Return to Grace

“Still, I can’t wait around for you to come home to get your statement,” he was saying as his voice tightened and his face became more intent. “Hannah, we got us a cold-blooded murder on our hands, and you two women shot. We don’t need any of this, not after the media mess with those barn burnings last spring.”

“I know. I’m sorry I brought my friends here—there, I mean. I just thought it would be a private picnic.”

Frowning, he took out a small notebook and flipped it open. “How ‘bout you tell me everything you remember happened at the graveyard?”

She went through things, step-by-step—why they came, their arrival, the loud deathrock music …

“Deathrock?” he interrupted, looking up from his scribbling. “That’s its name?”

“Yes, it’s very popular with goths.”

“Yeah, I been researching that. Black clothes is about the only thing you goths have in common with the Amish, far’s I can tell. Go on.”

You goths, he’d said. She’d rebelled against her people by casting her lot with something shocking, something even more verboten than going to the world. Now she’d brought deadly violence, which the Plain People avoided and abhorred, to them.

“The music must have covered any sounds until the gunshots,” she admitted. “I don’t know what kind of gun.”

“Not your worry. A high-speed rifle, like some folks hunt game with. You could have been killed. Your wrist would have been completely shattered if the bullet that hit you hadn’t been partly slowed and deflected by a gravestone that was busted up instead.”

Lena Lantz’s tombstone, Hannah thought. She should have made everyone move away from her grave. Growing up, she’d known Lena Miller well and liked her. Lena had lived on the next farm to Seth and Ella, and they’d all gone to singings and frolics together. The Lantz and Miller children had gotten especially close after Lena’s parents were killed when a car hit their buggy. But she’d never suspected that Lena had her cap set for Seth—or he for her. It took two, oh, yes, she knew that, and in a culture where birth control was forbidden …

“So, you strong enough to talk to Agent Armstrong now?” the sheriff was asking as he flipped his notebook closed. “I promised him I’d cut this short so as not to tire you out. I’ll do a follow-up later on whatever else you might remember.”

“I—sorry, what did you ask?”

“I know this is difficult, Hannah, but with this being a murder investigation, I called in the FBI, and they’re working with the State Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, the BCI. Ever since those young Amish girls got shot and killed in their schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, a couple of years back, the FBI like to swoop in real quick if there’s something like this—something that could smack of a hate crime against the Amish. From a distance, you all might have looked Amish with your long skirts, the guys in hats and such.”

“I— Yes, I understand.”

“So, FBI Special Agent Linc Armstrong would like a few words with you. Now, he stays too long or pushes too hard, you just tell him, but he’s a pretty take-charge guy. This is the third day I’ve kept him away from you. You okay with this?”

“I want to do everything I can to help.”

“Good girl. ‘Preciate it. Oh, Ray-Lynn also said, if you’re coming back and—” he nodded to Mamm, who stood and came closer “—if you won’t be working in your mother’s Amish cap-making business, Ray-Lynn can always use a good hand in the restaurant kitchen or waiting tables.”

“Tell her one good hand would be it for a while, Sheriff, and thanks for all you’re doing to unscramble the mess—the tragedy—I made.”

“Not all your fault by a long shot,” he said. “Well, didn’t mean that about a long shot, but I tell you we’ll find whoever put bullets in some visitors to my bailiwick. Even though you were in the wrong to be carousing there, you didn’t force your friends to come along and you sure as heck didn’t fire a rifle at them.” He lowered his voice. “Now, don’t you let Linc Armstrong get you down,” he said, and made for the door.

“I’m already down,” she whispered to her mother. “I guess I haven’t been myself since that night I argued with Daad.”

“Ya, I know,” she said, bending over the bed. “You just be brave with this government man now, because he already gave Seth a good going-over, and he’s been prying into everyone’s past, especially yours.”

Seth shoved his roofing hammer through a loop in his leather carpenter’s apron and heard the nails in it jingle as he scooted a bit higher on Bishop Esh’s farmhouse roof. The roof had been scarred by the Esh barn fire, set by an arsonist, and he was putting down new shingles. Seth was a timber framer, a barn builder, by trade. He’d overseen work crews erecting big buildings from churches to rustic state park lodges, but he picked up odd jobs between projects. Like everywhere in America, times were tough.

