Whiskers of the Lion (23 page)

Saturday, August 20

6:20
A.M.

ALTHOUGH REUBEN and Fannie got an early start Saturday morning, the travel was slow because of weekend traffic on SR 87. Reuben held to the berm wherever possible, and this impeded their progress even more, because the overnight rains had made potholes in the gravel beside the road.

When they approached the wetlands bordering the Pymatuning River, they found that the rain had produced flooding. Standing water had risen nearly to the level of the pavement. This was low country. They passed swampland, marshes, creeks, and lily pads. Everywhere they saw the encroachment of brown river water.

In Kinsman, Reuben followed 5W/7S through town. First there came Saint Patrick's Catholic Church. Then the Kinsman Chapel of the Christian & Missionary Alliance, plus the Dollar General, Marathon, and Main Drug. As they approached the gazebo at the center of town, they passed nineteenth-century homes set well back from the road. Brick-fronted businesses on the town square. Old buildings, with weathered and cracked bricks that had settled on their foundations.

Reuben paced his horse steadily south out of Kinsman on Route 7. At 88, he turned east, and the long low span of the Vernon Center Bridge came into view. The straight run of blacktop led from the intersection to the bridge, and Fannie could see a small blue pickup truck parked to the side, halfway across the bridge. Beside the pickup, Jodie Tapp was standing out on the pavement.

Reuben moved forward slowly. There were heavy metal guardrails on either side of the road. Over the guardrails, the land dropped steeply into the river bottoms. On the span of the bridge, low white walls guarded the edges. The lowlands bordering the Pymatuning River were flooded on each side of the road. The dirty brown water surged around marsh grasses, tall timber, and tangles of dense, bushy cover.

As Reuben started across the bridge, Fannie saw brown water rushing along at flood stage, only inches from the underside of the bridge. At the center of the bridge, Jodie stood smiling. She waved for Fannie to come to her. Fannie climbed down from the buggy's seat as Reuben set the hand brake. Fannie walked forward, and Reuben sat with the reins.

Over the swollen river, the two women met in the middle of the span. When Fannie held out her arms to embrace Jodie, Tapp stood stiffly in place, with her hands tucked into the front slit pocket of a gray hoodie.

Fannie released Jodie and stepped back. “What's wrong, Jodie? Is it your mother? Teresa Molina? What?”

Tapp answered, “I can't believe you are this naive.”

“What are you talking about?” Fannie asked as she stood in front of Jodie.

Reuben climbed down from the seat of the buggy and came forward to stand beside Fannie. “Is there a problem here, Fannie?”

Tapp stepped back a pace. “I knew you'd come,” she said flatly.

Reuben held Jodie's gaze. At his side, he took Fannie's hand in his.

Tapp's hand clutched at something inside the slit pocket of her hoodie. She snarled and said, “I can kill you both right here.”

Reuben stared peacefulness back at Tapp. “You can do nothing to harm us that God has not already allowed.”

Fannie reached a hand out to Tapp, and Tapp shouted, “Stay back!”

Fannie put her hand back at her side. “Jodie,” she said, “were you really part of the drug smuggling?”

“Oh, I cannot believe you naive and stupid Amish girls!” Tapp laughed. “Of course I was part of it.”

“I don't believe you,” Fannie said.

“I know you don't. That's why it was so easy to talk you Amish girls into carrying my suitcases home on the buses. Dozens, Fannie! It was dozens of Amish girls. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana. And it worked, too. Until stupid Ruth Zook dumped my drugs into a farm pond.”

“Did you kill Ruth?” Fannie asked.

Exasperated, Tapp shouted, “No, you moron! I was in Florida!”

“Then who killed her, Jodie, if you didn't?”

“Teresa's cousin. Dewey Molina. They tracked him down in Bradenton. I had to pretend to be his hostage.”

“I grow weary of this,” Reuben said. “Fannie, this cannot be a part of our lives.”

Fannie took a step toward Tapp. “Are you really going to kill us, Jodie?”

With scorn, Tapp said, “You're too stupid to live, Fannie.”

