Chapter 4
Rachel pulled the van into her driveway as dusk was falling. She had intended to return the vehicle to her next-door neighbor that day, but decided that the following morning would be soon enough. Hulda Schenfeld was a lovely woman and a good friend, but Rachel simply didn’t have the energy to deal with the nonagenarian that night.
To Rachel’s relief, the public parking area for the B&B was empty except for a single car: a lime-green VW with Coexist and Save the Redwoods stickers displayed on the rear bumper. That meant she wouldn’t have to go inside and chat with guests.
The vehicle belonged to a college professor from California who was writing a screenplay featuring a talking cat. She was here for an extended stay. The screenwriter, Professor Li, was an ideal guest. She had reserved a room for six weeks and paid in advance. She just wanted to be left alone to write. Her only requests had been that the housekeeping staff leave clean sheets and towels outside the door rather than disturb her, and that she have use of the kitchen twice a day to make her own juice. Apparently, Professor Li lived entirely on raw vegetables and fresh fruits, which she processed in her own juicer. She was smartly dressed and pleasant enough if Rachel passed her on the stairs or in the hall, but for all the interaction she had with her hostess or the staff, she might as well have been a ghost. That was a blessing now because Rachel was in no condition to be a good hostess, or any hostess at all, for that matter.
She was exhausted. Had it only been hours since they’d discovered Beth Glick’s body in the quarry? It seemed as though it had happened days ago.
She eyed her cell phone, still lying on the console, as the van crawled down the driveway. She’d been avoiding Evan, but she knew that she had to call him back eventually.
Rachel didn’t regret going to the bishop. It had been the right thing to do. As close as she and Evan were, there were things he didn’t understand about her position in the Amish community. He didn’t want her to do anything to impede the authorities’ investigation of Beth’s death, but news of a child’s death couldn’t come to an Amish household from an outsider. Especially under these circumstances. It just couldn’t.
As Rachel drove around the fieldstone farmhouse, she considered the idea of just jumping into the shower and going straight to bed. She could deal with Evan after a night’s sleep. In the end, they’d work it out. No matter what they quarreled about, and it was rare that they ever did, he never held a grudge. Evan was the nicest guy she’d ever met.
She swung the van around the house and jammed on her brakes. Evan’s police cruiser was parked in her spot.
“Oh, good,” she muttered under her breath. She put the van in reverse and considered making a run for it, but good sense prevailed. How foolish would that look? Evan would probably follow her; he might even turn on his lights and siren. He’d been known to do it before when she tried to avoid him.
Slowly, she got out of the vehicle, taking her cell phone with her. Her goats bleated from the stone barn. It was past their evening feeding. “Coming,” she promised.
“Rachel,” Evan called. He was sitting in the backyard on the glider in the grapevine arbor. It was one of her favorite spots at Stone Mill House and one her guests loved. She had built the arbor with her own hands, using lumber from a collapsed barn that she’d had torn down. It was now covered with grapevines and surrounded with bee balm and butterfly bushes.
Her feet felt as if they were weighed down. “Hey,” she said as she approached him. Butterflies, absent this evening from the arbor, fluttered in her stomach. “Still need to get a new battery for my phone.” She held up the phone, then slid it into her skirt pocket.
“Sit.” Evan’s expression was serious, but he didn’t seem angry with her. More resigned, she guessed. His eyes were gray, almost pewter in color, interesting eyes with thick lashes that she would have given a pinky finger to own. “You didn’t come straight home.” He didn’t wait for her to reply. “Where did you go? Please tell me you haven’t been to the Glicks’ farm.”
She shook her head. “No, Mary Aaron and I went to Bishop Abner. After we talked to him, he went to meet with the Glicks’ bishop. I imagine Bishop Schroder went right to Beth’s family with the bad news.”
“Rachel. It’s not your place or the bishops’ to—”
“I’m sorry, but I couldn’t let strangers tell them, Evan.” She stood at the edge of the arbor. “I just couldn’t,” she repeated.
