Finding Mercy
Finding Mercy
Karen Harper
Hidden in the heart of the Home Valley, a secret danger takes root…Quiet, cautious Ella Lantz has spent her entire life in the close-knit Amish community of the Home Valley. Tending her lavender fields, she finds calm and serenity in purple blooms, heavenly scents and a simple life. But the sudden arrival of a strange visitor to her parents' home heralds a host of new complications.Alex Caldwell is unlike any man Ella has ever met—clearly, he's no "Pennsylvania cousin," whatever the elders may say. In fact, Alex is a Wall Street whistle-blower under witness protection…and he's brought a world of trouble to the Lantz doorstep. As Ella comes to trust—even love—a man so utterly worldly, she realizes her life has already changed forever.When it becomes violently clear that even the Home Valley is no refuge, Ella and Alex are driven into the wider world to hide. And with such a high price placed on their silence, they may not survive to share their love.…"Harper, a master of suspense, keeps readers guessing about crime and love until the very end." —Booklist, starred review, on Fall from Pride
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Hidden in the heart of the Home Valley, a SECRET danger takes root…
Quiet, cautious Ella Lantz has spent her entire life in the close-knit Amish community of the Home Valley. Tending her lavender fields, she finds calm and serenity in purple blooms, heavenly scents and a simple life. But the sudden arrival of a strange visitor to her parents’ home heralds a host of new complications.
Alex Caldwell is unlike any man Ella has ever met— clearly, he’s no “Pennsylvania cousin,” whatever the elders may say. In fact, Alex is a Wall Street whistle-blower under witness protection...and he’s brought a world of trouble to the Lantz doorstep.
As Ella comes to trust—even love—a man so utterly worldly, she realizes her life has already changed forever. When it becomes violently clear that even the Home Valley is no refuge, Ella and Alex are driven into the wider world to hide. And with such a high price placed on their silence, they may not survive to share their love....
Finding Mercy
Karen Harper
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
For all the Kurtzes who enjoy Ohio Amish country: Margaret, Ruth, Barb, Bev and her friends. And as ever, for everything, to Don.
Contents
Prologue (#u33813598-adb4-5336-9473-6232ffc4de3c)
Chapter 1 (#u6ed7a5a6-98ea-5069-a7f3-4be4718fa4a0)
Chapter 2 (#ude17f0f2-5df4-58e8-8307-c772de2cff79)
Chapter 3 (#uc128bc1c-d1c7-5f25-9164-3ba300b72a9e)
Chapter 4 (#u6448af23-e32f-590b-95fb-8d7d215d0c40)
Chapter 5 (#u2e9c7cee-3ac1-5538-bd39-687228522853)
Chapter 6 (#u52024112-f9c3-571e-ba4c-03375ec75f89)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
April 12, 2011
ALEX CALDWELL WAS sick to death of having to hide like a hunted animal trapped in a borrowed lair. How had his well-planned life imploded so fast? From a great career with a corner office forty stories up overlooking the Hudson River to a room in a one-floor Georgia motel with a single, curtained window. From skiing vacations in Vermont and golf in the Hamptons to running in place in front of a TV. From lobster and steak dinners to carryout and fast food that was all starting to taste like cardboard.
Damn his mentor and former boss Marv Boynton and his under-the-radar schemes that had brought down SkyBound, Inc., along with Alex’s career and hopes! He couldn’t stand just hiding and waiting for the trial to start anymore. The Atlanta spring weather shouted to him, and he was going out for a run, no matter what his government watchdog said.
“I’m going to jog a couple of times around the building,” he told Jake, who was slumped against his headboard, staring like a zombie at a cable news show.
“Not on my watch, you’re not. I know you’re going stir-crazy. You think this is my idea of a great assignment? But you’re a precious commodity, Metro Man, and—”
“I asked you not to call me that. Use my name. It may be all I have left.”
“You should’ve taken the offer on the witness protection program. At least you’d be stashed someplace you could see the light of day. We’re both getting bug-eyed looking at these cable news shows, looking for more on the big man’s case. You’ll hear soon enough when they’re ready for you. ’Sides, you snore, and I’m missing my beauty sleep.”
“You should talk. I finally made some earplugs out of toilet paper so I don’t have to listen to you at night too.”
As ever, they tired of sniping at each other, and their conversation trailed off. Alex could think of more than one comeback, including that Jake was no beauty. Jake—no last name permitted—was balding, nearly sixty, with such big shoulders it seemed he had no neck. He had a gun but no personality. A former private security firm employee, he’d been let go recently and had taken a job protecting witnesses. As long as Alex refused to go into the federal WITSEC program, he was evidently stuck with the man until he could testify against his former boss for economic espionage—with the Chinese, no less. His whole life, his climb up the ladder, sabotaged by his decision to step forward as a whistle-blower—one, evidently, who needed protection until he could testify, or so the feds claimed. He was tempted to wear a disguise and go back home to Manhattan. Five weeks of this, no date for the trial yet, and he was going stark, raving nuts.
In a rage silent but for grunts, he did sit-ups and ab crunches on the floor until he broke out in a sweat and his belly muscles screamed as loud as his desperation. Then he realized Jake was snoring. Since he was asleep…
Alex got up slowly, not turning the volume of the droning TV either up or down. As he tiptoed toward the outside door of the motel room, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He looked bad, too thin, almost gaunt. He’d lost his tan. His usual great haircut was shaggy, his once clean-cut skin scruffy with beard stubble. He was down to his last pair of clean chinos and a cutoff sweatshirt.
He had to get the hell out of here, even for a few minutes. He wasn’t going to risk being traced by doing anything stupid like calling a friend or either of the women he’d been dating—man, he’d like to import either Marci or Anita right now.
Despite being thirty-two years old, Alex felt like a kid sneaking downstairs early on Christmas morning. Holding his breath, he slowly turned the dead bolt. Jake got to make phone calls—he’d made a private one last night. It really irked Alex to be a prisoner. But he knew the WITSEC program would be worse. There you gave up not only your past but had to create an entirely new present.
Jake snored on, though it didn’t sound deep or regular. Alex opened the door and sucked in a big breath. He took a step out and savored it all. Fresh air! The sound of traffic on the nearby beltway, lined with tall buildings. The splashes of colored flowers in the distance on the hill and in a bed near the motel sign. Open sky with puffs of cumulous clouds and a jet gliding overheard, probably from nearby Dobbins Air Reserve Base or even the huge Atlanta airport. Freedom!
Shaking in anticipation, Alex closed the door quietly behind him and began to walk fast. Just a couple of times around the building, he told himself. Atlanta was hilly with rich, red soil, so different from the flat concrete of Wall Street or even the manicured grassy spots in SoHo. Different too from his grandmother’s terraced lawn overlooking Nassau, where he’d wanted to hide out before the feds nixed it.
Filling his lungs with breeze, he broke into a trot, then a run. He turned a corner, passed cars and U-Hauls parked early for the night. He read license plates from up and down the Midwestern states…Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, what he used to think of as flyover country when he traveled to L.A., heading for Hong Kong.
He turned another corner, kept going, faster. Just get this waiting over, be further deposed, prepare his testimony with his lawyers, then make it through the trial, all the publicity. Find a new job, maybe start a new career. Save some money again, decide on which woman to pursue. “If you can’t decide, man,” a friend had told him, “the answer is neither of them.”
His muscles felt the burn now, his lungs expanded to take in good air, despite an idling black pickup spewing CO2 at the far end of the parking lot. The sun felt so good on his shoulders, so much better than the night that had become his friend. Even with Jake accompanying him, he could duck outside only for a few minutes to gaze up at the vast, black night.
The feds were being paranoid, he thought. He’d complained of overkill but had been told their precautions were so he wouldn’t be “overkilled.” They’d regaled him with stories of witnesses who had been kidnapped or killed, tortured, some whose bodies turned up and some who just vanished.
Shutting all that out, Alex spotted one of the maids across the parking lot, going from room to room with her cart of mops and brooms. She was either really pretty or he was getting desperate for female companionship.
He ran on. The next time around, the black pickup was still there with its motor running. Its side window was down and the driver was holding up some kind of mirror that snagged a piece of sunlight. No, not a mirror, maybe binocs. A telescope? Or maybe…
A crack resounded, echoed off the building behind him. Stucco and shards of shingles spit at him. He lunged forward and hit the concrete walk on his belly as a second shot sounded. It shattered the window he’d just run past.
Shooting at him! But how—no one knew where…
Somewhere a woman was screaming, then Jake’s voice. “Stay down! Gun. Gun!”
The pickup roared away. Jake, cursing, hauled Alex to his feet by the waistband of his slacks and shoved him toward their car, pushed him into the backseat on his face, slammed the door, got in the driver’s seat and roared away.
“That’s it for me!” Jake shouted as he sped up, then made a screeching turn. “You don’t play by the rules, and somehow they found you, Metro Man! I’m delivering you to the Atlanta cops and then I’m outta here! For them to track and find you, someone wants you bad. I’d bet city hall you got a nice expensive contract on your head!”
Alex felt shaken to his soul—bullets…hit man…contract. Traced hundreds of miles from Manhattan. He hated and feared having to become someone he wasn’t, but he couldn’t live like this or else he was going to die like this.
1
June 20, 2011
ELLA LANTZ’S FIELD of lavender, edging toward full bloom, stretched as far as her eyes could see. But, she admitted, peering out from under her bonnet brim, that was only because the humped, wide-set rows of the fragrant purple plants went up the hill and disappeared from sight. She had almost an acre of the sweet stuff and, as Grossmamm Ruth put it, with no man or marriage coming down the pike, her little garden of Eden here in Eden County was her future.
With her curved hand sickle, Ella cut an armful of the earliest, hardy English lavender, then rushed down to where her widowed brother, Seth, was loading the wagon with his household goods. Beside him in the wagon sat Hannah Esh, Ella’s good friend, whom he was going to marry this Friday, in just four days.
Even though Amish weddings usually avoided the farming months, everyone agreed they’d waited a long time. Their borrowed wagon was filled with the rest of Seth’s furniture, which was going into storage in the Troyer barn until his and Hannah’s house was done. Meanwhile, the newlyweds were going to live in the big Troyer house while Seth would build first his and Hannah’s home, then one for the youngest Troyer son, Josh, and his wife, Naomi. So many weddings, Ella thought, but none of them hers. Both Naomi and Hannah were her friends, and she wanted to send enough lavender with Seth to scent the Troyers’ house, then later the wedding itself at Hannah’s family home.
Ella was grateful to the Troyers for hiring her oldest brother in these tight times. And, she was getting a house of her own in the bargain. Seth was giving her his two-story home on this property. She planned to live upstairs and make the downstairs into a lavender workshop and store where she could oversee a small staff to make potpourri, candles and soap.
“Here, for Mrs. Troyer,” Ella said, and lifted the big bundle of blooms up to Hannah, who cradled them across her knees. On the wagon seat between her and Seth perched three-year-old Marlena, Seth’s little girl, who adored her new mother-to-be. The child smiled and waved down at her aunt Ella, who had helped to care for her since her mother died two years ago.
One of the four big Belgians hitched to the wagon snorted and stamped a huge hoof. They were anxious to be off. Ella knew Seth and Marlena were only going four miles away, but she would miss them. Suddenly, the small home she was inheriting here seemed miles from the big Lantz farmhouse where her parents and two younger siblings lived.
“Oh, they smell so good!” Hannah said, sniffing the spiky blooms with their purple tips. “Remember, I’ll help you when I can at your new store.”
“When you can won’t be much,” Ella told her with a playful punch on her leg. “Not with taking care of Marlena. Besides, you have a lot of catching up to do since you’ve been helping Ray-Lynn manage her restaurant.”
Ray-Lynn Logan was their Englische friend who owned and operated the Dutch Farm Table Restaurant in the nearby little town of Homestead. The kindly woman, who was recovering from an accident and a coma, shared ownership of the popular eating and meeting spot with Jack Freeman, the county sheriff and Ray-Lynn’s close friend. Hannah had been living with Ray-Lynn for a while, after Ray-Lynn’s accident, and would stay with her until her wedding.
“Gotta go now, Ella,” Seth called down to her. “Enjoy the house. If you need help building the shelves, just let me know.”
“Oh, ya, I’ll just get on your waiting list, you mean!” she kidded him. She smiled through her tears and bit her lower lip as he giddyapped the horses. To lose little Marlena from her care made her so sad… Before that last wagonful of Seth’s household goods rattled down the gravel driveway, the rest of the Lantz family, who had helped him load, came out into the front yard to wave goodbye. Ella wondered where they’d disappeared to while she’d picked the lavender.
Her parents, Eben and Anna, waved goodbye as did her sprightly grandmother Ruth, age 80, who lived with them. Mamm and Daad shouted advice in their Deutsche dialect as if Seth and Hannah—and their only grandchild, Marlena—were leaving for the ends of the earth.
Abel, age twenty-six, Ella’s second-oldest brother, not wed yet, who farmed the fields with Daad, looked sad. He would miss their oldest brother too. Barbara, sixteen, and Aaron, fourteen, the youngest, who was aching for his running around rumspringa time to begin, both turned quickly away and headed back toward the big farmhouse. Ella, at twenty-four, was the middle child of the five of them. She’d felt that way too—stuck in the middle, not quite companions of the two oldest boys or her two much younger siblings. That was probably why she’d made two close friends over the years—Hannah and Sarah, who had gone to the world and been shunned.
Ella was surprised to see an outsider watching from the porch as everyone hurried back inside. So when had he arrived, and where was his car? Who was he? Maybe that’s why everyone had disappeared inside for a while.
Yet she hesitated to follow her family back inside the house. Despite living with so many people, she often chose to be alone, especially when she felt the drowning darkness swirling toward her. No good to have someone see her that way, especially since an Amish girl, who trusted in her faith to pull her through, couldn’t escape its clutches. Going off on her own when that inner darkness came, she’d managed to keep her terrible secret from even those closest to her. Ever since she’d almost died ten years ago, she’d felt not only blessed but cursed....
“Ella, come here!” Her father’s voice pulled her from her agonizing. “Something for the whole family to hear!” Holding the porch door open, he windmilled his arm. As she hurried toward the house, she saw her mother’s white face in the window, peering out at her—or else watching the road, even though Seth’s wagon was out of sight. What was going on? It surely had something to do with that stranger.
Taking a shortcut down the row with her late-blooming French lavender, she broke into a run.
* * *
Alexander Caldwell was really a wreck. This area reminded him of an old Clint Eastwood Western rerun. He saw horses and buggies, people in hats and bonnets, big barns and farmhouses with no phone or electric wires, no satellite TV dishes. And he was to be a part of all this, he marveled, as the black buggy clip-clopped along at such a slow speed he could actually see what usually blurred past beside the road. Hopefully, somewhere up ahead, Gerald Branin, his link to the outside world, was laying the groundwork for this huge deception that could mean life or death to him, especially since the shooter in his attempted Atlanta assassination had not been caught.
Gerald, his WITSEC manager, had sounded so certain that the heart of Amish country was the best place for him to hide out until the trial. This was a one-eighty from his own life in Manhattan. This was Podunk, the boondocks, the sticks, aka Homestead, Ohio, in Eden County. Soon enough his testimony at the trial would splash his name across the country and the world. But since the attempt on his life and at the urging of his lawyer, Logan Reese, he had finally admitted he needed to hide out. The feds had convinced him to try Amish anonymity.
He could, he thought perversely, envision the headlines now: Former NYC Exec Exposes Corporate Espionage by CEO of Tech Firm Skybound, Inc.… Investors Left Devastated and Furious… Chinese Businesses Involved… Atlanta Assassination Attempt Financed by—Why, You Name It: Alexander Caldwell’s rich and powerful former boss? The Chinese who want to shut Caldwell up to avoid sanctions? Irate investors? Place your bets on who would most like to shut the whistle-blowing witness up for good.
“Best put that hat back on,” Bishop Joseph Esh, who was driving the buggy, told him. “It’s to wear, not bend in your hands. Make you harder to pick out among our people, ya, it will.”
“Oh, right,” Alex said, smoothing and replacing it on his head. He couldn’t get used to his Amish hairstyle, either, or the lack of zippers on his broadfall-style pants, the suspenders, or the five hundred dollars Branin had given him in small bills, when he was used to credit cards. No smartphone, which he missed horribly. Like an idiot he kept lifting his wrist to check his Rolex for the time when he didn’t and couldn’t wear a watch—and did time even matter in this place? At least he was playing a younger, unwed man, so he didn’t have to grow a beard. This elderly man had a long, white one.
“I do appreciate everything, sir,” he told his host.
“Sir is too worldly. Bishop or just Joseph is good for me. Be careful not to talk much in front of strangers and just nod when we speak the Deutsche but for those few words I told you. Too bad you got to use lies to protect the truth. Learned it the hard way myself, but the ends sometimes justify the means. You got your story straight?”
“Yes—ya. My manager rehearsed it with me, so I won’t rattle my bio—biography—off again. I guess this has never happened before, that your people have sheltered a kind of fugitive.”
“Nope. Did it because we owe FBI Agent Lincoln Armstrong a favor for helping solve a crime in these parts and your man Branin is a friend of his. And because Armstrong canceled a money debt my daughter Hannah owed him. I would take you in myself but too many people in and out of a bishop’s home. We all—you too, I know—hope this won’t last long.”
“That’s for sure. I’d like to get this over, sanely and safely.”
“Life is precious, each one. You got a lot to live for. Enjoy and treasure each day. We all do.”
Bishop Esh turned the buggy onto another curving, hilly road with a metal signpost that read Oakridge, and a hand-lettered one under it with an arrow. Lavender Plain Products, No Sunday Sales.
* * *
“We what?” Ella heard her brother Abel ask Daad as she hurried into the kitchen where her family and the stranger were gathered around the big table. She took off her bonnet, draped the tied strings over the back of her usual chair and sat. Pieces of shoofly pie and raspberry iced tea were at each place. Abel went on, “Take in an Englischer and say he’s our cousin? But why, Daad?”
Daad shot Abel a sharp look. Ella could tell their worldly visitor wanted to answer but deferred to their father.
“Partly in thanks,” Daad answered, “for what Agent Armstrong did for the Eshes. The bishop asked us to house this man we will call our cousin Andrew Lantz from Intercourse, Pennsylvania, though he is really an Auslander from a big Eastern American city. Andrew will work with us, work the fields. He will be with us until at least late summer, maybe longer. We will not question him about his true identity or his past. He is a good man. Now Mr. Branin here will say a bit more before our guest arrives.”
Ella noted Daad frowned at Aaron for rolling his eyes at the mention of Intercourse. She’d heard Aaron and a couple of guys from his buddy group snickering over the name of that town before. Ah, those almost-ready-for-rumspringa years, when Amish teens enjoyed running around and trying worldly things. She should have cut loose more, but after her accident, she was so afraid of doing anything wrong, of setting off the darkness again.
She studied the Auslander. Mr. Branin was a short, wiry man whose red hair was fading to gray and creeping up pretty high on his forehead. He had sunglasses sticking out of his pocket, both the pockets and glasses sure signs he was an Englischer. He was dressed half fancy, half country in a white-sleeved shirt with jeans and running shoes. He wore a gold watch and wedding ring, which stood out here. He leaned forward with his elbows on the kitchen table as he talked, gesturing so much he almost punched Barbara in the face and she scooted back in her chair.
“I know it won’t be easy to pretend a stranger is part of the family,” Mr. Branin said. “But when the bishop brought me here a while ago in his buggy, he assured me that you and your people will take good care of this man. I must admit this is a radical placement for a witness, and I want to assure you that Andrew Lantz has done nothing wrong. Sometimes this program is forced to protect criminals who are informing on worse criminals, but that is not the case here. Andrew is helping our country at great risk to himself—a risk we will eliminate by hiding him here in a world so different from his own. Among your people, we appreciate that even the photographing of faces is not permitted.”
“And,” Daad said, “the new owner who bought the county newspaper, so far at least, is not like those big newspaper people, always poking into our privacy.”
“Good,” Mr. Branin went on. “And I assure you, I’ll make a visit every once in a while.” He looked from face to face and, evidently, since he hadn’t been introduced to Ella before, nodded at her. “Sometimes you may be aware of my presence, but sometimes not.”
Ella thought that sounded funny. Was this man going to hide in haystacks or up on the hill above her field? She sure didn’t need someone spying on her, especially if she had to go off alone. She took a drink of iced tea and tucked into her piece of pie. For a moment, silence descended, but for the clink of forks on plates and Aaron’s fidgeting and shuffling his big feet under the table.
“Someone’s going to have to tell Seth,” Ella said, her pie halfway to her mouth.
“I told him and Hannah first,” Daad said. “They will keep Andrew’s secret too.”
“But the others,” she plunged on, ignoring Mr. Branin’s frown, “the neighbors, the church…”
“We have been helped, and we will help in turn,” Daad said. “We will be the Good Samaritan to this wounded man.”
This wounded man? Ella thought. She’d sure like to know more about what had happened to the outsider they were taking in.
* * *
Bishop Esh’s words seemed to cut to the core of things, something Alex had always admired in mentors and bosses, even Marv, whom he was going to betray—as his boss had betrayed everyone who’d trusted him and SkyBound.
“It’s like you been banned from your people for a while, and we understand that.” The old man went on, “And to tell the truth as you have about a sinner, at cost to your own safety—that is also why I said yes to the witness protection people. He makes me to lie down in green pastures, He leads me beside the still waters…that is why too. As the Lord shelters us, we ought to shelter others.”
Alex could only nod. He kept telling himself he was Andrew Lantz now, the Pennsylvania cousin of the family he would stay with and was about to meet. Gerald Branin, the WITSEC Deputy Marshal Inspector in charge of his case, had grilled him about his fake background but had not told him much about the Amish family who would take him in until the case came up in federal court in Manhattan. Five children, he’d been told, four of them still at home. As an only child, that would be a challenge, but maybe it could help to keep him from missing his friends so much. What he wouldn’t give for a good, noisy bar crawl with his buds right now.
Again he surveyed the rolling hills with fertile fields of nearly knee-high corn guarded by tidy farms and barns. It was pretty, he had to admit that, like stepping back into a Currier & Ives painting. He watched other buggies pass with a nod or a wave on this narrow road. Everyone seemed to know the bishop’s buggy—which looked like all the rest to him—and many called out a greeting in the German dialect.
When the bishop turned the buggy down a long lane, Alex saw a pale purple field of flowers marching partway up a high hill. The unearthly beauty of that—and that scent in the air amidst the buzzing of bees as the bishop reined in—seemed so foreign. As tense as Alex felt, the peaceful scene calmed his heart.
“I live just next farm over yonder,” Bishop Esh said, pointing. “Three of us church families close together here—Kauffman, Esh and Lantz—with a real nice pond in the center. You just walk that field there, come have a meal with me and my wife, tell us how you’re doing. Better make it after Friday, though, big family wedding with my daughter marrying the oldest of the Lantz sons. All kinds of things going on. You’re invited too.”
“Thanks. That’s kind of you. I appreciate all you’ve done.”
At least living with these backward, simple people would be a break from the high-speed chaos of his life, Alex thought. He usually lived fast and hard—he’d even been tempted to try an extreme sports vacation once, but he’d chickened out. Since he didn’t know the first thing about horses, barns or crops—or much about the Amish—maybe the next couple of months would be pretty extreme.
* * *
“Wait—maybe that’s them now,” Mr. Branin said, and jumped up to look out the window. “Mr. Lantz, that’s the same buggy that dropped me off here, isn’t it?”
Daad looked out the window as Mamm had been doing off and on, when Ella thought she was just yearning for Seth to bring little Marlena back. “Ya, it’s the bishop—them,” Daad said with a nod.
Ella leaned back in her chair, but it wasn’t worth it to crane her neck. Just get the man here, greet him kindly, then Daad, Abel and Aaron would keep him occupied, she thought. She had loads of work to do getting her new place ready and tending her crop, so she’d be too busy to help much. Her sister, Barbara, usually helped her tend the lavender but she was living with the Kurtz family ten miles outside town, since they had six children and the mother was ailing. Ella missed her younger sister, but Barbara would be back for Seth’s wedding. Everyone expected Barbara would be the next Lantz bride, because she was closer than ever to her come-calling friend, Gabe Kauffman.
“I see he’s tall and thin, this Andrew Lantz,” Daad said. “Can’t tell his hair or eye color from here—hope he’s not got dark eyes and hair. Harder to fit in among our people.”
“Ah, no,” Mr. Branin said, sounding nervous now. “Dark blond hair and blue eyes, though you can’t tell it with that hat yet.” He hurried to the back door behind Daad. With a single, small black suitcase in his hand, the stranger appeared on the threshold behind Bishop Esh.
Though Ella had heard Daad describe the Auslander, she was surprised to see he was a whole head taller than the bishop. His square chin had a little cleft in the middle of it under his firm lips. He put his bag down but kept rotating his hat brim in his hands, clean-looking ones, no broken nails or bruises. Daad introduced each of them in turn by name as they stood at their places around the table. She realized she’d been rudely staring.
“Next, Ella, middle child, eldest daughter, keeps the lavender field, sells her goods, yet a maidal—not married.”
Did Daad have to introduce her like that? Not only as a maidal, but sells her goods and not married yet?
“Ella.” The stranger repeated her name as he had not the others. His gaze, sharp blue as winter ice, snagged hers and held a moment. His voice was deep and in just the few words he said, she sensed how lost he felt. He looked sturdy, though, with the muscles he’d need to help around here. His chest swelled his shirt and his upper arms filled out his Amish coat, which was just a bit too short at his wrists. His trousers fitted him just fine, though. He had new running shoes; so clean and white they stood out.
“Welcome, Cousin Andrew,” she said, as the others had before, and then the introductions went on until Mamm sat him down and fed him and the bishop pie and iced tea, while Ella and Barbara bustled around to help Mamm prepare a light evening meal. They would feed him up good, unless his working around here kept the weight off.
More than once, when Ella darted a quick glance his way, their guest—Andrew—had those sharp blue eyes still on her. Later, when she placed his roast beef and gravy sandwich in front of him, she said, “Things are upside down today, first dessert, now the main course.”
“I appreciate both,” he said directly, quietly to her, then addressed everyone in a louder voice. “I mean to pitch in and help any way I can, though I’ve got to admit, planting a memorial tree after 9/11 is about as close as I’ve come to farming.”
“Oh, ya,” Daad said, “9/11, when the country was attacked and so many people died. Whatever is in the evil and sad past in your life, Andrew, we will keep you safe here.”
Ella was amazed to see tears shimmer in Andrew’s eyes. His lower lip quivered. He looked just the way she felt when she was afraid of the drowning darkness she had shared with no one and never could. She fought the desire to put her hand on his shoulder and began to serve the others.
