Hex Marks the Spot

by Madelyn Alt

  He took my hand in his. “Don’t ask, Maggie. It will all come out soon enough.”

  But I couldn’t help myself. The need to know, to understand, had always run strong in me. To the bitter end. “Tell me.”

  He blew his breath out, the male urge to protect running a strong counter to my very female need for truth. His jaw clenched—once, twice—but his eyes on mine never wavered, ice blue flames in the night. “It’s Luc Metzger.”

  Chapter 4

  Mother Mary.

  Luc Metzger, the talented Amish furniture carver I had met only that afternoon? Whose angelic face and earthly form could launch many an admiring female? Husband to the pretty Hester and father to their four children? Eli’s friend Luc?

  I shook my head, trying to wrap my mind around it. “We just saw him. Hours ago.”

  “I know, love. I know.” Marcus squeezed my fingers gently and pulled until I followed him back toward Christine. His hand felt warm and reassuring against mine, but I was shivering and I couldn’t stop. Questions were forming in my head like machine-gun fire. I couldn’t stop them, either. “Was it an accident, Marcus? He was riding his bike earlier, and it is dark out here. It wouldn’t be too hard to sideswipe a bike on this narrow road. And…”

  My voice trailed off when my seeking eyes connected with his. The breath squeezed out of my lungs. The air around me felt used up. As dead as the air in a room that’s been closed off for years. As dead as the man lying out there on the cold, wet ground. “God.”

  Marcus was digging his cell phone out of his jacket pocket. “God or Goddess, neither had a part in this.”

  Marcus punched numbers onto the dial pad of his cell phone and turned away from me. Thank goodness we had lucked into cell coverage. It was usually pretty spotty out here, away from town—service could drop without notice, and often did. I wrapped my arms around myself, trying not to think of Luc Metzger lying just beyond the jumble of buggies.

  Marcus spoke quietly into the phone before pressing another button and signing off. “They’ll send someone out right away, along with an ambulance.”

  I turned my head and gazed out toward where I knew Luc must be. “It doesn’t seem right, leaving him out there while we wait for the police to arrive.”

  “There’s nothing else we can do.”

  I knew he was right, but still, it felt coldhearted to let him lie. “What about the others?”

  “They won’t disturb anything. They’re praying over his body.”

  At least he had friends with him now, watching over him. People he must have known. I would say a prayer for him tonight, too. It couldn’t hurt. Sudden tears of sympathy welled in my eyes as I thought back to earlier today. His pretty auburn-headed wife, and the pride in her eyes when she had spoken of him as her husband. What would she and her children do now?

  A headache, sudden and intense, struck me from behind, expanding outward like a violently red rose with viciously barbed thorns. I bit my lower lip against the rush of pain and the waves of nausea it brought along with it. “I-I think I’d better sit down.”

  Blindly I turned back in the direction of Christine, closing my eyes when the brilliance of the headlights hit my face. I foundered there a moment, uncertain which way to turn, the pain in the back of my head so intense that I feared I wouldn’t make it. My knees buckled beneath me.

  “Whoa there, girl. Hold on to me.”

  Strong arms closed around me, supporting me all the way back to Christine’s worn bucket seat. As soon as I was sheltered within the old Bug’s confines, I began to feel a little bit better.

  “You okay, Mags?”

  “I will be.”

  I was still sitting there, catching my breath, when a squad car squealed to a halt, sirens screaming. The sirens cut off suddenly, making the silence that followed feel harsh and abrupt. I lifted my head just in time to watch Tom Fielding in full cop mode step slowly from the vehicle, awash in the red-blue wigwags of police lights. His leonine coloring and stoic gray eyes suited him in a way I couldn’t help but admire, in more ways than just the physical. Something about his stance—poised, controlled—spoke to me. Always. Ever the professional, he was practicing the first rule of smart police work: Assess Your Situation Carefully Before Acting.

  His gaze passed slowly over the buggies, motorcycle, Christine. It snagged there a moment on me, slouched and shivering with the driver’s side door open, but I got the distinct impression the pause had more to do with Marcus crouching at my feet than anything else. His expression unreadable, Tom turned away to speak briefly into the radio clipped to his shoulder harness before moving our way.