He could see the hilly sweep of much of the Home Valley, where he’d lived all his life. The woodlots were every hue from scarlet to gold, the wheat harvest was in the big barns or silos. Shucked corn was in the Yoder grain elevator, waiting to be hauled out in boxcars. The stalks in the corn maze delighted both Amish and Englische kids and adults as they ran through it. The white farmhouses and smaller grossdaadi hauses, the big red or black barns—three of which he’d built—stood strong and tall in the autumn sun, punctuated by occasional silos and windmills. From this vantage point—he loved heights—he could see the pond where he used to swim with Hannah, a place he had never gone with Lena, and then the graveyard beyond….

That brought his thoughts back to earth. When the authorities took away that bright yellow tape they’d strung along the fence there, he intended to replace Lena’s shattered stone grave marker. He’d been questioned by both Sheriff Freeman and that FBI go-getter, Lincoln Armstrong, interviews he’d expected and accepted. He’d even weathered Armstrong’s implications he might have had a motive to shoot at Hannah, and the fact he’d asked to see his gun to check his ammunition. What he hadn’t been prepared for was being called a hero for helping the wounded women.

His people knew better than to label him that, because such a thing was prideful, but two newspapers and three TV reporters had tried to interview him and take his picture. It was a blessing that the local paper had recently closed and had not been picked up by a new buyer, because it would have been all over this. But up here, he felt safe from his new, sudden fame. Bishop Esh, working in his barn below, had said he’d head off anyone else who came looking for the Amish Hero Saves 2 Lives, Finds Man Dead in Graveyard.

Seth turned and gazed past the chimney, toward his boyhood home, the next farm to the northeast where his brother Abel helped their daad farm. The Miller farm beyond that, Lena’s childhood home, was owned by her only brother. At the far edge of his parents’ property, Seth saw his own small house, which he’d built, where he still lived with little Marlena and where Lena had died suddenly on their kitchen floor of a burst aortic aneurism. She’d had the condition since birth, and no one knew it. He was grateful he didn’t have to add Marlena to the brood of kinder at his parents’ place as usual, but had brought her with him today, thanks to the Eshes’ kind offer to let her play here. Mrs. Esh was at the Wooster hospital with Hannah, but Naomi was keeping an eye on his girl.

Again, though it was the last thing he wanted or needed, his thoughts turned to Hannah. When he’d first seen her in the graveyard, lying almost on Lena’s grave, her hair had looked so scarlet that for one split second he’d feared she’d been shot in the head, too, and was bleeding from her skull. Now why had a pretty woman like her done those things to herself? Black eye paint around those blue-green eyes and dark strokes covering her blond, arched eyebrows. Her beautiful hair, once long and honey-blond, hacked off, dyed the hue of martyr’s blood and stuck up in spikes. The clothes—well at least they covered her lithe, lovely body, so she wasn’t flaunting that to the world.

He shifted his weight on the ridgeline of the roof, the very roof where the Lantz and Kauffman kids used to play Andy Over, heaving a ball up and letting it roll down the other side of the roof, where your opponent had to run and catch it, wherever it suddenly appeared. How clearly he recalled once when they were fifteen that, with both of them looking up, Hannah had bounced into him. They both went down and rolled in the autumn leaves together, with him on top, pressing her down with his knee between her legs, touching her breast, laughing and then kissing for the first time before their friends ran back around and they’d jumped to their feet …

He shook his head to shove that memory away. It really annoyed him how the mere thought of Hannah against him, in his arms, under him, made his body go tense with desire. He missed the pleasures of the marriage bed, even with a woman he had not chosen. Now, he knew two willing Amish maidals who would make him a good wife, and he needed to decide which one to pursue and get to courting so Marlena could have a mother and so he could stop this stupid longing.

“You coming down for noon meal?” Bishop Esh’s voice sliced through his agonizing. He stood below with his hands cupped around his mouth. “Your little girl’s waiting with Naomi. I see any more of those media folks, I’ll get rid of them for you, sure I will.”

