Danger in Amish Country: Fall from GraceDangerous HomecomingReturn to Willow Trace (Love Inspired Suspense)

by Perry, Marta

  “Lydia? Can you open the door? Please? Are you okay? Lydia?” He shook the door.

  Nothing. All was silent and the door would not budge.

  Panic struck through him. He would have to get into the store another way. Lydia was in trouble. And he was going to help her whether she welcomed him or not.

  TWO

  Joseph raced into Bishop Miller’s office. Surely the old man kept an extra key inside. But at seeing the multiple stacks of papers piled over cabinets and tables, Joseph decided it might take forever to find a key in that mess. The fastest way to get to Lydia was to go out the back door and run around to the front of the store.

  Joseph wove his way through the maze of unfinished furniture and pushed through the heavy metal doors in back. Through pelting rain, he sprinted around the corner, his chest tight and heart pounding. His foot slipped on the loose gravel. Sharp rocks pressed into his palms as he pushed off the ground and kept moving. He turned the corner from the side of the building. A distant streetlight glowed over the facade of the store. He saw no cars in the parking lot. No traffic on the main road. Only darkness lay beyond the scope of the lights.

  Joseph slowed his steps, approaching the big glass doors. Lydia’s voice sounded faintly under the din of pouring rain. He froze as she came into view. She was crying. Sobbing. In front of her lurched a tall, dark-headed man. He was soaked from the rain and his coat was stained with...

  Was that blood?

  It looked like blood. The man jerked toward Lydia. Light reflected off something he held in his hand. Joseph flinched. It was a gun.

  Please, Lord, don’t let me have been too late, Joseph prayed as he pressed his way through the front doors. Lydia lifted her head. Her eyes were wide with fear.

  “Put the gun away and step back, sir.” Joseph spoke in a controlled voice as he entered the store and continued forward.

  The man turned with great effort, groaning as he moved. Even his breath was labored. The gun fell to the floor. Then with his limp arms dangling at his sides, he closed his eyes and collapsed to the floor.

  Joseph rushed forward and knelt over the fallen man. “What’s happened? How did he get in here?”

  “Joseph, it’s okay.” Lydia knelt beside him. “It’s Billy Ferris. I let him in. He’s hurt and confused.”

  Billy. The same Billy who’d been the reason Joseph had left the little town of Willow Trace. And left Lydia. Joseph clenched his teeth. He looked down at the man’s face. Bruised, swollen, cut, bleeding, his features bore no resemblance to the Englisch boy he’d spent so much of his childhood with. Could this really be Billy?

  Joseph reached forward and touched the man’s shoulder. His eyes flickered. The man jerked forward again, grabbing at his belly.

  “Joe...” He coughed. He looked up and attempted to smile at Joseph. Only then did Joseph believe that this wreck of a person was indeed his old friend.

  Lydia leaned in and touched Joseph’s shoulder. Her whole body trembled. “He’s bleeding badly. I think he has a fever, too. He keeps trying to say something but I can’t understand.”

  Joseph turned to Lydia. Looking into her eyes for the first time in five years caused a flood of unexpected emotions to race through him. Love, tenderness, pain and betrayal. But that would all have to wait. Billy Ferris was between them, once again.

  “How is he hurt?” Joseph examined his old friend limp on the floor. At his shoulder, there was a cut, more like a slash. His clothing was soaked from the ribs down with not only rain but with blood and dirt, as well. From the way he clutched at his belly, the pain there must have been most acute. Joseph lifted the tails of the bloody shirt and cringed at what had once been a tightly muscled abdomen. Billy’s stomach had been cut. Lydia gasped and turned her head away.

  It was no small wound. No wonder Billy was grabbing at his belly. He needed a doctor. “Is there a phone? We have to call 911.”

  Lydia shook her head. “I don’t have one. The store doesn’t have one. Bishop Miller won’t allow them. He pays for an outside service to take orders for the store. Messages are hand delivered.”

  “I don’t have one, either.” Joseph sat back on his heels. What could they do? The closest place was Lydia’s but he couldn’t imagine moving Billy in his buggy in this condition.

  “Can you get some water and rags?” he asked Lydia. “Maybe if we clean him up a bit, we will see that he’s not quite so bad.”

