by Jane Jensen
“You didn’t mean to kill Katie, did you?” I said, unable to resist pushing him. “Did you catch her making the video? You hit her on the back of the head in a rage and then you had to finish it, didn’t you? You hid her body in the woodpile until you could get rid of it, and the phone fell out. Bad luck. Where did she tape the two of you?” I looked around. “Not here, surely. It’s a bit too open. You’d take her someplace more private.”
Aaron still said nothing, but I saw his eyes move to a door at the back of the room.
“Back there?” I asked. The phone still in my hand, I went to the door and pushed it open. Behind it was a little workshop, maybe eight feet by ten, with no windows and a concrete floor. An array of tools was organized neatly on a pegboard, and a worktable and chair was against the wall. It smelled of oil, Pennsylvania dirt, and age. It smelled just like my grandfather’s workshop, the scent stirring memories long forgotten. I walked in and looked around, found a light switch and pulled it, lighting a dim yellow overhead bulb. It flashed with the generator, casting flickering shadows.
Aaron stood in the doorway. “You have no right to be here,” he said, but his voice had lost all of its hubris. It was almost a whisper. He looked afraid for the first time since I’d met him.
I knew I was grandstanding. I knew I should just leave and call Grady. I shouldn’t question Lapp, not without the Miranda and witnesses and a lot of other hoops having been jumped through. But I just wanted him to admit it, goddamn it. I wanted him to admit that he’d sexually abused Katie Yoder, probably from the time she was eleven years old. After all his judging of Ezra—of me—I wanted him to goddamn well acknowledge that he himself was a pedophile. I wanted to at least see it on his face.
“I bet she put it here,” I said, noticing a rough wooden shelf opposite the worktable. I went over and put the phone on the middle shelf, on its side, facing out. “She came in before you, didn’t she? She set up the phone and she called you in here.”
Aaron’s knees started to go out. His face was utterly white like he might faint. He leaned heavily on the door frame, then staggered over to the worktable and fell into the chair. “God help me,” he muttered.
“Did you see the phone while you were touching her? Did you get suspicious when she tried to get you to talk about it? Or maybe afterward she gloated about it, showed you the evidence?”
I took the phone and put it in my pocket for safekeeping. I walked to the doorway and stood there looking at him. Aaron’s utter despondency was starting to sink in through my anger. He was slumped in the chair like a rag doll, his face drained of color, his eyes shut, his breathing labored. Maybe that was all the acknowledgment I was going to get. Maybe it was enough. I studied him. It made me sick to think about what he’d done to Katie in this room.
“It’s not what you think.” He opened his eyes to look at me. “She was . . . so beautiful. So young. And she liked it. Liked the attention, wanted to be held and petted. I always . . . she enjoyed it too. She was greedy for it. When she got older, she wanted me to leave my wife—demanded it! I would never, never do that. So Katie, she put an end to it. I repented of this sin years ago already.” His eyes were distant. “It was a pair of earrings, that first time. Some cheap, gaudy things some Englishwoman had given her in town, like you hand a biscuit to a dog. Katie had them on, cleaning up, here in the barn. When I saw them I was angry but I felt this . . . lust. The world out there. It just won’t leave us alone.”
I closed my eyes. I tried to filter through what he was saying.
Aaron had taken her young, far too young. But later on it must have been mutual enough, in Katie’s mind, that she had expectations. She’d wanted Aaron to leave his wife, given him an ultimatum? Cut off their affair? Maybe when Katie was out meeting up with men from Craigslist, she’d already been over Aaron Lapp. If so, she must have come back one last time, one last time to get her twenty-five-thousand-dollar video, and maybe her revenge too. And that had been a fatal mistake.
“I don’t think the law is going to care that you repented of it, Lapp. It was pedophilia while it was going on, and then, in October, it was murder.”
