Fall from Pride (2 page)

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?”