“Coming right down. Just taking a breather.”

How long has the bishop watched him sitting up here? And how long before Hannah—if she returned at all—would be brought here, so he could at least see her again?

3

ALTHOUGH FBI SPECIAL AGENT LINC ARMSTRONG’S taut mouth smiled, Hannah noted that his sharp gray eyes did not as he assessed her. He was sinewy, angular and seemed tightly coiled. His brown hair was only about an inch long, short compared to Amish and goth men. His ears were so close to his head that his face seemed even longer than it was, a serious, angular face. He was dressed in black slacks, white shirt, striped tie and a dark blue jacket with FBI scripted in gold thread over the pocket. Though Hannah, who had just turned twenty-five, was not good at guessing people’s ages, she figured him to be in his mid- to late thirties.

“I appreciate your time while you’re recovering,” he told her, then introduced himself. He even held out his badge to her, in a sort of wallet he opened. The badge flaunted an eagle holding arrows in his talons over a line which read Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice. Under that was Armstrong’s photo; his face had a serious, even pained look. When he still held the wallet open—perhaps he didn’t realize how fast an Amish woman could read—she reread the other words near his photo: “Lincoln Armstrong is a regularly appointed Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and as such is charged with the duty of investigating violations of the laws of the United States in cases in which the United States is a party of interest.”

A party of interest? That sounded so cold, and the badge looked so … so commanding. No wonder the Amish never wanted to be involved with government agents, even though they were not arresting and executing the Plain People for their beliefs like in the old days in Europe.

Lincoln Armstrong’s words were clipped; he talked fast. He said he was Assistant Special Agent in Charge assigned to investigate violent crimes in Northeast Ohio. He was from “the Cleveland office,” but would be staying at the Red Roof Inn on the interstate eight miles from Homestead until his investigation was finished.

“I want to help in any way I can,” she told him. “Those were—are—my friends, though I shouldn’t have brought them here—there—that night.”

The man made her very nervous. Even seeing a State Highway Patrol or police car when she was driving bugged her and she slowed way down, but then she’d never really liked driving the car she and Tiffany had shared. But she told herself again that this man was here to help, and she was going to help him.

Still with bolt-upright posture, Agent Armstrong sat on the bedside chair and asked question after question, while she answered as best she could. She could tell that sometimes he was asking the same question but in a different way. No, she didn’t think they were followed that night. No, she’d told no one else where they were going.

“To the best of your knowledge,” he said, looking up narrow-eyed from where he’d been taking notes, “did you or your friends have any enemies who might want to scare or harm you? For instance, I understand you broke up with your boyfriend, Jason Corbett, recently. Though he has an alibi, you never know that he didn’t send or hire someone.”

She just stared at him. Mamm was right, this man had been checking into her past. And he’d had three days to interview everyone else.

“He wouldn’t do that,” she insisted. “We really weren’t that serious to start with, a friend of a friend kind of thing, and breaking up was a mutual decision.”

“Okay, that fits what he told me. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that Seth Lantz, your other former boyfriend, came along just after the shooting in time to find and help you? And I understand your breakup with him was not a mutual decision.”

Hannah pushed the button that raised the top of her bed higher. She was fairly tall for an Amish woman and wanted to stand up to this man’s height and rigid posture, but in bed like this she felt at such a disadvantage.

“Thank heavens, Seth came along!” she said, a bit too loudly. She lowered her voice. “Although I managed to call 9-1-1, he saved Tiffany and me, even if it was too late for Kevin. And he tried to spot the shooter, though he must have gone by then.”

“He or she or they. It’s best not to assume or construe. But we can surmise the shooter went back into the woods above the graveyard, then down to wherever a vehicle or buggy was hidden. Unless the shooter lived close enough to walk home.”

Buggy? Walk home? She’d never considered it could be someone Amish, but she and her friends had been disturbing the peace, desecrating hallowed ground. She had no doubt that Seth must have been upset by that.

“We were in the dark, so he, she or they must have been a good shot.”

“You didn’t glimpse any movement from higher on the hill, did you? I realize the music kept all of you from hearing anything until the shots.”