2
THAT EVENING AS dusk descended, Ella worked late in Seth’s house. No, it was her place now, she reminded herself as she carried cartons of lavender products in from her work shed. Kitchen cabinets and counters, two long tables and planks on sawhorses would have to do for shelves and work areas until she could get everything built the way she wanted. She hoped to buy a still someday so she could distill the precious lavender oil. At least she’d finished stitching her dress to attend Hannah at her wedding. She’d been thrilled when Hannah asked her to be one of the side sitters, special friends of the wedding couple.
From dowels overheard, Ella hung the remaining bunches of last year’s dried flowers by the rubber bands around their stems. Instantly, the kitchen and living area, even the two small first-floor bedrooms, gave off the familiar, delicate smell. Sometimes she was so used to the scent that her nose went numb from it, but it was deep in her mind and heart and she could imagine it. The kitchen here bothered her, but not because it was so small. On its wooden floor, Seth’s wife, Lena, had died of an aortic aneurism, something she’d carried inside since birth and no one knew about.
Ella lit a third kerosene lantern to keep away sad thoughts. Her black mood had been lurking lately, probably because Seth and her little charge Marlena had left. Ella guessed worldly people would call her malady an off-and-on depression. Secretly, from books in the book mobile, she’d looked up the problem, but she still just wasn’t sure what to call it or how to best cope with it. She hoped it wasn’t what she read about bipolar disorder. Mostly, she just hid out when it hit her. You’d think nearly drowning would make every second of life that followed full of relief and joy, but that cold, grasping whirlpool seemed to pull her under sometimes, as it had then.
At least the hard work of producing her small number of Lavender Plain Products kept her focused outside herself. Now her family’s new houseguest gave her lots to think about. Since she’d moved her things into the previous unused upstairs here, “Cousin” Andrew was being given her bedroom. How strange to think of an intriguing mystery man sleeping in her once private place.
She decided to go back to the farmhouse to get the refrigerated items Hannah had brought her from the restaurant for her generator-run fridge. It had been so kind of Ray-Lynn and Hannah to think of a sort of housewarming gift for her, and she was going to give both of them scented candles when she got settled here.
But as she stepped out on her back porch, she saw a figure jogging down the lane from the house or barn. In the gathering gloom, she could see clean white shoes. Those, and the fact no one Amish went jogging, told her who it was. His quick steps spit gravel in a regular rhythm. But it was almost dark, and even buggies should stay off the roads now.
Earlier, she’d seen Daad take Andrew for a tour of the barn and the fields—back to the pond too, a place she always tried to avoid. Then she’d seen Mamm showing him around their big garden, pointing out and naming flowers and vegetables as if he were from another planet. It was pretty obvious to them that their adopted cousin had no idea of how to garden or farm. But Daad and the boys would teach him. She sure could use his help weeding her lavender beds, but she hadn’t dared say so.
Ella headed for the farmhouse. Since her brothers had carried her bedroom furniture to her new place after supper, maybe this would be her last trip tonight. Trail bologna, Swiss cheese, some of Ray-Lynn’s delicious baked goods; she’d seen how much Andrew had appreciated their food… Ach, she had to stop thinking about him so much, just because he was new and different. Too much happening around here at once, but maybe that would help her keep her head above water—she always thought of it that way....
She was almost to the farmhouse when she heard a long squeal of car brakes, then a crash. Not far down the road! What if a car had hit a buggy? It happened too often, and who came out the loser then? Little Marlena’s maternal grandparents had been killed in a buggy car crash in the area that sound came from—the direction Andrew had run.
What if a car had hit him, jogging in the dark on the road?
Not even taking time to call for help inside the house, she lifted her long skirt and broke into a run in the same direction he had gone.
* * *
When Ray-Lynn Logan heard the screech of brakes and the bang! she stopped her van right in the middle of the road.
She’d given her restaurant manager, Hannah Esh, the day off to help her fiancé, Seth, get settled at the Troyer house and to help her family prepare for her wedding day. Ray-Lynn had promised she’d pick her up after she closed the restaurant, and bring her home. Hannah had been living with her ever since Ray-Lynn’s concussion and coma, though of course Hannah was leaving this week to begin her new life as Seth Lantz’s wife and little Marlena’s mother. After her accident—which was really an attempted murder—Ray-Lynn had lost a couple of years of her memories, and that was about how long she’d had the restaurant. Worst of all, she’d forgotten her entire relationship with Jack, the county sheriff, which they were trying to rebuild—a relationship she still wanted to work, thank goodness. As appealing a man as Jack Freeman was, that kind of love—romance—she could not just fake.
But she was certain of what she’d just heard. Her accident had been at night too. She shouldn’t have driven out after dark even now, but she had to learn to cope again, to be normal.
Sweating, shaking, she knew she couldn’t just sit here in her new van in the middle of the road, even a usually quiet, country road in Amish country. She hit her emergency blinkers, fumbled for the cell phone in her big purse and punched in the easy-dial for Jack’s private number. He’d know it was her from the caller ID. He had to answer! Good! No recording. He was picking up.
“Honey, you home?” he asked before she could say a word. His voice sounded so good. “I had a domestic outside of town, didn’t get a chance to call you yet, but—”
“Jack, I’m in the van on Oakridge just before Troyer Mill Road, going to pick up Hannah! I—I’m not hallucinating, but I just heard a car hit something—it’s wrecked—I’m sure of it.”
“What direction from there?”
“Before the covered bridge, but past the Amish cemetery, not too far from that pond in the woods. I’m afraid to go look.”
“Keep clear of it. Go on back to the bishop’s house and wait there. I’ll check it out right now.”
“But Hannah will worry about me. You know she does.”
“You can explain to her later. Just do what I said, and I’ll look into it.”
He punched off. Yes, she should do as he said, but what if she could help someone the way others had helped her? The old Ray-Lynn, the one who was so outgoing, feisty and strong—she had to get her back so she could be the woman Hannah and Jack both assured her had made him fall in love with her. How could a take-charge man like Sheriff Jack Freeman ever love a wimpy, wishy-washy, scared little rabbit? Ding-dang, she still had to recover her old self!
She turned on her brights, put the van into Drive and headed down the road toward where she’d heard the crash.
* * *
Alex’s first reaction when the car roared down the road toward him was to dive out of the way, not even be seen. At least the roar hadn’t included gunfire. Since Atlanta, he’d been paranoid about loud sounds, about vehicles backfiring or even speeding up. If there was a contract out on his life, did he just have to fear guns or could someone try something else? A car accident would look a lot more natural than bullets in the brain.
Praying his location had not been compromised again, he leaped off the narrow road. The speeding car had barely missed him as it vaulted up and over the next hill ahead—and then the crash.
At least the ditch where he’d landed was dry, but when he got to his feet and tried to climb out, he realized he’d twisted his left ankle. Idiot! He’d been so desperate to run for a while, savor the safety and freedom of this place. Now how was he going to get to that wreck, get back to the farm and the Lantzes?
He had to go up and over a hill to see if he could help. When others came, he’d have to fade away, try to cut through the woods past the pond Eben had showed him on his tour this evening.
Alex limped up the hill, which seemed endless. A sharp pain stabbed his ankle with each step. What else bad could happen to him? His past in ruins, his life endangered, probably a price on his head. But he couldn’t just leave someone who might be hurt or dead. As much of a jerk as the driver had been to speed on these hills, Alex couldn’t leave someone in need, no matter if his own hide was in danger.
Running footsteps behind him. What if this was a setup? Someone tried to flush him out with the headlights, tried to hit him, but he’d jumped aside, now they’d make sure…
He hunkered down just off the road—no ditch this high on the hill—and saw a person running toward him. A woman? Her light-colored apron and the white cap Amish women wore seemed to glow in the dark. His eyes had adjusted after staring into the headlights of that car.
He stood and limped onto the berm of the road. The woman running toward him stopped. “Andrew? Oh, thank the Lord, you’re all right! I heard that car crash like it hit something.”
“I sprained my ankle getting out of its way. Can I lean on you? I’m pretty sure the crash was just on the other side of the hill.”
“Oh, ya, sure. Is it bad? If it hurts too much, I can just go see. That crash was loud. Surely someone else will come. They didn’t hit a buggy, did they—or if you didn’t see it, only heard it…”
He could tell she was nervous too, and not only because of the wreck. Did she not want him to touch her, put his arm around her shoulders? Ella was pretty, the lavender lady, with the white-blond hair and pale blue eyes. She had a great bod her Amish garments could not quite hide and an almost angelic face, framed by that stiff white cap. Unlike her mother and grandmother, Ella had her feelings written plain on her face, emotions that flitted past and changed. He’d been upset to hear he was being given her bedroom, but Mrs. Lantz had assured him that Ella had already planned to move to the small house on the other side of the garden and her big field.
“Okay, sure, lean on me,” she told him, stepping closer. Strange that, just as he reached his arm to touch her, the new moon popped over the horizon behind her head. Its sickle shape didn’t give them much light but, in the midst of his fear, it seemed strangely like a celestial smile.
* * *
At the bottom of the hill, the side of a small, red sports car was wrapped around a big tree. And the hood of the car was evidently on fire. As they trudged toward it together, their awkward gait—Alex was now half hopping, just putting pressure on his good leg—reminded Ella of a three-legged race.
When they got there, they both gasped. It looked as if the red car itself bled strings of blood. No—Ella saw it was spools of shiny, red cord that had been thrown out of the car.
“Stay back,” Alex ordered her, and took his arm from her shoulders. “I’ll see if someone’s still inside.”
“You can’t—your ankle. I’ll check.”
“No! If that fire spreads, the gas tank might blow!” he shouted, and made a grab for her. He missed and only snagged his fingers in her prayer kapp, which pulled off and yanked her long, pinned-up braid free. The weight of it slapped between her shoulder blades as she ran. She was pretty sure she heard a couple of curse words from Cousin Andrew.
He was right about a possible explosion. She smelled gas. She’d have to hurry. Passenger side crunched in. Driver’s door open. No one in the car, maybe got out, but to where? Been thrown out?
“No one here!” she started to shout back to Andrew, but he’d come up right behind her. He tugged her back so hard by an elbow that she almost flew off her feet. She banged into him. He fell back, but she balanced them before he pulled her away. His face, lit by the fire, looked like a mask of anger. What was this man really like?
“Get back, I said! You could be killed if that blows!”
Limping, he managed to drag her across the road and shoved her into the ditch, just as the car went up in flames with a big boom! Clinging together, they huddled in shallow water among grass and weeds. The light and heat slapped them, a hundred times worse than an open oven door or roaring fireplace log. Light all over—no, that was headlights up on the road. Someone was here to help! And here she was in Andrew’s arms, clinging to him.
Ella clambered up and out of the ditch, dripping wet, her snagged braid spilling her hair loose. Despite the headlights in her eyes, she could see someone was getting out of a van.
“Ella? Ella, you okay? It’s Ray-Lynn. The sheriff’s on his way. What happened? Whose car?”
“Don’t know, but he didn’t burn up with it. I went to get him out but he was gone.”
“We’ve got to find him, like you and Hannah found me, saved me. I— Oh, who’s that?”
“This is our cousin, Andrew Lantz from Pennsylvania, visiting us for a while. We were— We both heard the crash.”
Ella could see Andrew was already searching among the charred trees along the road, using a Y-shaped branch he’d found for a crutch. “Here!” he shouted to them. “He’s back here!”
They ran to him, bent over a prone form. It seemed one unwound spool of the crimson cording pointed right at him. A young, dark-haired man lay sprawled half in the ditch on this side of the road. When Andrew turned him over to see if he was breathing, they saw he looked Asian. Andrew gasped.
“You know him?” Ray-Lynn asked.
“No—just surprised. Chinese, I think, and here—in Amish country.”
They could hear the sheriff’s siren coming closer. Andrew’s head jerked up, turned toward the sound.
“It’s all right,” Ray-Lynn said. “Just the sheriff. He’ll call the authorities for help, and we can tell them what happened.”
Ella took off her apron and covered the unmoving man.
“He’s breathing, has a pulse,” Andrew said as he rose and moved away.
Ella bent over the injured man while Ray-Lynn walked away to flag down the sheriff. He jumped out of his squad car with a bright flashlight. Ella saw him give Ray-Lynn a quick, one-handed hug and whisper to her, though his words carried on the wind.
“Don’t you let this flash you back to your own accident. You done good, honey, you and Ella and— Where’d that Amish guy go?”
Ella looked around as Ray-Lynn filled the sheriff in, and he came over to look at the unconscious victim. Unless Andrew had dived back into the ditch, he was nowhere to be seen, and with that sprained ankle. Then in the scarlet reflection of the sheriff’s pulsating light bar, she saw he was crosscutting the field that led toward the pond and the more distant farm, moving jerkily with that homemade crutch.
Like a real Amish man, was he just humble, not wanting to take credit for helping to save someone’s life—if the car’s driver lived? Or was it because he had his identity to hide and even the sheriff could not know about his being in that protection program? Or, she thought as the new, local newspaper editor, Lucinda Drayton, pulled up, was Andrew just making sure he wouldn’t be interviewed or photographed?
Ms. Drayton slammed her car door and ran toward the sheriff shouting, “What happened?” Ella would have to tell Andrew that the new editor was real good about not showing Amish faces. Didn’t he know he’d have to talk to the sheriff later?
Sheriff Freeman told Ms. Drayton, “Don’t know much yet. That license plate’s almost toast, but I’m gonna call in what I can see of it. We got an injured man on the ground. Squad’s coming.”
He walked back to his car and bent inside it to get some sort of telephone from the seat. Ray-Lynn knelt by the victim, and Ms. Drayton started photographing the still-smoldering wreck. In the reflected headlights, her short, sleek silver hair looked like a prayer kapp.
Ella walked over and told Ray-Lynn, “I can answer the sheriff’s questions tomorrow, but I’ve got to get back right now.”
“I can take you home, but it will be a while. Where did your cousin go?”
“He’s new—shy, too. I’ve got to go see if he’s okay,” Ella said, and hurried away as she heard other sirens coming closer. Even though Andrew was hiking toward the place she never wanted to so much as see again, she cut through the trees the way he had, toward the pond.
3
ELLA HURRIED TO catch up with Andrew, but he had a good start on her, even using his makeshift crutch. Whatever he was hiding must be bad if he didn’t even want to meet the sheriff.
She wasn’t planning to go near the pond now, just skirt around it, but she needed to be certain he’d make it back to the farmhouse. She’d get Grossmamm Ruth to tend to that ankle with a poultice or a wrap.
Oh, no, he was making straight for the water. It was all worse in the dark, with the trees hunched over it, because it had looked like that when she’d met her best friends Sarah and Hannah there that night so long ago. Back then, Ella had been the wildest of the three, planning pranks, urging the others to sneak out at night. Scolding her once, Mamm had called her a daredevil, but even that bad name hadn’t stopped her adventures.
That night, they’d taken off their clothes to keep them dry and, stripped bare, had gone into the cold water.
“Ooh, goose bumps already!” Sarah had said. “I’m gonna get out and just sketch the scene.”
“Of us naked?” Ella had challenged, and they’d all giggled. “Just swim around a little and you’ll warm up. Hannah’s not complaining.”
“It’s ’cause my teeth are chattering too hard!” Hannah had cried, chin-deep in the pond.
And then, somehow, amidst the laughter and the kidding, the kicking and the splashing, it happened. In the middle, where the coldest water came in from a deep stream that fed the pond, it seemed an evil, icy hand reached for Ella and pulled her around and down.
Had she put her own head under? In their horseplay, had she inhaled or swallowed water? Later, she could never remember. It was black and wet, and she held her breath, but her air was gone and a darkness like death sucked her in. She struggled, but it was too strong until someone grabbed her long hair and pulled and then…
The next thing she remembered was lying on the bank, spitting up water, shaking, gasping with her friends bending over her. Later, when she could breathe and talk, she begged them not to tell her parents what had happened—what had almost happened.
But she was changed after that. Hannah and Sarah knew it. Ella admitted it. Her parents saw it as an improvement. The daredevil had drowned and a more careful Ella was born that night, fearful the Lord had scolded her, shaken her.... Ever since, she’d lived with the curse of the sudden, drowning moods that she hid from everyone, however hard that was in such a tight community. Oh, they knew she was moody, a bit of a loner, a hard worker tending her lavender. But they never knew she carried with her the burden of the blackness, the wet, drowning fear of…
“Ella? I thought you’d stay with them.” Andrew’s voice jolted her. She saw pale moonlight sliced through the opening in the trees enough for him to see her too. He was sitting on the bank of the pond with one leg in it. “Your dad showed me this pond and said the water was cold. I needed to soak my ankle. I should have soaked my head for getting in that mess my first night here, but I’m glad we could help whoever that was. I think he’s going to live.”
“I pray he will,” she called to him, staying put at the edge of the clearing, leaning back against a big maple as if glued to it. No way was she getting closer to that water—or to him again. “You reacted like you knew that injured man.”
“No. Just surprised to see an Asian man in Amish country, which was stupid of me. I—I used to know some Chinese, and that’s what I think he was, American-Chinese, of course.” His voice had a slight tremor to it. “I didn’t expect him here, that’s all.”
She wondered if Andrew had been a travel agent. Or what if he was a spy against the Chinese and that’s why he had to hide out? No, that was crazy.
“Is the cold water helping your ankle? My grandmother is good at tending to things like that. I can head home and bring a buggy closer so you don’t have to walk far.”
“I think I’ll be able to make it with this crutch. I apologize for leaning on you earlier.”
“Oh, that’s fine. We all have to do that—lean on each other. You know, you still might have to answer some questions from the sheriff. The woman who owns the local newspaper showed up too. She’s pretty nice, though, not like the man who owned it before.”
No answer from him but a huge sigh. Silence. Just an owl’s whoo-whoo, wind rustling the leaves overhead and the ripple of the water where he moved his foot in it.
“You can tell me if I’m out of line,” he said, not looking at her now, “but are you afraid of me? Or is there some rule about not getting too close to outsiders or to men for unmarried Amish women?”
“Oh, no—not like that. I’m just—wary of the water.”
“Oh. The pond. Your dad said it’s deep. You mean you can’t swim.”
“I used to. Liked it, even, but not now.” She almost blurted out more. She had a strange urge to confide in this stranger when she’d not even told her own family. Nor had she shared her near drowning with her come-calling friend, Eli Detweiler, though they were once, briefly, betrothed. But Eli would not—could not—give up his liquor after rumspringa, and there was no way she was going to trust him to be her husband and the father of her children—or to know the deepest, fearful secret of her heart.
Wide-eyed, drawn to Andrew but not going closer, she watched him stand unsteadily. He still had his makeshift crutch. She almost ran forward to help but stayed put. He kept his shoe and sock off; they dangled over one shoulder. It was even a big step for her to be this close to that water, looking at its cold, pale face.
“I’ll run ahead and bring Daad back with the buggy,” she said, and started across the fringe of the clearing. “I can drive it through the Kauffman farm, then I’ll call for you.”
“No, don’t walk all that way alone in the dark,” he insisted. “It’s bad enough for me to be out here alone. Since you said it’s okay for us to be close, I can make it with this crutch and you.”
It’s okay for us to be close… His word snagged in her mind. A while ago he’d said, they had to lean on each other. I can make it with this crutch and you. She’d wanted someone to trust and tell her deepest fears to for so long, someone strong to rely on. Since Andrew wouldn’t be here long, maybe she could confide in him, and then he’d be gone and she could go on alone....
She shook her head to clear it, then remembered her kapp was gone and her hair was loose and wild. When she turned against the breeze, her tresses, silvered by moonlight, blew in her face. Though an Amish woman only unbound her long, uncut hair for her husband in their marriage bed, Andrew limped closer, his eyes taking her all in.
“Yeah, I suppose I’ll have to speak to the sheriff,” he said as they started off together, away from the pond. He didn’t touch her this time, and they moved slowly. “But I’m pretty sure Mr. Branin hasn’t informed him yet about my being undercover here. And the last thing I need is a newspaper interview.”
“Maybe I can help, at least with Ms. Drayton at The Home Valley News.”
“You’ve helped already, just by being here, by caring about what happened to me.”
He turned slowly sideways to stare at her. Up this close, with his face etched by moonlight, she could see how thick his eyelashes were, see the little squint lines at the corners of his blue eyes and the worry line on his broad brow. Suddenly self-conscious, she pulled her hair back behind her head, twisting and knotting it into a horse tail. When her gaze locked with his, she nearly stumbled, and it was he who reached out to briefly steady her.
Lightning leaped between them, something unspoken but understood. They both had secrets. They both had a new friend.
* * *
Alex was not used to being fussed over by women. By anyone. Yet the fact that Ella and the woman she called Grossmamm Ruth were tending to him was strangely comforting. It made him miss his own grandmother, now lost to him by her dementia.
His father had always tried to make him grow up too fast, which turned out to be a good thing when he lost both his parents in a boating accident when he was thirteen. Until he was eighteen, he’d lived off and on with a New York City legal guardian with vacations with his grandmother at her place in Nassau—lovely but lonely. She was being tended there now by a full-time caregiver and wouldn’t recognize him even if he did visit.
His first instinct when the feds convinced him he might have a price on his head was to hide out at her place, but they’d told him that could endanger her too. Gerald Branin had said they’d seen WITSEC cases where a hit man used a close family member to flush out or coerce their target.
“Ow!” he clipped out as Grossmamm Ruth, massaging his ankle, hit a sore spot.
“Good!” the silver-haired lady said. “So that’s the exact spot of the sprain. We tie the ice bag there, but you keep drinking that good dandelion tea, keeps swelling down real good.”
Obviously, this dear old woman’s favorite word was good, or goot, as she said it, even in English. “Ella, you pour him more tea,” she said. “And please get him some more of your daad’s good honey with the comb on a biscuit—good for what ails you.”
She was bossing Ella around too, but she seemed to take it. He’d known a lot of kids growing up who didn’t get it that rules and regs from a parent—with consequences—mean they cared, they loved you, wanted you safe. Damn, he hoped he would be safe here among these kind and good people.
He was yearning for a cup of Starbucks java but he downed the weak, strange tea. It warmed his insides anyway. Ella warmed him too, and that presented a problem.
“Now,” Ruth said, “no more using that tree limb crutch you found. I got a good hospital one you can use. But, ach, even with that, you’ll not be going into the fields with Eben and the boys tomorrow, not for a couple days. I gave my ankle a bad twist our last winter in Florida, on the Lido Beach. Made me so mad—I could not walk in the sand and wade the waves.”
“In Florida?” Alex asked.
“Oh, ya. My husband and I, we had a nice little house down there in Pinecraft, right by Sarasota. You think the Amish can’t take trips, enjoy warm weather in the winter?”
“I’ve just never heard of Amish snowbirds,” he said.
“Ach, these old bones did not like the winter cold, even though there’s always work to do here.”
“That’s why I want to help,” Alex insisted, still trying to deal with a mental picture of fully clothed, black-clad Amish like Grossmamm Ruth on a south Florida beach amid the bikinis and Speedos. “I’m already enough of a burden.”
“You go help Ella with her bed—right out the back door.”
The way the old woman had put that—Ella’s gaze met his. She actually blushed, her fair skin turning rosy from her throat to her cheeks.
“Help me weed my lavender bed,” she put in quickly.
“I know what she means. If I can kneel and not put weight on this foot, that’s fine.”
“My sister Barbara usually works with me but she’s helping another family out. You’ll get to meet her at Seth’s wedding though. I think Barbara will be staying home after that, so you wouldn’t need to help me for long.”
Ella’s father came in the back door from outside. “I walked the field to tell the bishop all that happened,” he told them, bending to take off his muddy shoes before coming into the immaculate kitchen in his socks. “The sheriff was there, coming here next to talk to Ella and Andrew. The bishop says we should tell the sheriff the truth about you, have him keep the newspaper editor and others away from you, best as can.”
“I’d rather leave it for Gerald Branin to tell him—procedure, protocol, he said.”
Eben shrugged, then nodded. “Then you are only Cousin Andrew Lantz until we get the say-so, but the sheriff always been straight with us. And you tell the bishop when next you see him.”
A sharp knock rattled the back screen door and “Sheriff Freeman here!” resounded through it. Alex wondered if the sheriff could have overheard any of that. Sure, he’d been called to the accident scene, but he seemed to materialize out of the blue—the darkness—everywhere. No, that was unfair, Alex scolded himself. He was just paranoid, not trusting anyone with a gun, even a law-and-order guy.
The phone call his guard Jake had made in Atlanta the night before someone tried to kill him had been eating at him. Could the call have been to sell him out? Neither he nor Branin could figure how the would-be assassin had found him. When Alex had sneaked out to go jogging, Jake sounded like he was snoring, but it was a different sound from those he made at night. Could he have been faking it, setting it up for Alex to sneak out while the assassin awaited? And then, of course, he rushed out to help so it would look good. Could a man so deep asleep wake up and get outside that fast?
And that car last night—could someone have sat in a vehicle, waiting for Alex—Andrew—to go out alone? Was that speeding car sent to kill him and just went out of control? The black pickup sitting in the Atlanta motel parking lot had looked harmless enough. Even the glint-eyed reflection had not panicked him at first.
Who to trust? Very few in the outside world—but he did trust these people who had taken him in.
* * *
After talking briefly alone to Andrew, Sheriff Freeman called Ella into the living room. She could see why he didn’t want to question them together, but she wished he would have. That way she could help Andrew seem more Amish, maybe cover for him a bit, because she knew he hadn’t told the sheriff who he really was.
“Standard procedure to talk to witnesses separate, Ella,” he said when she sat down on the other end of the couch from him.
“We weren’t exactly witnesses to the wreck—only about as much as Ray-Lynn was.”
“Right, after the fact. I’ll talk to her too.”
“I hope seeing that didn’t bring back bad memories of her own accident.”
“She seems pretty steady. Still can’t thank you and Hannah enough for getting her help when she was hurt. She’s getting some of her old spunk back. Now, isn’t it a little strange for your cousin Andrew—anyone Amish—to be out for an evening run, especially with all the exercise the men get in the fields?”
“He just arrived and hasn’t started to work the fields yet. Then with the sprain he got, jumping out of the way of that car, it will be a few more days before he starts to work with Daad or the boys.”
“Yeah, thank God he wasn’t hit. By the way, the driver/victim regained consciousness en route to the hospital. Broken bones, some question of spinal injury when he was thrown clear. He was lucky he was thrown, though. If not, he would have fried in the wreck. We’ve contacted NOK—next of kin. His address was actually local, though I’d never seen him. Moved in recently from New York State. You know any reason that would upset your cousin? Andrew looked kinda green at the gills when I told him that. He’s from Pennsylvania, right?”
“Yes, from Intercourse. Lots of Amish, lots of Lantzes there.”