Fannie stood immobile. She studied the face of her friend and grew sad. She stepped back to stand beside her fiancé.

Tapp glared spitefulness into Fannie's eyes.

Fannie looked sadly back at Tapp, and then she closed her eyes. She beheld the oneness of creation, and she embraced the true and eternal testimony of her life, even if that required her death at the hands of a friend, on a deserted bridge over a swollen river.

“Take out your cell phone,” Fannie heard Tapp command.

Fannie opened her eyes. She lifted the phone from the pocket of her dress, and she held it forward for Tapp.

“Throw it in the river,” Tapp said.

Fannie turned around and threw the phone into the roiling brown water. Then she turned back to face Tapp.

Tapp turned to Reuben. “Do you have a phone, too?”

“No,” Reuben answered flatly.

“Why not?”

“They are harmful.”

“Oh,” Jodie ridiculed. “Are we afraid of frequencies close to the brain?”

“No.”

“Then explain why,” Jodie insisted, stepping closer. “Because you people don't make any sense to me at all.”

Reuben glanced right to smile at Fannie, and he turned back to Tapp. Slowly and deliberately, Reuben answered. “In your world with cell phones, Jodie, who among you deems a friend so precious that you would ride for half a day in a buggy, just to sit on a porch with a glass of tea and talk for an afternoon?”

“You're crazy,” Tapp replied.

“I don't think I am,” Reuben said evenly.

Jodie Tapp seemed to stall on a thought. She seemed to have caught a fleeting insight that she had never before considered. She realized that Fannie had spoken to her, and she said, “What?”

“Jodie,” Fannie said, “aren't you afraid of Teresa Molina? Shouldn't you be hiding from her?”

Tapp laughed, and she laughed again, as if pleased by some hidden mystery or taken with some entertaining irony. Fannie and Reuben waited for her answer.

Tapp swallowed nervously and wetted her lips with the tip of her tongue. She appeared to be pressurized by bottled anxiety. It was apparent both to Fannie and to Reuben that she was not a woman at peace. She was not a woman who enjoyed simplicity of thought. The plain beauties of life would forever be inaccessible to her.

Fannie said to her, “Have you ever known any peace?”

As if addressing a simpleton, Tapp smiled with condescension. “Teresa Molina was running from her own cartel, Fannie. They don't tolerate failure. So I killed her for them. No one will ever find her body. I made sure of that.”

Hoping that Jodie would talk a little more, Fannie asked, “How did you find us, Jodie?”

“I just kept calling you, Fannie. I knew you'd tell me where you were, eventually. Once you called me with that new phone of yours, I knew I'd find you, sooner or later. I have to admit, I didn't expect it would take four months.”

“I mean, how did you get here so fast this morning?” Fannie said.

“Oh Fannie, really? Are you kidding? Each time I called you, I learned a little more about where you were. ‘It's raining here,' you said once. I checked my radar. ‘There's a fabric store here.' I checked the Internet for fabric stores near Amish communities. ‘The Indians' games are on the radio all the time.' That meant near Cleveland. More and more, each time we talked, I drew closer to you. I moved every day. I was in Middlefield last night. I must have just missed you.”

“You said you were down in Akron, Jodie.”

“See? It was so easy to fool you.”

With deep and genuine chagrin, Fannie said, “I'm sorry, Jodie.” She pulled a wire loose from inside her apron, and she showed Jodie the microphone that had recorded their conversation.

Jodie stepped back, startled. She drew her hands out of the pocket of the hoodie, and she pointed a revolver at Fannie.

Immediately, three uniformed deputies dashed out of the bushes at the ends of the bridge. They were led by Captain Bobby Newell. They all rushed forward on the flat span of the bridge, and Newell shouted, “Drop your weapon, Tapp!”

Jodie stared slackjawed at Fannie. She turned her head to see Newell approaching, but she did not drop her weapon.

Again, Newell shouted, “Drop your weapon!”

Jodie leaned over at the waist, put her revolver on the pavement at her feet, and backed up slowly to the edge of the bridge. “How did you know?” she asked Fannie. “How did you figure it out?”

