Chapter 2
“Will you come, Rachel?” Mary Aaron pleaded. “We need your help. Dat needs you.”
Rachel nodded. “Of course I’ll come.” She turned back to her guest. “I’m afraid I have an emergency. I have to go.”
Ms. Hess frowned as she stepped out of the gift shop and into the hall. “I’m interested in this quilt. Can’t your errand wait until—”
“Sorry.” Rachel reached around her guest and pulled the gift shop door shut behind her. She flipped the wooden sign around so that it read: CLOSED. Please come again! “Family comes first.”
“But the quilt.”
“We can talk about it later.” Rachel indicated the door across the hallway. “Breakfast in the dining room,” she said. She turned to Mary Aaron. “Wait for me out front. I’ll bring the Jeep around. We can throw your scooter in the back.”
The church districts in Stone Mill were Old Order and very conservative. Members weren’t permitted to operate any type of motor vehicle; they used horse-drawn wagons and carriages. Mary Aaron was, however, permitted to accept a ride from Rachel.
“We have to hurry! The police are talking to him. You know how Dat can be.”
“It’ll be all right.” Rachel gave her cousin’s hand a quick squeeze. “We’ll straighten this out.”
Mary Aaron opened her mouth to answer and then closed it abruptly, but Rachel knew what she was thinking. Willy and Uncle Aaron had been feuding for years. Everyone knew how much the dead man and Uncle Aaron had disliked each other; they’d had a public shouting match at the livestock sale only days before Willy disappeared. It had been such a scene that the bishop, two preachers, and a deacon had called on her uncle that evening—not a particularly pleasant visit for any of them, she imagined.
“Meet you out front,” Rachel repeated. Then she went down the hall, exited the main house, and entered the kitchen, where Ada was patting loose sausage into round cakes and dropping them onto a skillet.
“I’ve got to go to Uncle Aaron’s,” she explained in Pennsylvania Deitsch. It was an old German dialect used only among the Amish in North America. “Please see that the guests get breakfast and ask the girls to . . . you know, the usual morning chores.”
Ada’s pale-blue eyes narrowed. She was a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a plump middle and a wide bottom, but she exhibited none of the joviality usually associated with a plus-size woman.
“You’ll manage fine,” Rachel said with forced cheerfulness as she snatched her keys from a hook near the back door. Ada could be prickly, but she was a capable woman and Rachel couldn’t run the business without her. “I’ll be back soon,” she promised, crossing her fingers behind her back.
On her way out, she paused long enough to snatch an elastic hair tie and a handful of large bobby pins from a drawer. As she stepped onto the back porch and into a pair of black Keds, she began to plait her hair into a single braid.
She couldn’t believe Willy O’Day was dead. Not just dead. Dead in her uncle’s cow pasture. That chill that she’d felt earlier returned and rippled down her spine. It didn’t seem possible. Willy had been missing since October. He couldn’t have been lying in the pasture all that time. Someone would have found him. The buzzards would have found him.
She hurried across the grassy back lawn. Securing her braid with the hair tie, she took a few quick twists and then used the pins to fix it tightly to the back of her head.
This all had to be a misunderstanding. Things like this happened to strangers on the evening news. Unexplained disappearances and deaths happened in Harrisburg or Philadelphia, not in peaceful Stone Mill. It was ridiculous for the police to even consider that Uncle Aaron might be involved. He was Amish. He’d had the centuries-old canon of nonviolence bred into his blood and bones.
Rachel tugged open the carriage shed doors and entered the semidarkness of the stone outbuilding to climb into her Jeep. In the driveway, she circled the house and braked long enough for Mary Aaron to lift her scooter into the back and climb in beside her.
“Seat belt,” Rachel reminded automatically. Amish buggies didn’t require seat belts, and whenever she transported one of the Plain folk, she had to remind them about safety.
“Could you get my scarf?” Rachel nodded and motioned toward the glove compartment.
Mary Aaron opened it, pulled out a crumpled men’s bandana, and attempted to smooth out the wrinkles.
At a four-way stop, Rachel took a moment to cover her head with the bandana and knot it at the nape of her neck. “You’re certain Willy’s dead?” She slid the car into first gear and went through the intersection. “He didn’t just fall and hit his head or something?”
“If he did, he fell into his own grave and then revived just long enough to cover himself up. Someone working for the power company found him.” Mary Aaron grimaced. “No, he’s dead all right. Dat said it looked like someone bashed in his head.”
“He was murdered?” Rachel whispered.
“Ya. Willy O’Day was murdered. Right there on our farm. And the way the police are acting, they think Dat did it.”
Rachel didn’t know what to say . . . so she said nothing. The blacktop narrowed and snaked downhill toward the rich bottomland where the Hostetler farm lay. She pointed. “Behind the seat. Would you get my skirt and blouse?”
