Fall From Pride
Karen Harper
Against the peaceful night sky, a barn burns…Sarah Kauffman sought permission from her church elders to paint murals on a few of the Amish community's barns. Each was designed like an old-fashioned quilt square, representing a piece of the Amish traditions Sarah loved. The works of art were intended to draw more tourists to the Home Valley in the struggling economy. But instead, they invited a menace.One by one, each barn is set ablaze and destroyed… The arson fires spread fear through the community—amongst Amish and Englischers alike. Now Sarah wonders if she's being punished for her pridefulness…or whether there's a more malevolent will at work. As an outsider, arson investigator Nate MacKenzie struggles to investigate the crime scenes while adhering to Amish ways.With Sarah as his guide, he warms to the Plain People and their simple ways. As the fires rage, beliefs are challenged, a way of life is questioned and family secrets are exposed. In the aftermath of the destruction the people of the Home Valley must join together to raise their barns and their hopes for the future.
Praise for the novels of
New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author
KAREN HARPER
“A strong plot, a pair of well-written characters and a genuinely
spooky atmosphere add up to yet another sterling effort from
Harper. Fast-paced and absorbing, this one will keep readers
turning pages far into the night.”
—RT Book Reviews on Deep Down
“The story is rich…and the tension steadily escalates
to a pulse-pounding climax.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Hiding Place
“Strongly plotted and well written, featuring a host of
interesting characters, Harper’s latest is a winner.”
—RT Book Reviews on Below the Surface
“Harper keeps tension high as the insane villain cleverly evades
efforts to capture him. And Harper really shines in the final act,
providing readers with a satisfying and exciting denouement.”
—Publishers Weekly on Inferno
“Harper spins an engaging, nerve-racking yarn, alternating
her emphasis between several equally interesting plot strands.
More important, her red herrings do the job—there’s just no
guessing who the guilty party might be.”
—RT Book Reviews on Hurricane
“Well-researched and rich in detail…
With its tantalizing buildup and well-developed characters,
this offering is certain to earn Harper high marks.”
—Publishers Weekly on Dark Angel, winner of the 2005 Mary Higgins Clark Award
Fall from Pride
Karen Harper
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
For my family and friends who love those relaxing,
lovely trips to Ohio Amish country.
As ever, for Don.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Author’s Note
1
Saturday, May 22, 2010
The Home Valley, Ohio
“SARAH, YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHO JUST DROVE in. Passing by, that’s what he said. It’s Jacob! In a fancy car, too. He’s right outside the barn.”
At her younger brother’s words, Sarah Kauffman’s insides lurched. She had once cared for Jacob, but since he’d been shunned, it was verboten for him to be here. No way she wanted to see her former come-calling friend, but someone had to get him away from Gabe and his buddy group. Her family had invited the young people for a barn dance tonight.
“If the kids won’t tell him to leave, I will,” Sarah said as she circled the long plank table laden with food. “He’s a bad influence, and you youngie liet don’t need that in your running-around days!”
She hurried outside and down the sloped approach to the barn, her eyes scanning the clusters of boys huddled by their courting buggies or the two cars someone had driven in, and beyond all that, with its headlights still glowing golden, Jacob’s red car stood out like a beacon.
No, she thought, the glow was not where headlights should be, but higher, farther off, behind the car and buggies so that they stood out in stark silhouette.
She moved to the side and squinted across the dark distance. The glow was growing, wavering. It was coming not from something on her family’s property but from across the newly planted fields that stretched to those of Bishop Esh.
Ignoring Jacob’s calling her name, she pointed, stiff-armed, at the distant blaze of color, but Jacob must have thought she was gesturing for him to leave.
“Hey, just came to say hi to all my ol’ friends, ’speci’ly you, an’ I’m not leavin’ till we talk,” he slurred, but she hardly heeded him.
What was that strange light? The moon rising low on the horizon? Someone burning trash? No. No! The Esh barn, where she had begun enlarging the quilt square she’d painted there two months before…the Esh barn was on fire!
“Fire!” she screamed. “Fire, over there—the Esh barn! Does anyone have a phone? Call the fire department!”
Sarah lifted her skirts and ran through the scattered boys, past a smooching couple who jumped to their feet. She almost tripped over some beer cans on the grass. Smooching and drinking—now she knew why their guests hadn’t spotted the fire.
She raced past their grossdaadi haus where her younger sister, Martha, was tending to their eighty-year-old grossmamm tonight, past the family garden and into the field.
Laboring through the rich, damp soil, she sank ankle-deep with each lunging step, once falling to her hands and knees, but this was the fastest way to get there, even compared to a buggy or Jacob’s car. Schnell! Schnell, hurry, hurry, she urged herself. Human lives, the horses, the stored hay and straw, the old barn itself…and her bold painting of an Amish quilt square. She jumped up from her knees and clambered on, hearing voices behind her of others coming, too.
Out of breath, a stitch in her side, she ran on, to warn the Eshes—Bishop Joseph and his wife, Mattie, almost her second parents because she and their girl Hannah had been so close…. Were they home tonight? Already gone to bed? Their house looked dark, but the glow of kerosene lanterns didn’t show sometimes. Didn’t they know their livelihood, their future, was on fire? The flames seemed high in the barn, reaching downward as well as up. Maybe the firemen could use her painting ladders to spray water.
It seemed an eternity until she reached their yard, screaming, “Fire! Fire!” She prayed no one would be trapped in the barn, that they could get the work team and buggy horses out if they were in for the night. She knew that barn as well as her own. It was where she, Hannah and Ella had played as children, tended animals, the barn where the bishop had been brave enough after much discussion to let her paint her very first quilt square and then let her enlarge it when he saw how well the others were received.
Exhausted but energized, Sarah stumbled into the Esh backyard, her dress and hands smeared, clods of soil clinging to her shoes. The belching heat slapped her face. What had been a glow in the hayloft was now a red-and-orange monster inside the barn trying to get out, licking at the windows, curling its claws around the eaves. Shouting, she beat her fists on the back door of the dark house, but no one came.
Turning back toward the barn, she saw that Jacob, Gabe and several other boys had followed her across the fields. Using someone’s jacket to avoid burning their hands, they lifted the bar on the barn door and pulled it open. That only fed the flames, which made a big whooshing sound and drove everyone back. The beast’s breath came hotter, orange fires from hell. She could see its fiery fingers reaching for the pattern of the six-foot-square Robbing Peter to Pay Paul quilt square she’d been enlarging from her wooden ladders and scaffolding earlier today. She’d left them leaning against the barn. Maybe they’d been burned up by now.
Her agony was not only to see the barn burn but her quilt square, too. How proud she had been of her work, the beauty of the striking design. Bishop Esh had chosen that repetitive, traditional pattern because he said it would remind folks that Paul and Peter were equal apostles—a Bible lesson, even on a barn.
Sarah watched in awestruck horror as the flaming beast devoured her neat white and gold circles within the bright blue squares. The paint crackled and blistered. Was it her imagination that the colors ran like blood? Was this a sign that she should not have asked to place it on the bishop’s barn—shouldn’t have been so worldly in her pride over it? She’d even felt a bit important when the local newspaper had put this painting and her picture—not of her face, of course—on the front page. But for so long she’d felt different from her Amish sisters and friends…. She stopped herself, knowing her line of thinking was a danger and a sin.
“Their plow team’s in the south field!” someone yelled. At least that was a blessing. The six big, blond Percherons that pulled the farm equipment were safe.
“The Eshes must not be home!” Sarah shouted, ignoring Jacob, speaking to her brother and the other boys.
“I called the fire department on my cell,” Jacob yelled, coming closer. “They’ll be here ASAP.”
She wasn’t sure what “a sap” meant, but she asked him, “So there are no buggy horses inside, either?”
“Naw or we’d hear them, even over the roar, that’s sure!” he shouted as he came closer. She hadn’t seen him for months and she couldn’t see him well now, only his bulky, black silhouette etched by leaping lights. The fire made a deafening roar. Inside, something heavy fell and little golden lines ran madly between the old, weathered boards. Barn swallows from under the eaves circled madly around the increasing clouds of ash-and-cinder-laden smoke.
It seemed an eternity before the fire engine pumper truck screeched in from the closest town of Homestead with six volunteer firemen, three of them Amish. When Sheriff Freeman’s car pulled in with the siren sounding, several other firefighters spilled out to help. They pumped what water they had in the truck through two hoses, then, when that was quickly gone, rigged a hose to draw water from the pond. It was too late to save the barn, so they watered down the roof of the house and outbuildings to keep flying debris from burning them, too.
As word spread or they saw the seething sky, other Home Valley Amish arrived in buggies, some Englische neighbors in their cars. Even before the Eshes raced up the lane in their buggy, back from visiting Mattie Esh’s sister on the other side of the valley, even before the local newspaper editor, Peter Clawson, started taking pictures, the big, old barn with Sarah’s bright painting on it had burned into oblivion.
Nathan MacKenzie took the call on his cell phone. His digital clock read 3:24 a.m. Something terrible must have happened, and he hoped it wasn’t bad news about his foster mother. His heartbeat kicked up. It was his boss, Mark Lincoln, the state fire marshal of Ohio.
“Nate, I need you to check out a big fire in Amish country, pronto. I want you there shortly after dawn.”
“Amish country?” he said, raking his fingers through his short hair. “Northeast but south of Cleveland, right? That’s Stan Comstock’s district.”
“Our northeast supervisor’s in Hawaii for his daughter’s wedding and won’t be back for about ten days. It’s a barn fire, Nate. Went to the ground—no one inside but for them a huge loss. Two volunteer firefighters were slightly injured when a beam fell. They should have been outside at that point, and I’m not sure how much correct protocol was followed. I just got calls from both the county sheriff and the local newspaper editor. I’ll input what I know to you online including GPS specs for getting there. It’s in a rural area called the Home Valley outside Homestead, Ohio, in Eden County. Real pretty rolling-hill country.”
“And it was arson?”
“We won’t know until you take VERA up there and get a good look. But the thing is, the newspaper guy says the Amish in Pennsylvania had a rash of hate-crime barn arsons a couple of years ago, and we can’t take a chance with this. You’ll have to handle things with kid gloves, not go in like gangbusters, even with VERA, you hear?”
“Of course,” Nate said, fumbling in the dark for his jeans. VERA was one of the two expensive, state-of-the-art technology-laden vehicles that served the state Fire and Explosion Investigation Bureau, usually called the Arson Bureau. And VERA was Nate’s idea of the perfect date to investigate arson on the road.
“You know much about the Amish?” Mark asked.
“Good food, handmade furniture, quilts, buggies, black clothing, no electricity, old traditions. How’s that?”
“When you get a chance, research their belief system or find someone Amish you can trust there to translate their ways for you. Whatever you turn up, they’re going to tell you this was God’s will. They’ll rebuild and forgive the arsonist—if that’s what it was.”
After Mark hung up, Nate muttered, “They may forgive, but I won’t.”
2
SARAH GLANCED OUT THE WINDOW OF THE Esh farmhouse again. The beast that had devoured the barn left only a pile of blackened bones. The emergency vehicle carrying the two injured firefighters—Levi Miller, Amish, and Mike Getz, Englische—to the regional hospital had pulled away. Both had been struck by debris when a flaming beam fell and temporarily trapped them before they were rescued. Word was that, despite broken bones, both were expected to recover just fine.
Jacob had been asked to go, but other than that, no one had left. It was as if the circle of Home Valley neighbors were mourning a mutual, fallen friend. Since the Amish held worship services in their homes or barns every other week, and it was an off Sunday, many had buggied in. Others had arrived, including Ray-Lynn Logan. The owner of the Dutch Farm Table Restaurant in Homestead had parked next to the sheriff’s car and was handing out doughnuts and coffee. Ray-Lynn was Sarah’s friend and an outspoken admirer of her painting skills.
Sarah was exhausted and filthy, but to please her devastated hosts, she sat at the Eshes’ kitchen table to eat. Mattie Esh and her two oldest daughters, Ida and Ruth, both married and living nearby, were turning out scrambled eggs and bacon to be washed down by hot chocolate. Sarah had been thanked repeatedly for spotting the flames and for rushing here to warn the family. But she still felt as if someone had died, not only the old barn, but the painted square that had meant so much to her.
“Still can’t figure a cause,” Bishop Esh muttered to his wife. “No kerosene lantern out there, no green hay to smolder in the bays or loft, no lightning storm, and at night.”
“God’s will,” Mattie told him, tears in her eyes. “We may not understand His ways but must learn to accept.”
“So who’s the preacher now?” her husband said, his voice tired but kind. “We’ll rebuild, Lord willing.”
Sarah offered to help clear the table, but they wouldn’t hear of it, so she went outside again. She wanted to head home to wash up and relieve Martha from taking care of their grandmother, but she just couldn’t leave yet. If—when—the Eshes rebuilt, would they want another painted square? It had gone a long way that the bishop had let her put one on his barn, even though it was fairly small at first. What was worrying her most was that some of Gabe’s friends at the danze last night had been smoking around her family’s barn. It was a fair distance across the field, so surely none of them had sneaked over here to get more privacy for their doings, then carelessly thrown a butt or match down. The Amish never locked their barns, even if, in these modern times, some had begun to lock their homes.
