The Names of Our Tears (25 page)

Wellings started down the slope, but Robertson pulled him back. “You can’t go down there, Wellings. I’m sure you noticed that most of the roads around here are closed, and I’ve declared a flood emergency.”

“I can’t just stand here,” Wellings protested.

As he spoke, the generator coughed a last time and choked to a stop. “I can still save the equipment!” Wellings shouted. He turned back to wave two men up from an EPA panel truck that had arrived with him. The men ran forward in the rain, and Wellings said, “We’ll have a pickup truck here in five minutes.”

Robertson shook his head. “Can’t let you go down there. Not until this subsides.”

“You don’t have the authority to stop us!” Wellings barked. “You can’t expect me to stand by and let it all get flooded.”

As solicitously as he could manage, Robertson asked, “The equipment in that trailer, Robert? Is it all up on tables?”

“Yes, but it all needs power. I’ve got to get that generator running again.”

“If it stops raining,” Robertson said, “maybe the water won’t reach the equipment.”

Wellings stared incredulously at the big sheriff. “You can’t be serious. Water would ruin everything in that trailer. All my equipment and all our samples.”

“Can’t let anyone go down there, now, Robert. It’s low ground to everything near here. At least five watersheds empty into these bottoms.”

Speechlessly, Wellings stared through the rain at the trailer down below. The two men from the panel truck reached the top of the dam, their city shoes caked with mud. One said to Wellings, “We’ve got a pickup coming.”

Wellings ignored him. “Look, Robertson, we’ll take a boat. We can fix a line.”

“And what?” Robertson asked. “Drag your trailer through a hundred yards of flooded swamp?”

Wellings had no answer.

Privately delighted at the Zooks’ good fortune, Robertson gave an earnest frown and said, “Maybe the rain will stop.”

Finding renewed vigor, Wellings shouted, “You can’t stop us!”

Robertson looked back to the driveway beyond the barn and saw young Deputy Baker pulling his cruiser in beside the sheriff’s
Crown Vic. He turned back to Wellings and said, “I’m posting a deputy here, Wellings. If you try to go down there, I’ll have you arrested. For your own safety.”

Wellings studied the sheriff’s resolve, spun back toward his trailer in the bottoms, and flipped back around to nose up to Robertson. “If the equipment in that trailer gets ruined,” he hissed, “I’ll have your badge.”

Smiling a threat, Robertson said, “The fine people of this county gave me my badge, Wellings, and if I thought you or any other federal creep could take it from me—well, I don’t know, I guess I’d just have to let your superiors know that you parked a science lab in a swamp and then whined about the fact that it rains a lot here in April. How’s that sound to you, Wellings? You came out here to ruin the lives of decent Amish folk, and you arrogantly sank a million dollars worth of what—gas chromatographs, mass spectrometers, computers, like that, Wellings—in a flood zone, during the rainy season?”

Wellings’s gaze showed a mixture of puzzlement, spite, and anger. He started to say something and stopped. With aggression and defeat bunching together in his fists, he marched and slid down off the sodden dam, pulling his two men down the slope with him. The two men climbed into the panel truck, and Wellings got into his sedan. Both vehicles backed onto the lawn, leaving scars in the grass, and then they turned around and left.

As Deputy Baker reached the sheriff’s position high up on the dam, Robertson said, “Sorry about the rain, Baker, but I want you posted right here, today. Let no one from the EPA go down into that flood.”

“What about others?” Baker asked. “The same thing?”

Robertson laughed. “I expect that the other folks out here will know better than to try.”

*   *   *

As he stepped carefully down the slope of the dam, Robertson got a call on his cell. He checked the number on his display, didn’t recognize it, and answered with his official tone, “Robertson.”

“Have you found my client?” Linda Hart asked. “She needs to be in protective custody.”

“Look, Hart,” Robertson said, “she’s not willing to come back.”

“Where is she, then?”

“We don’t know.”

“Trace her phone.”

“She’s using Howie Dent’s phone,” Robertson said, irritated. “He keeps it switched off.”

“But have they called you?”

“Once. Last night.”

“Didn’t Rachel pull any data on that call?”

“Yes,” Robertson sighed. “She did that this morning. They were somewhere near Memphis.”

“Are you going to send someone?”

