Fall from Pride

by Karen Harper

  “Not to change the subject but guess who just came in?” Sarah whispered. “No, don’t even turn around if you’re putting up fences between you and him.”

  “Good thought to keep giving him the cold shoulder, but unfortunately, I need to run this place,” Ray-Lynn said, and reached over to pat Sarah’s hand. “Talk to you later.”

  Sarah had to admire how Ray-Lynn handled the sheriff. Nice but cool as a March breeze. Polite but that was all. Sarah bit back a little smile as she slid out of the booth and took her purse with her money in it to buy new paint. Grossmamm always used to say that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but Ray-Lynn’s vinegar seemed to be working wonders right now, because when she did what she called her sashay away from him, Sheriff Jack Freeman was all eyes.

  Nate fidgeted and stared at his computer screen, waiting for the chemical assay analysis reading to come up. Yes! A copper-based color compound in the ash residue. He’d only heard of one case where the arsonist started a fire by breaking open an artificial log and igniting it to burn the house of his former, remarried wife, but the story had been picked up in the media and he’d just happened to catch it. Now where had that case been? Out in L.A., maybe—but how long ago?

  He jumped up and stretched. Such a chemically treated log made for a fast, hot and colorful flame and would eventually burn away completely, leaving no evidence, so his risking going into the blaze was well worth it. This arson was a far cry from the wick-and-accelerant approach of the Esh barn fire, yet it surely must have been started by the same person. Two barn burners using double ignition points and choosing buildings with Sarah’s paintings was too similar to be a coincidence. Both incendiary devices used materials that were readily available in Amish country or anywhere. As soon as he talked to Mike Getz and Jacob Yoder—who were neck-and-neck as his top suspects, with Hannah running a close second—he’d stop by the hardware store in Homestead and see if he could get someone there to recall who had bought artificial fireplace logs. The problem was that purchases of those could have been made last winter or even in the fall. He was pretty sure the few Amish homes he’d been in didn’t have fireplaces, but then Jacob wasn’t technically Amish anymore.

  The moment the bell over the hardware store door rang and Sarah stepped inside, Cindee Kramer called to her from behind the checkout counter. “Hi, Sarah! Boy, oh, boy, wasn’t that fire something last night? Mike was so upset he couldn’t help put it out, but at least he spotted it and called it in.”

  “Much appreciated, too,” Sarah said, and stopped to talk. “That quick call probably kept it from burning to the ground.”

  Sarah knew she was supposed to leave all the questions up to Nate when he came by later, but with that lead-in, she couldn’t help but ask, “So what was Mike doing when he noticed it—I mean, was he outside or something?”

  “He ran inside from where he was grilling burgers out back and called 9-1-1. Even one-armed, he’s great at barbecuing, great one-handed at a lot of things, tell you the truth,” she said with a little snicker. “I’m so proud of him lately, picture in the paper and all, helping with these fires. But our burgers burned to a crisp,” she added with a tight grin. “Could have started our own fire, I guess, one way or t’other.”

  Cindee had naturally curly black hair, and lots of it, in a kind of big halo around her head. Her thin face got lost in it, but that was the only skinny part of her because she had a real full figure, chest and hips. She’d been helpful picking out paint in the past, and maybe she was being helpful today, too, and just didn’t know it. After all, Nate had only told Sarah not to ask who bought artificial fireplace logs.

  “So is your barbecue pit right where you can keep an eye on your broken-armed wonder, in case he needs help juggling all of that?” she asked Cindee.

  “Not really. It’s out behind the shed, ’cause I don’t like the smoke drifting into the kitchen and that keeps sparks away from our big woodpile.”

  Their woodpile? Then, did that mean they didn’t use artificial logs? On the other hand, Cindee hadn’t had Mike in view while he was outside, so he could have slipped away to start a fire practically next door.

  “Wow, the entire neighborhood smells of smoke,” Cindee went on. “Now that you mention it, I did go out to help him use the electric fire starter, but he said he could handle that by himself and he did, too. So, you in for more paint? Since some of the Schrock barn’s still standing, will you redo your block quilt piece when it gets fixed?”

