Finding Mercy. Karen Harper

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      “So, where is the man you were with?” she asked, evidently as an afterthought as she squinted up the hill into the sun. “He seems to have disappeared, but if he’s your cousin, I’d like to thank him in person.”

      As if she expected no answer to that, Connie Lee headed for her sleek car, which still had its motor running. She got back in, slammed the door, backed up and drove down the lane.

      And the woman was right. Andrew was nowhere in sight on the brow of the hill. Wasn’t he overdoing hiding himself? He was only Cousin Andrew now, not whoever he really was. At least since he’d seemed eager to lend advice about organizing her business, he’d probably be happy to hear there would be a new demand—an expanding market—for her lavender.

      She headed toward her house. