Return to Grace
Return to Grace
Karen Harper
In the shadows of a graveyard, a shot rings out…Hannah Esh fled the Home Valley Amish community with a broken heart, throwing herself into her worldly dreams of a singing career instead. But as much as she tries to run from her past, something keeps pulling her back. On a whim, she brings four worldly friends to the Amish graveyard near her family’s home for a midnight party on Halloween.But when shots are fired and one of her friends is killed, Hannah is pulled back into the world of her past. The investigation into the shooting uncovers deep-buried secrets that shock the peaceful Amish village to its core. Determined to prove her value to the community she left behind, Hannah attempts to bridge two cultures, working closely with both handsome, arrogant FBI agent Linc Armstrong and her former betrothed, Seth Lantz, who is now widowed with a young daughter.Caught between Seth and Linc, between old and new, Amish and worldly, Hannah must chose her future. Unless a killer, bent on secrecy, chooses it for her."Harper, a master of suspense, keeps readers guessing about crime and love until the very end." –Booklist starred review on Fall From Pride“Danger and romance find their way into Ohio Amish country…lively and endearing.”—Publishers Weekly on Fall From Pride
Return To Grace
Karen Harper
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
For all the friends and family
who love Ohio Amish country, especially to Don
for all the great trips there.
1
October 31, 2010
HANNAH ESH HAD SPENT TIME IN THIS AMISH graveyard but never to host a party. She would have given anything not to be here now, especially with her four goth friends, who didn’t even have to dress for Halloween to look weird. But she should talk, because she’d been one of them for nearly three years. Yet more than ever she wanted to go home, and home was the farmhouse just across two fields from here.
“Awesome!” Liz Bartoli, her roommate, said with a shudder as she saw how dark it was without car or neon city lights. There weren’t even electric lights from the nearby Amish properties. “Maybe after we have a bash here, we can all go through that corn maze down the road. An amazing maize maze,” she added with a snorted giggle. “It wasn’t fair of you guys to run through it without us.”
“Kevin and Mike have already seen that. Besides,” Hannah said, “the sign said it’s closed after five and you have to make special arrangements with the owners to go in there after dark.” She’d been upset when Kevin had driven right up to the entry of the corn maze. Then he and Mike had gotten out to tear a ways into it—and come crashing back through one wall of it when they got lost. “And each of us would have to leave a donation,” Hannah added as she opened the unlocked, squeaky gate in the wooden fence surrounding the hillside acre of graves and grass.
“Listen to you!” Tiffany Miles, who worked with Hannah at the recording studio, scolded as she got a blanket out of the trunk. “You can take the Amish girl out of the country, but you can’t take the Amish out of the girl. Rules and regs out the wazoo!”
Kevin Pryor, Tiffany’s guy, found that really funny as he and Mike Swanson, Liz’s friend, hauled the cooler from the trunk of Kevin’s black car. But Hannah wasn’t laughing. Ever since her family’s barn had burned last spring, she’d been more than homesick. She missed her folks, even her daad, the local bishop she’d had a huge falling-out with. She longed to see others, too, but she couldn’t think of that now. Somewhere she’d heard the expression “You can’t go home again,” and it scared her to death that it might be true.
Oh, why had she let her friends talk her into this tonight? Worse, Halloween fell on the Sabbath this year, and that bothered her, too. She should have just given them directions but she figured she’d better keep an eye on them. Since she’d recently broken up with her boyfriend, she’d tried to get out of coming along, but they’d insisted they could cheer her up. Yet being back here, all she wanted to do was cry.
“Perfect place,” Mike said with a tip of his velvet top hat, “for a booze and boos party. Boo! We goths have finally gone ghosting!”
“There are no ghosts here,” Hannah insisted, feeling defensive as they passed her grandparents’ simple tombstones. “Everyone buried here is at peace.” But the truth was she felt haunted by all she’d loved and left behind.
Mike cranked up the volume on his MP3 player. Deathrock music spewed out, heavy drums and synthesizers to a tribal beat, pulsing but sad, so different from the music Hannah had in her head of singing a country song or a hymn, her own voice blending with Seth’s, now as lost to her as all the Amish.
Suddenly, she wanted to strip off the heavy, draped chain necklaces she wore, the fishnet stockings under the ankle-length, purple ruffled skirt and black velvet jacket. To wash off her heavy eye shadow and black lipstick, to hide her spiky, red-dyed hair under a black bonnet.
The guys plunked their stuff down pretty much in the middle of the graveyard before she read the name on the closest tombstone. Oh, no! Not Lena Lantz’s grave, but it was too late to make them move and no way was she going to explain why. Lena had died almost a year ago, so Hannah had not been here then and had only heard indirectly about the tragedy. It was so hard to believe she’d been away from the Home Valley for nearly three years.
Kevin passed around wineglasses and poured. Clumps of clouds hid the moon, but he pretended to howl at it. They clinked glasses and drank the bloodred wine.
“Vampires got nothing on us tonight,” Mike teased, and pretended to bite Liz on the neck while she screamed and giggled. Tiffany got to her feet, twirling the parasol she always carried, even after dark—what an attention-getter, as if goths needed that. She did a jerky dance around the low, matching stone markers with only the deceased’s name, birth and death dates.
“Stop that. Not funny!” Hannah protested when Tiffany pretended to be digging up Lena’s grave with the closed parasol as a shovel. Kevin got up to cavort with her. Suddenly, it was too much. Hannah pictured herself standing nearby with her family and friends when they buried her grandparents … and here lay a young mother, even though she was the woman Seth dumped her for. Hannah hated herself for bringing her friends here where they didn’t belong—and neither did she.
She stood and yanked the parasol out of Tiffany’s hands and shoved her back from Lena’s grave. Then, ashamed that she’d used violence, she turned her back on her friends as tears spilled down her cheeks. Hands on her hips, lifting her gaze up the hill, she stared at the dark woodlot, trying to get control of herself. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills. From whence comes my help? The words ran through her head.
“Chill out, Hannah!” Kevin protested. “We’re just kidding around.”
“Sorry, Tiff,” Hannah told her friend, turning back to face them, “but please don’t even pretend to do that—disturb the dead. We—we shouldn’t be here.”
Hannah sat back down and took a big swig of their bitter wine—another mistake, for she soon felt sick to her stomach and her very soul. She flopped back on the grass, wondering if she was going to throw up, wishing again they were not so near Lena Lantz’s grave as her four friends whispered and stared at her.
Then … Was that sound a clap of thunder? No, there was no storm. A shot?
The music—the voices—another sharp sound! Tiffany flew back, fell at Hannah’s feet, holding her shoulder, screaming. Everything happened at once. Bang, bang! The gravestone Hannah had been lying near splintered, exploded, peppering her with stone shards. Kevin shouted, “Gun! Someone’s got a g—” before he threw himself back flat on the ground so he wouldn’t be hit. No, he was hit, right in his forehead, where blood bloomed. Tiffany kept screaming as she lay flat on the ground, and Liz and Mike cowered.
On and on went the beat of the music and a new staccato of shots. Ignoring a sharp pain in her wrist, Hannah belly-crawled for her black macramé bag a few feet away. Cell phone. Get help. Tiffany hurt. Kevin staring at the sky. So dark. Loud blackness.
She found her phone, punched in 9-1-1, thinking the shooter would come closer, but no more shots. Pulse pounding. In shock? Still alive, still moving, thinking. Terrified but energized. Her own voice frenzied, answering the calm questions on her phone. “Yes, that’s what I said. Some people have been shot at—shot … Yes, with a gun! … The Oakridge Road Amish graveyard northwest of Homestead. Send help quick!”
It was only then she saw the left sleeve of her velvet jacket was torn and wet and that her wrist was ripped open and slick with blood.
Seth Lantz couldn’t believe someone was hunting after dark—or had a car misfired … more than once? It was rolling country here; maybe a car would come roaring over the next hill. No, a woman was screaming. A hunting accident? Maybe Englische kids were playing some sick Halloween prank on the Amish because they ignored this worldly holiday. It was the Sabbath, and he wouldn’t even have been hunting today if it didn’t help to keep meat on the table. In this far-reaching recession, big building jobs were hard to come by, and he’d been doing pickup repair work lately.
He reined in his horse as he approached the fenced-in graveyard on Oakridge. His mare, Blaze, tossed her head, upset to be stopped in the middle of nowhere while heading home. That screaming and loud noise: it was from the graveyard.
He giddyupped Blaze to the gate and saw a black car parked there, though this was an all-Amish graahof. His young wife was buried here, as were his grandparents, including his dear grossdaadi Gideon, who had taught him to build barns. He threw Blaze’s reins over a hitching post and, hunched low, went around the outside of the fence instead of through the gate.
Some sort of loud-beat music thudded on. Amid other voices, the woman’s screams had turned to gasping sobs. He put one hand on the wooden fence and vaulted it sideways. No place to really hide in here, no tall monuments, trees or bushes like in English cemeteries, but at least the darkness hid him.
Then, despite the noise, he picked out a voice he thought he knew, the one that sometimes still danced through his dreams. If it was Hannah Esh, who was she talking to in a one-way conversation?
“Yes, in the head. He’s not moving, not breathing…. Pulse. I—I’m not sure…. Two others wounded—losing blood, a lot…. Her shoulder and my wrist…. Yes, just visiting…. I—yes, I said my name is Hannah Esh, and I used to live near here. I’m dizzy—faint…. Yes, thank you, please hurry because Kevin might be dead….”
Seth rose to his full height and strode forward, nearly tripping over a prone body. A scarlet cape was splayed out under him, matching the blood that covered his face and white, ruffled shirt. He saw one woman, her arm and chest soaked in blood—a woman with dark-lined eyes. A horror movie he’d seen once in his rumspringa days darted through his mind: ghouls robbing graves and feeding on corpses.
He saw another woman sobbing, bent over on the ground. And then the one he sought, though he hardly recognized her, hadn’t seen her for more than three years, had only heard what she’d done to herself after what he’d done to her.
“Hannah,” he choked out, “it’s Seth. Are you hurt?”
Tears streaming black lines down her ravaged face, the woman who had once been the love of his life looked up at him. “Seth? Sorry. I—we—I called for help. He’s dead, I think, and I just want to die from pain and shame.”
She looked like something from the depths of hell, as he bent to rip the purple velvet ruffles off the bottom of her long skirt. Using his pocket knife to cut the material, he made a tourniquet for her arm and wrapped her bleeding wrist. He made a pressure pack for the other girl’s shoulder and told the unharmed girl to keep her hand on it, even though it hurt the one who had been shot. He put two fingers to the blood-slick side of the young man’s neck, then flipped up the edge of the blanket over the lifeless body.
Striding back toward the huddled group, he asked the man who had not been shot, “What happened here? Did one of you do this?”
That man’s eyes were wide, his face expressionless. He, too, wore dark-eyed makeup and was dressed fancy, old-fashioned. After a moment, as if it took time for the question to sink in, the man shook his head. “From out there,” he said, pointing up the slant of hill toward the back of the graveyard. “From the dark.”
“Turn that music off,” Seth said. Looking dazed, the man fumbled with the MP3 player, and silence finally descended. Seth hurried up the hill, ran the entire fence line, seeing no one, though someone could be hiding, watching in the woods higher up. It made the hair on the back of his neck prickle.
He heard distant sirens and went back to hold the blood-soaked velvet to Hannah’s wrist. “Why are you all here? What in the world …?” he started to ask, then bit off the rest when he saw that Hannah lay almost on his wife’s grave and that her marker had been blasted to bits.
Hannah’s pain got worse, worse. Cold waves, then sizzling hot in her wrist, hand, arm. Twirling now, floating. Seth could not really be here. Had her thoughts summoned him? Had he come to be with Lena? His handsome face sported a blond beard now. Well, of course it did … married man, even if widowed. And with a child, a girl, Lena’s child, must be two years old now, named Marlena. How it had hurt to hear all that, but she’d asked her friend Sarah to keep her informed, anyway.
What in the world? Seth’s words kept revolving through Hannah’s head. She had gone to the world, left her people. Seth’s fault? Lena’s? Her own? Because of the terrible argument she’d had with her father? Forgive Seth? She could not. She’d jumped the fence, left the Plain People, tried to have a singing career, tried to fit in, but really didn’t.
Bright blinking lights, a siren that went silent. People to help, medics. A little beam of light in each eye. Voices, words flying by she tried to grab. Seth’s voice, then these strangers’ words.
“… Can’t transport him … deceased … bled out. Bullet to the head. Crime scene. Sheriff Freeman should be here soon. He can call the coroner.”
“Wooster, E.R., we’re going to transport two females with gunshot wounds, shoulder, wrist … starting IVs … sending vitals …”
“Did you see what happened here, Mr. Lantz?”
Muffled words in and out of her head …
Lifted onto a gurney, carried, made the pain worse. IV in her arm, wrist bandaged. Two emergency vehicles, bloodred lights piercing the night, but so bright inside where they lifted her, slid her in. The sound of a buggy, a single horse’s hoofbeats coming fast, a voice she knew. Daad! Mamm, too! Was she dreaming?
“We saw the blinking lights from our house. Did a car hit a buggy? Can we help?” her father asked in English.
In their German dialect, her mother said, “Seth, Naomi’s with Marlena, so don’t you worry for that. Ach, what happened here?”
Before Hannah could hear an answer, with great difficulty, she lifted her head to look out past her feet. If she was going to die, to bleed out or never be allowed back here again, she was going to get a glimpse of her parents.
“Bishop Esh,” Seth was saying, “Hannah was here with worldly friends. She’s been hurt—shot, and she’s inside that one, right there.”
Her mother peered into the E.R. vehicle. It had been so long since Hannah had looked into her pale blue eyes. More wrinkles than Hannah remembered. Mamm looked grieved. Grieved for her.
“Oh, Mamm,” Hannah got out before bursting into tears.
Her father, white beard, intense stare, squinted into the brightness at her, and choked out his childhood nickname for her. “Hanni!”
Mamm climbed right up, came in and bent over her, holding her other hand. “I’m going with her,” she called out to Daad with Seth standing so tall behind him, though Hannah could barely make out their silhouettes in this brightness. “You tell Naomi to take care of things, Joseph.”
“Naomi,” Hannah heard herself repeat her younger sister’s name. “How is … Naomi?”
“Planning her wedding to Joshua Troyer in two weeks,” Mamm said, close to her ear. “You can help her with things when you come home and let that painted scarlet hair grow out to your real blond.” She stroked Hannah’s forehead, brushing her gel-spiked hair back. With her unhurt hand, before she remembered it was tethered by IVs, Hannah seized her mother’s wrist and held tight. If she did die, she thought as she began to slip away, she could at least go grateful: she’d seen Seth and he had helped her; Mamm and Daad at least still claimed her; and sweet Naomi was going to be married … going to be married.
Someone slammed the door and her thoughts went black.
2
HANNAH SWAM INTO THE LIGHT, THEN PLUNGED to darkness again, thinking, Naomi’s going to be married, going to be married.
Hannah had been certain she was going to be married, too. Seth Lantz was the only man she had ever loved. They’d been scholars together at the one-room schoolhouse. He had been her come-calling friend for years. They’d survived their rebellious rumspringa years and had planned to be baptized into the church at the same time. Whether they sang duets of the old hymns or “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” their voices blended beautifully, and their lives would, too. Hannah’s best running-around friends, Sarah and Ella, knew she and Seth were privately promised to each other. And then … and then …
She had been certain Seth was going to propose to her that sweet spring evening at the pond. He was so nervous, the big six-footer, one of the tallest men in the Home Valley. One of the handsomest, too, with his blond hair and sky-blue eyes, his square chin. Then came the words that had turned her well-planned life upside down.
“Hannah, I—I don’t know how it happened. I mean, I know how but not why,” he’d faltered. “I realize you and I have been waiting for each other—waiting to join the church, to bed together, to build a life, start a family, but I … It only happened once, but—I hope you and the Lord and the brethren can forgive me—but Lena Miller’s going to have my child. She’s sure—and I’m going to have to … to marry her.”
She had just gaped at him. The words didn’t register at first, but his stark, stunned expression did. She’d wanted to drown herself in the pond—she wanted to drown him!
“I—I will always love you,” he’d stammered, “and I hope you can forgive me….”
She had become so hysterical she was never certain what she’d said to him that night. She’d hit him, too, pounded on his big, broad shoulders when violence was not their way. But this was brutality. He might as well have beaten or killed her. Running back home across the fields, past the Kauffman farm to her own, blinded by tears of pain and fury, she’d wished the fresh-plowed earth would simply swallow her. Then that argument with her father, the bishop, no less.
“No, I can’t forgive him—never will!” she’d shouted. “Even if I could forgive, I could never forget! Don’t tell me I have to accept that and go on, see them together, see their children over the years, Lena in his house, in his buggy—poor Hannah, the castoff. He’s the one who should be sent away, but I’m the one who’s going! I’m going to sing for a career, I don’t care if you say I can’t. At least I won’t be shunned, because I’ve never joined the church, never been baptized, never been betrayed like this, either. I don’t care if both of them admit their sin before the church or the entire world, because I won’t be there. I won’t be anywhere around here!”
Her mother’s pleading, her sister’s tears, nothing stopped her. In her deepest, darkest dreams, she could still hear her father’s calm voice calling after her as she charged up the stairs to pack. “Hannah! Hannah Esh, you come back here!”
“Hannah. Hannah,” a voice called now, pulling her from heavy, sodden sleep. With great difficulty, Hannah slitted one eye open. Her mother, wearing a black bonnet and cape, was sitting by her bed. A hospital room. Hannah saw she was tied to tubes and monitors.
Her mother stood and leaned close over her, putting a warm palm on Hannah’s cheek. She spoke in their German dialect. “I thought you were waking up, dear girl. You lost a lot of blood, but they operated to patch you up and put some metal pins in your wrist. They say with physical therapy, you’ll recover most of the use of your hand, but it will take months. At least it’s your left one and not your right. I was praying you’d come back to us, back to life and come home to your family now. The police, even a government FBI man, are going to find out who shot at you and—and your friends. I’ll stay with you, stay right here in your room, and then you come home with me, oh, ya.”
Hannah tried to say, “Danki, Mamm,” but her throat felt raw, and nothing came out. What a mess she’d made of things. It all came back in a rush: Kevin dead, Tiffany and her shot while they were defiling the graveyard with their boos and booze. She’d lived through it, but whatever life she’d once had among her Amish family and former friends was surely dead, too.
Hannah floated in and out of strange sleep—pain pills, that was causing her problems, she told herself. When her thoughts settled, she wished she could take medicine to mute her mental pain, as well.
Once Daad was even here. They didn’t talk, even though they had so much to say. He mostly paced the floor, frowning, muttering to himself, even hitting his forehead with his hand now and then, as if he was blaming himself for the state she was in. But he’d also lifted a glass of water to her lips, and the strangest scrap of scripture had popped into her head: If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in so doing you will heap coals of fire on his head. Would all she’d said, all she’d done, make her father turn against her? He was an upright, stern man. Would he believe she had caused not only her own punishment but the harm that came to Tiffany and Kevin? Tiffany was recovering in a Cleveland Hospital, Mamm had said, and Kevin’s body had been autopsied and would be released by the authorities and buried in a few days. Liz and Mike had gone home to their families.
Later, Hannah wasn’t certain when Mamm told her that Sheriff Freeman had come to see her. “You sure you’re strong enough to talk to him?”
“Yes. I want to help any way I can. To know who would do such a thing and why.”
“Perhaps God only knows. I’ll sit in the chair in the corner, and you tell the sheriff or me if you get too tired or too upset to answer his questions. He’s been keeping some folks away from you, so we are grateful.”
“What folks?” Hannah asked, wondering if Seth had tried to see her.
“Newspaper and TV reporters. Don’t you fret, because there is a police officer outside your door to keep them away.”
If that was meant to be comforting, it only made Hannah more nervous. This was a double nightmare: not only had people’s lives been ruined because of her, but she was evidently in some danger. Surely a policeman wasn’t just to keep reporters away. Did the police think she could identify someone? Her people lived private, plain lives and now look what she’d done by bringing trouble to them.
Tall and straight, Eden County’s sheriff was an imposing man in his crisp black uniform. The Amish didn’t trust government officials much or even vote in worldly elections. But Jack Freeman, who was elected, got along with them just fine, although the Amish did not approve of his divorce. Still, word was, his wife had left him when he didn’t want her to, so maybe that wasn’t all his fault.
His brown eyes assessed Hannah, then took in the room as he thanked Mamm for her help. He pulled up the chair next to the bed and put his big-brimmed hat on the floor and a white bakery box on the bedside table.
“From Ray-Lynn Logan,” he said, referring to the worldly woman who ran the Dutch Farm Table Restaurant in Homestead, the biggest town in the Home Valley area, though that wasn’t saying much. “She remembers you liked whipped pies.”
“Oh, you mean whoopie pies. They’re more like cookies, like Amish Oreos with filling.” She couldn’t believe they were making small talk when she feared what was coming. “Please thank her for me—you, too, for bringing them.”
“She said she hopes you’re coming back home. Your family and friends want you to.”
She still had friends at home? The Amish might be great at forgiving sinners, but could they ever forget the things she had done and now had caused? Her dearest friend, Sarah Kauffman, had remained close, but she’d left for Columbus and was going to marry an outsider. Sarah had said that Hannah’s other once-upon-a-time good friend Ella Lantz, Seth’s sister, had been very critical of Hannah’s worldly life. Or could the sheriff possibly mean Seth had said he was still her friend? He must have also interviewed Seth about the shooting.
“Still, I can’t wait around for you to come home to get your statement,” he was saying as his voice tightened and his face became more intent. “Hannah, we got us a cold-blooded murder on our hands, and you two women shot. We don’t need any of this, not after the media mess with those barn burnings last spring.”
“I know. I’m sorry I brought my friends here—there, I mean. I just thought it would be a private picnic.”
Frowning, he took out a small notebook and flipped it open. “How ‘bout you tell me everything you remember happened at the graveyard?”
She went through things, step-by-step—why they came, their arrival, the loud deathrock music …
“Deathrock?” he interrupted, looking up from his scribbling. “That’s its name?”
“Yes, it’s very popular with goths.”
“Yeah, I been researching that. Black clothes is about the only thing you goths have in common with the Amish, far’s I can tell. Go on.”
You goths, he’d said. She’d rebelled against her people by casting her lot with something shocking, something even more verboten than going to the world. Now she’d brought deadly violence, which the Plain People avoided and abhorred, to them.
“The music must have covered any sounds until the gunshots,” she admitted. “I don’t know what kind of gun.”
“Not your worry. A high-speed rifle, like some folks hunt game with. You could have been killed. Your wrist would have been completely shattered if the bullet that hit you hadn’t been partly slowed and deflected by a gravestone that was busted up instead.”
Lena Lantz’s tombstone, Hannah thought. She should have made everyone move away from her grave. Growing up, she’d known Lena Miller well and liked her. Lena had lived on the next farm to Seth and Ella, and they’d all gone to singings and frolics together. The Lantz and Miller children had gotten especially close after Lena’s parents were killed when a car hit their buggy. But she’d never suspected that Lena had her cap set for Seth—or he for her. It took two, oh, yes, she knew that, and in a culture where birth control was forbidden …
“So, you strong enough to talk to Agent Armstrong now?” the sheriff was asking as he flipped his notebook closed. “I promised him I’d cut this short so as not to tire you out. I’ll do a follow-up later on whatever else you might remember.”
“I—sorry, what did you ask?”
“I know this is difficult, Hannah, but with this being a murder investigation, I called in the FBI, and they’re working with the State Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, the BCI. Ever since those young Amish girls got shot and killed in their schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, a couple of years back, the FBI like to swoop in real quick if there’s something like this—something that could smack of a hate crime against the Amish. From a distance, you all might have looked Amish with your long skirts, the guys in hats and such.”
“I— Yes, I understand.”
“So, FBI Special Agent Linc Armstrong would like a few words with you. Now, he stays too long or pushes too hard, you just tell him, but he’s a pretty take-charge guy. This is the third day I’ve kept him away from you. You okay with this?”
“I want to do everything I can to help.”
“Good girl. ‘Preciate it. Oh, Ray-Lynn also said, if you’re coming back and—” he nodded to Mamm, who stood and came closer “—if you won’t be working in your mother’s Amish cap-making business, Ray-Lynn can always use a good hand in the restaurant kitchen or waiting tables.”
“Tell her one good hand would be it for a while, Sheriff, and thanks for all you’re doing to unscramble the mess—the tragedy—I made.”
“Not all your fault by a long shot,” he said. “Well, didn’t mean that about a long shot, but I tell you we’ll find whoever put bullets in some visitors to my bailiwick. Even though you were in the wrong to be carousing there, you didn’t force your friends to come along and you sure as heck didn’t fire a rifle at them.” He lowered his voice. “Now, don’t you let Linc Armstrong get you down,” he said, and made for the door.
“I’m already down,” she whispered to her mother. “I guess I haven’t been myself since that night I argued with Daad.”
“Ya, I know,” she said, bending over the bed. “You just be brave with this government man now, because he already gave Seth a good going-over, and he’s been prying into everyone’s past, especially yours.”
Seth shoved his roofing hammer through a loop in his leather carpenter’s apron and heard the nails in it jingle as he scooted a bit higher on Bishop Esh’s farmhouse roof. The roof had been scarred by the Esh barn fire, set by an arsonist, and he was putting down new shingles. Seth was a timber framer, a barn builder, by trade. He’d overseen work crews erecting big buildings from churches to rustic state park lodges, but he picked up odd jobs between projects. Like everywhere in America, times were tough.
He could see the hilly sweep of much of the Home Valley, where he’d lived all his life. The woodlots were every hue from scarlet to gold, the wheat harvest was in the big barns or silos. Shucked corn was in the Yoder grain elevator, waiting to be hauled out in boxcars. The stalks in the corn maze delighted both Amish and Englische kids and adults as they ran through it. The white farmhouses and smaller grossdaadi hauses, the big red or black barns—three of which he’d built—stood strong and tall in the autumn sun, punctuated by occasional silos and windmills. From this vantage point—he loved heights—he could see the pond where he used to swim with Hannah, a place he had never gone with Lena, and then the graveyard beyond….
That brought his thoughts back to earth. When the authorities took away that bright yellow tape they’d strung along the fence there, he intended to replace Lena’s shattered stone grave marker. He’d been questioned by both Sheriff Freeman and that FBI go-getter, Lincoln Armstrong, interviews he’d expected and accepted. He’d even weathered Armstrong’s implications he might have had a motive to shoot at Hannah, and the fact he’d asked to see his gun to check his ammunition. What he hadn’t been prepared for was being called a hero for helping the wounded women.
His people knew better than to label him that, because such a thing was prideful, but two newspapers and three TV reporters had tried to interview him and take his picture. It was a blessing that the local paper had recently closed and had not been picked up by a new buyer, because it would have been all over this. But up here, he felt safe from his new, sudden fame. Bishop Esh, working in his barn below, had said he’d head off anyone else who came looking for the Amish Hero Saves 2 Lives, Finds Man Dead in Graveyard.