The sheriff led her through telling him how the wrecked vehicle began to flame, then blew up. How Andrew found the driver, turned him over.
“Which he should not have done, but I’m giving him a pass on that because it was natural to want to learn if the guy was dead or not,” he said, still taking notes. Ella saw she’d been gripping her hands in her lap and tried to relax her cramped fingers. The sheriff was writing on his notepad, so maybe he hadn’t noticed how nervous she was.
“They talk a little different in the eastern Amish enclaves, don’t they?” the sheriff said as he looked up straight at her. “Andrew doesn’t have the same kind of—excuse me for putting it this way—accent as your people here.”
“There are some differences,” she said in a rush, trying to answer him in a way that wasn’t a lie. Would he be angry when he heard they hadn’t told him the truth about Andrew? Mr. Branin should tell him soon. Why hadn’t he already? “A lot of back-and-forth, long-distance relatives,” she went on, “even marriages, but each area has some things unlike and special. All kinds of varied people come into Amish country, like that man who got hurt.”
“Yeah. Samuel Lee. Word is that he’s here to open a luxury spa and retreat in our area. Now, that’s a good one. What next? I hear it’s out on Sweetgum Lane near the Yoders’ dairy farm and the old Troyer Mill. All right, I’ve gotta go now. Thanks, Ella.”
Feeling bad they hadn’t told him the truth about Andrew, she stood and walked out with him. Andrew still sat in the kitchen with his foot up on a kitchen chair with Grossmamm Ruth keeping an eye on him. Mamm had come downstairs and was dishing out strawberry shortcake for everyone. After quick goodbyes—and the sheriff’s giving Andrew another steely-eyed stare—Ella walked him to the back door even before Mamm could ask him to stay for shortcake.
As he went out, Ella called to him, “Sheriff Freeman! Just a minute. Let me cut some lavender for Ray-Lynn if you’re going to question her. I know she has trouble sleeping sometime and, with this going on tonight, it will help her, one of the best things lavender does. I will just take a minute.”
Her hand sickle was in her new workshop, so she grabbed Mamm’s pruning shears by the back door and darted out to the closest end of the English lavender beds. As she’d come into the kitchen, she’d overheard Daad agreeing that Andrew could help her weed for the next day or so, stay on his knees and off his ankle. That possibility and the familiar, heady scent of her plants stretching up the hill, made her feel she could fly. Despite the terrible events of the night, her dark mood had lifted. Yes, with Andrew there, even the nightmare of being near the pond hadn’t pulled her down.
She cut a good armful of the fragrant, flowering spikes and handed it to the sheriff.
“I oughta have this all over my office and the jail,” he said as he put it next to him on the passenger seat of his cruiser. “Keep me calm with all the bad stuff been happening ’round here. Thanks, Ella, for Ray-Lynn and me. Night, now.”
As he pulled out, the yard, the lane, the road went dark again. Only the kerosene-lantern-lit house and the slice of moon sailing high gave wan light. Starlight—so distant, such tiny specs in the big dark ocean of sky. She spun to look up at her lavender beds, marching toward the hill and up. It was the perfect site for the crop, with the much larger hill and its woodlot above, which sheltered the flowers from winter winds and where Daad kept his beehives so the bees would work all the gardens in the area.
And she saw, reflected, atop the hill, a large, staring eye, pale and lit from within.
She started toward the house, still looking back and up. Had she imagined it? She saw nothing now. Had a camera light popped, like when English folks tried to take verboten images of her people? Could Ms. Drayton have come by to follow up on the story of the car wreck and— No, she’d come to the door, wouldn’t she? Hunter with a night-vision rifle? Binoculars?
Whatever it had been, it wasn’t there now. She rushed inside and closed the storm door but decided not to upset everyone. What if it was just some strange reflection of light off one of the tin pans she had hanging high to keep birds away? What if it was a cluster of early lightning bugs?
Out of breath, she told everyone, “I gave the sheriff some lavender for Ray-Lynn.”
They turned to her, including Andrew, as Daad said, “You can use Andrew’s help with the lavender for a couple days, ya? We’ll get him out in the fields soon enough.”
“Oh, ya, danki, Daad. Andrew too,” she said with a nod their way.
Patting the plastic ice pack on her patient’s ankle, Grossmamm put in, “You just be sure you take good care of his ankle, Ella.”
Ella bit her lower lip, uncertain whether to laugh or sulk. She was too old for Grossmamm to scold. Ella felt exhausted, yet energetic too. And she’d just take those tin pans down so they didn’t reflect moon or lantern glow and get her all het up over nothing.
4
IT HAD RAINED some overnight. Ella had heard the patter on her roof, a gentle rain, but she still hadn’t slept well. Her first night in her new house…the car accident…and Andrew. Then too, when she’d drifted off, she’d dreamed she’d seen a huge glowing animal eye, watching her from the blackness.
She shook her head to pull herself back to the here and now. “I guess you can tell which are weeds, ya?” she asked Andrew as they surveyed her lavender from the bottom of the hill after a hearty breakfast with the family. Daad and the boys had set out for the fields already. Mamm and Grossmamm had headed into town in the family buggy to help Mrs. Lantz with wedding preparations. For now, it was just the two of them.
“Of course, I can tell the flowers from the weeds,” he said, sounding a bit annoyed. Maybe he had not slept well either on his first night in a new place, in her old room. “It’s just going to be a question of getting to them since the lavender’s so tall and I’ve got to manage this crutch.”
“If I don’t keep after them, they’ll be taller than the crop, though part of the height is because I have to build up the beds with crushed limestone and ground oyster shells.”
“No kidding?” He turned to her instead of surveying the plants. “Where do you get oyster shells around here?”
“At the mill that has chicken feed. They use ground shells as grit in the feed. I’ll need to buggy there later to get some more, if you want to go along. It will look funny, though, with the man just sitting there and the woman handling the reins. One of the boys should teach you.”
“Or you could show me while we drive.”
“While we buggy,” she corrected him. “Like we say, ‘He buggied over to see me.’ Even in English, you’ve got to learn some of the talk.”
“So,” he said, frowning and looking around again, “you’ve got quite a cottage industry going here.”
“Ya, and now I’ve got the cottage for it. I’m going to turn the house into a workroom and store instead of just delivering things here and there.”
“Instead of buggying things here and there, you mean,” he said with a grin, then sobered again. “Your fledgling enterprise impresses me. You know, only two-thirds of small businesses survive their first two years and fewer than half make it to four years, but growth is the answer. With the right packaging, branding and promotion—financing too—your Lavender Plain Products could really turn into something with expanding market opportunities. Your dad could do the same for his honey and the honeycomb he sells on the side.”
“Our businesses already are something,” she said, hands on her hips. “In your other life, did you own a company that sold something?”
“Not exactly. So, tell me more about the lavender. I take it with all the mulching, the roots don’t like water.”
“Right. The saying is, ‘Lavender does not like to get its feet wet.’”
His eyes lit and, thinking he must like the way she’d put that, she smiled back. They stayed that way a bit too long, as if they were suspended at the bottom of the hill, lulled by the buzz of the bees, the scent of the flower, like in a dream.
“I was just thinking,” he said, “the lavender’s mistress doesn’t like to get her feet wet either. You wouldn’t come near that pond last night. So no wonder lavender grows so beautifully for a beautiful gardener and in Eden County, no less.”
Her stomach did a funny flip-flop. A worldly compliment. And he’d called her mistress. Should she explain that her people only valued inner beauty? Her family had one mirror in the whole house and that was turned to the wall and mostly unused. But she said, “Sadly, there was a serpent in the Garden of Eden. Besides, I think of myself more as a farmer, of an important crop too. Lavender does lots of things, all good.”
“It smells great, that’s for sure. I didn’t mean to imply you haven’t done a good job with all this.” They started up the hill to where she’d left off with her weeding yesterday. The two tin plates she’d left hanging up the hill were knocking together in the breeze. For sure, one of those must be what had made the reflection she saw last night after the sheriff left.
“Lavender does more than smell good,” she told him, suddenly anxious to keep their conversation on her work and not herself. He kept stealing glimpses at her. “It can be used in recipes too, all kinds of yummy things like muffins, jellies and jams, chocolate, breads, teas and honeys. I plan to hire some friends to make those products to sell when I get the store going.”
He was frowning now at some inward thought. What had she said to set him off? She wished she could read his moods.
“You won’t believe this,” Andrew said, “but I had a lavender-infused drink not long ago.”
“Of course, I believe it. Lemonade?”
“Actually, a martini.”
“Oh. Liquor. I couldn’t go worldly with my sales. You have a lot to learn about us and our ways.”
“I want to, so I’ll get busy here. The bees won’t sting me, will they?”
“Not if you let them be themselves and don’t try to take over what they do best.”
“I hear you loud and clear, Ella Lantz. Okay, boss, I’ll get to work.”
She watched him lean on his crutch, put his weight on his good leg and start to pull weeds. Though she just tried to accept the way things were, she was aching to know what he was hiding from. Had he left loved ones behind? A woman? A family? Even children? How she would hate being forced away from her life here. That thought chilled her and she shivered.
* * *
Ray-Lynn had carted her bouquet of lavender into the restaurant because it cheered her up. She put it right on the table where folks came in, near Ella’s products she sold, under the front door sign that spoke of both her love of her Southern roots and of her adopted neighbors, the Ohio Amish: Y’all Come Back Now. Danki!
Jack was sitting in the back booth, facing the front door as he always did when he was here so he could keep an eye on things. Keep an eye on her too, she knew. Both he and Hannah had told her that Jack and she had been dating for a while and had been getting very involved before her accident and coma, whatever very involved really meant. She was embarrassed to ask Jack and wondered how much he really knew of her—had seen of her, in the flesh.
She was finally getting up the courage to ask him how intimate they had been and what he really wanted from her. They were business partners—she had the legal document that explained that—but had they been bed partners, too? Evidently taking the high road, good guy that he was, Jack had not pressured her on resuming where they left off—and just exactly where was that?
Today he looked not only bleary-eyed from getting little sleep after that car wreck last night, but she could tell he was upset by something the stranger who had joined him was saying. Jack, tall and imposing in his uniform, even sitting down, seemed to dwarf the outsider, a compact, balding man, maybe in his late fifties, with graying, reddish hair and a creeping hairline. He reminded Ray-Lynn of a rumpled professor and kept gesturing as he talked. Ding-dang, they looked at odds, but they were keeping their voices down, leaning forward over their empty plates, as if they’d like to leap over the table at each other. When she’d refilled their coffee cups, she had overheard only that the guy’s name was Branin, nothing else.
She went over with their check herself. Although Jack owned half of the restaurant, he always insisted on paying. She should, she thought, carry the big bouquet of lavender right over to them and plunk it on their table, since its smell was supposed to calm people down.
“…still say I should’ve been told up front, not after the fact…” she heard Jack mutter.
“We had to get him placed,” Branin said. “Since the Amish were willing and we had a go-between, it happened real fast…”
They stopped talking and looked up at her. “You two gentlemen need anything else?” Ray-Lynn asked, and put the check on the table.
“We’re doing fine,” Jack said. “Thanks, Ray-Lynn.”
She and Jack exchanged one of their “see you later” looks and she walked to the next booth and chatted with those patrons while keeping an ear cocked. Branin was saying, “Sorry I tracked you down here. Your office dispatcher told me where you’d gone. I appreciate your inviting me to join you for breakfast, Sheriff.”
“So, you staying in the area for a while? Don’t you have to get back to D.C.?” was the last thing she heard as she saw new patrons come in and went to seat them.
D.C.? Washington, D.C.? Having to put up with that FBI Agent Linc Armstrong from Cleveland a while ago was one thing, but D.C.? At least her car accident and coma had not hurt her curiosity, even though it was said that was what killed the cat.
* * *
When Ella saw that one high patch of her hardy Hidcote lavender had their flower heads about one-third open—which was ideal picking for sachets—she decided to take a break from weeding, get her hand sickle and cut some. The morning breeze and sunshine had dried out the foliage and flowers well enough for cutting.
“You are allowed to take a rest, you know,” she told Andrew as she started past him down the hill. “I’ll be right back. Oh—look,” she told him as he stood and stretched his big frame, “a car just turned in the lane.”
She could tell he tensed right away. “It looks like the same make of sports car that was in the wreck,” he said. “A white one, though. Do you know who it is?”
“No, but sometimes customers see my sign down the road and just stop by. It’s all right. You can stay here.”
Since no one was at the farmhouse, she walked down to the driveway. It was a stranger, a woman dressed fancy in a pale blue linen suit, white silky blouse and gold jewelry that glinted in the sun. Her hair was sleek and black, collar-length, with flat, straight-cut bangs. The ebony sheen of it in the sun looked so unusual in this area full of fair-haired folks. Just like the young man in the car wreck last night, she looked Asian.
“Hello,” the woman said, nodding. “This is the Lantz farm? Sheriff Freeman told me on the phone where to find it. I’m Connie Lee, Sam Lee’s mother—the man whose car went out of control last night.”
“Oh, ya, how is he doing?”
“Back injuries, two broken legs, but at least they don’t think he’ll be paralyzed. His father’s with him, and we’re having him flown to the Cleveland Clinic, but his long-term prognosis is good. I understand that you and your cousin were the first to reach him and risked your lives to be sure he was out of his burning car. I can’t thank you enough. I wanted to give you this token of our gratitude,” she said, and reached in her purse for a white envelope.
Ella’s eyes widened, not in the surprise at a gift, but because she glimpsed a gun in that purse. A small one, gleaming silver. She tried to keep calm. Amish women might not deal with firearms, but lady Auslanders evidently did.
“Unless that’s just a thank-you note, we are glad to have helped but nothing else is needed,” Ella told her.
“Oh, but—a donation for your church then.”
“It is not our way, but you could donate to our church’s Help Haiti fund—in your son’s name.”
She drew the envelope back. “Haiti? Yes, that was a mess there. How nice of your people. I need to rush today, but let me just mention the other thing then, something that has nothing to do with the accident. My husband, Chang, and I are from New York City, and we’re going to open a luxury spa here in the Home Valley. You know, clients can come for few days or a week, get out of the rat race, lose weight, find peace and quiet. I believe Sheriff Freeman said you are the one who sells the lavender.”
“Yes, Ella Lantz. I’m currently expanding my shop and products.”
“That’s great, because we want to decorate our new spa with country decor, kind of Amish chic. We were thinking of calling our own products we use here the Skinny Spa line, but we’ll probably repackage things as the Sweetgum Spa line, since that’s the road we’re building on. Great buzzword for anything today, you know—skinny. You might want to consider that for your products line. We’d want to purchase and sell for you things like lotions, essential oils, spritzes, scented candles, body candles…”
“Body candles?”
“Right. People love them. They burn with a fragrance, then leave a puddle of warm liquid we use for massages. Well, more later, as I’ll be back and forth, but we are so grateful that you helped save our Sam. He’ll eventually be running the Sweetgum Spa, and I’ll be sure you and your family have unlimited free beauty packages.”
“That’s kind of you,” Ella told her, but it just showed this woman knew next to nothing about Amish anything. “Skinny” products and Amish chic decor around here? No way.
“So, where is the man you were with?” she asked, evidently as an afterthought as she squinted up the hill into the sun. “He seems to have disappeared, but if he’s your cousin, I’d like to thank him in person.”
As if she expected no answer to that, Connie Lee headed for her sleek car, which still had its motor running. She got back in, slammed the door, backed up and drove down the lane.
And the woman was right. Andrew was nowhere in sight on the brow of the hill. Wasn’t he overdoing hiding himself? He was only Cousin Andrew now, not whoever he really was. At least since he’d seemed eager to lend advice about organizing her business, he’d probably be happy to hear there would be a new demand—an expanding market—for her lavender.
She headed toward her house. Surely, with his sprained ankle, he hadn’t hiked higher up the hill. He’d no doubt reappear when he saw the stranger was gone. She got the hand sickle, which she kept good and sharp, picked up a big basket and started back outside, still thinking about Connie Lee, her husband with the strange name of Chang and injured son, Sam. Was that really Samuel, a good biblical name? And in Connie Lee’s world, was that little gun just what this sharp blade was to Ella, a part of her she didn’t even think as a weapon? Because, in Amish country, what could she be afraid of?
Ella startled and almost cut herself when she glimpsed a man standing right outside her kitchen window. Oh—Andrew! But what…why?
Ella hurried outside and around the corner. “Were you hiding there while she was here?” she asked him. “Did you hear anything she said?”
“I saw she looked Chinese, like the driver who wrecked his car,” he said only, not looking at her, but staring at his feet. His crutch rested against the side of the house.
“What is it? What about the Chin—”
“Never mind. But look at this,” he said, pointing at the damp soil beneath her window. “I came down the hill and watched from around the corner to see what was going on and noticed footprints in the ground, pointing inward. See?”
“Ya, well, it rained last night and a couple of days ago. Seth did me a favor and cleaned these windows outside, so that’s probably why the prints.”
“Would he have cleaned every window? Because I’ve almost made it all the way around now and there are the same prints.”
She went with him. He was right. And, for sure, not Seth’s prints, not those of any Amish man, she reckoned, because they were pointy toed with a distinct separate heel, like maybe cowboy boots.
“Not Seth’s,” she said, shaking her head. “Not even Amish.”
“And recent. Maybe made last night, with the rain and all. Let’s go see if they’re at the farmhouse too.”
They were, around all the lower windows, which Seth had not cleaned. The hair on the back of Ella’s neck prickled. Could this be related to that huge eye she imagined on the hill?
“What about the sheriff?” Andrew asked, his voice urgent.
Again, she agonized, what and who was this man hiding from? Despite the fact she was sweating, she shivered. Maybe the prints had been made by someone who wasn’t used to mud, so in the dark he didn’t think about leaving a kind of calling card.
“I—I think the sheriff just wears black shoes,” she told him. “And why would he come here and look in after being here last night?”
“Maybe he knows there’s something fishy about me—but why your place, too, unless he thought I’d be living there and that you were still here in the farmhouse? Can you think of anyone around here who wears boots? That woman wasn’t wearing boots, was she? They could be a woman’s.”
“Andrew, she was at her son’s bedside in a hospital last night. She says they’re moving him to the Cleveland Clinic, so—”
“I’m sorry to involve you in my problems, and if I thought there was one moment of danger for any of you, I’d leave.”
“And go where?” she challenged.
Their eyes met and held as happened far too many times. Ella gripped the hand sickle hard in her hand. For one moment, she thought she should tell him about the reflection she’d seen on the hill last night, but it surely had been one of those tin pans catching wayward light. She didn’t want him to be more upset, or to think he’d have to leave.
“Let’s tell my father about these prints, and we’ll keep an eye out,” she said, longing to comfort him. “My sister Barbara has a come-calling friend from the next farm over, so I’ll ask her when she gets home if it could be Gabe, but he must know she’s not here.”
Ella reached out her free hand to touch his arm. The man was so tense he felt like a carved piece of wood. “Don’t fret,” she said. “Let’s just sniff some lavender, okay? It’s supposed to be as calming as it is stimulating.”
“Sniff some lavender,” he repeated with a little shake of his head. He sighed, and his shoulders heaved as if he was trying to force himself to relax. “As for stimulating,” he told her, “I find peaceful, pacifist Amish country very stimulating.”
His eyes took her in again. What a shift of moods. The man was teasing, almost flirting now—wasn’t he? How she wished she understood worldly ways better.
“So tell me everything our visitor talked about,” he said as he leaned on his crutch and they started back up the hill side by side. “Did she seem to have a foreign accent?”
“There’s something about you and the Chinese,” Ella blurted, when she’d meant to keep her own counsel.
“Have you ever heard of the ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, Ella?”
“No. Meaning keep my nose out of it?”
“Truth is, I like your nose—and quick mind—but the less you know, the better.”
“I have heard of the ‘inquiring minds want to know’ policy.”
“You are so honest and open, and I can’t be either, not now at least. Can you trust me enough that we can still be friends—as well as boss and slave, of course.”
She could not stop her laughter any more than she could stop wanting to be around this mysterious man. Whatever danger he was in, he was dangerous too—at least to her usually careful and controlled secret self.
5
RAY-LYNN STOOD WITH her sack of two turkey sandwiches, dill pickles, slaw and raspberry iced teas in the sheriff’s office, waiting for Jack to finish a phone conversation. Lately her attempts to rebuild a relationship with him seemed destined to be overhearing snatches of his conversations with others. Only this time, she knew who he was talking to.
Standing at the back of the reception area near the short hall to his office, she’d figured out he was talking to FBI Agent Lincoln Armstrong, who had helped him solve a murder case here in town. Meanwhile, Ray-Lynn kept up sporadic chitchat with Doreen, the sheriff’s day shift phone receptionist and dispatcher. Doreen was only twenty-two and fairly new to Homestead, so at least, Ray-Lynn thought, here was someone who didn’t know more about her recent past than she did.
She and Jack had arranged to have lunch together today in his office. At least it was past the noon rush in the restaurant. She wished Doreen would quit chattering so she could hear Jack better.
“Have you seen the new deputy who came over from Wooster?” Doreen asked with a roll of her brown eyes. Her reddish-tinted hair—a much wilder color than Ray-Lynn’s—was in tight ringlets that bounced as did her full breasts. “He’s absolutely gung ho about working here—and absolutely darling,” she said in a stage whisper. “Winston Hayes, but goes by Win, and he is a winner! Not married, either.”
“I heard he was coming but haven’t met him.”
Ray-Lynn could tell Jack was giving Agent Armstrong a bad time. “So why did you recommend to Branin sending someone who was a hit magnet to the Home Valley?” Jack demanded. “That’s a fine way to say thanks after what we been through around here lately!”
Now what in tarnation was a “hit magnet,” Ray-Lynn wondered.
“And now that you’ve taken early retirement,” Jack went on, “forget coming anywhere near Hannah. She’s marrying Seth this Friday. Yeah, that’s what I said, so just keep clear.”
Wow, Ray-Lynn thought, cocking her head to concentrate on his voice while Doreen rambled on about Win Hayes. Linc Armstrong had retired from the FBI he seemed to love so much? She dare not tell Hannah, because she’d also have to tell her where she got the info and no way was she admitting to eavesdropping on Jack Freeman, even if she was desperate to know everything she could find out about him—about them. Drat her memory loss. She had to keep calm; she had a lot to be grateful for, to look forward to and live for.
“In other words, Win’s really a good name for him,” Doreen was saying in her southern Ohio twang, which could not hold a candle to a real Georgia drawl. “He’s built real muscular, a little short for a guy—like maybe my height—but he’s got big ideas. I can tell, he’s going places, wants to be a sheriff someday. Does he ever look great in a uniform! I get the vibe of you’re-safe-with-me, but he gives me the shivers at the same time, know what I mean?”
“I do indeed,” Ray-Lynn said as she heard Jack hang up. “Nice chatting with you, Doreen.” As she went down the hall, Jack swept open the door of his office, which had been ajar.
“Hey, didn’t know you were here!” he said with a smile.
“It’s one-thirty. Actually, after. I was waiting in the main office with Doreen.”
“Wish we had time to drive out somewhere nice, ’cause it’s a pretty day, but I ’preciate your bringing this here,” he said, ushering her in and closing the door firmly. He gave her a hug and a quick kiss. Would he guess she’d overheard him? If so, it wasn’t her fault. “Too much going on for us to really connect sometimes,” he muttered as she took the food items out of the sack and placed them on the edge of his desk.
“And that’s something I want—feel I’m ready for,” she said as they sat in his two guest chairs. He had repositioned them in front of his desk so they were facing each other. Jack reached over and put a big, warm hand on her knee.
“I’d like that, honey. I been trying to give you some space and time, but you bet I’d like that, picking up where we left off.”
She almost blurted out the question that had been haunting her: But where did we leave off? Were we sleeping together? Talking marriage? The Ray-Lynn who was rebuilding her memories and confidence after her brain trauma wasn’t ready for any of that, was she? Because she needed to know where they’d been to trust where they were going.
“Let’s do dinner soon,” Jack said as he unwrapped the sandwich she’d made for him herself in the restaurant’s kitchen. “Not around here unless it’s a private picnic somewhere really pretty. You know, my new deputy—”
“Oh, yes, I heard about him just now from his fan club groupie Doreen,” Ray-Lynn said, thinking he was going to talk business now.
“Yeah, real ambitious, doesn’t quite know yet that he doesn’t know much. But I’m glad to get the extra manpower with the crimes we’ve had around here lately. He was fairly new on the Wooster force but volunteered to come here when he heard there was an opening—likes smaller towns and rural folks, he said. Anyhow, I was going to say, Win told me that if you stand on the hill above Ella Lantz’s lavender field, the scent is great and there’s a stunning view of the valley. How about we do wine, cheese, a loaf of bread and thou up there some evening as the sun sets—maybe tonight, if I can get away. It’s short notice, but how about it? I’ll take a radio, bring a blanket, just like in the old days.”
“You know the old days for us are new days to me, Jack. But it sounds wonderfully romantic.”
“That’s what I mean it to be. I think we’re more than friends again. We’ve rebuilt that a different way from what we did the first time, but now we can move on by going back.”
He looked so intent. His sandwich was halfway to his mouth, but he seemed not to know it, and she saw that as a great compliment.
* * *
Ella knew Andrew needed some horse skills, especially hitching and handling a buggy. She was disappointed when Daad told Aaron at midday dinner that he should take an hour and give their guest his first buggy lesson. She’d been planning to take a back road through a field to the mill today and teach Andrew herself along the way. Though it wasn’t her regular day for it, she’d also planned to make lavender deliveries to Amanda Stutzman’s Plain & Fancy B & B and to the Dutch Farm Table Restaurant in town, all excuses to show Andrew around a little more. And, she admitted to herself, just to have more time with him. She had never been so passionately curious about anyone in her life.
Daad called to Aaron as he and Andrew headed out the back door, “Harness up in the barn, so no outsider can see you teaching him.” Mamm and Ella got up from the table and began to clear dinner dishes while Aaron walked out to the road to get the mail. “So,” Daad said, turning toward Ella, “what do you think about those footprints Andrew spotted? You got a secret come-calling friend who’s too eager?”
“I’m not seeing anyone. I don’t know what to make of those prints, made by Western cowboy boots, I think. Maybe Aaron’s ready-for-rumspringa friends came after him or were playing a prank. Some of them don’t have much sense about sneaking out.”
Amidst the clink of flatware and dishes, Mamm put in, “Though you’ve changed your ways, that’s the pot calling the kettle black, my girl. I believe you and your friends used to sneak out once or twice.”
At that, Ella kept silent. She’d been pleased she’d somehow thrown off the black mood that was threatening her yesterday, and she didn’t want it circling back. Just because she couldn’t teach Andrew to handle a horse and buggy, just because he couldn’t go with her to get ground oyster shells from the gristmill today, so what, she tried to buck herself up.