  “Ya, okay.” She hopped up and headed to the back of the store.

  Joseph gazed down. “What happened to you, my friend?”

  Billy murmured and coughed. His eyes looked up. The pain Joseph could see in them nearly brought him to tears. Billy clutched Joseph’s wrist and tried again to speak.

  “You have a phone, don’t you?” Of course he does. Joseph searched Billy’s pockets. He found a set of keys, a wallet and a plastic Baggie of pink powder. The label over the packet read Bath Salts. Joseph frowned. Bath salts must be some type of street drug. He tossed the bag aside. Looked as if Billy’s bad choices had only gotten worse since Joseph went to Indiana. Now here he was cut and possibly bleeding to death.

  “What happened to you, Billy?” Joseph grabbed a sheet draped over a nearby piece of furniture. He rolled it up and placed it under Billy’s head in an attempt to make him more comfortable. “You should have gone to the hospital, not come here.... Why are you here?”

  Billy tried again to speak. “Lydia... What’s...”

  Joseph frowned. Lydia? Lydia and Billy? Friends? A twinge of resentment flashed over him. Was that why Billy was there? To see Lydia?

  Lydia returned with towels and water. She placed one towel on Billy’s stomach then pressed another to the deep cut on his shoulder. Joseph helped inch Billy’s arm out of the jacket so that she could get to the cut better. The patient protested with a groan.

  “He said that he came here to see you?” Joseph wished he’d checked his emotions before speaking. Had he sounded jealous?

  Lydia shrugged. “I guess. That’s what it sounded like he said to me, but I don’t know why. I haven’t laid eyes on him since—well—since that last night we all went out together.”

  That last night. Joseph knew all too well the night she meant. It had been the worst of his life. The night his parents sent him away to Indiana without letting him speak to Lydia.

  Remembering it was like getting his own stomach cut open, although it was more like his heart that had been shred to pieces.

  “Talk to us, Billy,” Joseph said. “Who did this to you? How did this happen? Why? Why didn’t you go to the hospital?”

  Billy’s lips trembled in a feverish delirium. “He knows—he knows—and he’ll find you. What’s... Remember Alex? Be...be careful.”

  He knows? Who knows? Who is Alex? Lydia was right. Billy’s words made no sense. Whether his mind was affected by drugs or by the horrible pain, only a doctor could discern.

  The cut on Billy’s shoulder was much worse than it had appeared. Joseph rolled up the sleeve of his heavy coat to help elevate the wound. Something hard and metal was inside the sleeve. It had perhaps stopped the blade from causing further damage. Joseph groped inside the coat sleeve. He hadn’t thought to check there for a pocket. Amish didn’t have fancy things like pockets. He hoped it wasn’t full of drugs. It wasn’t. Joseph nearly smiled as he slid a high-tech touch-screen cell phone from the coat sleeve. He tapped the emergency button and held it until a dial tone sounded.

  A voice answered quickly. “This is Emergency. Please state your name and location...”

  Joseph and Lydia exchanged a look of hope.

  Thank You, Lord. Thank You. Please let Billy live.

  *

  The next forty minutes seemed an eternity to Lydia. Bright lights flashed, sirens whistled, the rain continued to pour down. People ran here and scurried there. It was as if she were in a dream where the images were all blurred and fuzzy—a dream she wished she’d wake from, making this strange evening all go away.
/>   Instead, she watched as the EMTs strapped Billy Ferris to a gurney. They gave him several injections and hooked him to an oxygen tank. Lydia closed her eyes, hoping to hold in the tears, which had perched on her bottom lids. Her own chest was tight and lacked sufficient air. Only adrenaline had kept her from feeling the full weight of the situation. But now that Billy was someone else’s responsibility, exhaustion and confusion slammed down on her like a hammer.

  And that was without even thinking about the fact that, after all these years, Joseph Yoder was back in Willow Trace and standing right beside her. So many emotions flooded through her—too many to sort. What was clear, however, was that, during his absence, Joseph had grown taller, broader and more handsome. His hands were now lined with calluses. His face had a crease or two developing around the eyes. His brown hair was still wavy and streaked with honey-blond strands. His soft hazel eyes looked as if they might take her in and swallow her up whole.