  “I’m going to do a quilt square on my own family’s barn— Ocean Waves pattern. Do you remember I showed you that one?”

  “Sure do. You said it was your favorite, ’cause you’d love to see the ocean. I remember it kind of seemed to shift and move.”

  Sarah could hear Mr. Baughman, who owned the store, talking to another customer down one of the aisles. She and Cindee walked toward the back of the store, where the paint samples always intrigued Sarah. Little paper squares laid out by color and hue, she wanted to arrange them into a painting right on the spot. Although it was not a big store, it seemed to have everything packed in, items for both English and Amish customers. They passed kerosene lanterns and kerosene, then an array of battery-powered kitchen gadgets, since electricity, unless provided by a generator, was verboten.

  “Exterior latex, couple of contrasting blues and a white, right?” Cindee asked.

  “Right, but I’ll have to decide which blues. I really appreciate your help. I’ll drop you off a couple of half-moon pies when I take some to the Schrocks. My mother and sisters are making and freezing huge batches of them for the auction at the schoolhouse on Saturday.” And that, Sarah figured, would allow her to take a look at their barbecue area. Could the burned barn really be seen from there?

  “Can you believe the Schrocks missed that whole thing?” Cindee asked. “Told us they were going to hire a van driver to take the whole family to see relatives near New Philadelphia, coming back later today, so I bet they don’t even know, with no telephones and all. Poor people when they get driven in and see that.”

  So, Sarah thought, Mike Getz knew ahead of time that the Schrocks would not be home last night. She had to report all this to Nate when she saw him again.

  When Mr. Baughman peeked around the corner and said a quick, “How you ladies doing?” Cindee hightailed it back to the front checkout desk. Sarah had always liked Cindee. Anybody who liked and knew paint colors the way she did was fine with her. At least Cindee hadn’t brought up the fact that artist’s tubes of oil paints, canvas and easels were on sale again, because Sarah could hear them practically calling her name from the other side of the store.

  That night Sarah lay on the hideaway bed in the living room of the grossdaadi haus, unable to sleep. So much was happening so fast. Nate had not come back as far as she knew, but she’d left him a note about what she’d learned from Cindee, stuck in his sleeping bag he’d left on the ground. A nice way to spend the night, she thought—that is, him sleeping under the starry sky. She assumed he’d done a lot of interviews today, maybe even driven to Cleveland to talk to Hannah and her employer to see if she had proof of where she’d been during the barn burnings—an alibi.

  She sure hoped it wasn’t someone Amish or even former Amish doing this, including Jacob. Enough outsiders thought the Amish were a little crazy, or quaint. Quaint—that’s what Mr. Clawson had called something she’d said.

  She and Martha had kept the news of the second arson from Grossmamm. She’d gone to sleep pretty well tonight and hadn’t stirred—at least, Sarah hadn’t heard her in the bathroom. Strange how the old woman was so afraid of Nate, but then it might be best if Sarah was, too, because he really intrigued her…really made her want to…

  Sarah gasped. She heard gravel against the big window right over her head. Was Hannah here again? What if Nate was right to suspect Hannah, and she had come to look at the second barn she’d burned? Or had Nate questioned her today, and Hannah had come to tell her to keep
away from him? Or it could be Nate himself, wanting to talk to her, even though she hadn’t heard him drive in. Yes, she’d mentioned to him that Hannah had thrown gravel against the window the night after her family’s barn burned.

  She heard a handful of dirt or gravel again. Sarah sat up and pulled the bed quilt around her cotton nightgown like a shawl before she cracked the dark green curtains to look out. No one—she saw no one.

  She tiptoed to Grossmamm’s door and didn’t hear her stirring, so at least Hannah—or Nate—had not wakened her. Sarah hurried across the small living room, turned the single lock on the front door and stepped out into the warm, windy night, walking to the edge of the small porch.

  “Hannah!” she called. “Hannah?”

