Karen Harper - Return to Grace

Linc interrupted her agonizing. “Forensic specialists have gone extensively over this site and that upland woodlot where the shooter stood. So that night you had your friends put down the blanket, the boom box, the food and wine on Lena Lantz’s grave, right?”

“No! No, I wouldn’t do that. As you said, you shouldn’t construe things. That was just chance that Kevin and Mike stopped at her grave, because they knew nothing about Lena or Seth, either. I obviously hadn’t been here for her burial, so I was upset when I saw we were near her tombstone. I wanted them to move away, but I didn’t want to have to explain why, so I didn’t say anything.”

Studying her as she spoke, he nodded. She gasped as they reached Lena’s grave. Not only was the tombstone a mess but white paint outlined the shape of Kevin’s body on the grass. She noted he had fallen sideways over the lower part of Lena’s grave. Nearby, small yellow circles were sprayed around what looked to be blood spots.

“Tiffany’s blood and yours,” he said. “We had it tested. You’re type AB, if you ever need to know.”

Linc firmly took the elbow of her good arm to steady her. Each time he touched her, even briefly—but especially when he assessed her with that hard stare—she felt heat. No one but Seth had ever affected her that way.

Hannah took a good look at what was left of Lena’s tombstone, which, they’d said, had kept her from sustaining a much worse wound when the bullet ricocheted. The rectangular stone was deeply cracked, one corner shattered. One or more bullets had blasted away the word Lantz and her death date, so it read only Lena and her birth year.

“He— Seth, I mean,” she said, “is going to replace it when you let him, when you clear away the police tape.”

“So he said. That tombstone definitely saved your wrist, pins in it or not, and it may have saved your life. The shooter took Kevin down in one head shot, and I suspect was pretty skilled, so you and Tiffany were just plain lucky.”

“Just plain blessed,” she corrected him, then realized how Amish that sounded. “I’m grateful Mike and Liz weren’t hit at all. The shooter must have been interrupted or— I don’t know. I—I see you have a gun, though your jacket hides it a bit.”

He turned her toward him and looked her full in the face. “Affirmative—yes. You’re very observant, very smart, Hannah. But this small semiautomatic handgun in my hip holster—I try to especially keep it out of sight among your people—is a far cry from what someone shot you with. That was a high-velocity—that’s a high-speed—rifle, probably with a night-vision scope. We’ve retrieved and tested the bullets, lethal for hunting big game and, obviously, for a person. And I promise you I’m going to find out whether it was a random act, an anti-Amish or anti-goth hate crime, or whether it was some sort of hit with a specific target. Okay, now talk me through what happened when all of you settled here.”

She did her best, though she’d done the same when he’d interviewed her in the hospital. Was he looking for discrepancies in what she said? As she told him about Tiffany’s wound and screams, Kevin’s scarlet bloom of blood, he interrupted for the first time.

“So the two of them were sort of dancing around and pretending to dig at Lena Lantz’s grave with Tiffany’s closed parasol when they were shot?”

The dreadful scene she’d been reliving fled. Her head cleared. She simply nodded. Did he think Seth had seen them and been angry? She darted a look down the hill at her former fiancé. He was pacing, not looking up at them, but frustration and anger emanated from the tilt of his head, his hard strides and clenched fists. Yes, she thought, Seth as she once knew him was capable of passion, of sudden swerves from self-control. He might be Amish, but he was only human! She was surprised to realize that her time away from him had somewhat muted her anger toward him.

Afraid Linc would think she was somehow suspicious of Seth—and upset at how much she wanted to protect him—she dragged her gaze from Seth back to Linc’s gray-eyed, piercing stare. But he did not pursue what he must be thinking and surprised her by changing the subject.

“One more quick thing before we ask Seth to join us in this reenactment. Can you give me any idea of how long it was between when Tiffany and Kevin went down and Seth arrived to help? Think about the time frame of when you crawled to your purse to get your cell, made the call, talked to the 9-1-1 operator, then he appeared.”

“I—I don’t know. Time was … strange. Extended, I think. I was in pain, I saw all that blood on them, then on me—”

“Ten minutes? Five?” he probed.

“I’d say two minutes, max, until I made the call, but then don’t you have the rest of the timing from the 9-1-1 records?”

He blinked. Not, she realized, because he hadn’t thought of that, but because he hadn’t thought she would. She’d read his mind, hadn’t she?

“I’m not trying to protect Seth in this,” she insisted, even as she realized that was a lie. “He couldn’t have done the shooting up in those trees, with a gun that didn’t match your bullet tests—”

“Forensics,” he said, but she ignored him and plunged on.

“And then he didn’t have time to run around, down the hill and drive up in his buggy to help. Give that up, Special Agent Armstrong.”

“I said before, I admire your backbone, Hannah. You’re a fascinating blend of this world and the one you’ve lived in these past few years—my world. But my world includes solving crimes, and I do what I have to at any cost.”

“Then I’ll get Seth,” she said.

“No, I will. I want him to come over the fence, just where and how he did that night. If you don’t mind, lie on the ground as best you can recall where you were that night. Be right back.”

Her thoughts racing, Hannah sat, then lay where she was certain she had been hit. She felt cold all over and not just from the chill wind in the shadow of this hill. How had her safe Amish life changed so much that she was a new person now, an alien back where she’d been born?

Suddenly, she longed to see her old friend Sarah Kauffman, who had gone to the world, been shunned, but planned to wed the arson investigator who had solved the barn fires. Sarah had followed her heart, not only with Nate MacKenzie but by becoming an artist who painted scenes from Amish life—with faces on the people. But Sarah was living in Columbus.

This close to the earth, near the grass of Lena’s grave, Hannah could see that the edges of the replaced sod had not yet evened out or grown into the other grass. At funerals here, she’d seen the shaved-off sod the grave diggers had set aside so it could be replaced after they refilled the grave by hand. Had Linc and his investigators dug up the edges of the grass blanket over Lena’s grave, looking for bullets or digging for more blood spots?

“Okay, please vault the fence just like you said!” Linc’s loud voice nearby startled her, and she turned her head to see Seth, one hand on the fence with the yellow tape, clear it easily and land on his feet.

“Hannah, however it happened, I’m so glad you’ve come home!”

Later that afternoon, her first Amish caller was her close childhood friend Ella Lantz, Seth’s sister. Ella was a year younger than Seth and Hannah, the middle child in their family of five children. They shared a hug, and, as ever, Ella smelled wonderful.

Hannah had always thought Ella looked like an angel with her white-blond hair and pale blue eyes. As a girl, she had nearly drowned in the pond at the juncture of the three farms. Sarah and Hannah had saved her and it had bonded them all closer. But from that time on, Ella had changed. She’d buried deep her daredevil streak, become timid, even rigid and judgmental of those who didn’t toe the line—and that was Hannah and Sarah now, for sure.