Separate from the World (3 page)

“Benny was Samuel’s son? Samuel is your father, too?”

“Yep. Our father is Samuel, and our mother is Annie. Benny lived in an apartment next to the Grossvater Haus we built for our parents when Israel took over the big farm. Benny never married, so he stayed on with Israel. Israel and I support them all. Plus Lydia Weaver, who is Hannah’s sister.”

“And Hannah is?”

“Israel’s wife. She’s a Weaver. Daughter of David and Vesta Weaver. David has been dead for nearly fifteen years. Hannah’s mother, Vesta, lives with the Levi Klines down the road—with Hannah’s sister, Mary, who married Levi Kline.”

“And you’ll have other siblings,” Branden offered, and took up his coffee again.

There was an outcry from someplace on campus, perhaps at the far edge of the oak grove, Branden thought. He pictured the seniors starting their revelries, finished at last with exams and launching the weekend celebrations, prior to Monday’s commencement. His memories fell across the years long gone, and he shook his head. The weekend parties had deteriorated in twenty years from pleasant social events that the faculty might reasonably attend, to unrestrained, nearly continuous intoxicated spectacles. This year it seemed that Friday morning would mark the start of it all. Another good reason to retire, Branden thought.

The Amish visitor watched the thoughts drift across the professor’s face, waited patiently for them to pass, and spoke when Branden looked back to him.

“You asked about our family, Professor,” the little man said. “Israel and I are two of twelve. Hannah and Mary are two of fifteen. Most have moved away. We have sisters who married men up in Middlefield. And brothers who’ve moved to Kentucky and Ontario. We’re all kind of spread out now, because land is so tight around here. So, mostly, it’s me and Israel who are the Erbs of Calmoutier. And Lydia, Mary, and Hannah, who used to be Weavers. I guess Lydia still is a Weaver, because she never married.”

“I think I should be taking notes, Enos,” Branden said dryly.

Enos laughed. “I’ll write it out for you.”

“That’ll help.”

Through the open windows, Branden and his visitor could hear the distant chanting of a protest rally against the war in Iraq. A bullhorn prompted with a slogan, and the crowd responded, parroting the words: “Bush lied and people died!” repeated several times. Then the prompt, “U.S.—Never best!” and the crowd’s response with the same phrase time and again. When the shouts died off, a speech could be heard coming from a P.A. sound system, but Branden and Erb could not make out the words. No doubt, Branden mused, it was psychology professor Aidan Newhouse leading another of his antiwar rallies on campus. Still reliving the sixties.

Enos observed, “It’s pretty wild outside, and I’m not talking about that protest group. No. I saw two students, just now. That boy was sure getting some attention from his girl, and you’d better believe it.”

Branden smiled. “It’s the seniors. They’ll graduate on Monday.”

Enos shrugged. “They were out in the parking lot where I left my buggy. He had her pinned against his car—kissing out in the open.”

“They’re just college kids, Enos,” Branden offered, wondering how to explain the excesses of college life to a man who had devoted himself to plain living.

Looking right at Branden, Enos asked bluntly, “Do you get some attention from those college girls, too, Professor? I’ve heard professors can be like that.”

Branden’s back straightened, and heat flashed into his cheeks. In his present mood, he was powerless to hide his indignant anger. He let it display itself briefly and then quenched it.

Of all the Amish people he knew, few were capable of guile. There was, perhaps, the occasional inconsiderate bluntness in conversation, or an untoward curiosity about the suspect English lifestyles, but certainly no guile. With a mix of alarm and amusement, he eyed the little man and answered simply, “No, Mr. Erb. I am happily married.”

Enos nodded with a degree of satisfaction, drained the last of his coffee, and asked, “Your man said there was more?” lifting his empty mug.

Branden got out of his chair smiling broadly at the man’s directness, went out to Mallory’s front office, brought the carafe back, and poured more of the morning’s brew into Enos Erb’s mug.

The siren of an ambulance started up in the distance, and it mixed soon with the bleat of a sheriff’s cruiser. The sirens came nearer, mounted the college heights, and flashed by the history building to draw up on the other side of the oak grove, in front of the old stone chapel.

