Professor?”
Branden held out his hand and said, “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
The deputy shook his hand and said, “Stan Armbruster. Newest deputy in the department, which I guess you can tell by the fact that I’m the one out here shoveling dead horse parts off the road.”
“Well, Deputy,” Branden said, “they say that horse halted in its turn into the lane, and that’s what caused the semi to strike the buggy. I was just curious why some of the witnesses would say that it looked like the back legs of the horse seemed to give out, halfway through its turn.”
“Find what you were looking for?” Armbruster asked.
“Not at all sure,” Branden said. “But I’d be a whole lot happier if we didn’t let anybody ship that horse to a fertilizer plant for the time being.”
“I’ll mention it to the LT,” Armbruster said.
“Who’s in charge this morning?” Branden asked.
Armbruster scoffed, “The ‘flying tires’ think they are, but Lieutenant Wilsher’s in the house.” He made an unfriendly gesture toward the state troopers, and shook his head with the exaggerated disdain typical of rookies.
Branden smiled, thanked Armbruster, reminded him about the horse, walked down the drive to the front porch of John R. Weaver’s house, and entered through the screened door. He found himself in a long hallway that led back to a kitchen. The wide floorboards were painted a muted gray. The walls were plain white, and the hallway was trimmed liberally with fine cherry wood.
The kitchen was fitted with a wood stove, a large metal sink with a hand pump for water, and a small wooden table and chair. There were dirty dishes scattered haphazardly about the counters and the sink, and the doorless pantry shelves seemed equally disorganized, stocked with a bounty of dried goods, canned foods, condiments, chips, flour, salt and pepper, herbs, and a couple of dozen two-liter bottles of pop. In one corner, there was a small icebox made of heavy wood, trimmed and bound with ribbons of thick black iron.
Branden glanced through the other doorways off the hall and found a bedroom, a dining room, and a sitting room, all done in the traditional plain Amish fashion of the hallway—gray floors, white walls, and rich cherry trim, the furniture old and unadorned.
Passing back through the kitchen, Branden walked out onto a wide screened porch and found a surprisingly large, boxy addition attached to the back porch, electric lights showing through the windows. An electric line ran to a corner of the addition, and a telephone line came in underneath. There was also a cable TV service wire. The roofline ascended to a peak that was even with the top windows of the second floor of the main house, and, through the tall windows of the new addition, Branden noticed a soaring, vaulted ceiling.
Inside, Branden found Dan Wilsher, in uniform, seated at a modern, black lacquer desk and computer console in the single large room. The console held a monitor, a keyboard, a color printer, and a phone/fax machine. There was also a TV set and a VCR in a far corner, with an easy chair.
The lieutenant was a tall man, somewhat overweight, about fifty years old. He was serious on the job, but handled his duties as lieutenant with a quiet ease that the deputies respected. Out of uniform, he had a reputation as a jokester, and several times he had arranged practical jokes on the sheriff, leaving Robertson to guess who had put the younger deputies up to it. This, too, Branden reflected, had made Wilsher popular with the deputies.
The latest had been one of Wilsher’s best, with Phil Schrauzer “walking point.” Even with Schrauzer gone, Branden remembered it happily. Phil had backed his car up to the Brandens’ garage on a night shift, and he and the professor had off-loaded several boxes containing the sheriff’s entire collection of Zane Grey novels, even the first-edition Harper & Brothers. Then they had met all of the other deputies, corporals and captains alike, at the jail, each bringing several old volumes scavenged from garage sales, attics, used book stores, neighbors, grandparents, even the Internet. The gag had taken the better part of a month to prepare, but the next day, on the shelves where the sheriff’s prized Zane Greys normally stood, Robertson found twenty-seven hardbound Nancy Drew mysteries. For as long as he could, he studiously ignored them.
Some days later, when he could contain himself no longer, he started in on the deputies one at a time. It took a week and a half, and it was Schrauzer himself who finally broke. Branden delivered the Zane Greys from his garage to the sheriff, and Robertson cleared out Schrauzer’s locker and glued the Nancy Drews together into a tight, immovable pack in the empty space.
Wilsher came out of his reverie, turned to Branden, waved an arm to indicate the whole of the room, and said, “Pretty amazing, don’t you think?”
Branden stepped into the room and turned in place to see what Wilsher had indicated. On three of the walls behind him, high up in the vaulted space, there were large game trophies, North American for the most part, but several from Africa, too. There were deer, elk, moose, bear, and a cougar, plus kudu, wildebeest, steenbok, and warthog. As they hung with their eyes looking down into the room, they seemed to press in on Branden like guards in a private art gallery, making the unwanted visitor nervous by their unpleasant attentions.
Beneath the trophy heads, along two of the walls, there were wooden shelves, crammed with books, travel guides, and hunting magazines. The room was paneled in dark walnut and finished with a luxuriant blue carpet. In each of the four angled ceiling lines of the vaulted room, there was a large skylight.
Branden stared at the massive heads, feeling vaguely uneasy. Wilsher said, “Come over here and have a seat. It doesn’t spook you quite so much when you’re sitting down.”
Branden crossed the large room and took a seat on a desk chair in front of the monitor. He swiveled gently left and right and counted the imposing trophy heads, eighteen in all. Then he pushed up from the chair and walked over to a wall rack beside the TV, where four hunting rifles were held vertically in place inside a felt-lined walnut case. The case had slots for five rifles, but the middle slot was empty. Branden took one of the rifles down and sighted the scope through a window onto a distant hillside. He opened the bolt and inspected the chamber. Next he studied the scope, a Leupold variable-power model, with extraordinarily fine, custom cross hairs. The rifle itself was a classic Remington 700 series, mounted to a modern, black composite stock. Branden took a bill out of his wallet, wrapped it around the barrel, and slid it freely between the barrel and the stock. To Wilsher he commented, “Free-floated barrel,” with admiration, and stood the rifle back in the case where he had found it.
Wilsher said, “Guess he was a big hunter,” and continued browsing through the desk drawers.
Branden came over to the desk, and said, “Those aren’t run-of-the-mill firearms.”
Wilsher turned in his chair to face Branden and asked, “So how do you figure a guy in a buggy makes it over to Africa to hunt dangerous game?”
Branden shrugged and said, “Better yet, figure a guy in a buggy with a modern, electric addition off his back porch.”
The two fell silent for a moment and then Wilsher turned back to the desk. Branden rose to study the contents of a tall metal filing cabinet next to the computer console. He opened the top drawer labeled “Lands Owned.” The other drawers were marked “Lands Sold,” “Lands Leased,” and “Prospects.”
Wilsher said, “Weaver has land deals dating back to 1976, as far as I can make out.”
Branden studied the numerous file folders
