Anathema

by Colleen Coble

  BUBBLE LIGHTS ATOP the four squad cars parked outside the farmhouse strobed into the night. All available Parke County deputies had responded to the call to the Amish farmhouse. Deputy Matt Beitler parked his SUV behind his partner’s truck and got out. He buttoned his coat against the wind. When the call came in, he had been enjoying his day off with Analise. He ’d not been happy to be summoned to work.

  He opened the back door and let Ajax, his year-old K9 search dog, out of the back. Taking a firm hold on the German shepherd’s leash, he walked toward the house. The odor of manure from the barn wafted over him as he strode over the rough ground. Double homicide on an Amish farm. The Amish were peaceable and model citizens. Reece had sounded almost incoherent when he called, which made Matt break every speed record getting here. His partner wasn’t often anything but calm and methodical. O’Connor loathed losing control of anything.

  Generator-powered floodlights illuminated the yard. The sheriff had already called in the state boys, and technicians were busy looking for clues left by the perp. O’Connor was comforting a young Amish woman. In the dark, it was hard to make out more than her white bonnet.

  O’Connor glanced up and saw him. With his arm around the young woman, he led her to the porch and seated her in a rocker. “I’ll be right back,” he said to her before turning to join Matt.

  Matt watched the woman put her face in her hands. Her shoulders heaved. Her family or friends must be the murder victims. O’Connor would give him the details.

  “Stay,” Matt told the dog. He looped the leash around a hitching post and met his partner halfway, near the front door.

  “Thanks for getting here so fast.” O’Connor took off his hat and swiped at his blond hair.

  Thirty, O’Connor was already showing signs of early balding. He wore a distracted expression. The detective was one of the most dedicated in the sheriff ’s department. He’d helped Matt get the job and had been quick to partner with him, even though he was the senior officer.

  “Bad scene?”

  “Worse than you can possibly imagine.” In the glare of the lights, O’Connor looked deadly white. “Both of the parents.” He nodded toward the young woman. “She found them covered with a quilt.” He hesitated. “Their limbs are contorted, backs and necks arched.”

  “Strychnine poisoning?”

  “Maybe.”

  Matt winced. Strychnine was nasty. The victim suffered muscle convulsions that got worse and worse until the poor victim was worn out and the lungs quit working. He wouldn’t want to go that way. “You interrogate her?”

  O’Connor looked away. “Not yet. I—I was in the area and heard her scream. When I got here, she was outside, in shock. I think she passed out briefly.”

  “We ’d better talk to her.” Matt started toward the woman, but his partner grabbed his arm.

  “Go easy on her,” O’Connor said. “In fact, let me handle it. She ’s all alone now.”

  Unusual in an Amish family. They bred like rabbits. “Easy? We need the truth before the trail goes cold. What’s going on with her, boss?” Matt stared from his partner to the woman rocking with her arms clasped around herself. “Can I at least ask her some questions?”

  O’Connor dropped his hand from Matt’s arm. “Just be careful.”

  Matt approached the woman. “Ms. Schwartz? I’m Deputy Beitler. I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  In the brighter wash of light, he guessed her age between twenty and twenty-two. She looked almost colorless between her white bonnet and shapeless gray dress.

  O’Connor stepped around him and took Hannah’s hand. “Can you handle this now?” he asked the witness.

  Matt shot his partner an incredulous glare. Since when did they tiptoe around witnesses? The media would be swarming the area any minute. But it was O’Connor’s call. “Ms. Schwartz?” he said again.

  She looked up. In the glare of lights, her eyes took on a golden glow, eyes like those of a tiger. He could see clear down to her soul, and there was only goodness. Matt shook off the thought. In his experience, the first place to look for a perp was among a victim’s family and friends. Though in this case, he suspected a hate crime. But maybe she hated her parents. It happened.

  She rocked back and forth, back and forth.

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “I came home from—from a walk and found my parents.” Her voice was hoarse.