  For a second, there’d been a glimpse of that same boy who’d loved her since grade school, but then Joseph’s expression had become guarded. She wondered if he saw changes in her. Not that it mattered. What she and Joseph had had was gone. Forever.

  “Miss Stoltz, I have just a few more questions.”

  Lydia turned to Detective Macy, the man addressing her. Several officers had arrived at the store, but this one seemed to be in charge. He wanted to know every detail of what had happened. The Amish, in general, didn’t care much for the Englisch law enforcement—but they had to be there. Billy was, of course, Englisch. She tried to oblige Macy’s unending questions, but since she and Joseph had had nothing to do with Billy, his wounds or his arrival to the store, she didn’t see how anything she said was the least bit helpful.

  “Did Mr. Ferris give you a reason for coming to the furniture store?” Macy asked. “Did he know that you would be here?”

  “He tried to say a few things, but I cannot tell you that I understood any of it. I have no idea if he knew I worked here or not. I haven’t seen him in years.” Lydia thought, too, about Bishop Miller. He would not be pleased about all this transpiring at his store. He might even question her judgment in friends. Thanks to her father, she and her mother had enough to prove to the community without adding something else to it. In any case, this was going to be all over the papers and the evening news, as was anything both newsworthy and Amish.

  *

  Joseph ran his oil-stained hands over his thick hair and sighed aloud. He longed to be away from this chaos. How had this happened? He’d imagined seeing Lydia again for the first time in many different scenarios—at his cousin’s wedding, at her farmhouse, at Sunday meeting. But he had never imagined it like this.

  “I didn’t really understand him, either.” Joseph fiddled with the straw hat between his hands. “But he was certainly trying to talk. He recognized me. He said my name. But he couldn’t have known that I would be here tonight. I decided to work late just a few hours ago.”

  Macy tapped some notes into his electronic notepad with a tiny stylus. Then he turned back to Lydia. “So, you and Mr. Ferris were friends? He came here to see you?”

  Lydia’s eyes widened and her cheeks reddened. “No. We were never friends. Those two were friends.” She pointed at him. “I haven’t spoken to Billy Ferris since I last saw Joseph. And that was summer five years ago.”

  Joseph wondered if Macy could detect the bitterness in her voice. To him, it seemed unmistakable. “It’s true. He was a gut friend...before I moved away. He is Englisch, but my family lived next door to his. We—we grew up together...so to speak. But truthfully, I haven’t heard a word from him in the past five years. And like Lydia, I haven’t seen him since that same night that she mentioned—the one before I moved to Indiana.”

  Macy scrunched his face, as if he’d tasted something sour. “So, you are both saying that you haven’t seen each other or Mr. Ferris since you were all together on the very same night five years ago?”

  It did sound kind of strange when he put it like that, Joseph thought.

  “Ya, I suppose that is true.” Joseph scratched his head.

  “Did anything special happen on that night?” Macy looked suspicious.

  Lydia tensed. For an instant, Joseph thought to reach over and touch his hand to hers and comfort her. But those days were over. Perhaps seeing her brought old habits back to mind.

  “It was back in our rumspringa days,” Joseph said. “A long time ago. We met some Englisch kids and had some beer.”

  “Where did you meet?”

  A bead of sweat formed on Joseph’s forehead. He wiped it with his sleeve and swallowed hard. He knew Lydia didn’t want to hear any of this. He didn’t care to talk about it, either. “Tucker’s Pond. It was mostly friends of Billy’s. We were the only Amish. The two of us left pretty early on.”

  “And that’s it?” Macy tapped more notes into his electronic tablet.

  Lydia nudged her head at Joseph as if saying to go on with the rest of the story.

  Joseph shifted his weight, hesitating before continuing. “So, there is a bit more. Just before we left, Billy took out some drugs. I have no idea what they were. We didn’t take them, but most of the others did. After a half hour or so, one of the girls became very ill. When that happened, Billy got all agitated. He wouldn’t let us help. He told us to leave so I took Lydia home.”

  “Agitated?”