Branden stepped to his windows and saw a crowd of students and faculty standing in a ragged circle on the far side of the grove, in front of the chapel. When the paramedics ran up to the group, the crowd parted to let them through, and the professor saw a young woman, college age, in jeans and a white blouse, face down on the chapel’s stone walkway, blood pooling beside her head. The paramedics rolled her onto her back, and her head came to rest facing the professor’s office. In the instant that he recognized her, numbing shock and sorrow coursed through Branden’s veins, and the professor whispered, “Cathy.” He had just seen her final exam in his stack of ungraded blue books.

One of the girls standing beside the body started gesturing dramatically toward the tall bell tower of the chapel, and the people on the ground craned their necks to look up in unison.

Branden followed their gaze, but was unable to see because of the tall trees. Dazed and fighting denial, he moved to his left-most window. Between the top branches of a tree, he caught sight of a senior he recognized, standing bare-chested on the bell tower’s parapet. The boy seemed frozen to the stone, staring down at the dead girl, his face a blank mask of horror, his hair disheveled and sprouting out as if charged from electroshock.

Branden’s mind flooded with images of the two students, one now dead and one now perched on the edge of disaster. He saw them as he remembered them, in the classroom, holding hands on the sidewalk, carrying trays together through the dining room. They’d rarely been separated since they had started dating. Cathy and Eddie. They were his students.

Branden tried to get his mind to settle on the dreadful present, but he couldn’t catch up to the pace of his thoughts. He recognized this mental state. He taught about it in his Civil War classes—the fog of battle, brought on by horror and panic. The mind rendered useless by shock. An eerie, otherworldly kind of detachment from one’s normal capabilities. Soldiers frozen in place by the paralyzing spectacle that was assaulting their eyes. And he realized he’d be lucky in this fog simply to get his feet to move.

Branden’s eyes fell back to the crumpled body of his student, and he sensed that Enos Erb was standing beside him, on his tiptoes, looking down over the windowsill at the death scene.

When he realized what he was looking at, Erb blurted out, “Oh, my!” and ran out of the professor’s office. Mallory took his place at the windows.

Branden pulled his gaze back to the bell tower and saw Cathy Billett’s boyfriend standing with his arms spread wide, as if preparing to launch himself into flight. There was a shout from the crowd below, and the boy’s balance wobbled on the rail. Branden sucked air through his teeth and felt the muscles and tendons in his legs tighten involuntarily to the snapping point. Eddie pitched forward, arms flying, and then righted his balance. He looked blankly out over the treetops like a stage actor peering into floodlights, and seemed to resign himself to death. His face went slack, his eyes closed, and he put one foot out over the edge just as a sheriff’s deputy darted up behind him and clamped his fist onto Eddie’s belt, hauling him forcefully back from the edge.

Eddie screamed and spun around to swing at the man. The officer stepped underneath a wild, roundhouse punch. He pinned Eddie’s arm behind his back and hit him in the kidney to drop him to the roof, putting the two of them below the level of the parapet and out of sight to Branden and Mallory. After a moment, the deputy stood up, drew the flat of his palms over cropped black hair, and blew out a tense breath. Then he turned, stepped over to the edge, and looked down to wave at Sheriff Bruce Robertson below.

In his frozen panic, Branden had not noticed Robertson among the crowd on the ground. When he looked back up to the parapet, Branden realized he also had not recognized Sergeant Ricky Niell.

He should be doing something, Branden realized. He should be down there with Cathy. He should move. His eyes played mechanically from ground to parapet and back again, and he forced himself to breathe. He sensed that his legs were waiting for his mind to clear. He tried flexing his fingers and found them clenched into fists. He purposefully trained his eyes on the bell tower and was grateful for this one remnant of command that was still his. The scene there seemed unnaturally calm.

Sergeant Niell brushed off his uniform shirt, tucked the tails under his duty belt, and straightened a gold pen in his shirt pocket. He motioned down for more men to come up to the roof, and then turned, pulled the handcuffed senior to his feet, and started walking him over to the interior stone steps that would take them back through the belfry and down to the crowd milling around the dead girl’s body.

