Fall from Pride (9 page)

“Can you believe the Schrocks missed that whole thing?” Cindee asked. “Told us they were going to hire a van driver to take the whole family to see relatives near New Philadelphia, coming back later today, so I bet they don't even know, with no telephones and all. Poor people when they get driven in and see that.”

So, Sarah thought, Mike Getz knew ahead of time that the Schrocks would not be home last night. She had to report all this to Nate when she saw him again.

When Mr. Baughman peeked around the corner and said a quick, “How you ladies doing?” Cindee hightailed it back to the front checkout desk. Sarah had always liked Cindee. Anybody who liked and knew paint colors the way she did was fine with her. At least Cindee hadn't brought up the fact that artist's tubes of oil paints, canvas and easels were on sale again, because Sarah could hear them practically calling her name from the other side of the store.

 

That night Sarah lay on the hideaway bed in the living room of the
grossdaadi haus,
unable to sleep. So much was happening so fast. Nate had not come back as far as she knew, but she'd left him a note about what she'd learned from Cindee, stuck in his sleeping bag he'd left on the ground. A nice way to spend the night, she thought—that is, him sleeping under the starry sky. She assumed he'd done a lot of interviews today, maybe even driven to Cleveland to talk to
Hannah and her employer to see if she had proof of where she'd been during the barn burnings—an alibi.

She sure hoped it wasn't someone Amish or even former Amish doing this, including Jacob. Enough outsiders thought the Amish were a little crazy, or quaint. Quaint—that's what Mr. Clawson had called something she'd said.

She and Martha had kept the news of the second arson from
Grossmamm
. She'd gone to sleep pretty well tonight and hadn't stirred—at least, Sarah hadn't heard her in the bathroom. Strange how the old woman was so afraid of Nate, but then it might be best if Sarah was, too, because he really intrigued her…really made her want to…

Sarah gasped. She heard gravel against the big window right over her head. Was Hannah here again? What if Nate was right to suspect Hannah, and she had come to look at the second barn she'd burned? Or had Nate questioned her today, and Hannah had come to tell her to keep away from him? Or it could be Nate himself, wanting to talk to her, even though she hadn't heard him drive in. Yes, she'd mentioned to him that Hannah had thrown gravel against the window the night after her family's barn burned.

She heard a handful of dirt or gravel again. Sarah sat up and pulled the bed quilt around her cotton nightgown like a shawl before she cracked the dark green curtains to look out. No one—she saw no one.

She tiptoed to
Grossmamm
's door and didn't hear her stirring, so at least Hannah—or Nate—had not wakened her. Sarah hurried across the small living room, turned the single lock on the front door and stepped out into the warm, windy night, walking to the edge of the small porch.

“Hannah!” she called. “Hannah?”

Silence. Nothing moving but tree limbs. The hoot of a
barn owl sounded so lonely. The familiar squeak of the porch swing pushed only by the wind grated on her nerves, scraping along her spine to make the hair on the nape of her neck stand on end. The thick hair she let down at night moved back and forth across her shoulders like a ghostly caress.

Too late, Sarah realized she should not have stepped outside and no way was she going farther. Besides, last time Hannah had showed herself through the window, and Nate probably would have knocked. After all,
Grossmamm
had said she'd seen a man out here…unless it had been Nate looking around to be sure everything was quiet that night….

She felt fear nibble at her, but when had any of them been afraid to go back and forth between the farm buildings even at night?

Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, but she still saw no one. As she turned around to hurry back inside, Sarah felt gravel under her bare feet on the porch. So it hadn't been her imagination. If it was Hannah or Nate, it wasn't one bit funny.

She gasped. A note was stuck to the front door with a basting pin. It must have been there when she came out.

She took it inside with her, locked the door behind her and lit the kerosene lamp. She read, in large, handwritten, black printing, words from the Bible: “For wickedness burns as the fire; through the wrath of the Lord of Hosts the land is burned up, and the people shall be as fuel for the fire.”