“No.” There were tears in Aaron’s eyes. “We . . . She did come to me. Last year. Tempted me to do it again. And I gave in, God help me. But I never . . . I didn’t—”
His words cut off abruptly. I saw his eyes widen in shock, looking at something behind me. But I saw it a moment too late. There was no time to turn or even raise my arm. There was no time for anything before something smashed, with force, into the back of my head.
The pain was the worst thing I’d ever felt—like burning fire wrapping around my skull and shooting down my neck. It was vicious and deep, a dangerous blow, maybe fatal. I knew this on some level, knew I needed help, medical help, but mostly there was just the pain. It was so bad it stole my breath and every scrap of energy. My stomach rebelled in a wave of nausea and my vision went as soft as black cotton.
I was on the concrete floor. There was another whiff of that smell, the smell of my grandfather’s workshop, and I wondered if that would be the last thing I would ever smell. Then I knew nothing more.
—
“She told me she was leavin’. She told me that day,” Miriam Lapp was saying matter-of-factly.
I sat on the chair in her kitchen writing it down, writing and writing. The page in my notebook was white as snow and it was getting longer and longer. It was surely getting in the way on the kitchen floor.
“She told me to say good-bye to her family,” Miriam said as she flipped bloody pancakes in a heavy iron skillet on her stove. They looked . . . bony. Like pieces of a skull. I didn’t want to look at them.
“And then what happened?” I asked, wanting to make sure I wrote it all down. I had to get everything just right. I could hear an argument in the next room and I wished they’d shut up so I could concentrate.
—
The notebook page was dragging behind me. I worried that it would get wet in the snow and that all my hard work, everything I’d written down, would be ruined and become unreadable. If that happened, I’d never be able to solve the case. It would never end and Ezra would walk away from me. He’d tell me it was over if I couldn’t give him what he wanted.
“Stop,” I tried to say. “Let me pick up the paper. Just stop for one second.”
—
She was taking off my clothes. It was cold, so cold, and my head hurt so bad I wanted to die. My chattering teeth woke me up and my body convulsed with shivers.
“Don’t,” I muttered, looking up at her hard face. Take me to a hospital. I’m sick, so sick. Just let me sleep, please.
—
Someone rolled me onto my side in bed. Why was the bed so cold? It was wet too, slick and clammy. Disgusting. I wanted to protect my face from the cold, but my arms were stuck behind me. And then I rolled off the side of the bed into water, deep water. And I was drowning.
—
Black water. Freezing cold. My feet struck the bottom—toes scraping against stone. I was moving fast in the current. My knee struck a rock, and there was pain, but the pain was distant, like it was happening to someone else.
That scared me. The cold water stung my head where I felt a dull, frighteningly deep, and brutal ache. I had a bad head wound. If I was no longer fully feeling pain in my lower body, that was not good. Head trauma. My body was shutting down. But in a moment, I stopped worrying about my head wound because the only thing that mattered, the only thing in the whole world, was my need for—
Air. Air, air, air, air—
My feet found the bottom again and pushed up of their own accord, from some deep survival instinct. My head broke the surface of the water.
I gasped, choking, my lungs surging with blessed oxygen. I tried to bring up my hands to stabilize myself in the water so I could keep my head up, but they didn’t move. For a moment, I fear
ed they were paralyzed and then I felt the rope. Tied. My hands are tied behind me. My head was dragged under again by the rush of water. And my body slammed into something that yielded slightly and scraped my skin.
Chicken-wire fencing. It was submerged because of the flooding. Air was once again the only thing I cared about. Maybe I could use the fencing. I had no clothes to catch on it—my body was nude. But I used my feet to get purchase in the little sections of wire and pushed myself up. My head broke the surface again.
I gasped, drinking in air. My mind and body filled with one clear imperative: I didn’t want to die. There’d been days when, weighted down by grief and discouragement, I would have accepted death without a struggle. But not now. I wanted desperately to live. I didn’t realize how much I’d healed from Terry’s death until that instant, when suddenly there was so much to live for. Death would be a cruel and unwelcome thief.