“You know,” she said as the memory came back to her, “I did glance up the hill, just to calm myself because I was upset that Tiffany and then Kevin were dancing on the graves. But no, I saw nothing, no one.”

“And then Seth rode up—though not on a white horse—from the other direction.”

He had interviewed Seth, hadn’t he? “No. You must know he was in a buggy. And Blaze, his horse, is chestnut-colored with a white mark only on her face and chest.”

Something she’d said amused him, but she wasn’t sure what. Had he been trying to trap her in something? Agent Armstrong—no way was she going to call him Lincoln or Linc—leaned closer and lowered his voice, too.

“Considering your and Seth’s past, I’m sure he hurt you more than you did him when you broke up, Hannah, but I have to examine all possibilities, even that an apparent rescuer was the perpetrator.”

She sniffed and shook her head.

“It happens,” he went on. “Seth was out with a hunting rifle, but our forensics have shown that wasn’t the weapon involved. Still, I can tell from talking to him that he is upset that you ‘jumped the fence,’ as he put it, and hung out with the goths. He’s still upset with you about that.”

She didn’t like the direction this was going, but it scared her even more how much she wanted to defend Seth. She blurted, “Then you’d better put about everyone in the Amish church under suspicion, Agent Armstrong! They were all pretty upset when the bishop’s daughter left, though of course we—they—are all pacifists and would never shoot someone!”

“But that was a pretty big stretch for an Amish girl, wasn’t it? Not only leaving the only life you’d ever known, but going goth?”

“That’s just the group of friends I fell in with when I went to my ‘Cleveland office,’ to try to start a singing career.”

His eyes seemed to light, and the corner of his mouth twitched as if he would either grimace or smile at her subtle jab. “I like backbone in a witness and a victim,” he said, standing. “Good move to call 9-1-1, and good job giving all that information when you were shot and your friends were bleeding around you. I think you’re being released to go home tomorrow, Hannah, so I’ll see you then, because I want you to walk me through exactly what happened at the crime scene. It’s been secured, photographed, sketched and searched. I’ve questioned your remaining three goth friends, but I think your visiting the site with me would be invaluable. I take it I can find you at your parents’ place.”

It was a statement, not a question. Did he imply she was being confined there at least until she returned to the scene of the crime with him?

“If they’ll take me in for a while, yes, then I—”

“Take you in?” Mamm said as she peered around Agent Armstrong’s shoulder. “It’s your home. You are coming home, ya, at least till your wrist is better. Then we can all discuss what comes later.”

“Yes,” Hannah said as tears she could not stem blurred her view. “Agent Armstrong, I’ll be there—at my parents’ home.”

He tapped the edge of her mattress twice as if she were being dismissed, at least for now. “Thank you for your time and help, and thank you, Mrs. Esh,” he said with a nod Mamm’s way as she stepped to the side of the bed. “And thank you and Bishop Esh for feeding me so well yesterday.”

This government officer and law-enforcing ausländer had eaten at her house—that is, at her parents’ house—when she hadn’t been inside for years? It made her homesick all over again.

It was strange, Hannah thought as Agent Armstrong left the room, to have to deal with a man who knew things you didn’t and, even though you were both an eyewitness and a victim and he was going to help, who made you feel like you were under surveillance, too.

It was a couple of hours after dark that night when Sheriff Jack Freeman pulled into his driveway. Hearing an engine, Ray-Lynn Logan went to the kitchen window over the sink and cracked the curtains to make sure the headlights slashing through the night were his. Yes, his black sheriff’s cruiser with the gold logo on the side. He no doubt saw her van in the driveway. They had keys to each other’s places now. She wondered if he could possibly be as excited as she was each time they were together, but he was probably exhausted investigating the graveyard shooting and working with that hard-driving FBI guy from Cleveland.

Using the window glass for a mirror, she quickly checked her appearance. Pretty good for a woman who was almost fifty, she thought. She knew Jack liked her full breasts and hips, even though he’d admitted he was a “leg man.”

