Harmless as Doves (11 page)

On the counters, Spiegle had a can opener on a metal stand, a breadbox of pinewood, a hand juicer for oranges, tins of coffee and flour, and a small lazy Susan, holding two tiers of store-bought spices. Beside the sink, Spiegle had clamped a hand-cranked meat grinder to the countertop. In the center of the room stood a kitchen table and four plain chairs in golden-maple finish, and on the kitchen table sat a portable radio, showing AM and FM bands, with a separate dial for shortwave frequencies.

Wilsher turned back to face the bishop and asked, “Did you know he used a radio?”

Shetler frowned. “He wasn’t supposed to. We were working on that.”

“You mean that he should have gotten rid of it?”

“Yes,” Shetler said and studied the black box. “But this one is bigger than the one I knew about.”

“He’s got a smaller one,” Wilsher said. “In the bedroom, upstairs.”

Shetler pulled at his chin whiskers. “Did he have a phone, too?”

“In his pants pocket,” Wilsher said. “We’re going through his call history, but it’s a prepaid phone from Walmart with
no owner’s registration. The memory chip will have his address book.”

Distracted by his thoughts, Shetler looked back at Wilsher and said, “What?”

“We’re checking his call history. To see who he was talking to.”

“You can do that?” Shetler asked.

“Yes.”

“But really, is that something the government is allowed to do?”

“If we have the proper warrants.”

Shetler shook his head. “Everybody has those phones, now. I don’t think they know the government can check their calls.”

“It’s all in the phone company computers,” Wilsher said. He stepped out through the back door and down a short flight of steps to the backyard—a small patch of lawn with a concrete walkway leading to a shed for Spiegle’s horses and a barn off to one side. In the shade of the horse shed, Wilsher pointed out a Honda gasoline generator mounted on a wooden platform, and he asked Shetler, “Would he be permitted to run anything electrical with this?”

Shetler answered, “He kept a few batteries charged up, for lights here and there. But he wasn’t supposed to use them much. It was just going to be a temporary thing, until he adjusted to plain life.”

In the barn, Wilsher showed Spiegle’s buggy to Shetler and said, “He’s got one of those batteries mounted under his buggy, Bishop.”

Shetler bent over to look. Attached to the undercarriage, in front of the rear oval springs, Spiegle had a shelf holding a 12-volt car battery.

Standing up straight, Shetler smiled in mild consternation and said, “He was still making some adjustments to plain living, Chief Deputy. We were working on things like this.”

Outside in the barnyard, Wilsher asked, “Was he well treated? Did people out here accept him?”

“We were working on that, too.”

“Did he have any particular friends?”

“He had the whole church, I suppose.”

“But did he spend time with anyone in particular?”

“Me, I guess. And Billy Winters. But mostly he kept to himself.”

“How’d he get his house built?”

“He hired some of it done. We helped him with the rest.”

“And the outbuildings? Same thing?”

“He bought the lumber, and we put it up for him.”

“So, people had accepted him?”

“So to speak.”

“Did he farm?”

“No. He leased his land to other men, so they could raise a cash crop.”

“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 can’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?”