by Tami Hoag
The party line was that Carney and Trace had been together all of Wednesday evening. There were other witnesses to corroborate the story concerning the hours from nine o’clock on, but no one had seen them earlier. The Stuart kid was lying. Dane would have bet the farm on it, but he couldn’t prove it and he hadn’t been able to crack the boy’s story.
Trace Stuart. Christ, he was up to his neck in Stuarts. He wondered if Elizabeth knew her son was hanging out with a slimeball like Carney Fox while she was stumbling over dead bodies and digging up dirt on the respectable citizens of Still Creek. The kid was headed for trouble if that was the kind of company he was going to keep. Apparently, trouble ran in the family.
The boy was sixteen. Dane couldn’t quite reconcile the image he had of Elizabeth as a sexy, tempting woman with the image of a mother of a sixteen-year-old. She must have been little more than a girl when she’d had him. He started to wonder what that story was, but caught himself and broke off from that train of thought. He was spending time with his daughter now. This was a separate part of his life.
“So how did you get into town?” he asked, glancing up as Amy sneaked a French fry off his plate.
“Mrs. Cranston’s guild has to clean the church for the Jarvis funeral. I bummed a ride.” She nipped the last of the potato and delicately licked the salt off her fingertips.
“Good,” Dane grunted. “I don’t want you staying at the farm alone.”
Amy rolled her eyes. “Daddy—”
“End of discussion,” he declared, both his tone and his expression brooking no disobedience. “I know how grown-up you think you are. Jarrold Jarvis was grown-up too, and he’s dead now.”
“Do you think you’re looking for a serial killer?” she asked, her voice hushed with a combination of horror and excitement. She tossed her magazine aside and swung around to face him, leaning forward eagerly, eyes wide, elbows on the table.
“No, but I’m not taking any chances. You’re the only daughter I have.”
She gave him one of her pixie smiles. “I wouldn’t have to be if you got married again.”
Dane squeezed his eyes shut and groaned. When he opened them again she was still staring at him, eyes bright with expectation. He pulled a paper napkin from the dispenser and eased back against the cushion of the booth, carefully wiping a thin line of ketchup from his index finger. “That’s not likely, sweetheart,” he said softly.
“Well,” Amy mused, propping her chin on her hand, her expression turning pensive, “it would help if you would get a girlfriend. Mrs. Cranston says you never date anyone from around here. She says rumor has it you’re seeing someone in Rochester, but no one seems to think it’s serious because you never bring her down here.”
“Mrs. Cranston should mind her own business,” Dane grumbled.
“I suppose it’s just sex,” she speculated in the most casual of tones. She sipped on her Coke while Dane turned puce. “That’s so passé, Daddy. People need relationships, someone they can care about. I mean, I suppose sex is great, but—”
Dane held up a hand to cut her off. From the corner of his eye he could see his daughter’s offhand remarks had snagged the attention of several other restaurant patrons. Ears tipped and lifted like radar dishes to catch whatever other sage wisdom Amy might have brought with her from California.
“I don’t want to talk about sex,” he said tightly. He didn’t even want her to know what sex was.
Amy blinked at him. “Oh. Well, okay.” With a shrug she moved back to the heart of the matter. Her big lake-blue eyes darkened and softened with heartfelt emotion. “I don’t like to think of you all alone,” she said softly. “I want you to be happy.”
Dane couldn’t say anything for a few moments. Just as it had the first time she had brought it up, the topic had hit him broadside, knocking him off balance. The sincerity in his daughter’s statement kicked his feet out from under him altogether. As he looked at her, a knot of emotion tightened in his chest. Panic tightened it another degree. She was growing up too fast, slipping away from him, offering him comfort and concern when he still wanted to be reading her bedtime stories.
She reached across the table and brushed her fingertips over his knuckles, her pretty mouth curving into a tender smile that held too much understanding.
“I am happy,” he murmured in a tone so flat he didn’t even convince himself. He was happy, he insisted, as happy as he could reasonably expect to be. He had his life neatly arranged, just the way he wanted it—his job, the farm, recreational sex with Ann Markham, peace and quiet, no complications. Everything had been in its proper place until the Jarvis murder . . . and Elizabeth.
“You’re not so old,” Amy said earnestly. “You could get remarried and have a whole second family.”
And go through this again? he thought. The pain of having a child taken away from him by circumstance and years? The terrible sensation of sitting across from her and not knowing quite who she was or how she had become that person, knowing the time to find out was running through his hands like sand? Not on your life.
Amy sat back and stretched her arms to the sides, dropping the air of gravity like a rock. She could tell by the look on her father’s face, she wasn’t going to get anywhere. He kept the door closed on his private life. She wanted him to be more open, to treat her more like a friend and less like a child the way her stepfather did, but she said nothing along those lines. Instead, she changed the subject with what seemed to be the capriciousness of youth. “I met someone today while I was waiting outside your office,” she said, eyes twinkling. “He was so cute.”
Dane’s brows tugged together in irritation. “One of my deputies?” If he caught one of his deputies flirting with his baby girl, by God, there would be hell to pay.