Also she didn’t say anything back to Mamm, because it would be a lot worse for her if her parents ever learned she’d almost drowned on one of those nights she’d sneaked out, had suffered the attacks of black moods ever since—and had never told them one thing about it. Shouldn’t someone Amish just be able to trust in the Lord for healing? It should work to just pray fears away. A good Amish soul would confess to the bishop or the entire church to cleanse her conscience, yet Ella was certain that would not change a thing for her. In a way, she felt afraid of life now. The sampler Grossmamm Ruth had on her bedroom wall upstairs seemed like good advice, but it just didn’t work for Ella: Do Not Fret. It Only Causes Harm.
“You’re a real pretty girl, Ella,” Daad said as he rose from the table. Ella looked up, taken aback by the worldly compliment. Daad continued. “And since you go here and there delivering the lavender, sell some to outsiders, talk friendly to them, maybe you attracted the wrong kind of attention. What about a secret admirer, someone you might not even be thinking about? Should Mamm go with you today to the mill?”
“You mean like I’m being stalked? No one like that, Daad, really,” she said, and began washing up the dishes with such a vengeance that the warm, sudsy water swirled in the sink and made waves. “Sometimes, I wish there was someone for me—but not one who peeks in windows. I’ll be fine going to the mill on my own, just fine.”
* * *
As Ella started out to the barn to hitch her horse Fern to her buggy, two of Aaron’s buddy-group guys pulled into the lane at a good clip. They were in a fancy courting buggy one of them must have borrowed, because at fourteen, they were both too young to own one. Two more bug-in-their-beans pre-rumspringa boys who were feeling their oats already, Ella thought. They couldn’t wait for their running-around time, couldn’t wait to court a girl.
“Hey, Ella!” Mose Raber, a distant cousin, shouted. “Where’s Aaron? We got to show him this buggy!”
“He’s in the barn. I’ll send him out!” she called back. Since Andrew seemed to want to steer clear of people, no use to get these excited kids chattering away at him too in their Deutsche dialect he wouldn’t understand. What if the bishop hadn’t been able to tell everyone in the church yet that they were harboring an Auslander for a while?
Ella was surprised to find that Aaron was teaching Andrew with her horse and buggy. “We knew you were going to the mill, so we thought we’d hitch up for you while I show him,” Aaron said.
That kindness didn’t sound like Aaron lately—or had Andrew suggested that? “Danki, but I can do it. Besides, Mose and Sol are outside to show you a courting buggy. It’s okay if you go out to say hi. I can show Andrew.”
Could it be, she thought, that the Lord had set this up with perfect timing? Andrew might not be going with her to the mill, but she had him to herself again. How she wished he’d tell her something about his real life.
“Aaron said your horse’s name is Fern,” Andrew said, interrupting her thoughts as he patted her mare’s flank.
“Right. See the little leaf mark on her forehead, like a fern? What else did he say?”
“That you always curry her before hitching up, but he’d skip that part right now. And that she used to be a champion pacer and could do almost eight miles an hour instead of just six, like the slower horse your dad lets him use.”
“Speed,” she said, giving Fern a few quick strokes with the curry brush. “Both my brothers like fast buggies, new leather and speed. I do too, and if I blow Fern a kiss she goes even faster.”
He smiled. “I’ll remember that. The love of speed sounds universal to me—something the Amish have in common with the world.”
“I know what universal means,” she replied, trying not to sound testy. “You had to leave behind a fast car, I bet.”
“Not a sports car, though. I went for a black BMW—corporate image.”
He had actually told her something personal. “Oh, I see.”
“I don’t mean to talk down to you, but I suppose you think I’m speaking a foreign language sometimes.”
“Like you think about us, I guess. And never the twain shall meet, my grandfather used to say.”
“But we are meeting, and I want to learn your ways. I admire much about your life.”
“Okay, then,” she said, tossing the curry brush onto a hay bale. She hoped Andrew didn’t notice she was blushing over a compliment as simple as that. She stroked Fern hard with the palms of her hands a couple of times where she’d brushed her, whispering, “Ser gut, ser gut, mein Fern.”
She picked up some of the tack Aaron had already taken from the pegs along the wall near the stalls. “Here’s what to remember to harness a horse and hitch him or her to the buggy.” She named the different parts of the tack while she used each, then reviewed. “Collar around neck, breast strap between forelegs, crupper under tail…”
“That under-tail stuff can be dangerous, right? Got to watch out on that back end.”
She turned to look directly at him for the first time since she’d started harnessing. “You mean, what we call horse apples? Mostly, that happens when they’re grazing in the field or especially on the road. It’s one of the things some English hold against us, that and they say these steel wheel rims on the buggy cut into the asphalt. But we have a right to be there too, and we put up with fumes and noise and the danger of being hit or run over.”
“I never thought about outsiders disliking the Amish for anything. Do they harass or retaliate against you? Could that be a reason someone would be looking in the windows—to plan something against your family?”
“There have been a few hate crimes. Some folks blame us for being pacifists, for turning the other cheek, not serving in the army, and they take advantage of that. You know, I’ll tell Aaron to ask around to see if anyone else has had people looking in their windows. It could be just someone curious. Okay, here now, let’s back her up to the buggy. These long, narrow hickory pieces attach the horse to the buggy and keep her in line with it.”
As he helped her, he said, “I was surprised to see the bishop’s buggy had a foot brake. I mean, can’t you just tell the horse to ‘whoa’?”
“Going fast enough, the buggy could slide into her. Did you notice all our wagons and buggies have reflective orange safety triangles on the back? Headlights too—a high- and low-beam switch on the floor with the battery under the seat. Now, whatever is keeping Aaron?” she asked, taking a step back when he came closer to peer into the buggy.
“I’m learning a lot from you anyway. So, does it matter which side the driver sits on if two are in the buggy?”
“Sure, rules for everything, though this is not in the Ordnung. That’s the big church rules, moral things. But, ya, the woman always sits to the left of her husband or any man in a buggy.”
“Sounds good to me. That means the man is always right—right?”
She turned to him with a little laugh. He still bent so close to look inside the buggy that her bonnet brim bounced against his cheek. Again, that strange, silent but oh-so-loud force crackled between them. They breathed in unison. His lower lip dropped slightly. Even in the dim barn, she could see her reflection in his narrowed, blue eyes.
“Guess what?” Aaron’s voice startled them apart as he hurried back into the barn. “That courting buggy cost Mose’s older brother almost twelve-hundred bucks! It’s got emerald-green carpeting! His father was against it, but he saved up ’cause he wanted it so bad! Oh—you did it without me,” he added as Ella climbed quickly up in the buggy and bent to take the reins.
“That’s okay, Aaron,” she said. “Let Andrew hitch the other one himself and you just watch this time. And then take him for a ride but just up and down the lane.”
“I know what to do. You, Grossmamm, Mamm and Daad don’t have to tell me everything!”
“Danki, Ella!” Andrew shouted after her. “Ser gut, ser gut!”
“She can be really bossy,” she overheard Aaron say as she blew a kiss to Fern to speed her up—or was it a kiss to Andrew?
* * *
As Ella headed home from the mill, the early afternoon sky clouded over and the wind picked up. The weather was important to her people, a big topic of conversation, but she hadn’t heard it was going to storm. She could feel the extra weight of the buggy from the four big bags of ground shells, or else she would have giddyapped Fern faster. To avoid getting caught in a downpour, she turned onto a farmer’s lane that was a shortcut home. It was only wide enough for a four-horse hitch or big work wagon, but if she met someone coming the other way, she could easily pull off on the grassy edge of the cornfield.
Her thoughts on Andrew, she didn’t hear the motor vehicle behind her at first. Too much of a smooth sound, not loud like an English farmer’s tractor or planter. She craned her neck and tried to look back through the thick plastic window, which she hadn’t rolled up today. It looked like a big buggy at first but it was a van, a black one. It seemed to have dark-tinted windows. She knew how impatient English drivers could be. She’d better pull off and let it pass. But why would a vehicle that probably wasn’t local be on this cut-cross lane? There was nothing back here but corn and a couple of woodlots.
You might know, it began to rain. She didn’t stop to unroll the plastic windshield in front of her and blew Fern a kiss to get her to a place up ahead, which looked like a good pull-off spot. Most drivers in Amish country were considerate and polite—at least the ones who weren’t out drinking, like Sam Lee might have been, or who weren’t taking the hills fast because of the rollercoaster-like thrills.
Thunder rumbled even as the van’s engine behind got louder, vroom, vroom, like it was going to leap at her. The vehicle came closer, bumped the back of her buggy! Didn’t they see the sign that read Slow-Moving Vehicle? The van’s lights had been on low but now bright headlights popped on. Another bump, harder. The buggy jolted. She was nearly to the pull-off spot—or should she just keep going? No way she could escape, however fast Fern could go.
Rain pattered on her bonnet as Ella leaned out and looked behind, even extended an open hand as if to say, “Keep back! Stop!” Ya, the windows of the vehicle were tinted so dark she could not see the driver. The windshield wipers whipped back and forth hard. Her heart pounding, she threw herself back inside the buggy.
Though she wasn’t to the best spot yet, she swerved Fern to the right onto the grassy fringe of the field. Rain thudded on the fiberglass frame of the buggy like loud drums. She twisted around to stare out through her back plastic window. To her dismay, the car stopped, backed up and turned in too, this time shoving the buggy almost into Fern. Thank God, she wasn’t on the edge of a treed ravine like the one that had almost killed Ray-Lynn when she plunged over it! But that would-be killer was in prison. Out here in the open, exposed, no one around—what did this person want? Just to scare her? Or worse?
Don’t fight back…turn the other cheek, she recited to herself. Should she leave Fern, get out and run through the field? The plowed soil and rain would make for slow going. The van couldn’t follow but a person could. She’d be a sitting duck if someone had a camera—or a gun. Some terrible attacks on the Amish she’d heard or read about increased her panic: some drunk English teens turned over a buggy with a woman inside; an Amish boy throwing tomatoes at cars was shot to death. The only thing she had to fight back with, without really fighting back, was four bags of ground oyster shells.
When lightning crackled and struck something nearby, Ella nearly jumped out of the buggy. Had it hit a tree in the woodlot? If it struck again, what was taller out here in the open, the buggy or the van? Metal would attract the bolt, wouldn’t it? No one emerged from the van as it just sat there, rumbling low with the front windshield like a huge eye just staring at her. She should have told Daad and Andrew about that light she glimpsed on the hill. At least there was no more bumping or shoving. What did that person want?
She fumbled on the floor for her jackknife and slit the string stitching at the top of one of the big plastic bags. If someone got out and came around to hurt her, she’d fling ground oyster shells at them, in their eyes, get out and run across the corner of the field into the trees, lightning or not. Surely, this could not have anything to do with their hiding Andrew. No one around here knew who he really was, did they? So how could anyone have found him? This had to be about something else, about her. Like Daad had suggested, was she being stalked?
The van hulked behind her like a big beast, its hood and front bumper tight against her buggy, as if playing with its prey. She was certain her wheels would sink in the soil if she drove straight ahead into the field.
While thunder rumbled again, this time more distantly, she dug out fistfuls of the ground shells and dumped them in her lap, ready to throw. Sweating, praying—Oh Lord, please take care of Your own—she waited. Then came a deep honk-honk! of the van’s horn. Ella jumped. Fern snorted and startled. After another hard bump of the buggy, the van backed out, turned and drove away.
Despite the rain, Ella scrambled down from the seat, spewing ground shells and dust from her apron. She was going to get that license plate at any cost, tell Sheriff Freeman. Maybe the sheriff would know if others had been harassed this way too.
But the license plate was draped with a big dark cloth that dragged behind in the mud. It looked like an Amish woman’s cape, black as ravens’ wings. For a moment, she thought she glimpsed a face in the big, tinted back window, but it looked too thin—the white barrel of not a gun but a lamp? A telescope? Her grandfather had one they used to watch the stars through from the hilltop, years ago.
As the van disappeared down the lane at the end of the field, Ella heaved a frustrated, furious sigh and broke into tears she’d been holding back. She crunched through the wet oyster-shell grit and scrambled back up into the feeble protection of the buggy. At least the spilled feed would mark the exact spot so she could tell the sheriff where to look for tire tracks or anything to identify the van.
“Thank you, Lord, for Your protection,” she whispered as she picked up the reins and backed Fern and the buggy out onto the road. One of the buggy wheels seemed wobbly, but she had no choice but to head home. She was wet and chilled but that wasn’t why her hands were shaking so hard she almost flapped the reins. She reached behind into the small back seat and storage area for her cape.
It was gone, not on the floor, nowhere, but she knew she’d left it there when she went into the mill. And she knew now what was being dragged to death in pieces through the mud behind that black van.
6
AFTER A DASH through the woodlot, where she was afraid the van might appear again, Ella emerged onto Oakridge and headed straight for home. Now only the rattle of a bent back wheel pursued her until she heard the piercing shriek of a siren behind her.
She gasped when she saw a black vehicle. She stuck her head out to look back. Thank heavens! Only an Eden County police car. It must be the sheriff! She reined in, then realized it could be a trick. It wasn’t the sheriff’s car—no markings—nor did she recognize the short, muscular man who emerged from it, but he was wearing an officer’s uniform.
He must have realized her unease, because before approaching her he called out, “Winston Hayes, ma’am, the new Eden County deputy. You don’t have a fluorescent safety triangle on the back of your buggy. It’s the law. Some Amish been protesting that and even went to jail over it in Indiana.”
She looked at the back of her buggy. Not only was the safety sign gone but the back was scuffed and dented. Obviously, the van had knocked it off somewhere. She’d rather tell Sheriff Freeman what had happened, but she couldn’t pass over it with this man. Deputy Winston Hayes flashed his badge at her. Looking very sure of himself, he stood so erect. He was built strong, almost stocky, but was only tall enough to look her straight in the eyes—though she couldn’t see his eyes since he wore reflector-type sunglasses, despite the fact that the sky was a stormy gray. In her line of view, right behind his head, he’d left his light bar flashing. It made it look as if pulsating colors sprang from his head.
A buggy went by. She recognized the folks who stared but went on.
“Well, then?” he prompted, frowning.
“A black van bumped into the back of my buggy about a quarter hour ago, and I didn’t realize the sign was gone.”
“Yeah, sorry,” he said, whipping off his glasses and bending closer to the damage, then brushing his hand across the scuff marks. “Your left wheel rim’s askew too. Can you give me a description of the vehicle?” he asked, taking from his jacket pocket a small device that must be a cell phone, but one he typed things into with his thumbs.
“I’m not sure of the make. Tinted windows so I can’t describe anyone inside. And what’s scary is they had their license plate blacked out.”
“Someone with malice aforethought,” he muttered, straightening and putting a hand on his gun belt. “And this was where, ma’am?”
“I was taking a shortcut through the fields between Troyers Mill and here. I intend to tell Sheriff Freeman about it. I’d like to head home now.”
“Which is where?” he asked, his thumbs busy again on his little machine. A car went past; it slowed and people stared.
“I live at the Lantz farm, 400 Oakridge Road. I’m Ella Lantz.”
“Oh, yeah, the lavender farm. You and one of your brothers helped the guy in the wreck the first day I was here. Sorry for being so curious, but I’m trying to familiarize myself with your people. So, three brothers still at home?”
“No, Seth just moved out to the Troyer place. That was my cousin who found the accident with me.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s what the sheriff said. So your cousin is living here now?”
How much had the sheriff told his new deputy? she wondered. And why did Andrew even figure into this? A police officer trying to get his feet on the ground here or not, this man was being too nosy about Andrew. After deadly persecutions of the Amish in Europe years ago, it wasn’t her people’s way to trust government men, lawyers or law officers. After all that Sheriff Freeman had been through with the Amish community here, he was the exception. Besides, as bedraggled and upset at Ella was, her hackles went up in her desire to protect Andrew.
“I’ll be sure to get another safety sign, Officer Hayes,” she said, hoping to change the topic. “We have one in our barn. I got caught in the rain, and I don’t want to catch my death of chill, so I’d like to head home. I plan to talk to the sheriff soon.”
She edged away from him toward her buggy. He was frowning now. She got in, hoping he didn’t call her back or ask another question. But he let her go—that is, if she didn’t count the fact he followed so close behind her in his black cruiser all the way home that it brought back the panic of the black van. She fought hard to keep an attack of the drowning darkness at bay. When she turned into the farm lane, he sped away.
* * *
“I don’t need to be scolded like a child, Daad!” Ella protested at her father’s reaction to her telling him what had happened.
The rain had stopped drumming on the barn roof. The men had come in from the fields, but only Daad was still here when she buggied in. Though wet and shivering, she’d told him right away. He’d wrapped her in a horse blanket and unhitched Fern for her while she talked.
“Then don’t act like a child, going out on your own after those footprints around the houses!” he said.
“Those weren’t targeting me anymore than the boys!”
“Ach,” he went on, shaking his head so hard his beard wagged. “My fault for not insisting you take someone with you. That theft of your cape from your parked buggy at the mill, and then dragging it behind the van—what next?”
“I’m going to talk to the men who were working there, see if they can describe or identify someone who might have been near my buggy so I can follow up—”
“No! No. For all we know, it could be one of those men who followed you, been watching you—looking in windows. All right, you want to tell Sheriff Freeman what happened, fine. His deputy will probably tell him.”
“But I intentionally didn’t tell the new deputy everything. Especially when he started asking questions about our family and Andrew.”
“A new man, trying to learn the territory, that’s all. Police are too nosy anyways, always were. But you cannot go out without one of your brothers with you until we find out more!”
“Daad, I have a business to run, and Abel and Aaron are busy in the fields with you. I can see why I shouldn’t take Andrew with me, but—”
“But why? Someone is stalking you, I still think so, ya,” he said, starting to wipe Fern down with an old towel. Their raised voices obviously didn’t bother the horse, who was already munching from the feed trough.
“I mean,” Ella said, forcing herself to speak more slowly and calmly, “Andrew should stick close to home to keep himself safe.”
“And have people wonder if he’s sick? Folks would start talking about it and lots of others would get curious about him. He’s going to attend Seth’s wedding, so he’ll be on display then anyway. Besides, I think he has cabin fever already. It’s a hard time, his waiting to do the right thing, waiting to get his life back again. I didn’t ask, but wherever they were hiding him before, I think something bad happened.”
She almost blurted out, You mean he was stalked? but she kept quiet on that one. Was her protective father suggesting he trusted her going off alone with a worldly man? Her mind raced as she watched Daad hang Fern’s tack on the wall pegs. He immediately started to hammer her bent metal wheel back into place. She pulled the blanket tighter around her wet shoulders.
“You mean,” she said, having to talk louder again over the din, “you think I should take him with me when I leave on deliveries or errands? You didn’t even want me to show him how to hitch a buggy.”
“Never said that, just wanted to give Aaron more responsibility. You should take Andrew and visit just once to your places that sell the lavender. Tell them for a while they need to come here to pick things up.”
“But I’ve promised them I would make deliveries and included that in the price. All six of my vendors are busy women, and I’m hoping to expand. Daad, I’m twenty-four and am self-supporting and have my own home now, so—”
“That’s a problem too,” he said, stopping the hammering and turning to her. “At night, for a while, you should not sleep alone in that house, but come back inside with us.”
“But you just gave my room to Andrew.”
Daad sighed and put down the hammer. His shoulders slumped. His anger seemed to ebb from him. “We will set it up for Andrew to sleep in your mamm’s quilting room, since the three men in one room would be too much.”
“I can sleep in the quilting room.”
“Must you always argue with your father, girl? You think Andrew would go for that? I see him as good man and not only because of what Mr. Branin told me about him.”
“Here I thought Andrew was the one who had to be guarded, be worried about—not me.”
“With the sheriff’s help, we will find out who is bothering my girl, ya?” He put an arm around her shoulders, and they walked toward the barn door together. “And maybe it is not as bad as we fear, but you just let me explain to your mother.”
“I know it probably doesn’t mean much, but I thought I saw a light on the lavender hill the other night,” she said as they walked out of the barn and he slid the wooden bar across to close it. “I was pretty sure it was a reflection off one of my tin pans that scare the birds away.”
“Not a flashlight?”
“No, unless the battery was bad—dim. It was single, like an eye that opened and blinked shut.”
He put her between the runners of the sleigh they had put outside, propped up on its end against the barn so they could fix the bottom of it. He moved away from her and, hands on his hips, stared up the hill, then looked toward the house.
“I’m going to walk to the phone shanty and call the sheriff to come out,” he said.
“After I dry off and change clothes, I’m planning to take Ray-Lynn Logan her weekly lavender products into the Dutch Farm Table and also stop at the gift shop and B and B. I can ask Andrew to ride with me and see the sheriff then.”
“Ya, I guess, if you stay on the main roads, with others around from now on. And no asking those men at the mill if they saw someone take your cape. Pranksters, I pray, just that.”
She was glad to see no one in the kitchen, because she knew she must look a drowned cat—though it jolted her to think of it that way. Despite all she’d been through today, she had a hopeful heart. Blessedly, none of the feelings of impending doom that so often plagued her when something went wrong hovered over her head. However independent she’d been these past years, maybe she felt better because she liked the idea of Andrew taking care of her, just as she’d watch out for him.
* * *
Ella made sure Andrew heard her entire story before she asked him to accompany her for her deliveries that afternoon. He’d already agreed to move into the smaller quilting room. Abel and Aaron had moved his bed there and were muttering about having to move Ella’s bedroom furniture back into the farmhouse after just taking it in the other direction.
Andrew had said he’d like to go along in the buggy. They sat companionably close as they headed toward town three miles away. She didn’t know how he felt, but she felt good just to be with him.
“Want to handle the reins?” she asked.
“Always,” he said with a tight smile as he took them from her. Their fingers touched. His were strong and warm, smooth too, not like a farmer’s or a carpenter’s. She showed him how to hold the reins, wrap them a bit around his hand.
“I guess ‘always’ means more than it sounds like,” she said. “You were an important man—are still—if you can get things settled at home, right?”
“Some would think so. Also an ignorant man. I got taken in and in over my head. Now I’m trying to make amends. Do the right thing, as they say.”
“I admire you for that. I know all about making mistakes. I almost married a man who couldn’t give up his drinking. It was a blessing I had the courage to pull out, even though I’d said yes. Hold the right rein a little tighter, not all that slack.”
“You need a rearview mirror.”
“Some buggies have them. I just never saw the need—until earlier today.”
“Being followed like that is one of my worst fears.”
“I can’t begin to imagine what you’ve been through or still have to face. But maybe what happened to me today gives me a little hint of how hard it’s been for you. Do you think a lot about what you’ve left behind—what you’re missing—besides your car to impress your corporation?”
“You are a smart and very persuasive woman, Ella Lantz. If I were my enemies, I’d send someone like you to get me to confess all.”
“You’re teasing.”
“Yes and no. All right, I know a lot about you, so let’s play something like twenty questions—or ten. You tell me things you think you know about the other me, the real me. As long as you’re correct, you can ask another question.”
He smiled at her, a bit prideful, she thought, but she was grateful to have the chance to learn more about him.
“You’re from a big city, but not one in Ohio,” she said.
“That’s two questions, clever Ella, but yes and yes.”
“You’re not married.”
“How did you guess that? I could hardly wear a wedding ring around here, not an Amish man.”
“Because on your left ring finger, there is not a hint of white circle, but on your right hand, where you took off a ring, there is.”
“I think the sheriff and that new deputy should be asking you for help.”
“Don’t change the subject or think flattery will get you anywhere, not with the Amish,” she told him. “For us, cooperation, just like we have now, and not competition is the best way to live.”
“Which means we are worlds apart. You should see the dog-eat-dog environment I came from. And, you know, this stay here has really been lucky for me.”
“Not lucky—blessed. Blessed by God. Okay, here’s another guess. You believe in God but you hardly ever think about Him anymore, because you’ve been too busy. You think you can solve your problems your way.”
He turned to look at her as they clip-clopped along. He’d been turning his head away a lot and leaning out to look behind them. “I’d say that’s fair,” he admitted. “Until everything blew up in my face and what I was facing was the ruin of my dreams and maybe even death.”
She gripped his left wrist. “I know. That changes things, doesn’t it? Then you need something and someone to lean on. Oh, I have my questions too about life’s troubles, but I never think that the Creator of the world—of these hills and fields and my lavender—doesn’t have the answers. Last night I saw you go outside and look up at the stars, even though you were hobbling. You felt the strength and power out there in the vastness, didn’t you?”
“Sure. Yeah, I believe that. But I also know we’ve got to use what we’ve been given—gifts and time and talents—to do our best and accomplish something in life. I’ve said it before, but I mean this—I really admire your people and your family, so close and supportive, despite some pretty strict rules.”
“We’re almost to town. One more guess about you. Your company had something to do with the Chinese—maybe you’ve even been to China—but you’re worried they might be after you now.”
His eyes widened in surprise. His nostrils flared; he sniffed sharply, but he only shook his head and didn’t answer. As they headed into the fringe of town with more intersections, she took the reins back from him.
“So much for that game,” he said. “I don’t want you involved in any way.”
“But by coming along today and telling my father you were willing to help keep an eye on me, you are involved, so I am too. All right, you don’t want to say more, that’s fine. So, whatever big city you are from, this is lovely, little Homestead,” she said with a sweep of one hand at Main Street.
She pointed out the Dutch Farm Table Restaurant and told him the pizzeria was partway down the block and the two fast-food places were at the very end. Pulling Fern into the hitching post in front of the sheriff’s office, she gestured here and there. “That’s the volunteer fire department, the string of shops, Kwik Stop food store where we usually get our groceries, the pharmacy and hardware store. And that’s the newspaper office, down there near the only traffic light in town.”
“A one-traffic-light town! Never thought I’d live in one, though I did see one once in Scotland.”
“Oops, something personal slipped out. You’d better guard your mouth, Mr. Modern Andrew Lantz.”
The corners of his taut mouth crimped in an almost-smile as he intently studied her mouth. She wet her lips with her tongue. His eyes widened, then he turned abruptly away. “And my heart,” she was amazed to overhear him whisper as he grabbed his crutch and climbed carefully down to tie Fern to the hitching post.