From the back of her van’s tailgate, Ray-Lynn, still handing out coffee in paper cups, motioned Sarah over. The Kauffman women, Sarah’s mamm and married sister, Lizzie, made the half-moon pies for Ray-Lynn’s restaurant, and Sarah delivered them fresh daily in her buggy. Like most everyone else around, she loved to talk to Ray-Lynn. Even in the grief of this morning, she was like a spark of sunlight.
The shapely redhead was about to turn fifty, a widow whose dream had always been to have her own good homecookin’ restaurant in Cleveland—that is, before she’d fallen in love with Amish country. Her husband had suffered a drop-dead heart attack six years ago, just before they were to buy the restaurant, once owned by an Amish family who couldn’t keep up with the state’s increasingly strict health inspection codes.
But newspaper owner and editor, Peter Clawson, had gone in as Ray-Lynn’s partner, and she had made a real go of it, expanding to three rooms and a big menu. The Dutch Farm Table was the most popular place to eat and meet in town for both the local English and Amish, and, of course, tourists. They used to come by the busload, though they’d been in shorter supply lately in the far-reaching American recession.
“Good for you to spot that fire, Sarah,” Ray-Lynn said, and gave her a one-armed hug. “Gonna get your name in the paper again.”
“It didn’t save the barn. Maybe you can tell Mr. Clawson not to overdo it, especially so soon after that article about my barn quilt squares.”
“It may be a biweekly paper, but he’s putting out a special edition over this. I’ll bet we get folks here to gawk at the burned barn, let alone your other paintings. And if the Cleveland or Columbus papers pick this up, especially if it turns out to be foul play—”
“Foul play? Did you hear that someone set the fire?”
“The sheriff just wants all the bases covered, so he called the state fire marshal’s office,” she said with a roll of her snappy brown eyes. “But barn burning’s not the way we’d like to get buyers and spenders ’round here, is it? Personally, this painting,” she went on, pointing at the patch of empty sky where Sarah’s quilt square used to be, “was my favorite so far. Hi, ya’ll,” she called to someone behind Sarah as she gestured them over. “Coffee here, doughnuts all gone.”
Though Ray-Lynn had lived in Cleveland with her husband for years, it was no secret she’d been born and bred in the deep South, so she drew her words out a lot more than most moderns did. She even had a sign in the restaurant over the front door that Sarah had painted. It read Southern Hospitality and Amish Cooking—Ya’ll Come Back, Danki. And she was always trying to talk Sarah into painting a huge mural of Amish life on the side wall.
Secretly, Sarah yearned to paint not static quilt patterns but the beauty of quilts flapping on a clothesline, huge horses pulling plows in spring fields, rows of black buggies at church, one-room schoolhouses with the kinder playing red rover or eckball out back, weddings and barn raisings….
But all that was verboten. No matter what Ray-Lynn urged, Sarah knew an Amish painter could never be an Amish artist.
The moment he turned off the highway onto the narrow, two-lane road at the sign Homestead: 4 Miles, Nate MacKenzie felt as if he’d entered a beautiful but alien world. Another road sign bore the silhouette of an Amish buggy, so he cut his speed way down. Farmers plowing or planting in the fields used four-horse hitches and all wore black pants, blue shirts and broad-brimmed straw hats. Here and there, little boys dressed the same way as their elders, and girls in long dresses and white aprons fed goats or played some kind of beanbag game barefoot. Clothes flapped on lines and no electrical or phone wires existed around the neatly kept houses, which all boasted large vegetable gardens. Though the roads were nearly empty, he passed one black buggy and saw many others sitting beside barn doors or in backyards. The fields, even the woodlots in this broad valley, seemed well tended, almost as if he had driven his big vehicle into a painting of the past.
He noted a beautiful painted square, of what he wasn’t quite sure, on one old barn. Despite his need to get to his destination—“Two miles on Orchard Road, then turn left onto Fish Creek Road,” his sweet-voiced GPS recited—he slowed and craned his neck to look at the painting. The design was amazingly modern, yet he figured it was something old-fashioned. Not a hex sign, for sure. A quilt? Maybe they sold quilts at that old farmhouse.
He turned his eyes back to the road and tried to shake off his exhaustion. He’d felt burned out from too much work lately, but he’d managed about five hours’ sleep before Mark called, enough to keep him going. He thrived on adrenaline, one reason he loved this job, though this case could be a bit of a challenge with the unusual culture and all.
At age thirty, Nate MacKenzie was the youngest of the state’s twenty-one arson investigators. Though he’d told no one but his foster mother, his goal was to work his way up to become a district supervisor and then chief. He had both law enforcement and fire training. He saw himself as a detective who dealt with the remnants of a crime, the clues hidden in the rubble and ruins. After the tragedy that had happened to his family, his career was his calling, his only real passion.
He passed a one-room schoolhouse with a set of swings and a dirt baseball diamond. Man, it reminded him of something from the old show Little House on the Prairie. But surely a group of old-fashioned Amish couldn’t be too hard to handle, especially with his experience and the state-of-the-art technology at his fingertips. He would make a quick study of the Plain People by picking VERA’s online brain so he’d know how to deal with them and in case he needed their help.
Sarah was about to head home when she saw something big and black coming down the road, then turning into the lane. It looked like a bulky, square, worldly emergency vehicle but it was bigger than that—why, it could almost swallow four buggies in one gulp. She hoped it wasn’t some kind of hearse and one of the injured firefighters had suddenly died and was being brought back for burial.
She and the rest of the Plain People stood their ground and stared at it. Even Ray-Lynn quit talking. It had a truck cab and real fancy writing on the side, but, as it pulled in and stopped, the large lettering didn’t really make sense except for the first word: OHIO. OHIO FEIB SFM VERA it read in big print with some smaller script under that.
Bishop Esh, her own father, Ben, and Eben Lantz—the three farmers whose lands adjoined—walked over to greet the man who emerged from the truck cab. Even without his big vehicle, he stood out as an ausländer. Bareheaded, he was a good foot taller than the bearded Amish men, even with their straw hats. He was clean-shaven like unwed Amish men. His short, almost ebony hair looked strange amid the blond and brown heads she was used to. His body seemed all angles and planes, maybe because he didn’t look as well-fed as the Amish men. He wore belted jeans and a white shirt under a brown leather jacket, a kind hardly seen in these parts.
She wished she could hear what they were saying. The men shook hands and walked together toward the broken, still-smoking pile of beams and rubble. Sarah sidled a bit closer while some of the boys went over to peek at the vehicle.
She saw the visitor was not only speaking with the men but was talking into a little wire that hooked over one ear and curved around his face and stopped at the side of his mouth. It was either a small kind of recorder or a microphone like some workers wore at the McDonald’s in Homestead when you gave an order and they passed it on to the kitchen. The stranger seemed to be repeating some things the men told him. Bishop Esh was pointing and gesturing, then he swung around and scanned the crowd and motioned—to her.
Feeling exposed, maybe because she was bonnetless, since it was still back in her own barn, wearing only her prayer kapp on her head and suddenly aware of her soil-and-ash-smeared appearance, Sarah went over to join the men.
“Sarah Kauffman is the one who spotted the flames from her own barn, over yonder,” Bishop Esh was saying as he pointed across the fields, and the man turned his head away to look toward their barn. Her father nodded to her. He’d said earlier he was glad she had done the right thing to run across the fields because it took him twice as long to hitch up the buggy and come over to help.
Their visitor spoke something into his curved wire, then turned back to look at Sarah. Their gazes slammed into each other, right between the two men who held the most sway over her life, and yet it was like they weren’t there at all.
“I’m Nate MacKenzie, Mrs….Miss…” he floundered.
“Just plain Sarah is okay,” she said, crossing her arms over her waist, as neither of them broke their steady gaze. She bit her lower lip. She hadn’t meant to make that sound like a joke about the Amish being called the Plain People, but no one seemed to notice.
“I’m from the state fire marshal’s office in Columbus, here to determine the cause of the blaze,” their visitor told her.
The cause of the blaze. His words rotated through her head. Funny but she was starting to feel warm, as if the seething fire was still sending out flames. She was usually real easy with strangers, enjoyed talking to moderns with their outside experiences, so why should this man be different? Well, maybe it was just that big version of a worldly buggy he drove and his different looks.
Nate—that was probably really Nathan, a good Old Testament name—had strong features, a little cleft in the middle of his chin, which, along with his sharp-slanted cheeks, was peppered with beard stubble, like he’d been up all night and in a hurry, which he probably was. His lips were taut, his nose broad with a little bump, like maybe he broke it once. A thin white scar on his forehead slanted into his left eyebrow, but it was his eyes that entranced her. He had deep blue eyes when she thought dark-haired people mostly had brown ones. What a color that lake-blue would be for a painted quilt square—probably for the pattern of Ocean Waves, because that design, like her other favorites, seemed to shift, to move and beckon….
“The state fire marshal’s office received calls from the sheriff and the newspaper editor about this blaze,” Nate said directly to her. “I understand you ran across the fields. I’d like to interview everyone who saw the early stages of the fire. Actually, if it’s okay, I’d like to have you show me the exact spot at your place where you first saw the blaze so you can describe size, color and positioning to me. A time frame of its spread pattern will really help.”
Ordinarily, Sarah would have waited for the bishop or her father to approve, but she said, “I’d be glad to help. I was just going to go back over, and I can meet you there, or you can come calling—I mean, visit us when it suits.”
Her father cleared his throat and said, “Sarah had a big loss here, too, Mr. MacKenzie. She’s been painting large quilt patterns on barns to help draw visitors to our area, and this was her first one. Enlarging it lately, just yesterday, too.”
“Please, call me Nate. I saw one of those on the way in. Very striking. Did you lose paint or paint thinner in the barn last night?”
“Yes, but the cans were all closed up tight,” she told him, her voice steady now. “I tap them back in their grooves when I’m done. Besides, I use exterior latex paint, water soluble, not oil base that needs turpentine or something like that. I left my scaffolding and two ladders just outside the barn, leaning against it. That’s the bigger loss, moneywise.”
Nate, still watching her, nodded. The sunshine shot more directly into his eyes. She saw he had sunglasses in his coat pocket, but he made no move to put them on, maybe trying to blend in with her people just a bit. He no doubt felt like the outsider he was. Though she was Amish born and bred, sometimes even she felt like that, unwed at the lofty age of twenty-four, a painter, not a sewer of quilts like other women.
“Like I said, Mr. MacKenzie,” Bishop Esh put in, “no lanterns inside the barn and only seasoned hay, not the green stuff that can catch itself on fire.”
“No open accelerants from paint supplies, no spontaneous combustion from methane-emitting hay,” Nate said into his mouth wire. “Would it be okay if I take Sarah over to your farm in my vehicle?” he asked her father.
“Sure, and I’ll ride along,” Daad told him. “My son, Gabe, can bring our buggy back over.”
Sarah knew better than to feel prideful or important, but her people parted for the three of them like Moses at the Red Sea as they walked toward the big, black truck. “We call her VERA for Vehicle for Emergency Response and Arson,” Nate explained, patting the shiny hood as Sarah might her buggy horse, Sally.
“Arson,” Sarah repeated. “Then you do think someone set the barn on fire?”
“Yet to be determined. Arson’s the easiest crime to commit but often the hardest to prove. I know this barn—all your barns—are important to your way of life. If we can eliminate accident and act of nature, arson’s what’s left, and then I’ll investigate that.”
Nate wasn’t sure if the Amish woman and her father were awed or frightened by VERA, but they climbed in the big front seat with him, Sarah between the two men. He was surprised they didn’t fumble with their seat belts but clicked them quickly in place. She wore no wedding ring, but then he hadn’t seen one piece of jewelry on any of these people.
Amazing that, with her honey-colored hair parted in the middle and pulled straight back under her messed-up small cap and with her old-fashioned dirty apron and dress—a peach-colored one, not black—with not a bit of makeup on her face, Sarah Kauffman was a real looker. She was a natural beauty with auburn, perfectly arched eyebrows over heavily lashed amber eyes that seemed to have little flecks of gold swimming in them. Surprisingly, mixed with the scent of smoke, she smelled faintly of lavender. Her full mouth pouted as she looked wide-eyed at the dashboard computer screen.
“Why, it has a map of our area on it,” she said.
“It’s called a global positioner, and it talks to me in a nice female voice if I want it to,” Nate said as he backed up, careful that none of the crowd, especially the gawking boys, were behind him.
“Oh, now it’s changed to a kind of TV screen that shows what’s in the rear when you back up,” she said. Her voice was mellow without a trace of the accent that the older men seemed to have.
“Sarah, Mr. MacKenzie knows what’s in his truck,” her father said.
“Oh, right.”
“So could you tell me what you were doing when you first saw the fire?” Nate asked as he drove them out of the dirt lane to the road.
“My family was hosting a barn dance for my brother’s buddy group,” she explained. “Gabe is seventeen and during the mid to late teenage years, our young people are given a time of freedom called rumspringa, kind of a running-around time before they decide—or not—to join the church. I went outside to ask someone to leave and looked up above his car and—”
“His car?” Nate said.
“Right. Jacob Yoder’s. He shouldn’t have been there, and he was drunk, I think, and making noise, and I was going to ask him to leave.”
