Shunning Sarah (12 page)

“I want you to find who really killed Sarah Yoder,” she said.

“I want nothing more. Same with the police, I’m sure. Why? Do you have any information?”

“I believe the police are settling for a quick and easy suspect.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. “Do they think Josh did this?”

“No, his father.”

Her husband, Brian, was overseas in the armed forces. She even showed me a picture of him in uniform displayed on a superb walnut end table next to a small American flag. He was a good-looking man, but then again, a military uniform can make almost any man appear attractive.

“If he’s serving abroad, why are the cops even looking at him? Seems like that would be a sufficient alibi.”

She picked up some dried flowers from the table and started arranging them in a brick-colored vase. She fidgeted with the stems and that made her seem even more nervous about my question.

“He shipped out about five days before her body was found,” she said.

I did the math. According to the medical examiner report, he was still here when she was killed. But numerous others also had opportunity. There had to be more to Brian Kueppers to interest the cops.

“Other than that, why are they looking at him?” I asked.

Location, location, location. Sheriff Eide apparently thought only area farmers would know about the sinkhole. He’d ordered them all interviewed in case they saw something or did something.

As authorities took Michelle down the investigative play-by-play of who was where when, she had unwittingly confirmed Brian was unaccounted for during what they apparently believed was the critical time of Sarah’s death. In fact, he’d been gone for nearly four hours. Out driving is what he’d told her the night they’d argued.

Even that wasn’t nearly enough evidence to suspect him, I thought. There had to be more.

“I checked you out, Ms. Spartz, and you know what it’s like to be wrongly accused.”

She had checked me out. I had briefly been charged with murder once. But I wasn’t convinced of Brian Kueppers’s innocence.
He might be plenty guilty of killing Sarah Yoder. And apparently, military police had conducted an inquiry with him wherever he was in the Middle East at the request of Fillmore County law enforcement. He’d given them the same “out driving” alibi.

“It seems to me this isn’t enough for the law to get excited over.” I dropped my voice to a whisper. “They must know something else about your husband. The question is, do you know what it is?”

She crushed a brown flower in her palm and rubbed the dust between her fingers. I was reminded of Father Mountain delivering that traditional Ash Wednesday line about being dust and returning to dust.

Michelle wiped her hands on her jeans and looked up at me. “A couple times a few years back, he scared me.”

That was something. “Did he hurt you?” That was something else.

“Not badly. But I was frightened.”

“Did you ever call the authorities for help?” I asked.

She nodded.

That meant they had paperwork on her husband. “That’s why they’re interested in him.”

“But he changed. He got help. I know that sounds feeble, but we have a strong marriage even six thousand miles apart.”

I wasn’t convinced, but let her argument pass unchallenged by changing the subject. “How’s Josh doing?”

“He’s good. Proud of his role in helping to identify Sarah. Now that she has a name, he doesn’t seem afraid anymore.”

“He did important work,” I said. “I’m glad he’s coping.”

At the mention of Josh, she glanced at the clock in the kitchen. I realized she wanted me to leave before the school bus brought her son home.

“Let’s stay in touch,” I suggested, and she readily agreed. “Do you and your husband ever do webcam conversations?”

She said they’d had one frantic cybertalk after Josh fell in the pit, and were hoping for less urgent ones.

“I might like to chat with him myself,” I said.

I didn’t press the issue, just planted the idea of a face-to-face encounter with this possible suspect. But first, I’d want to see what the sheriff might cough up about Brian Kueppers. Because I sensed there had to be something else that Michelle either didn’t know or wasn’t telling.

T
he highway route back to the Twin Cities took me through the other end of Harmony, where I passed a large warehouse building with an enormous banner that read Everything Amish: Furniture Quilts Crafts.

I drove around the store and noticed a truck backed up against a loading dock. The cab was empty and the cargo had been unloaded.

