Return to Grace

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.

But maybe, Hannah hoped, Ella had learned that people make mistakes that should not only be forgiven but forgotten. Naomi had told Hannah that Ella had recently broken up with her serious come-calling friend, Eli Detweiler, because he hadn’t given up alcohol after his rumspringa years.

“I brought you some lavender,” Ella said, and held out a basket of sachets and soaps which perfumed the air. On a large lot near the Lantz farmhouse, Ella grew and harvested the fragrant herb. Then in a little workshop Seth had built for her out the back of their family’s farm, she packaged her precious plants she sold locally. Each hand-lettered label read Lavender Plain Products, Homestead, Ohio.

“How thoughtful of you!” Hannah said, and inhaled deeply as Ella took a chair at the card table laid out with a half-finished family jigsaw puzzle of the Grand Canyon. “They smell delicious and look lovely,” she added, admiring the printed cotton packets that made each sachet look like a small quilt square.

“Some say the scent is good for the heart,” Ella said. “I mean, not to cure a damaged heart, like what happened to Lena, but to lift your mood. Oh, Hannah, it was awful that she just fell over like that in their kitchen with the baby there but Seth out on a job. Such a tragedy. But then, you’ve had one, too. And I … believe me, I remember how it feels to … to almost die.”

“I was sorry to hear about you and Eli parting, but at least it was before you got betrothed or married.”

“I just couldn’t take a chance on him, trust him not to drink,” she said, gripping her hands in her lap. Ella’s feelings and moods were always transparent. She looked instantly grieved. “Every time he said he was done with drinking, he wasn’t. He looked bleary-eyed and was always tired, too, cutting back his work hours. I could smell it on him day or night. I just— I could not trust him to be the father of my children. I guess all of us—you, Sarah and I—had disappointments with men. Though Sarah’s gone the wrong way with a worldly man after that mess with Jacob, I’ll find someone to build a life with here, I know I will!”

“Meanwhile, you have a sweet future!” Hannah said, forcing a smile and picking up a cotton-wrapped and ribboned bar of soap to inhale the scent. Ella didn’t make the soap at home but provided the dried leaves and flowers for it, then wrapped the bars herself.

“Both bed-and-breakfasts in town use my products now as well as the Amish gift shops and Mrs. Logan’s restaurant, so that gets me more business. I just came from Mrs. Stutzman’s B and B, and she said to tell you that if you want a job you could do one-handed, she needs a half-time housekeeper—dusting, laundry, ironing. She does the cooking and makes the beds. Her half-time girl just quit.”

“People have been so kind to offer jobs. They must know it’s hard for me to have come home like this.”

“I know it, too,” Ella said, and reached out to lightly grasp Hannah’s good wrist. “At the B and B, you wouldn’t have to face a lot of our people yet, since Amanda Stutzman and her husband are Mennonite and their guests are ausländers. Oh, and guess who just moved in there for a spell?”

“Not the FBI agent?”

“No. Can you see him with all those ruffled curtains and quilts and teatime? Sheriff Freeman’s wife—former wife, like the moderns say—is back in town. I met her there when I delivered the new sachets and soaps I arrange in each room. She’s pretty but wears a lot of makeup. She says she’s here to stay. I think she’s come home, like you.”

Hannah remembered how much Ella loved to gossip, almost as much as her best friend, Naomi. Ella was to be one of Naomi’s attendants, or sidesitters, in the coming wedding. Would that be hard for her to face since she’d broken up with Eli? But Hannah kept thinking about poor Ray-Lynn Logan. It had been pretty obvious from the sheriff’s visit to Hannah’s hospital room that he and Ray-Lynn were getting close, and months ago Sarah had told her the same.

“Ella, that job offer sounds good to tide me over, but I don’t know if I’ll be staying after the investigation of the shooting is finished.”

“Oh, but we want you to. Seth does, I can tell!”

“Now don’t you go playing matchmaker for us, or for Sheriff Freeman, either. But the fact that the former Mrs. Freeman is living at the Plain and Fancy means she’s a five-minute walk from Ray-Lynn’s house.”

“That’s right. But here’s the thing,” Ella plunged on, leaning forward and lowering her voice, although they were alone in the living room. “Lillian Freeman’s been living in Las Vegas!”

She’d said those words, Hannah thought, as if the woman had just come from the very gates of hell. “But that doesn’t mean she was boozing it up, gambling day and night or dancing in a chorus line,” Hannah protested.

“A chorus line? Did she try to be a singer, like you? No, she was a hostess in some fancy casino restaurant, I think.”

Hannah wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. She’d actually forgotten how much she’d learned in the outside world that she’d never known about here in the shelter of Home Valley.