Fannie said, “Jodie, how did you know I had been staying with the FBI?”

“You told me.”

“No, I didn't.”

“I'm sure you did.”

“No, Jodie. I never told you that. So that's when I began to suspect you. When you first asked me about the FBI. Only then. Until then, I thought you really were my friend.”

Jodie pressed back against the low wall at the edge of the bridge. Behind her, the brown flood waters rushed away under the pavement. Newell and his men surrounded Tapp with their guns pointed at her. Jodie looked a last time at Fannie, smiled as if lost in tragic irony, and threw herself backward into the surging river water.

The current drew Jodie immediately under the bridge. Fannie rushed to the other side and watched for Jodie to pass from under the bridge. She saw nothing at first. Then, some fifty yards downstream, Fannie saw the lifeless body of Jodie Tapp, snagged on a tree trunk, head down in the water, limbs twisting erratically in the current.

Thursday, September 29

7:40
A.M.

SIX WEEKS after the stabbings, Detective Pat Lance drove down the farmer's lane to Stan Armbruster's old trailer. She parked beside a Dumpster where friends and family had thrown out what no one wanted of the brittle and broken household goods that Armbruster had left behind.

Slowly, Lance climbed the wooden steps to Armbruster's trailer door. She used a key his sister had given her to unlock the door, and once inside, she drifted from one empty room to another.

There was half a roll of paper towels left in the kitchen. Maybe a new tenant would want that, Lance thought. There was a stack of old magazines on the carpet where Armbruster's couch had sat with its back to the trailer's kitchen counter. No one would want them, Lance realized. She carried them outside to the Dumpster.

Back inside, she wandered from corner to corner in the musty rooms. It was all gone, she realized. Nothing left. But in the bedroom, in a corner behind the folding door to the bathroom, Lance found two brown paper grocery bags. Inside there was damp, musty clothing—a blue business suit, with subtle charcoal pinstripes. A white dress shirt and a red tie. It was all dirty, and it was all ruined by mold. Armbruster had dropped it there the day he had found the body of Howie Dent, and that had been the end of it, Lance realized.

Lance pulled the suit out of the bags and peered into the bottom of each sack. In the second one, there was a sparkle of silver, and Lance lifted out a sterling tie chain. She put it in her pocket.

The clothes went back into the sacks, and Lance carried them out to the Dumpster to toss them onto the top of the pile. She shook her head and thought how much she wished Stan had done better for himself. In the Dumpster, there was worn and broken furniture, much of it little more than family hand-me-downs. There was rusty kitchenware and dented pots and pans. Chipped plastic glasses. Dated foodstuffs. And now old magazines and a ruined suit.

“Stan,” Lance said to the Dumpster, “you should have done better for yourself.”

From farther back on the lane, Lance heard the barking of dogs. She wandered back to the cages and watched the farmer ladle dog food into bowls.

Lance said, “Hi,” and the farmer returned her simple greeting. When he had set the bowls in the cages, he came out and said, “Armbruster was the best trainer my dogs ever had.”

Sadly, Lance replied, “I know,” and she turned for her car.

 • • • 

As she drove back to Millersburg, Lance thought of Armbruster's phone. She thought of his pictures of her, and she wondered again, as she had done many times since she discovered them in the hospital, why he hadn't ever shown them to her. Why he hadn't ever spoken to her, to tell her how he felt. Why he had never asked her out.

East of Millersburg on SR 62, Lance turned south on 557 to head toward Charm. Halfway there, she turned onto the lane for Miller's Bakery. She knew it had always been Armbruster's favorite. Inside, under the dim lights of the gas ceiling mantles, she bought a maple cinnamon bun and had it boxed to carry it out.

Back on 557, Lance turned right behind a lumber truck, and she followed it around the many curves of the road into Charm. She parked at the Roadside Amish Restaurant, and she carried the little box with the cinnamon roll inside.

Stan Armbruster was seated in a booth beside the front windows. His left arm was cradled in a sling. On the table in front of him was the farmer's special breakfast. Lance slid onto the bench seat beside him and pushed him gently sideways to make more room for herself. She gave him the box with the cinnamon roll and said, “Not that you need more food.”