“I don’t think so. I didn’t get his name. Anyway, it reminded me that I saw a poster for a dance that’s coming up during that Amish days thing, and I thought that if I were to meet this guy again and if we hit it off, maybe I could ask him—”
“No.” The word came out automatically, surprising Dane almost as much as it surprised his daughter.
Some of Amy’s animation shorted out. She had kind of hoped to slide this past him on lighthearted enthusiasm, but he’d cut her off at the pass. The Argument loomed nearer. She could feel it coming, could feel the dread rise in her chest. She curled her fingers around the edge of the tabletop and braced herself. “But Daddy—”
“I said no.” Dane knew he was acting completely on instinct and the fear of having his child grow up. He was probably being unreasonable and undoubtedly being unfashionable, but he didn’t give a damn. He couldn’t seem to control much of anything else that was going on around him these days, but he could control this. “I don’t care what your mother lets you do. I think you’re too young to date and you’re not dating anyone while you’re staying with me. Is that clear?”
She stared at him for a moment, looking crushed and angry. A sheen of tears glazed her eyes.
“Yes, that’s clear, sir,” Amy said softly, her voice trembling with temper and hurt. From the corner of her eye she could see people staring at them, and she could have died from embarrassment. There would be no argument here, she thought bitterly. God had spoken. And she was just a little girl in pigtails who would be grounded for the rest of her life if she talked back in public.
“You know, Daddy,” she said tightly as she slowly gathered her purse and fashion magazine and slid from the booth. “One of these days you’re going to have to figure out that I’m not eleven and we don’t live in the Stone Age.”
Dane sat back, kicking himself mentally. The last thing he wanted was hard feelings between them. “Amy—”
“I have to go meet Mrs. Cranston now,” she said, battling the urge to cry. Head down, book and purse clutched against her chest, she hurried out.
“Amy—” Dane twisted around in his seat and watched her walk away, his cheeseburger hardening into a rock in his stomach. All he wanted was
to keep her near him, and he had just succeeded brilliantly in driving her away.
He thought of going after her but decided against it. He knew that last look she’d given him—she had inherited it from him. She was angry and she wanted to be left alone to stew and lick her wounds. Wounds he had inflicted. He picked up a limp French fry, dropped it back onto the plate, and shoved the plate away. “Shit.”
ELIZABETH SLAMMED THE DOOR OF THE CADILLAC AND stormed out of the shed she was using for a garage. She headed for the house, the wind whirling her skirt around her legs and tossing her hair. Another storm was brewing—in the atmosphere and inside her—and it was very clear which held more fury. She hadn’t been this angry since she’d caught Brock in the Jacuzzi with two of his female administrative aides. She hadn’t been this scared since she couldn’t remember when. Not even finding Jarrold Jarvis had frightened her as badly as this.
Aaron sat on the back steps, a newspaper in his hands, his somber gaze on her as she approached. He rose slowly as she neared and Elizabeth scrambled mentally for something civil to say. She wished he were gone. She didn’t want any witness to the battle that was about to take place.
“You’re looking like the wet hen that’s mad, I’m thinking,” he said blandly.
“Mad is too small a word, sugar.” She pulled up at the bottom of the steps, trying to rein in her emotions to a point where she could hang on and control them and not just fly into screaming hysterics. She was shaking inside and out, and she folded her arms across her middle to try to control that too. “My son has developed a knack for raising my blood pressure that is unsurpassed. I’m afraid we’re about to have us a knockdown drag-out hiss-spitting rhubarb here, Aaron. You might want to take your toolbox and skedaddle if you don’t care to hear the Lord’s name taken in vain.”
“He’s not here,” Aaron said calmly.
“The Lord?”
“Your son.”
“Oh, great.”
Elizabeth turned around in a circle, flopping her arms at her sides in an attempt to burn off some of the agitation twisting inside her. She’d been primed and ready for a fight, building a head of steam all afternoon, rehearsing her lines on the drive home. But as much as she’d been spoiling for a confrontation, the need to just see Trace, to touch him and look at his face and hear his voice, had been equally strong. But he was gone. She tried not to let herself see the symbolism in his absence. If she got any more distraught or depressed, she was liable to throw up.
After a minute of pacing she found a spot beside the steps and leaned against the side of the house, arms crossed once again. She stared past the farmyard, not seeing the outbuildings, gray and sagging like wet cardboard, or the bright orange basketball hoop Trace had nailed to the end of the shed. She looked past all that to the thick dark woods that marked the northern edge of her property, but she didn’t see the jack-in-the-pulpit that grew at the base of the nearest black walnut tree either, or the pair of squirrels that chased each other up the trunk of a silver maple. She saw only darkness, a barrier, a wilderness, and she felt those things inside her as she thought of Trace.
“What am I gonna do with that boy?” she murmured, not even aware she had spoken the words aloud.
“Children need purpose and discipline,” Aaron said, thinking Trace Stuart had neither.