Seth turned and gazed past the chimney, toward his boyhood home, the next farm to the northeast where his brother Abel helped their daad farm. The Miller farm beyond that, Lena’s childhood home, was owned by her only brother. At the far edge of his parents’ property, Seth saw his own small house, which he’d built, where he still lived with little Marlena and where Lena had died suddenly on their kitchen floor of a burst aortic aneurism. She’d had the condition since birth, and no one knew it. He was grateful he didn’t have to add Marlena to the brood of kinder at his parents’ place as usual, but had brought her with him today, thanks to the Eshes’ kind offer to let her play here. Mrs. Esh was at the Wooster hospital with Hannah, but Naomi was keeping an eye on his girl.
Again, though it was the last thing he wanted or needed, his thoughts turned to Hannah. When he’d first seen her in the graveyard, lying almost on Lena’s grave, her hair had looked so scarlet that for one split second he’d feared she’d been shot in the head, too, and was bleeding from her skull. Now why had a pretty woman like her done those things to herself? Black eye paint around those blue-green eyes and dark strokes covering her blond, arched eyebrows. Her beautiful hair, once long and honey-blond, hacked off, dyed the hue of martyr’s blood and stuck up in spikes. The clothes—well at least they covered her lithe, lovely body, so she wasn’t flaunting that to the world.
He shifted his weight on the ridgeline of the roof, the very roof where the Lantz and Kauffman kids used to play Andy Over, heaving a ball up and letting it roll down the other side of the roof, where your opponent had to run and catch it, wherever it suddenly appeared. How clearly he recalled once when they were fifteen that, with both of them looking up, Hannah had bounced into him. They both went down and rolled in the autumn leaves together, with him on top, pressing her down with his knee between her legs, touching her breast, laughing and then kissing for the first time before their friends ran back around and they’d jumped to their feet …
He shook his head to shove that memory away. It really annoyed him how the mere thought of Hannah against him, in his arms, under him, made his body go tense with desire. He missed the pleasures of the marriage bed, even with a woman he had not chosen. Now, he knew two willing Amish maidals who would make him a good wife, and he needed to decide which one to pursue and get to courting so Marlena could have a mother and so he could stop this stupid longing.
“You coming down for noon meal?” Bishop Esh’s voice sliced through his agonizing. He stood below with his hands cupped around his mouth. “Your little girl’s waiting with Naomi. I see any more of those media folks, I’ll get rid of them for you, sure I will.”
“Coming right down. Just taking a breather.”
How long has the bishop watched him sitting up here? And how long before Hannah—if she returned at all—would be brought here, so he could at least see her again?
3
ALTHOUGH FBI SPECIAL AGENT LINC ARMSTRONG’S taut mouth smiled, Hannah noted that his sharp gray eyes did not as he assessed her. He was sinewy, angular and seemed tightly coiled. His brown hair was only about an inch long, short compared to Amish and goth men. His ears were so close to his head that his face seemed even longer than it was, a serious, angular face. He was dressed in black slacks, white shirt, striped tie and a dark blue jacket with FBI scripted in gold thread over the pocket. Though Hannah, who had just turned twenty-five, was not good at guessing people’s ages, she figured him to be in his mid- to late thirties.
“I appreciate your time while you’re recovering,” he told her, then introduced himself. He even held out his badge to her, in a sort of wallet he opened. The badge flaunted an eagle holding arrows in his talons over a line which read Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice. Under that was Armstrong’s photo; his face had a serious, even pained look. When he still held the wallet open—perhaps he didn’t realize how fast an Amish woman could read—she reread the other words near his photo: “Lincoln Armstrong is a regularly appointed Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and as such is charged with the duty of investigating violations of the laws of the United States in cases in which the United States is a party of interest.”
A party of interest? That sounded so cold, and the badge looked so … so commanding. No wonder the Amish never wanted to be involved with government agents, even though they were not arresting and executing the Plain People for their beliefs like in the old days in Europe.
Lincoln Armstrong’s words were clipped; he talked fast. He said he was Assistant Special Agent in Charge assigned to investigate violent crimes in Northeast Ohio. He was from “the Cleveland office,” but would be staying at the Red Roof Inn on the interstate eight miles from Homestead until his investigation was finished.
“I want to help in any way I can,” she told him. “Those were—are—my friends, though I shouldn’t have brought them here—there—that night.”
The man made her very nervous. Even seeing a State Highway Patrol or police car when she was driving bugged her and she slowed way down, but then she’d never really liked driving the car she and Tiffany had shared. But she told herself again that this man was here to help, and she was going to help him.
Still with bolt-upright posture, Agent Armstrong sat on the bedside chair and asked question after question, while she answered as best she could. She could tell that sometimes he was asking the same question but in a different way. No, she didn’t think they were followed that night. No, she’d told no one else where they were going.
“To the best of your knowledge,” he said, looking up narrow-eyed from where he’d been taking notes, “did you or your friends have any enemies who might want to scare or harm you? For instance, I understand you broke up with your boyfriend, Jason Corbett, recently. Though he has an alibi, you never know that he didn’t send or hire someone.”
She just stared at him. Mamm was right, this man had been checking into her past. And he’d had three days to interview everyone else.
“He wouldn’t do that,” she insisted. “We really weren’t that serious to start with, a friend of a friend kind of thing, and breaking up was a mutual decision.”
“Okay, that fits what he told me. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that Seth Lantz, your other former boyfriend, came along just after the shooting in time to find and help you? And I understand your breakup with him was not a mutual decision.”
Hannah pushed the button that raised the top of her bed higher. She was fairly tall for an Amish woman and wanted to stand up to this man’s height and rigid posture, but in bed like this she felt at such a disadvantage.
“Thank heavens, Seth came along!” she said, a bit too loudly. She lowered her voice. “Although I managed to call 9-1-1, he saved Tiffany and me, even if it was too late for Kevin. And he tried to spot the shooter, though he must have gone by then.”
“He or she or they. It’s best not to assume or construe. But we can surmise the shooter went back into the woods above the graveyard, then down to wherever a vehicle or buggy was hidden. Unless the shooter lived close enough to walk home.”
Buggy? Walk home? She’d never considered it could be someone Amish, but she and her friends had been disturbing the peace, desecrating hallowed ground. She had no doubt that Seth must have been upset by that.
“We were in the dark, so he, she or they must have been a good shot.”
“You didn’t glimpse any movement from higher on the hill, did you? I realize the music kept all of you from hearing anything until the shots.”
“You know,” she said as the memory came back to her, “I did glance up the hill, just to calm myself because I was upset that Tiffany and then Kevin were dancing on the graves. But no, I saw nothing, no one.”
“And then Seth rode up—though not on a white horse—from the other direction.”
He had interviewed Seth, hadn’t he? “No. You must know he was in a buggy. And Blaze, his horse, is chestnut-colored with a white mark only on her face and chest.”
Something she’d said amused him, but she wasn’t sure what. Had he been trying to trap her in something? Agent Armstrong—no way was she going to call him Lincoln or Linc—leaned closer and lowered his voice, too.
“Considering your and Seth’s past, I’m sure he hurt you more than you did him when you broke up, Hannah, but I have to examine all possibilities, even that an apparent rescuer was the perpetrator.”
She sniffed and shook her head.
“It happens,” he went on. “Seth was out with a hunting rifle, but our forensics have shown that wasn’t the weapon involved. Still, I can tell from talking to him that he is upset that you ‘jumped the fence,’ as he put it, and hung out with the goths. He’s still upset with you about that.”
She didn’t like the direction this was going, but it scared her even more how much she wanted to defend Seth. She blurted, “Then you’d better put about everyone in the Amish church under suspicion, Agent Armstrong! They were all pretty upset when the bishop’s daughter left, though of course we—they—are all pacifists and would never shoot someone!”
“But that was a pretty big stretch for an Amish girl, wasn’t it? Not only leaving the only life you’d ever known, but going goth?”
“That’s just the group of friends I fell in with when I went to my ‘Cleveland office,’ to try to start a singing career.”
His eyes seemed to light, and the corner of his mouth twitched as if he would either grimace or smile at her subtle jab. “I like backbone in a witness and a victim,” he said, standing. “Good move to call 9-1-1, and good job giving all that information when you were shot and your friends were bleeding around you. I think you’re being released to go home tomorrow, Hannah, so I’ll see you then, because I want you to walk me through exactly what happened at the crime scene. It’s been secured, photographed, sketched and searched. I’ve questioned your remaining three goth friends, but I think your visiting the site with me would be invaluable. I take it I can find you at your parents’ place.”
It was a statement, not a question. Did he imply she was being confined there at least until she returned to the scene of the crime with him?
“If they’ll take me in for a while, yes, then I—”
“Take you in?” Mamm said as she peered around Agent Armstrong’s shoulder. “It’s your home. You are coming home, ya, at least till your wrist is better. Then we can all discuss what comes later.”
“Yes,” Hannah said as tears she could not stem blurred her view. “Agent Armstrong, I’ll be there—at my parents’ home.”
He tapped the edge of her mattress twice as if she were being dismissed, at least for now. “Thank you for your time and help, and thank you, Mrs. Esh,” he said with a nod Mamm’s way as she stepped to the side of the bed. “And thank you and Bishop Esh for feeding me so well yesterday.”
This government officer and law-enforcing ausländer had eaten at her house—that is, at her parents’ house—when she hadn’t been inside for years? It made her homesick all over again.
It was strange, Hannah thought as Agent Armstrong left the room, to have to deal with a man who knew things you didn’t and, even though you were both an eyewitness and a victim and he was going to help, who made you feel like you were under surveillance, too.
It was a couple of hours after dark that night when Sheriff Jack Freeman pulled into his driveway. Hearing an engine, Ray-Lynn Logan went to the kitchen window over the sink and cracked the curtains to make sure the headlights slashing through the night were his. Yes, his black sheriff’s cruiser with the gold logo on the side. He no doubt saw her van in the driveway. They had keys to each other’s places now. She wondered if he could possibly be as excited as she was each time they were together, but he was probably exhausted investigating the graveyard shooting and working with that hard-driving FBI guy from Cleveland.
Using the window glass for a mirror, she quickly checked her appearance. Pretty good for a woman who was almost fifty, she thought. She knew Jack liked her full breasts and hips, even though he’d admitted he was a “leg man.”
Ray-Lynn had seen little of Jack since the shootings three days ago, and just when things were really getting comfortable between them. So she’d left the restaurant the minute it closed tonight to bring them a meat loaf dinner to share—brought him his favorite raisin cream pie, too. She was getting familiar with his kitchen and this spacious brick ranch house, though she didn’t like the fact he’d lived here and decorated it with his ex-wife. Besides, it was two miles east of town, and there was a woodlot right out back, when some idiot was shooting people from trees in the dark. Maybe, she tried to tell herself, the shooting had been just some Halloween prank, an aberration, a one-night freak thing, and goths sure looked like freaks. Dealing with the Plain People was one thing, but no way did she want strange outsiders around her adopted town.
Ray-Lynn met Jack at his own back door with a big hug he returned so hard it made her toes curl. A Southern girl by birth, she’d almost chucked all the good manners her mother ever taught her to finally get this man to notice her as more than the source of good country cooking at her restaurant in town. Jack was divorced and had been sort of a loner, married only to his job since his wife had left him to move somewhere out west several years ago. He’d admitted that his ex was the only woman he’d loved, and he’d been heartbroken when she said she was done with him and rural, small-town living. But Jack had finally added, “That is, she was the only one I ever wanted before I fell in love with you, Ray-Lynn.”
Jack, who was just a year older, stood tall and ramrod-straight, maybe a leftover from his days as a marine. His auburn hair had a touch of gray at the temples, but with all that had gone on around here lately, he’d kidded her that he’d be all silver-headed soon. He’d bailed her out of a financial crisis earlier this year by investing in half of her restaurant in town, though he sure had more than fifty-percent of her heart. She loved it that they were partners in business, and she longed to be partners in life, too.
“Something smells good, but you smell better, honey,” he said, closing and locking the door behind him, then burying his face in her hair before giving her a long, openmouthed kiss that made her want to forget supper. She held tight to his leather jacket. He smelled of crisp autumn air and, as ever, both of safety and sexiness.
When they came up for a breath, she asked, “Progress here for sure, but any progress on the graveyard case?”
“Luckily, forensics cleared Seth Lantz, or at least the rifle he had in his buggy that night. Witnesses have been interviewed by either Armstrong or me—in some cases by both of us. Both wounded women are being released tomorrow, and Hannah Esh is coming home, at least for a while, so—as ever—the Amish see a blessing even in a tragedy.”
He hung his jacket, gun belt and hat on pegs by the back door, then, with a playful pat on her rear, went to use the bathroom. All dreamy-eyed—she had to admit, that’s what this man, in or out of uniform, did to her—Ray-Lynn jumped when she accidentally touched the hot pan she was warming the meat loaf in as she took it out of the oven. She yanked back about as fast as she had when she’d come across an old photo of Jack and his ex while she was looking for candlesticks today. It had been shoved, facedown, under some candles and matchbooks in an end table drawer.
As she ran cold water over her burn, she pictured their faces in the photo again, though it was the last thing she wanted in her head right now. They’d both looked so young and happy. Lillian Freeman was a pretty blonde, big-busted but not fat. Hopefully, Jack preferred Ray-Lynn’s real red hair to that bleached blond, but sometimes men couldn’t see through that and a blonde was a blonde. In the pic, they were sitting on a fence somewhere, grinning like all get-out, him in his marine uniform, her flaunting great legs in shorts and her breasts in a skimpy top.
“Smells like meat loaf!” Jack said when he came back in. “You okay, honey?” he asked when he saw her holding her finger under running water.
“Just a little burn.”
He came over and hugged her from behind. “I’m starved, but willing to kiss it—kiss you—to make it better.”
“And who said the way to a man’s heart is only through his stomach?” She turned in his arms to face him as he pressed her against the sink and kissed her again. They both ignored the running water, though they could have used a bit of a cold shower right now, she thought as she kissed him back hard again and slid her hands, burn or not, in the back pockets of his pants.
She was surprised when he broke their embrace, leaning past her closer to the window over the sink. He cracked the curtains and squinted out into the November night. Her head cleared. She heard something outside, too.
“Bad timing,” he said. “Headlights from someone pulling in. Hope it’s not the G-man, but someone might be in trouble. Don’t recognize the car.”
“If they come to the back door,” she said, straightening her blouse and smoothing her hair, “it must be someone who knows you.”
To her dismay, he strapped his gun belt back on as someone knocked hard on the back door. He motioned for Ray-Lynn to step out of the kitchen, and she did, hovering in the hall where she could see the back door in the hall mirror.
As Jack opened the door and a blast of cold air rolled in, Ray-Lynn gasped and pressed both hands over her mouth to stifle a shriek. Though she’d never met the woman, she recognized her image in the mirror the minute Jack opened the door. “Lily?” he asked, sounding shocked, but excited, as well. “Lily!”
“Jackman!” his former wife cried. “I’ve come home! I’ve missed you so much, baby, but I was scared to call ahead in case you said not to come!”
Lillian Freeman—if that was still her name after four years away—threw her arms around Jack’s neck as he took a step back in surprise, then hugged her as she burst into tears. Ray-Lynn fled into the living room, grabbed her jacket and purse and cried, too, all the way to her car.
She fumbled with the key in the ignition and backed down the driveway before remembering to turn her headlights on. Jack ran out and shouted something to her, but she spun her wheels and roared off into the dark night.
4
HANNAH WAKENED TO THE MUTED THUD-THUD of Mamm’s hand-operated pressing machine that put the creases in the stiff, white prayer kapps she made in the old sunroom at the rear of the house, a familiar sound that always carried up the back wall. She opened her eyes, then closed them again. It was bad enough to have to look at the wrapped gauze and taped bandage on her left wrist and the array of pills on the bedside table but worse to feel she was in a time warp. Except for moving her twin bed to the guest room and storing some wedding supplies here, Naomi hadn’t changed much of their shared back-corner bedroom after Hannah had left.
From the top of the familiar maple dresser, Hannah’s bonneted childhood doll seemed to stare at her for all the things she’d done wrong, despite being eyeless and faceless. Strange to have the feeling she was being watched in this private, second-story bedroom in the middle of open fields.
Despite her pain pills, she hadn’t slept well because she’d heard some sort of unfamiliar flapping, like bird wings, from time to time. Maybe it was a loose shingle on the roof in the brisk wind that had now calmed a bit. If Seth was working up on the roof today, she hoped he’d be careful. Amish men didn’t use safety harnesses, for whatever happened was God’s will, one thing she’d learned to question during her days in the world. After all, sometimes people’s injuries were their own stupid fault.
But one huge change in this spot of her happy childhood and rumspringa years were the signs of Naomi’s coming wedding adorning the room: a treadle sewing machine with a nearly completed, sky-blue wedding dress, bolts of burgundy material for her four attendants’ dresses, boxes of favors and inscribed napkins stacked in the corner by the closet. The talk at supper last night had been all about the Esh-Troyer marriage. Well, of course, Hannah could see why. It wasn’t just to avoid talking about the mess she’d made of her life. Amish weddings were planned and prepared quickly after the announcement in church of the betrothal. With so many invited, lots of people pitched in, preparing to feed nearly four hundred guests at a wedding feast with a traditional, home-cooked meal.
In the emotion of her reunion with Naomi yesterday—Hannah knew her younger sister had looked up to her just as she had to her older, now-married sisters, Ida and Ruth—she had promised not only to attend the wedding but to help with it. Nothing like facing the entire Amish community she’d let down. At least she had until a week from today to prepare herself for that.
Hannah groaned, sat up carefully and gasped to see a small, round face staring up at her over the side of the bed. So that’s why she felt she was being watched. It was a darling little Amish doll—a living one, with a pert mouth and wide, azure eyes.
“Where Naomi?” the child asked in their German dialect. Then Hannah knew who it was. Not the niece whose birth she’d missed while she was gone, but Seth and Lena’s little daughter, Marlena, now around two and a half years old.
“I’m Hannah,” she told the child, and her voice broke. Like an idiot, she blinked back tears. The little girl resembled Seth more than Lena. “I—I can help you find Naomi.”
“Daadi go up,” Marlena said, pointing at the ceiling or, more likely, the roof since Seth was reroofing the house, though she hadn’t heard one hammer or nail when it must be midmorning. “Mamm go up, too,” Marlena added.
“Oh, there you are!” Naomi cried, rushing into the room and scooping up the child. “She was playing in the hall when I went to use the bathroom.”
“Naomi,” Hannah said as she swung her feet carefully to the floor, “you do not have to move out of your room for me, especially not with all you have going on here.”
“It was our room for years and still is!” Naomi insisted. “And now it can be yours, because after next Thursday, we’ll be living with Josh’s folks for a while. I’m fine in Ida and Ruth’s old room.”
“Daadi go up,” Marlena said again, pointing. “Up to the sky.” The child squirmed to be put down, toddled to the back window facing the barn and craned her neck to peer skyward.
“I’ll have to tell Seth you’re up, and he can pound away on the new shingles now,” Naomi said. “He didn’t want to wake you, so he’s helping Daad stack firewood. As for this little one, she thinks her daadi goes up on the roof looking for her mamm, who is in heaven.”
“Oh, that’s what she meant. But Seth or anyone else does not have to work around me.”
“You know it’s our way, whether you’re a guest or family, and you’re both,” Naomi said with a nod. Taking Marlena’s hand, she started from the room. “Oh,” she said, turning back, “someone else is waiting for you to get up. Special Agent Armstrong will be here right after noon meal to take you to the graveyard to walk through … through what happened. Sorry, but that’s what he said when he came by earlier. Give me a shout if you need help getting dressed,” she added, and pointed toward the chair in front of the sewing machine as they left the room.
Hannah gasped. Now she saw why Naomi’s wedding dress was only partly done. It was not just because they were letting Hannah sleep in this morning. She saw, laid out over the chair back and arranged on its seat, a new Amish dress in emerald-green, a good color for a maidal; black undergarments, no bra of course, which would take some getting used to again; a new pair of white, laced walking shoes like the women wore; a new cape—no, it was one of her old ones—and a new black bonnet. But no prayer kapp for her red-dyed, short-cut head, the sign of a dedicated Amish woman. All this kindness and generosity—but the lack of that precious kapp—spoke louder than Naomi’s words.
Tears blurring her vision, Hannah walked slowly to the small oval mirror they kept turned to the wall unless it was absolutely needed. After all, it was prideful to preen and to change the appearance God gave to each of His children. The true reason photographs of Amish faces were forbidden was that it could lead to individualism and conceit in one’s appearance, even though it also defied the Biblical warning “Thou shalt make no graven images.”
Hannah turned the mirror outward and jolted as her image stared back. Scarlet hair, though it now lay flat and looked softer after Mamm had washed and brushed it in the hospital. A face plain and naked without the dramatic mascara and black lipstick. Just Hannah Esh’s Amish face again, only one now lined with pain, perhaps fear, eyes narrowed, full lips pressed together, and the lower one trembling. She realized she was shaking all over and not just because she’d risen from a warm bed.
Was she scared to be home? Afraid of having to face everyone, especially Seth, again?
She thrust out her lower lip in defiance and walked to the clothing. One-handed, she reached for it to get dressed. It was only then she noticed that the screen to the side window behind the sewing machine was cleanly slit along its edge. Maybe that was what she’d heard flapping last night. But it was so unlike her daad to leave something not repaired. She leaned closer and gasped. Long, dark marks on the sill inside of the screen made it look like some sharp object had tried to pry the window itself open.
“You didn’t lean a ladder at the driveway side of the house, even to carry the shingles up, did you?” Bishop Esh asked Seth as he sat at the far end of the dinner table from Hannah, with Marlena in a high chair beside him. Seth was pleased to see Hannah at the table and dressed Amish, though she hadn’t covered her head. As ever, she seemed for him some sort of magnet and he the compass needle pulled to her true north.
He had to focus on the bishop’s words. “No,” Seth answered. “I’ve kept the ladder between the flower beds in back, near where the shingles were unloaded. Since the peak of the roof is on the driveway side, my ladder wouldn’t reach it. Is there a problem?”
“Yes, one we will have to run by Agent Armstrong, that’s for sure,” the bishop said, frowning.
Naomi, sitting on the other side of Marlena’s high chair, put in, “Someone cut the screen in the side window to my bedroom—now Hannah’s—and it wasn’t my Josh, that’s sure. He wouldn’t do that, even if the ladder marks were under the cut window. And someone tried to pry it open, too, but it sure wasn’t Josh and me!”
“We know that, Naomi,” Mrs. Esh said, and reached over to pat her youngest daughter’s hand. “You’ve always done things on the straight and narrow, ya, we know that.”
Seth saw Hannah’s cheeks color, as if that was a reflection on her, maybe on him, as well. Sure, Hannah used to slip out to meet him once in a while after the house went dark but not through a sliced window screen. Hannah and her friend Sarah, next farm over, had sneaked out in their rumspringa years to listen to the radio and fool around. But this news upset him, and not because he’d been indirectly asked if that ladder and the cut screen was his doing. If it wasn’t him, who was it? Could Josh have done it and not told Naomi? Once Linc Armstrong found out about it, he’d probably question anyone within miles who had a ladder.
“Could someone have been trying to break in?” Seth asked, his fork halfway to his mouth. He hadn’t so much as tasted the chicken on biscuits yet, since he’d been making sure Marlena ate well.
“Naomi’s sure the window wasn’t that way yesterday,” the bishop said. “It could be those nosy reporters with their cameras, not taking no for an answer.”
Or it could be something worse, Seth almost said. That thought hung in the air while people went back to eating. Finally, Hannah spoke.
“I don’t want Agent Armstrong trampling all over my private life, but he’s going to have to take a look at the window and the ladder marks.”
“Right,” Seth put in. “One more thing. He asked me to go with you to the graveyard this afternoon. Not to hear what you tell him, but to pick up the story where I came in. To talk to us about the crime scene.”
He said no more and tucked into Mrs. Esh’s delicious dinner, though he hardly felt hungry anymore. He’d bet a new barn that part of the reason Agent Armstrong wanted him to go along was so that he could see how he and Hannah would act when they were together. Actually, he’d like to see how they would, too.
Hannah noted how tense Seth and Agent Armstrong were around each other as they stood under her bedroom window after dinner.
“Those imprints look identical to your ladder’s feet, Seth,” Armstrong observed as he rose from a squat after a close examination of the imprinted soil between the bare rose canes. He’d already taken photos of the feet of the ladder, the cut screen and the scratches he called “jimmy marks” on the bedroom windowsill upstairs.
Hannah hugged her cloak tighter around herself with her good arm as she, Seth, Naomi and Daad watched the agent’s every move. His eyes had seemed to take in everything inside and outside the Esh home, just like he tried to see inside people’s heads.
“Of course,” Agent Armstrong added, “whoever it was could easily have borrowed your roofing ladder, though I don’t see any footprints back there but yours.”
Hannah watched as the two very different men looked at each other, eye-to-eye. Neither blinked or flinched.
“It’s the why that will lead us to the who,” Seth said.
“Lead us? But I get your drift. Motive. Easier said than done, but I’ll get to the bottom of it,” Armstrong countered.
“But what I don’t like,” Seth went on, “and what you didn’t mention is that if someone was trying to get to Hannah, he had to know what bedroom she was in, had to be some sort of insider. Bishop Esh and I checked, though I don’t think you did, to be sure no other windows in the house had a random cut screen or screwdriver marks.”
“Who said it was a screwdriver?”
“I— We, especially her family, just want Hannah protected,” Seth insisted.
Bishop Esh put his shoulder between the two men to make them step farther apart. “I’m going to buggy into the hardware store in town,” he told them, “get a new screen and bolts for both Hannah’s windows and extra ones for the windows and doors downstairs. Hannah told her mother in the hospital that she could not think of anyone who was her enemy, but I know Agent Armstrong has considered that, too, Seth.”
“Daad,” Hannah put in, “I’m sorry to cause so much trouble again for y—”
“Ya, you have, my girl!” he said, frowning at first before he cleared his throat. Hannah jolted at his tone. Since she’d been back, she’d seen Daad had a bee in his bonnet over her leaving and defying him. Maybe he still resented the way her hair looked. She’d tried to just ignore and smooth over the tension between them. After all, she could hardly blame him after what she’d put him, as her father and as bishop, through. “Just be grateful,” he went on in a calmer voice, “you are where you should be now, that’s for sure.” He shot a side glance at Seth she could not read. “You two go on now, help Agent Armstrong.”
Though Hannah could tell Seth didn’t want to get in the black car Agent Armstrong drove, she got in the backseat when he opened the door for her. “Watch your head,” he told her, and put a hand on her hair, then leaned over her to fasten her seat belt, evidently so she wouldn’t have to do it one-handed. She smelled a tart pine scent on him, and his hand touched her hip hard through her cape and skirt as he clicked the belt closed.
“You want to ride shotgun, Seth?” he asked. “You know, up front?”
“I’ll ride with Hannah,” he said, and walked around to sit next to her in the rear seat behind the cagelike divider that separated the front seats from the back. It was, she thought, a wide seat. Agent Armstrong was across the screen, but Seth seemed so far away from her.
“Listen,” Armstrong said as he drove slowly out of the Esh driveway past clothes blowing on the line in the brisk November day, “I’ve been calling both of you by your first names, so I’d appreciate it if you’d just call me Linc. My dad named me Lincoln for our Civil War president, Honest Abe, and that’s my motto—straight talk, full disclosure. I expect that from both of you. We’re working together on this, okay?”
“Fine,” Hannah said only. She did want to help in any way she could, including getting along with this man. She looked at Seth’s frowning profile.
