Marta Perry - Danger In Amish Country

A teacher’s sixth sense presently told Sara that something was wrong with the background noises. She looked toward the back of the room to discover that Lily was not only not working on her report, she was out of her chair and hanging over Johnny Stultzfus’s desk, whispering away.

“Lily!” Sara’s sharp tone had every pair of eyes in the room focused on her. “You will take your seat immediately, and you will also write one hundred times I will not chatter in class. Is that understood?”

Lily, her pretty face set in a pout, nodded.

She was justified, Sara told herself, but she hated to see all of her students looking at her with such dismay.

Relenting, she went to lean against her desk. “All right. Tell me what is so fascinating to all of you that you can’t concentrate on your work.”

“Please, Aunt Sara.” Becky remembered to raise her hand, but she forgot, as always, that she was supposed to call her aunt Teacher Sara in the classroom. “Everyone is talking and wondering about the man who fell off the cliff.”

“Did he really jump?” Johnny’s question exploded out of him before she could react to Becky. “I heard he had a parachute.”

“Not a parachute, dummy.” Adam Weaver, seated next to him, gave him a light punch on the arm. “Nobody could use a parachute off a cliff.”

“Adam, keep your hands to yourself,” Sara said sharply.

“I heard—” someone else said, and a babble of voices spoke, all telling a different, wilder story.

Sara sighed. If anyone had hoped the kinner wouldn’t learn about the body at the bottom of the cliff, they’d be disappointed. The only sensible thing was to tell them the truth so they’d stop making up stories.

“Enough.” She held up her hand, and the room fell quiet. “Here is exactly what happened. On Friday, after school, I was showing Rachel’s daed the cliff, where it looks like the profile of an old man.”

Several heads nodded. They probably all knew that much.

“We saw someone lying at the bottom, and we went to see if he was hurt. Unfortunately...” She hesitated, but they already knew. “Unfortunately the man had passed from his injuries.”

“Was there a lot of blood, Teacher?” Adam said with a certain amount of relish.

“No, there was not.” She said it firmly and held his gaze for a moment, mindful of what he might likely repeat to his father. Some of the parents were bound to dislike this departure from the curriculum. Including, most likely, Caleb.

“The poor man was beyond help, so I went to Mr. Brown’s farm and asked them to call the police. The emergency squad came and took the man away. And that’s all that happened. Are there any questions?”

There were, of course, but she was able to answer them honestly without giving any gory details. Finally her scholars seemed to run out of queries.

“Now you know the facts,” Sara said. “So you don’t need to make up any stories about it.” She paused. “Do any of you have anything else to say about it?”

She let her gaze rest for a moment on Rachel. It seemed she was about to speak. But the moment passed, and Rachel joined the rest of the class in a chorus of “No, Teacher Sara.”

Sara felt oddly dissatisfied. There were too many questions as yet unanswered. Maybe they never would be. But as her scholars got back to work at last, she realized that the cheerful presence of the children was chasing any remaining shadows from her thoughts as well as her schoolroom.

It was raining when school ended, a steady gray drizzle that made Sara disinclined to rush out into it. She saw Caleb standing at the edge of the playground, waiting for his daughter.

Why hadn’t he come to the door for her? She hadn’t spoken to him since Saturday, although of course she’d seen him at worship yesterday. Maybe Caleb thought they’d gotten too close during those moments in the schoolroom on Saturday. Now he was eager to put some distance between them.

Sara settled down to grade papers, trying to dismiss the thoughts, but Caleb’s frowning face kept intruding. She sighed. Caleb was so determined that Rachel should forget the past, but obviously he couldn’t do that himself. And she suspected he was wrong in his approach to his daughter’s grief, although she didn’t think he’d want to hear it from her.

Forcing the troubling thoughts away, she set to work and had the correcting done in an hour. She glanced at the windows, startled at how dark it had become because of the thick clouds and the steady rain. She’d better head for home before Daed came looking for her.

Putting on her outer clothes, she glanced back at the schoolroom before locking the door. With the battery lamp turned off, the familiar room looked different. But not scary. Of course not. She locked up and started down the path toward home.

At least the rain was stopping now, but water still dripped from the trees, and wet branches sagged, waiting for her to walk into them. She moved quickly, hugging her jacket around her. It was only sensible to get to the warmth and light of home as soon as possible.

The path wound along the creek, where the water rushed over the stones, fed by the rain. She resolutely did not look toward the opposite side, not that she could have seen the cliff from here anyway. Still, if—

Her skin prickled. A sound, some alien noise, had disturbed her. She was as familiar with the usual sounds along the path as she was the tone of her schoolroom. She slowed, listening, trying to identify the sound. It was the faintest murmur, but it almost sounded like footsteps on the path behind her.

Sara whirled, staring, but no one was there. Ferhoodled, that was what she was, letting herself imagine things. She hurried on. She wasn’t frightened exactly. She’d walked this way almost every day since she was six. But the loneliest section of the path was just ahead of her now, where it dipped into the pine woods before coming out behind the barn.

It was always dark and silent in the pines. Shadowy even on a bright day, which this surely wasn’t. Well, if she didn’t go through the pines, she wouldn’t get home, not unless she went clear back to the school and walked home along the road.

The thought of turning and walking toward the sound she thought she’d heard made her heart quail. No, it was better to go on.

She strode into the trees, trying not to imagine things in the shadows. She was perfectly all right; in a few minutes she’d be home, and it was ridiculous to let herself be spooked.

A sound came again, from behind her and to the right—like a body pushing through the undergrowth beyond the pines. Her heart jerked, and she forced herself to turn around, to call out.

“Is someone there?” The dense shadows swallowed up her voice.

No answer. But suddenly the bushes shook as if someone was forcing his way through them. In a moment he’d step into the clear space under the pines where nothing grew. She’d see him.

No. Sara spun and ran, her breath coming in ragged gasps, her schoolbag thumping against her hip. Were those footsteps behind her or the thudding of her own heart? She didn’t know, and she wouldn’t stop to find out.

She ran on, letting the bag slip down so that she could grasp the strap in her hand, with some vague thought of fending off an attack. An image of a body falling from the cliff filled her mind, accelerating her fear.

And then she broke through into the cleared ground behind the barn, which glowed with a welcoming light. She raced through the door and into the comforting presence of her startled father and brother.

FIVE

Caleb didn’t stop at the end of the path as he usually did when he walked Rachel to school in the morning. The memory of her frightened cries in the middle of the night was too strong. He wouldn’t relinquish her hand until they’d reached the safety of the school.