I tugged at my bonds. I was weak, incredibly weak, and growing weaker in the freezing water. I couldn’t undo the ropes around my wrists or even hang on to the chicken wire with my feet. The current pushed me relentlessly and the wire bent under my body. The barbs on top scraped deep into the skin of my stomach as the water dragged me over the top.
No.
I fought for some purchase on the fencing, but it was gone, well gone. Then it was just me under the water again, my searching legs finding no bottom, my damaged head leading the way under the current’s surge with no ability to stop or even bring up my arms to protect it. I’d hit another rock. Even the thought of anything touching my head filled me with panic. I was going to drown.
The sides of the creek. The creek isn’t that wide.
The thought gave me hope. With the last burst of energy I had, I fought the current and tried to swim to my left, twisting my body and kicking with my legs, all the while trying to keep my head up. It was hard. I was moving forward more than I was moving left. But I fought on, kicking my legs, ignoring the numbness and broken feel to my knee. I went under. My lungs burned, needing air, but I resisted the urge to try to fight my way to the surface and kept pushing left. If I stopped now, any progress I’d made toward the bank would be lost in an instant.
And then I felt the touch of pebbles under my toes. One more hard push and my feet found the bottom. I again resisted the terrible need to push up and find air, refusing to let my feet leave the earth, sure I’d never find it again if I did. I dug in my frozen toes and forced my legs to walk. A moment later my head broke the surface, my feet still on the rocky creek bed.
It was a victory as sweet as any I’d ever had, that moment of feeling that I’d accomplished something, that I’d fought for, and won, both ground and air. I was saved.
And then the current pulled my feet off the slippery stones, and my head under the water.
I fought again for the shore, but my body was so weak, it barely obeyed my commands. Who would believe a mere creek could rush so fast? Be so dangerous?
It isn’t. The creek isn’t that wide. You can make it the shore. Just do it. Do it!
I thought of Ezra working on his rockers, steady and strong, the way he looked driving his buggy, petting Horse. I remembered the sight of him naked in my bed, his long blond hair like silk on the pillow. I saw the line of his jaw; the tiny, ironic lift at the corner of his mouth; his kind, sweet eyes.
I drifted, losing thought, losing myself. I might never have returned except that my shoulder slammed, hard, into something. The pain brought me back to my senses. It was a fallen tree, partially submerged. And my head had popped out of the water. I gasped in lungfuls of air and when I exhaled I was screaming.
“Ezra! Ezra!” I didn’t sound like myself. It was desperate, hoarse screaming. “Ezra!”
It was raining, raining hard, the drops striking my face. The current began to push me along the log, determined to send me on my way, maybe to the Susquehanna where I would finally wash up, like Katie had, on Robert Island. I had no way to cling to the log. My legs ran under it into clear water and could not rise high enough to catch hold. My hands were bound. I pushed my shoulders into the bark as hard as I could, trying to stay put.
“Ezra!” I screamed.
I stopped moving, a small branch bracing me and bending under the strain. Where was I? I remembered crossing one fence; had I crossed others? Was I still near the Lapps’ farm? Ezra’s? Or was I far downstream by now? I searched the creek banks but it was dark and there was something wrong with my eyes. Everything was blurry and doubled.
Concussion. Dear God, I’m badly hurt.
The twig bent further. I slipped another inch down the log.
A kind of resignation stole over me. I was going to die after all. There was nothing I could do about it. I wished I’d been able to tell someone about the Lapps. I wished I’d been able to get justice for Jessica and Katie. And I wished, more than anything, that I didn’t have to leave him.
Something lighter came into my view of the bank, something large and moving. It took me a long moment for the shape to coalesce enough to recognize what it was.
It was a horse. No, it was Horse. He was watching me.
“Ezra,” I said. “Ezra.”
I must have scared Horse, and I couldn’t blame him. He turned and stormed away.
