The Names of Our Tears (9 page)

“And how could anyone have convinced her even to try?”

WHEN THE sheriff arrived early the next morning at the jail, there were flurries dusting the courthouse square, stirring soft whiteness into the air around the granite Civil War monument. Robertson checked in with his night dispatcher, Ed Hollings, and then, in the duty room at the other end of the hall, he filled his coffee carafe with water. In his office, he put up a full pot of brew, settled behind his desk while the coffeemaker chattered, and searched the list of contacts on his computer for the phone number of Sergeant Ray Lee Orton in the Bradenton Beach Police Department north of Sarasota. As he was punching the number into his cell phone, Hollings came in briefly and said, “I’ll be staying over a few hours, Sheriff. Ellie called in sick this morning.”

Robertson punched out of his call and followed Hollings out to the front counter. “Did she say what was wrong?”

Hollings sat at the radio consoles and started to answer, but a call rang in, and he held up an index finger and answered the call. It was a brief report from a motorist who had witnessed a fender bender in the parking lot of the Walmart. Hollings dispatched a unit and turned back to Robertson. “She said stomach flu, Sheriff.”

Robertson gave a distracted scowl, turned around, and stepped back down to his desk, punching in the number again for the Bradenton Beach Police Department. Before he could put the call through, Pat Lance knocked at his door and entered. Again Robertson switched off his call.

Lance was dressed in the same navy blue pantsuit she had worn to the Zook farm the day before. Her blouse was a butter yellow color, open at the neck. She sat in a chair at the front of Robertson’s old cherry desk and asked, “Learn anything useful after I left?”

Robertson sat back in his battered swivel chair and tented his fingers in front of a broad smile. “Lance,” he said, “they don’t like women in pants.”

“Are you kidding?” Lance blurted.

“Not at all. They asked me to tell you not to wear ‘the pants of a man’ when you go out there.”

Lance popped out of her chair. “You’re kidding!”

“Not at all.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Nothing,” Robertson said, smiling to cover an urge to laugh. “Is that going to be a problem for you?”

“What am I supposed to wear?” Lance asked indignantly. “A long Amish dress?”

“Yes, I think they’d prefer that, Lance. Again, is that going to be a problem for you?”

This time Robertson couldn’t hold back. He laughed, took his fingers down, and smiled openly at his detective.

Lance sat down and asked with an awkward calm, “How long have you been planning to ambush me with that one, Sheriff?”

“Oh, since they told me,” Robertson said, and stood behind his desk. He came around to his coffeemaker and asked, “Black, right, Lance?”

She nodded, and Robertson poured coffee into two white mugs. He carried the mugs to his desk, handed one to Lance, sat behind his desk again, and chuckled. “It worked fine, Lance. By the time you left, they were ready to talk.”

Not finding anything particularly humorous in the exchange, Lance set her mug on the corner of Robertson’s desktop. “They’re fossils,” she muttered. “Misogynistic fossils.”

Robertson chuckled again. “Somebody called me that same thing last year, Lance. Do you women sit around a campfire and agree on these phrases, like ‘misogynistic fossils’?”

Lance started a reply, saw the sheriff’s broad smile, and gave up with, “Oh, forget it.”

Picking up his phone again, Robertson said, “I put my report on the system last night. The only thing I learned at the Zooks’ is that somebody in Sarasota has a drug conduit running up here. I was just going to call Ray Lee Orton.”

“Who?” Lance asked, still distracted by the issue of attire.

“Cop in Bradenton Beach. Gonna ask him who the lead people are down there, in drug enforcement.”

Lance looked up and nodded, keeping to her seat as she sipped coffee.

Ed Hollings came back down the hall. Pausing only briefly in the sheriff’s door, he said, “Amish girl to see you, Sheriff,” and returned to his consoles out front.

Robertson pushed down on his intercom button and said, “Can you ask what she wants?” but Hollings appeared again at his door with a young Amish woman and said, “She said it can’t wait.”

Lance stood up and ushered the visitor into Robertson’s office. The sheriff stood behind his desk and said, “What can we do for you?”

The Amish woman looked nervously at Lance and then turned, unsure of herself, to Robertson.

The sheriff came out to the side of his desk with his coffee mug and said, “This is Detective Pat Lance, and I am Sheriff Robertson. How can we help you?”