“Fine with me,” Seth muttered. “You going to make straight talk a policy with everyone you question, such as Josh Troyer, about whether he used my ladder last night?”
Hannah saw Armstrong’s eyes dart toward Seth in the rearview mirror. “One step ahead of me, Seth. No, not with everyone, just key witnesses, and I don’t figure Naomi’s fiancé is one, but I’ve looked into him, too. The Troyers are a wealthy family, aren’t they, with owning the big grain elevator and that historic grist mill? Since they offer tours of the mill, I’m not sure if they’d think publicity of a murder around here would be good or bad for business.”
Hannah and Seth exchanged lightning-quick glances. This man was suspicious of everyone and considered every angle. If he thought Josh or the Troyers could be involved, anyone could be on his list.
Neither Seth nor Hannah responded. Linc Armstrong’s sharp eyes—like those of the eagle on his badge, she thought—glanced at them in the rearview mirror now and then. Could her feeling of being watched just be a reaction to his FBI surveillance and suspicious nature, no matter how friendly he seemed on the surface? She felt so torn about him, both guarded yet grateful.
When he pulled the car to a stop, almost exactly where her friends had parked at the graveyard on Halloween night, Linc said, “Seth, I’ll ask you to stay put until I’ve had Hannah walk me through things, then I’ll have you approach and enter the grounds just as you did that night.”
If “stay put” meant stay in the car, Seth ignored that order. He got out and stood near the fence, festooned with fluttering yellow plastic tape with the big, black words repeated over and over: Police Crime Scene Do Not Enter Police Crime Scene Do Not Enter … It was a good thing, she thought, that no one in the church had died right now. Her thoughts went to Kevin and Tiffany, to her other worldly friends who had not been hit by bullets that night. She wanted to write letters to their families. She couldn’t call, because Linc had confiscated her phone for now; a phone she’d need to give up, if she stayed here….
Feeling Seth’s gaze burning into her back from where he stood at the fence, she ducked under the tape Linc lifted for her, and they went into the graveyard.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner,” Jack told Ray-Lynn as he pulled her into the inside back entry to the restaurant, despite the fact she’d just seated a party of six during the lunch rush. “I ran into complications.”
“I guess you did. If she’s come back to haunt you, she missed Halloween.”
“I didn’t mean her. Something about the graveyard case with Agent Armstrong. Ray-Lynn, why didn’t you answer your phone last night after you drove away? Or come to the door of your house when I knocked on it? Considering how you ran out, I didn’t want to just use my key—which I’d left at my house, anyway.”
“Where did she stay last night?”
“Not with me. I got her settled in at Amanda Stutzman’s B and B.”
“Oh, great! Just great. So she’s living within walking distance of my house! You told me once she worked as a hostess in this restaurant. Don’t you dare ask me to give her a job here, I don’t care if you do own fifty percent of it now! You said she used her salary to help pay for your house and the decor, so I supposed you’re thinking she still owns half of that. When she took off, you never paid her back because she didn’t want your money, right? Bet she thinks that house is still half hers and you’re all hers, because it kind of looked that way last night!”
“Would you calm down? I’ll work it out. I just didn’t want you to be upset.”
“I’m not upset. I’m way beyond that.”
“I want us to talk this out, but I’ve got obligations right now, you know that, and you’ve always understood that. You gotta trust me on this.”
“I do—to help solve the graveyard shootings. The other …” She shrugged and fought to keep from bursting into tears. “I’ve got people waiting, Jack, and you do, too. Duty calls, as they say. Does she—does she intend to stay?”
He shrugged, then nodded. “So she says. Got fed up with a shallow life in Vegas, she said, and—”
“Las Vegas? She’s been in Las Vegas and now wants to come back to Homestead, Ohio, in Amish country? Jack, she may look like a million bucks, but she’s probably just broke or running from something!”
“From mistakes, she says.”
“Did you tell her about us?”
“Of course I did. Told her not to apply for a job here or even to come in, but she said it’s a free country.”
Ray-Lynn slapped the extra menus she still held to her chest down on the pile of cartons. “You can’t handle her, can you? But you want to, don’t you—handle her, real up close and personal? You never got over her, did you?”
“Damn it, Ray-Lynn, just give me some time!”
“Oh, I will. Lots. Now, I’ve got a restaurant to run and a life to live, so excuse me,” she said, and grabbed the menus. She darted past him back into the restaurant proper, put the stack of menus by the cash register and went into the ladies’ room, the two stalls of which were blessedly empty.
With stiff arms, she steadied herself against the washbasin, afraid to look at herself in the mirror. She wanted to throw things, to break the mirror, just shatter it and scream. But she ran cold water and dabbed it under her eyes, then went back out and stood near the front door with a smile pasted on her face. The sign over the front door, the one she’d been so proud of, that her very own Amish artist, Sarah Kauffman, had painted so beautifully, really riled her now: Southern Hospitality and Amish Cooking—Y’all Come Back, Danki.
No way in all of God’s creation could she be glad Lily Freeman had come back.
5
“IS THIS PRETTY MUCH THE PATH THE FIVE OF you took that night?” Linc asked as they walked from the gate up the hill into the heart of the graveyard.
“Yes,” Hannah told him. “I don’t think we walked in single file, though.”
“I believe these are your grandparents buried here,” he said, indicating two of the many identical stones laid out in neat rows.
“Yes. You have cased the place, as they say,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. Again, it amazed her how much background work this man had done into her life. Did he think she was somehow the key to what had happened? Surely no one had meant to shoot her that night, but she couldn’t accept that someone had been after the others, either. It must have been a random act—except for that slit screen. And was the policeman assigned to guard her hospital room just to keep reporters away? Daad had fended the media off, so was the policeman to protect her from someone else?
Linc interrupted her agonizing. “Forensic specialists have gone extensively over this site and that upland woodlot where the shooter stood. So that night you had your friends put down the blanket, the boom box, the food and wine on Lena Lantz’s grave, right?”
“No! No, I wouldn’t do that. As you said, you shouldn’t construe things. That was just chance that Kevin and Mike stopped at her grave, because they knew nothing about Lena or Seth, either. I obviously hadn’t been here for her burial, so I was upset when I saw we were near her tombstone. I wanted them to move away, but I didn’t want to have to explain why, so I didn’t say anything.”
Studying her as she spoke, he nodded. She gasped as they reached Lena’s grave. Not only was the tombstone a mess but white paint outlined the shape of Kevin’s body on the grass. She noted he had fallen sideways over the lower part of Lena’s grave. Nearby, small yellow circles were sprayed around what looked to be blood spots.
“Tiffany’s blood and yours,” he said. “We had it tested. You’re type AB, if you ever need to know.”
Linc firmly took the elbow of her good arm to steady her. Each time he touched her, even briefly—but especially when he assessed her with that hard stare—she felt heat. No one but Seth had ever affected her that way.
Hannah took a good look at what was left of Lena’s tombstone, which, they’d said, had kept her from sustaining a much worse wound when the bullet ricocheted. The rectangular stone was deeply cracked, one corner shattered. One or more bullets had blasted away the word Lantz and her death date, so it read only Lena and her birth year.
“He— Seth, I mean,” she said, “is going to replace it when you let him, when you clear away the police tape.”
“So he said. That tombstone definitely saved your wrist, pins in it or not, and it may have saved your life. The shooter took Kevin down in one head shot, and I suspect was pretty skilled, so you and Tiffany were just plain lucky.”
“Just plain blessed,” she corrected him, then realized how Amish that sounded. “I’m grateful Mike and Liz weren’t hit at all. The shooter must have been interrupted or— I don’t know. I—I see you have a gun, though your jacket hides it a bit.”
He turned her toward him and looked her full in the face. “Affirmative—yes. You’re very observant, very smart, Hannah. But this small semiautomatic handgun in my hip holster—I try to especially keep it out of sight among your people—is a far cry from what someone shot you with. That was a high-velocity—that’s a high-speed—rifle, probably with a night-vision scope. We’ve retrieved and tested the bullets, lethal for hunting big game and, obviously, for a person. And I promise you I’m going to find out whether it was a random act, an anti-Amish or anti-goth hate crime, or whether it was some sort of hit with a specific target. Okay, now talk me through what happened when all of you settled here.”
She did her best, though she’d done the same when he’d interviewed her in the hospital. Was he looking for discrepancies in what she said? As she told him about Tiffany’s wound and screams, Kevin’s scarlet bloom of blood, he interrupted for the first time.
“So the two of them were sort of dancing around and pretending to dig at Lena Lantz’s grave with Tiffany’s closed parasol when they were shot?”
The dreadful scene she’d been reliving fled. Her head cleared. She simply nodded. Did he think Seth had seen them and been angry? She darted a look down the hill at her former fiancé. He was pacing, not looking up at them, but frustration and anger emanated from the tilt of his head, his hard strides and clenched fists. Yes, she thought, Seth as she once knew him was capable of passion, of sudden swerves from self-control. He might be Amish, but he was only human! She was surprised to realize that her time away from him had somewhat muted her anger toward him.
Afraid Linc would think she was somehow suspicious of Seth—and upset at how much she wanted to protect him—she dragged her gaze from Seth back to Linc’s gray-eyed, piercing stare. But he did not pursue what he must be thinking and surprised her by changing the subject.
“One more quick thing before we ask Seth to join us in this reenactment. Can you give me any idea of how long it was between when Tiffany and Kevin went down and Seth arrived to help? Think about the time frame of when you crawled to your purse to get your cell, made the call, talked to the 9-1-1 operator, then he appeared.”
“I—I don’t know. Time was … strange. Extended, I think. I was in pain, I saw all that blood on them, then on me—”
“Ten minutes? Five?” he probed.
“I’d say two minutes, max, until I made the call, but then don’t you have the rest of the timing from the 9-1-1 records?”
He blinked. Not, she realized, because he hadn’t thought of that, but because he hadn’t thought she would. She’d read his mind, hadn’t she?
“I’m not trying to protect Seth in this,” she insisted, even as she realized that was a lie. “He couldn’t have done the shooting up in those trees, with a gun that didn’t match your bullet tests—”
“Forensics,” he said, but she ignored him and plunged on.
“And then he didn’t have time to run around, down the hill and drive up in his buggy to help. Give that up, Special Agent Armstrong.”
“I said before, I admire your backbone, Hannah. You’re a fascinating blend of this world and the one you’ve lived in these past few years—my world. But my world includes solving crimes, and I do what I have to at any cost.”
“Then I’ll get Seth,” she said.
“No, I will. I want him to come over the fence, just where and how he did that night. If you don’t mind, lie on the ground as best you can recall where you were that night. Be right back.”
Her thoughts racing, Hannah sat, then lay where she was certain she had been hit. She felt cold all over and not just from the chill wind in the shadow of this hill. How had her safe Amish life changed so much that she was a new person now, an alien back where she’d been born?
Suddenly, she longed to see her old friend Sarah Kauffman, who had gone to the world, been shunned, but planned to wed the arson investigator who had solved the barn fires. Sarah had followed her heart, not only with Nate MacKenzie but by becoming an artist who painted scenes from Amish life—with faces on the people. But Sarah was living in Columbus.
This close to the earth, near the grass of Lena’s grave, Hannah could see that the edges of the replaced sod had not yet evened out or grown into the other grass. At funerals here, she’d seen the shaved-off sod the grave diggers had set aside so it could be replaced after they refilled the grave by hand. Had Linc and his investigators dug up the edges of the grass blanket over Lena’s grave, looking for bullets or digging for more blood spots?
“Okay, please vault the fence just like you said!” Linc’s loud voice nearby startled her, and she turned her head to see Seth, one hand on the fence with the yellow tape, clear it easily and land on his feet.
“Hannah, however it happened, I’m so glad you’ve come home!”
Later that afternoon, her first Amish caller was her close childhood friend Ella Lantz, Seth’s sister. Ella was a year younger than Seth and Hannah, the middle child in their family of five children. They shared a hug, and, as ever, Ella smelled wonderful.
Hannah had always thought Ella looked like an angel with her white-blond hair and pale blue eyes. As a girl, she had nearly drowned in the pond at the juncture of the three farms. Sarah and Hannah had saved her and it had bonded them all closer. But from that time on, Ella had changed. She’d buried deep her daredevil streak, become timid, even rigid and judgmental of those who didn’t toe the line—and that was Hannah and Sarah now, for sure.
But maybe, Hannah hoped, Ella had learned that people make mistakes that should not only be forgiven but forgotten. Naomi had told Hannah that Ella had recently broken up with her serious come-calling friend, Eli Detweiler, because he hadn’t given up alcohol after his rumspringa years.
“I brought you some lavender,” Ella said, and held out a basket of sachets and soaps which perfumed the air. On a large lot near the Lantz farmhouse, Ella grew and harvested the fragrant herb. Then in a little workshop Seth had built for her out the back of their family’s farm, she packaged her precious plants she sold locally. Each hand-lettered label read Lavender Plain Products, Homestead, Ohio.
“How thoughtful of you!” Hannah said, and inhaled deeply as Ella took a chair at the card table laid out with a half-finished family jigsaw puzzle of the Grand Canyon. “They smell delicious and look lovely,” she added, admiring the printed cotton packets that made each sachet look like a small quilt square.
“Some say the scent is good for the heart,” Ella said. “I mean, not to cure a damaged heart, like what happened to Lena, but to lift your mood. Oh, Hannah, it was awful that she just fell over like that in their kitchen with the baby there but Seth out on a job. Such a tragedy. But then, you’ve had one, too. And I … believe me, I remember how it feels to … to almost die.”
“I was sorry to hear about you and Eli parting, but at least it was before you got betrothed or married.”
“I just couldn’t take a chance on him, trust him not to drink,” she said, gripping her hands in her lap. Ella’s feelings and moods were always transparent. She looked instantly grieved. “Every time he said he was done with drinking, he wasn’t. He looked bleary-eyed and was always tired, too, cutting back his work hours. I could smell it on him day or night. I just— I could not trust him to be the father of my children. I guess all of us—you, Sarah and I—had disappointments with men. Though Sarah’s gone the wrong way with a worldly man after that mess with Jacob, I’ll find someone to build a life with here, I know I will!”
“Meanwhile, you have a sweet future!” Hannah said, forcing a smile and picking up a cotton-wrapped and ribboned bar of soap to inhale the scent. Ella didn’t make the soap at home but provided the dried leaves and flowers for it, then wrapped the bars herself.
“Both bed-and-breakfasts in town use my products now as well as the Amish gift shops and Mrs. Logan’s restaurant, so that gets me more business. I just came from Mrs. Stutzman’s B and B, and she said to tell you that if you want a job you could do one-handed, she needs a half-time housekeeper—dusting, laundry, ironing. She does the cooking and makes the beds. Her half-time girl just quit.”
“People have been so kind to offer jobs. They must know it’s hard for me to have come home like this.”
“I know it, too,” Ella said, and reached out to lightly grasp Hannah’s good wrist. “At the B and B, you wouldn’t have to face a lot of our people yet, since Amanda Stutzman and her husband are Mennonite and their guests are ausländers. Oh, and guess who just moved in there for a spell?”
“Not the FBI agent?”
“No. Can you see him with all those ruffled curtains and quilts and teatime? Sheriff Freeman’s wife—former wife, like the moderns say—is back in town. I met her there when I delivered the new sachets and soaps I arrange in each room. She’s pretty but wears a lot of makeup. She says she’s here to stay. I think she’s come home, like you.”
Hannah remembered how much Ella loved to gossip, almost as much as her best friend, Naomi. Ella was to be one of Naomi’s attendants, or sidesitters, in the coming wedding. Would that be hard for her to face since she’d broken up with Eli? But Hannah kept thinking about poor Ray-Lynn Logan. It had been pretty obvious from the sheriff’s visit to Hannah’s hospital room that he and Ray-Lynn were getting close, and months ago Sarah had told her the same.
“Ella, that job offer sounds good to tide me over, but I don’t know if I’ll be staying after the investigation of the shooting is finished.”
“Oh, but we want you to. Seth does, I can tell!”
“Now don’t you go playing matchmaker for us, or for Sheriff Freeman, either. But the fact that the former Mrs. Freeman is living at the Plain and Fancy means she’s a five-minute walk from Ray-Lynn’s house.”
“That’s right. But here’s the thing,” Ella plunged on, leaning forward and lowering her voice, although they were alone in the living room. “Lillian Freeman’s been living in Las Vegas!”
She’d said those words, Hannah thought, as if the woman had just come from the very gates of hell. “But that doesn’t mean she was boozing it up, gambling day and night or dancing in a chorus line,” Hannah protested.
“A chorus line? Did she try to be a singer, like you? No, she was a hostess in some fancy casino restaurant, I think.”
Hannah wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. She’d actually forgotten how much she’d learned in the outside world that she’d never known about here in the shelter of Home Valley.
Hannah knew the November sunset would be early, so late afternoon, when she heard Seth come into the house to wash up and get Marlena, she decided to slip outside. However comforting it was to be near her family again, she felt cooped up. She’d even helped, one-handed, with dusting, as if preparing for the job at Amanda Stutzman’s B and B she was considering taking. She had to do something other than sit around waiting for Linc to think of some new clue or lead.
Hannah had been racking her brain trying to come up with the who or why of the shooting. And she’d shed tears again, writing condolence letters to her goth friends’ families. Worst of all, if she let her thoughts drift a bit or woke up at night, she saw the shootings all over again in her head. Her doctor had told her she might have such spells, like those who’d had trauma in battle, a stress syndrome.
She swirled her cape around her shoulders, put a bonnet on—but couldn’t tie it with one hand—and went out into the dying day. The brisk breeze perked her up a bit, and she inhaled deeply. She needed to get her strength back, she told herself, so she walked back and forth along the side of the barn, admiring the view of gently rolling fields, now bare of crops but awaiting spring plantings. Partly screened by bare trees, the pond at the juncture of the three farms looked as flat gray as the sky. To the west, the newly repaired Kauffman barn with the bright quilt square Sarah had painted looked more distant than it really was as the sun sank lower and the hills threw deepening shadows.
Glancing northeast toward the Lantz farm, she admired Ella’s little workshop and Seth’s small house, neither of which had been there when she left home. She pressed her back against the sturdy barn built after the fire. Had she instinctively taken her walk here because she could see for miles? No high-velocity rifles with what Linc called night scopes could be out there now. Or was it because Seth had helped to build this barn, big and strong?
“You shouldn’t be out here in the open, Hannah.”
She jumped and her heartbeat kicked up at the voice behind her, as if her thoughts had summoned him.
She turned to face Seth with Marlena in his arms.
“Because I’m in the open for miles around, I feel safe. I refuse to be a prisoner.”
“I was up on a roof all afternoon. Someone else could be, too—on one of these roofs, hidden behind a tree, even hunkered down on the ground in camouflage hunting gear. You have no idea the range of some rifles today.”
A shiver snaked down her backbone and she pressed tighter to the barn. “I will not just hide. I’m fine, just fine!” Realizing she sounded strident, she stood straight and said in a calmer voice, “I’ve been waiting for a moment to thank you for all you did that night. I know my family has expressed their gratitude, but Tiffany and I might have died, too, without your help.”
“God’s will that I came along to help in time—and that it was you. Even through your friend’s screaming and your pain, I knew it was your voice. Talking, singing, even shouting, your voice has always been beautiful to me.”
She gaped at him, eyes wide, mouth open before she caught herself and, not trusting that voice, nodded. Marlena fidgeted in his arms and sneezed. He cleared his throat.
“That’s all I had to say,” she whispered.
“It means a lot to me. Can I talk to you a minute before I head home? But not out here, where Marlena might catch cold. Can we step into the barn? I have my buggy there.”
She was afraid of the rush of feelings that overwhelmed her near this man, memories, yes, but too strong a reaction to him even now. Distrust, dislike for what he’d done to her, but also raw need, far different from the curiosity she felt about Linc Armstrong. Not moving to follow him at first, she asked, “Do we really have anything but the shooting—which we’ve been over backward and forward with Linc Armstrong—to talk about?”
“I want to show you—you, not him—something I found stuck or caught in the widow with the slit screen late this afternoon. He didn’t climb a ladder to look at your window from the outside so I did.”
“Which means now your footprints are probably where you said they weren’t!”
“We’re both starting to think like him, aren’t we?”
“But what did you find?” she asked, following him around the corner of the barn, not that she wanted to feel even more alone with him, but she understood about Marlena. If she had a little girl like that, especially if she was rearing her alone, she’d be so overprotective that she’d be as uptight as Ella.
He went to his buggy, not the two-seat courting one Hannah was picturing. Of course he’d have a family-size one now. He put Marlena on the front seat, where she sat primly, while he reached in past her and brought out what looked to be a big chicken feather, until Hannah noted its strange black-brown markings in the light from the open barn doors.
“That was stuck in my bedroom window?”
He nodded. “So you couldn’t see it from inside, or almost from outside, either. Wedged lengthwise with the side of the quill and the outer edge of the feather holding it.”
“So, wedged there carefully, intentionally, by someone who managed to open the window itself at least a crack.”
“I’d say so. You can see I damaged it a little, pulling it out. If I wouldn’t have been nearly on top of it, I never would have seen it, either.”
“It’s a big one. From …”
“From an eagle, I think. A wing pinion.”
“An eagle? Like the American bald eagle?” she said, picturing the eagle with arrows in its talons on Linc’s FBI badge.
“I think they’re endangered and government-protected. But that kind of eagle is also sacred to Native Americans. I heard the eagle and the panther were special animals to the historic Indian tribe that once lived around here.”
Her good hand on her hip, she demanded, “Indian tribe? From long ago? You heard that where?”
“At your father’s request, my daad’s been reading up on Iroquois and Erie Indian history because of tribal rights disputes to some lands around here—some of our land. We’ve got to be prepared if there’s a lawsuit or more bad publicity. It’s all come to a boil since you’ve been gone. John Arrowroot, their local spokesman, is on a mission about getting Indian land back from people in this valley.”
“I remember him. He’s a retired lawyer, isn’t he? He’d always show up at our auctions or fundraisers, stalking around and looking grim. I used to be scared of him when I was little.”
“That’s him. He’s been a lot louder about it lately, giving interviews in the Cleveland and Columbus newspapers. He has an eagle feather like this one painted on the picture window of his house, like a talisman or a warning. I’ve only seen it once when I was hunting with my daad, and we wandered onto his isolated piece of land. I saw him last in the butcher shop outside of town, in an argument with Harlan Kenton, who owns the place.”
“I know where that is. Harlan’s the brother of Amanda Stutzman, who runs the Plain and Fancy B and B. Ella says she’s offered me a job, which I’m thinking of taking.”
“If you do, I’ll buggy you there and back, or if I’m working away, get someone else to. You shouldn’t be out alone.”
“As soon as Naomi’s married, she’s giving me my old horse and buggy back. By then, maybe all this will be over. By the way, the Plain and Fancy is where Sheriff Freeman’s ex-wife is staying.”
“Sheriff Freeman’s ex-wife is back in town? But the thing is, I’ve been trying to decide whether to get the sheriff or our mutual friend Linc in on this feather clue or not. I don’t want to falsely accuse Arrowroot or get him stirred up again over Indian rights to our land. But this feather says he needs a closer look.”
“That’s pretty flimsy evidence. Maybe we could talk to him about something else, just psych him out.”
“I like the sound of that ‘we,’ if it doesn’t include Agent Armstrong. But no, I don’t want you around Arrowroot. Listen. There’s more. That day in Harlan Kenton’s butcher shop, before their argument, I heard Arrowroot say the large mound—mound, not hill—with the Amish graveyard on it had once been holy land his people used for sacrifices.”
“Human sacrifices? Did they bury people there, too?”
“I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”
6
THE NEXT MORNING, SETH DROPPED MARLENA off at the Eshes and told Mrs. Esh he’d be back to continue reroofing in about an hour, but he didn’t tell her why. He’d decided to talk to John Arrowroot without tipping him off by questioning or accusing him about the feather, let alone about shooting people in the cemetery.
After Seth had questioned his daad last night about what he knew of Arrowroot’s Erie Indian tribe, he’d come up with a few facts that might point to him as a suspect. Which tribe Arrowroot claimed was a bit confusing as the Erie had supposedly been wiped out years ago by their enemy, the Iroquois. But many of the Seneca tribe were descended from Erie blood, as Arrowroot claimed to be.
The Erie had been farmers and hunters who once flourished in this area, living in small groups. That, Seth thought, sounded like his own people. But the tribe were fierce warriors, known for their skill with poisoned arrows.
So, Seth told himself, Arrowroot deserved watching, not only because he wanted Amish land returned to Seneca-Erie tribal members, but because he could have been the cemetery shooter, especially if that hill had once been sacred to his tribe. Maybe he’d been there for some special, secret ceremony and thought Amish or goth intruders were defiling it. If Seth picked up any proof, he’d tell the sheriff or Linc Armstrong. Right now, he didn’t need the FBI Goliath jumping in with both feet and stirring up this man against the Amish again. If Seth could prove Kevin Pryor’s killer was John Arrowroot, that would get him out of the way for good.
Seth buggied down the main street of Homestead, getting caught at the single traffic light. He’d seen the Dutch Farm Table Restaurant was busy already. Though he’d fixed oatmeal for Marlena and himself this morning, his stomach rumbled. No way he wanted her hooked on those sugary, boxed cereals just because they were easy to serve.
He turned down Fish Creek Road, passing the Rod ‘n’ Gun shop, which was attached to its owner’s one-floor house. The shop was run by Elaine Carson, a former U.S. army officer who bled, as she put it, “red, white and blue.” A big American flag flapped in front of her store with a shooting range out back. Linc had told Seth he’d asked to obtain her list of customers who’d purchased high-velocity rifles in the past two years, but since both Amish and English around here hunted in droves, he’d given up on that tactic.
Seth shook his head as he passed by. His people were grateful for the country that was their home, but too much patriotism spelled idolatry to them. Elaine Carson was way over the line on that, even though Amish kids loved the fireworks she shot off every Fourth of July. Elaine, he’d heard, thought the Amish, who didn’t vote or serve in the armed forces, were ungrateful to the U.S. of A., though she sure tolerated their business.
Seth turned Blaze onto Valley View Road several miles southeast of town and went up and down two hills until he reached the narrow, unpaved road that led to Arrowroot’s property, hidden in trees on a hill. That day he and his father had found themselves hunting near the man’s house, they’d gone up to the door and asked for permission to be on his property. It was a friendly, common question, since hunters often traveled from farm to farm with, “Mind if we hunt here a bit?” The answer was always “Sure, don’t mind a bit.”
“Yes, actually, I do mind,” Arrowroot had told them, standing in his front door and glaring through thick glasses that magnified his dark eyes. “You Amish have my people’s land. Isn’t that enough for you?”
“Sorry to bother you,” Daad had said, immediately backing off. “And sorry you’re bothered by our owning land in these parts.”
“These parts should be returned to their rightful owners. The U.S. government had no right to sell it to settlers, but there will be a day of reckoning.”
“I’m sure there will,” Daad had replied calmly. It was another of the countless lessons Seth had seen of his people’s pacifism, their turn-the-other-cheek philosophy in action. But he figured even then that the day of reckoning his father agreed on was Judgment Day for everyone, not the return of land to a historic tribe of Native Americans. Still, the Amish felt for any group that was persecuted by a government.
“Whoa, Blaze,” Seth said, and reined in. At least he’d recalled one other important thing about John Arrowroot that he was planning to use right now. The roof of his single-story, sprawling house needed new shingles. Seth needed the work—and, as Hannah put it, to psych out this man.