I parked near the front door, next to a fast-looking Chevy Camaro. The sports car caught my eye because it was the type of vehicle that my deceased husband would have loved to test drive. I ran my hand over the shiny black fender. The rest of the lot was ordinary. Several cars had out-of-state license plates and seemed to belong to tourists, shopping for a piece of Amish culture.

Since the autumn day was cool, Husky waited in the car while I explored. The professional setup contrasted with the occasional handwritten signs along dirt roads professing to sell New Potatoes or Baskets. Those all cautioned Not on Sundays.

What this sprawling enterprise lacked in country charm it made up for in selection. And hours. I noted it was open Sunday afternoons. And at the cash register, a modest sign indicated they took credit cards. A convenience not found on the Amish farms I visited.

A young woman greeted us, but immediately retreated to a
corner room when I mentioned I’d like to talk to someone about Sarah Yoder.

I was admiring an oak dining-room table when a handsome man approached me. He wore designer jeans and a black turtleneck under a fashionable blazer. He looked good enough to be on air, or in
GQ
magazine. But something about him seemed different, perhaps his manner of speech or way of walking.

“We deliver,” he said.

I was tempted. If Malik had been along, he wouldn’t have left empty handed. After all, our station van has plenty of room in back. Usually during ratings months my cameraman saved his overtime money to buy a new household appliance for his wife. But lately, overtime was virtually nil. So were any real prospects of new furniture.

“Maybe another time,” I answered. “The set is stunning, but space is an issue.”

I was renting another furnished house in south Minneapolis and until I knew I was settled somewhere to stay, I didn’t want to acquire anything large or heavy.

“Then maybe the quilts are calling you.” He walked me over to a full wall display of color and design hanging from rails across the ceiling.

A vivid geometric one attracted my attention, but when I saw the prices, I warned myself not to become too attached. The cheapest was marked $750, the most expensive $1,195. Buying cashew crunch, potatoes, and pie in the line of duty was one thing. A quilt, at that price, was something else.

“If the Amish are such simple folk,” I asked, “how come their goods are so pricey?”

“Because Amish must make a living, too,” he replied. “And because in this manufactured world of ours, finding something so beautiful that is truly made by hand is difficult. Each of these quilts is as unique as a fingerprint.”

His answer seemed obvious and made me want one even
more. Clearly he couldn’t charge those prices if customers weren’t paying up.

“But you haven’t come here to talk about quilts, have you?” he said. “I understand you have questions about Sarah Yoder.” He introduced himself as Isaac Hochstetler, the owner of Everything Amish. “But you can call me Ike.”

I handed him a business card that read Riley Spartz, news reporter, but assured him he could call me Riley.

“Are you Amish, Ike?” Hardly seemed possible. His clothing far from plain. But he appeared to be running a thriving business selling Amish merchandise.

“Once,” he said, “but we should talk about Sarah, not me.”

Ike’s past sounded fascinating, and he might be a more interesting tutor than Father Mountain. But time was tight. Channel 3 would be expecting the corn-maze story soon.

I told Ike that I understood he had contacted the police after seeing the artist sketch of the murdered woman and had identified her as Sarah Yoder.

“How did you know her?” I asked.

“She worked for me for a few days. And then she stopped showing up.” He walked over to a desk calendar and flipped the pages back. “This was her last shift.”

The day was five days before her body was discovered in the pit.

“What was Sarah’s last day at work like?” I asked.

“I missed most of it.” He had to drive to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester midafternoon to visit a sick friend, so he left Sarah to close up the store. “All she had to do was shut the door and the place would lock. And she apparently did. Whatever trouble befell her, it happened after she left here.”

“Seems sort of trusting to leave her in charge after only being on the job a matter of days,” I remarked. “You certainly have valuable inventory.”

“She was Amish,” Ike said. “I didn’t worry.”

“So you might have been the last person to see Sarah alive?”

“No, that earmark goes to her killer.”

Ike said he had already gone over these details and his whereabouts with investigators. They had examined the store for fingerprints, but so many customers had come and gone since Sarah that no such clues were possible. They were also checking phone records, but found nothing suspicious during her final afternoon at work.