“We have a protocol. Troopers should have been the first to tell them.”
She didn’t say anything.
She could see that he was trying hard to contain his annoyance with her. “Rachel, you understand that you can’t get involved with this case. Right?”
She settled onto the glider, conscious of the goats still pitifully bleating. It wasn’t as if they were truly starving; she’d fed them that morning.
The glider was oversized, painted blue, with a high back, and wide enough for three people to sit side by side. She’d left a gap between them. “I’m already involved, Evan. I found her.”
“This is a matter for the authorities. It’s police business. You’re a civilian. Anything you do could interfere with the investigation.” He was still wearing his uniform, which meant he’d come straight from work. Now, he removed his campaign-style trooper hat and placed it on a wooden table. He ran a hand through his short, dark hair. “Sergeant Haley asked me to assist on the investigation, because I grew up here.”
“You may live in Stone Mill,” she agreed, “but the Amish still consider you an outsider.” She kicked off her flip-flops and tucked one leg up under her skirt.
He studied her bare foot for a moment. “Amish wearing sandals, now?”
“When I left the house at noon, I was just going swimming. We didn’t expect to get caught up in . . . in this.”
He didn’t comment on her skirt or hideous, oversized shirt, for which she was grateful. She rubbed her temples. “Is the detective still coming to talk with me tonight, or are you supposed to question me?”
“He’ll be here in the morning.”
“Good. That’s better than tonight.” She glanced toward the barn, now in full shadow, then back at him. “I’m sorry if I caused you a problem, going to the bishop, but Beth is a touchy subject in the Amish community. This had to be handled carefully.”
He brushed dried dirt off the hem of his trousers without speaking. The crease was sharp.
She thought back to when she and Mary Aaron were in the van, getting ready to leave the quarry. “Was he right?” she asked. “The paramedic at the scene. Did someone murder her?”
“I’m not qualified to say. The medical examiner . . .” He sighed and lowered his head, staring at his polished boots. “I wanted you to know I didn’t leave her alone, Rachel. I waited, and I followed the ambulance to the hospital.”
She raised her chin and gazed into his eyes. “That was a kind thing to do.”
He flushed. It was one of the qualities she found endearing about Evan. Tough cop or not, he could never hide his humanity. “She wasn’t a member of your family’s church? Is that why you had to have one bishop talk to the other?”
“Yes. Beth’s family belongs to another church district,” she explained. “They’re the ones who drive the black buggies with the gray tops. They’re very conservative.”
“Two-tone buggies make them more conservative?”
She shook her head, raising a hand to him. “Don’t even get me started on the color of buggies, what wheels can be made of, or what shade of blue is the most appropriate.”
He gave her a half-smile. They’d talked about the intricacies of various Amish sects many times, and he knew the subject made her crazy. “So Beth’s church is more conservative than your family’s?”
“Yes. Small differences to you and me, maybe, but not to them. Straight pins on the women’s dresses, even the little girls’. No buttons. And the men’s hat brims are wider. And they have more fasting days than we do.” She corrected herself. “Than my parents’ church does. Most of their young people accept baptism right out of school, when they’re sixteen.”
“That’s young, isn’t it?” he asked.
The hunger cries grew more incessant. Goats could be drama queens.
Rachel glanced in the direction of the stone barn, distracted. “Not for—” She looked back at Evan. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to feed up. Otherwise they’ll never shut up.” She rose and walked out from under the arbor. The backyard was illuminated by two security lights mounted on poles that came on automatically at sunset.
Evan followed her.
She opened the side door to the barn, which held a spacious pen for three long-eared goats. A door on the far side of the indoor enclosure led to the pasture, but it was closed. Ada, Rachel’s cook, must have closed it when she left; it wasn’t safe for goats to be out at night. Too many predators. “It’s coming,” she soothed.