  “Angry. Excited. Worried about the girl, I think. But he was high, too. It’s hard to say.”

  Detective Macy stared up at the ceiling for a second, as if stowing away this bit of information in case he needed it later. Then he looked at Lydia. “And this is how you remember it, too?”

  Lydia nodded, her head down.

  “Who was this girl? Do you remember any of their names?”

  Lydia and Joseph exchanged a quick glance.

  “They were Billy’s friends. We didn’t know them,” Joseph said.

  “I remember one,” Lydia said. “One of the girl was named Michelle. Not the one who was sick. Another. She had been out with us before. But not the others. Do you think this has something to do with what happened tonight?”

  Macy shook his head. “I doubt it. My guess is that this is all about drug sales. A deal gone bad. Your friend Mr. Ferris has been arrested several times on suspicion of selling and distribution. I have a feeling this will be connected with a more recent incident. But stay away from Tucker’s Pond. It’s still a high school hangout and a place to buy and sell.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well...thank you.” Macy looked over his notes and seemed pleased. “That will be all for now. I’ll just need to know how to get in touch with you, if I have more questions.”

  They each rattled off their addresses. As he typed them into the pad, his phone began to ring.

  “Excuse me.” He took the call and began to circle the shop, moving away from them. Joseph and Lydia stood like statues at the front door until he returned.

  “Bad news.” Macy put his phone away. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this.... Mr. Ferris passed away on the ride to the hospital. I’ll notify the next of kin. You should go on home and be very careful. Remember, unless the medical examiner thinks the cuts were self-inflicted, this is now a homicide. Neither of you should leave town without permission. Marked cars will be patrolling here on a regular basis until we know more. This is for your own safety and protection. I can arrange an escort home, if you like.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Lydia said quickly. The detective turned away and dismissed them with a nod.

  “Wait...Detective Macy, do you believe we are in danger?” Joseph asked.

  Detective Macy looked back. “Do you think you are in danger, Mr. Yoder?”

  “I don’t know that I know what to think,” Joseph said.

  Despite her brave stance, Lydia was fighting an onslaught of tears. “It doesn’t make any sense. None of it. But we do think Billy told us to be careful, or at least, it seemed li
ke he was trying to say that.”

  “Then you should be careful, even if it makes no sense. One of the hardest parts of my job,” Detective Macy said, “is to remind myself that with every senseless murder there is a killer somewhere who thinks it all makes perfect sense.”

  THREE

  Joseph and Lydia hardly spoke to one another as they locked up the store. Out back, she waited inside the buggy while Joseph hitched up his chestnut mare. Ten minutes. She could handle Joseph Yoder for ten more minutes. That was all it would take for him to get her home. Ten more minutes. Lydia stiffened as Joseph came around to the front of the buggy and gave her a nod.

  “Thankfully, the rain has died down a bit, ya?” He climbed inside the vehicle. It was a four-seater, hard covered buggy—the type Amish families used to go to Sunday meeting. He tapped the reins and called gently to his horse. The mare stepped out onto the main road toward home.

  The steady trotting and Joseph at her side made Lydia think of many courting nights that had started or ended in this way.

  “A most unusual night,” she said. “I can hardly believe any of it actually happened.”

  “Poor Billy. He should have stopped that business of his long ago.”

  “What business?”

  “Selling drugs. I found some on him when I was searching for a phone. But I didn’t know it had gone so far. I didn’t know he had a record. What a shame. He was a good guy—I mean, inside him somewhere, he had a good heart.” Joseph wiped the couple of tears that trickled down his cheek.

  “Ya, it is sad.” Lydia touched his shoulder. The contact made her suddenly aware of her natural attraction to him. She wondered how her body could betray her heart like that. “I saw you give the bag to the police.... So, you really hadn’t talked to Billy since you left?” The question sounded like an accusation. She hadn’t meant for it to, but he and Billy had been so close. It seemed so strange they hadn’t been in touch.

  “Didn’t you read any of my letters?”

  Lydia dropped her hand and lowered her head. No. She had not read them. It was too painful. And what was the point? He’d left without a word. Just like her father. His decision about her had been clear enough. No need to read his letters and feel the pain all over again. “I did not. You left. End of story.”