As he opened the box, Armbruster said, “Thanks. I'll save it for later.”

Lance smiled and laughed and shook her head. “We can split it, Detective.”

“Oh really?”

“Yes, and when I finally get you out of that sling, you can start running laps. If you keep eating breakfast here, you'll be as big as the sheriff.”

 • • • 

When Armbruster had finished his breakfast and a last cup of coffee, Pat slid off the booth's seat and said to him, “Follow me back into town, Stan. I want to stop at the jail.”

Armbruster slid out and carried his bill and his box to the cash register. “I'm not sure I'm ready,” he said as he fished his wallet out of a back pocket. “I haven't been back there yet.”

“I know, Stan,” Pat said. “We're going to fix that today.”

In the restaurant's lot beside Armbruster's red Corolla, Lance said, “Robertson figures that it's time for you to come off medical leave, Stan. And he's grousing about Ricky, too.”

Armbruster unlocked his car and set the pastry box on the passenger's seat. He straightened up beside the car and asked, “What's with Ricky?”

“Half days. He goes up to Akron with Ellie every afternoon to see their babies. It's going to be two more weeks before they can bring the children home. So Robertson has been squawking about how he has only one detective.”

Armbruster rolled his eyes and rapped the knuckles of his good hand against the window glass. “And has he needed more than one detective, lately? Has there been anything to detect?”

“Not really.” Lance laughed. “There hasn't been a thing.”

“So what's his problem?”

“He wants you back, Stan. At least for today. He wants me to bring you back to the jail today.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. Maybe he's lonely.”

“Right. I'm sure.”

“No, Stan. Just follow me into town. I'll meet you on the front steps.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so, Detective. I do.”

 • • • 

Pat Lance opened the door into the jail's front counter lobby, and she nudged Stan Armbruster through the door. They were all standing there to greet him.

Applause broke out, and pink heat blushed into the fair skin of Stan's cheeks. As Pat steadied him with her arm looped into his, Stan stood inside the door and took it all in.

At the very front stood little Rachel Ramsayer, reaching up to shake Armbruster's hand. Behind her were Professor Branden and his wife, Caroline. To the left, Ricky Niell stood beside his wife, Ellie. Beside Ellie was Pastor Cal Troyer. To the right, close to the counter, stood Chief Deputy Dan Wilsher and Captain Bobby Newell, both in their dress uniforms. Also in their dress uniforms were several deputies clustered behind the chief. Del Markely stood applauding behind her counter, and at the back corner of the counter, Melissa Taggert stood with her husband, the sheriff, who was sporting a new beard to mask the long pink scar on his face. Armbruster surveyed it all with a wide smile.

As the applause died away, Del's voice boomed out, “OK, OK, now everybody just stand aside. I have something to present.”

She carried a paper sack out through the counter door, and she pulled the sheriff along with her. Robertson resisted at first, but Missy urged him forward with Del.

Once Del had Robertson and Armbruster positioned in the center of the lobby, and once the people had gathered around, she planted her feet wide and fluffed the bushy gray ponytail at the back of her head. She waved her arms for fanfare, and she bent over the sack. From it, she pulled a plaque, and she held it up to show it around. Framed behind glass were two service photographs, one of the old sheriff and one of young Armbruster.

“This is going on my wall,” Del announced with pride. She pushed her way back through the crowd to stand behind her counter. There she took out a nail and a hammer, and she pounded the nail into the knotty pine paneling over her radio consoles.

“Sheriff,” she declared loudly, “I hate this old pine paneling. You seriously need to remodel.”

Again there was applause. The sheriff waved a surrendering palm in the air. “OK, Del. Whatever you say.”

Del nodded and bowed with the flare of an accomplished magician. Then she hung the plaque on the nail and stood back to point to the inscription that was written underneath the photos of Robertson and Armbruster.

“
STABBED IN THE LINE OF DUTY
,” she read aloud. “
STABBED, BUT TOO ORNERY TO DIE
.”