The goats danced and leaped in the air, tails up, ears twitching in anticipation. Rachel circumnavigated two stacks of bushel baskets she’d borrowed from her father, slid the lid off a feed barrel, and scooped out a generous amount of goat chow. Ada said she was overfeeding them. That they were going to get fat.
“Could you turn on the water at the wall?” she asked Evan. When he’d done it, she lifted the handle of the faucet and water poured into the stainless steel trough. She pulled off a chunk of timothy and dropped it into the hayrack. Tails twitched as the goats dove into their supper.
Evan leaned against the stall, a lean hand gripping the top rail. “So, you were saying that Beth Glick had been baptized?”
“Probably at sixteen.” Rachel dusted the loose hayseeds off her hands.
“I understand she’s been gone almost two years.” He straightened. “Did she go to another Amish community?”
“No one knows, but that’s doubtful. Her parents woke up one morning to find her kapp on her bed and her suitcase and purse missing.” Rachel pulled a bobby pin from her hair that was poking her and stuck it back in somewhere else. “When you leave your kapp behind, you leave that life,” she said softly.
The natural progression of thoughts normally would have taken her back to the day she left her parents’ home. And her kapp. But she refused to go there tonight. She just didn’t have the emotional energy.
Evan was probably thinking something along the same lines. But if he was, he didn’t say anything about it. Instead, he asked, “How old was she when she left? She barely looked more than sixteen.”
Rachel exhaled, trying to think. “She left when she was about eighteen, so she would be—would have been—twenty.”
They were both quiet for a moment, lost in their own thoughts. Then she looked up at him. He’d had an awful day, too, and she doubted that he’d eaten anything. “Come inside,” she said. “We’ll see what Ada left in the refrigerator.”
“I didn’t come to eat.” It was a weak protest.
“Well, I’m hungry.” Which wasn’t really true, but she knew that if she didn’t eat, he wouldn’t. She shut off the barn light and the water, and they went outside.
“You think she ran away?” Evan walked toward the house with her.
“I assume. She left with seventy-five dollars of her mother’s chicken-and-egg money. It was taken from a sugar bowl in a cupboard, according to my Aunt Hannah. She makes it a point to keep up on local gossip.”
“So Beth stole from her parents and took off. And no one has heard from her all this time? There must have been some contact. Letters, a phone call to a friend.” He grimaced and shrugged. “Okay, no phone calls. But someone must know something about where she was all that time.”
Rachel opened the screen door, and Sophie launched herself through the air, barking excitedly. She jumped up and down at Rachel’s feet as though she’d been left alone for days rather than just a few hours. “Outside, girl. Do your business.”
Sophie stopped spinning and yipping long enough to race out into the grass and disappear into the darkness. A minute later, she shot back through the door that Rachel was still holding open.
The kitchen was dark. Rachel hit the switch. The counters and floor were spotless, thanks to Ada and her cleaning crew. Turning back to Evan, who’d followed her in, she said, “As far as I know, no one heard from Beth after she left. Not a word.”
“Strange,” he commented.
“Not really.” Rachel washed her hands at the big soapstone sink, dried them on a tea towel, and scooped out dog food from a cookie jar for Sophie. She poured it into a small blue crockery dish on the floor, and the dog stopped hopping long enough to stare suspiciously at the dry nuggets. Rachel groaned. “She’s spoiled rotten. She wants people food, but the vet says that this is what she should be eating.”
Evan regarded Sophie without comment. He liked her, and he was always slipping her bits of food under the table. Rachel guessed that if it were up to him, the dog would have whatever they were eating.
She opened the refrigerator door and peered in. Ada had left potato salad, a plate of sliced tomatoes and onions, fresh from the garden, and a roasted chicken covered with plastic wrap. “I think we hit the jackpot.” She began to pull out the dishes and hand them to him.
“So no one, to your knowledge, heard from Beth? No word in two years?” He carried the chicken and potato salad to the table for two, by the window.