Seth wrapped the reins around a low tree limb and climbed down from the buggy. He saw someone glance out at him from behind a dark curtain in the front window, the one with the large, painted feather that looked identical to the one stuck in Hannah’s window. He hoped he hadn’t made a mistake to try to look into this on his own. But he wanted to help Linc Armstrong solve the shootings schnell—that is, fast—so he’d get out of here and leave the Amish—and Hannah—alone.
Ray-Lynn was relieved that Jack came in for breakfast with the FBI guy because then she didn’t have to spend time with the sheriff. Until he came to her to explain what was really going on between him and his ex-wife, she didn’t trust herself not to just bawl like a baby. Still, his eyes sought her as she bustled about the restaurant doing her best to keep busy away from the men’s booth. But when she could, with a swift, sideways glance, she watched him, too. At least Lily Freeman had not shown her face here.
Elaine Carson, who owned the Rod ‘n’ Gun store, came in, wearing her usual black jeans and leather jacket. The woman rode a motorcycle at times—noisy, darn thing—but Ray-Lynn could see her bright red pickup with the American eagle and stars-and-stripes flag decals parked out in front. Unlike most women, she sat at the counter.
“Hi, Ray-Lynn,” Elaine called out. “Got some pancakes and sausage on the griddle for a hardworking woman?”
“I recognize one when I see one. Right away.”
“Any more news about the shootings? Kinda miss that newspaper, despite who ran it. Oh, I see the powers-that-be over there, so I’ll ask them.”
Taking her freshly poured coffee with her, Elaine strode over to Jack’s booth. She was tall and angular with straight, short brown hair and no makeup. Ray-Lynn took the opportunity to seat an English couple in the next booth, but she didn’t have to strain to hear since Elaine seemed to have one level of volume, and that was loud. Ray-Lynn wondered if she was hard of hearing from her army days or working the shooting range, or if she’d never gotten over the decibel level for giving orders.
“Gentlemen—officers of the law,” she addressed the two men. “Sorry my customer list was a mile long, but you gotta understand the culture around here. I’m sure the sheriff has told you, Agent Armstrong. I mean, everyone hunts, Amish and English alike, right, Sheriff? Even kids. 22-caliber for small game like squirrels and coyotes, 12-gauge shotguns for deer, then the high-speed weapons, you name it.”
“We understand,” Linc Armstrong told her. “Just keep your ear to the ground, then, okay?”
“And my mouth closed, you mean,” she said and, with her balled fist, lightly hit his shoulder. He was dressed in a cargo camouflage outfit today. “But I will keep an eye out. They didn’t call me Eagle Eye in the old days for nothing. And, you know, Annie Oakley was an Ohioan, though I’m actually related to Kit Carson. Take care, then,” she concluded, and went back to her place at the counter.
Ray-Lynn quit her chitchat with the new couple, whom she suspected were outsiders here just to gawk or newspeople on the sly, and headed back to the cash register, only to have her cell phone play “Tara’s Theme” from Gone with the Wind. She answered it, stuck one finger in her other ear to cut the restaurant buzz and tried to not look at Jack when he glanced at her. Darn it, let him think it was some other man calling her.
“Ray-Lynn, it’s Sarah Kauffman, calling from Wooster. I’d love to see Hannah, but I know better than to try. How’s she doing?”
“Good, as far as I hear—mending physically, at least. Not sure about the rest of her.”
“I can imagine it’s hard for her to face what happened and to be home. I thought we’d have time to stop to see you, but we’re here looking for a house to buy or rent.”
“You’re moving to Wooster?”
“Nate and I are going to be married a week from Saturday, on the thirteenth at 2:00 p.m. It will be a small wedding in a chapel we just booked here in Wooster with a restaurant reception after. The northeast supervisor for the State Marshal’s Arson Investigation team has lung cancer, and Nate’s going to take his place earlier than we thought. We don’t want to be separated and—thanks to you—I can move my painting studio anywhere.”
“I’m looking at your latest and my favorite, the one of the kids playing eck ball back of the little schoolhouse. Got it hung right on the wall where folks come in, and I can tell your people stop and admire it, painted faces and all.”
“Good to hear. Maybe someday …” she said, but she choked up and her voice broke before she cleared her throat. “Listen, Ray-Lynn, I’m hoping you can take a message to Hannah from me, since no way I can get to see her now, and I’m hoping, once we move, you could come and bring her—maybe even for the wedding. I know Ella and my family won’t come.”
“Of course, I could bring whoever wants to attend! I’m so happy for both of you. Do you—do you want your family to know? I mean, word will get around …”
“Since I was Hannah’s link to her family when she was living away, I’m praying she’ll do the same for me. So here are the directions to the chapel for you, and what I want my family to know. I hope Hannah can tell them.”
Ray-Lynn reached for a pad and pen to take notes. As she did, she saw that Jack was ignoring Agent Armstrong and frowning at her. Maybe, she thought, that was because she’d been smiling at the good news over the phone, when he didn’t expect happiness from her right now. She forced a broad smile and nodded as if she’d been asked something delightful, then hunkered down to pay attention to Sarah.
“So,” John Arrowroot said as he opened his front door before Seth could knock, “the graveyard hero. To what do I owe this honor?”
“Not a hero in my mind, but I was glad I happened by, maybe scared the shooter off. I’m surprised you know who I am, since I’ve kept my face out of the news coverage.”
“I know who a lot of you are in the so-called Home Valley. My ancestors once called this land Eri’e Rique, ‘at the place of the panther.’ And you just happened by my remote location today, because …?”
“I recalled your roof could use reshingling, and I’m between big projects. Jobs are scarcer than usual for timber framers right now.”
“Ah, yes, the barn builder, the leader of the barn raisings.” The man’s taut mouth lifted in a little smirk. This close up, Seth saw his black hair, scraped back on his skull in a tight ponytail, was threaded with silver that matched his silver ring and a sort of eagle charm on a leather thong around his neck. He would guess the man’s age at sixty or sixty-five. He wore a white dress shirt with jeans, a wide, studded leather belt and Western leather-tooled boots. “Now, that would be different,” Arrowroot went on, “to have just one Amish man hanging over my head instead of all of you. I do get leaks in bad storms.”
“If you have a ladder, I can go up, measure and give you an estimate,” Seth said, trying to keep calm at the man’s subtle digs and goading tone. “I left my ladder where I’ve been working. You ever climb a ladder yourself to look at the roof’s condition?”
“Actually, I don’t like heights. You sure,” he said as he finally stepped outside, “you’re not here to spy on me?”
The man was clever, but Seth had known that. But clever enough to kill someone and escape without leaving a clue, at least at the scene of the crime?
“I intend to fix the roof, not drill holes in it and look through,” Seth said.
Arrowroot almost smiled. “I have no secrets, anyway. I’ve made it clear what my goals are.” He led Seth to the detached, single-car garage and lifted the door himself, though many moderns had a button that did that. “So, how did a man as young as you—what, mid-twenties?—get to be a master builder around here?”
“From the age of fourteen I worked with my mother’s father, Gideon Raber, who taught me about timber framing. He was also in charge of barn raisings, so I had a nine-year apprenticeship with him before he died. It ended up I knew more than anyone else who’d trained with him. But getting back to your obvious goals, why not just file a lawsuit, since you’re a lawyer?”
“The state government’s declined to meet with me so that I can pursue my land claims and the feds don’t recognize Indian tribes or lands in Ohio, so my lawyer’s brain says to go about this another way.”
Seth couldn’t resist saying, even as he hefted the ladder from the garage—only a tall stepladder, not an extension one, “You mean like do something dramatic to draw attention to your cause?”
“In a way. You think you can reach the roof with that?”
“Over on the slant of hill, yes. What do you mean, ‘in a way’?”
“You’ve heard of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ haven’t you? Let’s just stick to roofing. I appreciate your having the guts to come up here, but if you have the nerve to run into a graveyard where people have been shot, guess this is a piece of cake. You know, most of your people are polite but they treat me like a pariah, or at least a ghost they don’t even see.”
“My people love and need their land,” Seth said, noting numerous photos of what might be aerial shots of this area tacked to the back wall of the garage near a cluttered workbench. He wondered if there was a shot of the graveyard there, or the woodlot above it. If he could get a job here, he’d have time to check. So maybe the Lord had inspired him to come here for more than one reason.
Seth positioned the ladder, then began to climb. He didn’t know what a pariah was and he didn’t believe in ghosts. But he was starting to think John Arrowroot had a powerful motive, at any cost to himself or others, to shake things up by bringing in a lot of media coverage here. Linc had asked if maybe the Troyers, who lived on land abutting the hill above the graveyard, would take potshots at weird strangers to bring curious tourists in for their grain mill tours. Seth thought that was a crazy theory, but he didn’t trust John Arrowroot as far as he could throw his entire roof.
After the noon meal, Hannah went out in the new barn to familiarize herself with it. She’d been horrified that the barn of her childhood had burned, and she’d watched from a distance as the men raised this one, with Seth astride the very peak of it.
She stopped to pat her onetime horse Nettie’s muzzle and fuss over her. When she’d left, Naomi had inherited this horse and buggy. Now she realized she’d missed the sorrel mare with three white feet, missed the slower pace of riding in a buggy, when one had time to enjoy the passing scenery which didn’t blur by just like life could do.
Every now and then, Hannah peeked out the door or a window at Seth working hard on the roof. He was almost finished and then wouldn’t be around. Would he still leave little Marlena here during the day? Despite the fact she was the symbol of all she’d lost with Seth, the tot was adorable.
She heard a car and glanced out, wondering if Linc could be back. But Ray-Lynn Logan got out of a van and started for the house. Hannah recognized her not only by her distinctive vehicle but by her red hair. She was a real pretty woman with snappy brown eyes and a personality to match. Her Southern drawl was easy and comforting, like she could lull you into trusting anything she said.
“Ray-Lynn!” Hannah called and waved, ignoring the fact Seth stopped his work to peer down at them. “I just wanted to thank you for the oatmeal chocolate chip whoopie pies you sent to the hospital with the sheriff!”
Ray-Lynn turned away from the house and walked toward the barn with another bakery box in her hand. “Got more for y’all,” she said in her soft, melodic way, “but got to admit it’s a bit of a cover-up. Here,” she said, putting the box down on the family sled Daad had been repairing, then fumbling in her purse. “I wrote the information down in case I didn’t get to talk to you alone. Sarah’s going to marry Nate a week from Saturday in Wooster, and I’ll take you there for the service and reception if you want to go. I know how much it would mean to her—to you, too, I bet.”
“Oh!” was all Hannah could manage at first as she took the note from Ray-Lynn and held it tightly. Weddings! Weddings everywhere, English and Amish. And poor Ray-Lynn looked like she wanted to cry, as well.
“I’d love to be there for her,” Hannah said. “Thanks for this, Ray-Lynn. I’m sorry, I’ve decided not to take the job the sheriff said you offered me. I just don’t want to face so many people right now, be in such a public place, however warm and friendly your restaurant is. I think I’m going to take a part-time housekeeper job at Mrs. Stutzman’s B and B.”
Ray-Lynn sank onto a hay bale and pulled Hannah down beside her. “My motto is, when you’re all shook about the way things are going—with life, with losses, with love—just eat,” she said. She reached for the box she’d just given Hannah, opened it up and pulled out two whoopie pies. She gave one to Hannah. Ray-Lynn took a big bite of hers, then talked with her mouth half-full.
“Do me a big favor, Hannah. Keep an eye on one Lily Freeman at the B and B. See what she’s like, what she really wants around here.”
Hannah swallowed her mouthful of the cookie and wiped frosting off the side of her mouth. “I heard about her. Okay—for Sarah’s other best friend, who believed in her art and helped her follow her heart, I will.”
“And I’ll let you know if I hear anything at the restaurant about the shootings—” she took another big bite “—for you to tell the sheriff, because I’m not speaking to him.”
“Oh. Right. We can be allies in this.”
Ray-Lynn tapped the rest of her whoopie pie to Hannah’s as if they were clinking goblets or shaking hands. “I swear, however different our lives, we women have to stick together,” Ray-Lynn said, blinking back tears. “As for men, you can’t live with them, can’t live without them, whether they’re the Ashley Wilkes or the Rhett Butlers of the world.”
“The who?”
“Have I got a movie to share with you. You drop by sometime, since the B and B’s not far from my house. Listen, Hannah, I don’t mean to dump Seth Lantz and Jack Freeman in the same pot, but ding-dang, I think you and I have a lot in common.”
She pointed at the box of whoopie pies between them. “So, you want to split another one of these?”
7
AFTER RAY-LYNN LEFT, HANNAH, FEELING ON a sugar-and-chocolate high from the whoopie pies, climbed the ladder to the loft, one-handed. She sat on a bale of straw by the hay mow window to read the information Ray-Lynn had written down about Sarah’s wedding and reception.
Sarah and Nate were moving to Wooster! It was not far away, though in the next county. Hannah was soon to begin twice-a-week physical therapy on her wrist in Wooster, near the hospital. Yes, she needed that job at Amanda Stutzman’s B and B so she could hire what her people called taxi service, someone who would drive her not only to get physical therapy but the mental therapy of visiting Sarah.
Hannah shifted her position, looked out and realized, from this vantage point, she was almost as high as Seth. He stood now at the top of his extension ladder, evidently surveying his work on the roof. It all looked neatly done to her—and finished. He’d told the family at noon meal he had been hired to reroof John Arrowroot’s house and hoped to be able to talk some sense into him, but Hannah, maybe her daad, too, knew Seth intended more than that. She resisted the temptation to call to him, as if inviting him to join her here. If he still had memories of the way they used to kiss and hug in the old barn loft …
As he climbed down his ladder and went in the back door of their house, she heaved a huge sigh. Marlena’s delighted squeals sounded clear up here before the storm door closed behind him.
Hannah folded the note and stuck it in the top layer of her wrist bandage, then stood and peered out the four-sided, louvered cupola, which kept the barn cool in the summer and chilly right now. Of course, the vistas were much broader than the scenes she’d admired from below yesterday. She could see clear to the pond and beyond to the brow of the graveyard hill. She’d meant to ask Seth why the edge of the sod over Lena’s grave was so unkempt, but she was afraid it was something Linc did and she didn’t want the two men to argue. She couldn’t tell if the police tape had been removed or not because the fence itself looked as tiny as toothpicks from here.
She scanned a bit farther. The corn maze her male goth friends had been intrigued by that fateful night was partly visible over the next slant of the road. Several years ago, her father, as bishop, and the church elders had asked that its original name, Amish Corn Maze, be changed. It was run by two non-Amish brothers, George and Clint Meyers—red necks, Ray-Lynn had called them. She’d had the sheriff haul them out of her restaurant when they got into a fight with another patron a couple of years ago.
The Meyerses had refused to call their maze something else at first but had eventually renamed it Amish Country Corn Maze. Most English in the area admired and worked well with their Amish neighbors, but the maze owners still held a grudge over that. What had really annoyed the brothers was that the Amish boycotted the maze when they filled it with Halloween horror tableaus—witches, goblins, vampires, skeletons and fake bloody, dead bodies—so near the cemetery.
Hannah was surprised the maze still stood this late in the fall. Usually, they cut it down after harvest and Halloween, because the stalks were pretty ragged by then, and in colder weather, interest waned and profits dropped. A puzzle of paths, like life, her daad had called it once. Suddenly, she recalled something else that hit her like a fist.
She’d never mentioned to Linc or anyone else that the goths had made a brief maze visit. She’d been so focused on what happened at the cemetery and after.
She began to pace, ducking her head when the roof slanted inward. Could the Meyers brothers have heard the commotion Kevin and Mike made as they tore through the maze long after it closed? The Meyers house was just behind the maze. Could the brothers have been angry and grabbed a rifle and climbed that hill when her friends moved on to the cemetery? She remembered how upset she’d been when Linc had first suggested that someone might have driven a buggy or walked to the site to shoot at them, but it was just down the road from where the brothers lived.
She squinted through the louvers at the distant maze again. She could imagine its angular twists and turns and dead ends. It was a good thing she remembered the cell phone number Linc had told her to call if she ever thought of anything else, because she was going to walk to the phone shanty down the road and call him right away. She would insist he return her cell phone, too. He’d said he wanted to have it checked for any strange or suspicious calls she might have received or even background noise it might have picked up during her 9-1-1 call.
By the time Hannah carefully climbed down the ladder and went outside, her concern about Linc and Seth arguing had come home to roost. At least she wouldn’t have to phone Linc, because here he was, jawing at Seth just outside the back door of the Esh farmhouse.
“You’re withholding evidence with tricks like that!” Linc accused, pointing at Seth.
Hannah stopped on the other side of his car. She didn’t want to get in the middle of this, but they were talking loudly enough that she wasn’t exactly eavesdropping. It didn’t take long for her to figure out what the topic was.
“So what if I got a job reroofing at Arrowroot’s? It’s what I do between big projects. And if I learn something or get something out of him, fine.”
“But why didn’t you—or the bishop or Hannah—tell me about this guy wanting the Amish out of here? The sheriff thought of it and went to see him and guess what—Seth Lantz had already come calling. And now you’re saying that cemetery was sacred to his people? Yeah, you’re obstructing an official murder investigation.”
“It’s not evidence yet, just facts. It’s enough that the sheriff tipped him off he’s being watched. And he’s hardly going to admit anything if you storm over there to interview him.”
“The FBI has assisted western tribes with tracking looted items and ancestors’ bones from cemeteries in our art theft program, so I could have used that to get him talking, built a bridge. But now that you’ve horned in, you’re just going to have to report to me—and don’t screw it up!”
“You mean like you did when you didn’t closely check the exterior of Hannah’s window? I did and found an eagle feather stuck half under the sill,” Seth told him, not giving ground. Neither man had retreated but stood just a few feet apart. “And I knew that was Arrowroot’s symbol, his talisman.”
“And, once again, didn’t tell me. But if he’s the shooter, why would he want to plant that to draw attention to himself?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. He hardly made his cause a secret lately. The thing is, you could have looked up there, but you didn’t,” Seth repeated, pointing up toward Hannah’s window. His voice was strong, like Linc’s, getting louder. Although the Amish were soft-spoken, he was more than holding his own.
“And here’s what really scares me,” Seth added, finally lowering his voice so she could barely hear him. “Did Arrowroot, or whoever wanted to make it look like he’d been outside Hannah’s window, only want to leave that feather? Or did he really want inside that window to hurt her but couldn’t raise it? And how did he know which was her window?”
“All right, all right, I’m impressed with your thinking it all through,” Linc said, holding up both hands as if he were under arrest. “I’ve considered she might still be a target, too, but see no evidence of that so far, and this is my investigation. Listen. Anything fishy you find out from Arrowroot, you let me know. You got that?”
“He already asked me if I was there to spy.”
For some reason, suddenly, as if he’d sensed that she was spying, Seth glanced over at her and Linc turned his head.
“Evidently, you heard us,” Linc said, walking closer. “Are you in on this?”
“He showed me the feather.”
“Well, confession time all around. I thought you said you’d call me if anything else came up, Hannah.”
“Maybe now you’ll give me my cell phone back. I was just about to call you, but not about John Arrowroot. I thought of something else that probably doesn’t mean anything, just a coincidence, but—”
“There are no coincidences in something like this,” he said, taking her arm and turning her away from Seth. “Get in the car and tell me,” he told her, and opened his front passenger’s side door to practically push her in.
As Linc stalked around the front of the car, got in and slammed the driver’s side door, Hannah was afraid to look at Seth. But he just stalked back into the house and that door closed, too.
Just when Ray-Lynn was starting to think that at least Lillian Freeman had a shred of decency not to come into the restaurant, she found the woman standing in the driveway of her house when she pulled in after closing up that evening. In the dark, she actually could have hit the woman with her van. God forgive her, she was tempted.
“What are you doing here?” Ray-Lynn asked, rolling down her window.
“I’m at a disadvantage, since you evidently recognize me,” Lillian countered. “I just wanted to say a friendly hello. I mean, no bad feelings, okay?”
Although her blond hair was perfectly styled and her makeup intact, including fake eyelashes, the woman looked like she was out jogging—running shoes, sharp-looking gray workout pants and matching jacket with some sweat marks across her chest. Ray-Lynn almost wondered if she’d caught her at something, like a prank or even worse. She killed her headlights and motor, then got out to face her unwanted guest.
“No bad feelings,” Ray-Lynn lied as best she could. “No feelings at all.”
“I—I heard you and Jack had—have something going. I mean, he mentioned you.”
Ray-Lynn bit her lower lip so she wouldn’t say what she was thinking about Jack. Mentioned her? How nice! Or was this woman trying to get her even more angry with Jack, to drive a bigger wedge between them?
“Since it’s a small town and all,” Lillian went on, “I figure we’d cross paths and better get the worst over.”
“If this is the worst, that would be great. Will you be staying long? I’d heard somewhere you were fed up with small-town life—and your ex-husband, for that matter.”
“Live and learn,” she said with a little shrug and her hands on her hips. “And please, call me Lily. I’m back, maybe for good.”
Or for bad, Ray-Lynn thought, gripping her car keys so hard they bit into the palm of her hand. Surely this woman, however much nerve she had, wasn’t going to ask for her old job back at the restaurant. And, as she suddenly turned tail and jogged away with a jerky little wave, Ray-Lynn had the worst feeling she wasn’t going to keep up this polite facade to ask Ray-Lynn to give up Jack, either. Oh, no, she was just going to try to take him.
“You okay about this?” Linc asked Hannah as he stopped his car where Kevin had parked his along the road by the maze the night of the shootings. They’d planned this all out, and he’d explained everything to her parents, but she still felt shaky about it.
It was even a similar night, Hannah thought as she glanced out the windshield, with the moon mostly hidden by clumps of clouds. Just as when she’d been with her friends, she eyed the big maze sign with its rules: No Smoking! Stay on the Paths! Hold Kids by the Hand! Do Not Touch Displays! Enjoy Half Mile of Scary Fun!
“Yes. I said I wanted to help and I do,” she told Linc. “I admit it wouldn’t be the same in broad daylight. Sorry I didn’t think to tell you sooner, but our quick stop here that night—it just slipped my mind at first.”
“I understand. I cleared it with the Meyers brothers this afternoon, played up that you didn’t approve of Kevin and Mike running through here and that you said they’d have to pay. George and Clint said they’d stay in the house so we could replicate the trespassing. They seemed pretty calm about it, said it’s happened before that people ran through without paying and tampered with the displays or the maze itself. The only thing they said I could slightly construe to be self-implicating was that they don’t want people to make their own paths because it ‘riles’ them. ‘We laid it out and no crashing through our corn barriers!’”
She had to smile at Linc’s mimicking of the brothers. “They’re not the usual type of kind English neighbors around here,” she explained. “But if they’re guilty of the shootings, anything they say isn’t to be trusted—such as they’ll stay put in their house tonight.”
“In my book they’re a step down from rednecks, like you said Ray-Lynn called them. But that type doesn’t want the FBI breathing down those red necks, believe me. They’ll stay put tonight. Besides, they’re entertaining a lady.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Yeah, well, the lady’s their momma from the other side of town. It’s her birthday. They got a cake and all. Listen, Hannah,” he added, his voice suddenly much more serious. He turned even more toward her and reached across her to firmly grasp her right upper arm. “I know you’re not big on this reenactment tactic, but it may help. You may remember even more.”
“But I barely went into the maze that night, just a little ways to yell at them to come out. I went in the entrance and took one turn and it seemed so dark. By the time I started walking back toward the car, they came bursting out through the maze wall.”
“Anything else you recall, just let me know, honey.”
Honey? It was no doubt a slip of the tongue. He’s probably meant to say Hannah. But he still held her arm, stroking it with his thumb as if to calm her, but it didn’t. It had the opposite effect.
“All right, let’s go,” she said, and pulled away to fumble with her door handle, which was still locked until he clicked something so she could open it. The big print sign with the maze rules—Stay on the Paths!—was knocking against something in the wind. It scared her when Linc drew his gun, though he just held it down at his side. In his other hand he held a sturdy flashlight with a bright beam. That made her feel a bit better, as had their earlier heart-to-heart talk today.
Trying to figure him out as a person, not just as an investigator, she’d asked him if he had a family.
“Sure—two brothers who live out near Denver, one of them a police chief. I have nieces and nephews galore. But married with kids? No. Came close, but it wouldn’t have worked out, anyway. Sometime I work 24/7, seven days a week, then can leave on a moment’s notice and be gone for days, like this assignment. Since Quantico—that’s our training site in Virginia—I’ve been busy climbing the Bureau’s ladder—that’s another name for the FBI. My college degree was in finance, but white-collar crimes bored me stiff.”
“So now you’re in a group that looks into murders?”
“Right, violent crimes. Amish country is the last place I thought that would ever take me. If I make it to retirement age at fifty, I don’t know if I could take a place this peaceful.”
“Age fifty? But that’s so young to retire.”
“Only twelve years away, but I’ll find something else to do. Maybe help build barns,” he’d said with a chuckle, though she couldn’t see what was funny about that. And she thought someone that busy could still be lonely, but she didn’t say so yet. Right now, as they approached the maze, that gun was making her feel more jumpy than safe.
“You sure you need the gun?” she asked as her courage wavered again.
“Just a precaution, since I can’t see around the next corner. So how scary are the displays in here?”
“I came through once with Seth in our rumspringa years, though we weren’t supposed to because the bishop—my father—didn’t approve of this place with its witches and fake dead bodies. It’s not like things jump at you, at least not back then. They’re mostly stuffed, but some look real, even though most folks come through in the daylight, unless you make special arrangements with the Meyerses for a group after dark and then they watch you like a hawk.”
“Yeah? Then I’ll bet they would have been upset at unannounced night visitors, especially weird-looking ones making noise.”
Despite fitful moonlight and Linc’s flashlight beam, it was instantly darker inside the maze. The dry cornstalks rustled and seemed to press in on them. Shadows leaped from everywhere.
“Okay, so the guys probably turned to the right here,” he said, darting his beam into the blackness.
“I’m not sure, but they did eventually emerge from the right side of the maze, over this way. But they were inside here long enough that they could have gotten a lot farther than this.”
“The Meyers brothers must know this labyrinth in their sleep. They could have been in here, nearby, and Kevin and Mike wouldn’t even have known it.”
Hannah gasped when they walked through fake, suspended cobwebs—yarn?—around the next turn, but Linc just shoved them away with the flashlight. The beam bounced across his face. It almost made his features look like a fright mask she’d seen uptown in the drugstore near Halloween. While Hannah hung back a bit, Linc peered around another corner. It was all she could do to keep from taking his arm, clinging to him.
“Don’t look here,” he said, stepping back almost into her. “It’s a gross ghoul or zombie in an open coffin. Tell you what, let’s do this backward since you do know where they emerged from. They should hand out maps of these paths.”