Rachel wasn’t Amish anymore, and everyone knew it. Her leaving the faith was a disgrace that her family lived with every day. She was an Englisher to the Amish, but still, if she expected to be welcome among them, she couldn’t show up at her uncle’s place in jeans and a T-shirt. And if she wanted any of her family to speak to her, she had to wear a head covering. The modest shirt and calf-length denim skirt was a hard-won compromise, but the best deal she could make.
“What if they’ve arrested Dat?” Mary Aaron held the clothing on her lap so it wouldn’t blow out of the Jeep.
“They won’t,” Rachel replied, but the words felt awkward. “So what if Willy’s body is on your property? That doesn’t mean your father killed him.”
“Dat threatened him.” Mary Aaron chewed nervously at a ragged thumbnail. “ ‘If you ever set foot on my farm again, Willy, you’ll be sorry.’ That’s what he said.” She hesitated. “At least that’s what everyone says he said. I wasn’t there.”
Rachel glanced at her cousin, then back at the road. “People say things all the time that they don’t mean.”
Her uncle was known to be taciturn, even gruff, but never violent—at least not to humans or animals. But he had a reputation. He’d once gotten so angry with his windmill when it kept breaking down that he’d hacked at the supports with an ax until the whole thing crashed into the garden. And then there was the incident with the grape arbor when he’d taken the same ax to it in front of a group of women who had gathered at his farm to quilt.
“He wouldn’t hurt anyone,” Rachel continued. “He couldn’t even put his own driving horse down when it broke its leg.”
“That’s different. Dat likes horses. It’s people he has problems with. Especially English people.”
Uncle Aaron had never been mean to Rachel when she was a child; he hadn’t been exactly warm and friendly, either. Since Rachel’s return to Stone Mill, however, he’d barely been civil. The Hostetlers had always been sticklers for following the Ordnung—the rules—and Rachel had broken the rules. All of them. Her father’s people, the Masts, were equally devout, but much more easygoing in gray areas, such as runaway children and dealings with the English.
Rachel and Mary Aaron rounded a sharp curve in the Jeep and climbed a hill to an intersection. It was blocked by a police cruiser. A state trooper stood in the middle of the road and held up one hand. Rachel pulled her Jeep alongside him. “This is Mary Hostetler,” she said. “She lives on the Aaron Hostetler farm just ahead.”
“The road is closed to all traffic,” the officer deadpanned.
“But how do I get home?” Mary Aaron looked like she was fighting tears. “My mother needs me.”
“Sorry. No exceptions.”
“Can we park and walk in?” Rachel asked. She knew several of the local policemen, but she didn’t recognize this trooper.
“Sorry.” He waved his hand, indicating she could make a left or a right. “You’ll have to move along.”
“All right, Officer.” Rachel turned down the one-lane road to the left. Once they had gone a quarter mile and were out of sight of the policeman, she turned onto an old logging road.
“The bridge?” Mary Aaron asked.
Rachel nodded. She drove a short distance, far enough so that the trees blocked sight of her Jeep from the road, and stopped. Climbing out, she hastily stepped into the denim skirt. It fell halfway between her ankles and knees. Next, she donned the blue blouse over her T-shirt. “Will I pass?” she asked her cousin in Pennsylvania Deitsch.
Mary Aaron shrugged. “Not as Amish, but you’re Plain enough.”
Definitely not a compliment, in Rachel’s eyes. But Plain was good where she was headed. She tucked the Jeep key into a hidden zipper pocket of her skirt and set off through the woods. She could tell by the crunch of leaves and undergrowth that Mary Aaron was following.
It wasn’t far to the river. It was deep, rocky, and, because it was spring, fast-running. No chance of wading across it today—too much water. But downstream were the remnants of an old covered bridge. There were missing floorboards, and it was too rickety for even a horse and wagon, but the stone foundation had survived two hundred years of spring floods. Rachel had crossed it dozens of times as a child, and she was certain they could safely cross it now. Old stand timber grew thick on the far side. The nearest land was Mast property, but just beyond that parcel lay the boundaries of Uncle Aaron’s farm.
“So tell me again how Willy was found,” Rachel said.
“Someone found him in the pasture. Someone working for the power company. I guess they were checking something on the highline that cuts across our property,” Mary Aaron explained.
Rachel pushed through a blackberry bush and stopped to extricate her skirt from the briars. “And they’re certain it’s Willy?”
“It must be. One of the firemen said it’s him. It’s awful: fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances. Mam didn’t know whether to stay with Dat or run and hide. You know how shy she gets around Englishers—strangers, anyway.”