“And do what, Hart? Ask around about hitchhiking Amish girls, or farm boys who bought bus tickets?”

“You could try. Maybe the airports.”

“They’re not using credit cards, Hart. They have used his phone only once. And from Memphis, they could go anywhere.”

“You’re giving up, Robertson!”

“No, Hart, I’m not. When they ask for our help, I’ll send everyone I’ve got. Until then, I need to let Ricky chase this drug gang in Florida. That’s my best play.”

“Call Howie’s phone again.”

“We’re doing that every hour. Why don’t you try calling yourself?”

Hart hesitated.

Robertson asked, “What?”

“I don’t have his number.”

“It won’t do you any good, Hart. He doesn’t answer.”

“Give it to me anyway, OK?”

“I’ll text it to you.”

“Fine.”

“Fine, then.”

“Good-bye.”

“Bye.”

*   *   *

When Robertson reached the bottom of the dam, he lifted his umbrella to check his course, and he glanced down the long seventy yards of the Zook driveway to the far end out by the road. There he saw Emma Wengerd standing in the rain, without a coat.

Too cold and too wet, he thought, for a little girl to be standing out in just a plain dress. He walked faster along the driveway.

As he reached the back edge of the house, Emma took a single step forward toward the road. A car splashed by in the eastbound lane, close enough to Emma to spray water on her legs. The sheriff doubled his pace. Fifty yards.

Another car sped by, and again Emma took a step, now at the very end of the drive, her feet touching the blacktop of the road. A car hissed by in the westbound lane, and Robertson started jogging, calling out, “Hey there, Emma? Hey!” Forty yards.

Emma looked back at him briefly, turned to face straight ahead, and took another step out into the road. Louder, Robertson started shouting for the Zooks in the house. He glanced left down the road. No more traffic yet. Thirty yards.

Emma stepped forward again, and out of the corner of his right eye, Robertson saw Grandfather Zook splashing across the lawn toward his granddaughter. Twenty-five yards.

Running now, Robertson threw his umbrella aside and splashed forward as fast as his bulk would permit. A westbound delivery truck blew past Emma, the draft lifting the hem of her dress. Her prayer covering blew off and landed ten paces away on the wet pavement. Bolt straight and seeming as determined as a soldier, Emma stared straight ahead as the sheriff ran. Twenty yards.

To his left, on the crest of a hill some hundred yards up the road, a loaded timber hauler came forward in Emma’s lane, and Robertson shouted again, running, stumbling, starting to lose
wind, trying to shout again, but voiceless, both from alarm and from exertion. Fifteen yards.

A final determined step put Emma in the middle of the eastbound lane, and to her left, the trucker clamped down on every brake he had, air compressors screaming, gears grinding, tires skidding. Ten yards.

Relentlessly, it lurched toward her, unable to stop in time.

The desperate driver cranked his wheels left, held, and cranked back right. The truck broke left into the oncoming lane, but careened back immediately toward Emma.

Robertson churned his legs frantically up and down, racing forward, as awkward at full-tilt run as a wheel suddenly squared, and he thought he had surely lost her. Lost his chance. Failed. Still he ran. Five yards.

As the nose of the timber truck slipped past, inches from her head, Robertson threw an arm over Emma’s shoulder and pivoted right with his last gasp of hope, to wrench her away from the pavement.

Alvin Zook ran up, and Emma and the sheriff fell together in the tall ditch grasses beside the road. The truck flashed past them, spraying water, foam, and road debris over them, hissing steam from its undercarriage as it shuddered to a stop some forty yards beyond.

The driver popped out of the cab and ran back toward Robertson.

The sheriff pushed up to his feet and then pulled Emma up from the ditch beneath him.

The driver was shouting, but Robertson didn’t hear. Boots planted deep in the muck of the ditch, he held Emma tightly against his big, heaving chest and listened only to her weeping, as she cried time and time again, “I want to be with Ruth.”

ROBERTSON’S FIRST call went to Cal Troyer. “She’s inside now,” he said, standing out on the Zooks’ front porch. He had laid his rain slicker over the back of a porch chair, but even as cool as it was, the sheriff was still sweating under his flannel shirt. “Five-fifty-seven is closed north of Charm,” he added. “You’ll have to circle around through Farmerstown.”

