Whiskers of the Lion (13 page)

Thursday, August 18

5:30
P.M.

ON THE second floor of the Masts' main house, the bedroom had plain plaster walls painted stark white and accented with dark, rich-grained walnut trim along the baseboards, around the crown molding, and around the framing of the doors. Covering tall wooden windows on two walls in the corner room, there were long and plain purple curtains reaching full-length to the floorboards, which were painted a nondescript flat gray. The furniture, consisting of a headboard, dressers, and nightstands, was of a classic Shaker style, with clean lines and simple round knobs. Everywhere in the room, it seemed, a determined effort had been made at simple, unadorned functionality. Everywhere, that is, except the bedspread.

On the king bed, the Masts had displayed an ornate quilt that had been elaborately hand-stitched to make an intricate, repeating six-point star pattern in green, rose, and periwinkle fabrics. To Pat Lance it seemed curious that the room was purposefully plain and simple, as all Amish no doubt would have it, whereas the quilt, from conception and design to construction, was an artful expression of unrestrained creativity. She laid her suitcase on the quilt and thought it a shame to cover so beautiful an object. In contrast to the rich colors of the quilt, outside the bedroom windows a drab and misty rain continued to spill from a dull and leaden sky.

Irma shook her head and stepped to the windows to close each of the long drapes. “No point letting all of the gloom inside,” she remarked. Then for a gaslight in the ceiling, Irma opened the valve in the wall pipe. She lit the lamp with a wooden match and carefully adjusted the flame on the silk mantle to a white-hot glow. This she repeated at a lamp stand in the corner of the bedroom. When she turned to Lance, she asked, “Your dress?”

Lance opened her suitcase on the bed and took out a pale green Mennonite dress. “It reaches to the floor,” she said, holding the plain dress to her neck. “I also have a white apron.” She pulled the second garment from her suitcase. “It has some lace, but I thought it might do.”

Beside the dress and apron, Lance also set out a white organdy prayer Kapp with string ties. “I got this at the dry goods store in Mt. Hope,” she said, and she looked to the Amish women for their opinions.

Fannie shook her head and pressed her fingertips to her lips to mask a frown. In solemn Dietsch dialect, she spoke at considerable length to Irma.

Once Fannie had finished, Irma said to Lance, “Maybe only in the bedroom, Detective. We think it's much too fancy for public attire.”

Distracted while fumbling with her cell phone, Fannie asked Lance, “You bought the dress in a store?”

Lance nodded earnestly. “At Walmart, in Millersburg. I bought the plainest, simplest dress I could find. I saw other women in Walmart wearing the same thing.”

Fannie slipped her phone into a side pocket of her dress. “This would do for a Mennonite woman,” she said, “but never for Amish.”

Irma held the dress to herself, with the apron displayed in front, and again the Amish women spoke dialect. Lance understood only that they were asking questions of each other about the dress.

“I gather this won't do,” Lance said, embarrassed. “It seems that I've missed the mark.”

“It's a little too short,” Irma said. “And the stitching is much too fancy.”

“And there aren't the proper number of pleats,” Fannie added, checking the display on her phone. “Plus it's not gathered at the shoulders correctly.”

“According to whom?” Lance asked, smiling now, aware that the women had made mild sport of her. “Who decides about dresses?”

“The bishop decides, of course,” Irma said. “Each district has its own way. It's the bishop who decides.”

“The number of pleats in a dress?” Lance asked, curious now more than embarrassed.

“Pleats in front,” Fannie said, phone tumbling in her agile fingers.

“And on the rump,” Irma added. “They'll be different.”

“The rump?”

“In back,” Irma said. “The rump. What do you call it?”

Still wrestling with the notion of the bishop's actually approving dress styles, Lance asked, “Are you saying that a bishop decides how many pleats are to be sewn into a woman's dress?”

“Who else?” Fannie asked. She punched several buttons on her phone, seeming distracted by worrisome thoughts.

Detective Lance took note of Fannie's detachment, but she was more concerned at the moment with what the two Amish women had been saying about fashion. She arched a brow and shook her head disbelievingly. “And the stitching is also
approved
?”

