Karen Harper - Return to Grace

“And I’ll let you know if I hear anything at the restaurant about the shootings—” she took another big bite “—for you to tell the sheriff, because I’m not speaking to him.”

“Oh. Right. We can be allies in this.”

Ray-Lynn tapped the rest of her whoopie pie to Hannah’s as if they were clinking goblets or shaking hands. “I swear, however different our lives, we women have to stick together,” Ray-Lynn said, blinking back tears. “As for men, you can’t live with them, can’t live without them, whether they’re the Ashley Wilkes or the Rhett Butlers of the world.”

“The who?”

“Have I got a movie to share with you. You drop by sometime, since the B and B’s not far from my house. Listen, Hannah, I don’t mean to dump Seth Lantz and Jack Freeman in the same pot, but ding-dang, I think you and I have a lot in common.”

She pointed at the box of whoopie pies between them. “So, you want to split another one of these?”

AFTER RAY-LYNN LEFT, HANNAH, FEELING ON a sugar-and-chocolate high from the whoopie pies, climbed the ladder to the loft, one-handed. She sat on a bale of straw by the hay mow window to read the information Ray-Lynn had written down about Sarah’s wedding and reception.

Sarah and Nate were moving to Wooster! It was not far away, though in the next county. Hannah was soon to begin twice-a-week physical therapy on her wrist in Wooster, near the hospital. Yes, she needed that job at Amanda Stutzman’s B and B so she could hire what her people called taxi service, someone who would drive her not only to get physical therapy but the mental therapy of visiting Sarah.

Hannah shifted her position, looked out and realized, from this vantage point, she was almost as high as Seth. He stood now at the top of his extension ladder, evidently surveying his work on the roof. It all looked neatly done to her—and finished. He’d told the family at noon meal he had been hired to reroof John Arrowroot’s house and hoped to be able to talk some sense into him, but Hannah, maybe her daad , too, knew Seth intended more than that. She resisted the temptation to call to him, as if inviting him to join her here. If he still had memories of the way they used to kiss and hug in the old barn loft …

As he climbed down his ladder and went in the back door of their house, she heaved a huge sigh. Marlena’s delighted squeals sounded clear up here before the storm door closed behind him.

Hannah folded the note and stuck it in the top layer of her wrist bandage, then stood and peered out the four-sided, louvered cupola, which kept the barn cool in the summer and chilly right now. Of course, the vistas were much broader than the scenes she’d admired from below yesterday. She could see clear to the pond and beyond to the brow of the graveyard hill. She’d meant to ask Seth why the edge of the sod over Lena’s grave was so unkempt, but she was afraid it was something Linc did and she didn’t want the two men to argue. She couldn’t tell if the police tape had been removed or not because the fence itself looked as tiny as toothpicks from here.

She scanned a bit farther. The corn maze her male goth friends had been intrigued by that fateful night was partly visible over the next slant of the road. Several years ago, her father, as bishop, and the church elders had asked that its original name, Amish Corn Maze, be changed. It was run by two non-Amish brothers, George and Clint Meyers—red necks, Ray-Lynn had called them. She’d had the sheriff haul them out of her restaurant when they got into a fight with another patron a couple of years ago.

The Meyerses had refused to call their maze something else at first but had eventually renamed it Amish Country Corn Maze. Most English in the area admired and worked well with their Amish neighbors, but the maze owners still held a grudge over that. What had really annoyed the brothers was that the Amish boycotted the maze when they filled it with Halloween horror tableaus—witches, goblins, vampires, skeletons and fake bloody, dead bodies—so near the cemetery.

Hannah was surprised the maze still stood this late in the fall. Usually, they cut it down after harvest and Halloween, because the stalks were pretty ragged by then, and in colder weather, interest waned and profits dropped. A puzzle of paths, like life, her daad had called it once. Suddenly, she recalled something else that hit her like a fist.

She’d never mentioned to Linc or anyone else that the goths had made a brief maze visit. She’d been so focused on what happened at the cemetery and after.

She began to pace, ducking her head when the roof slanted inward. Could the Meyers brothers have heard the commotion Kevin and Mike made as they tore through the maze long after it closed? The Meyers house was just behind the maze. Could the brothers have been angry and grabbed a rifle and climbed that hill when her friends moved on to the cemetery? She remembered how upset she’d been when Linc had first suggested that someone might have driven a buggy or walked to the site to shoot at them, but it was just down the road from where the brothers lived.

She squinted through the louvers at the distant maze again. She could imagine its angular twists and turns and dead ends. It was a good thing she remembered the cell phone number Linc had told her to call if she ever thought of anything else, because she was going to walk to the phone shanty down the road and call him right away. She would insist he return her cell phone, too. He’d said he wanted to have it checked for any strange or suspicious calls she might have received or even background noise it might have picked up during her 9-1-1 call.

By the time Hannah carefully climbed down the ladder and went outside, her concern about Linc and Seth arguing had come home to roost. At least she wouldn’t have to phone Linc, because here he was, jawing at Seth just outside the back door of the Esh farmhouse.

“You’re withholding evidence with tricks like that!” Linc accused, pointing at Seth.

Hannah stopped on the other side of his car. She didn’t want to get in the middle of this, but they were talking loudly enough that she wasn’t exactly eavesdropping. It didn’t take long for her to figure out what the topic was.

“So what if I got a job reroofing at Arrowroot’s? It’s what I do between big projects. And if I learn something or get something out of him, fine.”

“But why didn’t you—or the bishop or Hannah—tell me about this guy wanting the Amish out of here? The sheriff thought of it and went to see him and guess what—Seth Lantz had already come calling. And now you’re saying that cemetery was sacred to his people? Yeah, you’re obstructing an official murder investigation.”

“It’s not evidence yet, just facts. It’s enough that the sheriff tipped him off he’s being watched. And he’s hardly going to admit anything if you storm over there to interview him.”

“The FBI has assisted western tribes with tracking looted items and ancestors’ bones from cemeteries in our art theft program, so I could have used that to get him talking, built a bridge. But now that you’ve horned in, you’re just going to have to report to me—and don’t screw it up!”

“You mean like you did when you didn’t closely check the exterior of Hannah’s window? I did and found an eagle feather stuck half under the sill,” Seth told him, not giving ground. Neither man had retreated but stood just a few feet apart. “And I knew that was Arrowroot’s symbol, his talisman.”

“And, once again, didn’t tell me. But if he’s the shooter, why would he want to plant that to draw attention to himself?”

“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. He hardly made his cause a secret lately. The thing is, you could have looked up there, but you didn’t,” Seth repeated, pointing up toward Hannah’s window. His voice was strong, like Linc’s, getting louder. Although the Amish were soft-spoken, he was more than holding his own.