This morning, the look on his face remained unreadable — mouth frozen in a scowl, eyes locked on the horizon. Thirty-five years old, his long sideburns were the same brown as the hair that touched the collar of his shirt. But since he’d never been married, he sported no beard.
For one fleeting second though, when he’d come running to the pond with her, Deborah thought perhaps she’d seen recognition in his light brown eyes. Then any remembering had left his expression, like the shades she pulled down over her windows in the house to block out the dark night.
When she’d asked if he’d known the girl, Reuben had shaken his head once, stuffed his hands in the pockets of his work pants, and stared out over the waters of the pond. He hadn’t moved in the thirty minutes since.
“Did they say how long it would take to get here?” she asked.
Reuben shook his head slightly, but he didn’t break his silence.
“Did you speak to Officer Gavin?”
Again the headshake.
Deborah had known Reuben all her life. He’d never been the talkative type, but even for him this silence seemed a bit ominous.
She was about to step toward him, reach out to touch his shoulder, and question him further when a Shipshewana patrol car bumped down the lane. Esther, Leah, and Joshua popped up and began waving their arms. The patrol car pulled even with Deborah’s buggy and slowed to a stop before the officer rolled down his window and began talking to Esther.
As Deborah watched the scene play out, she noticed that Reuben never turned. If anything, the look on his face hardened.
Before she could puzzle it out, Officer Stan Taylor opened the door to the patrol car, stood and placed his hands across the roof of the vehicle. After he’d carefully assessed the situation, he looked toward them, looked back at her buggy, and then down at the ground. Taking off his officer’s cap, he resettled it on his head, then continued alongside the path of trampled grass — walking in the high weeds as if he didn’t want to contaminate any evidence that she, Esther, both kinner, or the horse hadn’t already managed to destroy.
Taylor fit easily into the small Amish community of Shipshewana. In fact, if Deborah remembered correctly, he’d been born there. Old enough to be a grandfather himself, each year Deborah expected him to retire, but he didn’t. As captain of their six-man department, he seemed to enjoy watching over Shipshewana and tending to what little needs their small community had.
Needs like dead girls in a pond.
The brown color of Taylor’s eyes reminded Deborah of the Black-eyed Susans waving by her side. They were the same shade of brown, framed by bushy white eyebrows like the flowers’ petals, and they were every bit as gentle as the blooms. A protruding stomach told Deborah that Officer Taylor wasn’t having much luck with the diet his wife had put him on. He still moved easily down the path though, losing no time plodding toward her.
As he neared, Deborah saw his concern. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d pulled her into a hug. Instead, he put his hand on the end of his pistol, which remained holstered in his belt.
“Are you all right, Deborah?”
“Ya, ya, I’m fine.” She couldn’t stop herself from sending a worried look Reuben’s way. “I didn’t actually find the girl; Esther did.”
“I spoke with her a minute. She seems shaken, but okay.” Taylor dropped into a crouch and studied the body floating a few feet away. “Reuben, any idea what happened here?”
The big man turned now, and Deborah had the oddest sensation that he’d been preparing himself for this moment, which was a ridiculous idea unless he had something to hide. Of all the people she knew, Reuben was the most forthcoming. He worked and he worked. There was little else in his life, and she couldn’t remember a time when there had been.
Of course he visited with his family on Sundays, but other than that he didn’t even like leaving the farm.
“No,” Reuben said.
Taylor stood and backed away from the girl. Deborah understood enough about murder scenes to realize he didn’t want to disturb any evidence. Pulling out his pad and pen, he turned to her. “You found her first?”
Deborah knew Taylor was testing her story, since she’d just told him who found the body. She shook her head and repeated what she’d said a moment earlier. “No, Esther did. We were driving up with a casserole, and we’d stopped to pick some flowers. Esther and the children walked over here while I waited with the buggy.”
“You had no indication that something was wrong?”
Deborah smoothed out her apron, looked back at the children. “Actually Cinnamon was acting a bit naerfich. I thought there might be a snake nearby.”
“All right. So Esther had been here with the kids — “
“Maybe five minutes when I heard her scream.”
“And what happened next?”
Deborah felt Reuben studying her as closely as Taylor was. She closed her eyes and allowed her mind to replay the scene, as if she were seeing the way a quilt would piece together. She knew the first time she told this story would be the most accurate, as each retelling of a story tended to stray further from the truth.
She’d heard Callie say so, based on the Agatha Christie books she read, but didn’t Deborah know it from experience with her own children?
Pulling in a deep breath, she pushed on. “I ran down the path, thinking one of the kinner might be hurt. But Leah was clutching Esther’s hand, and Esther was the one who had screamed. Joshua had plopped down on his bottom in the grass.”
Her pulse began to accelerate as she allowed her mind to drift back over the scene. Even though she was standing by the girl’s body now, telling of its discovery seemed somehow more urgent.
Why was that?
“And then?” Taylor didn’t step closer. His voice was calm, focused, recording the facts that would begin to lead them down the path to the discovery of this girl’s fate.