“Of course,” Fannie said. She put her phone in her pocket and seemed to gain some focus on Lance's questions. She advanced a step toward Lance. “The style of a hem, Detective Lance. And the length of a dress, the cut of a sleeve, and the colors, too. The bishop decides what is approved and what is not. We can tell a lot about your bishop by the way your clothes are made.”

Irma came forward to stand beside Fannie, and both women moved closer to Lance, as if to encourage the detective. Irma reached out delicately to take Lance's hand. In her other hand, she held a measuring tape and a thimble, which she had drawn from the pocket in her apron. “We make our own dresses,” she said with a smile. She released Lance's hand and explained, “No proper Amish woman would wear a store-bought dress.”

“How would I have known that?”

Together the Amish women shrugged.

“Then do you have something I can borrow?” Lance asked. “I really need to wear a proper outfit.”

Irma held up her tape measure. “We'll make a dress for you, Detective Lance. It shouldn't take any time at all.”

“OK, but I guess I'll need an apron, too.”

“We have some of those already,” Fannie said. “And your Kapp is fine. It's just that your dress would never work outside the bedroom.”

Irma paused with a thought, and a soft blush appeared in her cheeks. Delicately, she stepped into the adjoining bathroom. With the door closed behind her, she called softly to Fannie in Dietsch, and Fannie smiled. It was the first unguarded and genuine smile Lance had seen on Fannie since she had arrived that afternoon.

“What now?” Lance asked, expecting that she had overlooked some additional arcane trifle in proper Amish attire.

Fannie continued to smile as she turned her gaze to the floorboards. “Detective Lance, Irma has asked if you will be expecting to return your dress to Walmart.”

Not understanding the intent of the question, Lance answered, “I gave the receipt to my sheriff. I thought I'd be reimbursed for the expense.”

Fannie brought her eyes up to Lance and cocked a brow, with a hint of guile giving soft curvature to her smile. “I don't think Irma wants the dress to be returned, Detective Lance. Perhaps, she is thinking, you will not have need to keep it?”

 • • • 

In the Daadihaus, Professor Branden was on the phone with the sheriff. While he talked, Caroline sat with Reuben Gingerich and Abel Mast in the corner of the open room, at a round dining table near the kitchen door. Watching for the arrival of the FBI, Branden talked into his phone while standing on the other side of the room near the front window. The three at the table listened to his end of the call until it ended.

“It shouldn't be too much longer,” Branden said, closing his phone. “The FBI knows where we are.”

Gingerich stood and paced in the large room, ignoring the professor. He was lost in thought, his concern for Fannie showing in the troubled creases around his eyes.

Abel Mast, from his seat at the table, asked the professor, “Will they let her have any visitors?”

“I don't know, Abel,” Branden said. He crossed the room and took the chair that Gingerich had vacated. “Really, I doubt it. They probably should not permit her to have any visitors.”

“But we are all Amish,” Abel argued.

“I know,” Branden said. “I'll speak to them about it.”

As Gingerich paced in front of the window, Caroline asked him, “Reuben, are you prepared to wait? It might be weeks. And they might move her around a lot.”

Reuben answered a simple, “Yes,” and paused to stare out the front window at the gray weather. A steady and cool rain was spattering puddles on the gravel drive, where the Brandens' sedan and the detectives' patrol cruiser were both nosed up against the back porch. Through the pane, Reuben could hear the rain pinging insistently on the metal roofs of the cars. It was a tinny racket to which he was not accustomed.

Reuben turned to stare out over the fields beyond the gravel drive. A cover of fog was starting to collect over the pastures beyond, as the cool rain was lifted as vapor from the rich earth and the sun-warmed crops, producing damp aromas that held the hint of autumn weather, despite the fact that it was still only August.

Worried about Fannie, Reuben let his gaze wander to the back corner window of the main house. A lantern had been lit there, in the sewing room adjacent to the kitchen. Through the gray mist of the rain, Reuben could see Fannie and Irma both at work in the sewing room, Irma seated at the treadle machine, Fannie cutting fabric from a bolt of cloth in the standard color of dusty rose.

