Chapter 29
The local ministers had gotten together with the families of the people who had been shot, and all had agreed to a joint funeral service for the victims—the ones who were not Amish. The Amish would conduct their own services.
But for the others, Rick Dalton, Charles Whitman, David Blackburn, and Tom Garner, the high school had provided the gymnasium for the service.
Visitation had been conducted at local funeral homes individually for each one of the victims. After this joint service, separate funeral homes would collect the bodies and take them to the cemeteries for burial.
When Jojo and Conor arrived, there was no place to park for blocks from the school.
Somebody had anticipated there would be huge crowds and provided for the overflow outside in the parking lot where the service would be broadcast over loudspeakers.
Jojo and Conor joined the crowd in the parking lot.
It was a bright, sunshiny day when the service began at noon.
But it was still cold and those standing together in the parking lot under the cloudless sky mingled around, kept moving to keep their feet warm and spoke quietly to each other as they listened to the service being broadcast over the speakers.
A few minutes after they arrived, they noticed a group of teenage boys.
One of them, a tall, gangly, boy with thick glasses, spotted Jojo and Conor, turned and made his way toward them, with “come-on” gestures to the other boys he’d left behind.
He blundered through the crowd, clearing a path, a teenager missing essential self-awareness, probably didn’t realize he was being impolite.
“Lieutenant McCaffrey, you remember me, don’t you?” the boy said, not loud, but not in the hushed tones of the other conversations going on around them.
“Sure. I do, son,” Conor said quietly.
“You tell them.” The boy gestured back to the other boys. “You tell them I was the one who came and got you.”
That was when Jojo realized that Jason Crawford had been the teenager Conor had spoken about, the boy who had come to him and said that someone had broken into his grandparents’ house.
“And that’s how they found where the guy’d been shooting from.”
“Yes, son, you were very helpful. Thank you. We appreciate it.”
It was clear from his body language that Conor did not want to continue the conversation. But the boy was socially tone deaf.
“Tell them how I showed you the broken glass, didn’t I? Showed him the broken glass where the guy broke in.”
The other boys were aware that the conversation was inappropriate. One of them seemed particularly uncomfortable, took Jason’s arm and tried to pull him away, but Jason shook him off.
“Leggo, Zack.” He turned back to Conor. “And the footprints, tell them about the?—”
The boy named Zack grabbed Jason then, and yanked his arm, dragging him away, as he whispered urgently in his ear.
“You know that boy?” Conor asked.
“Jason? I know who he is, that’s all. He came to the farm with his father, Atticus, to install the plumbing in …
my bathroom.” She paused for a beat, wondering if Conor would pick up on the reference to an indoor bathroom in an Amish house, but it blew right by him.
“I saw him at Susanna Borntraeger’s wake with some other English teenagers who must have been her friends when she was on rumspringa. She was dating one of them.”
They stood quiet for a while, listening to the service, hearing the heartbreak of the speakers who gave the eulogies. Jojo spoke softly to people that she recognized.
“I’m sure it’s been busy at Mattingly’s,” Jojo said to an Amish woman in the crowd. Jojo had been surprised at how many Amish had chosen to come to the English funerals.
Ruth Ann Yoder rolled her eyes. “Crowds never stopped. I got to wondering if maybe the same people were going outside, changing clothes and coming right back in.” Ruth Ann was a cleaning lady at the funeral home where David Blackburn had been laid out.
“There was even a mourner out in the parking lot, too, cold as it was.” She shook her head. “Sitting in the car, sobbing.”
Jojo and Conor went back to his office after the funeral service to wade through the pile of information that the FBI had amassed about the protesters who had been carrying signs and shouting slogans in the parking lot of the ski resort before the shootings.
Conor cleaned off a chair for Jojo, moved papers that were sitting in it to a table, and then handed her an inch-thick pile of reports.
“You take these,” he said, “and I’ll take these.” He indicated a much smaller pile of reports that were positioned on his desk.
“So, how come my pile is bigger than your pile?”