Her father put in, “Jacob Yoder has been shunned for breaking the ordnung, Mr. MacKenzie. Lied to the bishop and aided an illegal theft ring of stolen cars, and was unrepentent.”
“So he and Bishop Esh have a history—not a good one?” Nate wanted to ask more about shunning and breaking the ordnung, but he let it go for now. Mark was right about this being a foreign world, one he was going to have to navigate his way through. Find an interpreter of their ways, their culture, Mark had advised. He supposed he should rely on the bishop whose barn had burned, but sitting next to this interested, interesting young woman, he had a better idea. He needed a translator all right, because, despite all of VERA’s space-age charms, he felt like a Star Trekker who was about to go where no man had ever gone before.
When her daad said he’d be out later and went into their house, Sarah was surprised. It was unusual for her father to leave her alone with an outsider, a man at least, so Daad must trust this man. Instead of taking time to change clothes, she decided to get his investigation going right away. She led him toward their barn since he had asked her to show him where she had been when she first noticed the blaze.
“By the way,” she told him, “our barn is almost a replica of the Esh barn, if you want to see how it looked before the fire. Except it’s usually neat as a pin, and we all ran out and left it like this last night.” She gestured inside where a table with food sat and bales of straw surrounded a now-empty circle.
“Yeah, it would help immensely if I could study its structure,” he said, lifting his eyebrows and looking intrigued by something. He had left his mouth wire in his truck. She wondered if he wanted to make her feel more at ease with him, which probably wasn’t going to happen, because he just plain disturbed her somehow.
“Feel free to look around,” she said, noting he at last pulled his gaze away from her to glance high and low inside their barn. “So,” she went on, “I was helping Mamm—my mother—serve food behind that long table there, and I came across this threshing floor—”
“Still used for threshing at harvest time?”
“Sometimes, but we haul modern gasoline threshers now, pulled behind the horses, of course.”
“But animal horsepower pulls them, so they’re not actually fueled by gasoline? That means the hay baler Bishop Esh says he lost in the fire would not have had gasoline in it even off-season?”
“Right—modern equipment but real horsepower.”
“In your field and the Eshes’, I saw them—beautiful horses, big as the Budweiser team. But go ahead. You walked to what spot before you saw the fire. And what did it look like then?”
“I honestly don’t know what time it was, if you need to know that—”
“I have the exact moment the call came in, so that will help.”
“Anyway, I shouted for someone to call the fire department. Later, Jacob told me he’d called it in on his cell phone.”
“Right. I have that info from the sheriff.”
“When the buzzers alert the volunteers, it takes a while to get to the firehouse and then here,” she said as she led him out of the barn.
“I’ve got all that and will be checking everyone out.”
“Oh, sure, to get their descriptions of the fire, too. So I would say I was right here when I saw the golden glow in the distance, which was growing fast and turning orange. And it seemed to start high, then burn downward.”
“Really? That could be a key clue.” He was taking notes with just a regular ballpoint pen on paper now, nodding, looking across the fields where she pointed.
“I thought at first the fire might be the headlights of Jacob’s fancy car,” she added.
“If he was exiled, why—”
“Shunned.”
“Okay, shunned. Then why was he here?”
“It really doesn’t have anything to do with the fire,” she assured him, hesitant to get into all that about Jacob’s past, especially how it meshed with hers.
“You need to let me decide that, Sarah,” he said, turning to her. “Just in case the cause of the fire is incendiary and criminal, I have the right to investigate anyone who could have caused it, even make an arrest.”
“You’re a policeman, too?” she blurted. Although her people rendered to Caesar what was Caesar’s and got on just fine with Sheriff Freeman, the Amish way was to steer clear of government authorities like the ones who had persecuted—burned to death by the hundreds—her people in Europe centuries ago. Her grossmamm, Miriam, was always reading to her from the Plain People’s heirloom book, the Martyrs Mirror—talk about horrible burnings!
“I’m a law officer under certain conditions,” he said. “So what’s with this Jacob Yoder I’ve heard mentioned more than once? He was shunned by Bishop Esh?”
“By all of the church, really. I—it will take some explaining.”
“Then we’ll do it in a later interview. Go ahead and take me across the field the way you ran last night and tell me how the fire appeared to change as you got closer, how the flames spread.”
Happy to have a topic besides Jacob Yoder, she nodded, looking up into his intense gaze again before walking toward the fringe of the plowed field. In his work clothes, Daad came out of the house, and she told him where they were going. He nodded and headed for the barn past the grossdaadi haus where Sarah stayed at night with her grandmother and where poor Martha had been stuck during all the excitement.
“Wait a sec,” Nate said so loudly she jumped. “Your barn doesn’t have lightning rods. The Esh barn didn’t, either?”
“Lightning rods show dependence on man, not God. If the Lord wants to protect a barn, He will.”
“Then, ultimately, if the fire was arson, God’s to blame?” Nate challenged, frowning.
“Not to blame,” she insisted, but she’d never thought of it that way. She supposed there were other sides to some of the things she’d been taught since birth. “We live in an evil world,” she went on, her voice more strident. “The Lord might allow it for a lesson, for our better good, to teach humility or bring our people closer—all positive things, gifts from above. We will work together to rebuild, to raise money for that if we must.”
“So I heard. On the other hand, at least you don’t have electrical wires coming in that could have caused a spark. I didn’t mean to criticize your beliefs, Sarah. I’m just used to lightning rods on barns. Those or smoke alarms or fire extinguishers can save lives and buildings. And maybe God gave the inventors the ideas for those things through inspiration, like positive, useful gifts from above.”
She had to admit that, in his own way, he was right. She must remember, she told herself, that this man was here to help them but that he was not one of them. She had to keep her fences up, however much she wanted to work with him to help the Eshes.
So, with Nate MacKenzie at her side, she plunged into the field following the trail of her frenzied footsteps, back toward the burned barn.
3
SARAH HEARD THE PURR OF A BIG MOTOR EVEN before she peeked outside the barn where she was cleaning up the danze debris. As if her thoughts had summoned him, Nate MacKenzie had returned in the masculine-looking vehicle that had a woman’s name. After Sarah had walked him across the field and back, he’d driven VERA over to the Eshes’ again to do some preliminary work, but now, midafternoon, here he was.
“Hi, again,” he called to her as he headed for their back porch but then did a U-turn toward her.
He came over, carrying something in a sealed plastic bag, wearing his sunglasses this time. They wrapped around his eyes like dark brown twin mirrors in which she could see herself getting larger as he came closer. At least she’d washed up and changed clothes but, not planning to go out in company, she still didn’t wear a proper bonnet over her clean prayer kapp.
“I did an initial walk around the ruins,” Nate said, stopping at the bottom of the banked entrance to the barn. “Every thing’s still too hot to sift through and may be for a couple of days.”
“Sift through? All the ruins?” she asked. That meant he’d be staying for a while.
“I may not have to, actually, to get proof of arson, though I’ll need details for my report that point to how and who. The why may be harder to come by, but I found something key to my investigation. A rubber band around a bunch of about twenty matches,” he said, lifting the plastic bag so she could see what was in it. “I found them on the ground about thirty feet from the back of the barn—not in this bag, of course. Bishop Esh says no one smokes in his family, nor does he keep matches around like this to light their kerosene lanterns.”
“Oh, no!” she blurted. “But why would kids who might be smoking on the sly put a bunch of matches together with a rubber band?”
“So some of the kids in the neighborhood last night were smoking, kids who were here at your barn dance?”
“During rumspringa, it’s fairly common. When the fire happened, I thought of it and worried a bit. But those matches are unburned, so you mean they might have dropped that bunch, but threw another pack like that into the barn?”
“Sarah, I’m not jumping to the conclusions you seem to be. It’s just that this is part of an old arson trick amateurs use. They get some kind of long trailer—a wick—light the end of it, maybe far away from the object to be burned, and have it ignite some kind of combustibles.”
“But you found no wick?”
“No. If one led into the barn, it would have been consumed in the inferno. Besides, you said the fire seemed fiercer high up, so that means someone had a very long wick if they were on the first floor. Of course, kids could have gone up into the loft.”
“We can ask them.”
“I will.”
“Or a long wick means the person could even stay outside the barn to light the fire.”
“That’s another possibility,” he told her with a nod. “A trailer, if it’s long enough—sometimes soaked with an accelerant—can give the perpetrator up to fifteen minutes to vacate the property before the fire ignites. So it could have been kids, but before I look around your barn to get an idea of what I’ll be searching for in the remnants, let’s have that little chat about why Jacob Yoder was hanging around if he’d been shunned.”
Deciding not to take notes or record Sarah as she talked, Nate listened carefully as they sat together just inside the barn door on bales of straw. His cell phone even rang once, but he glanced at it—a coworker in Columbus—then put it away without answering.
Sarah explained how she had broken her betrothal to Jacob even before he was shunned for helping hide stolen cars. She said that Sheriff Freeman could have brought aiding and abetting charges that would have sent Jacob to prison for a while, but he didn’t because he thought the Amish could make him shape up better by shock treatment—that is, ostracizing him from the church, his family and friends.
“He could have blamed the bishop and wanted revenge against him,” Nate said after she stopped talking. He hadn’t interrupted. He found her fascinating, the way she managed to keep control while emotions obviously rampaged through her. Her full, lower lip had quivered, but her voice never wavered. Her naive beauty was riveting, and he tried not to let that distract him from what she said. “Or, he could have picked that barn because of your wall painting there,” he added, “or because it would hurt the Eshes and you. Can you give me more details about shunning?” he asked.
“If he hadn’t been a member of the church, he wouldn’t have been shunned. But, once you’re a member and you break the set of rules—the ordnung—that’s that. But I don’t see how he can be vindictive. Not only did he bring it on himself, but he was not sent to prison when he could have been. Besides, the church will take him back with open arms if he atones and returns to our ways.”
“Since he was hanging around at your barn dance, does he think you’d take him back with open arms? Sorry, that’s too intrusive.”
“It’s okay. To tell the truth, though I once cared for Jacob, it was a relief for me when we got unmatched—before he helped those car thieves. I knew he was keeping something from me and he was flying too high and too fast in worldly ways and questionable company. Now, if you want to look around our barn or ask more questions, go right ahead while I finish cleaning up.”
He supposed he’d overstepped, pushing her about Jacob, but whatever cages he had to rattle, he would. As polite as she remained, her demeanor had shifted a bit from helpful to huffy. She started toward the long table, but he walked with her. “Can you tell me a little more about your quilt square paintings?” he asked.
“Painting is…dear to me,” she began, her voice almost faltering. She stopped and turned to face him. “I’ve done decorations on birdhouses and gazebos in my father’s wintertime carpentry shop for years, but I thought I could do more than scrollwork and leaves and birds—if it was allowed.”
“Allowed by your father and by Bishop Esh, I take it—and the church ordnung. As I said, the painting I saw was beautiful.”
“Best say it was purposeful. Just like the rest of the people in the country, shaky financial times have hit Amish businesses hard. Busloads of visitors used to come to eat in our restaurants and buy homemade goods like furniture and quilts, but not so many lately. So I thought, and convinced our church leaders, that it would be good to have something new to draw them in—a quilt trail, so to speak, where they could go from barn to barn, maybe buy things, even garden products or eggs if the more expensive items were too deep for their pockets. Besides farming, I guess we’ve learned to lean on the tourist trade a lot.”
“Maybe someone attracted to the decorated barns has a hidden agenda. Has anyone ever said something to you about not liking your paintings?”
“Not visitors. In general, our people don’t believe in doing things just for pretty, as we say. Things can’t only be pleasing as a decoration. Quilts, scented lavender sachets or candles, furniture—all has to be useful, purposeful for the common good.”
“And some of your people thought the quilt squares were just for pretty?”
She sighed. “Despite the bishop’s and the church elders’ permission, a few of the brothers and sisters, yes. Some think I’m being too different painting squares instead of quilting them. The local newspaper did an article and made me sound prideful when I try hard not to be!”
Emotion swelled her voice and flushed her cheeks with color. He wanted to comfort her. Was he nuts? He had to stay objective here, but he decided his best bet was to change the subject because, before she turned away, she almost looked as if she’d cry.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he said, “but Bishop Esh said I can park VERA and live on the woodlot at the juncture of the three farms while I’m here. He told me the best approach to it is from the lane that runs off your driveway and cuts behind this barn.”
“Sure, that’s fine,” she said, heading again toward the long plank tabletop set on sawhorses. “I can point it out to you.” She started to wipe the oilcloth-covered table with a vengeance.
“I’ve got food in VERA and I’ve been invited to eat with the Eshes when I’m over there working, but I don’t want to impose on them more than tonight. I’m told the Dutch Farm Table Restaurant is good.”
“The best, if you don’t want McDonald’s or Wendy’s—a big battle between those two with all kinds of specials. If you don’t mind day-old half-moon pies, I’ve got some here you can take with you. My mother and sister make them for the Dutch Farm Table. Here, help yourself,” she said, opening a cake-size box and extending it to him.
