J. Wachowski - In Plain View

“I’m actually out at the Jost farm right now.” I did a full three-sixty, scanning the view-singed barn, ruined house, and resisted the urge to add the obvious, what’s left of it.

“Goodness.” Grace laughed. “I will never get used to these phones.”

It seemed an odd thing to say, until I caught sight of a bundled gnome in the distance. She was near the road that led to the driveway, wearing one of those plastic rain hats old ladies always seem to have in their purses.

“Is that you?” I asked. My brain took a second to adjust. I had seen her image frozen on screen for hours yesterday. Here in this place, the real person was disconcertingly out of context.

“We’re parked across the road.” She pointed as she spoke. “I had to get out of the car to make this silly thing work. Now, what good is that?”

“Here I come.” I snapped my phone shut and walked toward the apparition of Grace at the end of the road.

She didn’t wait. At a surprisingly fast clip, she marched down the drive past the line of horse-powered vehicles parked along the country road, head down as she passed the buggies.

About a half mile up the road, an antique Ford Galaxie was parked on the shoulder. It was tan, of course, and more of a tank than a car-mostly hood and trunk, it must of packed enough steel to keep the Gary mills in business for a week. Grace got in on the driver’s side. Someone was sitting on the passenger side.

I knocked on the window.

Rachel.

She was sitting in the car. That’s why Ainsley had noticed no one was worried. Someone had seen her sitting in Grace’s car. They must have guessed that Rachel was leaving the community.

She popped the door latch and slid to the middle of the bench seat.

I climbed in beside her.

Grace didn’t speak. Rachel didn’t speak. We all sat shoulder to shoulder and stared straight out the front window.

Parochial school manners prompted my words. “Sorry for your trouble, Rachel.”

“I have something for you.”

Grace passed her the phone. Rachel passed it to me.

“A cell phone?”

“And this, too.” Rachel had wrapped herself in a giant triangle of black shawl. It covered her bonnet, her shoulders and the bulk of her plum-colored dress. She opened the shawl to reveal a pair of binoculars lying in her lap.

“Is this the phone I saw you holding that day in the bushes?”

She nodded.

“Where did you get these,” I asked gently, “the phone and the binoculars?”

“My father had them hidden in the barn. I found them both the day Thomas died.” She spoke without turning her head toward me. Her profile wore the stiff mask that covers heart-core panic.

“Do you know why he hid them?”

For a moment, her lip trembled. She reached out and took hold of Grace’s hand. “I was afraid to ask. The morning Thomas died, there was a call to the dairy. It was for my father. After that, he was gone a while. I found him in the barn, grenklich -not so good looking. So I asked, what’s the matter? He shouted me away, off to the house. ‘Back to your chores,’ he yells.

“I was pretty unhappy about that, the way he talked to me. I’m not a child anymore,” she insisted earnestly, her eyes glassy. “I went back to the house and then we all heard that big fuss with the sirens and car engines. That’s when they told us stay in the kitchen because there was Englischers everywhere with a fire truck, too.” She sniffed and raised the back of her hand against the end of her nose.

Grace clucked and dug her pocketbook from under the seat. She unsnapped the latch and passed Rachel a cloth handkerchief.

Rachel nodded her thanks. “I wasn’t so happy there were hard words between my father and me, but I wanted to know what was all that business with the fire truck. I thought maybe I would see Thomas.” She wasn’t crying yet, but her voice had gone high and light enough to break glass.

“I knew Father wasn’t in that barn anymore. He’d gone to help with cleaning the milking equipment. I went up to the loft window. From up there, I could see the lights sparkling, the fire truck, all those people. My foot kicked that,” she nodded at the binoculars, “and I found the phone buried next to it under some hay.

“I knew it was Thomas’ phone. He let me use it once. I couldn’t think how it got into the barn. I took the phone and went to call his fire station so I could leave the message I had this phone. I thought he must be working with the others over in the field. Maybe that’s what had made Father so angry.”

“That’s when I found you under the bush.”

She nodded in agreement. “I was afraid someone might find me using it if I stayed in the barn.”

Grace squeezed her hand. All three of us did some more staring out the windshield. The hood of the Galaxie stretched almost to the horizon from where I was sitting.

“How do you suppose your dad ended up with Tom’s phone?” I asked.

“Father must have seen Thomas. That’s all I can think.”

“Seen him?”

“Yah. Maybe in town? Friday is farmer’s market.”

“Maybe.” I didn’t have the heart to point out she didn’t believe it herself. “Has the phone been on the whole time?” There was enough power to read the LCD.

“No. We only turned it on to call you.”

I took a deep breath and scanned the menu for the calling record. My cell number was first, with the date and time of Grace’s call noted in the corners of the tiny screen. I hit the menu button to see previous calls, going back once, twice, and then some.

“Oh man.” I started to shake with the full-body-willies.

Seven calls were stored in the phone’s memory. On a guess, I’d say they were all placed within minutes of Tom Jost’s death. I searched my pockets for a pen and scrap of paper from Jenny’s hospital admittance. I copied all the numbers down, so I wouldn’t lose anything to the phone’s waning charge. The first and last numbers were the same. Maybe it had been busy?

One of the numbers, I didn’t need to write down. It was the number for WWST.

Rachel watched me making the list. She pointed to the number that had been called second. “That’s the number for our phone at the dairy.”

“Do you know any of the others?”

She shook her head.

I put Tom’s phone back in Rachel’s lap and took out my own.

“This’ll only take a minute.” I called each number and made a note of who answered.

The Clarion.

Police non-emergency.

Firehouse, station six.

And one number identified as no longer in service.

Television, news, police, his partners in fire-this wasn’t a call for help. This was a staged media event.

Tom himself placed the calls that brought everyone to the scene. But how had the phone gotten into his father’s hands? I mumbled to myself for a while. Yucky thoughts. It was hard to tell if Grace and Rachel were concerned or disgusted. I waited to be asked something, anything.

Nothing.

Coming up with questions is never my problem. “Rachel, why give these things to me?”

She bowed her head. “I saw the box you brought my father that day. You knew already.”

“Knew what?”

“My father had those binoculars in the barn. I think he saw Thomas die.” She was crying now, jagged glassy tears. “And he sent me off to do my chores.”

She surprised me. Naive doesn’t mean stupid, but I didn’t expect her to be able to visualize the ugliness of the situation.

“I didn’t know. I only guessed,” I whispered. “Neither of us knows what happened-not really. How your dad got the phone. Or how he felt inside.”

Grace clutched Rachel’s hand in a grip that made the knobby knuckles of her old hands bulge. “Leave God’s business in God’s hands,” she chided.