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Karen Harper
Hidden in the heart of the Home Valley, a secret danger takes root…Quiet, cautious Ella Lantz has spent her entire life in the close-knit Amish community of the Home Valley. Tending her lavender fields, she finds calm and serenity in purple blooms, heavenly scents and a simple life. But the sudden arrival of a strange visitor to her parents' home heralds a host of new complications.Alex Caldwell is unlike any man Ella has ever met—clearly, he's no "Pennsylvania cousin," whatever the elders may say. In fact, Alex is a Wall Street whistle-blower under witness protection…and he's brought a world of trouble to the Lantz doorstep. As Ella comes to trust—even love—a man so utterly worldly, she realizes her life has already changed forever.When it becomes violently clear that even the Home Valley is no refuge, Ella and Alex are driven into the wider world to hide. And with such a high price placed on their silence, they may not survive to share their love.…"Harper, a master of suspense, keeps readers guessing about crime and love until the very end." —Booklist, starred review, on Fall from Pride
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www.millsandboon.co.uk/ebookxmas (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk/ebookxmas)
Hidden in the heart of the Home Valley, a SECRET danger takes root…
Quiet, cautious Ella Lantz has spent her entire life in the close-knit Amish community of the Home Valley. Tending her lavender fields, she finds calm and serenity in purple blooms, heavenly scents and a simple life. But the sudden arrival of a strange visitor to her parents’ home heralds a host of new complications.
Alex Caldwell is unlike any man Ella has ever met— clearly, he’s no “Pennsylvania cousin,” whatever the elders may say. In fact, Alex is a Wall Street whistle-blower under witness protection...and he’s brought a world of trouble to the Lantz doorstep.
As Ella comes to trust—even love—a man so utterly worldly, she realizes her life has already changed forever. When it becomes violently clear that even the Home Valley is no refuge, Ella and Alex are driven into the wider world to hide. And with such a high price placed on their silence, they may not survive to share their love....
Finding Mercy
Karen Harper
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
For all the Kurtzes who enjoy Ohio Amish country: Margaret, Ruth, Barb, Bev and her friends. And as ever, for everything, to Don.
Contents
Prologue (#u33813598-adb4-5336-9473-6232ffc4de3c)
Chapter 1 (#u6ed7a5a6-98ea-5069-a7f3-4be4718fa4a0)
Chapter 2 (#ude17f0f2-5df4-58e8-8307-c772de2cff79)
Chapter 3 (#uc128bc1c-d1c7-5f25-9164-3ba300b72a9e)
Chapter 4 (#u6448af23-e32f-590b-95fb-8d7d215d0c40)
Chapter 5 (#u2e9c7cee-3ac1-5538-bd39-687228522853)
Chapter 6 (#u52024112-f9c3-571e-ba4c-03375ec75f89)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
April 12, 2011
ALEX CALDWELL WAS sick to death of having to hide like a hunted animal trapped in a borrowed lair. How had his well-planned life imploded so fast? From a great career with a corner office forty stories up overlooking the Hudson River to a room in a one-floor Georgia motel with a single, curtained window. From skiing vacations in Vermont and golf in the Hamptons to running in place in front of a TV. From lobster and steak dinners to carryout and fast food that was all starting to taste like cardboard.
Damn his mentor and former boss Marv Boynton and his under-the-radar schemes that had brought down SkyBound, Inc., along with Alex’s career and hopes! He couldn’t stand just hiding and waiting for the trial to start anymore. The Atlanta spring weather shouted to him, and he was going out for a run, no matter what his government watchdog said.
“I’m going to jog a couple of times around the building,” he told Jake, who was slumped against his headboard, staring like a zombie at a cable news show.
“Not on my watch, you’re not. I know you’re going stir-crazy. You think this is my idea of a great assignment? But you’re a precious commodity, Metro Man, and—”
“I asked you not to call me that. Use my name. It may be all I have left.”
“You should’ve taken the offer on the witness protection program. At least you’d be stashed someplace you could see the light of day. We’re both getting bug-eyed looking at these cable news shows, looking for more on the big man’s case. You’ll hear soon enough when they’re ready for you. ’Sides, you snore, and I’m missing my beauty sleep.”
“You should talk. I finally made some earplugs out of toilet paper so I don’t have to listen to you at night too.”
As ever, they tired of sniping at each other, and their conversation trailed off. Alex could think of more than one comeback, including that Jake was no beauty. Jake—no last name permitted—was balding, nearly sixty, with such big shoulders it seemed he had no neck. He had a gun but no personality. A former private security firm employee, he’d been let go recently and had taken a job protecting witnesses. As long as Alex refused to go into the federal WITSEC program, he was evidently stuck with the man until he could testify against his former boss for economic espionage—with the Chinese, no less. His whole life, his climb up the ladder, sabotaged by his decision to step forward as a whistle-blower—one, evidently, who needed protection until he could testify, or so the feds claimed. He was tempted to wear a disguise and go back home to Manhattan. Five weeks of this, no date for the trial yet, and he was going stark, raving nuts.
In a rage silent but for grunts, he did sit-ups and ab crunches on the floor until he broke out in a sweat and his belly muscles screamed as loud as his desperation. Then he realized Jake was snoring. Since he was asleep…
Alex got up slowly, not turning the volume of the droning TV either up or down. As he tiptoed toward the outside door of the motel room, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He looked bad, too thin, almost gaunt. He’d lost his tan. His usual great haircut was shaggy, his once clean-cut skin scruffy with beard stubble. He was down to his last pair of clean chinos and a cutoff sweatshirt.
He had to get the hell out of here, even for a few minutes. He wasn’t going to risk being traced by doing anything stupid like calling a friend or either of the women he’d been dating—man, he’d like to import either Marci or Anita right now.
Despite being thirty-two years old, Alex felt like a kid sneaking downstairs early on Christmas morning. Holding his breath, he slowly turned the dead bolt. Jake got to make phone calls—he’d made a private one last night. It really irked Alex to be a prisoner. But he knew the WITSEC program would be worse. There you gave up not only your past but had to create an entirely new present.
Jake snored on, though it didn’t sound deep or regular. Alex opened the door and sucked in a big breath. He took a step out and savored it all. Fresh air! The sound of traffic on the nearby beltway, lined with tall buildings. The splashes of colored flowers in the distance on the hill and in a bed near the motel sign. Open sky with puffs of cumulous clouds and a jet gliding overheard, probably from nearby Dobbins Air Reserve Base or even the huge Atlanta airport. Freedom!
Shaking in anticipation, Alex closed the door quietly behind him and began to walk fast. Just a couple of times around the building, he told himself. Atlanta was hilly with rich, red soil, so different from the flat concrete of Wall Street or even the manicured grassy spots in SoHo. Different too from his grandmother’s terraced lawn overlooking Nassau, where he’d wanted to hide out before the feds nixed it.
Filling his lungs with breeze, he broke into a trot, then a run. He turned a corner, passed cars and U-Hauls parked early for the night. He read license plates from up and down the Midwestern states…Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, what he used to think of as flyover country when he traveled to L.A., heading for Hong Kong.
He turned another corner, kept going, faster. Just get this waiting over, be further deposed, prepare his testimony with his lawyers, then make it through the trial, all the publicity. Find a new job, maybe start a new career. Save some money again, decide on which woman to pursue. “If you can’t decide, man,” a friend had told him, “the answer is neither of them.”
His muscles felt the burn now, his lungs expanded to take in good air, despite an idling black pickup spewing CO2 at the far end of the parking lot. The sun felt so good on his shoulders, so much better than the night that had become his friend. Even with Jake accompanying him, he could duck outside only for a few minutes to gaze up at the vast, black night.
The feds were being paranoid, he thought. He’d complained of overkill but had been told their precautions were so he wouldn’t be “overkilled.” They’d regaled him with stories of witnesses who had been kidnapped or killed, tortured, some whose bodies turned up and some who just vanished.
Shutting all that out, Alex spotted one of the maids across the parking lot, going from room to room with her cart of mops and brooms. She was either really pretty or he was getting desperate for female companionship.
He ran on. The next time around, the black pickup was still there with its motor running. Its side window was down and the driver was holding up some kind of mirror that snagged a piece of sunlight. No, not a mirror, maybe binocs. A telescope? Or maybe…
A crack resounded, echoed off the building behind him. Stucco and shards of shingles spit at him. He lunged forward and hit the concrete walk on his belly as a second shot sounded. It shattered the window he’d just run past.
Shooting at him! But how—no one knew where…
Somewhere a woman was screaming, then Jake’s voice. “Stay down! Gun. Gun!”
The pickup roared away. Jake, cursing, hauled Alex to his feet by the waistband of his slacks and shoved him toward their car, pushed him into the backseat on his face, slammed the door, got in the driver’s seat and roared away.
“That’s it for me!” Jake shouted as he sped up, then made a screeching turn. “You don’t play by the rules, and somehow they found you, Metro Man! I’m delivering you to the Atlanta cops and then I’m outta here! For them to track and find you, someone wants you bad. I’d bet city hall you got a nice expensive contract on your head!”
Alex felt shaken to his soul—bullets…hit man…contract. Traced hundreds of miles from Manhattan. He hated and feared having to become someone he wasn’t, but he couldn’t live like this or else he was going to die like this.
1
June 20, 2011
ELLA LANTZ’S FIELD of lavender, edging toward full bloom, stretched as far as her eyes could see. But, she admitted, peering out from under her bonnet brim, that was only because the humped, wide-set rows of the fragrant purple plants went up the hill and disappeared from sight. She had almost an acre of the sweet stuff and, as Grossmamm Ruth put it, with no man or marriage coming down the pike, her little garden of Eden here in Eden County was her future.
With her curved hand sickle, Ella cut an armful of the earliest, hardy English lavender, then rushed down to where her widowed brother, Seth, was loading the wagon with his household goods. Beside him in the wagon sat Hannah Esh, Ella’s good friend, whom he was going to marry this Friday, in just four days.
Even though Amish weddings usually avoided the farming months, everyone agreed they’d waited a long time. Their borrowed wagon was filled with the rest of Seth’s furniture, which was going into storage in the Troyer barn until his and Hannah’s house was done. Meanwhile, the newlyweds were going to live in the big Troyer house while Seth would build first his and Hannah’s home, then one for the youngest Troyer son, Josh, and his wife, Naomi. So many weddings, Ella thought, but none of them hers. Both Naomi and Hannah were her friends, and she wanted to send enough lavender with Seth to scent the Troyers’ house, then later the wedding itself at Hannah’s family home.
Ella was grateful to the Troyers for hiring her oldest brother in these tight times. And, she was getting a house of her own in the bargain. Seth was giving her his two-story home on this property. She planned to live upstairs and make the downstairs into a lavender workshop and store where she could oversee a small staff to make potpourri, candles and soap.
“Here, for Mrs. Troyer,” Ella said, and lifted the big bundle of blooms up to Hannah, who cradled them across her knees. On the wagon seat between her and Seth perched three-year-old Marlena, Seth’s little girl, who adored her new mother-to-be. The child smiled and waved down at her aunt Ella, who had helped to care for her since her mother died two years ago.
One of the four big Belgians hitched to the wagon snorted and stamped a huge hoof. They were anxious to be off. Ella knew Seth and Marlena were only going four miles away, but she would miss them. Suddenly, the small home she was inheriting here seemed miles from the big Lantz farmhouse where her parents and two younger siblings lived.
“Oh, they smell so good!” Hannah said, sniffing the spiky blooms with their purple tips. “Remember, I’ll help you when I can at your new store.”
“When you can won’t be much,” Ella told her with a playful punch on her leg. “Not with taking care of Marlena. Besides, you have a lot of catching up to do since you’ve been helping Ray-Lynn manage her restaurant.”
Ray-Lynn Logan was their Englische friend who owned and operated the Dutch Farm Table Restaurant in the nearby little town of Homestead. The kindly woman, who was recovering from an accident and a coma, shared ownership of the popular eating and meeting spot with Jack Freeman, the county sheriff and Ray-Lynn’s close friend. Hannah had been living with Ray-Lynn for a while, after Ray-Lynn’s accident, and would stay with her until her wedding.
“Gotta go now, Ella,” Seth called down to her. “Enjoy the house. If you need help building the shelves, just let me know.”
“Oh, ya, I’ll just get on your waiting list, you mean!” she kidded him. She smiled through her tears and bit her lower lip as he giddyapped the horses. To lose little Marlena from her care made her so sad… Before that last wagonful of Seth’s household goods rattled down the gravel driveway, the rest of the Lantz family, who had helped him load, came out into the front yard to wave goodbye. Ella wondered where they’d disappeared to while she’d picked the lavender.
Her parents, Eben and Anna, waved goodbye as did her sprightly grandmother Ruth, age 80, who lived with them. Mamm and Daad shouted advice in their Deutsche dialect as if Seth and Hannah—and their only grandchild, Marlena—were leaving for the ends of the earth.
Abel, age twenty-six, Ella’s second-oldest brother, not wed yet, who farmed the fields with Daad, looked sad. He would miss their oldest brother too. Barbara, sixteen, and Aaron, fourteen, the youngest, who was aching for his running around rumspringa time to begin, both turned quickly away and headed back toward the big farmhouse. Ella, at twenty-four, was the middle child of the five of them. She’d felt that way too—stuck in the middle, not quite companions of the two oldest boys or her two much younger siblings. That was probably why she’d made two close friends over the years—Hannah and Sarah, who had gone to the world and been shunned.
Ella was surprised to see an outsider watching from the porch as everyone hurried back inside. So when had he arrived, and where was his car? Who was he? Maybe that’s why everyone had disappeared inside for a while.
Yet she hesitated to follow her family back inside the house. Despite living with so many people, she often chose to be alone, especially when she felt the drowning darkness swirling toward her. No good to have someone see her that way, especially since an Amish girl, who trusted in her faith to pull her through, couldn’t escape its clutches. Going off on her own when that inner darkness came, she’d managed to keep her terrible secret from even those closest to her. Ever since she’d almost died ten years ago, she’d felt not only blessed but cursed....
“Ella, come here!” Her father’s voice pulled her from her agonizing. “Something for the whole family to hear!” Holding the porch door open, he windmilled his arm. As she hurried toward the house, she saw her mother’s white face in the window, peering out at her—or else watching the road, even though Seth’s wagon was out of sight. What was going on? It surely had something to do with that stranger.
Taking a shortcut down the row with her late-blooming French lavender, she broke into a run.
* * *
Alexander Caldwell was really a wreck. This area reminded him of an old Clint Eastwood Western rerun. He saw horses and buggies, people in hats and bonnets, big barns and farmhouses with no phone or electric wires, no satellite TV dishes. And he was to be a part of all this, he marveled, as the black buggy clip-clopped along at such a slow speed he could actually see what usually blurred past beside the road. Hopefully, somewhere up ahead, Gerald Branin, his link to the outside world, was laying the groundwork for this huge deception that could mean life or death to him, especially since the shooter in his attempted Atlanta assassination had not been caught.
Gerald, his WITSEC manager, had sounded so certain that the heart of Amish country was the best place for him to hide out until the trial. This was a one-eighty from his own life in Manhattan. This was Podunk, the boondocks, the sticks, aka Homestead, Ohio, in Eden County. Soon enough his testimony at the trial would splash his name across the country and the world. But since the attempt on his life and at the urging of his lawyer, Logan Reese, he had finally admitted he needed to hide out. The feds had convinced him to try Amish anonymity.
He could, he thought perversely, envision the headlines now: Former NYC Exec Exposes Corporate Espionage by CEO of Tech Firm Skybound, Inc.… Investors Left Devastated and Furious… Chinese Businesses Involved… Atlanta Assassination Attempt Financed by—Why, You Name It: Alexander Caldwell’s rich and powerful former boss? The Chinese who want to shut Caldwell up to avoid sanctions? Irate investors? Place your bets on who would most like to shut the whistle-blowing witness up for good.
“Best put that hat back on,” Bishop Joseph Esh, who was driving the buggy, told him. “It’s to wear, not bend in your hands. Make you harder to pick out among our people, ya, it will.”
“Oh, right,” Alex said, smoothing and replacing it on his head. He couldn’t get used to his Amish hairstyle, either, or the lack of zippers on his broadfall-style pants, the suspenders, or the five hundred dollars Branin had given him in small bills, when he was used to credit cards. No smartphone, which he missed horribly. Like an idiot he kept lifting his wrist to check his Rolex for the time when he didn’t and couldn’t wear a watch—and did time even matter in this place? At least he was playing a younger, unwed man, so he didn’t have to grow a beard. This elderly man had a long, white one.
“I do appreciate everything, sir,” he told his host.
“Sir is too worldly. Bishop or just Joseph is good for me. Be careful not to talk much in front of strangers and just nod when we speak the Deutsche but for those few words I told you. Too bad you got to use lies to protect the truth. Learned it the hard way myself, but the ends sometimes justify the means. You got your story straight?”
“Yes—ya. My manager rehearsed it with me, so I won’t rattle my bio—biography—off again. I guess this has never happened before, that your people have sheltered a kind of fugitive.”
“Nope. Did it because we owe FBI Agent Lincoln Armstrong a favor for helping solve a crime in these parts and your man Branin is a friend of his. And because Armstrong canceled a money debt my daughter Hannah owed him. I would take you in myself but too many people in and out of a bishop’s home. We all—you too, I know—hope this won’t last long.”
“That’s for sure. I’d like to get this over, sanely and safely.”
“Life is precious, each one. You got a lot to live for. Enjoy and treasure each day. We all do.”
Bishop Esh turned the buggy onto another curving, hilly road with a metal signpost that read Oakridge, and a hand-lettered one under it with an arrow. Lavender Plain Products, No Sunday Sales.
* * *
“We what?” Ella heard her brother Abel ask Daad as she hurried into the kitchen where her family and the stranger were gathered around the big table. She took off her bonnet, draped the tied strings over the back of her usual chair and sat. Pieces of shoofly pie and raspberry iced tea were at each place. Abel went on, “Take in an Englischer and say he’s our cousin? But why, Daad?”
Daad shot Abel a sharp look. Ella could tell their worldly visitor wanted to answer but deferred to their father.
“Partly in thanks,” Daad answered, “for what Agent Armstrong did for the Eshes. The bishop asked us to house this man we will call our cousin Andrew Lantz from Intercourse, Pennsylvania, though he is really an Auslander from a big Eastern American city. Andrew will work with us, work the fields. He will be with us until at least late summer, maybe longer. We will not question him about his true identity or his past. He is a good man. Now Mr. Branin here will say a bit more before our guest arrives.”
Ella noted Daad frowned at Aaron for rolling his eyes at the mention of Intercourse. She’d heard Aaron and a couple of guys from his buddy group snickering over the name of that town before. Ah, those almost-ready-for-rumspringa years, when Amish teens enjoyed running around and trying worldly things. She should have cut loose more, but after her accident, she was so afraid of doing anything wrong, of setting off the darkness again.
She studied the Auslander. Mr. Branin was a short, wiry man whose red hair was fading to gray and creeping up pretty high on his forehead. He had sunglasses sticking out of his pocket, both the pockets and glasses sure signs he was an Englischer. He was dressed half fancy, half country in a white-sleeved shirt with jeans and running shoes. He wore a gold watch and wedding ring, which stood out here. He leaned forward with his elbows on the kitchen table as he talked, gesturing so much he almost punched Barbara in the face and she scooted back in her chair.
“I know it won’t be easy to pretend a stranger is part of the family,” Mr. Branin said. “But when the bishop brought me here a while ago in his buggy, he assured me that you and your people will take good care of this man. I must admit this is a radical placement for a witness, and I want to assure you that Andrew Lantz has done nothing wrong. Sometimes this program is forced to protect criminals who are informing on worse criminals, but that is not the case here. Andrew is helping our country at great risk to himself—a risk we will eliminate by hiding him here in a world so different from his own. Among your people, we appreciate that even the photographing of faces is not permitted.”
“And,” Daad said, “the new owner who bought the county newspaper, so far at least, is not like those big newspaper people, always poking into our privacy.”
“Good,” Mr. Branin went on. “And I assure you, I’ll make a visit every once in a while.” He looked from face to face and, evidently, since he hadn’t been introduced to Ella before, nodded at her. “Sometimes you may be aware of my presence, but sometimes not.”
Ella thought that sounded funny. Was this man going to hide in haystacks or up on the hill above her field? She sure didn’t need someone spying on her, especially if she had to go off alone. She took a drink of iced tea and tucked into her piece of pie. For a moment, silence descended, but for the clink of forks on plates and Aaron’s fidgeting and shuffling his big feet under the table.
“Someone’s going to have to tell Seth,” Ella said, her pie halfway to her mouth.
“I told him and Hannah first,” Daad said. “They will keep Andrew’s secret too.”
“But the others,” she plunged on, ignoring Mr. Branin’s frown, “the neighbors, the church…”
“We have been helped, and we will help in turn,” Daad said. “We will be the Good Samaritan to this wounded man.”
This wounded man? Ella thought. She’d sure like to know more about what had happened to the outsider they were taking in.
* * *
Bishop Esh’s words seemed to cut to the core of things, something Alex had always admired in mentors and bosses, even Marv, whom he was going to betray—as his boss had betrayed everyone who’d trusted him and SkyBound.
“It’s like you been banned from your people for a while, and we understand that.” The old man went on, “And to tell the truth as you have about a sinner, at cost to your own safety—that is also why I said yes to the witness protection people. He makes me to lie down in green pastures, He leads me beside the still waters…that is why too. As the Lord shelters us, we ought to shelter others.”
Alex could only nod. He kept telling himself he was Andrew Lantz now, the Pennsylvania cousin of the family he would stay with and was about to meet. Gerald Branin, the WITSEC Deputy Marshal Inspector in charge of his case, had grilled him about his fake background but had not told him much about the Amish family who would take him in until the case came up in federal court in Manhattan. Five children, he’d been told, four of them still at home. As an only child, that would be a challenge, but maybe it could help to keep him from missing his friends so much. What he wouldn’t give for a good, noisy bar crawl with his buds right now.
Again he surveyed the rolling hills with fertile fields of nearly knee-high corn guarded by tidy farms and barns. It was pretty, he had to admit that, like stepping back into a Currier & Ives painting. He watched other buggies pass with a nod or a wave on this narrow road. Everyone seemed to know the bishop’s buggy—which looked like all the rest to him—and many called out a greeting in the German dialect.
When the bishop turned the buggy down a long lane, Alex saw a pale purple field of flowers marching partway up a high hill. The unearthly beauty of that—and that scent in the air amidst the buzzing of bees as the bishop reined in—seemed so foreign. As tense as Alex felt, the peaceful scene calmed his heart.
“I live just next farm over yonder,” Bishop Esh said, pointing. “Three of us church families close together here—Kauffman, Esh and Lantz—with a real nice pond in the center. You just walk that field there, come have a meal with me and my wife, tell us how you’re doing. Better make it after Friday, though, big family wedding with my daughter marrying the oldest of the Lantz sons. All kinds of things going on. You’re invited too.”
“Thanks. That’s kind of you. I appreciate all you’ve done.”
At least living with these backward, simple people would be a break from the high-speed chaos of his life, Alex thought. He usually lived fast and hard—he’d even been tempted to try an extreme sports vacation once, but he’d chickened out. Since he didn’t know the first thing about horses, barns or crops—or much about the Amish—maybe the next couple of months would be pretty extreme.
* * *
“Wait—maybe that’s them now,” Mr. Branin said, and jumped up to look out the window. “Mr. Lantz, that’s the same buggy that dropped me off here, isn’t it?”
Daad looked out the window as Mamm had been doing off and on, when Ella thought she was just yearning for Seth to bring little Marlena back. “Ya, it’s the bishop—them,” Daad said with a nod.
Ella leaned back in her chair, but it wasn’t worth it to crane her neck. Just get the man here, greet him kindly, then Daad, Abel and Aaron would keep him occupied, she thought. She had loads of work to do getting her new place ready and tending her crop, so she’d be too busy to help much. Her sister, Barbara, usually helped her tend the lavender but she was living with the Kurtz family ten miles outside town, since they had six children and the mother was ailing. Ella missed her younger sister, but Barbara would be back for Seth’s wedding. Everyone expected Barbara would be the next Lantz bride, because she was closer than ever to her come-calling friend, Gabe Kauffman.
“I see he’s tall and thin, this Andrew Lantz,” Daad said. “Can’t tell his hair or eye color from here—hope he’s not got dark eyes and hair. Harder to fit in among our people.”
“Ah, no,” Mr. Branin said, sounding nervous now. “Dark blond hair and blue eyes, though you can’t tell it with that hat yet.” He hurried to the back door behind Daad. With a single, small black suitcase in his hand, the stranger appeared on the threshold behind Bishop Esh.
Though Ella had heard Daad describe the Auslander, she was surprised to see he was a whole head taller than the bishop. His square chin had a little cleft in the middle of it under his firm lips. He put his bag down but kept rotating his hat brim in his hands, clean-looking ones, no broken nails or bruises. Daad introduced each of them in turn by name as they stood at their places around the table. She realized she’d been rudely staring.
“Next, Ella, middle child, eldest daughter, keeps the lavender field, sells her goods, yet a maidal—not married.”
Did Daad have to introduce her like that? Not only as a maidal, but sells her goods and not married yet?
“Ella.” The stranger repeated her name as he had not the others. His gaze, sharp blue as winter ice, snagged hers and held a moment. His voice was deep and in just the few words he said, she sensed how lost he felt. He looked sturdy, though, with the muscles he’d need to help around here. His chest swelled his shirt and his upper arms filled out his Amish coat, which was just a bit too short at his wrists. His trousers fitted him just fine, though. He had new running shoes; so clean and white they stood out.
“Welcome, Cousin Andrew,” she said, as the others had before, and then the introductions went on until Mamm sat him down and fed him and the bishop pie and iced tea, while Ella and Barbara bustled around to help Mamm prepare a light evening meal. They would feed him up good, unless his working around here kept the weight off.
More than once, when Ella darted a quick glance his way, their guest—Andrew—had those sharp blue eyes still on her. Later, when she placed his roast beef and gravy sandwich in front of him, she said, “Things are upside down today, first dessert, now the main course.”
“I appreciate both,” he said directly, quietly to her, then addressed everyone in a louder voice. “I mean to pitch in and help any way I can, though I’ve got to admit, planting a memorial tree after 9/11 is about as close as I’ve come to farming.”
“Oh, ya,” Daad said, “9/11, when the country was attacked and so many people died. Whatever is in the evil and sad past in your life, Andrew, we will keep you safe here.”
Ella was amazed to see tears shimmer in Andrew’s eyes. His lower lip quivered. He looked just the way she felt when she was afraid of the drowning darkness she had shared with no one and never could. She fought the desire to put her hand on his shoulder and began to serve the others.
2
THAT EVENING AS dusk descended, Ella worked late in Seth’s house. No, it was her place now, she reminded herself as she carried cartons of lavender products in from her work shed. Kitchen cabinets and counters, two long tables and planks on sawhorses would have to do for shelves and work areas until she could get everything built the way she wanted. She hoped to buy a still someday so she could distill the precious lavender oil. At least she’d finished stitching her dress to attend Hannah at her wedding. She’d been thrilled when Hannah asked her to be one of the side sitters, special friends of the wedding couple.