  He could see she was still in shock. “What about before your walk? Was there anything out of the ordinary, anyone else you saw while you were out?”

  She rubbed her head. “I—I don’t remember.”

  He straightened from hunching over the notepad in his hand. “You don’t remember?” O’Connor kept patting the woman on the shoulder. Matt had never seen his partner behave this way.

  “Everything is a blur. I can’t think.” She rubbed fiercely at her temples as though trying to force her brain to cooperate. She looked up at him with a piteous expression. “It was my fault.”

  He clicked his pen on again. “What do you mean?”

  “Of course it wasn’t your fault, Hannah,” O’Connor said, his voice a little too loud. “You need to rest. You’ll remember more tomorrow.”

  Matt poised his pen over the paper. “How was it your fault?”

  She raised her gaze to his then. “I mixed up the lemonade. It was a free sample we got in the mailbox. The poison was in that, wasn’t it?”

  “What makes you think they were poisoned?”

  “The—the way they looked. Poisoned rats look like that.” She shuddered. “We use it in the greenhouse.”

  He and O’Connor exchanged glances. O’Connor called over another deputy and asked him to check out the greenhouse.

  Matt turned back to Hannah. “You prepared lemonade before you went for your walk?”

  She nodded. “With lots of sugar because my datt has a sweet tooth. I poured glasses for everyone, including an extra for the guest. Someone was coming to look at Mamm’s quilts.”

  “Was it a man or a woman who came to buy a quilt?”

  She scrunched her forehead and went even paler. “Oh, why can’t I remember?” she moaned. “Let me think.” She sat quietly a moment. “Cyrus. Cyrus Long. At least I think he was here tonight. My memory is all jumbled up. Maybe he was here last night. I can’t remember.”

  “Can’t or won’t?” he asked as O’Connor rejoined them.

  “Matt,” O’Connor said with a warning in his voice. “I want to talk to you.” He retreated a few steps from the woman.

  Matt joined him. “What is with you, man? I’ve never seen you act like this. You’re mucking up the investigation.”

  O’Connor glanced at Hannah, then back to Matt. “She was with me.”

  “With you? What does that mean?”

  “I mean she slipped away to meet me.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “We were together. That’s all you need to know.”

  Matt couldn’t wrap his mind around it. O’Connor was a good eight years older than the Schwartz woman, and as one of the “Englisch,” he should have been the last man she ’d consider getting involved with. “I see,” he said. “A little cradle robbing?” He knew he was pushing it. O’Connor was his boss, but that was hard to remember when they were friends, practically brothers, before they were partners.

  “Shut up. You know nothing about it. I’ve been waiting all my life for someone like Hannah—sweet and good. When I’m with her, I’m better than I am alone. She had nothing to do with this crime,” O’Connor said, his voice firm.

  “You know as well as I do that the perp is usually known to the victim. You need to tell Sturgis. You can’t work this investigation.”

  “This is my case. I know my limits, and I can handle it, Beitler.”

  “O’Connor, think about this. You’re already on thin ice with that brutality charge.”

  O’Connor ran his hand through his hair. “And you think about how you got this job. And where you’d
be if not for me.”

  It went against Matt’s strong sense of right and wrong, but he finally shrugged. “Have it your way.” Both men went back to the girl. “I’m going to take a look at the scene,” Matt said.

  Hannah trembled. “I don’t have to go, do I?”

  “No, you stay here with Detective O’Connor.” At the house, Matt ducked under the yellow tape at the door and entered the living room. Halogen lights mounted around the room illuminated the bodies lying on the wood floor. “What have we got?” he asked Sturgis.

  “Two adults, I’d guess in their early fifties. Poisoning, maybe strychnine from the contortions of the bodies. The autopsy will tell us.” He nodded toward a heap of cloth. “A quilt was over them. The daughter removed it before we were called.”

  “Who called it in?” Matt asked.

  “The daughter. She went out to the greenhouse and used the phone there.”