SARAH WISHED SHE COULD JUST RUN TO NATE with this note—this threat—but it was too late and too far to go alone.

After checking on
Grossmamm
to be sure she was all right, she paced the floor in the small living room, back and forth, skittish at her own shifting shadow, peeking outside now and then. She circled the note, not touching it as if it would burn her. At dawn, she'd run to the house to show the note to
Daad,
talk him into going with her to take it to Nate. For once in her life, she wished they had telephones here at the farm, or that she had one of Nate's handheld phones so she could call him.

But had this note been left by the arsonist himself, or was someone else horning in? Recalling how Nate had put the evidence of the bundle of matches in a plastic bag, she went to the small kitchen and got a gallon-size bag and sealed the note inside. Nate had a fingerprint kit in VERA. Maybe if he eliminated her prints from when she tore it off and brought it inside, he could find other prints. But then he
couldn't go around making people give theirs, could he? Especially her people. They would mistrust him then—government intruding on personal privacy.

Each time she paced past the table, she glared at the message through the shiny plastic. Just regular, letter-size, white paper. Nothing special to identify that. Who wrote in such heavy, big print, or was that to show defiance or anger? And the fact it was a Bible quote—from someone Amish?

Was she to be the messenger of this threat to the church leaders or the entire Amish community? She did not want to cause panic or have the news media get hold of this. But how did the sender know she was in the smaller house and not with her family in the big one? Someone had been spying on her—or, again, it was someone Amish, someone they knew, who knew her family's ways, her ways. But someone Amish would have written in German, not English, wouldn't they?

Worst of all her agonizing was the implied warning that people would die, that the arsonist might burn more than barns. “And the people shall be as fuel for the fire.” Did the barn burnings with her quilt squares mean that someone was angry with
her?

Near three in the morning, she finally got hold of herself. She'd fight back—well, not really, because her people never did that—but she would not just let someone terrorize her or her community. She'd asked Cindee questions today. Now she had to learn more about this, not just let it destroy her confidence and faith.

Sarah tiptoed into her
grossmamm
's room to borrow her Bible to look for the exact location of the verse. Out in the living room, as she bent close to the single lamp, her hands shook, rustling the well-worn pages. As if she heard
Grossmamm
's shrill voice again, Sarah kept recalling the etchings of
her people being burned alive from the pages of the
Martyrs Mirror.
That one picture of a young woman tied to a ladder and being tipped into the flames flashed before her eyes. She was perspiring, but a chill snaked up her spine.

Sarah knew to look in one of the prophets for this quote. Finally, she found it early in the big book of Isaiah in the Old Testament. She whispered it in the sonorous German, Isaiah 9:19. What followed were other predictions of a dreadful future for those who worshipped idols—or had this quote been plucked out strictly for its mention of fire?

Curled on the couch, she eventually fell into a fitful sleep, slogging from dream to dream. A fiery beast was trying to burn VERA, flames licking at the truck, devouring it while she huddled inside with Nate, holding on to the ladder he said he would loan her. They were both barefoot and had been swimming, but even water from the pond was not enough to put out the inferno that burned them, burned her….

She woke to find she was uncovered and shaking with the predawn chill. After looking out from every window, she ran to the big house to talk to her parents and fetch Martha to sit with their
grossmamm,
so she could take Nate what might be his best clue yet.

 

Nate was surprised to see Sarah and her father on VERA's back doorstep even before he took a quick swim in the pond or shaved. But then he'd been surprised to find her note in his sleeping bag last night with all the helpful intel about Mike Getz. In a way, that had saved his day, because it had been one frustration after the other.

He'd made the hour-long drive to Cleveland and managed a quick interview with Hannah's boss, Myron Jenkins.
Jenkins couldn't provide Hannah with an alibi for either night of the barn burnings, but of course, that didn't necessarily imply guilt. No one was home at Hannah's apartment, where she lived with two other women, and the neighbor he'd talked to had no clue where Hannah's boyfriend lived so he hadn't been able to question him.