Hannah knew the November sunset would be early, so late afternoon, when she heard Seth come into the house to wash up and get Marlena, she decided to slip outside. However comforting it was to be near her family again, she felt cooped up. She’d even helped, one-handed, with dusting, as if preparing for the job at Amanda Stutzman’s B and B she was considering taking. She had to do something other than sit around waiting for Linc to think of some new clue or lead.

Hannah had been racking her brain trying to come up with the who or why of the shooting. And she’d shed tears again, writing condolence letters to her goth friends’ families. Worst of all, if she let her thoughts drift a bit or woke up at night, she saw the shootings all over again in her head. Her doctor had told her she might have such spells, like those who’d had trauma in battle, a stress syndrome.

She swirled her cape around her shoulders, put a bonnet on—but couldn’t tie it with one hand—and went out into the dying day. The brisk breeze perked her up a bit, and she inhaled deeply. She needed to get her strength back, she told herself, so she walked back and forth along the side of the barn, admiring the view of gently rolling fields, now bare of crops but awaiting spring plantings. Partly screened by bare trees, the pond at the juncture of the three farms looked as flat gray as the sky. To the west, the newly repaired Kauffman barn with the bright quilt square Sarah had painted looked more distant than it really was as the sun sank lower and the hills threw deepening shadows.

Glancing northeast toward the Lantz farm, she admired Ella’s little workshop and Seth’s small house, neither of which had been there when she left home. She pressed her back against the sturdy barn built after the fire. Had she instinctively taken her walk here because she could see for miles? No high-velocity rifles with what Linc called night scopes could be out there now. Or was it because Seth had helped to build this barn, big and strong?

“You shouldn’t be out here in the open, Hannah.”

She jumped and her heartbeat kicked up at the voice behind her, as if her thoughts had summoned him.

She turned to face Seth with Marlena in his arms.

“Because I’m in the open for miles around, I feel safe. I refuse to be a prisoner.”

“I was up on a roof all afternoon. Someone else could be, too—on one of these roofs, hidden behind a tree, even hunkered down on the ground in camouflage hunting gear. You have no idea the range of some rifles today.”

A shiver snaked down her backbone and she pressed tighter to the barn. “I will not just hide. I’m fine, just fine!” Realizing she sounded strident, she stood straight and said in a calmer voice, “I’ve been waiting for a moment to thank you for all you did that night. I know my family has expressed their gratitude, but Tiffany and I might have died, too, without your help.”

“God’s will that I came along to help in time—and that it was you. Even through your friend’s screaming and your pain, I knew it was your voice. Talking, singing, even shouting, your voice has always been beautiful to me.”

She gaped at him, eyes wide, mouth open before she caught herself and, not trusting that voice, nodded. Marlena fidgeted in his arms and sneezed. He cleared his throat.

“That’s all I had to say,” she whispered.

“It means a lot to me. Can I talk to you a minute before I head home? But not out here, where Marlena might catch cold. Can we step into the barn? I have my buggy there.”

She was afraid of the rush of feelings that overwhelmed her near this man, memories, yes, but too strong a reaction to him even now. Distrust, dislike for what he’d done to her, but also raw need, far different from the curiosity she felt about Linc Armstrong. Not moving to follow him at first, she asked, “Do we really have anything but the shooting—which we’ve been over backward and forward with Linc Armstrong—to talk about?”

“I want to show you—you, not him—something I found stuck or caught in the widow with the slit screen late this afternoon. He didn’t climb a ladder to look at your window from the outside so I did.”

“Which means now your footprints are probably where you said they weren’t!”

“We’re both starting to think like him, aren’t we?”

“But what did you find?” she asked, following him around the corner of the barn, not that she wanted to feel even more alone with him, but she understood about Marlena. If she had a little girl like that, especially if she was rearing her alone, she’d be so overprotective that she’d be as uptight as Ella.

He went to his buggy, not the two-seat courting one Hannah was picturing. Of course he’d have a family-size one now. He put Marlena on the front seat, where she sat primly, while he reached in past her and brought out what looked to be a big chicken feather, until Hannah noted its strange black-brown markings in the light from the open barn doors.

“That was stuck in my bedroom window?”

He nodded. “So you couldn’t see it from inside, or almost from outside, either. Wedged lengthwise with the side of the quill and the outer edge of the feather holding it.”

“So, wedged there carefully, intentionally, by someone who managed to open the window itself at least a crack.”

“I’d say so. You can see I damaged it a little, pulling it out. If I wouldn’t have been nearly on top of it, I never would have seen it, either.”

“It’s a big one. From …”

“From an eagle, I think. A wing pinion.”

“An eagle? Like the American bald eagle?” she said, picturing the eagle with arrows in its talons on Linc’s FBI badge.

“I think they’re endangered and government-protected. But that kind of eagle is also sacred to Native Americans. I heard the eagle and the panther were special animals to the historic Indian tribe that once lived around here.”

Her good hand on her hip, she demanded, “Indian tribe? From long ago? You heard that where?”