Lance held a straight chair out for her at the front of Robertson’s desk, and the young woman sat down on it. In her early twenties, she was stocky, bordering on overweight. Her face was round and pale, with a complexion as flawless as refined flour.
Her brown eyes were large and set wide over a thin nose and small mouth that seemed to curve perpetually down at the corners. Her hands rested nervously in her lap, fingers knitted together and struggling with tension.

Her long dress was made of a winter-heavy dark plum fabric, and her white apron was spread across her shoulders, over her bodice, and down to the hem of her dress. Folded over her arm was a black winter shawl. Her black bonnet covered all of her hair, and it was tied close to her cheeks for modesty. She wore black hose, soft black walking shoes, and round, wire-rimmed spectacles, gold in color.

Briefly she glanced again at Lance and then looked back to the sheriff. She studied the backs of her hands, nervously spreading her fingers over her knees. “Is it safe to talk here?” she asked, and knitted her fingers again in her lap. “Do I need a lawyer? I’m not sure how this works, but I heard this was a problem last year for the Burkholder boy.” Her eyes remained fixed anxiously on her hands.

Robertson stepped back behind his desk and sat down. “Why would you need a lawyer?”

Without looking up from her hands, she said, “Because I think I broke the law.”

Lance sat down beside her, and Robertson asked, “Can you tell us why you think that?”

“I don’t need a lawyer, first?”

Lance said, “You don’t have to tell us anything, unless you want to. Maybe you could start by telling us your name.”

“I am Fannie Helmuth,” she said, looking over to Lance, straight ahead to Robertson, and back to her hands. “Was a girl killed yesterday?”

Robertson leaned forward to rest his forearms on his desktop. “Yes, a girl was killed down near Farmerstown.”

“She was shot?”

“Yes,” Robertson said. “Ruth Zook. Do you know her?”

“No. I mean, I know who she is. Who she was. Did they find drugs at her house?”

“We think she poured drugs out into her farm pond,” Lance answered.

“Is that why all the fish were killed?”

“Yes,” Lance said. “We think so.”

“Was it all in an old leather suitcase?”

“We think so,” Robertson said, eyeing Lance. “We think she brought an extra suitcase home with her from Florida.”

“From Pinecraft?”

Robertson stalled a moment and then stood up behind his desk. “Fannie, maybe you’d better tell us why you’re here.”

Fannie Helmuth tried to speak, but the words caught in her throat. Lance asked, “Do you want something to drink?”

Eyes still focused on the backs of her hands, Fannie asked, “Do you have Mountain Dew?”

Lance said, “They’ve got it across the street, at the BP.”

Fannie didn’t reply, so Lance said, “I’ll go get you one,” and left.

Sitting back down, Robertson said, “If you know something about why Ruth Zook was killed, I think you should tell me.”

With a tragic smile, as sober as a brush with death, Fannie said, “I think I brought one of those suitcases home, too.”

*   *   *

When Lance returned with a Mountain Dew, the sheriff had Fannie Helmuth waiting for a lawyer across the hall in Interview B. He took Lance over, went into the room with her, and said to Fannie, “Detective Lance is going to sit with you while I get a lawyer. You don’t have to talk. Do you understand?”

“Is this the Mirad thing?”

“Miranda, yes,” Robertson said. “I don’t believe you can have done anything wrong, but you don’t have to say a word. You aren’t a suspect in any crime that we know about.”

To Lance, Robertson said, “Linda Hart?”

Lance sat down beside Fannie, scooted her chair closer, gave Fannie the Mountain Dew, and said, “She’d be the best, Sheriff. Under the circumstances, Hart would be the best.”

*   *   *

Linda Hart, tall and austere with cropped black hair, wearing a chocolate brown skirt suit, sat with Fannie for the better part of an hour. When the two crossed back to Robertson’s office, Lance and Robertson were seated across from one another at the sheriff’s big desk, and Captain Newell was standing at a west-facing window, polishing his thick black glasses. Robertson introduced the captain and asked Fannie to take a seat next to Lance, at the front of his desk. As if adversaries, Hart and Newell positioned themselves at opposite corners of the desk.

Hart started by saying, “Sheriff, so far as I can tell, Fannie hasn’t broken any laws.”

“We need to know about the suitcase,” Robertson said evenly.

“For all she knew,” Hart said, “the suitcase contained old clothes. She never looked inside.”

