by Tami Hoag
Elizabeth glanced to the east, sucking a breath in through her teeth as the rays stabbed into her eyeballs like needles. “Dawn. By golly, it is. Funny, I didn’t hear it crack.”
Her sarcasm was lost on Hauer. He looked up at her expectantly. “I come to look at your kitchen, Elizabeth Stuart.”
“My—?” The mere effort of trying to make sense of this episode was giving her a case of vertigo. She tipped her head back against the window frame and let out a slow, deliberate breath in an attempt to calm the squall churning through her stomach. She had no memory of asking him to come back, but she had no intention of arguing about it from this position either. “Just give me a second here, sugar,” she called, not risking another look. “I’ll be down in two shakes.” Down on the floor, puking up whatever dregs remained in her stomach, she thought bleakly as she moved away from the window.
She made her way across the room, sloshing through the puddle again, gritting her teeth against the urge to moan. Moaning was a luxury she didn’t have time for. She would have to deal with Aaron Hauer, then call Jolynn to come and get her. She intended to camp out on Sheriff Jantzen’s doorstep until he gave her something she could print in the Clarion.
Holding her breath to ward off the dizziness, she bent over and dug through her closet, pulling out a pair of jeans and a gray UTEP T-shirt that was so old and faded the insignia across the front was little more than a shadow—a bleak reminder of how long it had been since she’d walked the hallowed halls of the University of Texas at El Paso. The outfit was hardly high fashion, but it would do for the moment. After she sent Mr. Hauer on his way, she would come back and rummage through for something with a Fortune 500 look about it. Something appropriately businesslike. Something that would make Dane Jantzen sit up and wipe the smirk off his face.
Aaron Hauer was still standing patiently at the back door when Elizabeth arrived some ten minutes later. She figured anyone who came calling before the coffeepot kicked in could damn well cool his heels until she’d had a chance to pee and run a brush through her hair.
She leaned a shoulder against the door frame, needing to prop herself up. “What can I do for you, Mr. Hauer?”
“Aaron Hauer,” he corrected her, his voice rising and falling with the heavy accent of the German dialect his people spoke among themselves. His gaze was somber and steady behind the lenses of his spectacles. “My people, we don’t believe in titles. Titles are Hochmut, proud. Pride is a sin.”
“Really? My, well, I guess I’ll have to add that one to my list.”
He sighed briefly, no doubt already appalled by the list of her sins, Elizabeth thought. She was a far cry from the Amish women she’d seen around town in their long dresses and concealing bonnets, their eyes downcast demurely, voices hushed.
“I come to look at your kitchen, Elizabeth Stuart.”
“So you said.” She scratched a hand back through her hair, rubbing at her scalp as if she might jar loose some memory of inviting him back to her house. None came.
Aaron held up the doorknob that had fallen off as he’d knocked. One corner of his mouth quirked upward in a wry smile that transformed his face and complemented the tiny spark of humor hiding in his eyes. “I’m thinking you’re needing a carpenter.”
The laugh that rolled out of Elizabeth was spontaneous. She didn’t even try to hold it back, though it made her head pound like a bass drum. So the Amish could be opportunistic just like everyone else. At her insistence, Aaron Hauer had come into her house last night to stay with her while she called the sheriff’s office. Obviously, he’d taken one look at the way the place was falling down around her ears and started adding up the dollar signs.
“Sugar,” she drawled, “what I need here is a stick of dynamite and a big fat insurance policy, but I’ll be damned If I can afford either one.” She sobered and sent him a look of genuine apology. “I’m afraid I can’t afford a carpenter either, for that matter.”
He frowned a little, tilting his head to the side, his gaze narrowing. “You can’t know that. I have yet to tell you my price.”
“If it’s more than a cup of coffee, I can’t afford you.”
“We’ll see.” He picked up his carpenter’s box and pulled the screen door open, inviting himself in. “My consultation fee is a cup of coffee. You can manage that, I guess.”
He moved past her and into the kitchen as if he had every right to be there. Elizabeth followed, mouth hanging open, caught between amusement and irritation. “You’ve got a golden future as a Fuller Brush man just waiting for you, honey.”
Aaron ignored her. He set his toolbox on the table between cereal boxes and surveyed the room with a critical eye. The place was a shambles. It looked even worse in the light of day than it had the night before under the glare of artificial light. The only thing saving it from total disgrace was the scent of fresh coffee wafting from the electric pot on the counter. He didn’t approve of electricity, but coffee was something else again.
“You can’t cook in this kitchen,” he declared.
Elizabeth went to a cupboard with a door that hung by one hinge and pulled out a pair of mismatched coffee mugs. “I’ve got news for you, Aaron. I couldn’t cook in Wolfgang Puck’s kitchen.”
He glanced at her, straight brows pulling together in suspicion. “Who is this Wolfgang?”
“Nobody you’d know. Only a world-renowned chef and restaurateur.”