“Esther had one hand over her mouth, the other hand holding Leah’s. When I arrived by the water, she pointed toward the pond, so I followed her gaze. I thought maybe she’d found a dead animal or … or, I don’t know what. I never thought it would be a person … a girl.”
Spiders tiptoed down her spine as she voiced the thought she’d been holding back. “What if she’s someone we know?”
“We’ll find out soon enough,” Taylor said, his voice grim. “So are these Esther’s footprints?”
He pointed to the imprints in the mud leading down to the body.
“No.” Deborah felt the heat creep up her face. “I stepped a bit closer to see if I might know her. I’m sorry if I messed up your crime scene.”
“Don’t worry about it. You had a natural reaction to be concerned about the girl. Looks to me like the grass was trampled down on this side by Esther and the kids, but we’ll have the crime techs check their shoe sizes to confirm that. I noticed a wider path going around the other side — “
“Ya. Looks as if someone had dragged something through the weeds.”
Taylor paused, his eyes assessing her solemnly. “You didn’t walk that way at all?”
“No. I stayed here, on this side.”
“Should be able to collect some forensic evidence then. I suspect whoever dropped her off at this site — or killed her here — did so from the pond’s other side and she floated this way.”
“Floated?” Deborah reached for the strings of her prayer kapp, ran her fingers down the length of them.
“We’re on the south side,” Taylor said. “Wind’s been from the north for several days.”
He studied the scene a moment longer, then looked back down at his pad. “County should be here in a few minutes. Let’s finish up with your initial statement. After you determined it was a person, what did you do?”
Deborah tugged on her prayer kapp and looked back toward Joshua. He was running in circles around Esther, playing with a long reed of grass. Soon he’d be finding something to put in his mouth he shouldn’t. “I insisted they come away, come ba
ck from the water and the flowers. I didn’t want the children to realize what they were seeing and grow upset. I pulled Esther and the children down the path toward the buggy and then moved the buggy a little farther down the lane.”
Deborah peeked around Taylor’s uniformed shoulders to catch another glimpse of the group still waiting on her.
“Why did you move the buggy, Deborah?”
“What?”
“The buggy? It was originally parked there, right?” He pointed to a spot approximately a hundred feet from where Esther and the children now waited. The same spot he had stopped to examine earlier. “Why did you move it farther away? The children couldn’t see the body from where you were parked at first, so why did you move it?”
Deborah smiled, remembering what Callie had told her about an investigator’s attention to detail. “Cinnamon was nervous, spooked from the moment we stopped. Once Esther and the kinner came back to the buggy, the mare seemed even more agitated. You might think it sounds narrisch, but I believe she smelled death in the air. I wanted to move her so she would calm.”
Taylor rubbed a finger across his white, bushy eyebrow as he considered her reasoning. After a moment he seemed to accept it and wrote an additional notation on his pad.
“And then?”
“Esther stayed with the children and the buggy — where she is right now, and I ran to Reuben’s house. He took his buggy to the phone shack and called you.”
Turning his attention toward Reuben, Taylor mumbled, “All right. That’s all for the moment, but I still need to take a full statement from Esther. And I’ll want you to stay around in case I have any more questions.”
“The children — “
“I asked the dispatcher to send someone out to your house when Reuben mentioned you were here. Jonas should be here soon.”
As if his words had the power to produce the people she loved, a buggy and a truck pulled down the lane.
Deborah turned and hurried toward them, already feeling Jonas’ arms around her, his dark eyes assuring her all would be fine. But something caused her to glance back.
When she did, what she saw surprised her nearly as much as the floating corpse.
Reuben had turned, ready to face Taylor’s questioning, and for a fleeting moment, Deborah saw a look on his face. It was one she was familiar with. One she had felt often enough when she’d miscut a bolt of cloth or spoken too harshly to one of the children.
Reuben’s look, though, was tinged with such pain, colored with such heartache, that Deborah’s hand went instinctively to her throat.
It might have been only for one brief second when his thoughts were unguarded, might have been something that Officer Stan Taylor missed as he looked down at his pad to begin a new page of notes, but Deborah clearly saw how Reuben’s expression was temporarily consumed by regret.
Chapter 3
SAMUEL WATCHED the Englischers from his hiding spot in the woods. He’d known the moment the taller woman started around the south side of the pond that she’d find Katie’s body. If he were honest with himself, he’d prayed for it. The thought of her spending one more hour in the water would have split his heart right in two — if there was anything left of his heart to split.
He clutched his hat so tightly he could feel the brim breaking under his fingers.
Didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered now.
Crawling forward on his belly, he inched toward the top of the slope he was lying against so he could peer more closely at the group of people gathering around the pond. There were the two women who had arrived an hour before, their kinner, Reuben, and the Englischers. One of the Englischers was the local police officer — Samuel knew that because of the automobile he’d arrived in as well as the uniform the man was wearing. Another seemed to be from the local newspaper. The large magnet on the door of his truck read “Shipshewana Gazette.” The truck itself looked as though it had seen better days, even to Samuel, who wasn’t so familiar with Englisch automobiles.
This man held something up and pointed it toward Katie, but it wasn’t until the sunshine of the fall day reflected off the lens that Samuel realized it was a camera, understood that the man was taking pictures of her, photographing her body.