  “You call this in?” he asked Marcus, avoiding my eyes.

  Marcus nodded. “Over there,” he said with a jerk of his head. “The others are watching over him. Don’t worry, they know not to touch anything.”

  Tom’s gaze barely flickered in my direction. “Keep her here.”

  He needn’t have worried. I wasn’t going anywhere. The last thing I wanted was to see the destruction someone had wreaked upon one of Stony Mill’s inhabitants. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to keep my eyes and ears open, and it didn’t mean I was too far gone to feel miffed by his high-handed attitude. As though I was somehow both fragile flower and unnecessary annoyance in the night’s doings.

  As Tom picked his way carefully around the horses and buggies, I cast an accusing stare at Marcus.

  Marcus held up his hands. “Hey, I’m just doing what I was told.”

  “Like you do that often,” I grumbled under my breath. Especially where Tom was concerned. It hadn’t exactly escaped my notice that the two of them didn’t like each other much. He wasn’t fooling anyone.

  Within moments Tom was back, ushering the Amish prayer force away from the crime scene and heading to his car to talk to Dispatch. While he was occupied, an ambulance and a sheriff’s cruiser pulled up behind his squad car, ripping through the stillness with the relentless onslaught of their dual lights and sirens. The sheriff’s deputy quickly set out safety flashers and barricades before heading for Tom. In the meantime, the emergency medical technicians bustled about, poetry in motion as they got down to the business of gathering the tools of their trade. Tom pointed the way for the deputy, then headed over to intercept the EMTs. After only a few words the urgency drained from their movements—their healing skills would not be needed tonight. Resignedly they pulled the minimum of gear—a bag, a portable gurney that jackknifed open from a flat position, a couple of small stainless steel cases—from the back of the ambulance and followed Tom through the maze of buggies, leaving Marcus and me and all the Amish behind to scuff our feet against the chip-and-seal surface of the road, wondering what we should be doing to help.

  “Stay?” I whispered to Marcus.

  “You’ll have to now,” he whispered back. “He’ll want to talk to you, too, I’m pretty sure. Do you need to call someone? Let them know you’ll be late?”

  I ran through the short list of people I might call. Tom and Marcus were both here, and I saw no reason to involve Liss or any of the N.I.G.H.T.S. My best friend Steff, a nurse, was working the night shift at the local hospital. My little sister was no doubt waiting up for her workaholic husband to get home, but calling her would only serve to spread the word far and wide—there wasn’t a single soul in Stony Mill outside of my family’s reach when it came to gossip. My brother lived too far away to help. Grandpa Gordon? Well, I wouldn’t put it past him to try to hotfoot it all the way out here in his electric wheelchair, orange visibility flags flapping in the breeze. And there was no way I was going to wake my parents with something like this.

  I shook my head.

  Our Amish counterparts had been doing some quiet talking among themselves. Like one mind, one body, they began to straighten the haphazard positioning of the buggies and pull them off the road. Marcus went over to help. When they were finished, one of them offered his hand, enveloping Marcus’s none-too-tiny extremity in a massive, paw
like grip.

  “Jacob Ritter.”

  “Marcus. Marcus Quinn. Good to know you…but a pity that we had to meet on a night like this.”

  “A pity, ja.”

  “All of you knew Luc Metzger, I take it?”

  The big man nodded. “Ja. He is Amish. A part of our congregation. He is…was…a cousin to my wife, Johanna. We are family.”

  He spoke in the short, perfunctory sentences typical of the men of his community, but his demeanor of strength, sturdiness, and hard work hinted at so much more than a picture postcard image can provide.

  “We all knew Brother Luc,” another of the men said, stepping forward. “What happened here tonight…” His voice trailed away in quiet sorrow.

  By that time I had found my sea legs again, so I made my way over to where the men stood stamping the cold and uneasiness from their big, booted feet. I put my hand on Marcus’s shoulder to let him know I was there.