“If that’s all it was,” Robertson said to Hart, “then she hasn’t broken any laws, and we’re not interested in pursuing anything criminal. We just want to know how someone like Ruth Zook could have been induced to bring a second suitcase home from Florida.” To Fannie, Robertson added, “There’s no harm in telling us that.”

Hart turned to Fannie. “You can tell them about Jodie.”

“And the suitcase?” Fannie asked.

“Only
why
you thought you had to transport it for them, Fannie. You aren’t admitting that you actually did it.”

Robertson complained, “She’s already told us that much, Hart.”

“Not with her attorney present,” Hart said. “If you prefer, we won’t tell you anything.”

“OK,” Robertson sighed.

Hart nodded a “go ahead” to Fannie.

“I had to do it,” Fannie said. “They were going to kill Jodie.”

Robertson pulled a pad out of his center desk drawer and took a pen out of his shirt pocket. “Jodie?” he asked.

Nearly inaudibly, Fannie spoke with her gaze fixed on the
front edge of Robertson’s desk. “Jodie Tapp,” she said. “She is a waitress at Miller’s Amish Restaurant and Clock Shoppe. I work there as a waitress, too. To help with expenses when I’m in Florida. She’s just a little Mennonite girl, and those men know where she lives.”

Eyes fixed on his pad, Robertson wrote notes and asked, “Address of the restaurant?”

“I don’t know the number,” Fannie said, looking up to him. “It’s four blocks north of Bahia Vista, on Beneva, right on the northern edge of Pinecraft.”

“How long have you known Jodie?” Robertson asked.

“Three years. She’s been at Miller’s longer than anyone else. She kinda looks after us snowbirds.”

“Where does she live?”

“She has a little trailer in Cortez. Just over the bridge from Bradenton Beach. I’ve only been there once. She doesn’t have hardly anything at all, except what’s in that trailer. And they’ll kill her if she talks to anyone about this.”

Robertson held his gaze on his pad. “Who, Fannie? Who threatened to kill Jodie?”

Fannie looked up to Hart, and Hart said, “You can tell them about the boat, Fannie.”

“I only met them once,” Fannie said, anxious with her memories, fingers clenching and releasing in her lap, eyes ranging from Hart to Robertson and back. “When we went out on their boat for a sunset.”

“What were their names?” Robertson asked.

“Jim and John.”

“Last names?”

“I don’t know.”

“Name of the boat?”

“I don’t remember. It was white, and it had fishing poles sticking out of tubes on the top. Really, I don’t remember the boat very well.”

Agitated, Fannie stood abruptly. Quickly back in her seat, she muttered, “I’m so stupid. Now she’s after
me
.”

“Who is?” Robertson asked.

Fannie stared blankly at Robertson for a long moment, focusing inward, as if she were pondering a decision. Eventually, she sighed and said, “The angry woman I gave the suitcase to. If I had been smart, I’d have come home without that suitcase. Or I’d have tossed it in a lake.”

Trying to sound reassuring, Robertson said, “Ruth did something like that, Fannie. I think you’re safe, now, because you didn’t.”

“I’m not safe at all,” Fannie groaned. “She said if I talked to anyone about the suitcase, she’d come back. She said she knows where I live, and I believe her.”

“Detective Lance is going to ask you a lot of questions about this angry woman, Fannie,” Robertson said. “We need to know all about her. Everything you can remember.”

“OK. I’ll try.”

“It’s going to take quite a long time to go over it.”

“I can stay, Sheriff, but I don’t know how much I’ll remember.”

“And this all started with a sunset boat ride in Florida?” Robertson asked.

Fannie nodded and held a kerchief to her eyes. “We thought we were just going out for a sunset. That’s when they beat Jodie and said they’d kill her if I didn’t carry a suitcase home for them.”

WHILE DETECTIVE Lance questioned Fannie in Interview B, Robertson called Ricky Niell into his office. Bobby Newell poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup at the credenza and sat down next to Niell at the front of Robertson’s desk.

The sheriff leaned back in his swivel rocker and asked, “Have you listened to any of what Lance is asking Fannie Helmuth?”

Ricky nodded, sipped coffee, and said, “I’ve listened on the other side of the mirror. She’s not making any of it up.”

“No,” Robertson agreed. “We need to know if something like this happened to Ruth Zook.”