Fall From Pride

So, with Nate MacKenzie at her side, she plunged into the field following the trail of her frenzied footsteps, back toward the burned barn.

3

SARAH HEARD THE PURR OF A BIG MOTOR EVEN before she peeked outside the barn where she was cleaning up the danze debris. As if her thoughts had summoned him, Nate MacKenzie had returned in the masculine-looking vehicle that had a woman’s name. After Sarah had walked him across the field and back, he’d driven VERA over to the Eshes’ again to do some preliminary work, but now, midafternoon, here he was.

“Hi, again,” he called to her as he headed for their back porch but then did a U-turn toward her.

He came over, carrying something in a sealed plastic bag, wearing his sunglasses this time. They wrapped around his eyes like dark brown twin mirrors in which she could see herself getting larger as he came closer. At least she’d washed up and changed clothes but, not planning to go out in company, she still didn’t wear a proper bonnet over her clean prayer kapp.

“I did an initial walk around the ruins,” Nate said, stopping at the bottom of the banked entrance to the barn. “Every thing’s still too hot to sift through and may be for a couple of days.”

“Sift through? All the ruins?” she asked. That meant he’d be staying for a while.

“I may not have to, actually, to get proof of arson, though I’ll need details for my report that point to how and who. The why may be harder to come by, but I found something key to my investigation. A rubber band around a bunch of about twenty matches,” he said, lifting the plastic bag so she could see what was in it. “I found them on the ground about thirty feet from the back of the barn—not in this bag, of course. Bishop Esh says no one smokes in his family, nor does he keep matches around like this to light their kerosene lanterns.”

“Oh, no!” she blurted. “But why would kids who might be smoking on the sly put a bunch of matches together with a rubber band?”

“So some of the kids in the neighborhood last night were smoking, kids who were here at your barn dance?”

“During rumspringa, it’s fairly common. When the fire happened, I thought of it and worried a bit. But those matches are unburned, so you mean they might have dropped that bunch, but threw another pack like that into the barn?”

“Sarah, I’m not jumping to the conclusions you seem to be. It’s just that this is part of an old arson trick amateurs use. They get some kind of long trailer—a wick—light the end of it, maybe far away from the object to be burned, and have it ignite some kind of combustibles.”

“But you found no wick?”

“No. If one led into the barn, it would have been consumed in the inferno. Besides, you said the fire seemed fiercer high up, so that means someone had a very long wick if they were on the first floor. Of course, kids could have gone up into the loft.”

“We can ask them.”

“I will.”

“Or a long wick means the person could even stay outside the barn to light the fire.”

“That’s another possibility,” he told her with a nod. “A trailer, if it’s long enough—sometimes soaked with an accelerant—can give the perpetrator up to fifteen minutes to vacate the property before the fire ignites. So it could have been kids, but before I look around your barn to get an idea of what I’ll be searching for in the remnants, let’s have that little chat about why Jacob Yoder was hanging around if he’d been shunned.”

Deciding not to take notes or record Sarah as she talked, Nate listened carefully as they sat together just inside the barn door on bales of straw. His cell phone even rang once, but he glanced at it—a coworker in Columbus—then put it away without answering.

Sarah explained how she had broken her betrothal to Jacob even before he was shunned for helping hide stolen cars. She said that Sheriff Freeman could have brought aiding and abetting charges that would have sent Jacob to prison for a while, but he didn’t because he thought the Amish could make him shape up better by shock treatment—that is, ostracizing him from the church, his family and friends.

“He could have blamed the bishop and wanted revenge against him,” Nate said after she stopped talking. He hadn’t interrupted. He found her fascinating, the way she managed to keep control while emotions obviously rampaged through her. Her full, lower lip had quivered, but her voice never wavered. Her naive beauty was riveting, and he tried not to let that distract him from what she said. “Or, he could have picked that barn because of your wall painting there,” he added, “or because it would hurt the Eshes and you. Can you give me more details about shunning?” he asked.

“If he hadn’t been a member of the church, he wouldn’t have been shunned. But, once you’re a member and you break the set of rules—the ordnung—that’s that. But I don’t see how he can be vindictive. Not only did he bring it on himself, but he was not sent to prison when he could have been. Besides, the church will take him back with open arms if he atones and returns to our ways.”

“Since he was hanging around at your barn dance, does he think you’d take him back with open arms? Sorry, that’s too intrusive.”

“It’s okay. To tell the truth, though I once cared for Jacob, it was a relief for me when we got unmatched—before he helped those car thieves. I knew he was keeping something from me and he was flying too high and too fast in worldly ways and questionable company. Now, if you want to look around our barn or ask more questions, go right ahead while I finish cleaning up.”

He supposed he’d overstepped, pushing her about Jacob, but whatever cages he had to rattle, he would. As polite as she remained, her demeanor had shifted a bit from helpful to huffy. She started toward the long table, but he walked with her. “Can you tell me a little more about your quilt square paintings?” he asked.

“Painting is…dear to me,” she began, her voice almost faltering. She stopped and turned to face him. “I’ve done decorations on birdhouses and gazebos in my father’s wintertime carpentry shop for years, but I thought I could do more than scrollwork and leaves and birds—if it was allowed.”

“Allowed by your father and by Bishop Esh, I take it—and the church ordnung. As I said, the painting I saw was beautiful.”