“One more thing,” he said. He took a bite of one of the crimped-edge, glazed pastry half circles, this one filled with apple and cinnamon. Delicious. He talked with his mouth a bit full. “Mmm, this is fabulous,” he said. “I just want you to know that I need to be suspicious of everyone, every possibility. Not just of kids smoking, not just of Jacob, who may have a double motive, but even of the firefighters themselves. If a closer survey of the evidence in the ruins points to arson by a burn pattern or residue of accelerants, I’ll be looking at everyone, even them.”
“At the firemen? That doesn’t make sense, Amish or English.”
“It’s the so-called dirty little secret of firefighters. A few of them want to fight fires because fires mesmerize them, make them feel powerful, release pent-up feelings. They revel in being the first one into a fire, the hero, or, if they’re injured, even the victim who gets the glory or sympathy.”
“So that means you’ll even talk to the two who were hurt and not just to see how they describe the blaze? They were the first ones in.”
“Exactly.” He held the half-eaten, small pie up to his mouth and stared at her again. He was surprised she didn’t protest that, if an arsonist burned the barn, he—or she, though a female was unlikely—could be Amish, even one in good standing, especially if they thought both the bishop and the artist had overstepped with “just for pretty” painted quilt squares. He hadn’t mentioned that directly, but he couldn’t afford to ignore any possibilities.
“The Eshes can prove where they were before the fire, and our people don’t believe in insurance, so no one would burn his own barn for that,” she said, anticipating his next line of questioning.
“The Eshes have an alibi, but in the modern world, as you call it, sometimes people do burn their own property to get the money for it.”
He almost choked on the bite of half-moon pie he took to cover up the catch in his voice. What he’d just said hit too close to home—his own lost home and family. All he needed was that old nightmare he had buried deep to resurrect itself. But what scared him even more was his gut feeling that it would be so easy for someone to burn another isolated, unprotected barn. He had to act fast to stop that from happening.
“Are they burning our people again?” Sarah’s grandmother, Miriam Kauffman, asked her the night after the barn fire.
Her voice shaking, her expression distraught, the old woman stood in the doorway to the bathroom with her toothbrush in hand and her white hair in a long braid, ready for bed. Sarah told Martha, who had stayed last night in the small grossdaadi haus, that she’d take over. But Martha had wanted to hear every last detail about the fire and the fire marshal’s arson investigator, so she was waiting in the living room. Grossmamm and Martha had watched the fire from the kitchen windows, until Martha had convinced her charge to go to bed, but talk of the fire was what had probably set Grossmamm off right now. That, and the fact she insisted on reading a few pages from the Martyrs Mirror every night before she slept. “No, Grossmamm, it’s all right,” Sarah assured her. “No one is burning our people.”
“Ya, the authorities are coming again for us!” she insisted. “They tried to burn the Eshes out, and they’ll be here next! Soldiers like that man you were talking to outside today are going to slaughter us again.”
“That man is here to help us,” Sarah promised, putting her hands on the old woman’s shoulders. “We are safe here on the farm, in America.”
Sarah had considered taking the Martyrs Mirror away from her grandmother more than once. But that precious book had come down through her family, an heirloom. Poor Grossmamm, afflicted with Alzheimer’s, sometimes thought the Amish were still under siege as they’d been in Europe, hundreds of years ago.
Sarah kept talking, slowly, calmly. “That man was sent by the state government in Columbus to find out about our neighbor’s barn, why it burned. No Amish were burned or will be.”
“I was afraid you would be lost in the fire.”
“Me? No, I’m just fine. All I lost were some paint cans, my scaffolding and two ladders.”
“They killed our people on tall scaffolds as a warning so all could see. They tied women to ladders, then tipped them into the fires just because they disagreed with the state religion.”
“That’s all in the past. No one is going to burn. Even the horses were safe from that fire. Now brush your teeth, and I’m going to read to you from the Budget, all kinds of news about our people visiting and how well things are going.”
“Except for Amish martyrs being burned,” Miriam Kauffman mumbled as she thrust her toothbrush in her mouth and bent over the bathroom basin where she’d left the water running.
Sarah sighed. She knew she resembled her grandmother in her height and coloring, so she sure hoped she wouldn’t inherit the mental hauntings that plagued her. She’d been better lately, but seeing that barn fire across the fields had obviously set her off again. The Martyrs Mirror, with its lifelike etchings, was in almost every Amish home, along with the Holy Bible, of course, and the Ausbund, which contained the words to the traditional Amish hymns sung in the regular church meetings every other Sunday. As for the Budget, that newspaper was the Amish community glue that held the Plain People together wherever they lived. Births, deaths, marriages, horse sales, new addresses or endeavors and chatty tidbits were listed on page after page. Yes, she was going to spirit away the Martyrs Mirror and substitute it with the Budget right now.
Later, Sarah was glad she did. Not only did the chatty items in the Budget calm the old woman, but Sarah noted one about the Eshes that explained why they might have been out last night. Mattie Esh’s niece had just given birth to triplets, and they probably went to see them. As usual, Grossmamm fell asleep quickly, and Sarah took the kerosene lantern with her down the hall and into the living area. Most Amish farms had a grossdaadi haus for the older generation. When the grandparents who had worked the farm and raised their children were ready to retire, they voluntarily turned over the big house to the eldest married son, or the one who wanted most to keep the farm going, and moved to the smaller place on the property. No rest home, retirement village or shuffling off the older generation among the Amish. They cared for their aging parents or grandparents on-site and included them in as much of life as they cared to be a part of. After their grossdaadi, Gideon Kauffman, had died five years ago, his widow had started to slip into another world. Alzheimer’s, sure, and she’d had a doctor’s care, but they were still going to keep her here and look after her themselves.
Sarah found Martha sound asleep, sprawled on the sofa, breathing heavily. She covered her up with a quilt. That sofa made into a double bed, so where was she going to sleep? They both had their own rooms in the big house, but it was Sarah’s turn to stay here tonight. Should she wake Martha and send her away so she could have the hideaway bed?
She sat down in her grandfather’s big rocking chair very carefully, because she knew it squeaked. Her eyes were so heavy. She hadn’t slept last night…was dead on her feet today, except when Nate MacKenzie was around twice because he seemed to give her energy.
When her lids drooped, she saw fire, saw Nate’s intense gaze. She wondered how he was doing living in VERA down by the pond on the woodlot…. And what if the woods, all those trees around the pond, caught fire and the blaze burned him, burned her, too, crackling…popping…
She jolted alert. Her heartbeat pounded. That sound! Gravel against glass, against the window? That was the signal she and her friend Hannah Esh had always used during their rumspringa years to get each other up at night when they wanted to sneak out. Not to meet boys like some did, but to go for a night swim in the pond in the summer or just stuff themselves with candy or listen to a transistor radio until dawn while Sarah sketched pictures and Hannah sang along with every Top Ten hit. They knew better than to get their friend Ella from the Lantz farm for such goings-on. No way Ella, as much fun as she could be, would take a risk sneaking out like that.
Again, she heard the sound of gravel against the window. As she stood and looked, the glass was like a big black mirror since they hadn’t pulled the curtains closed. Sarah turned down the kerosene lamp and peered out, seeing at first only her own reflection. The Martyrs Mirror, she thought…now why had they put the word mirror in the title? She’d never thought about that. Were the Amish all martyrs to something or other? Did it mean to look deeply into your own life, to see yourself as you really were or to decide what you were willing to die for?
And then Hannah’s face appeared, not the old Amish Hannah but the new one her parents were so riled about. Hannah and her friends in Cleveland had gone goth. Whereas Hannah was a natural blonde with eyebrows and lashes so pale they hardly showed, she now had red, spiky hair and eyeliner dark as sin. Sarah was used to seeing her friend in the soft pastel dresses unwed women wore, not in black, partly ripped and fringed tight pants and wearing silver chains and pins and piercings. Even now, Hannah looked like some kind of worldly Halloween freak. And she was gesturing for Sarah to come outside.
Sarah held up one finger and, her hands shaking, scribbled a note for Martha. “I had to leave for a little bit. Stay with G., please—S.”
She grabbed the windbreaker she wished she’d worn last night and tiptoed out. Hannah here! She wasn’t shunned so she could come back anytime, but she didn’t. After she’d had the argument with her father almost three years ago, she’d left for Cleveland. Their daughter’s loss was the cross the bishop and his wife bore, and Sarah’s and Ella’s loss, too. When Hannah’s plan to record and sell her own songs didn’t work out, her friends and family prayed she would come home. Instead, her worldly boyfriend got her a job in a recording studio mixing something or other, answering the phone and greeting people at the front desk, looking just like this.
Sarah and Hannah hugged hard. Hannah smelled of an exotic scent Sarah could not name. Something smoky. She’d had incense burning in her little apartment the one time Sarah and Ella had visited her in Cleveland. Or had she been over to her family’s burned barn?
“Jacob phoned me,” Hannah told Sarah as they stepped awkwardly apart. “I couldn’t believe the barn was gone. It’s supposed to be in the Cleveland paper tomorrow, but I had to see it first, before all the gawkers in the world come flocking in.”
“You didn’t have to come at night. Everyone would have been glad to see you.”
“Give me a break. About like they’d be glad to have Satan himself drop by. But I knew I could come to you, that you’d go with me. I just can’t go see it alone, any more than I could face my father. I parked back down the road by the graveyard and walked here. He—Jacob—said you were the one who spotted the fire and he called it in, but that you weren’t back together yet.”
“Yet? Never. He crashed our party for Gabe’s friends. That’s why he was here.”
“Jacob also said there’s a superhero here to save the day, solve the crime—if it’s a crime.”
“Word travels fast, because Jacob was asked to leave before the state arson investigator showed up.”
“Will you go with me, Sarah? I can’t go to Ella. I don’t need her telling me I’ve got to mend my ways and come back. She never did quite get the ‘judge not lest ye be judged’ bit, did she?”
“I guess accepting that comes with suffering, and she’s been all wrapped up in traveling the road of her perfect Amish life.”
Sarah instantly regretted she’d said that with such a sharp tone. But sometimes she resented Ella’s sticking to the straight and narrow, when she herself would like to go her own way at times. How she yearned to paint entire landscapes instead of the geometric quilt squares that called for no more creative decision than what color of hardware store paint to use.
“In other words,” Hannah said with a bitter laugh, “she still hasn’t found out ‘it’s not all cakes and pies.’”
“I’ve been thinking lately that it’s not all quilts and pies.”
“You never did like to stitch quilts. And you think I’m a freak? But your painting—that’s you. Jacob told me about the quilt square you did on our—my family’s—barn.”
“A real font of information, isn’t he?” Sarah said, surprised again her voice was so sharp. Maybe Hannah’s rebellious nature was rubbing off on her. And was Nate right to be suspicious of Jacob? Nate had said that some firefighters loved the attention from a blaze, but did Jacob, too? Nate had also said that some arsonists returned to the scene of their crime, not only to watch the fire, but even later to relive the excitement. Maybe that’s why Jacob stopped at the very next farm. Or did he think his phoning in the fire would build bridges back to his people—and her?
The two young women started down the Oakridge Road that linked their farms. Sarah was glad Hannah didn’t insist on a run through the fields, like she’d done last night. They didn’t worry that there would be buggies or cars on the rural road now, because traffic was rare even in the daytime, unless a buggy clip-clopped past or tourists pleasure-driving some back byways happened by.
As they sneaked around Hannah’s childhood home, not going up the lane but skirting along the fence, Hannah cursed. “Damn! There’s a hole in the sky where it should be! Nothing but blackness and stars! It’s so—I can’t believe it, all of that destroyed to almost nothing!”
Her family’s team of horses plodded over to the fence as if to commiserate about the loss of their stalls, feed troughs and harnessing gear, the wagons and equipment they used to pull. Hannah put her hand out to one’s muzzle, and he snuffled against her palm as if he were crying.
“At least you guys still know me,” Hannah whispered.
“Why don’t you write your family a note!” Sarah suggested. “They’d love to hear from you, know that you cared enough to come see it.”
“It won’t help them to know I was here and saw this,” she insisted. Even in the darkness, with only the wan quarter moon rising, Sarah could see her friend’s tears track down her cheeks. “The heart of the farm, so many good times here… I’m so sorry, so sorry about what I’ve done,” Hannah cried, and began to sob so hard that some of her mascara ran down her face in dirty lines and smeared against Sarah’s cheek as she hugged her again.
“Good evening, ladies.” The deep male voice came from behind them. “Sarah, I thought you were going to stay all night with your grandmother, and what is this person confessing she’s sorry she’s done?”
4
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE IN THE DARK?” Sarah demanded.
The other girl glared at Nate and tugged her arm free. He was so shocked by her appearance that he let her go. He read in her defiant stare that she wouldn’t run, but he kept a light hold of Sarah’s arm. It was the first time he’d touched her. She radiated warmth from what must have been a walk down the road from her farm.
“I’m going to ask the questions, Sarah,” he said more harshly than he’d intended. “I’m Nate MacKenzie, state arson investigator,” he told the other young woman, riveting his gaze on her. “I want to know who you are and what you are doing here in the dark.”
Since he’d been in a sleeping bag near the back of the barn, Nate knew they hadn’t come across the fields. He’d seen the Eshes turn off their house lamps over an hour ago, so he’d been startled to hear women’s voices. Earlier, the bishop had sat outside with him for a while, over milk and cookies, no less. Nate had explained to him that he had obtained a search warrant to examine the ruins of the barn, but the bishop had said he had his permission and didn’t need anything from the government to say so.