He shrugged, largely unconcerned with anyone who lived outside a ten-mile radius of his community. Oh, he read in The Budget news of Amishmen who lived in other parts of the country, but the English didn’t concern him. They could keep their fashions and their wars and such to themselves. He wasn’t one for restaurants either. His nieces and nephews liked to go to the Dairy Queen in Still Creek for French fries and ice-cream cones once or twice a summer, but he never enjoyed taking them. Too many tourists staring, pointing, shooting their pictures as if they thought Amish were little more than animals in a zoo.
He accepted the mug of coffee Elizabeth offered him with a softly murmured “Danki,” and lifted the cup to his lips with no small amount of trepidation. If her housekeeping skills were anything to go by, he was in for an unpleasant shock. But the coffee was smooth and rich, and he sipped it, his brows lifted in surprise.
Elizabeth gave an offended sniff. “You don’t have to look so shocked. I can measure out Folger’s Crystals with the best of them.”
“You make a good cup of coffee too,” he said with a decisive nod.
She shook her head and chuckled to herself. “Thanks. Maybe I should have made Brock’s coffee for him,” she murmured reflectively as she dug through the rubble on the counter for a cigarette and a book of matches. “He might have decided I was good for something.”
“Brock?”
“My husband—formerly.”
“You are a widow?”
Her gray eyes narrowed with malicious glee as she stared up through a cloud of smoke. “I wish,” she said with relish.
Aaron watched her with a kind of stern bewilderment, tucking his chin back, instinctively knowing he should take a dim view of her attitude even though he didn’t understand what she was talking about.
“I’m divorced,” Elizabeth explained, tapping ash into a microwave tray that still bore traces of the overcooked lasagna that had been packaged in it.
Aaron grunted his disapproval as he set his cup aside and muttered “English” half under his breath. Marriage was meant by God for life. A man and woman joined in partnership to work and to bring forth children, to remain as companions until death. He had no sympathy for people who took the Lord’s word so lightly and disposed of marriage partners as easily and as often as they traded in their automobiles.
“How about you?” Elizabeth asked, naturally curious about this odd man who had invaded her kitchen. She hadn’t lived in Still Creek long enough to encounter any of its Amish residents up close and personal—until last night, and then small talk had seemed inappropri
ate to say the very least.
He stood across from her, his hands tucked into the deep pockets of his homemade black trousers. Like every Amishman she’d seen, he wore a cotton shirt that was a warm shade of blue, buttoned to the throat and trimmed with a set of black suspenders. For the first time she realized he was attractive in an unkempt sort of way. He kind of favored Nick Nolte in Cape Fear—taut, unsmiling, but not without appeal. His face was long with prominent cheekbones, a straight blade of a nose, a tightly compressed mouth. The expression he wore had the same kind of brooding quality that was all the rage in GQ these days. With a shave and a haircut he would have looked like any respectable yuppie male. He could have even kept his retro-look glasses as trappings of the upwardly mobile. Elizabeth almost laughed at the irony, but she doubted Aaron would find it amusing. A sense of humor probably wasn’t high on his list of attributes.
He made her think of an English professor she’d had at UTEP. Philip Barton. Indomitable, uncompromising, with straw-colored hair and eyes that burned with the intensity of lasers. She’d had a huge crush on him. The allure of the aloof. He’d taken her to bed and given her a C minus on her D. H. Lawrence paper. A man of high principles.
“My wife is dead,” Aaron Hauer said succinctly, and turned away from her.
The words hit Elizabeth with the force of a lead pipe, knocking the breath from her. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled.
If he heard her, he ignored her automatic statement of sympathy. He went to work inspecting the cupboards, his shoulders rigid, jaw set, gaze so intent on the cabinetry, Elizabeth wondered if he saw it at all or if he was looking right through it to some distant memory. She thought she could feel his pain radiating from him like an aura, and she envied him a little. He must have loved the woman he’d lost. That was more than she could say about her ex-husband. Brock had never loved her. He had loved possessing her, but he hadn’t loved her, and she knew for a fact he didn’t mourn her passing from his life.
“Ya, I can fix these for you,” Aaron said absently. His long-fingered hands stroked the frame of an open cupboard as a man might stroke a woman’s hair, gently, fondly. “Better to build new. There is no craftsmanship here.”
“I can’t even afford to have them fixed, let alone replace them,” Elizabeth said. She sank down on a chrome-legged chair that was undoubtedly as old as she was. The red vinyl seat was cracked and torn, and mice had long ago made off with the stuffing, but it took the weight off her blistered, aching feet and stopped the room from tilting like the deck of a listing ship. “I’m not just trying to horse-trade with you here, Aaron. The fact of the matter is, I’m pretty much broke.”
“So are your cupboards.”
“The place was vandalized a couple of times before I bought it,” she said, not wanting him to think all this wreckage was due to her lack of domestic skills.
“The young people from town used it as a place to have their drinking parties,” Aaron said, looking over his meticulously arranged toolbox for the proper size screwdriver. “A good spot for that.” His mouth tightened against the bitterness. “Hidden. Out of town. No one to bother them but Amish.”