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Karen Harper
In the shadows of a graveyard, a shot rings out…Hannah Esh fled the Home Valley Amish community with a broken heart, throwing herself into her worldly dreams of a singing career instead. But as much as she tries to run from her past, something keeps pulling her back. On a whim, she brings four worldly friends to the Amish graveyard near her family’s home for a midnight party on Halloween.But when shots are fired and one of her friends is killed, Hannah is pulled back into the world of her past. The investigation into the shooting uncovers deep-buried secrets that shock the peaceful Amish village to its core. Determined to prove her value to the community she left behind, Hannah attempts to bridge two cultures, working closely with both handsome, arrogant FBI agent Linc Armstrong and her former betrothed, Seth Lantz, who is now widowed with a young daughter.Caught between Seth and Linc, between old and new, Amish and worldly, Hannah must chose her future. Unless a killer, bent on secrecy, chooses it for her."Harper, a master of suspense, keeps readers guessing about crime and love until the very end." –Booklist starred review on Fall From Pride“Danger and romance find their way into Ohio Amish country…lively and endearing.”—Publishers Weekly on Fall From Pride
Return To Grace
Karen Harper
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
For all the friends and family
who love Ohio Amish country, especially to Don
for all the great trips there.
1
October 31, 2010
HANNAH ESH HAD SPENT TIME IN THIS AMISH graveyard but never to host a party. She would have given anything not to be here now, especially with her four goth friends, who didn’t even have to dress for Halloween to look weird. But she should talk, because she’d been one of them for nearly three years. Yet more than ever she wanted to go home, and home was the farmhouse just across two fields from here.
“Awesome!” Liz Bartoli, her roommate, said with a shudder as she saw how dark it was without car or neon city lights. There weren’t even electric lights from the nearby Amish properties. “Maybe after we have a bash here, we can all go through that corn maze down the road. An amazing maize maze,” she added with a snorted giggle. “It wasn’t fair of you guys to run through it without us.”
“Kevin and Mike have already seen that. Besides,” Hannah said, “the sign said it’s closed after five and you have to make special arrangements with the owners to go in there after dark.” She’d been upset when Kevin had driven right up to the entry of the corn maze. Then he and Mike had gotten out to tear a ways into it—and come crashing back through one wall of it when they got lost. “And each of us would have to leave a donation,” Hannah added as she opened the unlocked, squeaky gate in the wooden fence surrounding the hillside acre of graves and grass.
“Listen to you!” Tiffany Miles, who worked with Hannah at the recording studio, scolded as she got a blanket out of the trunk. “You can take the Amish girl out of the country, but you can’t take the Amish out of the girl. Rules and regs out the wazoo!”
Kevin Pryor, Tiffany’s guy, found that really funny as he and Mike Swanson, Liz’s friend, hauled the cooler from the trunk of Kevin’s black car. But Hannah wasn’t laughing. Ever since her family’s barn had burned last spring, she’d been more than homesick. She missed her folks, even her daad, the local bishop she’d had a huge falling-out with. She longed to see others, too, but she couldn’t think of that now. Somewhere she’d heard the expression “You can’t go home again,” and it scared her to death that it might be true.
Oh, why had she let her friends talk her into this tonight? Worse, Halloween fell on the Sabbath this year, and that bothered her, too. She should have just given them directions but she figured she’d better keep an eye on them. Since she’d recently broken up with her boyfriend, she’d tried to get out of coming along, but they’d insisted they could cheer her up. Yet being back here, all she wanted to do was cry.
“Perfect place,” Mike said with a tip of his velvet top hat, “for a booze and boos party. Boo! We goths have finally gone ghosting!”
“There are no ghosts here,” Hannah insisted, feeling defensive as they passed her grandparents’ simple tombstones. “Everyone buried here is at peace.” But the truth was she felt haunted by all she’d loved and left behind.
Mike cranked up the volume on his MP3 player. Deathrock music spewed out, heavy drums and synthesizers to a tribal beat, pulsing but sad, so different from the music Hannah had in her head of singing a country song or a hymn, her own voice blending with Seth’s, now as lost to her as all the Amish.
Suddenly, she wanted to strip off the heavy, draped chain necklaces she wore, the fishnet stockings under the ankle-length, purple ruffled skirt and black velvet jacket. To wash off her heavy eye shadow and black lipstick, to hide her spiky, red-dyed hair under a black bonnet.
The guys plunked their stuff down pretty much in the middle of the graveyard before she read the name on the closest tombstone. Oh, no! Not Lena Lantz’s grave, but it was too late to make them move and no way was she going to explain why. Lena had died almost a year ago, so Hannah had not been here then and had only heard indirectly about the tragedy. It was so hard to believe she’d been away from the Home Valley for nearly three years.
Kevin passed around wineglasses and poured. Clumps of clouds hid the moon, but he pretended to howl at it. They clinked glasses and drank the bloodred wine.
“Vampires got nothing on us tonight,” Mike teased, and pretended to bite Liz on the neck while she screamed and giggled. Tiffany got to her feet, twirling the parasol she always carried, even after dark—what an attention-getter, as if goths needed that. She did a jerky dance around the low, matching stone markers with only the deceased’s name, birth and death dates.
“Stop that. Not funny!” Hannah protested when Tiffany pretended to be digging up Lena’s grave with the closed parasol as a shovel. Kevin got up to cavort with her. Suddenly, it was too much. Hannah pictured herself standing nearby with her family and friends when they buried her grandparents … and here lay a young mother, even though she was the woman Seth dumped her for. Hannah hated herself for bringing her friends here where they didn’t belong—and neither did she.
She stood and yanked the parasol out of Tiffany’s hands and shoved her back from Lena’s grave. Then, ashamed that she’d used violence, she turned her back on her friends as tears spilled down her cheeks. Hands on her hips, lifting her gaze up the hill, she stared at the dark woodlot, trying to get control of herself. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills. From whence comes my help? The words ran through her head.
“Chill out, Hannah!” Kevin protested. “We’re just kidding around.”
“Sorry, Tiff,” Hannah told her friend, turning back to face them, “but please don’t even pretend to do that—disturb the dead. We—we shouldn’t be here.”
Hannah sat back down and took a big swig of their bitter wine—another mistake, for she soon felt sick to her stomach and her very soul. She flopped back on the grass, wondering if she was going to throw up, wishing again they were not so near Lena Lantz’s grave as her four friends whispered and stared at her.
Then … Was that sound a clap of thunder? No, there was no storm. A shot?
The music—the voices—another sharp sound! Tiffany flew back, fell at Hannah’s feet, holding her shoulder, screaming. Everything happened at once. Bang, bang! The gravestone Hannah had been lying near splintered, exploded, peppering her with stone shards. Kevin shouted, “Gun! Someone’s got a g—” before he threw himself back flat on the ground so he wouldn’t be hit. No, he was hit, right in his forehead, where blood bloomed. Tiffany kept screaming as she lay flat on the ground, and Liz and Mike cowered.
On and on went the beat of the music and a new staccato of shots. Ignoring a sharp pain in her wrist, Hannah belly-crawled for her black macramé bag a few feet away. Cell phone. Get help. Tiffany hurt. Kevin staring at the sky. So dark. Loud blackness.
She found her phone, punched in 9-1-1, thinking the shooter would come closer, but no more shots. Pulse pounding. In shock? Still alive, still moving, thinking. Terrified but energized. Her own voice frenzied, answering the calm questions on her phone. “Yes, that’s what I said. Some people have been shot at—shot … Yes, with a gun! … The Oakridge Road Amish graveyard northwest of Homestead. Send help quick!”
It was only then she saw the left sleeve of her velvet jacket was torn and wet and that her wrist was ripped open and slick with blood.
Seth Lantz couldn’t believe someone was hunting after dark—or had a car misfired … more than once? It was rolling country here; maybe a car would come roaring over the next hill. No, a woman was screaming. A hunting accident? Maybe Englische kids were playing some sick Halloween prank on the Amish because they ignored this worldly holiday. It was the Sabbath, and he wouldn’t even have been hunting today if it didn’t help to keep meat on the table. In this far-reaching recession, big building jobs were hard to come by, and he’d been doing pickup repair work lately.
He reined in his horse as he approached the fenced-in graveyard on Oakridge. His mare, Blaze, tossed her head, upset to be stopped in the middle of nowhere while heading home. That screaming and loud noise: it was from the graveyard.
He giddyupped Blaze to the gate and saw a black car parked there, though this was an all-Amish graahof. His young wife was buried here, as were his grandparents, including his dear grossdaadi Gideon, who had taught him to build barns. He threw Blaze’s reins over a hitching post and, hunched low, went around the outside of the fence instead of through the gate.
Some sort of loud-beat music thudded on. Amid other voices, the woman’s screams had turned to gasping sobs. He put one hand on the wooden fence and vaulted it sideways. No place to really hide in here, no tall monuments, trees or bushes like in English cemeteries, but at least the darkness hid him.
Then, despite the noise, he picked out a voice he thought he knew, the one that sometimes still danced through his dreams. If it was Hannah Esh, who was she talking to in a one-way conversation?
“Yes, in the head. He’s not moving, not breathing…. Pulse. I—I’m not sure…. Two others wounded—losing blood, a lot…. Her shoulder and my wrist…. Yes, just visiting…. I—yes, I said my name is Hannah Esh, and I used to live near here. I’m dizzy—faint…. Yes, thank you, please hurry because Kevin might be dead….”
Seth rose to his full height and strode forward, nearly tripping over a prone body. A scarlet cape was splayed out under him, matching the blood that covered his face and white, ruffled shirt. He saw one woman, her arm and chest soaked in blood—a woman with dark-lined eyes. A horror movie he’d seen once in his rumspringa days darted through his mind: ghouls robbing graves and feeding on corpses.
He saw another woman sobbing, bent over on the ground. And then the one he sought, though he hardly recognized her, hadn’t seen her for more than three years, had only heard what she’d done to herself after what he’d done to her.
“Hannah,” he choked out, “it’s Seth. Are you hurt?”
Tears streaming black lines down her ravaged face, the woman who had once been the love of his life looked up at him. “Seth? Sorry. I—we—I called for help. He’s dead, I think, and I just want to die from pain and shame.”
She looked like something from the depths of hell, as he bent to rip the purple velvet ruffles off the bottom of her long skirt. Using his pocket knife to cut the material, he made a tourniquet for her arm and wrapped her bleeding wrist. He made a pressure pack for the other girl’s shoulder and told the unharmed girl to keep her hand on it, even though it hurt the one who had been shot. He put two fingers to the blood-slick side of the young man’s neck, then flipped up the edge of the blanket over the lifeless body.
Striding back toward the huddled group, he asked the man who had not been shot, “What happened here? Did one of you do this?”
That man’s eyes were wide, his face expressionless. He, too, wore dark-eyed makeup and was dressed fancy, old-fashioned. After a moment, as if it took time for the question to sink in, the man shook his head. “From out there,” he said, pointing up the slant of hill toward the back of the graveyard. “From the dark.”
“Turn that music off,” Seth said. Looking dazed, the man fumbled with the MP3 player, and silence finally descended. Seth hurried up the hill, ran the entire fence line, seeing no one, though someone could be hiding, watching in the woods higher up. It made the hair on the back of his neck prickle.
He heard distant sirens and went back to hold the blood-soaked velvet to Hannah’s wrist. “Why are you all here? What in the world …?” he started to ask, then bit off the rest when he saw that Hannah lay almost on his wife’s grave and that her marker had been blasted to bits.
Hannah’s pain got worse, worse. Cold waves, then sizzling hot in her wrist, hand, arm. Twirling now, floating. Seth could not really be here. Had her thoughts summoned him? Had he come to be with Lena? His handsome face sported a blond beard now. Well, of course it did … married man, even if widowed. And with a child, a girl, Lena’s child, must be two years old now, named Marlena. How it had hurt to hear all that, but she’d asked her friend Sarah to keep her informed, anyway.
What in the world? Seth’s words kept revolving through Hannah’s head. She had gone to the world, left her people. Seth’s fault? Lena’s? Her own? Because of the terrible argument she’d had with her father? Forgive Seth? She could not. She’d jumped the fence, left the Plain People, tried to have a singing career, tried to fit in, but really didn’t.
Bright blinking lights, a siren that went silent. People to help, medics. A little beam of light in each eye. Voices, words flying by she tried to grab. Seth’s voice, then these strangers’ words.
“… Can’t transport him … deceased … bled out. Bullet to the head. Crime scene. Sheriff Freeman should be here soon. He can call the coroner.”
“Wooster, E.R., we’re going to transport two females with gunshot wounds, shoulder, wrist … starting IVs … sending vitals …”
“Did you see what happened here, Mr. Lantz?”
Muffled words in and out of her head …
Lifted onto a gurney, carried, made the pain worse. IV in her arm, wrist bandaged. Two emergency vehicles, bloodred lights piercing the night, but so bright inside where they lifted her, slid her in. The sound of a buggy, a single horse’s hoofbeats coming fast, a voice she knew. Daad! Mamm, too! Was she dreaming?
“We saw the blinking lights from our house. Did a car hit a buggy? Can we help?” her father asked in English.
In their German dialect, her mother said, “Seth, Naomi’s with Marlena, so don’t you worry for that. Ach, what happened here?”
Before Hannah could hear an answer, with great difficulty, she lifted her head to look out past her feet. If she was going to die, to bleed out or never be allowed back here again, she was going to get a glimpse of her parents.
“Bishop Esh,” Seth was saying, “Hannah was here with worldly friends. She’s been hurt—shot, and she’s inside that one, right there.”
Her mother peered into the E.R. vehicle. It had been so long since Hannah had looked into her pale blue eyes. More wrinkles than Hannah remembered. Mamm looked grieved. Grieved for her.
“Oh, Mamm,” Hannah got out before bursting into tears.
Her father, white beard, intense stare, squinted into the brightness at her, and choked out his childhood nickname for her. “Hanni!”
Mamm climbed right up, came in and bent over her, holding her other hand. “I’m going with her,” she called out to Daad with Seth standing so tall behind him, though Hannah could barely make out their silhouettes in this brightness. “You tell Naomi to take care of things, Joseph.”
“Naomi,” Hannah heard herself repeat her younger sister’s name. “How is … Naomi?”
“Planning her wedding to Joshua Troyer in two weeks,” Mamm said, close to her ear. “You can help her with things when you come home and let that painted scarlet hair grow out to your real blond.” She stroked Hannah’s forehead, brushing her gel-spiked hair back. With her unhurt hand, before she remembered it was tethered by IVs, Hannah seized her mother’s wrist and held tight. If she did die, she thought as she began to slip away, she could at least go grateful: she’d seen Seth and he had helped her; Mamm and Daad at least still claimed her; and sweet Naomi was going to be married … going to be married.
Someone slammed the door and her thoughts went black.
2
HANNAH SWAM INTO THE LIGHT, THEN PLUNGED to darkness again, thinking, Naomi’s going to be married, going to be married.
Hannah had been certain she was going to be married, too. Seth Lantz was the only man she had ever loved. They’d been scholars together at the one-room schoolhouse. He had been her come-calling friend for years. They’d survived their rebellious rumspringa years and had planned to be baptized into the church at the same time. Whether they sang duets of the old hymns or “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” their voices blended beautifully, and their lives would, too. Hannah’s best running-around friends, Sarah and Ella, knew she and Seth were privately promised to each other. And then … and then …
She had been certain Seth was going to propose to her that sweet spring evening at the pond. He was so nervous, the big six-footer, one of the tallest men in the Home Valley. One of the handsomest, too, with his blond hair and sky-blue eyes, his square chin. Then came the words that had turned her well-planned life upside down.
“Hannah, I—I don’t know how it happened. I mean, I know how but not why,” he’d faltered. “I realize you and I have been waiting for each other—waiting to join the church, to bed together, to build a life, start a family, but I … It only happened once, but—I hope you and the Lord and the brethren can forgive me—but Lena Miller’s going to have my child. She’s sure—and I’m going to have to … to marry her.”
She had just gaped at him. The words didn’t register at first, but his stark, stunned expression did. She’d wanted to drown herself in the pond—she wanted to drown him!
“I—I will always love you,” he’d stammered, “and I hope you can forgive me….”
She had become so hysterical she was never certain what she’d said to him that night. She’d hit him, too, pounded on his big, broad shoulders when violence was not their way. But this was brutality. He might as well have beaten or killed her. Running back home across the fields, past the Kauffman farm to her own, blinded by tears of pain and fury, she’d wished the fresh-plowed earth would simply swallow her. Then that argument with her father, the bishop, no less.
“No, I can’t forgive him—never will!” she’d shouted. “Even if I could forgive, I could never forget! Don’t tell me I have to accept that and go on, see them together, see their children over the years, Lena in his house, in his buggy—poor Hannah, the castoff. He’s the one who should be sent away, but I’m the one who’s going! I’m going to sing for a career, I don’t care if you say I can’t. At least I won’t be shunned, because I’ve never joined the church, never been baptized, never been betrayed like this, either. I don’t care if both of them admit their sin before the church or the entire world, because I won’t be there. I won’t be anywhere around here!”
Her mother’s pleading, her sister’s tears, nothing stopped her. In her deepest, darkest dreams, she could still hear her father’s calm voice calling after her as she charged up the stairs to pack. “Hannah! Hannah Esh, you come back here!”
“Hannah. Hannah,” a voice called now, pulling her from heavy, sodden sleep. With great difficulty, Hannah slitted one eye open. Her mother, wearing a black bonnet and cape, was sitting by her bed. A hospital room. Hannah saw she was tied to tubes and monitors.
Her mother stood and leaned close over her, putting a warm palm on Hannah’s cheek. She spoke in their German dialect. “I thought you were waking up, dear girl. You lost a lot of blood, but they operated to patch you up and put some metal pins in your wrist. They say with physical therapy, you’ll recover most of the use of your hand, but it will take months. At least it’s your left one and not your right. I was praying you’d come back to us, back to life and come home to your family now. The police, even a government FBI man, are going to find out who shot at you and—and your friends. I’ll stay with you, stay right here in your room, and then you come home with me, oh, ya.”
Hannah tried to say, “Danki, Mamm,” but her throat felt raw, and nothing came out. What a mess she’d made of things. It all came back in a rush: Kevin dead, Tiffany and her shot while they were defiling the graveyard with their boos and booze. She’d lived through it, but whatever life she’d once had among her Amish family and former friends was surely dead, too.
Hannah floated in and out of strange sleep—pain pills, that was causing her problems, she told herself. When her thoughts settled, she wished she could take medicine to mute her mental pain, as well.
Once Daad was even here. They didn’t talk, even though they had so much to say. He mostly paced the floor, frowning, muttering to himself, even hitting his forehead with his hand now and then, as if he was blaming himself for the state she was in. But he’d also lifted a glass of water to her lips, and the strangest scrap of scripture had popped into her head: If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in so doing you will heap coals of fire on his head. Would all she’d said, all she’d done, make her father turn against her? He was an upright, stern man. Would he believe she had caused not only her own punishment but the harm that came to Tiffany and Kevin? Tiffany was recovering in a Cleveland Hospital, Mamm had said, and Kevin’s body had been autopsied and would be released by the authorities and buried in a few days. Liz and Mike had gone home to their families.
Later, Hannah wasn’t certain when Mamm told her that Sheriff Freeman had come to see her. “You sure you’re strong enough to talk to him?”
“Yes. I want to help any way I can. To know who would do such a thing and why.”
“Perhaps God only knows. I’ll sit in the chair in the corner, and you tell the sheriff or me if you get too tired or too upset to answer his questions. He’s been keeping some folks away from you, so we are grateful.”
“What folks?” Hannah asked, wondering if Seth had tried to see her.
“Newspaper and TV reporters. Don’t you fret, because there is a police officer outside your door to keep them away.”
If that was meant to be comforting, it only made Hannah more nervous. This was a double nightmare: not only had people’s lives been ruined because of her, but she was evidently in some danger. Surely a policeman wasn’t just to keep reporters away. Did the police think she could identify someone? Her people lived private, plain lives and now look what she’d done by bringing trouble to them.
Tall and straight, Eden County’s sheriff was an imposing man in his crisp black uniform. The Amish didn’t trust government officials much or even vote in worldly elections. But Jack Freeman, who was elected, got along with them just fine, although the Amish did not approve of his divorce. Still, word was, his wife had left him when he didn’t want her to, so maybe that wasn’t all his fault.
His brown eyes assessed Hannah, then took in the room as he thanked Mamm for her help. He pulled up the chair next to the bed and put his big-brimmed hat on the floor and a white bakery box on the bedside table.
“From Ray-Lynn Logan,” he said, referring to the worldly woman who ran the Dutch Farm Table Restaurant in Homestead, the biggest town in the Home Valley area, though that wasn’t saying much. “She remembers you liked whipped pies.”
“Oh, you mean whoopie pies. They’re more like cookies, like Amish Oreos with filling.” She couldn’t believe they were making small talk when she feared what was coming. “Please thank her for me—you, too, for bringing them.”
“She said she hopes you’re coming back home. Your family and friends want you to.”
She still had friends at home? The Amish might be great at forgiving sinners, but could they ever forget the things she had done and now had caused? Her dearest friend, Sarah Kauffman, had remained close, but she’d left for Columbus and was going to marry an outsider. Sarah had said that Hannah’s other once-upon-a-time good friend Ella Lantz, Seth’s sister, had been very critical of Hannah’s worldly life. Or could the sheriff possibly mean Seth had said he was still her friend? He must have also interviewed Seth about the shooting.
“Still, I can’t wait around for you to come home to get your statement,” he was saying as his voice tightened and his face became more intent. “Hannah, we got us a cold-blooded murder on our hands, and you two women shot. We don’t need any of this, not after the media mess with those barn burnings last spring.”
“I know. I’m sorry I brought my friends here—there, I mean. I just thought it would be a private picnic.”
Frowning, he took out a small notebook and flipped it open. “How ‘bout you tell me everything you remember happened at the graveyard?”
She went through things, step-by-step—why they came, their arrival, the loud deathrock music …
“Deathrock?” he interrupted, looking up from his scribbling. “That’s its name?”
“Yes, it’s very popular with goths.”
“Yeah, I been researching that. Black clothes is about the only thing you goths have in common with the Amish, far’s I can tell. Go on.”
You goths, he’d said. She’d rebelled against her people by casting her lot with something shocking, something even more verboten than going to the world. Now she’d brought deadly violence, which the Plain People avoided and abhorred, to them.
“The music must have covered any sounds until the gunshots,” she admitted. “I don’t know what kind of gun.”
“Not your worry. A high-speed rifle, like some folks hunt game with. You could have been killed. Your wrist would have been completely shattered if the bullet that hit you hadn’t been partly slowed and deflected by a gravestone that was busted up instead.”
Lena Lantz’s tombstone, Hannah thought. She should have made everyone move away from her grave. Growing up, she’d known Lena Miller well and liked her. Lena had lived on the next farm to Seth and Ella, and they’d all gone to singings and frolics together. The Lantz and Miller children had gotten especially close after Lena’s parents were killed when a car hit their buggy. But she’d never suspected that Lena had her cap set for Seth—or he for her. It took two, oh, yes, she knew that, and in a culture where birth control was forbidden …
“So, you strong enough to talk to Agent Armstrong now?” the sheriff was asking as he flipped his notebook closed. “I promised him I’d cut this short so as not to tire you out. I’ll do a follow-up later on whatever else you might remember.”
“I—sorry, what did you ask?”
“I know this is difficult, Hannah, but with this being a murder investigation, I called in the FBI, and they’re working with the State Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, the BCI. Ever since those young Amish girls got shot and killed in their schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, a couple of years back, the FBI like to swoop in real quick if there’s something like this—something that could smack of a hate crime against the Amish. From a distance, you all might have looked Amish with your long skirts, the guys in hats and such.”
“I— Yes, I understand.”
“So, FBI Special Agent Linc Armstrong would like a few words with you. Now, he stays too long or pushes too hard, you just tell him, but he’s a pretty take-charge guy. This is the third day I’ve kept him away from you. You okay with this?”
“I want to do everything I can to help.”
“Good girl. ‘Preciate it. Oh, Ray-Lynn also said, if you’re coming back and—” he nodded to Mamm, who stood and came closer “—if you won’t be working in your mother’s Amish cap-making business, Ray-Lynn can always use a good hand in the restaurant kitchen or waiting tables.”
“Tell her one good hand would be it for a while, Sheriff, and thanks for all you’re doing to unscramble the mess—the tragedy—I made.”
“Not all your fault by a long shot,” he said. “Well, didn’t mean that about a long shot, but I tell you we’ll find whoever put bullets in some visitors to my bailiwick. Even though you were in the wrong to be carousing there, you didn’t force your friends to come along and you sure as heck didn’t fire a rifle at them.” He lowered his voice. “Now, don’t you let Linc Armstrong get you down,” he said, and made for the door.
“I’m already down,” she whispered to her mother. “I guess I haven’t been myself since that night I argued with Daad.”
“Ya, I know,” she said, bending over the bed. “You just be brave with this government man now, because he already gave Seth a good going-over, and he’s been prying into everyone’s past, especially yours.”
Seth shoved his roofing hammer through a loop in his leather carpenter’s apron and heard the nails in it jingle as he scooted a bit higher on Bishop Esh’s farmhouse roof. The roof had been scarred by the Esh barn fire, set by an arsonist, and he was putting down new shingles. Seth was a timber framer, a barn builder, by trade. He’d overseen work crews erecting big buildings from churches to rustic state park lodges, but he picked up odd jobs between projects. Like everywhere in America, times were tough.
He could see the hilly sweep of much of the Home Valley, where he’d lived all his life. The woodlots were every hue from scarlet to gold, the wheat harvest was in the big barns or silos. Shucked corn was in the Yoder grain elevator, waiting to be hauled out in boxcars. The stalks in the corn maze delighted both Amish and Englische kids and adults as they ran through it. The white farmhouses and smaller grossdaadi hauses, the big red or black barns—three of which he’d built—stood strong and tall in the autumn sun, punctuated by occasional silos and windmills. From this vantage point—he loved heights—he could see the pond where he used to swim with Hannah, a place he had never gone with Lena, and then the graveyard beyond….
That brought his thoughts back to earth. When the authorities took away that bright yellow tape they’d strung along the fence there, he intended to replace Lena’s shattered stone grave marker. He’d been questioned by both Sheriff Freeman and that FBI go-getter, Lincoln Armstrong, interviews he’d expected and accepted. He’d even weathered Armstrong’s implications he might have had a motive to shoot at Hannah, and the fact he’d asked to see his gun to check his ammunition. What he hadn’t been prepared for was being called a hero for helping the wounded women.
His people knew better than to label him that, because such a thing was prideful, but two newspapers and three TV reporters had tried to interview him and take his picture. It was a blessing that the local paper had recently closed and had not been picked up by a new buyer, because it would have been all over this. But up here, he felt safe from his new, sudden fame. Bishop Esh, working in his barn below, had said he’d head off anyone else who came looking for the Amish Hero Saves 2 Lives, Finds Man Dead in Graveyard.
Seth turned and gazed past the chimney, toward his boyhood home, the next farm to the northeast where his brother Abel helped their daad farm. The Miller farm beyond that, Lena’s childhood home, was owned by her only brother. At the far edge of his parents’ property, Seth saw his own small house, which he’d built, where he still lived with little Marlena and where Lena had died suddenly on their kitchen floor of a burst aortic aneurism. She’d had the condition since birth, and no one knew it. He was grateful he didn’t have to add Marlena to the brood of kinder at his parents’ place as usual, but had brought her with him today, thanks to the Eshes’ kind offer to let her play here. Mrs. Esh was at the Wooster hospital with Hannah, but Naomi was keeping an eye on his girl.