Bishop Joseph Esh had also reminisced about the barn, which his father had bequeathed him. Amish barns were almost a part of the family, he’d learned, the cornerstone of their way of life, necessary not only for running their fifty-or-so-acre farms but for keeping the generations working and worshipping together.
“This is Hannah Esh, from Cleveland,” Sarah said when the stranger continued to glare at him in silence. “She’s the Eshes’ third-oldest daughter, but she hasn’t lived here for three years because she’s away building her career.”
“It’s okay, Sarah,” Hannah said. “I can talk for myself. He just surprised me. I thought, at first, it might be my… Never mind. Mr. MacKenzie, a friend phoned to tell me my family’s barn burned to the ground, and I wanted to see it without bothering them. I’m a big disappointment to them and am living in so-called worldly exile.”
Hannah Esh, Nate noted, had a bitter tinge to her voice and a defiant expression on what could be—with that harsh makeup, he wasn’t sure—a pretty face.
“She’s not being shunned like Jacob. She left home before joining the church—perfectly permissible,” Sarah said.
“Then she’s able to be welcomed back with what you called open arms,” Nate said.
“I’d appreciate it if you don’t tell my parents I was here,” Hannah said. “And I certainly don’t want to see them tonight.”
She stared straight at him when she talked. Like Sarah, a strong woman—or were all Amish women?
“I would think they would be happy to know you cared,” he said.
“But only to visit to see a—a dead barn? I don’t think so.”
“Hannah, I need to know where you were last night, when the barn burned.”
“Why?” she countered instantly, and this time her steady gaze did dart away from him, back toward where the barn had been. He heard Sarah suck in a breath, so she no doubt recalled what he’d said about arsonists possibly returning to the scene of the crime. And Sarah’s quick mind would get it that Hannah, just as Jacob, had a motive to hurt the Eshes for rejecting her.
“All right,” she said, cutting off Sarah, who seemed ready to leap to her friend’s defense. Hannah folded her arms over her breasts. “I was in the recording studio, making a demo and mixing my own audio background.”
“You’re a singer?”
“I am, and trying to be a professional one.”
“She has a great voice,” Sarah added.
“So you’re saying you were alone last night,” Nate said, looking only at Hannah. “Who called you to let you know the barn burned?”
“No one you’ve met. Jacob Yoder.”
“But someone I’m going to meet real soon. I need all your contact information, Hannah, including the name and address of the owner of the studio where you work—just in case there are more questions.”
“And I’ll just bet there will be,” she said, her voice slightly shaky now. Ordinarily, he felt he could really read suspects, but with the barrier of her appearance, he couldn’t. It was tough enough to try to read the Amish, but an Amish woman who had rebelled? Maybe he could get more out of Sarah about Hannah later. She was becoming his touchstone here—his translator, as his boss had put it.
“I’d like to be able to drive you ladies back to Sarah’s but I jogged over from where I left my vehicle in the woodlot behind the Kauffman farm. So I’m going to walk you back.”
“Not necessary,” Hannah said. “No one’s out in Amish country in the dark.”
“Someone was out last night,” Nate said, handing her a small pad and a pen to write down her contact information. “Someone, I’ll bet, who had a big beef against either your father or Sarah, or both.”
Sarah loved her job taking Mamm’s and Lizzie’s half-moon pies to Ray-Lynn at the Dutch Farm Table Restaurant six mornings a week. Honoring the Amish tradition of no Sunday sales, the place had been closed yesterday. Sarah had to get up before dawn, but she didn’t mind. Grossmamm was always still asleep and either Martha, if she wasn’t in school, or Mamm if she was, came over to stay.
Some amazing sunrises greeted Sarah as she went out to the barn to hitch Sally to her buggy, but, she had to admit, never one as stunning as the orange, fuchsia and apricot blaze in the sky today. Cirrus clouds and feathery floaters made the heavens look like a kaleidoscope quilt—one with Nate MacKenzie standing near the barn, silhouetted by it all. Ya, if he’d only been wearing an Amish jacket and straw hat, what a painting that would make. As good as his word, he’d walked her to the grossdaadi haus last night and Hannah to her car down the road at the Amish cemetery. He seemed to turn up everywhere.
Somehow she managed to find her voice. “So you’re an early riser as well as a night owl,” she said as she carried her big flat basket with four boxes of half-moon pies into the barn. Daad and Gabe were already out in the fields with some of the work team, and the barn door stood open.
“I do what I must to solve a crime.”
“You’re sure it is?”
“I’ll start going through the debris today, and then—if it is—I’ll be interviewing others. Hannah just more or less knocked on my door before I was ready for her.”
“She’s had a hard time.”
“So have her parents.”
“Did they mention her to you?”
“Not a word, not even when I had a heart-to-heart talk with her father.”
She nodded, put the basket down on a hay bale and pulled her buggy out of the back corner from among the lineup of the big carriage, sleigh and smaller carts. She saw Daad and Gabe had already taken the work wagon out. Trying to stay calm near Nate when she didn’t know what was coming next, she went out to fetch her buggy horse, Sally, in the side field. Although the horses were often out in this mild weather where they could graze, she still took the mare’s feed bag with her so Sally would get her grain and vitamins. She saw three of the family’s work team of big Percherons were still grazing in the field. She whistled and her smart former harness racer came right over to the gate.
Again, she was grateful that the Eshes’ horses had not been in the barn when it caught fire. Could the arsonist, if there was one like Nate evidently thought, be Amish and know how important the horses were? No, not if he’d burn a precious barn.
She fastened Sally’s feed bag on, brought her through the gate, past Nate, and backed her up to the double-seat buggy. Most Amish women, unless they were unwed, didn’t have their own vehicle. Despite the fact it marked her as an unwed maidal, she loved her freedom and kept the horse well-tended and the black fiberglass buggy clean and shined. Although Nate was usually full of talk and questions, he came closer and leaned against a stall rail just watching.
“I have to have these half-moon pies at the Dutch Farm Table before they open at seven,” she explained. “It’s a real challenge in the winter, but I like the time alone to observe everything just waking up, any season of the year.”
“I guess the speed of a buggy gives you time for that. I keep learning about things I thought I had answers to.”
She wasn’t sure if he meant about his investigation or the way they lived here, but she just nodded as she put the crupper under Sally’s tail and the breast strap between her forelegs, then took the feed bag off so she could get the bridle on.
“When your father and brother opened up the barn this morning,” Nate said, “I really looked around in here to get an idea of the preburn layout of the Esh barn. Then I searched German bank barns on VERA’s laptop.”
“Searched?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry. On my computer. I studied up—a crash course on barns with three levels like yours and the Eshes’. I couldn’t believe how your barn exteriors are misleading. I mean, there’s so much more space inside than what I expected. It’s like, don’t judge a book by its cover, I guess, like with people, too. Sarah, I don’t want you to get the idea I’m prejudging people, Hannah or Jacob or anyone else.”
Over Sally’s back, their gazes locked and held again, the way they too often did. She always felt a funny fluttering in her lower belly she’d never had with Jacob. This man made her blush, too, but at least her complexion usually hid that.
“I had to ask your friend those questions last night, get her info,” he added in a rush.
“You’re really barking up the wrong tree with her.”
“You said that about Jacob, too.”
“She loves her parents, but they wanted her back in the nest under their roof and rules, and it led to harsh words. She was crushed to see the barn was gone.”
“Sarah, she’s still bitter about all that. She’s chosen to be about as far from Amish as she can get, despite the fact she’s still dressed in black.”
“She would never burn the barn!” she exploded at him, then put her hand up over her mouth as if she’d cursed. This man brought out all kinds of emotions in her she’d never known were there, or at least ones she’d never let out before. Why couldn’t she just be like other Amish women, content with her lot in life? Why did she have to yearn for the forbidden—to paint pictures, that is?
“Okay, thanks for that testimony about Hannah,” Nate said, his voice clipped. “You’re starting to sound like an expert witness, but I guess I asked for that. See you later. I’ve got a long day over at the site of the burn.”
As he strode away, she was upset she’d lost her temper. Patience and humility, not anger and pride, were what she needed. She went back to harnessing Sally but turned her head to watch Nate walk away. The man was too lanky, and she’d like to feed him up good. His head was down while he punched something into a little cell-phone type thing with both thumbs. He headed toward the back lane where he had VERA parked. She might have just kept staring, except Sally snorted and stamped her foot.
Just as she was heading out of the end of the lane onto the road, Sarah heard the purr of the big engine behind her. Nate in VERA, of course. Was this driven man, who needed some speed bumps in his life, as edgy as she? Was he annoyed to be slowed down by the buggy, impatient with their ways? May the Lord forgive her, but sometimes, Sarah had to admit, she was impatient with her people’s ways. But right now she hoped Sally didn’t leave any horse apples for his fancy vehicle to drive through. At least he knew better than to honk like some moderns.
As Sarah headed toward town under real horsepower, she craned her neck to watch VERA as Nate went the other way, toward the Esh farm.
Because a TV reporter with her cameraman and several tourists had been standing out in front, Ray-Lynn Logan had opened the Dutch Farm Table a half hour early. She was already there with a couple of her Amish waitresses, anyway, and her profits had been down lately. So she was glad to see Sarah Kauffman coming in the back door with the day’s supply of half-moon pies, which sold much better than doughnuts. Full-size schnitz and shoofly pies and other Amish desserts like date-nut and carrot cake came in from area bakers.
“Not late, am I?” Sarah asked. She was out of breath and looked as rosy-cheeked as she did in bitter winter.
“Not our heroine of the day,” Ray-Lynn told her, taking the basket from her hands and handing it to Leah Schwartz, who took it through the swinging doors into the kitchen. “You should see the special edition Peter put out. Got a real nice ad for the restaurant in it, too, but then he’d better, since he owns part of it. There’s a copy on the counter. Oh, by the way, he’d like a more in-depth interview with you, and I’ll bet the outside media coming in would, too. Two of those critters just left.”
“No. It’s a blessing I just happened to spot the fire first and I don’t want to sound prideful. Someone else made the call.”
“And he’s got a lot to say—Jacob, that is,” Ray-Lynn said, tapping her index finger on the middle paragraphs of the article under the large photo of the flaming barn behind the dark silhouettes of firefighters. “He kind of makes it sound like you were working together to call the fire in.”
“Oh, rats,” Sarah said, and leaned over the paper on the counter. “I did not tell him directly to make the call, but I figured he’d have a phone on him, even if half the other rumspringa kids did, too. I have refused more than once to see him, and we are not in cahoots of any kind.”
In cahoots, that’s a good one, Ray-Lynn thought, pouring Sarah a cup of coffee, then reaching in her quilted apron pocket for money to take back to her mother and sister. The Amish had a fresh way of saying some things. Sarah Kauffman might not want to be in cahoots with Jacob Yoder, but she’d sure like to get Sarah to be in cahoots with her about doing some paintings Ray-Lynn could sell for her. The girl was extremely talented, and Ray-Lynn was willing to risk a lot to bring her Amish art to the world.
“I see there’s a big interview here with Fireman Getz,” Sarah said, obviously trying to shift the subject. “It says he has a broken arm but he doesn’t regret going in first to try to put out the flames.”
“More fool he, and that Levi Miller, too. Levi’s cousin to my waitress Anna, you know, and she says both men got released from the regional hospital. Well, I bet I know why Mike Getz played the hero. He and his gal, Cindee what’s-her-name—”
“Cindee Kramer. She works in the hardware store where I buy my paint.”
“Right. Anyhow, they’re not married but been living together—”
“I know. That takes extra nerve around here.”
“They got into a real tiff in the restaurant last week, something about she didn’t look up to him anymore, but I’ll bet she does now. She had a real conniption at table eight in the back room. I was afraid he was going to start throwing things, but I’ll bet he could run for mayor after those heroics,” she said, pointing to the picture of him, smiling, no doubt, prefire, all decked out in his fireman gear. “What? You’re frowning again.”
“Nothing. I will just give the devil his due.”
Ray-Lynn wasn’t sure what that meant, coming from an Amish girl, but she saw outside what she’d been looking for and muttered to herself, “Speak of the devil…”
The sheriff’s shiny black cruiser with that bold light bar had pulled up to parallel park in front. The restaurant door opened, and Sheriff Jack Freeman came in, hanging his hat on a wooden peg, his sharp gaze scanning the room as if he’d find a robbery or kidnapping in progress in this little burg.
“Morning, Ray-Lynn, Sarah,” he said matter-of-factly. He passed them with a nod and his version of an official smile, then sat in his usual spot at the curve of the counter facing the door with his back to the wall so he could keep a good eye on things. Ray-Lynn used to scurry to pour him coffee and take his order—even when she knew what he’d order already—but she’d decided on another tactic now. No falling at his feet, just take it easy, a bit hard to get.
While Sarah scowled over the newspaper, Ray-Lynn sauntered down behind the counter and nonchalantly poured Jack his coffee during their usual chitchat about the weather. She was up for that much of their old routine, at least. She knew darn well he’d want sausage gravy on buttermilk biscuits and two eggs over easy, but she asked, “What will it be today, Sheriff? I’m sure you’ve got a busy day ahead with the extra folks in town, so I’ll send someone right over to get your order.”