“Twenty minutes,” Cal said. “I was headed to Walnut Creek for lunch.”

“I’ll stay until you get here,” Robertson said. He clicked off as Andy Zook came out through the front door.

Robertson shook his head sadly and didn’t speak. Zook returned his sympathetic wordlessness and nodded. Both men turned to face out toward the road where Emma had very nearly managed to kill herself.

As they stood there together, Irma Zook carried out two mugs of coffee and handed them to the men. “She’s with her grandfather,” she said, turning back into the house. “Alvin’s the best one to talk with her now.”

Andy held the screen door for his wife and then let it slap closed. “Been meaning to fix that,” he said to Robertson, then asked, “Do you really think she was trying to kill herself?”

“Yes,” Robertson said, eyes turned down. He took a sip of coffee. “I’ve got Cal Troyer coming out.”

Andy pulled the screen door open and paused. “She has never really been willing to talk much. Since her family died.”

“Cal said she had opened up to him a little bit,” Robertson said, turning. He held the screen for Andy.

Zook offered a puzzled “Thanks” and went inside.

*   *   *

Robertson’s second call went to Ricky Niell. “What have you got?” he asked. “I need some good news.”

“The DEA hasn’t turned up anything, yet, but they have the vehicle data and a description of Dewey Molina.”

“I knew that!” Robertson shouted.

“Sorry.”

Calmer, Robertson asked, “Really, Ricky, are we just dead in the water here?”

“Not yet. There are still two known locations to check here in Bradenton. The DEA wants to do that.”

“They gonna let you ride along?”

“No.”

“So, what are you going to do?”

“Orton and I are going to look for Jodie Tapp.”

“You think the DEA has any chance on the Molinas?”

“Fifty-fifty.”

Robertson blew a frustrated groan and held a thought. Ricky waited on the call. Shortly, Robertson asked, “You have any idea where to find this Tapp?”

“We’re going out to check some parking lots on her favorite beaches.”

“You’re kidding!”

“That’s all we’ve got, Sheriff. The Brandens will check for her at her trailer in Cortez.”

“How many beaches have you got down there, Niell?”

“About a thousand.”

“Thought so,” Robertson said. “Look, I’ve got a girl up here
who wants to die. Maybe it’d help if we could tell her who killed Ruth Zook.”

“I don’t know what more we can do, Sheriff.”

“What about Tapp’s friends? Or her known places?”

“Orton and I will be on that, Sheriff. All day long if we have to.”

“What about finding the Molinas?”

“If they come down to Florida, the DEA will track them down. Your BOLO is nationwide, right?”

“Yes. How about tracing those stolen boats?”

“Customs, and the Coast Guard.”

“That’s all you’ve got, Niell?”

“It is for now.”

“OK, then give it until tomorrow morning. If you don’t have anything by then, the DEA will have to close this out for us.”

“I’ll call you if we get something,” Niell said.

“You do that, Niell! Because I’ve got nothing but loose ends up here, and a little girl just tried to step in front of a truck!”

*   *   *

The sheriff’s third call went to his wife. “Missy, when can you release Ruth Zook’s body to her family?”

“I’d like to know more, Bruce,” Missy said. “Has something happened?”

“Emma Wengerd tried to kill herself,” Robertson said, weariness suffusing his tone. “Stepped out in front of a truck.”

“Somebody stopped her?”

“I did. But it was close, Missy. Far too close. And it took me too long to realize what she intended.”

“Then are you asking me as sheriff to release the body, or are you just frustrated?”

Robertson sighed. “I just think it’d help Emma if she could bury her stepsister. But maybe Cal is gonna have to fix this.”

“Is he out there?”

“On his way.”

“Is there going to be any more evidence?”

“No, Missy. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Ricky’s down in Florida, still?”

“Yes. The DEA is taking over the case.”

“Are you still thinking it was one of the Molinas who killed Ruth?”

“Them, or one of their crew. That’s where it all leads.”

“But you can’t do anything more up here?”

“Right.”

“Then, under the circumstances, I don’t have a good reason to hold the body any longer.”

“Thanks, Missy.”

“You’ll tell the Zooks?”

“Yes, as soon as Cal gets here.”

“OK, but tell them to bring plenty of ice. They’re going to want to bury her as soon as they can manage.”

*   *   *