When Nate returned to Homestead, he'd also struck out trying to trace where Jacob Yoder was living, so he was going to visit his previous place of employment in town today to ask some questions or even interview Jacob's parents. He'd also made an appointment to talk to Peter Clawson since the newspaper man was aware of all that went on in the area. The owner of the hardware store and Mike Getz's girlfriend, who worked there, couldn't recall who might have purchased artificial logs and certainly no one had lately. They were boxed away in sets of four—which could mean the arsonist had two more to use—in the back storeroom until autumn.

But one look at Sarah's face, and nothing else mattered.

“What happened?” he asked before either she or her father said a word. He wanted to touch her, hold her, but he didn't so much as move at first. Her pretty face looked ravaged; at the very least she hadn't slept or was sick.

Sarah extended a bagged note to him, and he scanned it. “Where and when was this found?”

“Last night on the door of the
grossdaadi haus
where I stay with my grandmother. Someone wanted me to find it right away and threw gravel against the window to get me outside. I thought it was Hannah and went out….”

His insides lurched and not just at her admitting the note could have been left by Hannah. This could mean Sarah's paintings—she herself—was the target of the arsonist. But it did mention “the people,” not an individual.

“You've got to be more careful,” he scolded, much too loudly. Even Ben Kauffman startled. “You could have been hurt!”

“Danger and fear—it's not how we think around here,” she protested. “I wasn't hurt. It just made it hard to sleep. That's a biblical quote from the prophet Isaiah.”

He fought to calm himself, to think and not just react. “And you thought to bag the note for me. Sarah, you're priceless. I assume you touched it.”

“Yes, but I thought you could take my fingerprints.
Daad
says it's all right as long as you don't send them to the government, just use them to see if there are others on the page you can trace. If it would have been stuck to the door with a thumbtack, I would have brought that for the same reason, but it was put there by a basting pin—a long one, sometimes used for quilt making, really common around here.”

Man, Nate thought, this girl is bright. Bright and shining in his eyes. But maybe the arsonist also knew she was bright and bold. Nate had thought her painting a quilt square on her own property would keep her safe, but would it? And that person her maybe-delusional grandmother had spotted—odds were now that the person was real and could be the arsonist. But he or she was also clever, probably too clever to get caught returning to where the note had been left.

“I'll also see if there are footprints or anything dropped near where you found this,” he told her.

He tried not to frown, but this biblical reference backed up a possibility he didn't like, just as the kerosene and fake fireplace log—and now the basting pin—did. Such as maybe he was going to end up arresting someone Amish, not that others couldn't cite scripture for their own purposes. He was starting to realize what Sarah feared most was probably
true. The arsonist was not some random outsider or even a “modern,” as they put it, with a grudge against the Amish. It was someone right here in this tightly-knit community, maybe even one of their own people.

“Sorry,” Sarah said, interrupting his agonizing. “But I think I—Martha, too—have made a mess of the gravel there, walking in and out, so you won't find footprints.”

“That's all right. You've done really well. I pretty much struck out yesterday asking if anyone recently bought artificial fireplace logs at the hardware store, so now, with this and the note you left me about Mike Getz, we have something to go on. Let's just hope the perp—perpetrator—made a mistake and has his, or her, prints on this page.”

Finally, her father spoke. He had looked pretty upset through all this, though Nate gave him credit for letting Sarah talk. He called Nate by his first name for the first time. “Nate, there's no way we can just keep Sarah to home, and that doesn't look like a refuge now, anyway. She said you have little handheld phones—no wires attached. I'll ask Bishop Esh, but since all this—” he gestured toward the note in Nate's hand “—I would say her idea you might let her borrow one when she goes into town and back could be a good idea.”