“Best say it was purposeful. Just like the rest of the people in the country, shaky financial times have hit Amish businesses hard. Busloads of visitors used to come to eat in our restaurants and buy homemade goods like furniture and quilts, but not so many lately. So I thought, and convinced our church leaders, that it would be good to have something new to draw them in—a quilt trail, so to speak, where they could go from barn to barn, maybe buy things, even garden products or eggs if the more expensive items were too deep for their pockets. Besides farming, I guess we’ve learned to lean on the tourist trade a lot.”

“Maybe someone attracted to the decorated barns has a hidden agenda. Has anyone ever said something to you about not liking your paintings?”

“Not visitors. In general, our people don’t believe in doing things just for pretty, as we say. Things can’t only be pleasing as a decoration. Quilts, scented lavender sachets or candles, furniture—all has to be useful, purposeful for the common good.”

“And some of your people thought the quilt squares were just for pretty?”

She sighed. “Despite the bishop’s and the church elders’ permission, a few of the brothers and sisters, yes. Some think I’m being too different painting squares instead of quilting them. The local newspaper did an article and made me sound prideful when I try hard not to be!”

Emotion swelled her voice and flushed her cheeks with color. He wanted to comfort her. Was he nuts? He had to stay objective here, but he decided his best bet was to change the subject because, before she turned away, she almost looked as if she’d cry.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said, “but Bishop Esh said I can park VERA and live on the woodlot at the juncture of the three farms while I’m here. He told me the best approach to it is from the lane that runs off your driveway and cuts behind this barn.”

“Sure, that’s fine,” she said, heading again toward the long plank tabletop set on sawhorses. “I can point it out to you.” She started to wipe the oilcloth-covered table with a vengeance.

“I’ve got food in VERA and I’ve been invited to eat with the Eshes when I’m over there working, but I don’t want to impose on them more than tonight. I’m told the Dutch Farm Table Restaurant is good.”

“The best, if you don’t want McDonald’s or Wendy’s—a big battle between those two with all kinds of specials. If you don’t mind day-old half-moon pies, I’ve got some here you can take with you. My mother and sister make them for the Dutch Farm Table. Here, help yourself,” she said, opening a cake-size box and extending it to him.

“One more thing,” he said. He took a bite of one of the crimped-edge, glazed pastry half circles, this one filled with apple and cinnamon. Delicious. He talked with his mouth a bit full. “Mmm, this is fabulous,” he said. “I just want you to know that I need to be suspicious of everyone, every possibility. Not just of kids smoking, not just of Jacob, who may have a double motive, but even of the firefighters themselves. If a closer survey of the evidence in the ruins points to arson by a burn pattern or residue of accelerants, I’ll be looking at everyone, even them.”

“At the firemen? That doesn’t make sense, Amish or English.”

“It’s the so-called dirty little secret of firefighters. A few of them want to fight fires because fires mesmerize them, make them feel powerful, release pent-up feelings. They revel in being the first one into a fire, the hero, or, if they’re injured, even the victim who gets the glory or sympathy.”

“So that means you’ll even talk to the two who were hurt and not just to see how they describe the blaze? They were the first ones in.”

“Exactly.” He held the half-eaten, small pie up to his mouth and stared at her again. He was surprised she didn’t protest that, if an arsonist burned the barn, he—or she, though a female was unlikely—could be Amish, even one in good standing, especially if they thought both the bishop and the artist had overstepped with “just for pretty” painted quilt squares. He hadn’t mentioned that directly, but he couldn’t afford to ignore any possibilities.

“The Eshes can prove where they were before the fire, and our people don’t believe in insurance, so no one would burn his own barn for that,” she said, anticipating his next line of questioning.

“The Eshes have an alibi, but in the modern world, as you call it, sometimes people do burn their own property to get the money for it.”

He almost choked on the bite of half-moon pie he took to cover up the catch in his voice. What he’d just said hit too close to home—his own lost home and family. All he needed was that old nightmare he had buried deep to resurrect itself. But what scared him even more was his gut feeling that it would be so easy for someone to burn another isolated, unprotected barn. He had to act fast to stop that from happening.

“Are they burning our people again?” Sarah’s grandmother, Miriam Kauffman, asked her the night after the barn fire.

Her voice shaking, her expression distraught, the old woman stood in the doorway to the bathroom with her toothbrush in hand and her white hair in a long braid, ready for bed. Sarah told Martha, who had stayed last night in the small grossdaadi haus, that she’d take over. But Martha had wanted to hear every last detail about the fire and the fire marshal’s arson investigator, so she was waiting in the living room. Grossmamm and Martha had watched the fire from the kitchen windows, until Martha had convinced her charge to go to bed, but talk of the fire was what had probably set Grossmamm off right now. That, and the fact she insisted on reading a few pages from the Martyrs Mirror every night before she slept. “No, Grossmamm, it’s all right,” Sarah assured her. “No one is burning our people.”

“Ya, the authorities are coming again for us!” she insisted. “They tried to burn the Eshes out, and they’ll be here next! Soldiers like that man you were talking to outside today are going to slaughter us again.”

“That man is here to help us,” Sarah promised, putting her hands on the old woman’s shoulders. “We are safe here on the farm, in America.”

Sarah had considered taking the Martyrs Mirror away from her grandmother more than once. But that precious book had come down through her family, an heirloom. Poor Grossmamm, afflicted with Alzheimer’s, sometimes thought the Amish were still under siege as they’d been in Europe, hundreds of years ago.