Reuben turned away from the window to address the professor. “Is Fannie just supposed to sit by herself in some lonely hotel room?”

“It's the best thing for now,” Branden said.

“Will she have books? Her sewing? Anything that is hers?”

“A television, I suppose.”

Reuben snorted disgust. “Television is a hideous circus spectacle,” he declared with rare heat. “Americans are addicted to circus spectacles. They indulge themselves in grotesque spectacles of the most insidious kind, and they don't even have to leave their living rooms to do it.”

“I wouldn't argue with you,” Branden said. “Maybe some of the TV channels are not so bad as that, but really Reuben, I wouldn't argue with you at all.”

Tires crunched the gravel outside Reuben's window. He turned back to peer out and saw a black panel van with no markings turn in at the corner of the main house. The van rolled to a stop behind the cars, and two men in dark suits got out of the front seats and opened large black umbrellas. The sliding door opened, and two more men got out at the side of the van. One of the black umbrellas was handed to the second pair of men, and together the four men crowded under the two umbrellas to confer. The men were dressed so similarly that they might have been wearing uniforms.

“They're here,” Reuben said disdainfully. “I'm going out to talk to them about books. They've at least got to let her have some books.”

 • • • 

While Fannie cut fabric, Stan Armbruster crowded into the corner of the small sewing room and pressed in against a stack of a dozen upright bolts of fabric. In the corner near the window, Irma was vigorously working the foot pedals of her sewing machine, feeding dusty-rose cloth under her needle. With her back turned to Armbruster, Fannie was bent over the cutting table using hand shears, cutting cloth from a bolt of the same fabric.

While the women worked, Armbruster asked Fannie about the April bus trip to Florida, and about the morning when she and Howie Dent had stopped with their fellow passengers for breakfast in Charlotte. Fannie described the ride south on I-77 from Sugarcreek as uneventful and unremarkable, the small hills of the southern Ohio countryside blending gradually into the stately mountains of West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina. She recalled the curviness of the route as it wound its way between rivers and mountains in Charleston. She remembered the high mountain pass beyond Wytheville, where the fog that night had been dense. Together, she and Howie had been seated near the back of the bus, and they had talked through the night.

Then Fannie described the two stops the bus had made before arriving in Charlotte the next morning. Some of the passengers had finished their trips at these early destinations, and more passengers had joined the trip, heading for Florida like the others. Fannie remembered that she got off briefly at the second stop to use the bathroom. When the bus arrived in Charlotte for breakfast at a restaurant near the highway, she and Howie had gotten off with the others, and the bus had circled around to a nearby gas station for fuel.

“The restaurant was already crowded,” Fannie said. “So I waited with Howie in line, so he could use the men's room. It was at the back of a hallway that led to the kitchen.”

“He did that?” Armbruster asked. “He got a turn in the restroom?”

“Yes, and when he came out, we turned in the long hallway to go get breakfast. But we saw some pushy men circling among the tables, looking at faces. They were rough-looking men, and Howie didn't like the way they were staring at people.”

“Did you think they were looking for you, Fannie?”

“No, but Howie did.”

“Then what? No breakfast?”

“No breakfast. He pulled me into the kitchen at the back of the hallway. We went out the back door, between two Dumpsters.”

“How did you get to downtown Charlotte?”

“Howie pushed me into a cab. He wanted me to scrunch down beneath the windows.”

“He chose downtown?”

“No. He told the cabdriver to get us to the Greyhound station. That just turned out to be downtown.”

Fannie hesitated with a memory. “I'm lucky I had my purse. I paid the cabdriver. All Howie had was his phone.”

“But why did he think those men were trouble? Because they seemed to be looking for someone?”

“I think so,” Fannie said. She measured a length of fabric, chalked it, and took up her scissors. As she cut, she said, “Really, it was Howie who was nervous about them. I wouldn't even have noticed.”

“Did he say anything about them, or did he just lead you out through the kitchen?”