From dowels overheard, Ella hung the remaining bunches of last year’s dried flowers by the rubber bands around their stems. Instantly, the kitchen and living area, even the two small first-floor bedrooms, gave off the familiar, delicate smell. Sometimes she was so used to the scent that her nose went numb from it, but it was deep in her mind and heart and she could imagine it. The kitchen here bothered her, but not because it was so small. On its wooden floor, Seth’s wife, Lena, had died of an aortic aneurism, something she’d carried inside since birth and no one knew about.
Ella lit a third kerosene lantern to keep away sad thoughts. Her black mood had been lurking lately, probably because Seth and her little charge Marlena had left. Ella guessed worldly people would call her malady an off-and-on depression. Secretly, from books in the book mobile, she’d looked up the problem, but she still just wasn’t sure what to call it or how to best cope with it. She hoped it wasn’t what she read about bipolar disorder. Mostly, she just hid out when it hit her. You’d think nearly drowning would make every second of life that followed full of relief and joy, but that cold, grasping whirlpool seemed to pull her under sometimes, as it had then.
At least the hard work of producing her small number of Lavender Plain Products kept her focused outside herself. Now her family’s new houseguest gave her lots to think about. Since she’d moved her things into the previous unused upstairs here, “Cousin” Andrew was being given her bedroom. How strange to think of an intriguing mystery man sleeping in her once private place.
She decided to go back to the farmhouse to get the refrigerated items Hannah had brought her from the restaurant for her generator-run fridge. It had been so kind of Ray-Lynn and Hannah to think of a sort of housewarming gift for her, and she was going to give both of them scented candles when she got settled here.
But as she stepped out on her back porch, she saw a figure jogging down the lane from the house or barn. In the gathering gloom, she could see clean white shoes. Those, and the fact no one Amish went jogging, told her who it was. His quick steps spit gravel in a regular rhythm. But it was almost dark, and even buggies should stay off the roads now.
Earlier, she’d seen Daad take Andrew for a tour of the barn and the fields—back to the pond too, a place she always tried to avoid. Then she’d seen Mamm showing him around their big garden, pointing out and naming flowers and vegetables as if he were from another planet. It was pretty obvious to them that their adopted cousin had no idea of how to garden or farm. But Daad and the boys would teach him. She sure could use his help weeding her lavender beds, but she hadn’t dared say so.
Ella headed for the farmhouse. Since her brothers had carried her bedroom furniture to her new place after supper, maybe this would be her last trip tonight. Trail bologna, Swiss cheese, some of Ray-Lynn’s delicious baked goods; she’d seen how much Andrew had appreciated their food… Ach, she had to stop thinking about him so much, just because he was new and different. Too much happening around here at once, but maybe that would help her keep her head above water—she always thought of it that way....
She was almost to the farmhouse when she heard a long squeal of car brakes, then a crash. Not far down the road! What if a car had hit a buggy? It happened too often, and who came out the loser then? Little Marlena’s maternal grandparents had been killed in a buggy car crash in the area that sound came from—the direction Andrew had run.
What if a car had hit him, jogging in the dark on the road?
Not even taking time to call for help inside the house, she lifted her long skirt and broke into a run in the same direction he had gone.
* * *
When Ray-Lynn Logan heard the screech of brakes and the bang! she stopped her van right in the middle of the road.
She’d given her restaurant manager, Hannah Esh, the day off to help her fiancé, Seth, get settled at the Troyer house and to help her family prepare for her wedding day. Ray-Lynn had promised she’d pick her up after she closed the restaurant, and bring her home. Hannah had been living with her ever since Ray-Lynn’s concussion and coma, though of course Hannah was leaving this week to begin her new life as Seth Lantz’s wife and little Marlena’s mother. After her accident—which was really an attempted murder—Ray-Lynn had lost a couple of years of her memories, and that was about how long she’d had the restaurant. Worst of all, she’d forgotten her entire relationship with Jack, the county sheriff, which they were trying to rebuild—a relationship she still wanted to work, thank goodness. As appealing a man as Jack Freeman was, that kind of love—romance—she could not just fake.
But she was certain of what she’d just heard. Her accident had been at night too. She shouldn’t have driven out after dark even now, but she had to learn to cope again, to be normal.
Sweating, shaking, she knew she couldn’t just sit here in her new van in the middle of the road, even a usually quiet, country road in Amish country. She hit her emergency blinkers, fumbled for the cell phone in her big purse and punched in the easy-dial for Jack’s private number. He’d know it was her from the caller ID. He had to answer! Good! No recording. He was picking up.
“Honey, you home?” he asked before she could say a word. His voice sounded so good. “I had a domestic outside of town, didn’t get a chance to call you yet, but—”
“Jack, I’m in the van on Oakridge just before Troyer Mill Road, going to pick up Hannah! I—I’m not hallucinating, but I just heard a car hit something—it’s wrecked—I’m sure of it.”
“What direction from there?”
“Before the covered bridge, but past the Amish cemetery, not too far from that pond in the woods. I’m afraid to go look.”
“Keep clear of it. Go on back to the bishop’s house and wait there. I’ll check it out right now.”
“But Hannah will worry about me. You know she does.”
“You can explain to her later. Just do what I said, and I’ll look into it.”
He punched off. Yes, she should do as he said, but what if she could help someone the way others had helped her? The old Ray-Lynn, the one who was so outgoing, feisty and strong—she had to get her back so she could be the woman Hannah and Jack both assured her had made him fall in love with her. How could a take-charge man like Sheriff Jack Freeman ever love a wimpy, wishy-washy, scared little rabbit? Ding-dang, she still had to recover her old self!
She turned on her brights, put the van into Drive and headed down the road toward where she’d heard the crash.
* * *
Alex’s first reaction when the car roared down the road toward him was to dive out of the way, not even be seen. At least the roar hadn’t included gunfire. Since Atlanta, he’d been paranoid about loud sounds, about vehicles backfiring or even speeding up. If there was a contract out on his life, did he just have to fear guns or could someone try something else? A car accident would look a lot more natural than bullets in the brain.
Praying his location had not been compromised again, he leaped off the narrow road. The speeding car had barely missed him as it vaulted up and over the next hill ahead—and then the crash.
At least the ditch where he’d landed was dry, but when he got to his feet and tried to climb out, he realized he’d twisted his left ankle. Idiot! He’d been so desperate to run for a while, savor the safety and freedom of this place. Now how was he going to get to that wreck, get back to the farm and the Lantzes?
He had to go up and over a hill to see if he could help. When others came, he’d have to fade away, try to cut through the woods past the pond Eben had showed him on his tour this evening.
Alex limped up the hill, which seemed endless. A sharp pain stabbed his ankle with each step. What else bad could happen to him? His past in ruins, his life endangered, probably a price on his head. But he couldn’t just leave someone who might be hurt or dead. As much of a jerk as the driver had been to speed on these hills, Alex couldn’t leave someone in need, no matter if his own hide was in danger.
Running footsteps behind him. What if this was a setup? Someone tried to flush him out with the headlights, tried to hit him, but he’d jumped aside, now they’d make sure…
He hunkered down just off the road—no ditch this high on the hill—and saw a person running toward him. A woman? Her light-colored apron and the white cap Amish women wore seemed to glow in the dark. His eyes had adjusted after staring into the headlights of that car.
He stood and limped onto the berm of the road. The woman running toward him stopped. “Andrew? Oh, thank the Lord, you’re all right! I heard that car crash like it hit something.”
“I sprained my ankle getting out of its way. Can I lean on you? I’m pretty sure the crash was just on the other side of the hill.”
“Oh, ya, sure. Is it bad? If it hurts too much, I can just go see. That crash was loud. Surely someone else will come. They didn’t hit a buggy, did they—or if you didn’t see it, only heard it…”
He could tell she was nervous too, and not only because of the wreck. Did she not want him to touch her, put his arm around her shoulders? Ella was pretty, the lavender lady, with the white-blond hair and pale blue eyes. She had a great bod her Amish garments could not quite hide and an almost angelic face, framed by that stiff white cap. Unlike her mother and grandmother, Ella had her feelings written plain on her face, emotions that flitted past and changed. He’d been upset to hear he was being given her bedroom, but Mrs. Lantz had assured him that Ella had already planned to move to the small house on the other side of the garden and her big field.
“Okay, sure, lean on me,” she told him, stepping closer. Strange that, just as he reached his arm to touch her, the new moon popped over the horizon behind her head. Its sickle shape didn’t give them much light but, in the midst of his fear, it seemed strangely like a celestial smile.
* * *
At the bottom of the hill, the side of a small, red sports car was wrapped around a big tree. And the hood of the car was evidently on fire. As they trudged toward it together, their awkward gait—Alex was now half hopping, just putting pressure on his good leg—reminded Ella of a three-legged race.
When they got there, they both gasped. It looked as if the red car itself bled strings of blood. No—Ella saw it was spools of shiny, red cord that had been thrown out of the car.
“Stay back,” Alex ordered her, and took his arm from her shoulders. “I’ll see if someone’s still inside.”
“You can’t—your ankle. I’ll check.”
“No! If that fire spreads, the gas tank might blow!” he shouted, and made a grab for her. He missed and only snagged his fingers in her prayer kapp, which pulled off and yanked her long, pinned-up braid free. The weight of it slapped between her shoulder blades as she ran. She was pretty sure she heard a couple of curse words from Cousin Andrew.
He was right about a possible explosion. She smelled gas. She’d have to hurry. Passenger side crunched in. Driver’s door open. No one in the car, maybe got out, but to where? Been thrown out?
“No one here!” she started to shout back to Andrew, but he’d come up right behind her. He tugged her back so hard by an elbow that she almost flew off her feet. She banged into him. He fell back, but she balanced them before he pulled her away. His face, lit by the fire, looked like a mask of anger. What was this man really like?
“Get back, I said! You could be killed if that blows!”
Limping, he managed to drag her across the road and shoved her into the ditch, just as the car went up in flames with a big boom! Clinging together, they huddled in shallow water among grass and weeds. The light and heat slapped them, a hundred times worse than an open oven door or roaring fireplace log. Light all over—no, that was headlights up on the road. Someone was here to help! And here she was in Andrew’s arms, clinging to him.
Ella clambered up and out of the ditch, dripping wet, her snagged braid spilling her hair loose. Despite the headlights in her eyes, she could see someone was getting out of a van.
“Ella? Ella, you okay? It’s Ray-Lynn. The sheriff’s on his way. What happened? Whose car?”
“Don’t know, but he didn’t burn up with it. I went to get him out but he was gone.”
“We’ve got to find him, like you and Hannah found me, saved me. I— Oh, who’s that?”
“This is our cousin, Andrew Lantz from Pennsylvania, visiting us for a while. We were— We both heard the crash.”
Ella could see Andrew was already searching among the charred trees along the road, using a Y-shaped branch he’d found for a crutch. “Here!” he shouted to them. “He’s back here!”
They ran to him, bent over a prone form. It seemed one unwound spool of the crimson cording pointed right at him. A young, dark-haired man lay sprawled half in the ditch on this side of the road. When Andrew turned him over to see if he was breathing, they saw he looked Asian. Andrew gasped.
“You know him?” Ray-Lynn asked.
“No—just surprised. Chinese, I think, and here—in Amish country.”
They could hear the sheriff’s siren coming closer. Andrew’s head jerked up, turned toward the sound.
“It’s all right,” Ray-Lynn said. “Just the sheriff. He’ll call the authorities for help, and we can tell them what happened.”
Ella took off her apron and covered the unmoving man.
“He’s breathing, has a pulse,” Andrew said as he rose and moved away.
Ella bent over the injured man while Ray-Lynn walked away to flag down the sheriff. He jumped out of his squad car with a bright flashlight. Ella saw him give Ray-Lynn a quick, one-handed hug and whisper to her, though his words carried on the wind.
“Don’t you let this flash you back to your own accident. You done good, honey, you and Ella and— Where’d that Amish guy go?”
Ella looked around as Ray-Lynn filled the sheriff in, and he came over to look at the unconscious victim. Unless Andrew had dived back into the ditch, he was nowhere to be seen, and with that sprained ankle. Then in the scarlet reflection of the sheriff’s pulsating light bar, she saw he was crosscutting the field that led toward the pond and the more distant farm, moving jerkily with that homemade crutch.
Like a real Amish man, was he just humble, not wanting to take credit for helping to save someone’s life—if the car’s driver lived? Or was it because he had his identity to hide and even the sheriff could not know about his being in that protection program? Or, she thought as the new, local newspaper editor, Lucinda Drayton, pulled up, was Andrew just making sure he wouldn’t be interviewed or photographed?
Ms. Drayton slammed her car door and ran toward the sheriff shouting, “What happened?” Ella would have to tell Andrew that the new editor was real good about not showing Amish faces. Didn’t he know he’d have to talk to the sheriff later?
Sheriff Freeman told Ms. Drayton, “Don’t know much yet. That license plate’s almost toast, but I’m gonna call in what I can see of it. We got an injured man on the ground. Squad’s coming.”
He walked back to his car and bent inside it to get some sort of telephone from the seat. Ray-Lynn knelt by the victim, and Ms. Drayton started photographing the still-smoldering wreck. In the reflected headlights, her short, sleek silver hair looked like a prayer kapp.
Ella walked over and told Ray-Lynn, “I can answer the sheriff’s questions tomorrow, but I’ve got to get back right now.”
“I can take you home, but it will be a while. Where did your cousin go?”
“He’s new—shy, too. I’ve got to go see if he’s okay,” Ella said, and hurried away as she heard other sirens coming closer. Even though Andrew was hiking toward the place she never wanted to so much as see again, she cut through the trees the way he had, toward the pond.
3
ELLA HURRIED TO catch up with Andrew, but he had a good start on her, even using his makeshift crutch. Whatever he was hiding must be bad if he didn’t even want to meet the sheriff.
She wasn’t planning to go near the pond now, just skirt around it, but she needed to be certain he’d make it back to the farmhouse. She’d get Grossmamm Ruth to tend to that ankle with a poultice or a wrap.
Oh, no, he was making straight for the water. It was all worse in the dark, with the trees hunched over it, because it had looked like that when she’d met her best friends Sarah and Hannah there that night so long ago. Back then, Ella had been the wildest of the three, planning pranks, urging the others to sneak out at night. Scolding her once, Mamm had called her a daredevil, but even that bad name hadn’t stopped her adventures.
That night, they’d taken off their clothes to keep them dry and, stripped bare, had gone into the cold water.
“Ooh, goose bumps already!” Sarah had said. “I’m gonna get out and just sketch the scene.”
“Of us naked?” Ella had challenged, and they’d all giggled. “Just swim around a little and you’ll warm up. Hannah’s not complaining.”
“It’s ’cause my teeth are chattering too hard!” Hannah had cried, chin-deep in the pond.
And then, somehow, amidst the laughter and the kidding, the kicking and the splashing, it happened. In the middle, where the coldest water came in from a deep stream that fed the pond, it seemed an evil, icy hand reached for Ella and pulled her around and down.
Had she put her own head under? In their horseplay, had she inhaled or swallowed water? Later, she could never remember. It was black and wet, and she held her breath, but her air was gone and a darkness like death sucked her in. She struggled, but it was too strong until someone grabbed her long hair and pulled and then…
The next thing she remembered was lying on the bank, spitting up water, shaking, gasping with her friends bending over her. Later, when she could breathe and talk, she begged them not to tell her parents what had happened—what had almost happened.
But she was changed after that. Hannah and Sarah knew it. Ella admitted it. Her parents saw it as an improvement. The daredevil had drowned and a more careful Ella was born that night, fearful the Lord had scolded her, shaken her.... Ever since, she’d lived with the curse of the sudden, drowning moods that she hid from everyone, however hard that was in such a tight community. Oh, they knew she was moody, a bit of a loner, a hard worker tending her lavender. But they never knew she carried with her the burden of the blackness, the wet, drowning fear of…
“Ella? I thought you’d stay with them.” Andrew’s voice jolted her. She saw pale moonlight sliced through the opening in the trees enough for him to see her too. He was sitting on the bank of the pond with one leg in it. “Your dad showed me this pond and said the water was cold. I needed to soak my ankle. I should have soaked my head for getting in that mess my first night here, but I’m glad we could help whoever that was. I think he’s going to live.”
“I pray he will,” she called to him, staying put at the edge of the clearing, leaning back against a big maple as if glued to it. No way was she getting closer to that water—or to him again. “You reacted like you knew that injured man.”
“No. Just surprised to see an Asian man in Amish country, which was stupid of me. I—I used to know some Chinese, and that’s what I think he was, American-Chinese, of course.” His voice had a slight tremor to it. “I didn’t expect him here, that’s all.”
She wondered if Andrew had been a travel agent. Or what if he was a spy against the Chinese and that’s why he had to hide out? No, that was crazy.
“Is the cold water helping your ankle? My grandmother is good at tending to things like that. I can head home and bring a buggy closer so you don’t have to walk far.”
“I think I’ll be able to make it with this crutch. I apologize for leaning on you earlier.”
“Oh, that’s fine. We all have to do that—lean on each other. You know, you still might have to answer some questions from the sheriff. The woman who owns the local newspaper showed up too. She’s pretty nice, though, not like the man who owned it before.”
No answer from him but a huge sigh. Silence. Just an owl’s whoo-whoo, wind rustling the leaves overhead and the ripple of the water where he moved his foot in it.
“You can tell me if I’m out of line,” he said, not looking at her now, “but are you afraid of me? Or is there some rule about not getting too close to outsiders or to men for unmarried Amish women?”
“Oh, no—not like that. I’m just—wary of the water.”
“Oh. The pond. Your dad said it’s deep. You mean you can’t swim.”
“I used to. Liked it, even, but not now.” She almost blurted out more. She had a strange urge to confide in this stranger when she’d not even told her own family. Nor had she shared her near drowning with her come-calling friend, Eli Detweiler, though they were once, briefly, betrothed. But Eli would not—could not—give up his liquor after rumspringa, and there was no way she was going to trust him to be her husband and the father of her children—or to know the deepest, fearful secret of her heart.
Wide-eyed, drawn to Andrew but not going closer, she watched him stand unsteadily. He still had his makeshift crutch. She almost ran forward to help but stayed put. He kept his shoe and sock off; they dangled over one shoulder. It was even a big step for her to be this close to that water, looking at its cold, pale face.
“I’ll run ahead and bring Daad back with the buggy,” she said, and started across the fringe of the clearing. “I can drive it through the Kauffman farm, then I’ll call for you.”
“No, don’t walk all that way alone in the dark,” he insisted. “It’s bad enough for me to be out here alone. Since you said it’s okay for us to be close, I can make it with this crutch and you.”
It’s okay for us to be close… His word snagged in her mind. A while ago he’d said, they had to lean on each other. I can make it with this crutch and you. She’d wanted someone to trust and tell her deepest fears to for so long, someone strong to rely on. Since Andrew wouldn’t be here long, maybe she could confide in him, and then he’d be gone and she could go on alone....
She shook her head to clear it, then remembered her kapp was gone and her hair was loose and wild. When she turned against the breeze, her tresses, silvered by moonlight, blew in her face. Though an Amish woman only unbound her long, uncut hair for her husband in their marriage bed, Andrew limped closer, his eyes taking her all in.
“Yeah, I suppose I’ll have to speak to the sheriff,” he said as they started off together, away from the pond. He didn’t touch her this time, and they moved slowly. “But I’m pretty sure Mr. Branin hasn’t informed him yet about my being undercover here. And the last thing I need is a newspaper interview.”
“Maybe I can help, at least with Ms. Drayton at The Home Valley News.”
“You’ve helped already, just by being here, by caring about what happened to me.”
He turned slowly sideways to stare at her. Up this close, with his face etched by moonlight, she could see how thick his eyelashes were, see the little squint lines at the corners of his blue eyes and the worry line on his broad brow. Suddenly self-conscious, she pulled her hair back behind her head, twisting and knotting it into a horse tail. When her gaze locked with his, she nearly stumbled, and it was he who reached out to briefly steady her.
Lightning leaped between them, something unspoken but understood. They both had secrets. They both had a new friend.
* * *
Alex was not used to being fussed over by women. By anyone. Yet the fact that Ella and the woman she called Grossmamm Ruth were tending to him was strangely comforting. It made him miss his own grandmother, now lost to him by her dementia.
His father had always tried to make him grow up too fast, which turned out to be a good thing when he lost both his parents in a boating accident when he was thirteen. Until he was eighteen, he’d lived off and on with a New York City legal guardian with vacations with his grandmother at her place in Nassau—lovely but lonely. She was being tended there now by a full-time caregiver and wouldn’t recognize him even if he did visit.
His first instinct when the feds convinced him he might have a price on his head was to hide out at her place, but they’d told him that could endanger her too. Gerald Branin had said they’d seen WITSEC cases where a hit man used a close family member to flush out or coerce their target.
“Ow!” he clipped out as Grossmamm Ruth, massaging his ankle, hit a sore spot.
“Good!” the silver-haired lady said. “So that’s the exact spot of the sprain. We tie the ice bag there, but you keep drinking that good dandelion tea, keeps swelling down real good.”
Obviously, this dear old woman’s favorite word was good, or goot, as she said it, even in English. “Ella, you pour him more tea,” she said. “And please get him some more of your daad’s good honey with the comb on a biscuit—good for what ails you.”
She was bossing Ella around too, but she seemed to take it. He’d known a lot of kids growing up who didn’t get it that rules and regs from a parent—with consequences—mean they cared, they loved you, wanted you safe. Damn, he hoped he would be safe here among these kind and good people.
He was yearning for a cup of Starbucks java but he downed the weak, strange tea. It warmed his insides anyway. Ella warmed him too, and that presented a problem.
“Now,” Ruth said, “no more using that tree limb crutch you found. I got a good hospital one you can use. But, ach, even with that, you’ll not be going into the fields with Eben and the boys tomorrow, not for a couple days. I gave my ankle a bad twist our last winter in Florida, on the Lido Beach. Made me so mad—I could not walk in the sand and wade the waves.”
“In Florida?” Alex asked.
“Oh, ya. My husband and I, we had a nice little house down there in Pinecraft, right by Sarasota. You think the Amish can’t take trips, enjoy warm weather in the winter?”
“I’ve just never heard of Amish snowbirds,” he said.
“Ach, these old bones did not like the winter cold, even though there’s always work to do here.”
“That’s why I want to help,” Alex insisted, still trying to deal with a mental picture of fully clothed, black-clad Amish like Grossmamm Ruth on a south Florida beach amid the bikinis and Speedos. “I’m already enough of a burden.”
“You go help Ella with her bed—right out the back door.”
The way the old woman had put that—Ella’s gaze met his. She actually blushed, her fair skin turning rosy from her throat to her cheeks.
“Help me weed my lavender bed,” she put in quickly.
“I know what she means. If I can kneel and not put weight on this foot, that’s fine.”
“My sister Barbara usually works with me but she’s helping another family out. You’ll get to meet her at Seth’s wedding though. I think Barbara will be staying home after that, so you wouldn’t need to help me for long.”
Ella’s father came in the back door from outside. “I walked the field to tell the bishop all that happened,” he told them, bending to take off his muddy shoes before coming into the immaculate kitchen in his socks. “The sheriff was there, coming here next to talk to Ella and Andrew. The bishop says we should tell the sheriff the truth about you, have him keep the newspaper editor and others away from you, best as can.”
“I’d rather leave it for Gerald Branin to tell him—procedure, protocol, he said.”
Eben shrugged, then nodded. “Then you are only Cousin Andrew Lantz until we get the say-so, but the sheriff always been straight with us. And you tell the bishop when next you see him.”
A sharp knock rattled the back screen door and “Sheriff Freeman here!” resounded through it. Alex wondered if the sheriff could have overheard any of that. Sure, he’d been called to the accident scene, but he seemed to materialize out of the blue—the darkness—everywhere. No, that was unfair, Alex scolded himself. He was just paranoid, not trusting anyone with a gun, even a law-and-order guy.
The phone call his guard Jake had made in Atlanta the night before someone tried to kill him had been eating at him. Could the call have been to sell him out? Neither he nor Branin could figure how the would-be assassin had found him. When Alex had sneaked out to go jogging, Jake sounded like he was snoring, but it was a different sound from those he made at night. Could he have been faking it, setting it up for Alex to sneak out while the assassin awaited? And then, of course, he rushed out to help so it would look good. Could a man so deep asleep wake up and get outside that fast?
And that car last night—could someone have sat in a vehicle, waiting for Alex—Andrew—to go out alone? Was that speeding car sent to kill him and just went out of control? The black pickup sitting in the Atlanta motel parking lot had looked harmless enough. Even the glint-eyed reflection had not panicked him at first.
Who to trust? Very few in the outside world—but he did trust these people who had taken him in.
* * *
After talking briefly alone to Andrew, Sheriff Freeman called Ella into the living room. She could see why he didn’t want to question them together, but she wished he would have. That way she could help Andrew seem more Amish, maybe cover for him a bit, because she knew he hadn’t told the sheriff who he really was.
“Standard procedure to talk to witnesses separate, Ella,” he said when she sat down on the other end of the couch from him.
“We weren’t exactly witnesses to the wreck—only about as much as Ray-Lynn was.”
“Right, after the fact. I’ll talk to her too.”
“I hope seeing that didn’t bring back bad memories of her own accident.”
“She seems pretty steady. Still can’t thank you and Hannah enough for getting her help when she was hurt. She’s getting some of her old spunk back. Now, isn’t it a little strange for your cousin Andrew—anyone Amish—to be out for an evening run, especially with all the exercise the men get in the fields?”
“He just arrived and hasn’t started to work the fields yet. Then with the sprain he got, jumping out of the way of that car, it will be a few more days before he starts to work with Daad or the boys.”
“Yeah, thank God he wasn’t hit. By the way, the driver/victim regained consciousness en route to the hospital. Broken bones, some question of spinal injury when he was thrown clear. He was lucky he was thrown, though. If not, he would have fried in the wreck. We’ve contacted NOK—next of kin. His address was actually local, though I’d never seen him. Moved in recently from New York State. You know any reason that would upset your cousin? Andrew looked kinda green at the gills when I told him that. He’s from Pennsylvania, right?”
“Yes, from Intercourse. Lots of Amish, lots of Lantzes there.”
The sheriff led her through telling him how the wrecked vehicle began to flame, then blew up. How Andrew found the driver, turned him over.
“Which he should not have done, but I’m giving him a pass on that because it was natural to want to learn if the guy was dead or not,” he said, still taking notes. Ella saw she’d been gripping her hands in her lap and tried to relax her cramped fingers. The sheriff was writing on his notepad, so maybe he hadn’t noticed how nervous she was.