“Ya,” Rachel agreed. At home or at church, her Aunt Hannah would chatter like a blue jay, but when she came to town, she rarely spoke, except in brief sentences, gaze cast downward. Even at Wagler’s Grocery, where she shopped twice a month, she pointed at what she wanted in the deli case and one of the clerks just gave her a pound. No matter what she bought—bacon, scrapple, cheddar cheese—she got a pound.
“Rae-Rae, have you crossed here lately?” Mary Aaron asked, hesitation in her voice.
Mary Aaron’s use of Rachel’s nickname made her look ahead, through the trees. What she saw made her stomach pitch. The bridge had not fared well over the last few winters. The roof was gone, the sides were rotten and gaping, and there was a stretch of beam running out to the first stone piling without any flooring or walls at all. It took a minute to assess the situation and choose the best path across. “You game?” she asked her cousin.
“If you are.”
Moments later, they stood at the river’s edge. It had rained heavily earlier in the week, and white water foamed around granite boulders protruding from the river. Rachel swallowed, glanced down at the raging force, and sucked in a deep breath. “It looks like it will just be a matter of moving from beam to beam,” she said, raising her voice to be heard above the rush of the water. “If the worst happens, we swim.”
Mary Aaron stared at the rush of water and gulped. The first beam was broken. They’d have to jump down onto the rocks, then up to the next beam. “It would be awful cold.”
“It would be.” Rachel took a leaping step, landed on a slippery rock and turned back to her cousin. “So I guess we’d better not fall in.”
Ten minutes later, Rachel and Mary Aaron—somewhat worse for wear—climbed a stile over a stone wall onto Uncle Aaron’s south pasture and were immediately engulfed by a wave of small Hostetlers, Masts, Beilers, and Bontraegers, accompanied by several dogs. The Zook twins were leading the pack—beating out Zebby Beiler on his black pony.
“No school today?” Rachel asked.
Mary Aaron shook her head. “Teacher had her wisdom teeth out.”
The children—all Amish and ranging between six and fourteen years of age—swarmed around them, tugging at their hands and skirts and talking excitedly in Pennsylvania Deitsch. Rachel knew every one of them by name; they were nieces or nephews, cousins, second cousins, or neighbors.
“Rachel! Rachel!” her niece Susan cried. Susan was Rachel’s oldest brother Paul’s daughter; Paul and his family lived in a small house on the same property where he and Rachel had grown up. “The police have come! And an ambulance car!” Susan’s blue eyes were as wide as a startled doe’s; her dirt-smudged kapp was barely hanging onto the back of her head.
“. . . Willy O’Day! Somebody cut off his head!” That was one of her Hostetler cousins, either Toby or Joel. It didn’t matter. Both were given to exaggeration.
“They did not!” Sally, Rachel’s youngest sibling, protested. At nine years old, she was as thin as a beanpole and always eager to take control of any situation. “You’re such a liar, Toby!”
“They broke his head,” another boy supplied eagerly.
“And buried him ten feet deep in Dat’s cow pasture.” That bit of information came from Mary Aaron’s little brother Jesse.
“Hush, all of you,” Mary Aaron chided. “You need to go home. You don’t belong here.”
“Listen to Mary Aaron,” Rachel agreed. “This is no place for any of you. You should all go home.” She eyed her nephew Naaman, who was Susan’s brother. He was sweaty, and his red hair stood up in clumps. Somewhere in his mad dash, he had lost his straw hat. “And be sure you find his hat.” Rachel motioned to his bare head. “Or all of you will be in hot water.”
“Rachel, please,” Mary Aaron urged. “We have to hurry.”
Rachel released Susan’s hand and strode after Mary Aaron. “They may not want us to get close to your father,” she told her, catching up. “You might have to cause a distraction.”
“What kind of distraction?”
“You’ll think of something.”
Rachel took a deep breath and began to jog up the hill beneath the electric power lines strung between highline towers. The highline didn’t bring electricity to the Amish farms, but carried it over the mountains to the English towns and country beyond. It had been a bone of contention with the Plain people since the towers had been erected, decades ago, cutting through the cropland and forest. Mostly, the Amish tried to ignore the ugly structures, but today, that was impossible.
At the crest of the hill, Rachel stopped to catch her breath. Below, she spotted two ambulances, three police cars, and a fire truck—why the emergency responders would need a fire truck for a dead man in a pasture, she couldn’t imagine. When she glanced back over her shoulder, Rachel saw that the Zook twins, the boy on the pony, and one of the older girls were still running after them, but she doubted if a few more onlookers would make any difference.
Half the inhabitants of the valley already seemed to be there ahead of them. Ahead, besides the emergency vehicles, Rachel saw two buggies, a wagon stacked with bales of straw, a half-dozen horses and a mule, and a collection of pickup trucks and cars. One, an older model Buick, bore the words The George—Fiction & Nonfiction Bookseller on one of the doors.