Again, though it was the last thing he wanted or needed, his thoughts turned to Hannah. When he’d first seen her in the graveyard, lying almost on Lena’s grave, her hair had looked so scarlet that for one split second he’d feared she’d been shot in the head, too, and was bleeding from her skull. Now why had a pretty woman like her done those things to herself? Black eye paint around those blue-green eyes and dark strokes covering her blond, arched eyebrows. Her beautiful hair, once long and honey-blond, hacked off, dyed the hue of martyr’s blood and stuck up in spikes. The clothes—well at least they covered her lithe, lovely body, so she wasn’t flaunting that to the world.
He shifted his weight on the ridgeline of the roof, the very roof where the Lantz and Kauffman kids used to play Andy Over, heaving a ball up and letting it roll down the other side of the roof, where your opponent had to run and catch it, wherever it suddenly appeared. How clearly he recalled once when they were fifteen that, with both of them looking up, Hannah had bounced into him. They both went down and rolled in the autumn leaves together, with him on top, pressing her down with his knee between her legs, touching her breast, laughing and then kissing for the first time before their friends ran back around and they’d jumped to their feet …
He shook his head to shove that memory away. It really annoyed him how the mere thought of Hannah against him, in his arms, under him, made his body go tense with desire. He missed the pleasures of the marriage bed, even with a woman he had not chosen. Now, he knew two willing Amish maidals who would make him a good wife, and he needed to decide which one to pursue and get to courting so Marlena could have a mother and so he could stop this stupid longing.
“You coming down for noon meal?” Bishop Esh’s voice sliced through his agonizing. He stood below with his hands cupped around his mouth. “Your little girl’s waiting with Naomi. I see any more of those media folks, I’ll get rid of them for you, sure I will.”
“Coming right down. Just taking a breather.”
How long has the bishop watched him sitting up here? And how long before Hannah—if she returned at all—would be brought here, so he could at least see her again?
3
ALTHOUGH FBI SPECIAL AGENT LINC ARMSTRONG’S taut mouth smiled, Hannah noted that his sharp gray eyes did not as he assessed her. He was sinewy, angular and seemed tightly coiled. His brown hair was only about an inch long, short compared to Amish and goth men. His ears were so close to his head that his face seemed even longer than it was, a serious, angular face. He was dressed in black slacks, white shirt, striped tie and a dark blue jacket with FBI scripted in gold thread over the pocket. Though Hannah, who had just turned twenty-five, was not good at guessing people’s ages, she figured him to be in his mid- to late thirties.
“I appreciate your time while you’re recovering,” he told her, then introduced himself. He even held out his badge to her, in a sort of wallet he opened. The badge flaunted an eagle holding arrows in his talons over a line which read Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice. Under that was Armstrong’s photo; his face had a serious, even pained look. When he still held the wallet open—perhaps he didn’t realize how fast an Amish woman could read—she reread the other words near his photo: “Lincoln Armstrong is a regularly appointed Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and as such is charged with the duty of investigating violations of the laws of the United States in cases in which the United States is a party of interest.”
A party of interest? That sounded so cold, and the badge looked so … so commanding. No wonder the Amish never wanted to be involved with government agents, even though they were not arresting and executing the Plain People for their beliefs like in the old days in Europe.
Lincoln Armstrong’s words were clipped; he talked fast. He said he was Assistant Special Agent in Charge assigned to investigate violent crimes in Northeast Ohio. He was from “the Cleveland office,” but would be staying at the Red Roof Inn on the interstate eight miles from Homestead until his investigation was finished.
“I want to help in any way I can,” she told him. “Those were—are—my friends, though I shouldn’t have brought them here—there—that night.”
The man made her very nervous. Even seeing a State Highway Patrol or police car when she was driving bugged her and she slowed way down, but then she’d never really liked driving the car she and Tiffany had shared. But she told herself again that this man was here to help, and she was going to help him.
Still with bolt-upright posture, Agent Armstrong sat on the bedside chair and asked question after question, while she answered as best she could. She could tell that sometimes he was asking the same question but in a different way. No, she didn’t think they were followed that night. No, she’d told no one else where they were going.
“To the best of your knowledge,” he said, looking up narrow-eyed from where he’d been taking notes, “did you or your friends have any enemies who might want to scare or harm you? For instance, I understand you broke up with your boyfriend, Jason Corbett, recently. Though he has an alibi, you never know that he didn’t send or hire someone.”
She just stared at him. Mamm was right, this man had been checking into her past. And he’d had three days to interview everyone else.
“He wouldn’t do that,” she insisted. “We really weren’t that serious to start with, a friend of a friend kind of thing, and breaking up was a mutual decision.”
“Okay, that fits what he told me. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that Seth Lantz, your other former boyfriend, came along just after the shooting in time to find and help you? And I understand your breakup with him was not a mutual decision.”
Hannah pushed the button that raised the top of her bed higher. She was fairly tall for an Amish woman and wanted to stand up to this man’s height and rigid posture, but in bed like this she felt at such a disadvantage.
“Thank heavens, Seth came along!” she said, a bit too loudly. She lowered her voice. “Although I managed to call 9-1-1, he saved Tiffany and me, even if it was too late for Kevin. And he tried to spot the shooter, though he must have gone by then.”
“He or she or they. It’s best not to assume or construe. But we can surmise the shooter went back into the woods above the graveyard, then down to wherever a vehicle or buggy was hidden. Unless the shooter lived close enough to walk home.”
Buggy? Walk home? She’d never considered it could be someone Amish, but she and her friends had been disturbing the peace, desecrating hallowed ground. She had no doubt that Seth must have been upset by that.
“We were in the dark, so he, she or they must have been a good shot.”
“You didn’t glimpse any movement from higher on the hill, did you? I realize the music kept all of you from hearing anything until the shots.”
“You know,” she said as the memory came back to her, “I did glance up the hill, just to calm myself because I was upset that Tiffany and then Kevin were dancing on the graves. But no, I saw nothing, no one.”
“And then Seth rode up—though not on a white horse—from the other direction.”
He had interviewed Seth, hadn’t he? “No. You must know he was in a buggy. And Blaze, his horse, is chestnut-colored with a white mark only on her face and chest.”
Something she’d said amused him, but she wasn’t sure what. Had he been trying to trap her in something? Agent Armstrong—no way was she going to call him Lincoln or Linc—leaned closer and lowered his voice, too.
“Considering your and Seth’s past, I’m sure he hurt you more than you did him when you broke up, Hannah, but I have to examine all possibilities, even that an apparent rescuer was the perpetrator.”
She sniffed and shook her head.
“It happens,” he went on. “Seth was out with a hunting rifle, but our forensics have shown that wasn’t the weapon involved. Still, I can tell from talking to him that he is upset that you ‘jumped the fence,’ as he put it, and hung out with the goths. He’s still upset with you about that.”
She didn’t like the direction this was going, but it scared her even more how much she wanted to defend Seth. She blurted, “Then you’d better put about everyone in the Amish church under suspicion, Agent Armstrong! They were all pretty upset when the bishop’s daughter left, though of course we—they—are all pacifists and would never shoot someone!”
“But that was a pretty big stretch for an Amish girl, wasn’t it? Not only leaving the only life you’d ever known, but going goth?”
“That’s just the group of friends I fell in with when I went to my ‘Cleveland office,’ to try to start a singing career.”
His eyes seemed to light, and the corner of his mouth twitched as if he would either grimace or smile at her subtle jab. “I like backbone in a witness and a victim,” he said, standing. “Good move to call 9-1-1, and good job giving all that information when you were shot and your friends were bleeding around you. I think you’re being released to go home tomorrow, Hannah, so I’ll see you then, because I want you to walk me through exactly what happened at the crime scene. It’s been secured, photographed, sketched and searched. I’ve questioned your remaining three goth friends, but I think your visiting the site with me would be invaluable. I take it I can find you at your parents’ place.”
It was a statement, not a question. Did he imply she was being confined there at least until she returned to the scene of the crime with him?
“If they’ll take me in for a while, yes, then I—”
“Take you in?” Mamm said as she peered around Agent Armstrong’s shoulder. “It’s your home. You are coming home, ya, at least till your wrist is better. Then we can all discuss what comes later.”
“Yes,” Hannah said as tears she could not stem blurred her view. “Agent Armstrong, I’ll be there—at my parents’ home.”
He tapped the edge of her mattress twice as if she were being dismissed, at least for now. “Thank you for your time and help, and thank you, Mrs. Esh,” he said with a nod Mamm’s way as she stepped to the side of the bed. “And thank you and Bishop Esh for feeding me so well yesterday.”
This government officer and law-enforcing ausländer had eaten at her house—that is, at her parents’ house—when she hadn’t been inside for years? It made her homesick all over again.
It was strange, Hannah thought as Agent Armstrong left the room, to have to deal with a man who knew things you didn’t and, even though you were both an eyewitness and a victim and he was going to help, who made you feel like you were under surveillance, too.
It was a couple of hours after dark that night when Sheriff Jack Freeman pulled into his driveway. Hearing an engine, Ray-Lynn Logan went to the kitchen window over the sink and cracked the curtains to make sure the headlights slashing through the night were his. Yes, his black sheriff’s cruiser with the gold logo on the side. He no doubt saw her van in the driveway. They had keys to each other’s places now. She wondered if he could possibly be as excited as she was each time they were together, but he was probably exhausted investigating the graveyard shooting and working with that hard-driving FBI guy from Cleveland.
Using the window glass for a mirror, she quickly checked her appearance. Pretty good for a woman who was almost fifty, she thought. She knew Jack liked her full breasts and hips, even though he’d admitted he was a “leg man.”
Ray-Lynn had seen little of Jack since the shootings three days ago, and just when things were really getting comfortable between them. So she’d left the restaurant the minute it closed tonight to bring them a meat loaf dinner to share—brought him his favorite raisin cream pie, too. She was getting familiar with his kitchen and this spacious brick ranch house, though she didn’t like the fact he’d lived here and decorated it with his ex-wife. Besides, it was two miles east of town, and there was a woodlot right out back, when some idiot was shooting people from trees in the dark. Maybe, she tried to tell herself, the shooting had been just some Halloween prank, an aberration, a one-night freak thing, and goths sure looked like freaks. Dealing with the Plain People was one thing, but no way did she want strange outsiders around her adopted town.
Ray-Lynn met Jack at his own back door with a big hug he returned so hard it made her toes curl. A Southern girl by birth, she’d almost chucked all the good manners her mother ever taught her to finally get this man to notice her as more than the source of good country cooking at her restaurant in town. Jack was divorced and had been sort of a loner, married only to his job since his wife had left him to move somewhere out west several years ago. He’d admitted that his ex was the only woman he’d loved, and he’d been heartbroken when she said she was done with him and rural, small-town living. But Jack had finally added, “That is, she was the only one I ever wanted before I fell in love with you, Ray-Lynn.”
Jack, who was just a year older, stood tall and ramrod-straight, maybe a leftover from his days as a marine. His auburn hair had a touch of gray at the temples, but with all that had gone on around here lately, he’d kidded her that he’d be all silver-headed soon. He’d bailed her out of a financial crisis earlier this year by investing in half of her restaurant in town, though he sure had more than fifty-percent of her heart. She loved it that they were partners in business, and she longed to be partners in life, too.
“Something smells good, but you smell better, honey,” he said, closing and locking the door behind him, then burying his face in her hair before giving her a long, openmouthed kiss that made her want to forget supper. She held tight to his leather jacket. He smelled of crisp autumn air and, as ever, both of safety and sexiness.
When they came up for a breath, she asked, “Progress here for sure, but any progress on the graveyard case?”
“Luckily, forensics cleared Seth Lantz, or at least the rifle he had in his buggy that night. Witnesses have been interviewed by either Armstrong or me—in some cases by both of us. Both wounded women are being released tomorrow, and Hannah Esh is coming home, at least for a while, so—as ever—the Amish see a blessing even in a tragedy.”
He hung his jacket, gun belt and hat on pegs by the back door, then, with a playful pat on her rear, went to use the bathroom. All dreamy-eyed—she had to admit, that’s what this man, in or out of uniform, did to her—Ray-Lynn jumped when she accidentally touched the hot pan she was warming the meat loaf in as she took it out of the oven. She yanked back about as fast as she had when she’d come across an old photo of Jack and his ex while she was looking for candlesticks today. It had been shoved, facedown, under some candles and matchbooks in an end table drawer.
As she ran cold water over her burn, she pictured their faces in the photo again, though it was the last thing she wanted in her head right now. They’d both looked so young and happy. Lillian Freeman was a pretty blonde, big-busted but not fat. Hopefully, Jack preferred Ray-Lynn’s real red hair to that bleached blond, but sometimes men couldn’t see through that and a blonde was a blonde. In the pic, they were sitting on a fence somewhere, grinning like all get-out, him in his marine uniform, her flaunting great legs in shorts and her breasts in a skimpy top.
“Smells like meat loaf!” Jack said when he came back in. “You okay, honey?” he asked when he saw her holding her finger under running water.
“Just a little burn.”
He came over and hugged her from behind. “I’m starved, but willing to kiss it—kiss you—to make it better.”
“And who said the way to a man’s heart is only through his stomach?” She turned in his arms to face him as he pressed her against the sink and kissed her again. They both ignored the running water, though they could have used a bit of a cold shower right now, she thought as she kissed him back hard again and slid her hands, burn or not, in the back pockets of his pants.
She was surprised when he broke their embrace, leaning past her closer to the window over the sink. He cracked the curtains and squinted out into the November night. Her head cleared. She heard something outside, too.
“Bad timing,” he said. “Headlights from someone pulling in. Hope it’s not the G-man, but someone might be in trouble. Don’t recognize the car.”
“If they come to the back door,” she said, straightening her blouse and smoothing her hair, “it must be someone who knows you.”
To her dismay, he strapped his gun belt back on as someone knocked hard on the back door. He motioned for Ray-Lynn to step out of the kitchen, and she did, hovering in the hall where she could see the back door in the hall mirror.
As Jack opened the door and a blast of cold air rolled in, Ray-Lynn gasped and pressed both hands over her mouth to stifle a shriek. Though she’d never met the woman, she recognized her image in the mirror the minute Jack opened the door. “Lily?” he asked, sounding shocked, but excited, as well. “Lily!”
“Jackman!” his former wife cried. “I’ve come home! I’ve missed you so much, baby, but I was scared to call ahead in case you said not to come!”
Lillian Freeman—if that was still her name after four years away—threw her arms around Jack’s neck as he took a step back in surprise, then hugged her as she burst into tears. Ray-Lynn fled into the living room, grabbed her jacket and purse and cried, too, all the way to her car.
She fumbled with the key in the ignition and backed down the driveway before remembering to turn her headlights on. Jack ran out and shouted something to her, but she spun her wheels and roared off into the dark night.
4
HANNAH WAKENED TO THE MUTED THUD-THUD of Mamm’s hand-operated pressing machine that put the creases in the stiff, white prayer kapps she made in the old sunroom at the rear of the house, a familiar sound that always carried up the back wall. She opened her eyes, then closed them again. It was bad enough to have to look at the wrapped gauze and taped bandage on her left wrist and the array of pills on the bedside table but worse to feel she was in a time warp. Except for moving her twin bed to the guest room and storing some wedding supplies here, Naomi hadn’t changed much of their shared back-corner bedroom after Hannah had left.
From the top of the familiar maple dresser, Hannah’s bonneted childhood doll seemed to stare at her for all the things she’d done wrong, despite being eyeless and faceless. Strange to have the feeling she was being watched in this private, second-story bedroom in the middle of open fields.
Despite her pain pills, she hadn’t slept well because she’d heard some sort of unfamiliar flapping, like bird wings, from time to time. Maybe it was a loose shingle on the roof in the brisk wind that had now calmed a bit. If Seth was working up on the roof today, she hoped he’d be careful. Amish men didn’t use safety harnesses, for whatever happened was God’s will, one thing she’d learned to question during her days in the world. After all, sometimes people’s injuries were their own stupid fault.
But one huge change in this spot of her happy childhood and rumspringa years were the signs of Naomi’s coming wedding adorning the room: a treadle sewing machine with a nearly completed, sky-blue wedding dress, bolts of burgundy material for her four attendants’ dresses, boxes of favors and inscribed napkins stacked in the corner by the closet. The talk at supper last night had been all about the Esh-Troyer marriage. Well, of course, Hannah could see why. It wasn’t just to avoid talking about the mess she’d made of her life. Amish weddings were planned and prepared quickly after the announcement in church of the betrothal. With so many invited, lots of people pitched in, preparing to feed nearly four hundred guests at a wedding feast with a traditional, home-cooked meal.
In the emotion of her reunion with Naomi yesterday—Hannah knew her younger sister had looked up to her just as she had to her older, now-married sisters, Ida and Ruth—she had promised not only to attend the wedding but to help with it. Nothing like facing the entire Amish community she’d let down. At least she had until a week from today to prepare herself for that.
Hannah groaned, sat up carefully and gasped to see a small, round face staring up at her over the side of the bed. So that’s why she felt she was being watched. It was a darling little Amish doll—a living one, with a pert mouth and wide, azure eyes.
“Where Naomi?” the child asked in their German dialect. Then Hannah knew who it was. Not the niece whose birth she’d missed while she was gone, but Seth and Lena’s little daughter, Marlena, now around two and a half years old.
“I’m Hannah,” she told the child, and her voice broke. Like an idiot, she blinked back tears. The little girl resembled Seth more than Lena. “I—I can help you find Naomi.”
“Daadi go up,” Marlena said, pointing at the ceiling or, more likely, the roof since Seth was reroofing the house, though she hadn’t heard one hammer or nail when it must be midmorning. “Mamm go up, too,” Marlena added.
“Oh, there you are!” Naomi cried, rushing into the room and scooping up the child. “She was playing in the hall when I went to use the bathroom.”
“Naomi,” Hannah said as she swung her feet carefully to the floor, “you do not have to move out of your room for me, especially not with all you have going on here.”
“It was our room for years and still is!” Naomi insisted. “And now it can be yours, because after next Thursday, we’ll be living with Josh’s folks for a while. I’m fine in Ida and Ruth’s old room.”
“Daadi go up,” Marlena said again, pointing. “Up to the sky.” The child squirmed to be put down, toddled to the back window facing the barn and craned her neck to peer skyward.
“I’ll have to tell Seth you’re up, and he can pound away on the new shingles now,” Naomi said. “He didn’t want to wake you, so he’s helping Daad stack firewood. As for this little one, she thinks her daadi goes up on the roof looking for her mamm, who is in heaven.”
“Oh, that’s what she meant. But Seth or anyone else does not have to work around me.”
“You know it’s our way, whether you’re a guest or family, and you’re both,” Naomi said with a nod. Taking Marlena’s hand, she started from the room. “Oh,” she said, turning back, “someone else is waiting for you to get up. Special Agent Armstrong will be here right after noon meal to take you to the graveyard to walk through … through what happened. Sorry, but that’s what he said when he came by earlier. Give me a shout if you need help getting dressed,” she added, and pointed toward the chair in front of the sewing machine as they left the room.
Hannah gasped. Now she saw why Naomi’s wedding dress was only partly done. It was not just because they were letting Hannah sleep in this morning. She saw, laid out over the chair back and arranged on its seat, a new Amish dress in emerald-green, a good color for a maidal; black undergarments, no bra of course, which would take some getting used to again; a new pair of white, laced walking shoes like the women wore; a new cape—no, it was one of her old ones—and a new black bonnet. But no prayer kapp for her red-dyed, short-cut head, the sign of a dedicated Amish woman. All this kindness and generosity—but the lack of that precious kapp—spoke louder than Naomi’s words.
Tears blurring her vision, Hannah walked slowly to the small oval mirror they kept turned to the wall unless it was absolutely needed. After all, it was prideful to preen and to change the appearance God gave to each of His children. The true reason photographs of Amish faces were forbidden was that it could lead to individualism and conceit in one’s appearance, even though it also defied the Biblical warning “Thou shalt make no graven images.”
Hannah turned the mirror outward and jolted as her image stared back. Scarlet hair, though it now lay flat and looked softer after Mamm had washed and brushed it in the hospital. A face plain and naked without the dramatic mascara and black lipstick. Just Hannah Esh’s Amish face again, only one now lined with pain, perhaps fear, eyes narrowed, full lips pressed together, and the lower one trembling. She realized she was shaking all over and not just because she’d risen from a warm bed.
Was she scared to be home? Afraid of having to face everyone, especially Seth, again?
She thrust out her lower lip in defiance and walked to the clothing. One-handed, she reached for it to get dressed. It was only then she noticed that the screen to the side window behind the sewing machine was cleanly slit along its edge. Maybe that was what she’d heard flapping last night. But it was so unlike her daad to leave something not repaired. She leaned closer and gasped. Long, dark marks on the sill inside of the screen made it look like some sharp object had tried to pry the window itself open.
“You didn’t lean a ladder at the driveway side of the house, even to carry the shingles up, did you?” Bishop Esh asked Seth as he sat at the far end of the dinner table from Hannah, with Marlena in a high chair beside him. Seth was pleased to see Hannah at the table and dressed Amish, though she hadn’t covered her head. As ever, she seemed for him some sort of magnet and he the compass needle pulled to her true north.
He had to focus on the bishop’s words. “No,” Seth answered. “I’ve kept the ladder between the flower beds in back, near where the shingles were unloaded. Since the peak of the roof is on the driveway side, my ladder wouldn’t reach it. Is there a problem?”
“Yes, one we will have to run by Agent Armstrong, that’s for sure,” the bishop said, frowning.
Naomi, sitting on the other side of Marlena’s high chair, put in, “Someone cut the screen in the side window to my bedroom—now Hannah’s—and it wasn’t my Josh, that’s sure. He wouldn’t do that, even if the ladder marks were under the cut window. And someone tried to pry it open, too, but it sure wasn’t Josh and me!”
“We know that, Naomi,” Mrs. Esh said, and reached over to pat her youngest daughter’s hand. “You’ve always done things on the straight and narrow, ya, we know that.”
Seth saw Hannah’s cheeks color, as if that was a reflection on her, maybe on him, as well. Sure, Hannah used to slip out to meet him once in a while after the house went dark but not through a sliced window screen. Hannah and her friend Sarah, next farm over, had sneaked out in their rumspringa years to listen to the radio and fool around. But this news upset him, and not because he’d been indirectly asked if that ladder and the cut screen was his doing. If it wasn’t him, who was it? Could Josh have done it and not told Naomi? Once Linc Armstrong found out about it, he’d probably question anyone within miles who had a ladder.
“Could someone have been trying to break in?” Seth asked, his fork halfway to his mouth. He hadn’t so much as tasted the chicken on biscuits yet, since he’d been making sure Marlena ate well.
“Naomi’s sure the window wasn’t that way yesterday,” the bishop said. “It could be those nosy reporters with their cameras, not taking no for an answer.”
Or it could be something worse, Seth almost said. That thought hung in the air while people went back to eating. Finally, Hannah spoke.
“I don’t want Agent Armstrong trampling all over my private life, but he’s going to have to take a look at the window and the ladder marks.”
“Right,” Seth put in. “One more thing. He asked me to go with you to the graveyard this afternoon. Not to hear what you tell him, but to pick up the story where I came in. To talk to us about the crime scene.”
He said no more and tucked into Mrs. Esh’s delicious dinner, though he hardly felt hungry anymore. He’d bet a new barn that part of the reason Agent Armstrong wanted him to go along was so that he could see how he and Hannah would act when they were together. Actually, he’d like to see how they would, too.
Hannah noted how tense Seth and Agent Armstrong were around each other as they stood under her bedroom window after dinner.
“Those imprints look identical to your ladder’s feet, Seth,” Armstrong observed as he rose from a squat after a close examination of the imprinted soil between the bare rose canes. He’d already taken photos of the feet of the ladder, the cut screen and the scratches he called “jimmy marks” on the bedroom windowsill upstairs.
Hannah hugged her cloak tighter around herself with her good arm as she, Seth, Naomi and Daad watched the agent’s every move. His eyes had seemed to take in everything inside and outside the Esh home, just like he tried to see inside people’s heads.
“Of course,” Agent Armstrong added, “whoever it was could easily have borrowed your roofing ladder, though I don’t see any footprints back there but yours.”
Hannah watched as the two very different men looked at each other, eye-to-eye. Neither blinked or flinched.
“It’s the why that will lead us to the who,” Seth said.
“Lead us? But I get your drift. Motive. Easier said than done, but I’ll get to the bottom of it,” Armstrong countered.
“But what I don’t like,” Seth went on, “and what you didn’t mention is that if someone was trying to get to Hannah, he had to know what bedroom she was in, had to be some sort of insider. Bishop Esh and I checked, though I don’t think you did, to be sure no other windows in the house had a random cut screen or screwdriver marks.”
“Who said it was a screwdriver?”
“I— We, especially her family, just want Hannah protected,” Seth insisted.
Bishop Esh put his shoulder between the two men to make them step farther apart. “I’m going to buggy into the hardware store in town,” he told them, “get a new screen and bolts for both Hannah’s windows and extra ones for the windows and doors downstairs. Hannah told her mother in the hospital that she could not think of anyone who was her enemy, but I know Agent Armstrong has considered that, too, Seth.”
“Daad,” Hannah put in, “I’m sorry to cause so much trouble again for y—”
“Ya, you have, my girl!” he said, frowning at first before he cleared his throat. Hannah jolted at his tone. Since she’d been back, she’d seen Daad had a bee in his bonnet over her leaving and defying him. Maybe he still resented the way her hair looked. She’d tried to just ignore and smooth over the tension between them. After all, she could hardly blame him after what she’d put him, as her father and as bishop, through. “Just be grateful,” he went on in a calmer voice, “you are where you should be now, that’s for sure.” He shot a side glance at Seth she could not read. “You two go on now, help Agent Armstrong.”
Though Hannah could tell Seth didn’t want to get in the black car Agent Armstrong drove, she got in the backseat when he opened the door for her. “Watch your head,” he told her, and put a hand on her hair, then leaned over her to fasten her seat belt, evidently so she wouldn’t have to do it one-handed. She smelled a tart pine scent on him, and his hand touched her hip hard through her cape and skirt as he clicked the belt closed.
“You want to ride shotgun, Seth?” he asked. “You know, up front?”
“I’ll ride with Hannah,” he said, and walked around to sit next to her in the rear seat behind the cagelike divider that separated the front seats from the back. It was, she thought, a wide seat. Agent Armstrong was across the screen, but Seth seemed so far away from her.
“Listen,” Armstrong said as he drove slowly out of the Esh driveway past clothes blowing on the line in the brisk November day, “I’ve been calling both of you by your first names, so I’d appreciate it if you’d just call me Linc. My dad named me Lincoln for our Civil War president, Honest Abe, and that’s my motto—straight talk, full disclosure. I expect that from both of you. We’re working together on this, okay?”
“Fine,” Hannah said only. She did want to help in any way she could, including getting along with this man. She looked at Seth’s frowning profile.
“Fine with me,” Seth muttered. “You going to make straight talk a policy with everyone you question, such as Josh Troyer, about whether he used my ladder last night?”
Hannah saw Armstrong’s eyes dart toward Seth in the rearview mirror. “One step ahead of me, Seth. No, not with everyone, just key witnesses, and I don’t figure Naomi’s fiancé is one, but I’ve looked into him, too. The Troyers are a wealthy family, aren’t they, with owning the big grain elevator and that historic grist mill? Since they offer tours of the mill, I’m not sure if they’d think publicity of a murder around here would be good or bad for business.”