She left him staring wide-eyed at her while she went over to fill other people’s cups at the tables.
Jack Freeman was a few years older than Ray-Lynn but he was holding up better than most men his age. No paunch, very few gray hairs, just enough to make his auburn hair looked frosted at the temples. Unlike the bearded Amish men, he was clean-cut, something he’d never changed from his former marine days. He always looked slightly tanned, which set off his clear, brown eyes and white teeth. His black uniform was military clean and crisp-looking, pretty surprising since he’d been divorced for years and Homestead’s one dry cleaner had gone out of business. It annoyed Ray-Lynn that she got kind of shivery around him. The man exuded authority and control, both of which she was itching to dismantle, at least in private, with her Southern gal feminine wiles. But he seemed to put up a big wall when she came on soft and sweet, so her new strategy was worth a try.
She ignored him but made a big fuss over seating four tourists from Columbus, chatting away to them, while Anna Miller took the sheriff’s order. Good—she could tell he didn’t like the lack of personal attention. It was another risk, but she’d decided some things were worth it.
She walked back to Sarah while Jack took out his own copy of the special edition of the Home Valley News. It was only about eight pages this time—a lot of ads, about half of them for businesses Peter had his finger in, even the Buggy Wheel Shop, which had only Amish customers who would go there to buy new buggies whether there was an ad or not.
“The rest of that fire article’s not so bad, is it?” Ray-Lynn asked Sarah. “As I’ve told you a hundred times before, you’re a fabulous artist and should be aiming higher than just quilt squares on barns. I know you’re yearning to do more than copy patterns even if you do choose the colors.”
“I wish he hadn’t put my age in here,” Sarah whispered, looking as if he’d written that she was a serial killer. “It sounds weird that a twenty-four-year-old woman still has her maiden name. ‘Sarah Kauffman, age twenty-four, from the Kauffman farm next door.’ Why do papers think they have to tell stuff like that, and who told him my age?”
“Listen to your friend Ray-Lynn, my girl. At twenty-four, you are still what the big, bad world would consider a young chick, believe me. Now, I know Amish women your age are usually wed by now, but it’ll happen. Besides, not to sound like a broken record, but you’ve got other talents, and I’m real sorry to see that first pretty quilt square you did got burned up with the barn. You’ve got to branch out, so my offer is still open for you to paint an Amish scene on that long wall right there instead of that old-fashioned wallpaper. I’ll never forget those beautiful drawings you showed me from your sketchbook.”
“Thanks, Ray-Lynn. I haven’t shown anyone but Hannah, Ella and you those drawings, so I guess we’re keeping each other’s secrets, right?”
“And secrets they will remain for now,” Ray-Lynn said. The thing was, Sarah had eyes like a hawk. Maybe all artists did. Though Ray-Lynn had tried to hide it, her Amish friend had picked up on the fact that she was smitten with Jack Freeman. “You just keep that offer about the mural in mind now,” she urged Sarah. “I’d pay you well for your time if we can just get permission from your powers-that-be around here.”
“Can I take this copy of the paper to show the arson investigator?”
“Why, sure. But if you don’t want to be interviewed, better steer clear of the Esh place. I think a camera crew and a few others went out there to talk to him—oops, more customers to be seated.”
“I’m supposed to take some things to the Eshes, a chicken dinner when Mamm and Lizzie get it ready.”
Though Ray-Lynn knew the Amish rarely showed affection in public, she gave Sarah’s shoulders a quick squeeze. As she passed Jack, heading to seat more folks who’d come in the front door, she said, “I’ll have Anna refresh that coffee while you’re waiting for whatever you ordered, Sheriff.”
5
IT WAS ARSON. BY NOON, NATE KNEW FOR SURE. He’d been interrupted more than once by curious Amish or others. Bishop Esh had said he trusted Nate’s judgment so, with two of his sons, he was planting a cornfield to the south.
Nate had stonewalled the Cleveland reporter and her cameraman, though they still hung around by their van which read News Live at Five. He’d phoned the state fire marshal from the privacy of VERA. It was going to be an interesting case file. He hoped he wouldn’t be recalled until the area supervisor returned from his daughter’s wedding in Hawaii. He’d told Mark he had some leads already, though he hadn’t told him he was convinced that there’d be another arson. He had nothing to back that up but his instincts, and Mark was a just-the-facts guy.
As he left VERA, Nate saw Sarah driving her buggy into the lane. His insides flip-flopped—probably, he told himself, because the reporter had asked him if he knew where Sarah was and he’d said no. He hadn’t exactly lied. She could have been anywhere on the three miles of road between here and the restaurant in Homestead.
“How’s it going?” she asked as she reined in.
“Arson for sure,” he told her. “I’m going to point out the evidence to the bishop when he comes back for lunch.”
“We call it dinner,” she said, “and I’ve got it right here all packed up in my buggy. A lot more food than you moderns are used to, I bet, but we’ve all been up early working hard—you, too.”
“If I ate like your people, I’d gain more than evidence about an arson around here.”
“You could afford to gain some weight,” she said, then blushed. “I mean, someone who jogs and walks all over like you do, even though you drive your truck, too.”
“VERA’s a gas hog, but I still call her my home away from home. But I’m now as much of an expert on banked, three-story barns as I am on VERA.”
Twice he’d spent late hours online and learned that banked barns were also called German barns—no surprise there. What was banked was the slanted, hard-packed earth leading up to the broad double doors. The only other entry was in the stone-constructed lower level. Originally, that was where the barn animals had stalls, though he’d observed that the local Amish kept their horses in stalls and their buggies stored on the second level called the threshing floor. A haymow or loft was on the third level under a peaked roof with a cupola on top to aerate the barn. Windows were small and minimal but threw enough light inside, especially if the double doors were open.
The most important thing he’d learned was that the window or windows were all on the third level. So the arsonist had to have been up in the loft or on a ladder to get lit trailers to go through a window. Sarah’s wooden ladders and scaffolding had been burned from outside the barn—but had they been used by the arsonist first?
“So how is VERA as a home?” she was asking.
“Cozy, maybe too cozy. I’ll show you around, and then you’ll see what I mean.”
He didn’t say so but he found the confines of the VERA’s high-tech combination of lab/office/storage/bathroom/bedroom a little claustrophobic, especially out here in the wide-open Home Valley surrounded by rolling hills. If the weather stayed mild and dry, he planned to keep sleeping out under the stars. It brought back the best memory he had of his dad when they used to camp out in Southern Ohio down by Old Man’s Cave, before his whole childhood went up in flames.
“By the way,” he said when their mutual staring in silence stretched out a bit too long, “you’d better stay in the house if you don’t want to be interviewed. As you can see by their vehicle, the TV folks are still here.” His BlackBerry tone sounded, and he looked down to see if it was his boss again. “I’ve got to take this,” he told her. “It’s my foster mother, and I always take her calls.”
“Foster mother?”
“I’ll explain sometime.”
“I’ll head straight in with the food and come out with the Eshes when you announce the arson,” she said with a snap of her reins. “Unless someone tells the TV people who I am, they won’t notice me separate from the others at all.”
But even as he took the call, he couldn’t help thinking that Sarah somehow stood out. Even among the Plain People, she didn’t seem plain at all.
Everyone ate before hearing Nate’s verdict, maybe, Sarah thought, to fortify themselves for what was to come. Then, too, though no one said so, it was possible the bishop was hoping the media outside would leave them alone to hear about the autopsy of the barn fire in private. That’s what it felt like, Bishop Esh had said, an autopsy of his dead barn, with the burial and then, hopefully, the resurrection yet to come.
At the Esh table the number of guests swelled, but then Mamm and Lizzie had sent over enough fried chicken, biscuits, gravy, applesauce, chowchow, dandelion salad, schnitz pie and rhubarb crunch to feed an entire work crew. Churchwomen were taking turns sending a noon meal to the bishop’s family for a while. The Eshes had insisted that Sarah, Nate and Mike Getz, who showed up and had just done an interview with the Cleveland TV station, join them. Also, two church elders, Reuben Schrock and Eli Hostetler, who both had Sarah’s squares painted on their barns, dropped by in time for dessert and coffee.
Sarah saw that Nate ate like a field hand, after they’d just had that talk about his gaining weight. And she also noted that Nate watched Mike Getz like a hawk.
“I know now it was a bad move,” Mike, a big guy with a shaved head and goatee, admitted. “I shouldn’t have rushed inside to try to pull some of the buggies out, but the barn looked like a goner and I wanted to save something.”
He ate with his left hand since his right was in a cast. Sarah could see the clean, white plaster had writing on it already, including in pink ink, “Love Ya! Cindee” and a large heart. Mike’s head seemed to sit directly on his broad, slanted shoulders—a man with no neck, and not, she thought, a lot of sense.
“But a broken bone’s a small price to pay,” he went on, his mouth partly full, “to help a neighbor.”
Strictly speaking, Mike wasn’t a neighbor of the Eshes but lived much closer to Elder Reuben Schrock and his family, over on Fish Creek Road.
“Have you rushed into other buildings on fire?” Nate asked. The entire Esh family, along with Sarah and Nate, had eaten first and it was mostly men at the table now, with Sarah and Esh daughter Naomi clearing dishes and serving more pie and coffee. Naomi was betrothed, and Sarah knew how badly she missed having her older sister Hannah here to help plan for the big event next autumn. Well, Sarah thought, maybe she and Ella could somehow convince Hannah to attend that day—if Sarah could talk Ella into building bridges with Hannah.
“I’ve always done what I could,” Mike Getz was telling Nate. “I’ve been working with the volunteer department since I was twenty—for six years. Man, I think your job must be really fascinating, Mr. MacKenzie.”
“It is,” Nate said, “and I’d be happy to talk to you about it. I always like to meet dedicated firefighters.”
Mike Getz just beamed. As she stood in the doorway to the kitchen, Sarah wondered if Mike had just gone to number one on Nate’s list of suspects.
“We have something to announce,” Reuben Schrock said, and cleared his throat. “Bishop Esh, we would like to hold a barn raising soon as possible with an auction of goods even sooner to raise some cash for the project and to build up the alms fund for the rebuilding and other needs.”
“We are grateful,” Bishop Esh said, his voice quiet, his face serious. Sarah could hear his wife, Mattie, standing beside her, sniff back a sob.
The other elder, Eli Hostetler, spoke. “Date for the raising to be determined, when we can clear the space and order the wood and all. But we’ll be announcing the auction for next weekend at the schoolhouse, lest it rains.”
Sarah knew her family and others would donate quilts and that outsiders would snap them up. For once, she almost wished she liked quilting bees, but she never had, standing out like a black sheep among the other skilled-at-stitching Amish sisters. At least some of Daad’s birdhouses would be for sale, a few things she had decorated. She wished she could contribute some painted quilt squares on wooden wall plaques, but her father had said he didn’t think it was a good idea for her to be branching out too much.
When everyone rose from the table—still not hurried—and Nate passed Sarah, he whispered, “So is that alms fund like Amish insurance? Will you explain later?” He kept moving, not waiting for an answer.
They all gathered outside where Nate, standing knee-deep in the black bones of the barn, took over. The TV reporter, a blonde woman, scribbled notes while her cameraman held out a microphone on a long pole. The bishop had asked them not to film, and they’d agreed. It wasn’t so much, Bishop Esh had explained to the reporter, that the Amish saw still or moving pictures as making graven images, which the Bible warned about, but that having one’s picture taken or being featured in a magazine or newspaper story could make one prideful—that is, feel better than or separate from the community.
Sarah thought again of her interview with Peter Clawson, who had just come roaring in in his truck. Had she been prideful to speak to him and to be so pleased with the printed color pictures of her quilt squares adorning Amish barns? Community oneness was everything to her people, their essence, their very survival. So why couldn’t she squash her desire to paint entire pictures of the Amish? Defiant independence to chase a personal dream fueled by a God-given talent had ruined Hannah’s life so far.
Word really must have spread that the arson investigator was going to give his verdict. Most of the Lantz family from the third adjoining farm buggied in, including Sarah’s friend Ella, her parents and four of her siblings. Sarah noted that Barbara, nearly sixteen, went over to stand by Gabe, but he shook his head at something she said and shifted a few steps away. Ella came over to stand by Sarah, linking arms with her as Nate’s voice rang out in the hush. It was disturbed only by the spring breeze turning the windmill, birdsong and the occasional snorting of the buggy horses tied to the fence rails near where Hannah and Sarah had stood together just last night. She should be here, Sarah thought, and whispered that to Ella. “Ya, Hannah should be home with her family and you and me, just like in the old days,” Ella whispered as Nate’s deep voice rang out.
“Arson is often proved by investigators finding a path of foreign accelerants that ignited, then spread, the flames. Accelerants can include grease, kerosene, gasoline and paint thinner, but I’ve been able to eliminate the accidental spill-age of those or even the presence of those. Besides finding a bunch of matches—unlit—outside of the barn, I found evidence of accelerants within, so let me explain and point that out.”
His cell phone tone sounded. Sarah noted he ignored it.
