Chapter 13
He set the nameplate down on his desk. “Lieutenant Conor McCaffrey.”
Conor with one “n” was the Irish spelling. Everybody misspelled it, of course, as either Connor or Conner. Thanks a bunch, Mom and Dad.
The name matched the words on the door, or maybe he wouldn’t have believed it yet.
It was true, though. He had earned the silver lieutenant’s bar to replace the three chevrons of his sergeant rank, and he had been given his first post—the Pennsylvania State Police barracks in Somerset.
“Barracks” was the state police word for “station.”
There was a knock at the door. He called out, “Come in.”
Sergeant Michael Donnelly stepped into the room. “You need help getting any more of your stuff out of your car?”
“No, I’m good. Thanks for carting those books.” He gestured toward the box of books sitting on top of two other cardboard boxes on the floor.
“Those babies were heavy! You sure you didn’t stick a couple of barbells into that box?”
Conor liked Donnelly, not just because his last name was as Irish as McCaffrey’s. He seemed like a steady sort, the kind of man you could depend on in a pinch, not easily rattled.
“I got you a cup of coffee,” Donnelly said, holding out the cup he had brought with him into the room. “But I don’t know how you like it.”
“I like it black,” Conor said, reaching for the cup.
That was a bald-faced lie. Conor would drink black coffee, did drink black coffee, but he liked his coffee with something like a bucket of creamer in it.
Black coffee was definitely more manly than tan coffee, however, and fresh out of the academy, a thing like that had mattered to him.
Turned out “just black” was a hard thing to change once you’d drawn that line in the sand though, and he’d long ago accepted no creamer as his cross to bear.
“Have a seat.” Conor looked around and realized there was no seat.
The two comfortable chairs were piled high with not-yet-put-away belongings, and the leather couch—which could convert to a bed if need be—was the dump site for all the not-yet-opened boxes.
Donnelly took a box and a pile of files off one of the two ladder-back chairs facing the desk and settled himself into it.
“So, how has your first five days been?” he asked.
“Can’t complain.”
There was a beat, and then he and Donnelly chanted together. “If you complain, they’ll give you more work.”
“I hear you worked a car-buggy wreck on Henderson Creek Road yesterday.”
“I did and scored a baggie full of an unknown white powder which I am sure the lab will determine was nothing but a cup of powdered sugar. The guy was taking it home to his wife, you see. Their anniversary.”
“Stuffed inside the door panel of his Mercedes?”
“Trunk musta been full.”
“How’d you manage to make a drug bust on a traffic stop?”
Conor let out a breath. He’d given a very succinct version yesterday of what had happened when he’d returned to the barracks and started filling out the mountain of paperwork the arrest and the wreck required. But he hadn’t yet had time to tell anybody the full story.
“I pulled up behind a line of stopped cars, left the cruiser and started walking, hadn’t gotten twenty-five yards before I heard a gunshot.”
Donnelly’s head snapped up. “I didn’t know that part.”
Then Conor described coming upon the scene of the woman holding a pistol, the overturned buggy, and the dead horse lying in the middle of the road.
“It was totally the work of her dog that we found the drugs. The woman said her name was Jojo Kaufmann. Know her?”
Donnelly smiled broadly. “Yeah, I know Jojo. Most people in Somerset County do.”
“What can you tell me about her? She said she’d worked for the DEA in Chicago.”
“Before that, she was a military police officer. She came back home last winter when her mother was sick, worked for a little while as a deputy sheriff before she became a security guard at the bank … but she was born and raised Amish.”
“Seriously?” That was a conversation stopper. “She’s not Amish now though … don’t they frown on leaving, won’t talk to you if you?—?”
“How much do you know about the Amish?”
Conor hated to admit it. “Not a whole lot.”
“Okay then, cram course: Amish 101. You know the basics, right? The Amish live simple lives: no electricity, no electric anything, they can ride in a car but not own one—so horses and buggies. They won’t let themselves be photographed, the men wear straw hats and suspenders, the women long skirts and bonnets … and no indoor plumbing.”
“I already knew most of that.”
“Okay, Amish 201: We’ll start with shunning. Their word for it is meidung … or something like that. If an Amish adult leaves the church and community, no Amish person will speak to them, they’ll literally turn their backs and walk away. You know what rumspringa means?”
Conor had heard the word but shook his head.
“Rumspringa literally means ‘running around.’ It’s a time in the life of an Amish person—usually mid-teens to early twenties—where they go out and experience the world and decide if they want to remain Amish.