Ray-Lynn had seen little of Jack since the shootings three days ago, and just when things were really getting comfortable between them. So she’d left the restaurant the minute it closed tonight to bring them a meat loaf dinner to share—brought him his favorite raisin cream pie, too. She was getting familiar with his kitchen and this spacious brick ranch house, though she didn’t like the fact he’d lived here and decorated it with his ex-wife. Besides, it was two miles east of town, and there was a woodlot right out back, when some idiot was shooting people from trees in the dark. Maybe, she tried to tell herself, the shooting had been just some Halloween prank, an aberration, a one-night freak thing, and goths sure looked like freaks. Dealing with the Plain People was one thing, but no way did she want strange outsiders around her adopted town.

Ray-Lynn met Jack at his own back door with a big hug he returned so hard it made her toes curl. A Southern girl by birth, she’d almost chucked all the good manners her mother ever taught her to finally get this man to notice her as more than the source of good country cooking at her restaurant in town. Jack was divorced and had been sort of a loner, married only to his job since his wife had left him to move somewhere out west several years ago. He’d admitted that his ex was the only woman he’d loved, and he’d been heartbroken when she said she was done with him and rural, small-town living. But Jack had finally added, “That is, she was the only one I ever wanted before I fell in love with you, Ray-Lynn.”

Jack, who was just a year older, stood tall and ramrod-straight, maybe a leftover from his days as a marine. His auburn hair had a touch of gray at the temples, but with all that had gone on around here lately, he’d kidded her that he’d be all silver-headed soon. He’d bailed her out of a financial crisis earlier this year by investing in half of her restaurant in town, though he sure had more than fifty-percent of her heart. She loved it that they were partners in business, and she longed to be partners in life, too.

“Something smells good, but you smell better, honey,” he said, closing and locking the door behind him, then burying his face in her hair before giving her a long, openmouthed kiss that made her want to forget supper. She held tight to his leather jacket. He smelled of crisp autumn air and, as ever, both of safety and sexiness.

When they came up for a breath, she asked, “Progress here for sure, but any progress on the graveyard case?”

“Luckily, forensics cleared Seth Lantz, or at least the rifle he had in his buggy that night. Witnesses have been interviewed by either Armstrong or me—in some cases by both of us. Both wounded women are being released tomorrow, and Hannah Esh is coming home, at least for a while, so—as ever—the Amish see a blessing even in a tragedy.”

He hung his jacket, gun belt and hat on pegs by the back door, then, with a playful pat on her rear, went to use the bathroom. All dreamy-eyed—she had to admit, that’s what this man, in or out of uniform, did to her—Ray-Lynn jumped when she accidentally touched the hot pan she was warming the meat loaf in as she took it out of the oven. She yanked back about as fast as she had when she’d come across an old photo of Jack and his ex while she was looking for candlesticks today. It had been shoved, facedown, under some candles and matchbooks in an end table drawer.

As she ran cold water over her burn, she pictured their faces in the photo again, though it was the last thing she wanted in her head right now. They’d both looked so young and happy. Lillian Freeman was a pretty blonde, big-busted but not fat. Hopefully, Jack preferred Ray-Lynn’s real red hair to that bleached blond, but sometimes men couldn’t see through that and a blonde was a blonde. In the pic, they were sitting on a fence somewhere, grinning like all get-out, him in his marine uniform, her flaunting great legs in shorts and her breasts in a skimpy top.

“Smells like meat loaf!” Jack said when he came back in. “You okay, honey?” he asked when he saw her holding her finger under running water.

“Just a little burn.”

He came over and hugged her from behind. “I’m starved, but willing to kiss it—kiss you—to make it better.”

“And who said the way to a man’s heart is only through his stomach?” She turned in his arms to face him as he pressed her against the sink and kissed her again. They both ignored the running water, though they could have used a bit of a cold shower right now, she thought as she kissed him back hard again and slid her hands, burn or not, in the back pockets of his pants.

She was surprised when he broke their embrace, leaning past her closer to the window over the sink. He cracked the curtains and squinted out into the November night. Her head cleared. She heard something outside, too.

“Bad timing,” he said. “Headlights from someone pulling in. Hope it’s not the G-man, but someone might be in trouble. Don’t recognize the car.”