Rachel set out plates, silverware, and cloth napkins. “Iced tea?” He nodded, and she went on. “Beth’s bishop doesn’t approve of phones, not even for businesses in the community. In an emergency, members of his congregation reach out to Amish from another district who might keep a cell phone for emergencies. Or even Englishers. They’ll flag down a passing car, but they won’t use a phone. Beth couldn’t have called them if she wanted to.”
Bishop, her big, seal point Siamese, appeared in the doorway and meowed. She glanced at his dish on the windowsill, high out of Sophie’s reach. “You still have food,” she said to the cat. “No begging.” She poured two glasses of tea.
“But they get mail. She could have mailed them a letter or something.”
“I don’t think she ever did,” Rachel said grimly.
He was quiet for a minute, then asked, “If Beth left after her baptism, that’s serious, isn’t it?”
She indicated he should sit. They took their seats, and he waited as she bowed her head for just a moment of silent grace. It was a habit that even fifteen years away from Stone Mill hadn’t ended.
“Serious enough that her family declared her dead to them.” Rachel picked up her fork. “Before you’re baptized, sins are far more easily forgiven. The assumption is made that a person doesn’t know better. It’s more complicated than that”—she gestured with her fork—“but you get what I mean.”
“Right.” He took a bite of potato salad. “Maybe she was hiding with some other Amish group. This is good.”
Rachel shrugged. “What does Ada make that isn’t good?” Bishop strolled under the table and rubbed against her bare ankle. She toyed with her fork. As much as she liked potato salad and roasted chicken, she wasn’t sure she could eat even a forkful. She had the feeling that if she closed her eyes, she’d see Beth’s white face. “I suppose anything is possible, but Beth left her kapp.” She shook her head. “Chances are, she didn’t go to another Amish community. She became English.”
They ate in silence for a couple of minutes. She knew what he was wondering: If Beth had left the Amish, why was she in Amish clothes when she died? Rachel was wondering the same thing, of course. She pushed a piece of roasted chicken around her plate.
“How long will the autopsy take?” she asked. “By custom, family and friends sit with the body after death. I don’t know if that will happen or not, since she had been shunned. But the funeral is usually twenty-four to forty-eight hours after death. They don’t believe in keeping the dead above ground any longer than possible.”
“No embalming?”
“No. We don’t embalm.” She wondered if the Glicks would agree to bury Beth at all or if they’d refuse the body. “Off the record,” she said, looking at him across the table from her, “do you think someone killed her?”
He didn’t answer.
She went on. “You must have seen what the paramedic was talking about: the marks on her neck.”
“We’ll wait and see what the medical examiner’s report says,” he hedged.
She watched him. He kept his gaze fixed on his plate. “But you’ll tell me when you find out?” she asked.
“I shouldn’t.” He hesitated. “But it’s possible that I’m going to need your help when I go to talk to Beth’s parents. Sergeant Haley told me he hasn’t, personally, had much luck talking with the Amish on some other cases. I think he’s hoping that since I’m from here, they’ll be more willing to talk with me.”
She didn’t know that they’d be any more willing to talk to Evan than to Sergeant Haley, but she didn’t say so. She suspected Evan already knew that. “If you’re going to try to talk to the Glicks, you need to wait until after the funeral,” she warned. “That time should be private.”
“It’s not my decision, Rachel. Sergeant Haley wants me to interview them first thing tomorrow. My lieutenant wants me to do whatever the detective needs.”
“If you push them, they’ll refuse to talk to you.”
He considered that for a moment. “Will you come with me?”
“Not unless you wait until after the funeral. It wouldn’t be right to intrude on their grief.”
“Even if it helps us find out what happened to her?”
She laid her fork down. “That’s not the way they’d see it, Evan. They’re not going to care all that much about what happened. Don’t you understand?” she asked, trying not to be frustrated with him. “What matters is that she’s dead and was unrepentant. To the Glicks, to any Old Order Amish person, what happens in this world, or has happened, isn’t important. It’s what happens in the hereafter.”