Rachel pressed her hand to her side to ease the stitch. Poor George. A wave of compassion for one of Stone Mill’s all-time finest educators made her blink back tears. Sixty-seven-year-old George O’Day had been devastated by his twin brother’s disappearance, but he’d never given up expecting Willy to walk through the doors of The George. Finally learning that Willy wasn’t coming home, that he was dead, would be terrible for him.
After a moment’s rest, Rachel and Mary Aaron walked down into the valley to mingle with the crowd of Amish and English gathered outside the ominous CRIME SCENE tape that ringed what was obviously the spot where Willy’s body had been discovered. They were only ten feet or so from the fence line that divided the Hostetler property from a piece owned by the O’Day brothers.
Rachel caught sight of her father and her brother Paul talking to Aunt Hannah. Hannah’s eyes were red and puffy, her nose red, and her mouth quivering.
“Aunt Hannah.” Rachel hurried over to them.
Mary Aaron moved to her mother’s side and hugged her.
Rachel’s father and brother both nodded to her. Rachel met her dat’s gaze, then looked away, afraid she might tear up. No words were necessary. Your family needs you, he was saying.
“Where’s Uncle Aaron?” Rachel began, and then she saw him standing on the far side of the yellow tape barrier, surrounded by police.
“Bad, bad,” her aunt muttered, and then, “Englishers. My poor, poor Aaron.” She gripped Rachel’s arm. “You must help him. You can talk to them Englishers, tell them that Aaron is a good man, not a killer.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Rachel promised, giving her aunt’s hand a squeeze.
Aunt Hannah slipped off her shawl and wrapped it around Rachel’s shoulders. “So you look proper when you talk to them Englishers,” she said.
“Thank you,” Rachel murmured, looking for a way to get to her uncle without being stopped by the big officer standing directly in front of them.
From the corner of her eye, Rachel saw Bill Billingsly, editor of their hometown newspaper, holding up his iPhone. She knew very well what he was doing. She could just imagine the front page of Monday’s paper. LOCAL OLD ORDER AMISH FARMER ARRESTED ON MURDER ONE! Bill was fond of theatrics, and more than once she’d caught him taking pictures of her Amish neighbors even though he knew very well it was against their beliefs.
“All the news that’s fit to print,” Bill liked to say to anyone who would listen. “And Amish faces sell papers.” On any other day, she’d confront him and try to shame him into deleting the photos, but today, it was more important for her to get to Uncle Aaron before he said anything too incriminating.
“Rachel! What am I going to do?”
She looked up to see George O’Day stumble toward her. He was a man of average height and average weight, but he had the brightest, twinkling blue eyes. As always, he was wearing a ball cap over his full head of white hair that read THE GEORGE.
“George. I’m so sorry.” Rachel took a step toward him and hugged him.
“Who would do such a thing?” he rasped, resting his head on her shoulder for a moment. “Surely not Aaron Hostetler. I know he wouldn’t . . . couldn’t.” He staggered back and covered his face with his hands. “I can’t believe this has happened. I can’t believe it.”
It wasn’t quite as unbelievable as George suggested, but Rachel would never say such a thing. As sweet as George O’Day was, and as many parents, kids, and fellow teachers and administrators had reason to love George, there were an equal number of people who had good reason to despise Willy.
George’s twin brother had none of his common decency and little of his charity toward his fellow man. Rachel had often wondered how George and Willy’s parents had hatched one son with a heart of gold and another with a heart of stone. While George had lived his life trying to help others, Willy’s life’s ambition had been to take advantage of them.
“They won’t let me see him.” George’s lower lip quivered. He was in good health for his age, but today, he looked ten years older and fragile. “Maybe there’s been some mistake. Maybe it isn’t Willy. It could be an old Indian grave . . . couldn’t it?”
A woman screamed, and Rachel looked up to see Hannah collapse into Mary Aaron’s arms. Immediately, people surged forward, and the policeman holding the crowd back ducked under the tape to reach the fallen woman.
Realizing Mary Aaron had just presented the necessary diversion, Rachel dashed under the yellow crime scene tape. “Don’t say another word!” she called to her Uncle Aaron, waving to him.
Her uncle looked up, startled.
“I’m coming!” Rachel bounded forward, and her foot sank into soft soil. She lost her balance, and before she had a chance to catch herself, she pitched forward onto her knees. Looming just in front of her was a ditch—not a ditch, she realized, with horror. A grave.
Lying in the bottom of the hole was a man . . . or what had been a man. And it was Willy O’Day. There was no mistaking him. He was still wearing his THE GEORGE ball cap, and his signature three-carat diamond ring glittered obscenely on his skeleton finger.