They can leave during rumspringa, before they join the church, and they’re still accepted in ‘full fellowship.’ And during rumspringa, the Amish rules about behavior and dress and all kinda other things don’t apply to them. ”
“In practical terms, what does that mean?”
“It means they get to become like normal teenagers—as much as that’s possible considering they still live at home and wear straw hats and suspenders.
When Jojo went on rumspringa, she decided to go to high school.
The Amish don’t educate their children past eighth grade, and she needed at least a GED to do what she wanted with her life. ”
“Which was … to join the military and become a police officer?” McCaffrey shook his head in wonder.
“I don’t know of any other Amish person in Somerset County who’s ever gone that far—except Jojo’s older brother, Liam. Jojo literally drove a horse and buggy to Somerset Area Senior High School, tied the reins to a fire hydrant, went in and enrolled as a sophomore. She was in my class.”
“How’d that work out for her?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say probably not very well.
Oh, she got the education she had to have to do what she wanted to do.
But in terms of an experience—you know, kids can be cruel.
And a bunch of snotty teenage girls …” He rolled his eyes.
“The only clothes she had were Amish clothes. So that’s what she wore to school, and she kind of stuck out—ya know, though she wasn’t wearing a black kapp. ” He paused. “You know about those?”
Conor shook his head.
“It’s spelled ‘k-a-p-p.’ Black means single, white means married, little girls wear dark-colored bonnets. And men wear straw hats called ‘scribblers.’”
Then Donnelly returned to his story.
“Jojo wore her hair down. It was long and curly, absolutely jet black and …” He paused. “I can’t believe I remember this, but I recall thinking that I’d never seen a girl’s hair as shiny as hers, glossy, always made me think of moonlight.”
Donnelly was a happily married man with four kids, but Conor thought that for a moment he almost looked wistful. “Of course, Jojo could think circles around the rest of us.”
“Seriously?”
“The Amish don’t fool around with education.
Their kids don’t learn a whole bunch of foolishness.
But what they learn, they learn—math, science, history, reading, writing and three languages—English, Pennsylvania Dutch, and high German for church.
She started high school as a sophomore because of her age, but hell, in terms of ability and what she knew, she could have been a senior, but there was one gigantic hole in her education—literature.
I guess they’re only allowed to read the Bible.
Maybe a few other Christian books. She hadn’t read anything that the rest of us had read.
I saw her one day when her father came to pick her up at school.
Drove up in a buggy and she climbed in, with all the girls pointing and giggling.
And she had a stack of books from the library so heavy she could barely carry it.
I couldn’t see what they were, not all of them.
But I saw some like the complete works of Shakespeare. ”
“That must have been a doorstop book.”
“Moby Dick. A Tale of Two Cities. The Iliad and The Odyssey. And that’s how she finally made something of a connection to the rest of us. Halfway through the year, we were assigned The Lord of the Rings trilogy in English class.”
“I didn’t read that until college.”
“I don’t imagine anybody reads it now. They just watch the movies.
But when we read it, we got hooked. And nobody more than Jojo.
I remember seeing her the Monday morning after we were assigned the trilogy on Friday.
She looked like she hadn’t slept a wink.
I was standing beside the teacher’s desk when she asked very politely if she could go to the library and check out The Hobbit.
The teacher told her to finish Lord of the Rings first, and she said she already had. ”
“One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them …” McCaffrey intoned and Donnelly grinned.
“Everyone was asked to read their favorite portion aloud in class. And Jojo read some of the poetry—in Elvish. When she read it, the poems almost made sense. The way she pronounced the words, I guess because she was already trilingual. I do believe, now I could be mistaken, but I believe that Jojo taught herself how to speak Elvish.”
“You can speak that?”
“She could. She didn’t see it as some major accomplishment.
She said Tolkien was a linguist, and even though the words were all made up, the verbs conjugated—closer to German than English.
And that was the thing about her. She was so, what’s the word?
Self-possessed maybe. I mean she’s like fifteen years old, didn’t have a friend in the school, was laughed at, mocked, and teased.
But she acted like she didn’t care at all. Maybe she didn’t.”
“You said a minute ago that she was the only person you knew who’d used rumspringa to go to high school—except for her brother.”
“Yeah, he died when I was still in elementary school. He went to high school, joined the military, and became a Navy SEAL. That’s the reason for her dog.”
“Trident? What does her brother have to do with her dog?”
“A Navy SEAL pin is in the shape of a trident.”
McCaffrey suddenly felt monumentally stupid. All this time, he’d thought Jojo had named her dog after a package of sugarless gum.