“That may be their belief,” he said quietly, “but if she was killed, the sooner we find out the truth of where she’s been all this time, the quicker we’ll bring her murderer to justice. And maybe save the life of another young person who’s left the Amish.”
“You think this has something to do with Beth leaving?”
He dropped his gaze to his plate. “I don’t know. But I plan to find out.”
The next morning, Rachel was up before the sun. She’d slept poorly, repeatedly waking in the darkness, heart pounding. Beth Glick’s body kept floating past her or slipping out of her grasp and sinking into a bottomless, still well of blue-green water. At five, she gave up trying to sleep, jumped in the shower, and pulled on a pair of capris and a T-shirt.
Letting her damp hair hang loose over her shoulders, she unplugged her cell phone from the wall and took it with her. She made her way quietly down the front stairs from the third story, with Sophie running ahead of her and Bishop ambling one step behind. She let the dog out the back door and left her to play in the grass for a few minutes; she wouldn’t wander far.
The Siamese watched as Rachel filled the kettle and set it on the commercial-sized gas range. A dull ache settled behind Rachel’s eyes as she measured loose Assam into a porcelain teapot. She could enjoy coffee at a social event, but real tea, hot or cold, was her staunch ally. When the water was almost boiling, she poured it over the tea leaves and counted off the minutes until it was ready. She added a liberal amount of apple blossom honey and then padded, barefoot, out onto the back porch.
Questions about the dead girl surfaced as Rachel sat on an Amish-made chair, but she pushed them away. She had things to do this morning. Business matters. She needed to check her email for reservations and new orders for her shop. She had to make certain the changes she’d made to the website were up and running. She couldn’t keep going over and over the previous day’s tragedy when there were practical things she had to attend to. And nothing could get done until she’d had at least two cups of tea and cleared her brain of cobwebs.
She sighed and stared out into the first purple streaks of the coming dawn, her mind a tangle of pressing problems. When she’d quit her six-figure job in a rising company to return to her hometown, she had been determined to make a difference here. Stone Mill, like so many other small rural towns, had been dying. The lack of employment for young people was the biggest culprit. Traditional livelihoods, such as farming, coal mining, and manufacturing, had all but vanished.
The Amish community remained entrenched in their land, but like their Englisher neighbors, they suffered from the economic changes and the lack of available farmland. Large, growing families and the price of land suitable for growing crops meant that only a handful of Amish boys could hope to make a living as their fathers and grandfathers had. In some ways, the isolation of the valley, hemmed in by mountains, was a blessing because it insulated the communities and protected traditional ways of life. But isolation also had its drawbacks. The Amish might not want to be part of the modern world, but without cars to drive the distance to State College or Huntingdon, they needed local grocery stores, English doctors, feed mills, and places to sell what they produced. It was clear to Rachel that if the town ceased to exist, her Amish relatives and their neighbors would have a difficult time remaining.
Rachel sipped her tea. Sophie came up onto the porch and dropped to a sit.
When Rachel first left the valley, she hadn’t expected to ever return for more than a visit. She found the challenge of surviving in the English world exhilarating, first in college and then in corporate America. But as the years passed, she’d discovered something lacking in her success. She’d been homesick for family, for the slower pace of her girlhood, and for the joys of small-town values. When she’d returned to Stone Mill, she’d had a plan. Restoring Stone Mill House and opening the B&B was just the beginning. Without a thriving town, no one would come to stay in her charming rooms. Her problem hadn’t simply been how she would survive but also how she could help Stone Mill, both English and Amish, to prosper.
Extensive research had convinced her that it was possible for Stone Mill to survive the economic downturn. The valley and surrounding mountains had natural beauty, clean water and air, a rich history, and virtually no crime. What had been needed were jobs, up-to-date medical care, and good schools. She’d hit upon the idea of making Stone Mill a quaint tourist attraction. Luring visitors to the area would bring money, and higher incomes would provide stability.