Samuel backed quickly down the hill and tried to stand, but he tripped over his pack of things and fell on top of Katie’s duffle. Crawling on his hands and knees in the opposite direction — any direction away from the scene at the pond — he forgot to quiet his movements. Sweat slicked his palms, causing leaves to stick to them as he lunged onward like a child. And he might have continued that way, crawling clear out of LaGrange County and leaving their small bundle of things behind, if his stomach hadn’t stopped him near the creek.
After no more than five — maybe six — feet of crawling, Samuel gasped, clutched one arm across his middle, and began retching. He hadn’t eaten, but the little bit of water he’d had a few hours earlier found its way up. Mostly it was dry heaving — his body looking for something to expunge and finding very little.
His heart looking for a way to reject the final travesty of what he’d seen.
After two minutes he was done, though sweat now beaded along his forehead, and he’d lost his hat somewhere along the way.
Wiping the back of his arm across his mouth, he collapsed into a sitting position while searching for and finding his hat. Tears again coursed down his cheeks, through the beard that was less than a week old.
He scratched at the stubble, and then he was lost, drifting back to three weeks ago, when Katie had reached up and touched his cheek that was still smooth, teased him about how quickly his beard would come in …
“Within a month of our wedding, you’ll need a comb to keep it proper. “ Her palm lingered on his cheek, her brown eyes sparkling with laughter. When she did pull her hand away, it was to twine her fingers with his and tug him toward the barns. “You promised you would help me name the pups today. “
“Pups don’t need naming, Katie. They’re only hounds.”
“You sound like my dat. I want to name them even if we are selling them soon. Seems the kind thing to do — assigning a name to something that you have to feed and care for.”
“Next you’ll be naming the cattle.” Now he was teasing her, though he didn’t mind following her into the barn. He’d worked all day in her father’s fields, and passing a half hour in the barn, looking at her pretty face, seemed a fair price to pay for naming a few hound dogs.
Though she wore one of her old dark gray work dresses, she’d starched the white apron that covered it. Her light brown hair was pulled back properly and covered with a white prayer kapp, but nothing could hide the prettiness of her face. Katie was one of the most beautiful girls Samuel had ever seen, though that wasn’t why he’d lost his heart to her. It was her kindness, the way she had of caring for every little thing — even hounds that would soon be gone.
“‘Course I wouldn’t name cattle. Cows don’t crawl up in your lap or lick your hand. “
“Gut thing,” Samuel muttered.
Katie stepped closer as they moved into the shelter of the barn. “When we have our own place, I’d like to have a pup. They’re gut for warning of snakes and also in case someone approaches who shouldn’t be about.”
“And what stranger would be approaching here? Your family lives so far out, visitors are rarer than snow in September.” Samuel tried to hold the criticism from his voice, but wasn’t quite successful. He didn’t realize he might have sounded a bit harsh until she turned to gaze at him with an expression that was now solemn. “I didn’t mean to judge, Katie.”
Glancing to the right then to the left as they walked down the length of the barn, Katie pulled Samuel into the last stall. The dog and her pups lay in a shaft of light in a corner on top of a pile of hay, but Katie ignored them, her attention focused completely on him.
“Does it bother you so much, Samuel? Be honest with me. Do you regret working for my father?”
/> “How could I regret it, when I wouldn’t have grown so close to you otherwise?”
“It was Gotte’s wille, ya?”
“Ya, I believe it was. “
“But now — “
“Now, I wonder if perhaps we should stay here after we marry, or — “
“Or move off on our own. Move north to Shipshewana, where you can work in the RV factories.” She crossed over to the pups, selected the smallest, and picked it up, cuddling it closely.
“It’s what I’ve said before. Here the work is endless, and I’m not sure we’ll ever make enough to get ahead. Look at how your father struggles. There hasn’t even been time to begin building our own house, though he promised.”
“I know he did. And he meant to, but the summer crops — “
“I understand his reasons, Katie. I understand.” Samuel was running his hand up and down his jawline, trying to puzzle out all the emotions and conflicting thoughts running through his mind, when Katie stepped close to him, cupping her hand over his.
“It’ll grow in nice and thick, Samuel. I can tell. Might not even take a month. Then you’ll be needing a comb.”
Chapter 4
REUBEN WATCHED DEBORAH WALK AWAY. Watched her walk toward Jonas, Esther, and her Englisch friends Trent and Callie.
Jonas wrapped his arms around her; then Esther and the children joined in the circle. Almost immediately, Callie Harper was pulled into their midst, and though Trent McCallister stood on the outside, soon he, too, was shaking hands with Jonas, tousling the bopplin’s hair, and lightly touching Deborah’s and Esther’s arms.
Good people, every one of them. Rueben hadn’t been much help when Deborah was trying to clear the Englisch woman’s name in the murder investigation last summer. Seemed ironic now. One thing he could bet the crops in his east field on — if Deborah Yoder said a person was honest and true, it was a fact.
Pulling in a deep breath, he forced his attention to the officer who stood waiting.
Didn’t allow himself to stare into the water.
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