Hannah and Seth exchanged lightning-quick glances. This man was suspicious of everyone and considered every angle. If he thought Josh or the Troyers could be involved, anyone could be on his list.
Neither Seth nor Hannah responded. Linc Armstrong’s sharp eyes—like those of the eagle on his badge, she thought—glanced at them in the rearview mirror now and then. Could her feeling of being watched just be a reaction to his FBI surveillance and suspicious nature, no matter how friendly he seemed on the surface? She felt so torn about him, both guarded yet grateful.
When he pulled the car to a stop, almost exactly where her friends had parked at the graveyard on Halloween night, Linc said, “Seth, I’ll ask you to stay put until I’ve had Hannah walk me through things, then I’ll have you approach and enter the grounds just as you did that night.”
If “stay put” meant stay in the car, Seth ignored that order. He got out and stood near the fence, festooned with fluttering yellow plastic tape with the big, black words repeated over and over: Police Crime Scene Do Not Enter Police Crime Scene Do Not Enter … It was a good thing, she thought, that no one in the church had died right now. Her thoughts went to Kevin and Tiffany, to her other worldly friends who had not been hit by bullets that night. She wanted to write letters to their families. She couldn’t call, because Linc had confiscated her phone for now; a phone she’d need to give up, if she stayed here….
Feeling Seth’s gaze burning into her back from where he stood at the fence, she ducked under the tape Linc lifted for her, and they went into the graveyard.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner,” Jack told Ray-Lynn as he pulled her into the inside back entry to the restaurant, despite the fact she’d just seated a party of six during the lunch rush. “I ran into complications.”
“I guess you did. If she’s come back to haunt you, she missed Halloween.”
“I didn’t mean her. Something about the graveyard case with Agent Armstrong. Ray-Lynn, why didn’t you answer your phone last night after you drove away? Or come to the door of your house when I knocked on it? Considering how you ran out, I didn’t want to just use my key—which I’d left at my house, anyway.”
“Where did she stay last night?”
“Not with me. I got her settled in at Amanda Stutzman’s B and B.”
“Oh, great! Just great. So she’s living within walking distance of my house! You told me once she worked as a hostess in this restaurant. Don’t you dare ask me to give her a job here, I don’t care if you do own fifty percent of it now! You said she used her salary to help pay for your house and the decor, so I supposed you’re thinking she still owns half of that. When she took off, you never paid her back because she didn’t want your money, right? Bet she thinks that house is still half hers and you’re all hers, because it kind of looked that way last night!”
“Would you calm down? I’ll work it out. I just didn’t want you to be upset.”
“I’m not upset. I’m way beyond that.”
“I want us to talk this out, but I’ve got obligations right now, you know that, and you’ve always understood that. You gotta trust me on this.”
“I do—to help solve the graveyard shootings. The other …” She shrugged and fought to keep from bursting into tears. “I’ve got people waiting, Jack, and you do, too. Duty calls, as they say. Does she—does she intend to stay?”
He shrugged, then nodded. “So she says. Got fed up with a shallow life in Vegas, she said, and—”
“Las Vegas? She’s been in Las Vegas and now wants to come back to Homestead, Ohio, in Amish country? Jack, she may look like a million bucks, but she’s probably just broke or running from something!”
“From mistakes, she says.”
“Did you tell her about us?”
“Of course I did. Told her not to apply for a job here or even to come in, but she said it’s a free country.”
Ray-Lynn slapped the extra menus she still held to her chest down on the pile of cartons. “You can’t handle her, can you? But you want to, don’t you—handle her, real up close and personal? You never got over her, did you?”
“Damn it, Ray-Lynn, just give me some time!”
“Oh, I will. Lots. Now, I’ve got a restaurant to run and a life to live, so excuse me,” she said, and grabbed the menus. She darted past him back into the restaurant proper, put the stack of menus by the cash register and went into the ladies’ room, the two stalls of which were blessedly empty.
With stiff arms, she steadied herself against the washbasin, afraid to look at herself in the mirror. She wanted to throw things, to break the mirror, just shatter it and scream. But she ran cold water and dabbed it under her eyes, then went back out and stood near the front door with a smile pasted on her face. The sign over the front door, the one she’d been so proud of, that her very own Amish artist, Sarah Kauffman, had painted so beautifully, really riled her now: Southern Hospitality and Amish Cooking—Y’all Come Back, Danki.
No way in all of God’s creation could she be glad Lily Freeman had come back.
5
“IS THIS PRETTY MUCH THE PATH THE FIVE OF you took that night?” Linc asked as they walked from the gate up the hill into the heart of the graveyard.
“Yes,” Hannah told him. “I don’t think we walked in single file, though.”
“I believe these are your grandparents buried here,” he said, indicating two of the many identical stones laid out in neat rows.
“Yes. You have cased the place, as they say,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. Again, it amazed her how much background work this man had done into her life. Did he think she was somehow the key to what had happened? Surely no one had meant to shoot her that night, but she couldn’t accept that someone had been after the others, either. It must have been a random act—except for that slit screen. And was the policeman assigned to guard her hospital room just to keep reporters away? Daad had fended the media off, so was the policeman to protect her from someone else?
Linc interrupted her agonizing. “Forensic specialists have gone extensively over this site and that upland woodlot where the shooter stood. So that night you had your friends put down the blanket, the boom box, the food and wine on Lena Lantz’s grave, right?”
“No! No, I wouldn’t do that. As you said, you shouldn’t construe things. That was just chance that Kevin and Mike stopped at her grave, because they knew nothing about Lena or Seth, either. I obviously hadn’t been here for her burial, so I was upset when I saw we were near her tombstone. I wanted them to move away, but I didn’t want to have to explain why, so I didn’t say anything.”
Studying her as she spoke, he nodded. She gasped as they reached Lena’s grave. Not only was the tombstone a mess but white paint outlined the shape of Kevin’s body on the grass. She noted he had fallen sideways over the lower part of Lena’s grave. Nearby, small yellow circles were sprayed around what looked to be blood spots.
“Tiffany’s blood and yours,” he said. “We had it tested. You’re type AB, if you ever need to know.”
Linc firmly took the elbow of her good arm to steady her. Each time he touched her, even briefly—but especially when he assessed her with that hard stare—she felt heat. No one but Seth had ever affected her that way.
Hannah took a good look at what was left of Lena’s tombstone, which, they’d said, had kept her from sustaining a much worse wound when the bullet ricocheted. The rectangular stone was deeply cracked, one corner shattered. One or more bullets had blasted away the word Lantz and her death date, so it read only Lena and her birth year.
“He— Seth, I mean,” she said, “is going to replace it when you let him, when you clear away the police tape.”
“So he said. That tombstone definitely saved your wrist, pins in it or not, and it may have saved your life. The shooter took Kevin down in one head shot, and I suspect was pretty skilled, so you and Tiffany were just plain lucky.”
“Just plain blessed,” she corrected him, then realized how Amish that sounded. “I’m grateful Mike and Liz weren’t hit at all. The shooter must have been interrupted or— I don’t know. I—I see you have a gun, though your jacket hides it a bit.”
He turned her toward him and looked her full in the face. “Affirmative—yes. You’re very observant, very smart, Hannah. But this small semiautomatic handgun in my hip holster—I try to especially keep it out of sight among your people—is a far cry from what someone shot you with. That was a high-velocity—that’s a high-speed—rifle, probably with a night-vision scope. We’ve retrieved and tested the bullets, lethal for hunting big game and, obviously, for a person. And I promise you I’m going to find out whether it was a random act, an anti-Amish or anti-goth hate crime, or whether it was some sort of hit with a specific target. Okay, now talk me through what happened when all of you settled here.”
She did her best, though she’d done the same when he’d interviewed her in the hospital. Was he looking for discrepancies in what she said? As she told him about Tiffany’s wound and screams, Kevin’s scarlet bloom of blood, he interrupted for the first time.
“So the two of them were sort of dancing around and pretending to dig at Lena Lantz’s grave with Tiffany’s closed parasol when they were shot?”
The dreadful scene she’d been reliving fled. Her head cleared. She simply nodded. Did he think Seth had seen them and been angry? She darted a look down the hill at her former fiancé. He was pacing, not looking up at them, but frustration and anger emanated from the tilt of his head, his hard strides and clenched fists. Yes, she thought, Seth as she once knew him was capable of passion, of sudden swerves from self-control. He might be Amish, but he was only human! She was surprised to realize that her time away from him had somewhat muted her anger toward him.
Afraid Linc would think she was somehow suspicious of Seth—and upset at how much she wanted to protect him—she dragged her gaze from Seth back to Linc’s gray-eyed, piercing stare. But he did not pursue what he must be thinking and surprised her by changing the subject.
“One more quick thing before we ask Seth to join us in this reenactment. Can you give me any idea of how long it was between when Tiffany and Kevin went down and Seth arrived to help? Think about the time frame of when you crawled to your purse to get your cell, made the call, talked to the 9-1-1 operator, then he appeared.”
“I—I don’t know. Time was … strange. Extended, I think. I was in pain, I saw all that blood on them, then on me—”
“Ten minutes? Five?” he probed.
“I’d say two minutes, max, until I made the call, but then don’t you have the rest of the timing from the 9-1-1 records?”
He blinked. Not, she realized, because he hadn’t thought of that, but because he hadn’t thought she would. She’d read his mind, hadn’t she?
“I’m not trying to protect Seth in this,” she insisted, even as she realized that was a lie. “He couldn’t have done the shooting up in those trees, with a gun that didn’t match your bullet tests—”
“Forensics,” he said, but she ignored him and plunged on.
“And then he didn’t have time to run around, down the hill and drive up in his buggy to help. Give that up, Special Agent Armstrong.”
“I said before, I admire your backbone, Hannah. You’re a fascinating blend of this world and the one you’ve lived in these past few years—my world. But my world includes solving crimes, and I do what I have to at any cost.”
“Then I’ll get Seth,” she said.
“No, I will. I want him to come over the fence, just where and how he did that night. If you don’t mind, lie on the ground as best you can recall where you were that night. Be right back.”
Her thoughts racing, Hannah sat, then lay where she was certain she had been hit. She felt cold all over and not just from the chill wind in the shadow of this hill. How had her safe Amish life changed so much that she was a new person now, an alien back where she’d been born?
Suddenly, she longed to see her old friend Sarah Kauffman, who had gone to the world, been shunned, but planned to wed the arson investigator who had solved the barn fires. Sarah had followed her heart, not only with Nate MacKenzie but by becoming an artist who painted scenes from Amish life—with faces on the people. But Sarah was living in Columbus.
This close to the earth, near the grass of Lena’s grave, Hannah could see that the edges of the replaced sod had not yet evened out or grown into the other grass. At funerals here, she’d seen the shaved-off sod the grave diggers had set aside so it could be replaced after they refilled the grave by hand. Had Linc and his investigators dug up the edges of the grass blanket over Lena’s grave, looking for bullets or digging for more blood spots?
“Okay, please vault the fence just like you said!” Linc’s loud voice nearby startled her, and she turned her head to see Seth, one hand on the fence with the yellow tape, clear it easily and land on his feet.
“Hannah, however it happened, I’m so glad you’ve come home!”
Later that afternoon, her first Amish caller was her close childhood friend Ella Lantz, Seth’s sister. Ella was a year younger than Seth and Hannah, the middle child in their family of five children. They shared a hug, and, as ever, Ella smelled wonderful.
Hannah had always thought Ella looked like an angel with her white-blond hair and pale blue eyes. As a girl, she had nearly drowned in the pond at the juncture of the three farms. Sarah and Hannah had saved her and it had bonded them all closer. But from that time on, Ella had changed. She’d buried deep her daredevil streak, become timid, even rigid and judgmental of those who didn’t toe the line—and that was Hannah and Sarah now, for sure.
But maybe, Hannah hoped, Ella had learned that people make mistakes that should not only be forgiven but forgotten. Naomi had told Hannah that Ella had recently broken up with her serious come-calling friend, Eli Detweiler, because he hadn’t given up alcohol after his rumspringa years.
“I brought you some lavender,” Ella said, and held out a basket of sachets and soaps which perfumed the air. On a large lot near the Lantz farmhouse, Ella grew and harvested the fragrant herb. Then in a little workshop Seth had built for her out the back of their family’s farm, she packaged her precious plants she sold locally. Each hand-lettered label read Lavender Plain Products, Homestead, Ohio.
“How thoughtful of you!” Hannah said, and inhaled deeply as Ella took a chair at the card table laid out with a half-finished family jigsaw puzzle of the Grand Canyon. “They smell delicious and look lovely,” she added, admiring the printed cotton packets that made each sachet look like a small quilt square.
“Some say the scent is good for the heart,” Ella said. “I mean, not to cure a damaged heart, like what happened to Lena, but to lift your mood. Oh, Hannah, it was awful that she just fell over like that in their kitchen with the baby there but Seth out on a job. Such a tragedy. But then, you’ve had one, too. And I … believe me, I remember how it feels to … to almost die.”
“I was sorry to hear about you and Eli parting, but at least it was before you got betrothed or married.”
“I just couldn’t take a chance on him, trust him not to drink,” she said, gripping her hands in her lap. Ella’s feelings and moods were always transparent. She looked instantly grieved. “Every time he said he was done with drinking, he wasn’t. He looked bleary-eyed and was always tired, too, cutting back his work hours. I could smell it on him day or night. I just— I could not trust him to be the father of my children. I guess all of us—you, Sarah and I—had disappointments with men. Though Sarah’s gone the wrong way with a worldly man after that mess with Jacob, I’ll find someone to build a life with here, I know I will!”
“Meanwhile, you have a sweet future!” Hannah said, forcing a smile and picking up a cotton-wrapped and ribboned bar of soap to inhale the scent. Ella didn’t make the soap at home but provided the dried leaves and flowers for it, then wrapped the bars herself.
“Both bed-and-breakfasts in town use my products now as well as the Amish gift shops and Mrs. Logan’s restaurant, so that gets me more business. I just came from Mrs. Stutzman’s B and B, and she said to tell you that if you want a job you could do one-handed, she needs a half-time housekeeper—dusting, laundry, ironing. She does the cooking and makes the beds. Her half-time girl just quit.”
“People have been so kind to offer jobs. They must know it’s hard for me to have come home like this.”
“I know it, too,” Ella said, and reached out to lightly grasp Hannah’s good wrist. “At the B and B, you wouldn’t have to face a lot of our people yet, since Amanda Stutzman and her husband are Mennonite and their guests are ausländers. Oh, and guess who just moved in there for a spell?”
“Not the FBI agent?”
“No. Can you see him with all those ruffled curtains and quilts and teatime? Sheriff Freeman’s wife—former wife, like the moderns say—is back in town. I met her there when I delivered the new sachets and soaps I arrange in each room. She’s pretty but wears a lot of makeup. She says she’s here to stay. I think she’s come home, like you.”
Hannah remembered how much Ella loved to gossip, almost as much as her best friend, Naomi. Ella was to be one of Naomi’s attendants, or sidesitters, in the coming wedding. Would that be hard for her to face since she’d broken up with Eli? But Hannah kept thinking about poor Ray-Lynn Logan. It had been pretty obvious from the sheriff’s visit to Hannah’s hospital room that he and Ray-Lynn were getting close, and months ago Sarah had told her the same.
“Ella, that job offer sounds good to tide me over, but I don’t know if I’ll be staying after the investigation of the shooting is finished.”
“Oh, but we want you to. Seth does, I can tell!”
“Now don’t you go playing matchmaker for us, or for Sheriff Freeman, either. But the fact that the former Mrs. Freeman is living at the Plain and Fancy means she’s a five-minute walk from Ray-Lynn’s house.”
“That’s right. But here’s the thing,” Ella plunged on, leaning forward and lowering her voice, although they were alone in the living room. “Lillian Freeman’s been living in Las Vegas!”
She’d said those words, Hannah thought, as if the woman had just come from the very gates of hell. “But that doesn’t mean she was boozing it up, gambling day and night or dancing in a chorus line,” Hannah protested.
“A chorus line? Did she try to be a singer, like you? No, she was a hostess in some fancy casino restaurant, I think.”
Hannah wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. She’d actually forgotten how much she’d learned in the outside world that she’d never known about here in the shelter of Home Valley.
Hannah knew the November sunset would be early, so late afternoon, when she heard Seth come into the house to wash up and get Marlena, she decided to slip outside. However comforting it was to be near her family again, she felt cooped up. She’d even helped, one-handed, with dusting, as if preparing for the job at Amanda Stutzman’s B and B she was considering taking. She had to do something other than sit around waiting for Linc to think of some new clue or lead.
Hannah had been racking her brain trying to come up with the who or why of the shooting. And she’d shed tears again, writing condolence letters to her goth friends’ families. Worst of all, if she let her thoughts drift a bit or woke up at night, she saw the shootings all over again in her head. Her doctor had told her she might have such spells, like those who’d had trauma in battle, a stress syndrome.
She swirled her cape around her shoulders, put a bonnet on—but couldn’t tie it with one hand—and went out into the dying day. The brisk breeze perked her up a bit, and she inhaled deeply. She needed to get her strength back, she told herself, so she walked back and forth along the side of the barn, admiring the view of gently rolling fields, now bare of crops but awaiting spring plantings. Partly screened by bare trees, the pond at the juncture of the three farms looked as flat gray as the sky. To the west, the newly repaired Kauffman barn with the bright quilt square Sarah had painted looked more distant than it really was as the sun sank lower and the hills threw deepening shadows.
Glancing northeast toward the Lantz farm, she admired Ella’s little workshop and Seth’s small house, neither of which had been there when she left home. She pressed her back against the sturdy barn built after the fire. Had she instinctively taken her walk here because she could see for miles? No high-velocity rifles with what Linc called night scopes could be out there now. Or was it because Seth had helped to build this barn, big and strong?
“You shouldn’t be out here in the open, Hannah.”
She jumped and her heartbeat kicked up at the voice behind her, as if her thoughts had summoned him.
She turned to face Seth with Marlena in his arms.
“Because I’m in the open for miles around, I feel safe. I refuse to be a prisoner.”
“I was up on a roof all afternoon. Someone else could be, too—on one of these roofs, hidden behind a tree, even hunkered down on the ground in camouflage hunting gear. You have no idea the range of some rifles today.”
A shiver snaked down her backbone and she pressed tighter to the barn. “I will not just hide. I’m fine, just fine!” Realizing she sounded strident, she stood straight and said in a calmer voice, “I’ve been waiting for a moment to thank you for all you did that night. I know my family has expressed their gratitude, but Tiffany and I might have died, too, without your help.”
“God’s will that I came along to help in time—and that it was you. Even through your friend’s screaming and your pain, I knew it was your voice. Talking, singing, even shouting, your voice has always been beautiful to me.”
She gaped at him, eyes wide, mouth open before she caught herself and, not trusting that voice, nodded. Marlena fidgeted in his arms and sneezed. He cleared his throat.
“That’s all I had to say,” she whispered.
“It means a lot to me. Can I talk to you a minute before I head home? But not out here, where Marlena might catch cold. Can we step into the barn? I have my buggy there.”
She was afraid of the rush of feelings that overwhelmed her near this man, memories, yes, but too strong a reaction to him even now. Distrust, dislike for what he’d done to her, but also raw need, far different from the curiosity she felt about Linc Armstrong. Not moving to follow him at first, she asked, “Do we really have anything but the shooting—which we’ve been over backward and forward with Linc Armstrong—to talk about?”
“I want to show you—you, not him—something I found stuck or caught in the widow with the slit screen late this afternoon. He didn’t climb a ladder to look at your window from the outside so I did.”
“Which means now your footprints are probably where you said they weren’t!”
“We’re both starting to think like him, aren’t we?”
“But what did you find?” she asked, following him around the corner of the barn, not that she wanted to feel even more alone with him, but she understood about Marlena. If she had a little girl like that, especially if she was rearing her alone, she’d be so overprotective that she’d be as uptight as Ella.
He went to his buggy, not the two-seat courting one Hannah was picturing. Of course he’d have a family-size one now. He put Marlena on the front seat, where she sat primly, while he reached in past her and brought out what looked to be a big chicken feather, until Hannah noted its strange black-brown markings in the light from the open barn doors.
“That was stuck in my bedroom window?”
He nodded. “So you couldn’t see it from inside, or almost from outside, either. Wedged lengthwise with the side of the quill and the outer edge of the feather holding it.”
“So, wedged there carefully, intentionally, by someone who managed to open the window itself at least a crack.”
“I’d say so. You can see I damaged it a little, pulling it out. If I wouldn’t have been nearly on top of it, I never would have seen it, either.”
“It’s a big one. From …”
“From an eagle, I think. A wing pinion.”
“An eagle? Like the American bald eagle?” she said, picturing the eagle with arrows in its talons on Linc’s FBI badge.
“I think they’re endangered and government-protected. But that kind of eagle is also sacred to Native Americans. I heard the eagle and the panther were special animals to the historic Indian tribe that once lived around here.”
Her good hand on her hip, she demanded, “Indian tribe? From long ago? You heard that where?”
“At your father’s request, my daad’s been reading up on Iroquois and Erie Indian history because of tribal rights disputes to some lands around here—some of our land. We’ve got to be prepared if there’s a lawsuit or more bad publicity. It’s all come to a boil since you’ve been gone. John Arrowroot, their local spokesman, is on a mission about getting Indian land back from people in this valley.”
“I remember him. He’s a retired lawyer, isn’t he? He’d always show up at our auctions or fundraisers, stalking around and looking grim. I used to be scared of him when I was little.”
“That’s him. He’s been a lot louder about it lately, giving interviews in the Cleveland and Columbus newspapers. He has an eagle feather like this one painted on the picture window of his house, like a talisman or a warning. I’ve only seen it once when I was hunting with my daad, and we wandered onto his isolated piece of land. I saw him last in the butcher shop outside of town, in an argument with Harlan Kenton, who owns the place.”
“I know where that is. Harlan’s the brother of Amanda Stutzman, who runs the Plain and Fancy B and B. Ella says she’s offered me a job, which I’m thinking of taking.”
“If you do, I’ll buggy you there and back, or if I’m working away, get someone else to. You shouldn’t be out alone.”
“As soon as Naomi’s married, she’s giving me my old horse and buggy back. By then, maybe all this will be over. By the way, the Plain and Fancy is where Sheriff Freeman’s ex-wife is staying.”
“Sheriff Freeman’s ex-wife is back in town? But the thing is, I’ve been trying to decide whether to get the sheriff or our mutual friend Linc in on this feather clue or not. I don’t want to falsely accuse Arrowroot or get him stirred up again over Indian rights to our land. But this feather says he needs a closer look.”
“That’s pretty flimsy evidence. Maybe we could talk to him about something else, just psych him out.”
“I like the sound of that ‘we,’ if it doesn’t include Agent Armstrong. But no, I don’t want you around Arrowroot. Listen. There’s more. That day in Harlan Kenton’s butcher shop, before their argument, I heard Arrowroot say the large mound—mound, not hill—with the Amish graveyard on it had once been holy land his people used for sacrifices.”
“Human sacrifices? Did they bury people there, too?”
“I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”
6
THE NEXT MORNING, SETH DROPPED MARLENA off at the Eshes and told Mrs. Esh he’d be back to continue reroofing in about an hour, but he didn’t tell her why. He’d decided to talk to John Arrowroot without tipping him off by questioning or accusing him about the feather, let alone about shooting people in the cemetery.
After Seth had questioned his daad last night about what he knew of Arrowroot’s Erie Indian tribe, he’d come up with a few facts that might point to him as a suspect. Which tribe Arrowroot claimed was a bit confusing as the Erie had supposedly been wiped out years ago by their enemy, the Iroquois. But many of the Seneca tribe were descended from Erie blood, as Arrowroot claimed to be.
The Erie had been farmers and hunters who once flourished in this area, living in small groups. That, Seth thought, sounded like his own people. But the tribe were fierce warriors, known for their skill with poisoned arrows.
So, Seth told himself, Arrowroot deserved watching, not only because he wanted Amish land returned to Seneca-Erie tribal members, but because he could have been the cemetery shooter, especially if that hill had once been sacred to his tribe. Maybe he’d been there for some special, secret ceremony and thought Amish or goth intruders were defiling it. If Seth picked up any proof, he’d tell the sheriff or Linc Armstrong. Right now, he didn’t need the FBI Goliath jumping in with both feet and stirring up this man against the Amish again. If Seth could prove Kevin Pryor’s killer was John Arrowroot, that would get him out of the way for good.
Seth buggied down the main street of Homestead, getting caught at the single traffic light. He’d seen the Dutch Farm Table Restaurant was busy already. Though he’d fixed oatmeal for Marlena and himself this morning, his stomach rumbled. No way he wanted her hooked on those sugary, boxed cereals just because they were easy to serve.
He turned down Fish Creek Road, passing the Rod ‘n’ Gun shop, which was attached to its owner’s one-floor house. The shop was run by Elaine Carson, a former U.S. army officer who bled, as she put it, “red, white and blue.” A big American flag flapped in front of her store with a shooting range out back. Linc had told Seth he’d asked to obtain her list of customers who’d purchased high-velocity rifles in the past two years, but since both Amish and English around here hunted in droves, he’d given up on that tactic.
Seth shook his head as he passed by. His people were grateful for the country that was their home, but too much patriotism spelled idolatry to them. Elaine Carson was way over the line on that, even though Amish kids loved the fireworks she shot off every Fourth of July. Elaine, he’d heard, thought the Amish, who didn’t vote or serve in the armed forces, were ungrateful to the U.S. of A., though she sure tolerated their business.
Seth turned Blaze onto Valley View Road several miles southeast of town and went up and down two hills until he reached the narrow, unpaved road that led to Arrowroot’s property, hidden in trees on a hill. That day he and his father had found themselves hunting near the man’s house, they’d gone up to the door and asked for permission to be on his property. It was a friendly, common question, since hunters often traveled from farm to farm with, “Mind if we hunt here a bit?” The answer was always “Sure, don’t mind a bit.”
“Yes, actually, I do mind,” Arrowroot had told them, standing in his front door and glaring through thick glasses that magnified his dark eyes. “You Amish have my people’s land. Isn’t that enough for you?”
“Sorry to bother you,” Daad had said, immediately backing off. “And sorry you’re bothered by our owning land in these parts.”
“These parts should be returned to their rightful owners. The U.S. government had no right to sell it to settlers, but there will be a day of reckoning.”
“I’m sure there will,” Daad had replied calmly. It was another of the countless lessons Seth had seen of his people’s pacifism, their turn-the-other-cheek philosophy in action. But he figured even then that the day of reckoning his father agreed on was Judgment Day for everyone, not the return of land to a historic tribe of Native Americans. Still, the Amish felt for any group that was persecuted by a government.
“Whoa, Blaze,” Seth said, and reined in. At least he’d recalled one other important thing about John Arrowroot that he was planning to use right now. The roof of his single-story, sprawling house needed new shingles. Seth needed the work—and, as Hannah put it, to psych out this man.
Seth wrapped the reins around a low tree limb and climbed down from the buggy. He saw someone glance out at him from behind a dark curtain in the front window, the one with the large, painted feather that looked identical to the one stuck in Hannah’s window. He hoped he hadn’t made a mistake to try to look into this on his own. But he wanted to help Linc Armstrong solve the shootings schnell—that is, fast—so he’d get out of here and leave the Amish—and Hannah—alone.