  “Pretty shocking,” Marcus said as sympathetically and nonintrusively as possible. “No one ever thinks it will be someone they know, do they?”

  I knew what he was doing. In his own laid-back way, he was working the crowd, making them receptive and putting them at ease.

  “I’ve seen death before,” Marcus went on, “but I don’t know that I’ve ever been as surprised by it as I am tonight. I can’t seem to wrap my mind around it. Why Luc Metzger?”

  “It is God’s will,” intoned a stocky man with rawboned features and dour brown eyes. “Who are we to judge?”

  God’s will, the stocky man had said. Something told me God would have been appalled to have his name associated with this. It was the Amish way to treat with mercy and compassion even the most reviled of men, but it didn’t sit well with me, not with Luc lying cold on the ground a scant ten yards away. Maybe I was missing something.

  I cleared my throat. “Excuse me. What, exactly, did happen to Luc?”

  Men…they’re funny creatures. There they were, discussing away without concern. Insert one lone inquisitive female into the mix, and they seal up tighter than a humidity-swollen door. And Amish men appeared to be even more closemouthed than most. It wasn’t so much that they were eyeing me with wariness or suspicion—actually, they weren’t looking in my direction at all.

  “It’s not that we think you can’t handle it.” This from a beardless boy of seventeen or eighteen who, although he spoke with the tiniest bit of German inflection in his English, was dressed in jeans, trainers, and an Indianapolis Colts T-shirt. Rumspringe, the Amish called the custom that allowed their young people to experience life in the secular world before dedicating themselves to the traditional way. Seeing him on the street, I would never have guessed him to be Amish. “It is that the way that Luc died is unseemly.”

  Okay, most boys his age didn’t use the word “unseemly.” Definitely Amish.

  “Unseemly.” I turned my attention to Marcus, who had been watching my efforts with amusement. “And to the rest of us, that translates into…”

  All traces of humor faded from Marcus’s eyes. “Definitely not accidental. Blunt force trauma. Apparently someone mistook his head for a birthday piñata.”

  “Bad?”

  “Yeah.”

  Nice.

  My stomach gave a nasty little lurch, and my head began to throb again. I had known it was no accident—from the moment I’d stepped from the car, I’d felt the frenetic, unsettled sensation of dark energy on the move—but still, the glaring truth left me grasping for a handhold against the flow to keep from being swept away.

  To the rest of us, the Amish were the Gentle People, love thy neighbor, honor peace not war, turn the other cheek. They were the last people who came to mind as victims when random acts of violence came a-knockin’ at the door of life…because you’d have to be some kind of cretin to pick on an Amish man or woman who wouldn’t lift a hand to defend themselves. Most of the good ol’ boys around here had too much pride to lower themselves to that level. I gazed over my shoulder to where Tom and the EMTs were working in the bright light of floodlamps. “Who would have done such a thing?” I wondered aloud. “And why, for heaven’s sake?”

  “I do not know,” came a grim voice from behind me. “But I will pray for him, of that I am certain.”

  I turned to the voice. It was the stocky man from before. “For Luc, you mean?”

  “For his attacker.”

  “Well,I will not pray for him. Whoever he is.” The teenager in the Colts tee stepped forward, his smooth features twisted against the fury he was only just repressing.

  “Jonah!” Jacob Ritter hissed. “Be still.”

  “I will not. Whoever it was does not deserve our prayer, and he does not deserve God’s blessing. Luc was our brother. How can we pray for his attacker when we still haven’t explained this to his wife? His children?”

  “It is our way, Jonah. You know that as well as I.”

  In lieu of a retort that might have disappointed his father, Jonah picked up a pebble from the road and flung it away. It pinged off a tree across the road with an impact that could be felt by all.

  Leaving the photograph-taking and evidence-collecting to his colleagues, Tom headed our way to begin phase two of the investigation.

  “I’d like for each of you to sign in with your name, address, and phone number—if applicable,” he amended quickly, as though taking note for the first time that the majority of his witnesses were of the Amish persuasion and probably not in possession of a phone. At least, not the traditional kind. I had heard some of them had begun carrying cell phones, acceptable to them since they were not physically linked to the outside world by wires. “I’ll need to talk to each of you briefly about what happened here tonight before I can release you.”