“It would for sure. I'll show her how to use it, and she can call me if she sees anything strange. The only thing is, when I need to drive somewhere, I have to put my antenna down so a tree limb overhead doesn't damage it,” he explained, gesturing up at it, “and that might play havoc with our signals. I was going to ask, anyway, Mr. Kauffman, would it be permissible for Sarah to take me to see the other two barns that have her paintings—in her buggy? I passed one on the road coming in, but I'd like her to tell me something about
the patterns she's painted that may relate to a pattern with the arsons. Besides, I don't want to be seen driving VERA there, in case the arsonist thinks I'm daring him or her to strike again. Of course, you or Gabe or Martha could go along.”

Nate realized he'd said too much, but he'd really wanted to explain himself so he didn't alienate Sarah's family or hurt her reputation.

“With plans for the big auction Saturday and buying the wood and hardware for rebuilding the Esh barn,” Ben Kauffman said, “we're all pretty busy. But if you sit behind Sarah's seat in her buggy, so you're not real obvious, I say okay.”

“Great. Would you like to come inside VERA, Mr. Kauffman, while I take Sarah's fingerprints? We won't be long.”

“I'll just sit right here on the back, then walk her home. You two can make plans about seeing the other barns.”

Nate rolled Sarah's prints as fast but as carefully as he could. Her fingers were delicate but strong. Talented hands, he thought. They sat, of necessity, very close together. Her hair smelled of that seductive lavender scent again. Was her friend Ella Lantz's making and selling lavender soap and sachets so different from Sarah's being able to paint scenes of Amish life? All three of the best friends—Hannah, Sarah and Ella—seemed to have special talents that didn't fit the mold around here.

He'd thought this assignment would be a piece of cake, but that old Amish saying was really hitting home right now. Sarah sometimes said quilts instead of cakes, but he was learning the hard way that dealing with the Amish was not all cakes and pies.

 

When Nate found no prints but Sarah's on the paper with the Bible quote, it only drove home again that the enemy
was careful and clever. Would Hannah, Jacob or even Mike Getz have thought to keep the paper clean of their prints? Maybe Getz watched the forensic tech shows on TV. And both Hannah and Jacob were living out in the world where they could think of that, too.

He glanced at his watch. He had time to go into town for breakfast at the Dutch Farm Table, then to visit the Buggy Wheel Shop where Jacob Yoder used to work. That would give him plenty of time to get back here to go with Sarah—and guard Sarah, truth be told—to the other two barns with her painted patterns. If the owners were home, he was tempted to tell them to stay home after dark every night. He didn't want to panic them, but an empty house seemed to be part of the arsonist's pattern. So how, then, were “the people” going to be “fuel for the fire”?

As he drove past the Kauffman barn, he saw Sarah up on a ladder, chalking out the perimeter of the square for her painting. He stopped and unloaded his ladder and metal scaffolding, then set it up for her, so she had more stability. Since the barn burnings were at night—cover of darkness and more spectacular for the arsonist, he figured—he'd just take these back each evening when she was done in case he needed them. It would give him more excuses to see her, and not, he admitted to himself, just because she was proving to be such a help to him.

“Thanks,” she told him. “I'll really need those when I start painting. I think it might rain this afternoon, which may wash my chalk marks off, but I needed to do something on this today.”

“The threat of rain won't stop us from going out this afternoon, will it?”

“This fiberglass buggy and even the Amish woman who
drives it won't wash away in a little rain—or a swim in a pond, Nate MacKenzie,” she told him, her voice teasing, almost flirty. His wanting to respond to that, but realizing he should keep this all business, made him almost tongue-tied as they looked into each other's eyes a moment too long.

“So what's this pattern?” he asked.

“It's my favorite, because I'd like to see the Atlantic and Pacific oceans someday. I've seen Lake Erie and just imagined it was the ocean. It's called Ocean Waves. A lot of triangles close up, but it looks like rolling waves with whitecaps from farther back.”

“Like an impressionist painting.”

“What's that?”

“Just what you said. Up close you can't see the images, only the pieces, but if you stand back a bit, the impression of the big picture becomes clear. I think most of the impressionists were French. I'll show you some on the laptop sometime.”