“They talk a little different in the eastern Amish enclaves, don’t they?” the sheriff said as he looked up straight at her. “Andrew doesn’t have the same kind of—excuse me for putting it this way—accent as your people here.”
“There are some differences,” she said in a rush, trying to answer him in a way that wasn’t a lie. Would he be angry when he heard they hadn’t told him the truth about Andrew? Mr. Branin should tell him soon. Why hadn’t he already? “A lot of back-and-forth, long-distance relatives,” she went on, “even marriages, but each area has some things unlike and special. All kinds of varied people come into Amish country, like that man who got hurt.”
“Yeah. Samuel Lee. Word is that he’s here to open a luxury spa and retreat in our area. Now, that’s a good one. What next? I hear it’s out on Sweetgum Lane near the Yoders’ dairy farm and the old Troyer Mill. All right, I’ve gotta go now. Thanks, Ella.”
Feeling bad they hadn’t told him the truth about Andrew, she stood and walked out with him. Andrew still sat in the kitchen with his foot up on a kitchen chair with Grossmamm Ruth keeping an eye on him. Mamm had come downstairs and was dishing out strawberry shortcake for everyone. After quick goodbyes—and the sheriff’s giving Andrew another steely-eyed stare—Ella walked him to the back door even before Mamm could ask him to stay for shortcake.
As he went out, Ella called to him, “Sheriff Freeman! Just a minute. Let me cut some lavender for Ray-Lynn if you’re going to question her. I know she has trouble sleeping sometime and, with this going on tonight, it will help her, one of the best things lavender does. I will just take a minute.”
Her hand sickle was in her new workshop, so she grabbed Mamm’s pruning shears by the back door and darted out to the closest end of the English lavender beds. As she’d come into the kitchen, she’d overheard Daad agreeing that Andrew could help her weed for the next day or so, stay on his knees and off his ankle. That possibility and the familiar, heady scent of her plants stretching up the hill, made her feel she could fly. Despite the terrible events of the night, her dark mood had lifted. Yes, with Andrew there, even the nightmare of being near the pond hadn’t pulled her down.
She cut a good armful of the fragrant, flowering spikes and handed it to the sheriff.
“I oughta have this all over my office and the jail,” he said as he put it next to him on the passenger seat of his cruiser. “Keep me calm with all the bad stuff been happening ’round here. Thanks, Ella, for Ray-Lynn and me. Night, now.”
As he pulled out, the yard, the lane, the road went dark again. Only the kerosene-lantern-lit house and the slice of moon sailing high gave wan light. Starlight—so distant, such tiny specs in the big dark ocean of sky. She spun to look up at her lavender beds, marching toward the hill and up. It was the perfect site for the crop, with the much larger hill and its woodlot above, which sheltered the flowers from winter winds and where Daad kept his beehives so the bees would work all the gardens in the area.
And she saw, reflected, atop the hill, a large, staring eye, pale and lit from within.
She started toward the house, still looking back and up. Had she imagined it? She saw nothing now. Had a camera light popped, like when English folks tried to take verboten images of her people? Could Ms. Drayton have come by to follow up on the story of the car wreck and— No, she’d come to the door, wouldn’t she? Hunter with a night-vision rifle? Binoculars?
Whatever it had been, it wasn’t there now. She rushed inside and closed the storm door but decided not to upset everyone. What if it was just some strange reflection of light off one of the tin pans she had hanging high to keep birds away? What if it was a cluster of early lightning bugs?
Out of breath, she told everyone, “I gave the sheriff some lavender for Ray-Lynn.”
They turned to her, including Andrew, as Daad said, “You can use Andrew’s help with the lavender for a couple days, ya? We’ll get him out in the fields soon enough.”
“Oh, ya, danki, Daad. Andrew too,” she said with a nod their way.
Patting the plastic ice pack on her patient’s ankle, Grossmamm put in, “You just be sure you take good care of his ankle, Ella.”
Ella bit her lower lip, uncertain whether to laugh or sulk. She was too old for Grossmamm to scold. Ella felt exhausted, yet energetic too. And she’d just take those tin pans down so they didn’t reflect moon or lantern glow and get her all het up over nothing.
4
IT HAD RAINED some overnight. Ella had heard the patter on her roof, a gentle rain, but she still hadn’t slept well. Her first night in her new house…the car accident…and Andrew. Then too, when she’d drifted off, she’d dreamed she’d seen a huge glowing animal eye, watching her from the blackness.
She shook her head to pull herself back to the here and now. “I guess you can tell which are weeds, ya?” she asked Andrew as they surveyed her lavender from the bottom of the hill after a hearty breakfast with the family. Daad and the boys had set out for the fields already. Mamm and Grossmamm had headed into town in the family buggy to help Mrs. Lantz with wedding preparations. For now, it was just the two of them.
“Of course, I can tell the flowers from the weeds,” he said, sounding a bit annoyed. Maybe he had not slept well either on his first night in a new place, in her old room. “It’s just going to be a question of getting to them since the lavender’s so tall and I’ve got to manage this crutch.”
“If I don’t keep after them, they’ll be taller than the crop, though part of the height is because I have to build up the beds with crushed limestone and ground oyster shells.”
“No kidding?” He turned to her instead of surveying the plants. “Where do you get oyster shells around here?”
“At the mill that has chicken feed. They use ground shells as grit in the feed. I’ll need to buggy there later to get some more, if you want to go along. It will look funny, though, with the man just sitting there and the woman handling the reins. One of the boys should teach you.”
“Or you could show me while we drive.”
“While we buggy,” she corrected him. “Like we say, ‘He buggied over to see me.’ Even in English, you’ve got to learn some of the talk.”
“So,” he said, frowning and looking around again, “you’ve got quite a cottage industry going here.”
“Ya, and now I’ve got the cottage for it. I’m going to turn the house into a workroom and store instead of just delivering things here and there.”
“Instead of buggying things here and there, you mean,” he said with a grin, then sobered again. “Your fledgling enterprise impresses me. You know, only two-thirds of small businesses survive their first two years and fewer than half make it to four years, but growth is the answer. With the right packaging, branding and promotion—financing too—your Lavender Plain Products could really turn into something with expanding market opportunities. Your dad could do the same for his honey and the honeycomb he sells on the side.”
“Our businesses already are something,” she said, hands on her hips. “In your other life, did you own a company that sold something?”
“Not exactly. So, tell me more about the lavender. I take it with all the mulching, the roots don’t like water.”
“Right. The saying is, ‘Lavender does not like to get its feet wet.’”
His eyes lit and, thinking he must like the way she’d put that, she smiled back. They stayed that way a bit too long, as if they were suspended at the bottom of the hill, lulled by the buzz of the bees, the scent of the flower, like in a dream.
“I was just thinking,” he said, “the lavender’s mistress doesn’t like to get her feet wet either. You wouldn’t come near that pond last night. So no wonder lavender grows so beautifully for a beautiful gardener and in Eden County, no less.”
Her stomach did a funny flip-flop. A worldly compliment. And he’d called her mistress. Should she explain that her people only valued inner beauty? Her family had one mirror in the whole house and that was turned to the wall and mostly unused. But she said, “Sadly, there was a serpent in the Garden of Eden. Besides, I think of myself more as a farmer, of an important crop too. Lavender does lots of things, all good.”
“It smells great, that’s for sure. I didn’t mean to imply you haven’t done a good job with all this.” They started up the hill to where she’d left off with her weeding yesterday. The two tin plates she’d left hanging up the hill were knocking together in the breeze. For sure, one of those must be what had made the reflection she saw last night after the sheriff left.
“Lavender does more than smell good,” she told him, suddenly anxious to keep their conversation on her work and not herself. He kept stealing glimpses at her. “It can be used in recipes too, all kinds of yummy things like muffins, jellies and jams, chocolate, breads, teas and honeys. I plan to hire some friends to make those products to sell when I get the store going.”
He was frowning now at some inward thought. What had she said to set him off? She wished she could read his moods.
“You won’t believe this,” Andrew said, “but I had a lavender-infused drink not long ago.”
“Of course, I believe it. Lemonade?”
“Actually, a martini.”
“Oh. Liquor. I couldn’t go worldly with my sales. You have a lot to learn about us and our ways.”
“I want to, so I’ll get busy here. The bees won’t sting me, will they?”
“Not if you let them be themselves and don’t try to take over what they do best.”
“I hear you loud and clear, Ella Lantz. Okay, boss, I’ll get to work.”
She watched him lean on his crutch, put his weight on his good leg and start to pull weeds. Though she just tried to accept the way things were, she was aching to know what he was hiding from. Had he left loved ones behind? A woman? A family? Even children? How she would hate being forced away from her life here. That thought chilled her and she shivered.
* * *
Ray-Lynn had carted her bouquet of lavender into the restaurant because it cheered her up. She put it right on the table where folks came in, near Ella’s products she sold, under the front door sign that spoke of both her love of her Southern roots and of her adopted neighbors, the Ohio Amish: Y’all Come Back Now. Danki!
Jack was sitting in the back booth, facing the front door as he always did when he was here so he could keep an eye on things. Keep an eye on her too, she knew. Both he and Hannah had told her that Jack and she had been dating for a while and had been getting very involved before her accident and coma, whatever very involved really meant. She was embarrassed to ask Jack and wondered how much he really knew of her—had seen of her, in the flesh.
She was finally getting up the courage to ask him how intimate they had been and what he really wanted from her. They were business partners—she had the legal document that explained that—but had they been bed partners, too? Evidently taking the high road, good guy that he was, Jack had not pressured her on resuming where they left off—and just exactly where was that?
Today he looked not only bleary-eyed from getting little sleep after that car wreck last night, but she could tell he was upset by something the stranger who had joined him was saying. Jack, tall and imposing in his uniform, even sitting down, seemed to dwarf the outsider, a compact, balding man, maybe in his late fifties, with graying, reddish hair and a creeping hairline. He reminded Ray-Lynn of a rumpled professor and kept gesturing as he talked. Ding-dang, they looked at odds, but they were keeping their voices down, leaning forward over their empty plates, as if they’d like to leap over the table at each other. When she’d refilled their coffee cups, she had overheard only that the guy’s name was Branin, nothing else.
She went over with their check herself. Although Jack owned half of the restaurant, he always insisted on paying. She should, she thought, carry the big bouquet of lavender right over to them and plunk it on their table, since its smell was supposed to calm people down.
“…still say I should’ve been told up front, not after the fact…” she heard Jack mutter.
“We had to get him placed,” Branin said. “Since the Amish were willing and we had a go-between, it happened real fast…”
They stopped talking and looked up at her. “You two gentlemen need anything else?” Ray-Lynn asked, and put the check on the table.
“We’re doing fine,” Jack said. “Thanks, Ray-Lynn.”
She and Jack exchanged one of their “see you later” looks and she walked to the next booth and chatted with those patrons while keeping an ear cocked. Branin was saying, “Sorry I tracked you down here. Your office dispatcher told me where you’d gone. I appreciate your inviting me to join you for breakfast, Sheriff.”
“So, you staying in the area for a while? Don’t you have to get back to D.C.?” was the last thing she heard as she saw new patrons come in and went to seat them.
D.C.? Washington, D.C.? Having to put up with that FBI Agent Linc Armstrong from Cleveland a while ago was one thing, but D.C.? At least her car accident and coma had not hurt her curiosity, even though it was said that was what killed the cat.
* * *
When Ella saw that one high patch of her hardy Hidcote lavender had their flower heads about one-third open—which was ideal picking for sachets—she decided to take a break from weeding, get her hand sickle and cut some. The morning breeze and sunshine had dried out the foliage and flowers well enough for cutting.
“You are allowed to take a rest, you know,” she told Andrew as she started past him down the hill. “I’ll be right back. Oh—look,” she told him as he stood and stretched his big frame, “a car just turned in the lane.”
She could tell he tensed right away. “It looks like the same make of sports car that was in the wreck,” he said. “A white one, though. Do you know who it is?”
“No, but sometimes customers see my sign down the road and just stop by. It’s all right. You can stay here.”
Since no one was at the farmhouse, she walked down to the driveway. It was a stranger, a woman dressed fancy in a pale blue linen suit, white silky blouse and gold jewelry that glinted in the sun. Her hair was sleek and black, collar-length, with flat, straight-cut bangs. The ebony sheen of it in the sun looked so unusual in this area full of fair-haired folks. Just like the young man in the car wreck last night, she looked Asian.
“Hello,” the woman said, nodding. “This is the Lantz farm? Sheriff Freeman told me on the phone where to find it. I’m Connie Lee, Sam Lee’s mother—the man whose car went out of control last night.”
“Oh, ya, how is he doing?”
“Back injuries, two broken legs, but at least they don’t think he’ll be paralyzed. His father’s with him, and we’re having him flown to the Cleveland Clinic, but his long-term prognosis is good. I understand that you and your cousin were the first to reach him and risked your lives to be sure he was out of his burning car. I can’t thank you enough. I wanted to give you this token of our gratitude,” she said, and reached in her purse for a white envelope.
Ella’s eyes widened, not in the surprise at a gift, but because she glimpsed a gun in that purse. A small one, gleaming silver. She tried to keep calm. Amish women might not deal with firearms, but lady Auslanders evidently did.
“Unless that’s just a thank-you note, we are glad to have helped but nothing else is needed,” Ella told her.
“Oh, but—a donation for your church then.”
“It is not our way, but you could donate to our church’s Help Haiti fund—in your son’s name.”
She drew the envelope back. “Haiti? Yes, that was a mess there. How nice of your people. I need to rush today, but let me just mention the other thing then, something that has nothing to do with the accident. My husband, Chang, and I are from New York City, and we’re going to open a luxury spa here in the Home Valley. You know, clients can come for few days or a week, get out of the rat race, lose weight, find peace and quiet. I believe Sheriff Freeman said you are the one who sells the lavender.”
“Yes, Ella Lantz. I’m currently expanding my shop and products.”
“That’s great, because we want to decorate our new spa with country decor, kind of Amish chic. We were thinking of calling our own products we use here the Skinny Spa line, but we’ll probably repackage things as the Sweetgum Spa line, since that’s the road we’re building on. Great buzzword for anything today, you know—skinny. You might want to consider that for your products line. We’d want to purchase and sell for you things like lotions, essential oils, spritzes, scented candles, body candles…”
“Body candles?”
“Right. People love them. They burn with a fragrance, then leave a puddle of warm liquid we use for massages. Well, more later, as I’ll be back and forth, but we are so grateful that you helped save our Sam. He’ll eventually be running the Sweetgum Spa, and I’ll be sure you and your family have unlimited free beauty packages.”
“That’s kind of you,” Ella told her, but it just showed this woman knew next to nothing about Amish anything. “Skinny” products and Amish chic decor around here? No way.
“So, where is the man you were with?” she asked, evidently as an afterthought as she squinted up the hill into the sun. “He seems to have disappeared, but if he’s your cousin, I’d like to thank him in person.”
As if she expected no answer to that, Connie Lee headed for her sleek car, which still had its motor running. She got back in, slammed the door, backed up and drove down the lane.
And the woman was right. Andrew was nowhere in sight on the brow of the hill. Wasn’t he overdoing hiding himself? He was only Cousin Andrew now, not whoever he really was. At least since he’d seemed eager to lend advice about organizing her business, he’d probably be happy to hear there would be a new demand—an expanding market—for her lavender.
She headed toward her house. Surely, with his sprained ankle, he hadn’t hiked higher up the hill. He’d no doubt reappear when he saw the stranger was gone. She got the hand sickle, which she kept good and sharp, picked up a big basket and started back outside, still thinking about Connie Lee, her husband with the strange name of Chang and injured son, Sam. Was that really Samuel, a good biblical name? And in Connie Lee’s world, was that little gun just what this sharp blade was to Ella, a part of her she didn’t even think as a weapon? Because, in Amish country, what could she be afraid of?
Ella startled and almost cut herself when she glimpsed a man standing right outside her kitchen window. Oh—Andrew! But what…why?
Ella hurried outside and around the corner. “Were you hiding there while she was here?” she asked him. “Did you hear anything she said?”
“I saw she looked Chinese, like the driver who wrecked his car,” he said only, not looking at her, but staring at his feet. His crutch rested against the side of the house.
“What is it? What about the Chin—”
“Never mind. But look at this,” he said, pointing at the damp soil beneath her window. “I came down the hill and watched from around the corner to see what was going on and noticed footprints in the ground, pointing inward. See?”
“Ya, well, it rained last night and a couple of days ago. Seth did me a favor and cleaned these windows outside, so that’s probably why the prints.”
“Would he have cleaned every window? Because I’ve almost made it all the way around now and there are the same prints.”
She went with him. He was right. And, for sure, not Seth’s prints, not those of any Amish man, she reckoned, because they were pointy toed with a distinct separate heel, like maybe cowboy boots.
“Not Seth’s,” she said, shaking her head. “Not even Amish.”
“And recent. Maybe made last night, with the rain and all. Let’s go see if they’re at the farmhouse too.”
They were, around all the lower windows, which Seth had not cleaned. The hair on the back of Ella’s neck prickled. Could this be related to that huge eye she imagined on the hill?
“What about the sheriff?” Andrew asked, his voice urgent.
Again, she agonized, what and who was this man hiding from? Despite the fact she was sweating, she shivered. Maybe the prints had been made by someone who wasn’t used to mud, so in the dark he didn’t think about leaving a kind of calling card.
“I—I think the sheriff just wears black shoes,” she told him. “And why would he come here and look in after being here last night?”
“Maybe he knows there’s something fishy about me—but why your place, too, unless he thought I’d be living there and that you were still here in the farmhouse? Can you think of anyone around here who wears boots? That woman wasn’t wearing boots, was she? They could be a woman’s.”
“Andrew, she was at her son’s bedside in a hospital last night. She says they’re moving him to the Cleveland Clinic, so—”
“I’m sorry to involve you in my problems, and if I thought there was one moment of danger for any of you, I’d leave.”
“And go where?” she challenged.
Their eyes met and held as happened far too many times. Ella gripped the hand sickle hard in her hand. For one moment, she thought she should tell him about the reflection she’d seen on the hill last night, but it surely had been one of those tin pans catching wayward light. She didn’t want him to be more upset, or to think he’d have to leave.
“Let’s tell my father about these prints, and we’ll keep an eye out,” she said, longing to comfort him. “My sister Barbara has a come-calling friend from the next farm over, so I’ll ask her when she gets home if it could be Gabe, but he must know she’s not here.”
Ella reached out her free hand to touch his arm. The man was so tense he felt like a carved piece of wood. “Don’t fret,” she said. “Let’s just sniff some lavender, okay? It’s supposed to be as calming as it is stimulating.”
“Sniff some lavender,” he repeated with a little shake of his head. He sighed, and his shoulders heaved as if he was trying to force himself to relax. “As for stimulating,” he told her, “I find peaceful, pacifist Amish country very stimulating.”
His eyes took her in again. What a shift of moods. The man was teasing, almost flirting now—wasn’t he? How she wished she understood worldly ways better.
“So tell me everything our visitor talked about,” he said as he leaned on his crutch and they started back up the hill side by side. “Did she seem to have a foreign accent?”
“There’s something about you and the Chinese,” Ella blurted, when she’d meant to keep her own counsel.
“Have you ever heard of the ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, Ella?”
“No. Meaning keep my nose out of it?”
“Truth is, I like your nose—and quick mind—but the less you know, the better.”
“I have heard of the ‘inquiring minds want to know’ policy.”
“You are so honest and open, and I can’t be either, not now at least. Can you trust me enough that we can still be friends—as well as boss and slave, of course.”
She could not stop her laughter any more than she could stop wanting to be around this mysterious man. Whatever danger he was in, he was dangerous too—at least to her usually careful and controlled secret self.
5
RAY-LYNN STOOD WITH her sack of two turkey sandwiches, dill pickles, slaw and raspberry iced teas in the sheriff’s office, waiting for Jack to finish a phone conversation. Lately her attempts to rebuild a relationship with him seemed destined to be overhearing snatches of his conversations with others. Only this time, she knew who he was talking to.
Standing at the back of the reception area near the short hall to his office, she’d figured out he was talking to FBI Agent Lincoln Armstrong, who had helped him solve a murder case here in town. Meanwhile, Ray-Lynn kept up sporadic chitchat with Doreen, the sheriff’s day shift phone receptionist and dispatcher. Doreen was only twenty-two and fairly new to Homestead, so at least, Ray-Lynn thought, here was someone who didn’t know more about her recent past than she did.
She and Jack had arranged to have lunch together today in his office. At least it was past the noon rush in the restaurant. She wished Doreen would quit chattering so she could hear Jack better.
“Have you seen the new deputy who came over from Wooster?” Doreen asked with a roll of her brown eyes. Her reddish-tinted hair—a much wilder color than Ray-Lynn’s—was in tight ringlets that bounced as did her full breasts. “He’s absolutely gung ho about working here—and absolutely darling,” she said in a stage whisper. “Winston Hayes, but goes by Win, and he is a winner! Not married, either.”
“I heard he was coming but haven’t met him.”
Ray-Lynn could tell Jack was giving Agent Armstrong a bad time. “So why did you recommend to Branin sending someone who was a hit magnet to the Home Valley?” Jack demanded. “That’s a fine way to say thanks after what we been through around here lately!”
Now what in tarnation was a “hit magnet,” Ray-Lynn wondered.
“And now that you’ve taken early retirement,” Jack went on, “forget coming anywhere near Hannah. She’s marrying Seth this Friday. Yeah, that’s what I said, so just keep clear.”
Wow, Ray-Lynn thought, cocking her head to concentrate on his voice while Doreen rambled on about Win Hayes. Linc Armstrong had retired from the FBI he seemed to love so much? She dare not tell Hannah, because she’d also have to tell her where she got the info and no way was she admitting to eavesdropping on Jack Freeman, even if she was desperate to know everything she could find out about him—about them. Drat her memory loss. She had to keep calm; she had a lot to be grateful for, to look forward to and live for.
“In other words, Win’s really a good name for him,” Doreen was saying in her southern Ohio twang, which could not hold a candle to a real Georgia drawl. “He’s built real muscular, a little short for a guy—like maybe my height—but he’s got big ideas. I can tell, he’s going places, wants to be a sheriff someday. Does he ever look great in a uniform! I get the vibe of you’re-safe-with-me, but he gives me the shivers at the same time, know what I mean?”
“I do indeed,” Ray-Lynn said as she heard Jack hang up. “Nice chatting with you, Doreen.” As she went down the hall, Jack swept open the door of his office, which had been ajar.
“Hey, didn’t know you were here!” he said with a smile.
“It’s one-thirty. Actually, after. I was waiting in the main office with Doreen.”
“Wish we had time to drive out somewhere nice, ’cause it’s a pretty day, but I ’preciate your bringing this here,” he said, ushering her in and closing the door firmly. He gave her a hug and a quick kiss. Would he guess she’d overheard him? If so, it wasn’t her fault. “Too much going on for us to really connect sometimes,” he muttered as she took the food items out of the sack and placed them on the edge of his desk.
“And that’s something I want—feel I’m ready for,” she said as they sat in his two guest chairs. He had repositioned them in front of his desk so they were facing each other. Jack reached over and put a big, warm hand on her knee.
“I’d like that, honey. I been trying to give you some space and time, but you bet I’d like that, picking up where we left off.”
She almost blurted out the question that had been haunting her: But where did we leave off? Were we sleeping together? Talking marriage? The Ray-Lynn who was rebuilding her memories and confidence after her brain trauma wasn’t ready for any of that, was she? Because she needed to know where they’d been to trust where they were going.
“Let’s do dinner soon,” Jack said as he unwrapped the sandwich she’d made for him herself in the restaurant’s kitchen. “Not around here unless it’s a private picnic somewhere really pretty. You know, my new deputy—”
“Oh, yes, I heard about him just now from his fan club groupie Doreen,” Ray-Lynn said, thinking he was going to talk business now.
“Yeah, real ambitious, doesn’t quite know yet that he doesn’t know much. But I’m glad to get the extra manpower with the crimes we’ve had around here lately. He was fairly new on the Wooster force but volunteered to come here when he heard there was an opening—likes smaller towns and rural folks, he said. Anyhow, I was going to say, Win told me that if you stand on the hill above Ella Lantz’s lavender field, the scent is great and there’s a stunning view of the valley. How about we do wine, cheese, a loaf of bread and thou up there some evening as the sun sets—maybe tonight, if I can get away. It’s short notice, but how about it? I’ll take a radio, bring a blanket, just like in the old days.”
“You know the old days for us are new days to me, Jack. But it sounds wonderfully romantic.”
“That’s what I mean it to be. I think we’re more than friends again. We’ve rebuilt that a different way from what we did the first time, but now we can move on by going back.”
He looked so intent. His sandwich was halfway to his mouth, but he seemed not to know it, and she saw that as a great compliment.
* * *
Ella knew Andrew needed some horse skills, especially hitching and handling a buggy. She was disappointed when Daad told Aaron at midday dinner that he should take an hour and give their guest his first buggy lesson. She’d been planning to take a back road through a field to the mill today and teach Andrew herself along the way. Though it wasn’t her regular day for it, she’d also planned to make lavender deliveries to Amanda Stutzman’s Plain & Fancy B & B and to the Dutch Farm Table Restaurant in town, all excuses to show Andrew around a little more. And, she admitted to herself, just to have more time with him. She had never been so passionately curious about anyone in her life.
Daad called to Aaron as he and Andrew headed out the back door, “Harness up in the barn, so no outsider can see you teaching him.” Mamm and Ella got up from the table and began to clear dinner dishes while Aaron walked out to the road to get the mail. “So,” Daad said, turning toward Ella, “what do you think about those footprints Andrew spotted? You got a secret come-calling friend who’s too eager?”
“I’m not seeing anyone. I don’t know what to make of those prints, made by Western cowboy boots, I think. Maybe Aaron’s ready-for-rumspringa friends came after him or were playing a prank. Some of them don’t have much sense about sneaking out.”
Amidst the clink of flatware and dishes, Mamm put in, “Though you’ve changed your ways, that’s the pot calling the kettle black, my girl. I believe you and your friends used to sneak out once or twice.”
At that, Ella kept silent. She’d been pleased she’d somehow thrown off the black mood that was threatening her yesterday, and she didn’t want it circling back. Just because she couldn’t teach Andrew to handle a horse and buggy, just because he couldn’t go with her to get ground oyster shells from the gristmill today, so what, she tried to buck herself up.
Also she didn’t say anything back to Mamm, because it would be a lot worse for her if her parents ever learned she’d almost drowned on one of those nights she’d sneaked out, had suffered the attacks of black moods ever since—and had never told them one thing about it. Shouldn’t someone Amish just be able to trust in the Lord for healing? It should work to just pray fears away. A good Amish soul would confess to the bishop or the entire church to cleanse her conscience, yet Ella was certain that would not change a thing for her. In a way, she felt afraid of life now. The sampler Grossmamm Ruth had on her bedroom wall upstairs seemed like good advice, but it just didn’t work for Ella: Do Not Fret. It Only Causes Harm.