“And there was money in the till,” he continued, “so you can rule out robbery.”

“What about surveillance cameras?” I glanced around the ceiling and corners.

He shook his head, caressing another gorgeous wooden dining table, this one maple. His hands appeared strong and I wondered if he made some of the furniture himself.

“Never bothered with cameras,” he said. “Always figured most of the merchandise was too heavy for shoplifters. Anything else wasn’t worth stealing. Maybe that was a mistake.”

“When she didn’t show up for work the next day, did you consider reporting Sarah Yoder as missing to the police?” I asked.

“I never considered her missing. I thought she had returned to the Amish. And I respected her decision.”

“Sarah left the Amish?”

He nodded. “She was temporarily staying in a bed-and-breakfast across town. Sometimes I get a call from them to hire Amish who are starting over. I agreed to give her some hours provided she wore her Amish garb. The tourists appreciate the authenticity.”

“Why was she leaving the Amish?”

“An issue with the church.” He shrugged. “I didn’t go into the details with her because I didn’t want to know the details. Sometimes that type of sharing muddies the employer/employee relationship.”

I sympathized. My Channel 3 relationships were often muddy. But his next words changed everything. According to Ike, Sarah was being shunned.

C
onfusing scenarios flashed through my mind on the drive back north to Minneapolis. I wished Malik had been along instead of Husky so someone would talk back to me over the miles and help me make sense of this situation.

“What do you mean shunned?” I had asked Ike.

In the Amish world, he explained, being shunned meant being avoided until the member repented of their infraction. “It keeps Amish for the Amish.”

Ike speculated Sarah might have been caught drinking, smoking, or even listening to the radio. “If the church was shunning her, it means, in their eyes, she brought some form of disapproval on herself.” He didn’t think she was keeping company with English, or she wouldn’t have ended up working for him.

I wanted to learn more, but if I missed my corn-maze deadline, I’d be shunned as far as my boss was concerned. So to be polite, I bought a couple quilted patchwork pot holders and left.

Father Mountain answered my call from the car, and I put him on speaker. He described what he knew about the Amish custom of shunning. It was similar to excommunication, but not just from the church but from the entire community. “It’s the ultimate social rejection.”

“Worse than unfriending someone on Facebook?” I asked.

“Much worse.”

Shunning, known as
Meidung
, apparently involved some shaming rituals, such as not eating at the same table as the offending individual.

“While to you and me,” he said, “the practice might not sound arduous, to the shunned individual, it can be brutal to be in the bann.”

“In what?” Suddenly I heard the echo of a little Amish girl speaking of her dead sister and realized “barn” was not the word she used.

“The bann,” Father Mountain repeated. “That’s another term for being shunned. Placed in the bann.”

Shunned, I thought. A silent ban.

“The bann is harsh business,” my priest pal continued. “Spouses cannot sleep together. Parents must eschew grown children. It can tear families apart unless the sinner asks forgiveness.”

“What about children? Are they shunned?”

“Only adults. Once a member has been baptized into the Amish faith—and remember, Riley, for the Amish, only adults can be baptized—they must adhere to the
Ordnung
, church rules, or else. They must stay true to their vows, whether pertaining to religion, electricity, automobiles, clothing, even companionship.”

“Can Amish marry non-Amish?”

“No. They must both be of the faith. But prior to baptism, Amish teens are allowed a
Rumspringa
, a time of experimenting with English vices such as forbidden technology, cigarettes, or alcohol. Sometimes even sex.”

That sounded like the Amish romance I’d started reading the other night. But I’d written such escapades off as fiction.

“Father Mountain, that seems like inviting serious trouble into the Amish church.”

“The hope is by facing and rejecting sin, the next generation will be even stronger in their faith. How old was your victim?”

“Sarah was eighteen.”

“If she was being shunned, that means she had been baptized. If she was only eighteen, she couldn’t have taken her vows very long ago. What happened between then and now that made her leave?”