“The front door frame,” he said, pointing to a big, tumbled beam with a blackened metal handle on it, “shows what we call alligatoring—shiny blisters.” Several people leaned closer. The Cleveland reporter and Peter Clawson scratched away on their notepads.
“This indicates a rapid rise in temperature of the blaze, so nothing really smoldered. Evidence here,” he said, continually moving through the debris and pointing things out, “indicates it spread unusually fast, which eyewitnesses corroborated. These beams were from the roof—third or loft floor. Also, the fire seems to have started in more than one place, one at the back of the barn near a window, another near the east side window. Multiple V-pattern burns are also major clues pointing to arson.
“But how did someone reach those high windows to get the fire going in the loft where hay was stored? I’m surmising that the arsonist used one or both of the ladders that were on the ground outside the barn, which were then destroyed in the fire. In that respect, the arsonist either knew the ladders were available or stumbled into being able to use them. It meant he or she could stay outside the barn rather than going in and climbing the built-in ladders within to start the fire.”
The arsonist had used her ladders! Why hadn’t he told her that—warned her he’d say that? At least no one but Mattie Esh so much as glanced her way, but it made her sick that her equipment might have been a part of this—and that Nate had not confided that to her earlier when he told her it was arson.
“What might this accelerant be?” he went on. “I’m still running some tests in my mobile lab, but kerosene residue can be recovered from beneath floorboards, which it permeates. It can be found under the ash-and-water pastelike substance a hot, fast fire leaves behind. That was probably the case here, especially on the third floor or loft level, which was the ceiling of the threshing floor level. Bishop Esh reports that no kerosene was in the barn, not even an old lantern, and no gasoline in the farm equipment. No green hay to give off methane to cause spontaneous combustion, the latex, water-soluble paint cans were sealed.” A few heads turned Sarah’s way. “So my report, sad to say, in such a helpful, concerned community is criminal arson by a fairly primitive incendiary device lit from at least two points through small window access on the loft level.”
“Any way to catch the firebug with what you got?” Mike Getz spoke up.
“Arsonists have a way of being caught in a trap of their own making,” Nate said, staring at the big man. “The Esh fire is a crime and will be severely prosecuted by the state fire marshal’s department in the state courts of Ohio. The penalty for such is long prison time. So spread the word that arson is never, never worth the risk.”
Sarah noted that the portly, ruddy-faced Peter Clawson kept nodding fiercely, as he stood a few people in front of her. Sarah pulled Ella off to the side before he could turn around and ask her more questions. But she heard him tell the Cleveland reporter, “You can’t say the guy isn’t eminently quotable. You got some great sound bites, and I got another great article for the Home Valley News, and you can quote me on that.”
The next day an Amish work crew of young men—overseen by Nate—removed the remnants of the barn. They hefted the ruined debris out of the stone basement level where a lot had fallen and hauled it away in their work wagons with Nate keeping an eye on every piece for more clues. Then the Amish scraped and raked the place flat, down to the stone foundation on which the new barn would be erected.
It was hot and sweaty work, even just mostly doing the overseeing. Nate needed a swim in the pond near the woodlot—who needed a shower when the old swimming hole was there?—and some coffee to keep going. The test on the composition of the residue from under the old barn boards had proved to be kerosene, but that was in full supply around here and didn’t necessarily point to an Amish arsonist.
He drove VERA back past the Kauffman place, wishing he’d see Sarah, but no one was out for once—just laundry flapping on the line, blacks and pastels, men’s and women’s, big and small, the daily life of an Amish family, all hung tight together.
He parked VERA and stripped to his underwear and waded into the pond. When he saw the water was deep enough, he dived. It felt fantastic, cool, refreshing. Like a kid he swam on his back, splashing. He should have brought some soap out. He floated, then treaded water in the center of the pond, listening to the sounds of the wind through the maples and oaks, birdsong. He stared up at the blue sky with cotton clouds for he didn’t know how long.
Suddenly a voice called out, “You shouldn’t swim alone, you know. It could be dangerous.”
6
“DANGEROUS HOW?” NATE ASKED. HE SPUN AROUND to see Sarah with a large package in her arms.
“This just came for you at the house—FedEx,” she called to him. “Now that you’ve announced it was arson and you’re going to find the arsonist and send him to jail, what if he tries to hurt you?”
Nate swam toward her side of the pond, his muscular arms lifting from the surface at each stroke. When he was close enough to talk easily he stopped and treaded water. “You startled me, though I was expecting that package. It’s my fire protection hood. It wasn’t packed in VERA when I left. And thanks for worrying about my safety, but arsonists are usually cowards about confrontation. The arsonist wants my attention, not to get rid of me, but I’ll be on my guard.”
You won’t if you’re splashing around like a kid and not paying attention to who’s approaching, she thought, but she just nodded. As he remained fairly motionless about twenty feet away, she could see a lot of skin through the water. What if he was in there buck naked, because why would he have brought an ausländer swimsuit?
“So you fight fires, too?” she asked, hugging the package to her breasts. She’d come out here barefoot, a common practice among her people in the warm weather, especially on their own property. She fought the desire to sit down and dangle her feet in the pond. Though she’d done that a hundred times and her family shared ownership of this woodlot with the Eshes and the Lantzes, it suddenly felt like forbidden, foreign territory.
“I don’t fight fires if I can help it, but I don’t hesitate to go into a partially burned building or even one on fire if it will help me trap an arsonist. If you wouldn’t mind turning around for a minute, I’m not exactly clothed in here, and I’ll get out.”
“Oh, sure. Right,” she said, and sat down facing away with her back to the pond. Beneath the shade of her bonnet, her cheeks flamed. She stretched out her legs. Her toes barely peeked from under her moss-green skirt. “I’ll bet it feels good in there,” she said, hoping he didn’t think she was fishing for an invitation to join him. His voice had faded a bit, and she heard the water rippling as he evidently swam away.
“Sure does. I’ve got a washbasin and head—sorry, toilet—in VERA but no shower.”
“I’ll bet Daad will let you use ours if you want. I was going to send Gabe out with this package, but he took his buggy over to see his friend, Barbara Lantz, two farms over.”
“I take it your family’s close to them, but no quilt square on their barn yet?”
“It was decided first the bishop, then two elders, then the Millers wanted one. I’ve done those, but since then, no one else has come forward to ask for another. But your mentioning the Lantzes reminds me there’s a second reason to be careful in this pond. There’s a strange, cold current in it sometimes,” she said, still talking toward the trees. “I think there’s an underground spring that flows through it, especially after a rain. When we were teenagers and swimming here, Ella did a little jackknife dive and just kind of stayed under. Hannah and I about went off our beans—panicked, you know. We dived and found her and pulled her up but we could feel the colder current pulling us deep down, very scary. We had to almost pump the water out of her. She—well, she changed after that, got very rigid and strict with herself and others, always followed every rule.”
“So Ella Lantz owes you two her life,” he said, his voice coming closer until he stood in front of her. He’d pulled his jeans on over his wet legs and his black T-shirt stuck to the muscles of his chest and his flat belly. His short black hair looked even darker all wet. For a second she couldn’t recall what he’d just asked.
“Oh, we don’t think of it that way,” she told him. “It was the Lord who saved her, and we were just His way of doing it. No thanks needed, and we didn’t even let outsiders know, though someone blabbed, and it got into the Home Valley News.”
Nate reached down to her, and she gave him his package before she realized that he had meant to give her a hand up. His skin was cool from the water, or else hers was hot. Both barefoot, they walked back around the pond where he had VERA parked beside two big oaks. The vehicle had a tall, thin tower projecting upward from the back, and from that sprouted a five-branched antenna.
“Peter Clawson’s really got his ear to the ground around here, doesn’t he?” Nate asked. “I need to interview him about any leads he may have.”
“He keeps a lot of Amish employed in businesses he at least owns part of—the Dutch Farm Table, the Buggy Wheel Shop, a bunch of others. But his paper is his pride and joy.”
“Can I show you around VERA?” he offered with a sweep of his hand toward his big, worldly buggy.
“I’d like that, but better not right now. I have to get back. Gabe wants to see it, too, so can we come out later? And, oh, Mamm says come to supper—evening meal, not half the amount we eat midday, in about two hours.”
“Tell her thanks. I’d love to.”
She wanted to throw caution to the sweet breeze that had begun to dry and ruffle his hair and go into the back of VERA with him—it was cozy there, he’d said—but she knew she shouldn’t. She was already too attracted to him, like he had some kind of magnetic field and she was a compass needle.
“Before you go, then,” he said as he walked her back a ways toward the farm, “will you explain the alms fund one of the elders mentioned? It sounds like private Amish insurance, but I thought that was forbidden.” Forbidden, verboten, danced through her mind as she darted another glance up into his intense, blue-sky gaze. Again, she had to unscramble her thoughts to grab for the right thing to say.
“Not forbidden if we keep it within the Amish community,” she explained. “We do not pay into worldly insurance companies or the American government’s Social Security or ever use such funds, because health is a gift from God and that would be gambling against that in a way. But we do collect a percentage of everyone’s wages on a regular basis and use that to support those in the group who have big medical bills—or something like a house or barn burned. The church deacon collects and puts the money in a savings account until we need it. No big corporations profit. The family in need does pay a small part of their bills first, before our fund is used.”
“Like a deductible,” he said, nodding. “It’s really a private, small group insurance. Very smart—amazing…” He looked at her closely and he drew out the last word so it almost sounded like Ray-Lynn’s drawl. His gaze caressed her as he peered within the dim shelter of her black bonnet.
“I’ve got to get back,” she said, quickening her steps. “See you for supper and then Gabe and I can take a look at VERA later, if it’s okay.”
She didn’t want to seem like she was running away, but in a way she was. Standing so close to him, both of them in their bare feet, had made her think of Adam and Eve in the Garden, and look at all the trouble they’d got into!
If the bountiful Amish evening meal was what Sarah described as less food, Nate was as astonished by that as he was by his crazy attraction to her. It was probably just the fact she was so different from any woman he’d ever known, he tried to tell himself—bright but naive, stubborn yet humble, plain yet stunning, modest yet sexy without even trying. Man, he had to keep his mind on the food and the conversation, because her father, Ben Kauffman, had been drilling him about some things and here came another calmly couched but key question. At least he’d waited for this one until they were on the coffee and fabulous strawberry shortcake with home-churned vanilla ice cream. How Nate could put this dessert away after chowing down on sauerbraten, homemade bread, German potato salad and noodles with gravy, he wasn’t sure, but maybe he was about to pay the price for this great meal.
“So far, Mr. MacKenzie,” Ben Kauffman said, “have you found any proof, even hints, that the barn burning might be someone upset by Sarah’s painted quilt square?”
“No, sir, I haven’t. But it’s something I’ve considered and will stay aware of. I realize that such a work of art is to be useful—not just decoration.”
“In that case,” Ben Kauffman went on, “I will allow—ask—Sarah to paint a square for our barn. I ran it by Bishop Esh. I want to stand up for the earlier decision that she be allowed to paint her patterns on Home Valley barns to bring more visitors in. Amish businesses are slow. Orders for my gazebos, kids’ playhouses, birdhouses and other items are down. And I want everyone to know that I believe her painting was not and should not be a target of arson.”
Nate could see Sarah was surprised and elated. Her amber eyes filled with tears she blinked back. “Danki, Daad,” she said. Darn, Nate thought, if he wasn’t actually catching on to some of the German they used. Sadly, he hadn’t been able to speak to her elderly grandmother at all. She rarely spoke English anymore, and seemed pretty afraid of him, not to mention confused about things. She sat at the other end of the table, eating, but with her eyes on him as if he might leap at her. Sarah had introduced them, then whispered something to the old lady about him being here to help and that he could be trusted. Also at the table were Sarah’s mother, Anna, Gabe and Martha.
It really impressed him how the Amish generations stuck together. When he’d lost his parents in the tragedy, how he’d wished he’d had a grandparent or even an aunt and uncle to take him in. At least his childless neighbors down the street, Jim and Mary Ellen Bosley, had been willing to give him a foster home. But living so close to where it all happened had been hard. In a way, that empty lot where what people called “the death house” had sat haunted him all through his youth—and yet today.
“I’ll have to replace my ladders,” Sarah said.
“While you paint here, you can use the barn one and only buy one,” her father said. “And those planks for the long tables you can stand on.”
“I have a ladder in my truck Sarah can use,” Nate offered, “at least while I’m here. And a safer scaffolding than planks—if you don’t mind the suggestion. I won’t need them—unless there’s another blaze to investigate, and I hope not.”
“We pray not,” Anna Kauffman said.
“If the man in black comes back, there will be more fires.” The old lady spoke for the first time and in English. “I heard Sarah tell Martha the fire burned the barn like a beast devouring it. That’s what it will be like again if that monster keeps sneaking around my house at night.”
Nate could see Sarah was embarrassed by the outburst. “If you mean Nate here,” Sarah said, leaning toward the woman and taking her hand, “he’s only in the neighborhood for a while to help. And maybe you just dreamed the man in black.”
“No, I saw him with his horrible, glowing eyes when I got up to go to the bathroom. Ya, I did!”