  Silence. Nothing moving but tree limbs. The hoot of a barn owl sounded so lonely. The familiar squeak of the porch swing pushed only by the wind grated on her nerves, scraping along her spine to make the hair on the nape of her neck stand on end. The thick hair she let down at night moved back and forth across her shoulders like a ghostly caress.

  Too late, Sarah realized she should not have stepped outside and no way was she going farther. Besides, last time Hannah had showed herself through the window, and Nate probably would have knocked. After all, Grossmamm had said she’d seen a man out here…unless it had been Nate looking around to be sure everything was quiet that night….

  She felt fear nibble at her, but when had any of them been afraid to go back and forth between the farm buildings even at night?

  Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, but she still saw no one. As she turned around to hurry back inside, Sarah felt gravel under her bare feet on the porch. So it hadn’t been her imagination. If it was Hannah or Nate, it wasn’t one bit funny.

  She gasped. A note was stuck to the front door with a basting pin. It must have been there when she came out.

  She took it inside with her, locked the door behind her and lit the kerosene lamp. She read, in large, handwritten, black printing, words from the Bible: “For wickedness burns as the fire; through the wrath of the Lord of Hosts the land is burned up, and the people shall be as fuel for the fire.”

  9

  SARAH WISHED SHE COULD JUST RUN TO NATE with this note—this threat—but it was too late and too far to go alone.

  After checking on Grossmamm to be sure she was all right, she paced the floor in the small living room, back and forth, skittish at her own shifting shadow, peeking outside now and then. She circled the note, not touching it as if it would burn her. At dawn, she’d run to the house to show the note to Daad, talk him into going with her to take it to Nate. For once in her life, she wished they had telephones here at the farm, or that she had one of Nate’s handheld phones so she could call him.

  But had this note been left by the arsonist himself, or was someone else horning in? Recalling how Nate had put the evidence of the bundle of matches in a plastic bag, she went to the small kitchen and got a gallon-size bag and sealed the note inside. Nate had a fingerprint kit in VERA. Maybe if he eliminated her prints from when she tore it off and brought it inside, he could find other prints. But then he couldn’t go around making people give theirs, could he? Especially her people. They would mistrust him then—government intruding on personal privacy.

  Each time she paced past the table, she glared at the message through the shiny plastic. Just regular, letter-size, white paper. Nothing special to identify that. Who wrote in such heavy, big print, or was that to show defiance or anger? And the fact it was a Bible quote—from someone Amish?

  Was she to be the messenger of this threat to the church leaders or the entire Amish community? She did not want to cause panic or have the news media get hold of this. But how did the sender know she was in the smaller house and not with her family in the big one? Someone had been spying on her—or, again, it was someone Amish, someone they knew, who knew her family’s ways, her ways. But someone Amish would have written in German, not English, wouldn’t they?

  Worst of all her agonizing was the implied warning that people would die, that the arsonist might burn more than barns. “And the people shall be as fuel for the fire.” Did the barn burnings with her quilt squares mean that someone was angry with her?

  Near three in the morning, she finally got hold of herself. She’d fight back—well, not really, because her people never did that—but she would not just let someone terrorize her or her community. She’d asked Cindee questions today. Now she had to learn more about this, not just let it destroy her confidence and faith.

  Sarah tiptoed into her grossmamm’s room to borrow her Bible to look for the exact location of the verse. Out in the living room, as she bent close to the single lamp, her hands shook, rustling the well-worn pages. As if she heard Grossmamm’s shrill voice again, Sarah kept recalling the etchings of her people being burned alive from the pages of the Martyrs Mirror. That one picture of a young woman tied to a ladder and being tipped into the flames flashed before her eyes. She was perspiring, but a chill snaked up her spine.

  Sarah knew to look in one of the prophets for this quote. Finally, she found it early in the big book of Isaiah in the Old Testament. She whispered it in the sonorous German, Isaiah 9:19. What followed were other predictions of a dreadful future for those who worshipped idols—or had this quote been plucked out strictly for its mention of fire?