WHEN THE PROFESSOR realized that the cry he had heard while talking with Enos Erb had been his student falling to her death, he was finally able to force his feet to move. He stepped haltingly out of his office suite, started running in the hall, took the steps two at a time, and bolted out into the oak grove beneath his office windows. He ran across the expanse of lawn under the oaks and arrived at the ambulance just as paramedics were pulling their orange-padded gurney out of the back.

Sheriff Robertson waved impatiently for the paramedics to move forward. He spotted the professor and stepped up to him, barking, “What gives, Mike? You’ve never had a suicide up here! Not in forty years!”

“I know the girl!” Branden cried.

Robertson pulled the professor aside and asked for a name.

“Cathy Billett. She’s a junior,” Branden said, pulling at his hair, eyes wide with alarm. “That fellow over there in handcuffs is Eddie Hunt-Myers. He’s a senior. Bruce, I can’t believe this! They both took my final exam last night.”

“Would she have taken the ‘express’ off a bell tower over a stupid exam?” Robertson asked, indelicately. “Why would she do this, Mike?”

“No! She was a good student. Eddie too.” Taking a step forward, Branden complained, “Come on. Does he have to be in cuffs, like that?”

Robertson pulled him back. “He took a swing at Ricky Niell, Mike.”

“I saw that, Bruce. It’s more like he was going to jump, and Ricky surprised him from behind. He was just startled. I think you can take those cuffs off him now.”

Robertson frowned as he studied the professor’s expression. “He one of your little rich boys, Mike?”

“Knock it off!” Branden snapped. He paced an anxious circle in front of Robertson, who was still blocking him from the body. Some of the heat drained out of the professor when he realized he would not get past the large sheriff.

Sheriff Bruce Robertson had grown up a simple, small-town Buckeye, a friend from kindergarten of both Branden and Cal Troyer. Heavyset since childhood, in late middle age he was becoming “excessive.” His wife, Coroner Missy Taggert, had convinced him to stop smoking and lose weight when they married, but although he had succeeded at the first of her requests, he had failed at the second. His uniform fit too snugly, and his imposing bulk served as an unfortunate ally of his blunt and sometimes immoderate personality. He was the size of a bull and, when he was off his medicines, as impulsive as an overindulged teenager.

While Branden paced, there was an outburst from the crowd near the dead girl’s body. When Branden and Robertson looked over, they saw Ricky Niell pulling Eddie Hunt-Myers, still in handcuffs, away from an angry girl, who was slapping at Niell’s back and shoulders, as she hurled invectives. The Iraq War protesters had arrived from the far side of campus, led by Professor Aidan Newhouse, and some of them took up the girl’s side, shouting at Niell about police misconduct. Soon the crowd’s protests swelled to resemble the ruckus of a small mob.

A female deputy Branden did not recognize took hold of the angry girl’s shoulders and managed to wrap her arms around her and pull her back from Niell. Some members of the crowd made a surge in Niell’s direction, spurred on by the girl’s fury, as two more deputies planted themselves between the protesters and Ricky Niell.

There was a shout, “Let him go!” and a snarl from another voice, “Take your hands off me!” Someone barked, “No cops!” and several voices repeated the cry.

Professor Newhouse spoke a few calming words to try to settle his students down as he moved among them, asking for more restraint. But Newhouse’s students had taken his course about “The Sixties” to heart. The chant rang out: “NO COPS! NOT HERE! NOT AGAIN!” Newhouse persisted, however, and with great effort he was able to prevail. The protesters fell momentarily quiet. As they stood in place, eyeing Niell with evident scorn, one of the sheriff’s deputies took up a position too close to the protesters, and scuffling broke out again.

Seeing the anger rising, Niell hustled his bare-chested prisoner over to his cruiser and pulled the back door open, stuffing the boy inside. The shouts from the crowd peaked when Niell closed the door of the cruiser, with the senior Eddie Hunt-Myers struggling awkwardly in the back, hands pinned behind him, a dazed confusion frozen on his face.

Robertson waded into the crowd like a bulldozer, pushing people back from the paramedics, who were struggling to load the dead girl’s body onto their gurney. College security officers arrived on foot and helped move the most vocal and irate critics back several steps. And the mob fell suddenly silent when tall, lanky Ben Capper, the chief of security for the college, barked through a megaphone, “Stand back! Right now! I’m not going to tell you again.”