It angered him beyond words, though he spoke of it as if he thought teenagers should be expected to ruin property as a part of their coming of age. The way the English raised their children was nothing short of barbaric in his mind. They had no principles, no scruples, no respect for anyone or anything, no fear of God or of punishment. They disrupted other people’s lives and paid no consequences. But as he took his screwdriver to the hinge of one cupboard door, he calmed his temper and tried to see the good. If no one had ruined Elizabeth Stuart’s cupboards, then he wouldn’t have the job of fixing them.
“There are other ways of paying besides money, Elizabeth Stuart,” he said, turning his thoughts back to the matter at hand.
A jolt of shock went through Elizabeth and she sat up ramrod-straight on her chair. Christ in a miniskirt! Not only could Amishmen be opportunistic, they could be lewd and lascivious too. Trading work for sexual favors. This certainly brought new meaning to the idea of having a handyman.
She stared at him, agog, wondering just what it was about her that brought out this side of a man. It wasn’t as if she had set out to entice him—unless Amishmen simply went on the assumption that all “English” women were easy. In fact, all she’d tried to do since he had arrived was send him home. But here he was, calm as you please, suggesting—
“You have a windmill you are not making use of,” he said, putting his weight into the task of wrenching a screw free from the wood and half a dozen coats of paint.
Elizabeth blinked. “I do?”
“Ya.” He pulled the screw free, examined it briefly, tucked it into the deep pocket of his trousers, and went to work on another. “Silas Hostetler is by way of needing a new windmill. And Silas has a young black gelding I might could use to replace my old sorrel.”
“Ah . . .” So it wasn’t her body he was after. She wasn’t sure if she should be offended or relieved.
“We have a deal, then?” Aaron pulled another screw free and pocketed it before casting her a look over his shoulder.
She sat with one leg tucked up on her chair, hands around her ankle, arms framing her breasts, plumping them up beneath the man’s thin undershirt she wore. She looked wild and wicked to him with her black hair tumbling around her shoulders, unbound and uncovered. Sinful, he told himself. A woman’s hair was her glory and only for her husband to see.
But Elizabeth Stuart had no husband.
And he had no wife. As much as he still thought of himself as married, his Siri was with God and he was alone on this earth.
He tore his gaze away from her, turning back to the cupboard. He had no intention of involving himself with an English woman. No matter that she obviously needed a man to look after her, or that her eyes were the color of the sky just before dawn. He had come here for other reasons, practical reasons.
“I guess we do have us a deal.” Elizabeth pushed herself up out of the chair, a little bewildered that something good could happen this easily. Her life was Murphy’s Law in practice. That she could get her kitchen fixed up for the price of a worthless old windmill seemed too good to be true. But then, the windmill wasn’t worthless to an Amishman.
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, sugar, even if he’s hitched to an Amish buggy.
“Where I come from we shake on deals, Aaron Hauer,” she said, offering her hand.
He looked at it as if he suspected her of having a joy buzzer tucked into her palm. Reluctantly he set his screwdriver down and accepted her offer, sighing as if it pained him to touch her. Elizabeth’s mouth twitched into a wry smile. She didn’t doubt that he’d never shaken hands with a woman before, certainly not an “English” woman. It gave her a little feeling of triumph to be the first.
His hand was warm and dry, callused, tough. Tremendous strength was there, but the potential for gentleness too, and artistry. She thought of the way he’d rubbed his fingers over the cabinet and figured some lucky Amish maid was going to get herself a good husband one of these days, when he was finished mourning the wife who had died.
“Thank you, Aaron Hauer,” she said softly. His gaze caught on hers for an instant and something subtle charged the air between them. It wasn’t attraction, precisely, or need, or even understanding. Elizabeth couldn’t give it a name other than awareness, and even that seemed too strong. Odd was what it was. Then he pulled his hand back and glanced away from her, and whatever it had been was gone.
“I’ve got to go change for work,” she said, backing toward the dining room door. “Town’s liable to be damn near on fire with news of the murder.” He frowned at her language and turned back to his work without comment. Elizabeth watched him, bewildered. “You don’t seem overly concerned that a man was killed within shouting distance of your house.”
He grimaced as he twisted at another stubborn screw. “What goes on in the world of the English is of
no concern to me.” He muttered something in German as he fought to loosen the screw. The wood gave up its stubborn hold and he had the hardware free with a few expert flicks of the wrist.
Elizabeth went on watching him, amazed at his calm. He spoke as if their two worlds existed on parallel planes that couldn’t touch, couldn’t become entwined with each other even as they themselves were disproving that theory. That a killer might not discriminate between Amish and English the way he did apparently hadn’t occurred to Aaron Hauer. Elizabeth doubted Amish throats would be any more resistant to a blade than Jarrold Jarvis’s had been, but she envied Aaron his insulation of faith. It would have been nice to cite a Bible verse and absolve herself of any involvement in what had happened. But she couldn’t do that. Even if she hadn’t found the body, she was still a reporter.
“You’ll have to introduce yourself to Trace,” she said, mentally shifting gears as she moved sideways toward the phone that hung on the kitchen wall. She would call Jo for a ride, then call the guy Deputy Kaufman had said would pull her car out of the ditch—what was his name? Jurgen something. “Trace is my son,” she clarified. “It’s against his religion to get up before noon.