“Well, I can tell you what my mother always said to me when I questioned her authority.” Conor grinned a little. “I’m bigger than you are, and it’s my house.”
The two of them were quiet for a while, checking out the profiles that the FBI had assembled of the most prominent among the protesters.
“Ooh, I believe we have a live one,” Jojo said, and Conor looked up from the papers he was working on.
“His name is Ethan Cole. He’s 32, and he’s local!
” Jojo was convinced that the shooter was someone who lived in Somerset County, not some stranger who’d popped in for an evening to murder seven people and then popped back out. “He’s from Lower Turkeyfoot.”
“Lower? Turkeyfoot?”
“It’s about half an hour from here. Five, maybe six hundred people live there.
This guy’s probably not a candidate for local-boy-makes-good, though.
He has a rap sheet.” She thumbed through a couple of papers that had been stapled together.
“Oh, he’s been a busy boy. He’s been arrested for trespassing at pipeline construction sites.
Oh, and look at this. He joined the Earth Liberation Front about a year and a half ago. ”
Conor got up from his chair, walked around, and sat on the edge of the desk as Jojo flipped through the papers. “Earth Liberation Front, aren’t they the people who?—”
“—they’re the ones who spike trees. They pour sand into the gas tanks at fracking sites. They see themselves as soldiers in a war against those who are destroying the Earth. That’s what their website says anyway.”
She was scanning down the report. “Oh, check these out. He sent veiled threats to Rick Dalton when he first started construction of the resort. Claimed the resort was polluting the watershed, that run-off from the artificial snowmaking chemicals and treated wastewater were seeping into the streams.”
She scanned down some more. “Said they were scarring the land, clear-cutting slopes for new trails and disrupting wildlife habitats. He claimed that the resort had pumped so much water for their snowmaking machines out of the ground that local farmers were losing their wells. He wrote a nasty email about a farmer whose well had gone dry, and that Rick Dalton should …” She paused.
“You owe that man a well,” she quoted from the email. “You destroyed his livelihood just so you could make a buck. That farm has been in his family for generations. You will pay. Trust me, you will pay.” She looked up. “Sound like a threat to you?”
“I think we need to go have a talk with Mr. Ethan Cole tomorrow.”
When Jojo got home, the little brown puppy she’d dubbed Rascal bounded up to her, put his paws up on her legs and started licking every piece of exposed skin he could find, his tail wagging so fast it was a blur.
“Now you get down off Jojo,” Uncle Levi said. “Don’t you be jumping on people.” The dog paid no attention. “Come on now, get down, Rascal.” The dog continued to jump, and Uncle Levi continued to tell him he wasn’t supposed to do that.
“Uncle Levi, do you realize what you’re training this dog to do?” He cocked his head to the side. “You’re training him to ignore you.”
“Why would I train him to ignore me?”
“But that’s what you’re doing. When you tell a dog to do something, if you don’t make the dog do what you said, you’re training him not to listen. In dog training, failure and noncompliance are not options. Never give a command that you don’t intend to enforce.”
The old man looked sideways at her. “Doesn’t sound like much fun having a dog if all you do is order him around.” He looked at the little wiggly puppy who was still jumping on her, reached down and patted his head. “He’s just a puppy, a playful puppy, that’s all.”
Uncle Levi had no intention of civilizing the little dog.
She didn’t expect the pup to be as responsible as Trident, but he had to learn a few simple rules, or he’d be stealing baked chickens for the rest of his life.
But it was clear that if the dog was going to be trained, Jojo’d have to do it …
which right this minute seemed like an overwhelming task.
All she wanted was a hot bath and a bed.
“Trident come,” she said, and her dog leapt to her side. As she left the room, she heard Uncle Levi’s voice.
“Rascal, come.” Silence. “Aw, come on Rascal, come to Papa.” Another silence. “Rascal … Stay right there, doin what you’re doing … That’s right! Good boy, good dog! Why, it ain’t that hard to train a dog. Just gotta know what to tell it to do.”