Elizabeth gave a harsh laugh and wiped a tear that was clinging to her lashes. “Yeah? Well, you tell me how to discipline someone who’s sixteen, full of testosterone, and outweighs me by forty pounds.”
He didn’t have an answer for that. He couldn’t tell her to go back and give birth and start all over with the boy, which was the only answer Aaron could see. The English knew nothing of raising children. Theirs grew up as wild as grass, without purpose or a sense of the order of life. Amish children were taught from the cradle to love God, to obey their parents, to take joy in work, and to guard their way of life.
“You don’t get this?” Elizabeth asked, genuinely bewildered as she turned and looked up at him over the rusted stair railing. “Amish teenagers don’t rebel?”
He lifted his shoulders a fraction. “Ya, they have their time of rumschpringe—running around—before they join the church. Some of the boys fancy up their buggies with mirrors and such, stay out late, sneak off to see the moving pictures in town.”
Some of the boys. Not him, Elizabeth thought. He could never have been anything but devout with his long martyr’s face and somber eyes. “That doesn’t seem like much, compared.”
Fear sprang up inside her again, spurting through what calm she had managed, like floodwater forcing itself through the weak spots in a sandbag dam. She brought a hand up to her mouth to press back the sound of despair, rubbing off the last of her lipstick. Tears filled her eyes.
“My son is hanging around with the fella they think killed Jarrold Jarvis,” she admitted in a strangled voice. “Trace gave him an alibi.”
Christ in a miniskirt, her life was turning into one long, living nightmare. Horrible, outrageous things were going on all around her, and she was powerless to stop them. All she seemed able to do was stand by and report it all in the paper. Now she would have to print that her son had sprung the sheriff’s only suspect in the only murder in Tyler County in thirty-three years.
“They caught the man what done this terrible sin?” Aaron asked idly, easing himself back down on the top step.
“Jantzen thinks so.”
“Good, then. It’s all over.”
Elizabeth almost laughed as she shook her head. She pulled the combs from her hair and let it tumble free around her shoulders. “Hardly,” she said.
Aaron waited, expecting something more, but she let the subject drop. She climbed the stairs, looking weary as a grandmother, and sat down on the step beside him with a long, soul-deep sigh. The hem of her skirt fell to brush the tops of her feet. She looked almost modest for once, certainly more feminine than he had seen her. She sat quietly, staring toward her dilapidated outbuildings, where the wind was playing with a barn door, smacking it against the side of the building—thwak! thump, thump, thump, thwak! thump, thump, thump . . .
“What’cha reading there, Aaron?” she asked at last, a lopsided smile lifting one corner of her mouth. “Not the Clarion?”
He flipped up the top end of the paper in his hands. “The Budget.”
Elizabeth glanced at the first page. The masthead read: Serving the Sugarcreek Area and Amish-Mennonite Communities Throughout the Americas. Sugarcreek, Tuscarawas County, Ohio. There were no pictures, only columns of what looked to be newsy letters from around the country. “Got any murders in there?”
He gave her a stern look, brows drawing together above the rims of his spectacles. “No.”
“What’s it about?”
“The weather, the crops, who visited, who was born, who died.”
Not much different from what the Clarion had been until she had come along, Elizabeth thought. Exactly what some people thought the Clarion should be still. Charlie Wilder came instantly to mind. He had stormed into the office that afternoon, wanting to know why the special edition had held nothing but news of the murder.
“There isn’t a word in here about the Lady Cougar drill team preparing for their Horse and Buggy Days performance!” he huffed.
Elizabeth had been in no mood to take his petty complaints. She supposed she should have bitten her tongue for once, but the words were out before she could make any effort to stop them. “Have they killed anybody recently?”
Poor old Charlie turned red as a radish. “Of course not!”
“Well, there you go, sugar. When they kill somebody, they’ll get a special edition too.”
Of course, Charlie’s point had been that the Clarion wasn’t the place for bad news. Elizabeth narrowed her eyes as she looked at Aaron Hauer’s Amish paper. “What’s the worst news in there?”
“David Treyer’s cousin down in Kalona, Iowa, bought himself a tractor.”
She fell into a cou
ghing fit, trying to contain herself. Aaron didn’t seem to think the subject was amusing. The utter gravity of his expression told her tractor-buying was a serious offense as far as he was concerned, and she was determined not to offend him by laughing at the ways of his people. She had too good an idea of what it was like to be looked at with derision and ridicule.
“That’s bad?” she managed to ask, wiping her eyes with one hand while she dug the other into her purse in search of a cigarette.
“Tractors are not Plain,” Aaron said sternly.
She lit up and took a deep drag that should have been calming but burned her throat instead. Her gaze drifted away from the Amishman beside her to the west, where the sun was sliding down in the sky. A buggy rattled past on the road, harness jangling, wheels chattering on the gravel. From her vantage point Elizabeth could look just past it and see the framework of Still Waters in the distance. The construction site was deserted, and would be until after the funeral of its mastermind; then the building would go on, the resort would be completed—much to the benefit of Helen Jarvis and Rich and Susie Cannon.