“You’re a real pretty girl, Ella,” Daad said as he rose from the table. Ella looked up, taken aback by the worldly compliment. Daad continued. “And since you go here and there delivering the lavender, sell some to outsiders, talk friendly to them, maybe you attracted the wrong kind of attention. What about a secret admirer, someone you might not even be thinking about? Should Mamm go with you today to the mill?”
“You mean like I’m being stalked? No one like that, Daad, really,” she said, and began washing up the dishes with such a vengeance that the warm, sudsy water swirled in the sink and made waves. “Sometimes, I wish there was someone for me—but not one who peeks in windows. I’ll be fine going to the mill on my own, just fine.”
* * *
As Ella started out to the barn to hitch her horse Fern to her buggy, two of Aaron’s buddy-group guys pulled into the lane at a good clip. They were in a fancy courting buggy one of them must have borrowed, because at fourteen, they were both too young to own one. Two more bug-in-their-beans pre-rumspringa boys who were feeling their oats already, Ella thought. They couldn’t wait for their running-around time, couldn’t wait to court a girl.
“Hey, Ella!” Mose Raber, a distant cousin, shouted. “Where’s Aaron? We got to show him this buggy!”
“He’s in the barn. I’ll send him out!” she called back. Since Andrew seemed to want to steer clear of people, no use to get these excited kids chattering away at him too in their Deutsche dialect he wouldn’t understand. What if the bishop hadn’t been able to tell everyone in the church yet that they were harboring an Auslander for a while?
Ella was surprised to find that Aaron was teaching Andrew with her horse and buggy. “We knew you were going to the mill, so we thought we’d hitch up for you while I show him,” Aaron said.
That kindness didn’t sound like Aaron lately—or had Andrew suggested that? “Danki, but I can do it. Besides, Mose and Sol are outside to show you a courting buggy. It’s okay if you go out to say hi. I can show Andrew.”
Could it be, she thought, that the Lord had set this up with perfect timing? Andrew might not be going with her to the mill, but she had him to herself again. How she wished he’d tell her something about his real life.
“Aaron said your horse’s name is Fern,” Andrew said, interrupting her thoughts as he patted her mare’s flank.
“Right. See the little leaf mark on her forehead, like a fern? What else did he say?”
“That you always curry her before hitching up, but he’d skip that part right now. And that she used to be a champion pacer and could do almost eight miles an hour instead of just six, like the slower horse your dad lets him use.”
“Speed,” she said, giving Fern a few quick strokes with the curry brush. “Both my brothers like fast buggies, new leather and speed. I do too, and if I blow Fern a kiss she goes even faster.”
He smiled. “I’ll remember that. The love of speed sounds universal to me—something the Amish have in common with the world.”
“I know what universal means,” she replied, trying not to sound testy. “You had to leave behind a fast car, I bet.”
“Not a sports car, though. I went for a black BMW—corporate image.”
He had actually told her something personal. “Oh, I see.”
“I don’t mean to talk down to you, but I suppose you think I’m speaking a foreign language sometimes.”
“Like you think about us, I guess. And never the twain shall meet, my grandfather used to say.”
“But we are meeting, and I want to learn your ways. I admire much about your life.”
“Okay, then,” she said, tossing the curry brush onto a hay bale. She hoped Andrew didn’t notice she was blushing over a compliment as simple as that. She stroked Fern hard with the palms of her hands a couple of times where she’d brushed her, whispering, “Ser gut, ser gut, mein Fern.”
She picked up some of the tack Aaron had already taken from the pegs along the wall near the stalls. “Here’s what to remember to harness a horse and hitch him or her to the buggy.” She named the different parts of the tack while she used each, then reviewed. “Collar around neck, breast strap between forelegs, crupper under tail…”
“That under-tail stuff can be dangerous, right? Got to watch out on that back end.”
She turned to look directly at him for the first time since she’d started harnessing. “You mean, what we call horse apples? Mostly, that happens when they’re grazing in the field or especially on the road. It’s one of the things some English hold against us, that and they say these steel wheel rims on the buggy cut into the asphalt. But we have a right to be there too, and we put up with fumes and noise and the danger of being hit or run over.”
“I never thought about outsiders disliking the Amish for anything. Do they harass or retaliate against you? Could that be a reason someone would be looking in the windows—to plan something against your family?”
“There have been a few hate crimes. Some folks blame us for being pacifists, for turning the other cheek, not serving in the army, and they take advantage of that. You know, I’ll tell Aaron to ask around to see if anyone else has had people looking in their windows. It could be just someone curious. Okay, here now, let’s back her up to the buggy. These long, narrow hickory pieces attach the horse to the buggy and keep her in line with it.”
As he helped her, he said, “I was surprised to see the bishop’s buggy had a foot brake. I mean, can’t you just tell the horse to ‘whoa’?”
“Going fast enough, the buggy could slide into her. Did you notice all our wagons and buggies have reflective orange safety triangles on the back? Headlights too—a high- and low-beam switch on the floor with the battery under the seat. Now, whatever is keeping Aaron?” she asked, taking a step back when he came closer to peer into the buggy.
“I’m learning a lot from you anyway. So, does it matter which side the driver sits on if two are in the buggy?”
“Sure, rules for everything, though this is not in the Ordnung. That’s the big church rules, moral things. But, ya, the woman always sits to the left of her husband or any man in a buggy.”
“Sounds good to me. That means the man is always right—right?”
She turned to him with a little laugh. He still bent so close to look inside the buggy that her bonnet brim bounced against his cheek. Again, that strange, silent but oh-so-loud force crackled between them. They breathed in unison. His lower lip dropped slightly. Even in the dim barn, she could see her reflection in his narrowed, blue eyes.
“Guess what?” Aaron’s voice startled them apart as he hurried back into the barn. “That courting buggy cost Mose’s older brother almost twelve-hundred bucks! It’s got emerald-green carpeting! His father was against it, but he saved up ’cause he wanted it so bad! Oh—you did it without me,” he added as Ella climbed quickly up in the buggy and bent to take the reins.
“That’s okay, Aaron,” she said. “Let Andrew hitch the other one himself and you just watch this time. And then take him for a ride but just up and down the lane.”
“I know what to do. You, Grossmamm, Mamm and Daad don’t have to tell me everything!”
“Danki, Ella!” Andrew shouted after her. “Ser gut, ser gut!”
“She can be really bossy,” she overheard Aaron say as she blew a kiss to Fern to speed her up—or was it a kiss to Andrew?
* * *
As Ella headed home from the mill, the early afternoon sky clouded over and the wind picked up. The weather was important to her people, a big topic of conversation, but she hadn’t heard it was going to storm. She could feel the extra weight of the buggy from the four big bags of ground shells, or else she would have giddyapped Fern faster. To avoid getting caught in a downpour, she turned onto a farmer’s lane that was a shortcut home. It was only wide enough for a four-horse hitch or big work wagon, but if she met someone coming the other way, she could easily pull off on the grassy edge of the cornfield.
Her thoughts on Andrew, she didn’t hear the motor vehicle behind her at first. Too much of a smooth sound, not loud like an English farmer’s tractor or planter. She craned her neck and tried to look back through the thick plastic window, which she hadn’t rolled up today. It looked like a big buggy at first but it was a van, a black one. It seemed to have dark-tinted windows. She knew how impatient English drivers could be. She’d better pull off and let it pass. But why would a vehicle that probably wasn’t local be on this cut-cross lane? There was nothing back here but corn and a couple of woodlots.
You might know, it began to rain. She didn’t stop to unroll the plastic windshield in front of her and blew Fern a kiss to get her to a place up ahead, which looked like a good pull-off spot. Most drivers in Amish country were considerate and polite—at least the ones who weren’t out drinking, like Sam Lee might have been, or who weren’t taking the hills fast because of the rollercoaster-like thrills.
Thunder rumbled even as the van’s engine behind got louder, vroom, vroom, like it was going to leap at her. The vehicle came closer, bumped the back of her buggy! Didn’t they see the sign that read Slow-Moving Vehicle? The van’s lights had been on low but now bright headlights popped on. Another bump, harder. The buggy jolted. She was nearly to the pull-off spot—or should she just keep going? No way she could escape, however fast Fern could go.
Rain pattered on her bonnet as Ella leaned out and looked behind, even extended an open hand as if to say, “Keep back! Stop!” Ya, the windows of the vehicle were tinted so dark she could not see the driver. The windshield wipers whipped back and forth hard. Her heart pounding, she threw herself back inside the buggy.
Though she wasn’t to the best spot yet, she swerved Fern to the right onto the grassy fringe of the field. Rain thudded on the fiberglass frame of the buggy like loud drums. She twisted around to stare out through her back plastic window. To her dismay, the car stopped, backed up and turned in too, this time shoving the buggy almost into Fern. Thank God, she wasn’t on the edge of a treed ravine like the one that had almost killed Ray-Lynn when she plunged over it! But that would-be killer was in prison. Out here in the open, exposed, no one around—what did this person want? Just to scare her? Or worse?
Don’t fight back…turn the other cheek, she recited to herself. Should she leave Fern, get out and run through the field? The plowed soil and rain would make for slow going. The van couldn’t follow but a person could. She’d be a sitting duck if someone had a camera—or a gun. Some terrible attacks on the Amish she’d heard or read about increased her panic: some drunk English teens turned over a buggy with a woman inside; an Amish boy throwing tomatoes at cars was shot to death. The only thing she had to fight back with, without really fighting back, was four bags of ground oyster shells.
When lightning crackled and struck something nearby, Ella nearly jumped out of the buggy. Had it hit a tree in the woodlot? If it struck again, what was taller out here in the open, the buggy or the van? Metal would attract the bolt, wouldn’t it? No one emerged from the van as it just sat there, rumbling low with the front windshield like a huge eye just staring at her. She should have told Daad and Andrew about that light she glimpsed on the hill. At least there was no more bumping or shoving. What did that person want?
She fumbled on the floor for her jackknife and slit the string stitching at the top of one of the big plastic bags. If someone got out and came around to hurt her, she’d fling ground oyster shells at them, in their eyes, get out and run across the corner of the field into the trees, lightning or not. Surely, this could not have anything to do with their hiding Andrew. No one around here knew who he really was, did they? So how could anyone have found him? This had to be about something else, about her. Like Daad had suggested, was she being stalked?
The van hulked behind her like a big beast, its hood and front bumper tight against her buggy, as if playing with its prey. She was certain her wheels would sink in the soil if she drove straight ahead into the field.
While thunder rumbled again, this time more distantly, she dug out fistfuls of the ground shells and dumped them in her lap, ready to throw. Sweating, praying—Oh Lord, please take care of Your own—she waited. Then came a deep honk-honk! of the van’s horn. Ella jumped. Fern snorted and startled. After another hard bump of the buggy, the van backed out, turned and drove away.
Despite the rain, Ella scrambled down from the seat, spewing ground shells and dust from her apron. She was going to get that license plate at any cost, tell Sheriff Freeman. Maybe the sheriff would know if others had been harassed this way too.
But the license plate was draped with a big dark cloth that dragged behind in the mud. It looked like an Amish woman’s cape, black as ravens’ wings. For a moment, she thought she glimpsed a face in the big, tinted back window, but it looked too thin—the white barrel of not a gun but a lamp? A telescope? Her grandfather had one they used to watch the stars through from the hilltop, years ago.
As the van disappeared down the lane at the end of the field, Ella heaved a frustrated, furious sigh and broke into tears she’d been holding back. She crunched through the wet oyster-shell grit and scrambled back up into the feeble protection of the buggy. At least the spilled feed would mark the exact spot so she could tell the sheriff where to look for tire tracks or anything to identify the van.
“Thank you, Lord, for Your protection,” she whispered as she picked up the reins and backed Fern and the buggy out onto the road. One of the buggy wheels seemed wobbly, but she had no choice but to head home. She was wet and chilled but that wasn’t why her hands were shaking so hard she almost flapped the reins. She reached behind into the small back seat and storage area for her cape.
It was gone, not on the floor, nowhere, but she knew she’d left it there when she went into the mill. And she knew now what was being dragged to death in pieces through the mud behind that black van.
6
AFTER A DASH through the woodlot, where she was afraid the van might appear again, Ella emerged onto Oakridge and headed straight for home. Now only the rattle of a bent back wheel pursued her until she heard the piercing shriek of a siren behind her.
She gasped when she saw a black vehicle. She stuck her head out to look back. Thank heavens! Only an Eden County police car. It must be the sheriff! She reined in, then realized it could be a trick. It wasn’t the sheriff’s car—no markings—nor did she recognize the short, muscular man who emerged from it, but he was wearing an officer’s uniform.
He must have realized her unease, because before approaching her he called out, “Winston Hayes, ma’am, the new Eden County deputy. You don’t have a fluorescent safety triangle on the back of your buggy. It’s the law. Some Amish been protesting that and even went to jail over it in Indiana.”
She looked at the back of her buggy. Not only was the safety sign gone but the back was scuffed and dented. Obviously, the van had knocked it off somewhere. She’d rather tell Sheriff Freeman what had happened, but she couldn’t pass over it with this man. Deputy Winston Hayes flashed his badge at her. Looking very sure of himself, he stood so erect. He was built strong, almost stocky, but was only tall enough to look her straight in the eyes—though she couldn’t see his eyes since he wore reflector-type sunglasses, despite the fact that the sky was a stormy gray. In her line of view, right behind his head, he’d left his light bar flashing. It made it look as if pulsating colors sprang from his head.
A buggy went by. She recognized the folks who stared but went on.
“Well, then?” he prompted, frowning.
“A black van bumped into the back of my buggy about a quarter hour ago, and I didn’t realize the sign was gone.”
“Yeah, sorry,” he said, whipping off his glasses and bending closer to the damage, then brushing his hand across the scuff marks. “Your left wheel rim’s askew too. Can you give me a description of the vehicle?” he asked, taking from his jacket pocket a small device that must be a cell phone, but one he typed things into with his thumbs.
“I’m not sure of the make. Tinted windows so I can’t describe anyone inside. And what’s scary is they had their license plate blacked out.”
“Someone with malice aforethought,” he muttered, straightening and putting a hand on his gun belt. “And this was where, ma’am?”
“I was taking a shortcut through the fields between Troyers Mill and here. I intend to tell Sheriff Freeman about it. I’d like to head home now.”
“Which is where?” he asked, his thumbs busy again on his little machine. A car went past; it slowed and people stared.
“I live at the Lantz farm, 400 Oakridge Road. I’m Ella Lantz.”
“Oh, yeah, the lavender farm. You and one of your brothers helped the guy in the wreck the first day I was here. Sorry for being so curious, but I’m trying to familiarize myself with your people. So, three brothers still at home?”
“No, Seth just moved out to the Troyer place. That was my cousin who found the accident with me.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s what the sheriff said. So your cousin is living here now?”
How much had the sheriff told his new deputy? she wondered. And why did Andrew even figure into this? A police officer trying to get his feet on the ground here or not, this man was being too nosy about Andrew. After deadly persecutions of the Amish in Europe years ago, it wasn’t her people’s way to trust government men, lawyers or law officers. After all that Sheriff Freeman had been through with the Amish community here, he was the exception. Besides, as bedraggled and upset at Ella was, her hackles went up in her desire to protect Andrew.
“I’ll be sure to get another safety sign, Officer Hayes,” she said, hoping to change the topic. “We have one in our barn. I got caught in the rain, and I don’t want to catch my death of chill, so I’d like to head home. I plan to talk to the sheriff soon.”
She edged away from him toward her buggy. He was frowning now. She got in, hoping he didn’t call her back or ask another question. But he let her go—that is, if she didn’t count the fact he followed so close behind her in his black cruiser all the way home that it brought back the panic of the black van. She fought hard to keep an attack of the drowning darkness at bay. When she turned into the farm lane, he sped away.
* * *
“I don’t need to be scolded like a child, Daad!” Ella protested at her father’s reaction to her telling him what had happened.
The rain had stopped drumming on the barn roof. The men had come in from the fields, but only Daad was still here when she buggied in. Though wet and shivering, she’d told him right away. He’d wrapped her in a horse blanket and unhitched Fern for her while she talked.
“Then don’t act like a child, going out on your own after those footprints around the houses!” he said.
“Those weren’t targeting me anymore than the boys!”
“Ach,” he went on, shaking his head so hard his beard wagged. “My fault for not insisting you take someone with you. That theft of your cape from your parked buggy at the mill, and then dragging it behind the van—what next?”
“I’m going to talk to the men who were working there, see if they can describe or identify someone who might have been near my buggy so I can follow up—”
“No! No. For all we know, it could be one of those men who followed you, been watching you—looking in windows. All right, you want to tell Sheriff Freeman what happened, fine. His deputy will probably tell him.”
“But I intentionally didn’t tell the new deputy everything. Especially when he started asking questions about our family and Andrew.”
“A new man, trying to learn the territory, that’s all. Police are too nosy anyways, always were. But you cannot go out without one of your brothers with you until we find out more!”
“Daad, I have a business to run, and Abel and Aaron are busy in the fields with you. I can see why I shouldn’t take Andrew with me, but—”
“But why? Someone is stalking you, I still think so, ya,” he said, starting to wipe Fern down with an old towel. Their raised voices obviously didn’t bother the horse, who was already munching from the feed trough.
“I mean,” Ella said, forcing herself to speak more slowly and calmly, “Andrew should stick close to home to keep himself safe.”
“And have people wonder if he’s sick? Folks would start talking about it and lots of others would get curious about him. He’s going to attend Seth’s wedding, so he’ll be on display then anyway. Besides, I think he has cabin fever already. It’s a hard time, his waiting to do the right thing, waiting to get his life back again. I didn’t ask, but wherever they were hiding him before, I think something bad happened.”
She almost blurted out, You mean he was stalked? but she kept quiet on that one. Was her protective father suggesting he trusted her going off alone with a worldly man? Her mind raced as she watched Daad hang Fern’s tack on the wall pegs. He immediately started to hammer her bent metal wheel back into place. She pulled the blanket tighter around her wet shoulders.
“You mean,” she said, having to talk louder again over the din, “you think I should take him with me when I leave on deliveries or errands? You didn’t even want me to show him how to hitch a buggy.”
“Never said that, just wanted to give Aaron more responsibility. You should take Andrew and visit just once to your places that sell the lavender. Tell them for a while they need to come here to pick things up.”
“But I’ve promised them I would make deliveries and included that in the price. All six of my vendors are busy women, and I’m hoping to expand. Daad, I’m twenty-four and am self-supporting and have my own home now, so—”
“That’s a problem too,” he said, stopping the hammering and turning to her. “At night, for a while, you should not sleep alone in that house, but come back inside with us.”
“But you just gave my room to Andrew.”
Daad sighed and put down the hammer. His shoulders slumped. His anger seemed to ebb from him. “We will set it up for Andrew to sleep in your mamm’s quilting room, since the three men in one room would be too much.”
“I can sleep in the quilting room.”
“Must you always argue with your father, girl? You think Andrew would go for that? I see him as good man and not only because of what Mr. Branin told me about him.”
“Here I thought Andrew was the one who had to be guarded, be worried about—not me.”
“With the sheriff’s help, we will find out who is bothering my girl, ya?” He put an arm around her shoulders, and they walked toward the barn door together. “And maybe it is not as bad as we fear, but you just let me explain to your mother.”
“I know it probably doesn’t mean much, but I thought I saw a light on the lavender hill the other night,” she said as they walked out of the barn and he slid the wooden bar across to close it. “I was pretty sure it was a reflection off one of my tin pans that scare the birds away.”
“Not a flashlight?”
“No, unless the battery was bad—dim. It was single, like an eye that opened and blinked shut.”
He put her between the runners of the sleigh they had put outside, propped up on its end against the barn so they could fix the bottom of it. He moved away from her and, hands on his hips, stared up the hill, then looked toward the house.
“I’m going to walk to the phone shanty and call the sheriff to come out,” he said.
“After I dry off and change clothes, I’m planning to take Ray-Lynn Logan her weekly lavender products into the Dutch Farm Table and also stop at the gift shop and B and B. I can ask Andrew to ride with me and see the sheriff then.”
“Ya, I guess, if you stay on the main roads, with others around from now on. And no asking those men at the mill if they saw someone take your cape. Pranksters, I pray, just that.”
She was glad to see no one in the kitchen, because she knew she must look a drowned cat—though it jolted her to think of it that way. Despite all she’d been through today, she had a hopeful heart. Blessedly, none of the feelings of impending doom that so often plagued her when something went wrong hovered over her head. However independent she’d been these past years, maybe she felt better because she liked the idea of Andrew taking care of her, just as she’d watch out for him.
* * *
Ella made sure Andrew heard her entire story before she asked him to accompany her for her deliveries that afternoon. He’d already agreed to move into the smaller quilting room. Abel and Aaron had moved his bed there and were muttering about having to move Ella’s bedroom furniture back into the farmhouse after just taking it in the other direction.
Andrew had said he’d like to go along in the buggy. They sat companionably close as they headed toward town three miles away. She didn’t know how he felt, but she felt good just to be with him.
“Want to handle the reins?” she asked.
“Always,” he said with a tight smile as he took them from her. Their fingers touched. His were strong and warm, smooth too, not like a farmer’s or a carpenter’s. She showed him how to hold the reins, wrap them a bit around his hand.
“I guess ‘always’ means more than it sounds like,” she said. “You were an important man—are still—if you can get things settled at home, right?”
“Some would think so. Also an ignorant man. I got taken in and in over my head. Now I’m trying to make amends. Do the right thing, as they say.”
“I admire you for that. I know all about making mistakes. I almost married a man who couldn’t give up his drinking. It was a blessing I had the courage to pull out, even though I’d said yes. Hold the right rein a little tighter, not all that slack.”
“You need a rearview mirror.”
“Some buggies have them. I just never saw the need—until earlier today.”
“Being followed like that is one of my worst fears.”
“I can’t begin to imagine what you’ve been through or still have to face. But maybe what happened to me today gives me a little hint of how hard it’s been for you. Do you think a lot about what you’ve left behind—what you’re missing—besides your car to impress your corporation?”
“You are a smart and very persuasive woman, Ella Lantz. If I were my enemies, I’d send someone like you to get me to confess all.”
“You’re teasing.”
“Yes and no. All right, I know a lot about you, so let’s play something like twenty questions—or ten. You tell me things you think you know about the other me, the real me. As long as you’re correct, you can ask another question.”
He smiled at her, a bit prideful, she thought, but she was grateful to have the chance to learn more about him.
“You’re from a big city, but not one in Ohio,” she said.
“That’s two questions, clever Ella, but yes and yes.”
“You’re not married.”
“How did you guess that? I could hardly wear a wedding ring around here, not an Amish man.”
“Because on your left ring finger, there is not a hint of white circle, but on your right hand, where you took off a ring, there is.”
“I think the sheriff and that new deputy should be asking you for help.”
“Don’t change the subject or think flattery will get you anywhere, not with the Amish,” she told him. “For us, cooperation, just like we have now, and not competition is the best way to live.”
“Which means we are worlds apart. You should see the dog-eat-dog environment I came from. And, you know, this stay here has really been lucky for me.”
“Not lucky—blessed. Blessed by God. Okay, here’s another guess. You believe in God but you hardly ever think about Him anymore, because you’ve been too busy. You think you can solve your problems your way.”
He turned to look at her as they clip-clopped along. He’d been turning his head away a lot and leaning out to look behind them. “I’d say that’s fair,” he admitted. “Until everything blew up in my face and what I was facing was the ruin of my dreams and maybe even death.”
She gripped his left wrist. “I know. That changes things, doesn’t it? Then you need something and someone to lean on. Oh, I have my questions too about life’s troubles, but I never think that the Creator of the world—of these hills and fields and my lavender—doesn’t have the answers. Last night I saw you go outside and look up at the stars, even though you were hobbling. You felt the strength and power out there in the vastness, didn’t you?”
“Sure. Yeah, I believe that. But I also know we’ve got to use what we’ve been given—gifts and time and talents—to do our best and accomplish something in life. I’ve said it before, but I mean this—I really admire your people and your family, so close and supportive, despite some pretty strict rules.”
“We’re almost to town. One more guess about you. Your company had something to do with the Chinese—maybe you’ve even been to China—but you’re worried they might be after you now.”
His eyes widened in surprise. His nostrils flared; he sniffed sharply, but he only shook his head and didn’t answer. As they headed into the fringe of town with more intersections, she took the reins back from him.
“So much for that game,” he said. “I don’t want you involved in any way.”
“But by coming along today and telling my father you were willing to help keep an eye on me, you are involved, so I am too. All right, you don’t want to say more, that’s fine. So, whatever big city you are from, this is lovely, little Homestead,” she said with a sweep of one hand at Main Street.
She pointed out the Dutch Farm Table Restaurant and told him the pizzeria was partway down the block and the two fast-food places were at the very end. Pulling Fern into the hitching post in front of the sheriff’s office, she gestured here and there. “That’s the volunteer fire department, the string of shops, Kwik Stop food store where we usually get our groceries, the pharmacy and hardware store. And that’s the newspaper office, down there near the only traffic light in town.”
“A one-traffic-light town! Never thought I’d live in one, though I did see one once in Scotland.”
“Oops, something personal slipped out. You’d better guard your mouth, Mr. Modern Andrew Lantz.”
The corners of his taut mouth crimped in an almost-smile as he intently studied her mouth. She wet her lips with her tongue. His eyes widened, then he turned abruptly away. “And my heart,” she was amazed to overhear him whisper as he grabbed his crutch and climbed carefully down to tie Fern to the hitching post.
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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: Hidden in the heart of the Home Valley, a secret danger takes root…Quiet, cautious Ella Lantz has spent her entire life in the close-knit Amish community of the Home Valley. Tending her lavender fields, she finds calm and serenity in purple blooms, heavenly scents and a simple life. But the sudden arrival of a strange visitor to her parents′ home heralds a host of new complications.Alex Caldwell is unlike any man Ella has ever met—clearly, he′s no «Pennsylvania cousin,» whatever the elders may say. In fact, Alex is a Wall Street whistle-blower under witness protection…and he′s brought a world of trouble to the Lantz doorstep. As Ella comes to trust—even love—a man so utterly worldly, she realizes her life has already changed forever.When it becomes violently clear that even the Home Valley is no refuge, Ella and Alex are driven into the wider world to hide. And with such a high price placed on their silence, they may not survive to share their love.…"Harper, a master of suspense, keeps readers guessing about crime and love until the very end." —Booklist, starred review, on Fall from Pride