Lancaster had become a national destination for tourists wanting the Amish experience. What she had dreamed of was for Stone Mill to provide a genuine window into Amish culture, without twenty-foot-high plastic whirligigs and souvenirs made in China. She hadn’t thought that it would be easy, and it hadn’t been. But in the three years since she’d returned, she could count a dozen new businesses in town, and her Amish crafts website was slowly gaining momentum. Artisans using centuries-old skills fashioned quilts, baskets, furniture, and kiln-fired pottery that were in high demand in New York, Houston, and Los Angeles, and sold over the Internet. And young people who might have left family and friends to work in a big-box store in the next county, or moved West to live with family, stayed in Stone Mill and apprenticed to experienced elders.
Her most pressing problem right now was that, so far, no one else had come forward with the Internet and marketing skills needed to ensure continued success. Mary Aaron showed an aptitude for business in general, but religious restrictions limited her to dealing with the craftsmen and filling orders once they’d been received. It was up to Rachel to manage the website, travel to meet with prospective resellers, and handle contact with Englishers. All these tasks had been added to running her B&B. It was a juggling act, and sometimes she wondered if she’d taken on more than she could handle.
She drained the last drops of tea from her mug and started to rise. A gray mist seeped in from the fields, seeming to distort the morning sounds of roosters crowing and an owl hooting from the loft of the old stone barn. Abruptly, a shape materialized out of the shadows.
Sophie rose and barked.
“It’s only me. I didn’t mean to scare you.” Hulda took hold of one of the porch uprights and eased herself up onto the open porch. “Saw your light on,” the small woman said. “Came to the front door, but it was locked. Gracious, Rachel, when did you start locking your doors?”
Last night, Rachel thought as the adrenaline drained out of her muscles, making her sink back into the chair. Apparently, Hulda hadn’t heard about Beth.
“You startled me,” Rachel admitted, trying to make light of her overreaction. Hulda was often up early, and it wasn’t unusual for her to wander over for a cup of tea and a sweet. “Sorry I didn’t bring your van back last night, but—”
“I know. That nice young man of yours was here. I saw his police car come in not long before you got back.” Hulda tilted her head. “I’d come out to water my geraniums, the ones in the big pot on the front step, and there he came, still in his uniform. I think it’s nice that you find time for friends your own age.”
“I was just going back in for another cup,” Rachel said, holding up her mug. She wanted to tell Hulda about Beth, but she wasn’t comfortable being the source of the information. Not yet, at least. Not until she confirmed that Beth’s parents had been told. “Would you like one? I don’t know what Ada left in the sweets cabinet, but I’m certain there must be apple muffins or something.”
“I don’t want to put you out, but a cup of tea would go well,” Hulda agreed.
Rachel stood back as the white-haired woman strode past her and entered the kitchen. As usual, Hulda was dressed in a pantsuit and sensible black shoes, her hair and makeup done. Rachel hoped she had half of Hulda’s energy when she reached her nineties.
“Expecting more guests this weekend?” Hulda asked. “I’m surprised you haven’t been busier. Last month you were turning people away.”
“I know,” Rachel said, eager to move past the subject of why she’d locked her doors last night. There would be time enough to talk about it later, when they had more concrete information. She was just taking Hulda’s favorite mug out of the cupboard when her cell phone on the counter rang. Rachel stared at it. What time was it? Too early for anyone to call with good news.
“Are you going to answer that?” Hulda asked. “Who could it be at this hour?” She looked at the vintage timepiece she wore on a gold chain around her neck. “Six oh-three.”
Rachel picked up her phone. “Hello?”
“Rachel. It’s Evan. I’m sorry it’s so early.”
She had a bad feeling about this.
“I’ve been to the hospital and spoken to the medical examiner. The paramedic was right. Beth Glick was murdered.”