodded at them and asked, “You’re keeping a record of those locations, Pastor? Those yellow dots?”