  Curled on the couch, she eventually fell into a fitful sleep, slogging from dream to dream. A fiery beast was trying to burn VERA, flames licking at the truck, devouring it while she huddled inside with Nate, holding on to the ladder he said he would loan her. They were both barefoot and had been swimming, but even water from the pond was not enough to put out the inferno that burned them, burned her….

  She woke to find she was uncovered and shaking with the predawn chill. After looking out from every window, she ran to the big house to talk to her parents and fetch Martha to sit with their grossmamm, so she could take Nate what might be his best clue yet.

  Nate was surprised to see Sarah and her father on VERA’s back doorstep even before he took a quick swim in the pond or shaved. But then he’d been surprised to find her note in his sleeping bag last night with all the helpful intel about Mike Getz. In a way, that had saved his day, because it had been one frustration after the other.

  He’d made the hour-long drive to Cleveland and managed a quick interview with Hannah’s boss, Myron Jenkins. Jenkins couldn’t provide Hannah with an alibi for either night of the barn burnings, but of course, that didn’t necessarily imply guilt. No one was home at Hannah’s apartment, where she lived with two other women, and the neighbor he’d talked to had no clue where Hannah’s boyfriend lived so he hadn’t been able to question him.

  When Nate returned to Homestead, he’d also struck out trying to trace where Jacob Yoder was living, so he was going to visit his previous place of employment in town today to ask some questions or even interview Jacob’s parents. He’d also made an appointment to talk to Peter Clawson since the newspaper man was aware of all that went on in the area. The owner of the hardware store and Mike Getz’s girlfriend, who worked there, couldn’t recall who might have purchased artificial logs and certainly no one had lately. They were boxed away in sets of four—which could mean the arsonist had two more to use—in the back storeroom until autumn.

  But one look at Sarah’s face, and nothing else mattered.

  “What happened?” he asked before either she or her father said a word. He wanted to touch her, hold her, but he didn’t so much as move at first. Her pretty face looked ravaged; at the very least she hadn’t slept or was sick.

  Sarah extended a bagged note to him, and he scanned it. “Where and when was this found?”

  “Last night on the door of the grossdaadi haus where I stay with my grandmother. Someone wanted me to find it right away and threw gravel against the window to get me outside. I thought it was Hannah and went out….”

  His insides lurched and not just at her admitting the note could have
been left by Hannah. This could mean Sarah’s paintings—she herself—was the target of the arsonist. But it did mention “the people,” not an individual.

  “You’ve got to be more careful,” he scolded, much too loudly. Even Ben Kauffman startled. “You could have been hurt!”

  “Danger and fear—it’s not how we think around here,” she protested. “I wasn’t hurt. It just made it hard to sleep. That’s a biblical quote from the prophet Isaiah.”

  He fought to calm himself, to think and not just react. “And you thought to bag the note for me. Sarah, you’re priceless. I assume you touched it.”

  “Yes, but I thought you could take my fingerprints. Daad says it’s all right as long as you don’t send them to the government, just use them to see if there are others on the page you can trace. If it would have been stuck to the door with a thumbtack, I would have brought that for the same reason, but it was put there by a basting pin—a long one, sometimes used for quilt making, really common around here.”

  Man, Nate thought, this girl is bright. Bright and shining in his eyes. But maybe the arsonist also knew she was bright and bold. Nate had thought her painting a quilt square on her own property would keep her safe, but would it? And that person her maybe-delusional grandmother had spotted—odds were now that the person was real and could be the arsonist. But he or she was also clever, probably too clever to get caught returning to where the note had been left.

  “I’ll also see if there are footprints or anything dropped near where you found this,” he told her.

  He tried not to frown, but this biblical reference backed up a possibility he didn’t like, just as the kerosene and fake fireplace log—and now the basting pin—did. Such as maybe he was going to end up arresting someone Amish, not that others couldn’t cite scripture for their own purposes. He was starting to realize what Sarah feared most was probably true. The arsonist was not some random outsider or even a “modern,” as they put it, with a grudge against the Amish. It was someone right here in this tightly-knit community, maybe even one of their own people.