  “They have a phone?”

  The captain shrugged. “The Amish use phones in their businesses. You ever notice the little phone booths out by the road in their communities? Some of the families will share a phone, but they only use it to make appointments or do business. They don’t want it intruding on their personal lives.”

  Matt depended on his cell phone. He barely glanced at the quilt before allowing his gaze to wander the room. A sofa with worn seat cushions sat against the middle of the wall. Sturdy wooden tables, most likely handmade, flanked it with gaslights flickering on top of them. No rugs, no wall ornamentation or pictures.

  A red symbol and words on the wall caught his attention. “Blood?” he asked.

  “Paint.” Sturgis stuck an unlit cigar in his mouth and chomped on it.

  Matt wanted to chomp on something himself, anything to get the vile taste of murder out of his mouth. “It’s a peace symbol. We know what this is all about?”

  “Well, the Amish are all about peace. Maybe it’s a hate crime in some twisted way.”

  “A hate crime against the Amish?”

  “That was my first thought. It seems very well thought-out. The killer brought in everything he would need.”

  “Not everything,” Matt said, his gaze lighting on a spilled pool of liquid. “Hannah Schwartz mixed up some lemonade that came in the mail.”

  “Might be coincidence.”

  “Maybe.” But Matt would lay money on finding poison in the drink. “What about the foreign word? We know what it means?”

  “Not yet. I think it’s Greek.”

  Parke County was a quiet area, and murder was uncommon here. The largest town in this west-central Indiana community was Rockville, where Matt lived, with a population of 2,650. The joke in the area was that they had more covered bridges than residents. Driving through thick forests and hills was a peaceful pastime of Matt’s. He’d been on the force less than a year, and this was his first murder. Seeing something like this was a shock he could not imagine getting used to.

  Matt dragged his gaze from the bodies. “Let’s get the Schwartz woman in here and ask her some more questions. I’ll have one of the deputies take Ajax out and see if he can get a scent on the perp.”

  two

  “Demut and gelassenheit are at the heart of a good life, Hannah.

  Accept whatever God gives you without murmur.”

  PATRICIA SCHWARTZ

  Sitting on the porch of the plain white farmhouse, Hannah couldn’t quit rocking. The cold wind laden with the scent of water from the lake behind the house tugged at the strings of her bonnet and lifted the hem of her long skirt. The rocking calmed the screams still hunkering in her throat. It’s not true. It’s not.

  The chant echoed in her heart over and over. This had to be a nightmare. She’d awaken any moment to find herself helping Mamm make noodles or shoofly pie. She ’d hear Datt yodeling on his way in from the greenhouse.

  She’d expected God to punish her for her sin. Even when she’d put her black shoes on the road to the bridge, the knowledge settled over her like one of her mother’s heavy quilts. The heart commits sin first, and her heart was as black as the night. This punishment, though, was too much. She couldn’t bear it.

  Reece stayed close, but she huddled inside herself, undeserving of his comfort.

  “Hannah, liebling?”

  Hannah looked up to see her aunt Nora and her cousin Moe standing by the steps. “You’re not yodeling now,” she told Moe. Confusion contorted his face, and she knew she wasn’t making sense.

  Her aunt rushed up the steps with her arms outstretched. Hannah rose to meet her and practically fell into her arms. “They’re dead,” she sobbed. The screams she’d been holding back built in her throat, moving closer to her mouth. She clamped her teeth closed again.

  Nora held her, their tears mingling. Hannah became conscious of Moe’s big hand on her shoulder too. He wouldn’t know what to say, but his presence calmed her. Nora had to be grieving too. She ’d lost the brother she loved. How could a loving God allow something like this to happen? Hannah didn’t understand.

  “Ms. Schwartz?”

  Hannah lifted her gaze to meet that of the young cop. She struggled past the cotton wool in her brain to find his name. Deputy Beitler. He was a merciless hunter, his blue eyes assessing her for any weakness. His gaze softened for a moment, then hardened to flint again.