But that meant I had to be on Ezra’s land, didn’t it? If I could just make it to the bank, maybe work my way along the fallen tree . . . The branch that had snagged me bent further, threatening to give way, and my body was moved another inch toward the middle of the creek.
No, not this close. Please. Give me strength.
The branch gave way.
—
“I called an ambulance. They’re comin’. Hang on, Elizabeth. Gott im himmel, please.”
The voice was anguished—and familiar. My eyelids seemed to weigh a hundred pounds each, but I forced them open a crack. Ezra’s face loomed over me. It was fuzzy but it was undeniably his face.
“Hey,” I said. My voice croaked like a dying bullfrog.
“Oh, thank the Lord!” Ezra’s hand wiped at his mouth, his eyes. He was shaking so hard I could see it, even though I couldn’t see much.
“Don’t,” I said. Don’t cry. It’s fine.
“Oh, Elizabeth. Your head . . . I thought. Who hurt you like this?”
I wished he didn’t sound so upset. I was happy, so happy. I wasn’t dead, and Ezra had found me. There was even a heavy coat laid over my body. I wasn’t warm, but I was out of the water, I was on solid ground. I wasn’t fighting for air. Didn’t he know how amazing that was? That everything in the entire world had to be all right now? But then I remembered I had something I needed to tell him, something important.
“Miriam Lapp. Tell Grady.”
“Oh Lord. Oh no.” He sounded disbelieving, horrified.
“The phone,” I said, despite my chattering teeth. “In the woodbin. Grandfather’s smell. Solved the snow. I mean, the case. I solved the case, Ezra. Where are my notes?”
“It’s okay,” he said, rubbing my arms and legs under the coat, trying to warm me up. They were starting to prickle and hurt where the numbness was wearing off. “Rest now. The ambulance comes soon.”
“But I solved it. I solved the case.”
“I knew you would. I had faith.”
His face swam a little more into focus and I could see the emotion in his eyes, still damp with fear, but full of so many other things as well—relief and love. So much love.
“I have faith in you,” I said. And yeah, I had a concussion and I’d just nearly died, but I meant it. I meant every word.
In the end, what else was there to have faith in? Not in the fairness of life, or in a perfect world, or the goodness of man. What else, but the ones we love?
CHAPTER 16
Snake in the Grass
I was in the hospital for two days. They stabilized my knee, salv
ed and bandaged my rubbed-raw wrists and various cuts and bruises, and stitched my head back together and watched for it to explode. It didn’t.
The doctors told me the creek had saved my life. The cold water lowered my blood pressure, stopped the bleeding, and kept my brain from swelling inside my cranium like a soufflé. Ironic, that the thing that almost killed me had ended up saving my life. Or maybe that’s just the way it works.
Ezra came both days to see me. He had an English driver drop him off at the hospital in the middle of downtown Lancaster and wait in the cafeteria while we visited for a few hours. He was a little shy about holding my hand at first, but I clung to him even when people entered the room, not letting him retreat. I think he was surprised when the nurses didn’t pay any attention to us. God love those Lancaster General nurses. Ezra was still dressed Amish, and they knew I was a cop, so they had every reason to be confused. But in fact, they seemed particularly smiley about the two of us. It was nice. I was done hiding.
Ezra told me about the small farm he’d gone to see the week before. He showed me pictures on his cell phone.
“Only a fifteen minute drive to Lancaster. In a car, that is,” he said, not meeting my eyes.
“I need thirty days to get out of my lease,” I replied.
He smiled and nodded once. I smiled back. Screw it. If Grady and the police department didn’t like me living with Ezra, they could find another detective.
I thought it would be all right though. Because when Grady came to see me, he yelled at me for about five minutes for going into the Lapps’ barn on my own, and then told me they’d never have solved the murders without me. He and the chief were grateful. “Grateful” is a word I very much like to hear from my bosses. As long as there isn’t a “but” attached. Grady also said he was glad I’d survived my stupidity because he “needed me.”
“Hell yeah. You really, really do,” I said.
