Marta Perry - Home by Dark

He’d never seen an Englisch jail, but it seemed a pretty fair guess he wouldn’t like it.

“What’s taking so long?” Joseph muttered, peering over the log. “I can’t see him—”

He broke off at the sound of a motor. Lights swept through the trees, and Benj’s heart stopped. A vehicle was coming up the old logging road toward the barn. If Will was seen—

A man’s voice, shouting. Then, incredibly, a shotgun cracked through the woods, sending crows lifting in a noisy cloud from the trees. Benj was frozen, wits dazed by the sound.

And then Will vaulted over the log, shoving him with a hard hand. “Run,” he ordered.

Benj scrambled to his feet, following Will, with Joseph a step behind him, bolting through the brush. Another report, a branch crashing to the ground, and he was running as hard and fast as he could, running as if the devil himself were at his heels, crashing through the undergrowth heading down the hill and toward the road, if they got to the road they’d be safe, no one would shoot there.

An eternity later they stumbled out onto the macadam of the two-lane road that wound through Deer Run. Across the way was Mason House, where his sister Rachel lived now. He could go to Rachel, he could tell her—

Will grabbed his arm, shook him. “Where’s the cans?”

Benj blinked, then jerked his head toward the hillside. “Back there.”

“Dummy.” Will shoved him. “Ach, they can’t tell who we were from that. All we’ve gotta do is keep quiet.”

Joseph, always more cautious than Will, moved nervously. “But they were shooting. We should—”

“You should be quiet, like I tell you,” Will snarled. “You didn’t see anything, you don’t say anything, not to anyone. Got that?”

He spun, grabbing Benj by the shirt. “Answer me. You got that?”

Benj nodded. He hadn’t seen anything—that was for sure. Just a dark shape, wielding what had to be a shotgun. And right now he didn’t know whether he was more afraid of Will or the man with the gun.

CHAPTER ONE

SOMETHING WAS WRONG with her little brother. Rachel Weaver Mason swept the paint roller along the wall of what would be the registration area for her bed-and-breakfast, darting a sideways glance at her brother Benjamin.

Benjamin knelt on the drop cloth, straw-colored hair hiding his eyes, as he carefully cut in the edge of cream paint next to the woodwork. Benj might be only fourteen, but like most Amish youth, he possessed a number of practical skills, along with a strong work ethic. He’d said he’d help her with the painting, and he’d turned up bright and early this morning for what he called a work frolic.

Rachel suppressed a faint twinge at the expression. With any ordinary Amish family, a dozen or more relatives would have shown up at the word she needed help with the house her mother-in-law had so surprisingly left her.

But she was not Amish any longer. Running away to marry Ronnie Mason at eighteen, leaving behind her home, her family and her faith, had put a period to that part of her life. Even though she’d come back to Deer Run in the end, a widow with a nine-year-old daughter to support, she couldn’t expect to be treated as anything other than an outsider.

Only Benj, the little brother she’d hardly expected to remember her, looked at her as if she were family. The one time she’d seen her father since she’d returned, Daad had been as stiff and polite as if he’d never seen her before, and her heart still ached at the pain of that reception.

Was Daad hurting at the distance between them as well? Maybe so, but he’d never show it, and Mose, the brother who’d always been as close as a twin to her, copied Daad’s attitude.

Maybe that was better than seeing the pain and longing in her mother’s eyes. Mamm wanted her daughter back, wanted to be close to the granddaughter she barely knew, but Rachel’s return couldn’t wipe out the grief of her leaving. As for the two younger sisters who were little more than children when she’d left—well, Naomi and Lovina watched her as warily as a robin might eye a prowling cat.

“New paint makes it look better, for sure.” Benj sat back on his heels, glancing up at her with eyes as blue as her own.

Innocent eyes, but holding an edge of worry that didn’t belong there. Benj shouldn’t be jumping at sudden sounds and glancing warily around corners. That wasn’t normal.

“Was ist letz?” The question came out of her without conscious thought in Pennsylvania Dutch, maybe because that was the language of her heart. “What’s wrong, Benj? Are you worried about something?”

His hand jerked, depositing a drop of cream paint on the woodwork, and he bent to wipe it off with concentrated care. Benj was outgrowing the blue shirt he wore, his wrists sticking out of the sleeves, and the back of his neck was as vulnerable as her daughter Mandy’s.

“Worried?” he said finally, not looking at her. “I got nothing to worry about, ain’t so?” He tried to make it sound light, but his voice shook a little.

Rachel wanted to touch his shoulder, to draw him into her arms for comforting the way she would have when he was four. But she’d left then, abandoning him as she had the rest of the family. The fact that he seemed willing to start fresh with her didn’t mean she could go back to the way things once were.

“I don’t mean to pry,” she said, choosing the words carefully. “But if you ever want to tell me anything at all, I can keep it to myself.”

Benj seemed frozen, brush poised an inch from the wall. She held her breath, willing him to speak.

Then Mandy came clattering down the stairs, jumping the last few as if in too much of a hurry to take them one at a time, and the opportunity was gone.

“My room is all cleaned up,” she announced. “Can I help paint now?”

Mandy had obviously fixed her own hair this morning. The honey-colored braids were loose enough that strands already worked their way free of the bands, and the part was slightly erratic.

“No pictures of puppies on the wall?” Benjamin grinned at Mandy, his troubles apparently forgotten for the moment.

“I’m way past that,” she said loftily.

Rachel caught back a chuckle before Mandy could think she was being laughed at. Only nine, and Mandy sometimes sounded more like a teenager than Benjamin.

As for Benj, he treated Mandy like a little sister rather than the niece she actually was, to the obvious pleasure of both of them. He even had Mandy saying a few phrases in Pennsylvania Dutch.

“You can paint if you’re careful.” Rachel reminded herself that she’d wielded a pretty mean paintbrush at Mandy’s age. Amish children learned to work alongside their parents almost from the time they could walk. “You can use this roller, and I’ll go up the stepladder and do the top part.”

“It’s going to look so neat.” Mandy grabbed the roller, and Rachel steadied her arm for the first few strokes. “It was nice of my grandmother to leave us her house, wasn’t it? I wish we could have visited her.”

Rachel used climbing the stepladder as a pretext for not answering the implied question. She certainly wasn’t going to tell Mandy that the grandmother she’d been named after hadn’t ever invited them to come, not even when Ronnie died.

Amanda Mason had known how to hold a grudge, and Ronnie had been just as bad. Well, he’d been hurt, and he’d tried to mask it by insisting he didn’t care. His mother had always taken such pride in him that he hadn’t expected her iron opposition to his marriage. He’d been so sure she’d come around, but she never did. Rachel’s throat tightened, and she swallowed, trying to relax it.

Mandy swept the roller along the wall. “When it’s all finished, then we’ll start having guests, won’t we, Mommy?”