  He couldn’t blame her any more than she blamed herself.

  “Come inside with me a minute. There are some questions we need to ask, and we want you to see if anything is missing in the home.”

  “I can’t,” she whispered. Her gaze went past his shoulder to the black body bags being wheeled out of the house on gurneys. A scream rose in her throat, but she locked it behind her teeth. Her mouth and eyes watered with the effort of holding in her grief.

  “Be strong, Hannah,” Moe said. “We ’ll go with you if you need us.”

  Before she could answer, she heard the sound of buggy wheels and the deep vibration of her cousin Luca’s voice calling to her. The blood rushed to her head, and without realizing she was moving, she found herself by the buggy as Luca swung his boots to the ground. He was more like a brother than a cousin to her, having lived with the Schwartz family since he was five.

  The Amish didn’t hold much with hugging, but in her desperation for comfort, she hurtled herself into her cousin’s arms. He smelled of sweat and horse as his arms came around her awkwardly, though he hugged her as tightly as she clung to him. His chest heaved, and she knew he ’d heard the news.

  She lifted her head and saw his shocked gaze on the body bags being loaded into the emergency vehicle, but she couldn’t turn and look too. One glimpse had been too much to bear.

  “Both of them?” he whispered.

  She wet her lips, but no words could make it past the tight constriction of her throat, so she merely nodded.

  His gaze roamed her face as though to seek out some glimmer of hope. When he found none, his shoulders drooped. “It is God’s will,” he said. “Will we not accept both good and evil from his hand?”

  It was the way of the Amish to accept whatever came, to turn the other cheek when injured. But both of Hannah’s cheeks felt brutalized, left raw and bleeding. She had no more to give. Seeing the bodies of her parents had shattered her innocence. The pain in their faces had driven a spike deep into her heart and left a wound that would never heal. Why should they have had to suffer on her behalf? And there was another death, one few people knew about. Mamm was going to have a baby after many years of trying.

  Luca released her, and she followed him as he went to where Reece stood with Deputy Beitler. Nora and Moe were a few feet away, and Moe was comforting his mother. Even if Luca was unaware of the detective ’s speculative stare, she was not. How could the man suspect they might be capable of such a horrible deed? He must know nothing about her or her people.

  Luca stopped in front of the detectives. “I am Luca Schwartz, Hannah’s cousin. I live here too. Can you tell me what has happened?”

&nb
sp; “I’m Deputy Beitler. This is Detective O’Connor. I’m sorry to tell you that your aunt and uncle were murdered tonight.” He paused when Luca made a soft moan. “I’m sorry for your loss. Can you tell me how you happened to be living with them?”

  “My dad and Abe were brothers. My parents were killed in a buggy accident when I was five.”

  The deputy nodded toward the house. “I was about to ask your cousin to examine the home and see if anything is missing. I’d appreciate your cooperation as well. If we can pinpoint the motive, it might lead us to the killer.”

  Digging her feet into the dirt, Hannah prepared to tell him again that she couldn’t go back in there, but Luca nodded and turned toward the house. Her gaze collided with the young deputy’s, and she could have sworn she saw triumph in his eyes. Her dislike of him mounted.

  Life wasn’t a game, and it shouldn’t be about power. Her heritage emphasized the good of the many, not self-interest and power. The Englisch persisted in getting the focus of life wrong. She clutched her wool cape more tightly and followed the men. Duty called, and she would do her best to answer it.

  She glanced at Reece, and he answered the plea she put in her gaze by taking her elbow. The warm touch of his hand strengthened her. “I couldn’t get through this without you,” she whispered.

  He gave her elbow a reassuring squeeze. “I’ll protect you, Hannah. No matter what it takes. You can count on me.”

  She nodded, knowing he meant the words from the heart. With him by her side, she didn’t feel so alone. His presence was better than her aunt’s or her cousins’. Maybe because she knew how her family would react if they knew why she ’d survived this night.