Ray-Lynn was relieved that Jack came in for breakfast with the FBI guy because then she didn’t have to spend time with the sheriff. Until he came to her to explain what was really going on between him and his ex-wife, she didn’t trust herself not to just bawl like a baby. Still, his eyes sought her as she bustled about the restaurant doing her best to keep busy away from the men’s booth. But when she could, with a swift, sideways glance, she watched him, too. At least Lily Freeman had not shown her face here.
Elaine Carson, who owned the Rod ‘n’ Gun store, came in, wearing her usual black jeans and leather jacket. The woman rode a motorcycle at times—noisy, darn thing—but Ray-Lynn could see her bright red pickup with the American eagle and stars-and-stripes flag decals parked out in front. Unlike most women, she sat at the counter.
“Hi, Ray-Lynn,” Elaine called out. “Got some pancakes and sausage on the griddle for a hardworking woman?”
“I recognize one when I see one. Right away.”
“Any more news about the shootings? Kinda miss that newspaper, despite who ran it. Oh, I see the powers-that-be over there, so I’ll ask them.”
Taking her freshly poured coffee with her, Elaine strode over to Jack’s booth. She was tall and angular with straight, short brown hair and no makeup. Ray-Lynn took the opportunity to seat an English couple in the next booth, but she didn’t have to strain to hear since Elaine seemed to have one level of volume, and that was loud. Ray-Lynn wondered if she was hard of hearing from her army days or working the shooting range, or if she’d never gotten over the decibel level for giving orders.
“Gentlemen—officers of the law,” she addressed the two men. “Sorry my customer list was a mile long, but you gotta understand the culture around here. I’m sure the sheriff has told you, Agent Armstrong. I mean, everyone hunts, Amish and English alike, right, Sheriff? Even kids. 22-caliber for small game like squirrels and coyotes, 12-gauge shotguns for deer, then the high-speed weapons, you name it.”
“We understand,” Linc Armstrong told her. “Just keep your ear to the ground, then, okay?”
“And my mouth closed, you mean,” she said and, with her balled fist, lightly hit his shoulder. He was dressed in a cargo camouflage outfit today. “But I will keep an eye out. They didn’t call me Eagle Eye in the old days for nothing. And, you know, Annie Oakley was an Ohioan, though I’m actually related to Kit Carson. Take care, then,” she concluded, and went back to her place at the counter.
Ray-Lynn quit her chitchat with the new couple, whom she suspected were outsiders here just to gawk or newspeople on the sly, and headed back to the cash register, only to have her cell phone play “Tara’s Theme” from Gone with the Wind. She answered it, stuck one finger in her other ear to cut the restaurant buzz and tried to not look at Jack when he glanced at her. Darn it, let him think it was some other man calling her.
“Ray-Lynn, it’s Sarah Kauffman, calling from Wooster. I’d love to see Hannah, but I know better than to try. How’s she doing?”
“Good, as far as I hear—mending physically, at least. Not sure about the rest of her.”
“I can imagine it’s hard for her to face what happened and to be home. I thought we’d have time to stop to see you, but we’re here looking for a house to buy or rent.”
“You’re moving to Wooster?”
“Nate and I are going to be married a week from Saturday, on the thirteenth at 2:00 p.m. It will be a small wedding in a chapel we just booked here in Wooster with a restaurant reception after. The northeast supervisor for the State Marshal’s Arson Investigation team has lung cancer, and Nate’s going to take his place earlier than we thought. We don’t want to be separated and—thanks to you—I can move my painting studio anywhere.”
“I’m looking at your latest and my favorite, the one of the kids playing eck ball back of the little schoolhouse. Got it hung right on the wall where folks come in, and I can tell your people stop and admire it, painted faces and all.”
“Good to hear. Maybe someday …” she said, but she choked up and her voice broke before she cleared her throat. “Listen, Ray-Lynn, I’m hoping you can take a message to Hannah from me, since no way I can get to see her now, and I’m hoping, once we move, you could come and bring her—maybe even for the wedding. I know Ella and my family won’t come.”
“Of course, I could bring whoever wants to attend! I’m so happy for both of you. Do you—do you want your family to know? I mean, word will get around …”
“Since I was Hannah’s link to her family when she was living away, I’m praying she’ll do the same for me. So here are the directions to the chapel for you, and what I want my family to know. I hope Hannah can tell them.”
Ray-Lynn reached for a pad and pen to take notes. As she did, she saw that Jack was ignoring Agent Armstrong and frowning at her. Maybe, she thought, that was because she’d been smiling at the good news over the phone, when he didn’t expect happiness from her right now. She forced a broad smile and nodded as if she’d been asked something delightful, then hunkered down to pay attention to Sarah.
“So,” John Arrowroot said as he opened his front door before Seth could knock, “the graveyard hero. To what do I owe this honor?”
“Not a hero in my mind, but I was glad I happened by, maybe scared the shooter off. I’m surprised you know who I am, since I’ve kept my face out of the news coverage.”
“I know who a lot of you are in the so-called Home Valley. My ancestors once called this land Eri’e Rique, ‘at the place of the panther.’ And you just happened by my remote location today, because …?”
“I recalled your roof could use reshingling, and I’m between big projects. Jobs are scarcer than usual for timber framers right now.”
“Ah, yes, the barn builder, the leader of the barn raisings.” The man’s taut mouth lifted in a little smirk. This close up, Seth saw his black hair, scraped back on his skull in a tight ponytail, was threaded with silver that matched his silver ring and a sort of eagle charm on a leather thong around his neck. He would guess the man’s age at sixty or sixty-five. He wore a white dress shirt with jeans, a wide, studded leather belt and Western leather-tooled boots. “Now, that would be different,” Arrowroot went on, “to have just one Amish man hanging over my head instead of all of you. I do get leaks in bad storms.”
“If you have a ladder, I can go up, measure and give you an estimate,” Seth said, trying to keep calm at the man’s subtle digs and goading tone. “I left my ladder where I’ve been working. You ever climb a ladder yourself to look at the roof’s condition?”
“Actually, I don’t like heights. You sure,” he said as he finally stepped outside, “you’re not here to spy on me?”
The man was clever, but Seth had known that. But clever enough to kill someone and escape without leaving a clue, at least at the scene of the crime?
“I intend to fix the roof, not drill holes in it and look through,” Seth said.
Arrowroot almost smiled. “I have no secrets, anyway. I’ve made it clear what my goals are.” He led Seth to the detached, single-car garage and lifted the door himself, though many moderns had a button that did that. “So, how did a man as young as you—what, mid-twenties?—get to be a master builder around here?”
“From the age of fourteen I worked with my mother’s father, Gideon Raber, who taught me about timber framing. He was also in charge of barn raisings, so I had a nine-year apprenticeship with him before he died. It ended up I knew more than anyone else who’d trained with him. But getting back to your obvious goals, why not just file a lawsuit, since you’re a lawyer?”
“The state government’s declined to meet with me so that I can pursue my land claims and the feds don’t recognize Indian tribes or lands in Ohio, so my lawyer’s brain says to go about this another way.”
Seth couldn’t resist saying, even as he hefted the ladder from the garage—only a tall stepladder, not an extension one, “You mean like do something dramatic to draw attention to your cause?”
“In a way. You think you can reach the roof with that?”
“Over on the slant of hill, yes. What do you mean, ‘in a way’?”
“You’ve heard of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ haven’t you? Let’s just stick to roofing. I appreciate your having the guts to come up here, but if you have the nerve to run into a graveyard where people have been shot, guess this is a piece of cake. You know, most of your people are polite but they treat me like a pariah, or at least a ghost they don’t even see.”
“My people love and need their land,” Seth said, noting numerous photos of what might be aerial shots of this area tacked to the back wall of the garage near a cluttered workbench. He wondered if there was a shot of the graveyard there, or the woodlot above it. If he could get a job here, he’d have time to check. So maybe the Lord had inspired him to come here for more than one reason.
Seth positioned the ladder, then began to climb. He didn’t know what a pariah was and he didn’t believe in ghosts. But he was starting to think John Arrowroot had a powerful motive, at any cost to himself or others, to shake things up by bringing in a lot of media coverage here. Linc had asked if maybe the Troyers, who lived on land abutting the hill above the graveyard, would take potshots at weird strangers to bring curious tourists in for their grain mill tours. Seth thought that was a crazy theory, but he didn’t trust John Arrowroot as far as he could throw his entire roof.
After the noon meal, Hannah went out in the new barn to familiarize herself with it. She’d been horrified that the barn of her childhood had burned, and she’d watched from a distance as the men raised this one, with Seth astride the very peak of it.
She stopped to pat her onetime horse Nettie’s muzzle and fuss over her. When she’d left, Naomi had inherited this horse and buggy. Now she realized she’d missed the sorrel mare with three white feet, missed the slower pace of riding in a buggy, when one had time to enjoy the passing scenery which didn’t blur by just like life could do.
Every now and then, Hannah peeked out the door or a window at Seth working hard on the roof. He was almost finished and then wouldn’t be around. Would he still leave little Marlena here during the day? Despite the fact she was the symbol of all she’d lost with Seth, the tot was adorable.
She heard a car and glanced out, wondering if Linc could be back. But Ray-Lynn Logan got out of a van and started for the house. Hannah recognized her not only by her distinctive vehicle but by her red hair. She was a real pretty woman with snappy brown eyes and a personality to match. Her Southern drawl was easy and comforting, like she could lull you into trusting anything she said.
“Ray-Lynn!” Hannah called and waved, ignoring the fact Seth stopped his work to peer down at them. “I just wanted to thank you for the oatmeal chocolate chip whoopie pies you sent to the hospital with the sheriff!”
Ray-Lynn turned away from the house and walked toward the barn with another bakery box in her hand. “Got more for y’all,” she said in her soft, melodic way, “but got to admit it’s a bit of a cover-up. Here,” she said, putting the box down on the family sled Daad had been repairing, then fumbling in her purse. “I wrote the information down in case I didn’t get to talk to you alone. Sarah’s going to marry Nate a week from Saturday in Wooster, and I’ll take you there for the service and reception if you want to go. I know how much it would mean to her—to you, too, I bet.”
“Oh!” was all Hannah could manage at first as she took the note from Ray-Lynn and held it tightly. Weddings! Weddings everywhere, English and Amish. And poor Ray-Lynn looked like she wanted to cry, as well.
“I’d love to be there for her,” Hannah said. “Thanks for this, Ray-Lynn. I’m sorry, I’ve decided not to take the job the sheriff said you offered me. I just don’t want to face so many people right now, be in such a public place, however warm and friendly your restaurant is. I think I’m going to take a part-time housekeeper job at Mrs. Stutzman’s B and B.”
Ray-Lynn sank onto a hay bale and pulled Hannah down beside her. “My motto is, when you’re all shook about the way things are going—with life, with losses, with love—just eat,” she said. She reached for the box she’d just given Hannah, opened it up and pulled out two whoopie pies. She gave one to Hannah. Ray-Lynn took a big bite of hers, then talked with her mouth half-full.
“Do me a big favor, Hannah. Keep an eye on one Lily Freeman at the B and B. See what she’s like, what she really wants around here.”
Hannah swallowed her mouthful of the cookie and wiped frosting off the side of her mouth. “I heard about her. Okay—for Sarah’s other best friend, who believed in her art and helped her follow her heart, I will.”
“And I’ll let you know if I hear anything at the restaurant about the shootings—” she took another big bite “—for you to tell the sheriff, because I’m not speaking to him.”
“Oh. Right. We can be allies in this.”
Ray-Lynn tapped the rest of her whoopie pie to Hannah’s as if they were clinking goblets or shaking hands. “I swear, however different our lives, we women have to stick together,” Ray-Lynn said, blinking back tears. “As for men, you can’t live with them, can’t live without them, whether they’re the Ashley Wilkes or the Rhett Butlers of the world.”
“The who?”
“Have I got a movie to share with you. You drop by sometime, since the B and B’s not far from my house. Listen, Hannah, I don’t mean to dump Seth Lantz and Jack Freeman in the same pot, but ding-dang, I think you and I have a lot in common.”
She pointed at the box of whoopie pies between them. “So, you want to split another one of these?”
7
AFTER RAY-LYNN LEFT, HANNAH, FEELING ON a sugar-and-chocolate high from the whoopie pies, climbed the ladder to the loft, one-handed. She sat on a bale of straw by the hay mow window to read the information Ray-Lynn had written down about Sarah’s wedding and reception.
Sarah and Nate were moving to Wooster! It was not far away, though in the next county. Hannah was soon to begin twice-a-week physical therapy on her wrist in Wooster, near the hospital. Yes, she needed that job at Amanda Stutzman’s B and B so she could hire what her people called taxi service, someone who would drive her not only to get physical therapy but the mental therapy of visiting Sarah.
Hannah shifted her position, looked out and realized, from this vantage point, she was almost as high as Seth. He stood now at the top of his extension ladder, evidently surveying his work on the roof. It all looked neatly done to her—and finished. He’d told the family at noon meal he had been hired to reroof John Arrowroot’s house and hoped to be able to talk some sense into him, but Hannah, maybe her daad, too, knew Seth intended more than that. She resisted the temptation to call to him, as if inviting him to join her here. If he still had memories of the way they used to kiss and hug in the old barn loft …
As he climbed down his ladder and went in the back door of their house, she heaved a huge sigh. Marlena’s delighted squeals sounded clear up here before the storm door closed behind him.
Hannah folded the note and stuck it in the top layer of her wrist bandage, then stood and peered out the four-sided, louvered cupola, which kept the barn cool in the summer and chilly right now. Of course, the vistas were much broader than the scenes she’d admired from below yesterday. She could see clear to the pond and beyond to the brow of the graveyard hill. She’d meant to ask Seth why the edge of the sod over Lena’s grave was so unkempt, but she was afraid it was something Linc did and she didn’t want the two men to argue. She couldn’t tell if the police tape had been removed or not because the fence itself looked as tiny as toothpicks from here.
She scanned a bit farther. The corn maze her male goth friends had been intrigued by that fateful night was partly visible over the next slant of the road. Several years ago, her father, as bishop, and the church elders had asked that its original name, Amish Corn Maze, be changed. It was run by two non-Amish brothers, George and Clint Meyers—red necks, Ray-Lynn had called them. She’d had the sheriff haul them out of her restaurant when they got into a fight with another patron a couple of years ago.
The Meyerses had refused to call their maze something else at first but had eventually renamed it Amish Country Corn Maze. Most English in the area admired and worked well with their Amish neighbors, but the maze owners still held a grudge over that. What had really annoyed the brothers was that the Amish boycotted the maze when they filled it with Halloween horror tableaus—witches, goblins, vampires, skeletons and fake bloody, dead bodies—so near the cemetery.
Hannah was surprised the maze still stood this late in the fall. Usually, they cut it down after harvest and Halloween, because the stalks were pretty ragged by then, and in colder weather, interest waned and profits dropped. A puzzle of paths, like life, her daad had called it once. Suddenly, she recalled something else that hit her like a fist.
She’d never mentioned to Linc or anyone else that the goths had made a brief maze visit. She’d been so focused on what happened at the cemetery and after.
She began to pace, ducking her head when the roof slanted inward. Could the Meyers brothers have heard the commotion Kevin and Mike made as they tore through the maze long after it closed? The Meyers house was just behind the maze. Could the brothers have been angry and grabbed a rifle and climbed that hill when her friends moved on to the cemetery? She remembered how upset she’d been when Linc had first suggested that someone might have driven a buggy or walked to the site to shoot at them, but it was just down the road from where the brothers lived.
She squinted through the louvers at the distant maze again. She could imagine its angular twists and turns and dead ends. It was a good thing she remembered the cell phone number Linc had told her to call if she ever thought of anything else, because she was going to walk to the phone shanty down the road and call him right away. She would insist he return her cell phone, too. He’d said he wanted to have it checked for any strange or suspicious calls she might have received or even background noise it might have picked up during her 9-1-1 call.
By the time Hannah carefully climbed down the ladder and went outside, her concern about Linc and Seth arguing had come home to roost. At least she wouldn’t have to phone Linc, because here he was, jawing at Seth just outside the back door of the Esh farmhouse.
“You’re withholding evidence with tricks like that!” Linc accused, pointing at Seth.
Hannah stopped on the other side of his car. She didn’t want to get in the middle of this, but they were talking loudly enough that she wasn’t exactly eavesdropping. It didn’t take long for her to figure out what the topic was.
“So what if I got a job reroofing at Arrowroot’s? It’s what I do between big projects. And if I learn something or get something out of him, fine.”
“But why didn’t you—or the bishop or Hannah—tell me about this guy wanting the Amish out of here? The sheriff thought of it and went to see him and guess what—Seth Lantz had already come calling. And now you’re saying that cemetery was sacred to his people? Yeah, you’re obstructing an official murder investigation.”
“It’s not evidence yet, just facts. It’s enough that the sheriff tipped him off he’s being watched. And he’s hardly going to admit anything if you storm over there to interview him.”
“The FBI has assisted western tribes with tracking looted items and ancestors’ bones from cemeteries in our art theft program, so I could have used that to get him talking, built a bridge. But now that you’ve horned in, you’re just going to have to report to me—and don’t screw it up!”
“You mean like you did when you didn’t closely check the exterior of Hannah’s window? I did and found an eagle feather stuck half under the sill,” Seth told him, not giving ground. Neither man had retreated but stood just a few feet apart. “And I knew that was Arrowroot’s symbol, his talisman.”
“And, once again, didn’t tell me. But if he’s the shooter, why would he want to plant that to draw attention to himself?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. He hardly made his cause a secret lately. The thing is, you could have looked up there, but you didn’t,” Seth repeated, pointing up toward Hannah’s window. His voice was strong, like Linc’s, getting louder. Although the Amish were soft-spoken, he was more than holding his own.
“And here’s what really scares me,” Seth added, finally lowering his voice so she could barely hear him. “Did Arrowroot, or whoever wanted to make it look like he’d been outside Hannah’s window, only want to leave that feather? Or did he really want inside that window to hurt her but couldn’t raise it? And how did he know which was her window?”
“All right, all right, I’m impressed with your thinking it all through,” Linc said, holding up both hands as if he were under arrest. “I’ve considered she might still be a target, too, but see no evidence of that so far, and this is my investigation. Listen. Anything fishy you find out from Arrowroot, you let me know. You got that?”
“He already asked me if I was there to spy.”
For some reason, suddenly, as if he’d sensed that she was spying, Seth glanced over at her and Linc turned his head.
“Evidently, you heard us,” Linc said, walking closer. “Are you in on this?”
“He showed me the feather.”
“Well, confession time all around. I thought you said you’d call me if anything else came up, Hannah.”
“Maybe now you’ll give me my cell phone back. I was just about to call you, but not about John Arrowroot. I thought of something else that probably doesn’t mean anything, just a coincidence, but—”
“There are no coincidences in something like this,” he said, taking her arm and turning her away from Seth. “Get in the car and tell me,” he told her, and opened his front passenger’s side door to practically push her in.
As Linc stalked around the front of the car, got in and slammed the driver’s side door, Hannah was afraid to look at Seth. But he just stalked back into the house and that door closed, too.
Just when Ray-Lynn was starting to think that at least Lillian Freeman had a shred of decency not to come into the restaurant, she found the woman standing in the driveway of her house when she pulled in after closing up that evening. In the dark, she actually could have hit the woman with her van. God forgive her, she was tempted.
“What are you doing here?” Ray-Lynn asked, rolling down her window.
“I’m at a disadvantage, since you evidently recognize me,” Lillian countered. “I just wanted to say a friendly hello. I mean, no bad feelings, okay?”
Although her blond hair was perfectly styled and her makeup intact, including fake eyelashes, the woman looked like she was out jogging—running shoes, sharp-looking gray workout pants and matching jacket with some sweat marks across her chest. Ray-Lynn almost wondered if she’d caught her at something, like a prank or even worse. She killed her headlights and motor, then got out to face her unwanted guest.
“No bad feelings,” Ray-Lynn lied as best she could. “No feelings at all.”
“I—I heard you and Jack had—have something going. I mean, he mentioned you.”
Ray-Lynn bit her lower lip so she wouldn’t say what she was thinking about Jack. Mentioned her? How nice! Or was this woman trying to get her even more angry with Jack, to drive a bigger wedge between them?
“Since it’s a small town and all,” Lillian went on, “I figure we’d cross paths and better get the worst over.”
“If this is the worst, that would be great. Will you be staying long? I’d heard somewhere you were fed up with small-town life—and your ex-husband, for that matter.”
“Live and learn,” she said with a little shrug and her hands on her hips. “And please, call me Lily. I’m back, maybe for good.”
Or for bad, Ray-Lynn thought, gripping her car keys so hard they bit into the palm of her hand. Surely this woman, however much nerve she had, wasn’t going to ask for her old job back at the restaurant. And, as she suddenly turned tail and jogged away with a jerky little wave, Ray-Lynn had the worst feeling she wasn’t going to keep up this polite facade to ask Ray-Lynn to give up Jack, either. Oh, no, she was just going to try to take him.
“You okay about this?” Linc asked Hannah as he stopped his car where Kevin had parked his along the road by the maze the night of the shootings. They’d planned this all out, and he’d explained everything to her parents, but she still felt shaky about it.
It was even a similar night, Hannah thought as she glanced out the windshield, with the moon mostly hidden by clumps of clouds. Just as when she’d been with her friends, she eyed the big maze sign with its rules: No Smoking! Stay on the Paths! Hold Kids by the Hand! Do Not Touch Displays! Enjoy Half Mile of Scary Fun!
“Yes. I said I wanted to help and I do,” she told Linc. “I admit it wouldn’t be the same in broad daylight. Sorry I didn’t think to tell you sooner, but our quick stop here that night—it just slipped my mind at first.”
“I understand. I cleared it with the Meyers brothers this afternoon, played up that you didn’t approve of Kevin and Mike running through here and that you said they’d have to pay. George and Clint said they’d stay in the house so we could replicate the trespassing. They seemed pretty calm about it, said it’s happened before that people ran through without paying and tampered with the displays or the maze itself. The only thing they said I could slightly construe to be self-implicating was that they don’t want people to make their own paths because it ‘riles’ them. ‘We laid it out and no crashing through our corn barriers!’”
She had to smile at Linc’s mimicking of the brothers. “They’re not the usual type of kind English neighbors around here,” she explained. “But if they’re guilty of the shootings, anything they say isn’t to be trusted—such as they’ll stay put in their house tonight.”
“In my book they’re a step down from rednecks, like you said Ray-Lynn called them. But that type doesn’t want the FBI breathing down those red necks, believe me. They’ll stay put tonight. Besides, they’re entertaining a lady.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Yeah, well, the lady’s their momma from the other side of town. It’s her birthday. They got a cake and all. Listen, Hannah,” he added, his voice suddenly much more serious. He turned even more toward her and reached across her to firmly grasp her right upper arm. “I know you’re not big on this reenactment tactic, but it may help. You may remember even more.”
“But I barely went into the maze that night, just a little ways to yell at them to come out. I went in the entrance and took one turn and it seemed so dark. By the time I started walking back toward the car, they came bursting out through the maze wall.”
“Anything else you recall, just let me know, honey.”
Honey? It was no doubt a slip of the tongue. He’s probably meant to say Hannah. But he still held her arm, stroking it with his thumb as if to calm her, but it didn’t. It had the opposite effect.
“All right, let’s go,” she said, and pulled away to fumble with her door handle, which was still locked until he clicked something so she could open it. The big print sign with the maze rules—Stay on the Paths!—was knocking against something in the wind. It scared her when Linc drew his gun, though he just held it down at his side. In his other hand he held a sturdy flashlight with a bright beam. That made her feel a bit better, as had their earlier heart-to-heart talk today.
Trying to figure him out as a person, not just as an investigator, she’d asked him if he had a family.
“Sure—two brothers who live out near Denver, one of them a police chief. I have nieces and nephews galore. But married with kids? No. Came close, but it wouldn’t have worked out, anyway. Sometime I work 24/7, seven days a week, then can leave on a moment’s notice and be gone for days, like this assignment. Since Quantico—that’s our training site in Virginia—I’ve been busy climbing the Bureau’s ladder—that’s another name for the FBI. My college degree was in finance, but white-collar crimes bored me stiff.”
“So now you’re in a group that looks into murders?”
“Right, violent crimes. Amish country is the last place I thought that would ever take me. If I make it to retirement age at fifty, I don’t know if I could take a place this peaceful.”
“Age fifty? But that’s so young to retire.”
“Only twelve years away, but I’ll find something else to do. Maybe help build barns,” he’d said with a chuckle, though she couldn’t see what was funny about that. And she thought someone that busy could still be lonely, but she didn’t say so yet. Right now, as they approached the maze, that gun was making her feel more jumpy than safe.
“You sure you need the gun?” she asked as her courage wavered again.
“Just a precaution, since I can’t see around the next corner. So how scary are the displays in here?”
“I came through once with Seth in our rumspringa years, though we weren’t supposed to because the bishop—my father—didn’t approve of this place with its witches and fake dead bodies. It’s not like things jump at you, at least not back then. They’re mostly stuffed, but some look real, even though most folks come through in the daylight, unless you make special arrangements with the Meyerses for a group after dark and then they watch you like a hawk.”
“Yeah? Then I’ll bet they would have been upset at unannounced night visitors, especially weird-looking ones making noise.”
Despite fitful moonlight and Linc’s flashlight beam, it was instantly darker inside the maze. The dry cornstalks rustled and seemed to press in on them. Shadows leaped from everywhere.
“Okay, so the guys probably turned to the right here,” he said, darting his beam into the blackness.
“I’m not sure, but they did eventually emerge from the right side of the maze, over this way. But they were inside here long enough that they could have gotten a lot farther than this.”
“The Meyers brothers must know this labyrinth in their sleep. They could have been in here, nearby, and Kevin and Mike wouldn’t even have known it.”
Hannah gasped when they walked through fake, suspended cobwebs—yarn?—around the next turn, but Linc just shoved them away with the flashlight. The beam bounced across his face. It almost made his features look like a fright mask she’d seen uptown in the drugstore near Halloween. While Hannah hung back a bit, Linc peered around another corner. It was all she could do to keep from taking his arm, clinging to him.
“Don’t look here,” he said, stepping back almost into her. “It’s a gross ghoul or zombie in an open coffin. Tell you what, let’s do this backward since you do know where they emerged from. They should hand out maps of these paths.”
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Karen Harper
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: In the shadows of a graveyard, a shot rings out…Hannah Esh fled the Home Valley Amish community with a broken heart, throwing herself into her worldly dreams of a singing career instead. But as much as she tries to run from her past, something keeps pulling her back. On a whim, she brings four worldly friends to the Amish graveyard near her family’s home for a midnight party on Halloween.But when shots are fired and one of her friends is killed, Hannah is pulled back into the world of her past. The investigation into the shooting uncovers deep-buried secrets that shock the peaceful Amish village to its core. Determined to prove her value to the community she left behind, Hannah attempts to bridge two cultures, working closely with both handsome, arrogant FBI agent Linc Armstrong and her former betrothed, Seth Lantz, who is now widowed with a young daughter.Caught between Seth and Linc, between old and new, Amish and worldly, Hannah must chose her future. Unless a killer, bent on secrecy, chooses it for her."Harper, a master of suspense, keeps readers guessing about crime and love until the very end." –Booklist starred review on Fall From Pride“Danger and romance find their way into Ohio Amish country…lively and endearing.”—Publishers Weekly on Fall From Pride