  I watched and listened in silence as Tom began taking down information. Slowly the details I had been waiting to hear began to emerge. The community’s weekly Sabbath meeting was to have been hosted at the Ritter farm that evening. Luc’s wife, Hester, arrived with their children in tow, and was upset when Luc did not arrive in time for the meeting. When he still had not arrived by the end of the communal meal, the men had decided to go looking for him in the event of an emergency.

  Jonah had been the one to come upon the gruesome scene first. The road was dark, the moon fitful behind lacy clouds. He’d been walking past the long stretch of wooded acreage that was known locally as Alden Woods when his German shepherd ran ahead of him, barking like mad.

  “I wasn’t really paying much attention at first. I thought old Blue here was after a rabbit, or a stray cat or something. I don’t even know why I bothered to shine my flashlight over at first.”

  The first thing the beacon had caught on was the overturned bicycle, its reflectors blinking crazily in the narrow stream of light. Before Jonah had a chance to process the odd image, his dog had started to growl and had gone into a crouch, stalking something only he could see in the trees.

  “It made my hair stand on end,” Jonah confessed. “I swung the light beam over farther in that direction…and that’s when I saw Luc lying huddled on the edge of the road, less than ten feet away.” He shook his head, visibly shaken by the memory.

  “Did you see anything?” Tom asked him.

  “No.”

  “Hear anything? Think back, son.”

  “No, nothing. Well, a car or two off in the distance, but when it’s dark out here, you can hear a pin drop on the neighbor’s kitchen floor. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  Tom scratched some more on his notepad, frowning.

  The next details were fuzzy. Jonah had hightailed it home and rung the summoning bell, the community’s accepted SOS signal. His father took up the tale from that point, explaining how the men had hurried back to the farm and were quickly redirected by Jonah, only to find one of their own in the kind of trouble none of them had ever expected to see.

  Luc Metzger, dead.

  Tom cleared his throat. “Now, I have to ask this. Did anyone here touch o
r move the body or anything else out there, even by accident?”

  There was a lot of head shaking and mumbled “no”'s at the question. Jonah’s father spoke up. “We saw the same thing you saw back there. We touched nothing, not even Luc himself, after it was obvious that Luc was gone.” After a little pause, he said with some irony, “We may appear to live in another time, Deputy Fielding, but we are not ignorant of the laws.”

  The cause of death was all too apparent. Luc Metzger had been struck from behind with great force by an unidentified blunt object. His bicycle lay on the side of the road, his body crumpled next to it, half in and half out of the shallow ditch. Had he been on his bike when he was hit? Had death been mercifully instant? He was a simple man. Salt of the earth. Who could have had reason to kill him? Or could it have been an accident after all? Or a case of mistaken identity?

  I found myself remembering back to his parting from his wife, Hester. How he’d calmed her fears of the moment. What would his poor wife think when she heard the news? Who would tell her?

  So many questions.

  Tom snapped his pocket notebook shut. “If no one has anything else to add, then you’re free to go. I will ask you all to come down to the station in the morning to file a formal statement.”

  “Excuse me, Officer.” An older gentleman with a full, grizzled beard broke in. “Tomorrow is Sunday.”

  “Yes?”

  “We will be at worship tomorrow morning.”

  “Oh.” Ill-at-ease was a look Tom did not wear well. It clashed with his gunbelt. “Oh, of course. Monday, then.”

  “Monday we will be hard at work on our farms. Our ways, you see, are very different from the lives you choose. Our families and our farms are our only priorities. That is our way. We do not live in your world, and do not wish to.”

  Nonplussed, Tom cleared his throat. “Well, I appreciate that, sir, but a crime has been committed. It seems that, whether you wanted it to happen or not, your world and mine have collided. It’s not something anyone would have wished to happen, and yet it has. I would think that, under these circumstances, you can see that special sacrifices might be required.”