Clouds without Rain. P. L. Gaus
tapped a finger on his creased uniform breast pocket and said, “Got it all right here,” followed by, “How’s the sheriff doing?”
Robertson muttered something, but it was muffled by his face mask. Wilsher said, “Fine,” obviously not meaning it. He drew close to Niell’s ear and whispered, “Nothing yet about Schrauzer. Understand?”
Niell nodded and said, “Sheriff, the skid marks from the semi cab are not that long. And from the hilltop where the professor was, there wouldn’t have been more than three, four seconds reaction time, as fast as that truck was going. We figure he hit the buggy at close to forty-five, maybe fifty-five miles an hour, even jackknifed like he was.”
Wilsher asked Niell, “The Amishman’s name was Weaver?”
“Right. John R. Weaver. I think he’s connected up with Melvin Yoder’s bunch.”
“Weaver would have made that left-hand turn into his drive a thousand times. And it only takes a few seconds to swing one of those ponies off the road, buggy and all.”
“So you’re wondering why the buggy was standing there long enough to be hit,” Niell said.
“That, and why Weaver didn’t know a truck was coming.”
“There’s only about sixty yards from the hilltop down into the low part of the road where Weaver’s lane cuts in. That doesn’t leave much time for a reaction, even when traffic is slow.”
“Then we’ll be citing the truck driver for unsafe speed, in any case,” Wilsher said.
“Posthumously,” Niell said. “Still, you gotta figure the buggy had better odds than just to sit there and get hit like that.”
Wilsher thought a while and then asked, “Do we know the point of impact? Some buggy parts were thrown back at least thirty yards.”
Robertson tapped his fingers on the metal legs of the hospital bed to get their attention and said, “Cab pushed, kept on.” He stalled under the influence of the drugs. “I mean going. After. Twenty yards. Maybe more. Buggy parts at the drive. Parts, Dan.”
Wilsher turned to Niell and asked, “Are there any crashed buggy parts right at the turn onto the lane?”
“There are buggy parts everywhere,” Niell said, “but the first ones are there, yeah. At the turn onto the lane. The cab came on ahead after the crash and rolled over the point of impact.”
Robertson nodded weakly and tapped the legs of the bed insistently. In a faint, muffled voice he asked, “Why jackknifed?”
Wilsher shrugged.
Niell said, “The road curves as it crests there. At high speed, that would have brought the trailer around beside the cab somewhat. Jamming the brakes would have started the jackknife.”
Robertson said something like “Umph” and let his head drop. Wilsher made an entry in his notebook.
There was a knock at the door to the small emergency room, and, still dressed in his Amish costume, Professor Branden asked, “All right to come in?”
One of the doctors motioned for Niell and Wilsher to wait in the hall, and then he waved the professor in.
Nodding a silent greeting to the officers as they passed, Branden took one of the two seats at the head of Robertson’s bed and asked, “You going to make it all right, Bruce?” He was smiling, but vastly concerned.
He stood up briefly to evaluate the efforts of the doctors and sat back down heavily. Memories of an emergency room long ago surfaced in his mind, from a day in the seventh grade when Robertson had rolled a homemade go-cart on a dirt trail. Branden had been standing on the frame of the go-cart, bracing himself on Robertson’s shoulders. He was thrown clear when the go-cart flipped sideways, but Robertson was wedged under the hot lawnmower engine. Branden had fought desperately to lift the heavy engine and wooden frame while Robertson struggled to pull his broken arm out from under the sputtering engine. The burn that day had been bad enough, a patch roughly five inches wide on the back of his arm. The burns today looked like that ugly wound a dozen times over. The seventh-grader had healed quickly. This would be another matter entirely.
Again Branden asked, “Are you all right, Bruce?”
Robertson mumbled, “Drugged,” and lightly nodded his head.
Branden looked up to the doctors, and one of them said, “First- and second-degree burns on his back and arms. Several areas of third-degrees, too. We’ve got most of the shirt cut loose now, and we’ve had to lance some of the tissue because of the swelling. Mostly, now, we’re fighting dehydration and infection, but if I were guessing, I’d say he’ll be fine. A smaller man and it’d be a different story, burns as extensive as they are. We figure it’s fourteen percent by the body chart system. Now, it mostly depends on how well he cooperates with his recovery regimen.”
The professor said, “Oh, brother,” and winked at Robertson, well knowing how stubborn the sheriff could be. He leaned over, studied his friend’s face, and concluded the sheriff was out with the drugs. Then he said, “Hang in there, Sheriff,” and stepped out into the hall to confer with Niell and Wilsher. To them he said, “He got burned up pretty good, once, when we were kids. He’ll be fine.”
“The nurses say he’ll be okay,” Ricky said, and added, “They say Bruce was up on the hood of Schrauzer’s cruiser, trying to pull him back through the windshield.”
“It was a bundle of poles or something,” Branden said. “They got Phil out through the driver’s door.” After reflection, Branden added, “Does Bruce know Phil’s dead?”
“No,” Wilsher said, “and I’d like to keep it that way for now.”
“It looked to me like the eighteen-wheeler knocked the buggy into next week and jackknifed onto the car,” the professor said.
Niell said, “That’s about it.” Turning to the lieutenant, he delivered his report. “We talked again to the three witnesses. They all say the same thing, to a point. The buggy was stopped to make the left turn. The car was stopped behind it, plus Schrauzer in his cruiser, and up came the two other pickups and the produce truck. Then the accounts have it in different orders, but essentially they were all waiting in line when the buggy started its turn, and the back legs of the horse gave out. Two of the witnesses say they also saw Schrauzer backing his cruiser up at that point, and two also report hearing an engine backfire then.”
Branden asked, “How would Phil have known to back up that soon?”
Niell shrugged and Wilsher made a note in his book.
Niell continued. “I think it was the produce truck. That backfired, I mean. Anyway, they all saw the semi appear at the top of the hill, hit its brakes, trailer started around, the cab smashed into the buggy, and the trailer hit the car sideways and overturned. The impact threw the car back a ways, and the fire started under it. Probably the gas tank.”
Wilsher asked, “What about Weaver?”
“He was crumpled up in what’s left of the buggy. About thirty yards back and off to the side in a field.”
“Have you laid out most of the buggy?” Wilsher asked. “That’ll be important.”
“All that we could find so far. We’ll use floodlights tonight,” Niell said. “What’s left, we’ll get tomorrow.”
Wilsher made another entry in his notebook and asked, “Can either of you figure why Schrauzer was backing his unit up before anybody saw the semi coming over the hill?”
From the end of the hall, Ellie Troyer said, “I’ve got a better question for you, Dan.” Just coming off her shift at the dispatcher’s desk in the jail, she was dressed in a black skirt of conservative length and a white blouse. She walked briskly down the hall, hooked an affectionate arm into Niell’s, pulled him close, and asked, “How’s the sheriff?”
Wilsher