Sarah’s parents just looked at each other as Sarah helped the old woman away from the table. She was obviously demented. On the other hand, if she had seen someone, Nate wondered who, because it hadn’t been him.
Ray-Lynn knew Peter Clawson was a bit of a loner, but she couldn’t argue his generosity to others. Whether it was large tips for her Amish waitresses or his funding of local businesses, the man was magnanimous to a fault. And, if she thought she managed to catch all the local gossip, she was a rank amateur compared to Peter, who seemed to know almost everything about everyone. Why, if it wouldn’t be frowned on around here, he’d probably run something called the Home Valley Enquirer. She sometimes shuddered to think that he probably knew what kind of toilet paper she used at her house, though at least she’d stopped his just dropping in.
“I suppose you’re really going to talk up the Saturday auction to benefit the barn raising,” she said to him as she rang up his evening meal at the cash register.
“If not talk up, print up. You bet I will,” he said. “And not only for a broader distribution of the paper. The regular Thursday edition will have a full-page spread on it. The layout is already done. Lots of folks far and wide will come in for Amish goods at an auction, especially the cooking and the quilts.”
“I just heard about the auction and chicken barbecue from one of my girls,” she admitted as she handed Peter his change and watched him take a peppermint and a toothpick from her counter. “But then you always have your ear to the ground when it comes to business.”
“That’s right, Ray-Lynn,” he said with a wink as he smoothed his straight brown hair back from his forehead. “And, let’s face it, you are one of my most important business affairs.”
She could have kicked him, but it seemed no one else had heard. She didn’t like the suggestive way he’d worded that, because she’d done a good job holding him at bay. A good business partner, yes, but not a partner for life—no way. He was single, but he didn’t seem to look at women—that is, besides her.
Peter, at age forty-five, was balding and it obviously bothered him. Why his being overweight didn’t, she wasn’t sure, if he was so doggone concerned about his appearance. At least with his hair, he wasn’t to the stage where he’d tried a comb-over, but he was always messing with it. “Even if it’s monkey business, I’m on top of it, so don’t get too close to our illustrious sheriff, you hear now,” he added with a smug grin.
For one moment, Ray-Lynn was at a loss for words. Now how had he found out about that? Surely, Sarah hadn’t talked, so it must have been her own falling all over Jack that Peter had seen. Well, ding-dang. He was kidding her, of course, yet there was a strange edge to his voice. Surely, as well as Peter had seemed to take it that she wouldn’t date him, he wasn’t jealous.
“Monkey business?” she countered, hands on hips. “You’d better keep your mind and newspaper on the serious stuff around here, and there’s plenty of that lately.”
“I don’t like to show off my extensive knowledge of newspaper trivia, my Southern belle, but monkey business was what brought down presidential candidate Gary Hart, not to mention John Edwards. I suppose you don’t remember the details, but Gary Hart dared the press to follow him around, and they did…and found that married man—pillar of American morality—with a young mistress aboard a yacht called Monkey Business. Do you remember that?”
“No, Peter, actually, I don’t. I must have been too busy serving up mint juleps and sitting on the veranda with Scarlett O’Hara that year.”
“My point is, the newspaper people Hart dared to find out his business brought him down, just as the National Enquirer torpedoed John Edwards. Goodbye presidency, goodbye power. Ah, the power of the press. I’ll see you tomorrow, Ray-Lynn,” he concluded, speaking as usual almost in one breath as he went out and let the wooden door swing closed behind him.
Ray-Lynn wouldn’t have minded a bit if it had swung closed faster and hit him in his big rear end.
There was still a good hour of daylight left when Gabe and Sarah accompanied Nate to see VERA and to check if his ladder would suit for the quilt square she planned to paint on her own family’s barn. Though she would have preferred to have painted the entire, realistic scene of the farm, Sarah was thrilled to have another pattern to paint, one she was being allowed to select this time. And she was touched that her father believed in her work, especially when he’d been reluctant at first. More than that, she was excited to see VERA’s insides at last. Gabe was, too. He kept chattering about wanting to sit in the driver’s seat, no doubt dreaming about driving the big truck, whatever was in the back of it. As for her own dreams…
“Gabe, I’d like to ask you a question about the night of the fire,” Nate said as the three of them walked along the farm lane toward the woodlot. “On the level now, I take it some of the kids in their running-around years try smoking cigarettes.”
“Some,” Gabe said, nodding so hard his bangs bounced on his forehead under his straw hat. “A few even try pot. We’re allowed. I know it’s not good. Some kids have problems giving it up later, even tobacco cigs, I mean. You know, after they join the church, but, yeah, it’s kind of common, like maybe having a coupla beers.”
“So is there any chance someone could have sneaked across the field, maybe been around the Esh barn the night of your party but, because the party, at least inside the barn, was chaperoned by your mother and sister, wanted more privacy?”
To Sarah’s dismay, Gabe cheeks went as bright as a polished Red Delicious apple. She bit her lower lip to keep from either trying to help him out or questioning him herself. She recalled how out of breath and red-cheeked he’d been when he’d rushed into the barn to tell her Jacob was outside. Could he have come from way across the field and not only been outside their barn?
“I don’t think so,” Gabe said. “A coupla guys were smoking regular cigs outside behind the buggies—not me—but I have a time or two.”
“I’m not blaming anyone for smoking or accusing them of being an arsonist,” Nate assured him with a pat on his shoulder. “As I said, a single dropped cigarette or match in the hay was not how the barn fire started, but if some kids were over there, maybe they saw something—something they don’t even know was important for my investigation. I’d love to talk to them. I need all the help I can get,” he added as they approached VERA. “And I can keep things confidential. You know that word, Gabe—confidential?”
“Ya, Mr. MacKenzie. I can ask around and keep my ears open.”
“Good man,” Nate said, and this time hit his shoulder lightly with a balled fist.
Sarah and Gabe watched as Nate took a small bit of metal and plastic out of his pocket—not quite a key—aimed it in VERA’s direction, then pressed something. They heard a double click and VERA’s lights blinked once as if in welcome—or warning.
“Like a magic lock,” Gabe said as he climbed up into the high cab next to Nate while Sarah sat by the passenger’s side window. “Way cool.”
Sarah kept silent while Nate explained and demonstrated the various dashboard instruments. He showed them how the GPS worked and how the computer could perform other tasks. But Sarah sensed that it was just being in the big truck cab that impressed Gabe most. He kept touching the outer edge of the steering wheel and glancing out through the windshield. So her brother had a good imagination, too, just different from hers, that’s all, she thought.
“Do you want to see the magic techno-cave in back now?” he asked the wide-eyed seventeen-year-old.
“Maybe later,” Gabe said, his eyes aglow. Barbara Lantz, Sarah thought, might be jealous if she saw how her brother lusted—yes, a sin, but so human—after this big, polished, black truck cab.
“Then while I show your sister,” Nate said, “why don’t you slide over in the driver’s seat?”
“Nate!” Sarah blurted.
“Don’t worry,” he said as he got down and closed the door on the rapt boy who now had his hands on the steering wheel. He came around to help Sarah down. “He can’t start it, can’t go anyplace.”
He gestured toward the back of the vehicle, and she went with him. She’d been tempted to see VERA up close earlier today and now she would. After all, as entranced as Gabe was up front, he was here as a kind of chaperone. So what could happen while an Englische ausländer, however entrancing he was, introduced her to his sleek, brilliant, mechanical partner?
7
AT FIRST, NATE SHOWED SARAH THINGS INSIDE VERA she’d expected to see, like firefighting gear and an ax and shovel he’d used to examine the ruins of the Esh barn. He explained a scene light and demonstrated the neat collapsible ladder he said he’d loan her. She figured that was all to break her in easy when he began to show her the array of amazing instruments and machines neatly stowed inside VERA. But she was even more amazed by her feelings being so close to him. Despite Gabe nearby and the back doors being wide open, she felt so alone with Nate as it went from dusk to dark outside.
Nate’s tour of VERA’s marvels with brief explanations of their uses blurred by: a thermal imager, a digital camera, a laser range finder. He showed her handheld, wireless phones. Several years before she’d heard Peter Clawson call them walkie-talkies when he used them with his reporter, before times got tough and he started doing everything at the paper himself, except for some volunteers. Nate showed her his laptop computer and his printer, copier, scanner and fax machine. He said he had a fingerprinting kit but didn’t show it to her. VERA had what he called a camcorder and a fourteen-inch color TV with a built-in DVD that played flat silver disks and worked off a generator or the truck’s batteries.
“The antenna system you’ve seen on the roof is invaluable in the rolling terrain around here,” he went on. “The tower retracts into a rear compartment—here, see—and is raised and lowered by a single switch to go thirty-four feet into the air. Five antennae then pop out so I can get signals for communication.”
Signals for communication—his words echoed in her head. She hoped he didn’t know how his closeness was getting to her, as if his occasional light touch on her elbow or back, the scent of his hair or skin, was giving her body silent signals.
He was right about it being cozy in here. Besides a narrow counter for lab work on both sides of the truck, a skinny central table with newspapers open on it took up some space. She saw the Budget, the latest issue she’d been reading to her grandmother, and the special edition of the Home Valley News spread out with some things underlined or circled in red ink.
“Any clues in there?” she asked.
“Just trying to learn more about the area and the people. You’ve been very helpful with that.”
“Good. We all want to help you find who did it. You told my father you didn’t think the fire had anything to do with my paintings. I appreciate that.”
“I think it’s more likely someone’s out for revenge against Bishop Esh. But I’m glad you’ll be working at home for a while, because I don’t want to imply you don’t have to be careful painting your patterns. That’s what I’m looking for, a pattern. I’m just hoping—praying, as your mother put it—that I can find something that makes sense and leads to the arsonist. I can tell how much those painted quilt squares mean to you.”
“What I’d really like to paint are entire scenes of Amish life,” she blurted, though she was usually so guarded about sharing that. “Ray-Lynn Logan at the restaurant, Hannah and Ella are the only ones I’ve told. To my people, it would be too personal, too prideful, even if I didn’t sign my name on them. Ray-Lynn said I have a folk style, kind of primitive, but that it would suit my subject matter. She said it would be something like a woman called Grandma Moses used to paint. She told me that several months ago, but I remembered the name.”
“So you’d risk being a rebel to paint like that?”
“No, I’m fine doing the barn art. That’s a big step for all of us.”
“Your work might be like Grandma Moses, huh?” he said, leaning over the keyboard of his laptop. He tapped something, and the screen came alive, a picture of a group of men, including him, together under the sign Fire and Explosive Investigations Bureau. Then he typed in the words Grandma Moses and art, then another screen lit up with a series of paintings. He enlarged them one at a time while she stared at them in awe.
“Oh, yes,” she said, her voice shaky, “if those rural hills and farm scenes were Amish—ya, I could do that, only with my own touches, in my own way.” They leaned toward the screen together, so close her bonnet bumped his cheek. “Well, good for Grandma Moses,” Sarah said with a huge sigh, “and that nickname probably means she was elderly, too.”
“She took up painting very late, it says here, leaving the art of embroidery to follow her heart toward a new kind of art.”
To follow her heart… Sarah suddenly felt almost as close to the long-gone Grandma Moses as she did to her own grossmamm Miriam. The Amish didn’t embroider—too fancy—but she’d long ago given up stitching quilts unless she absolutely had to, and she’d suffered socially for that. Still, she did not want to be elderly when she got the gumption to try entire paintings, not with the latex paint she used on the barns but in oil paint on stretched canvas like she’d seen for sale in the back corner of the hardware store in town.
Nate left a big painting on the screen, one called The Old Oaken Bucket, with horses in the field, barns and hills, women in long skirts, even an Amish-looking man in the lower left corner of it. As much as Sarah was impressed with VERA’s insides, that picture perked things up, almost as if it were hung on the wall. It seemed like a gift Nate had given her.
She meant to move away, but they were suddenly wedged in close. Her breasts brushed his chest as she sidestepped.
“Okay,” Nate said, as if he needed to agree to something or was warning himself. “You know, I don’t mean to pry, but I smell lavender perfume or something really nice on you.”
“Not perfume,” she told him, blushing. “My friend Ella Lantz has a great lavender garden and makes soaps and sachets to sell. That’s just my—her soap. If you have a special someone, you might want to buy some of her Lavender Plain products, a gift from Amish country to take home.”
“Ah, no. I mean, there’s no special someone at home.”
She nodded. Their eyes locked again. She felt his intense stare clear down to the pit of her stomach.
Wiping his palms on his jeans, he moved away and peeked out through a small front window at Gabe as he had several times already, then back at her. “He’s still entranced,” he said, tilting his head a bit as if to peer inside her bonnet brim. She had the strongest urge to take it off, but she tried to concentrate on what Nate was saying now. He seemed as desperate to get back to business as she did, so he showed her his firefighting gear and explained how it went on, piece by piece.
“In those storage bins,” he said, pointing, “are PPEs—personal protective equipment—for a chemical or biological incident, coveralls, gloves, overshoes and a filter mask, some overlap from the fire gear I showed you. I’m a first responder in case there’s a terrorist attack. VERA’s equipped for Homeland Security, too.”
“Like 9/11 or a chemical attack, but I feel like there has been a terrorist attack on our Homestead area, too—only, thank the Lord, no one got seriously hurt.”
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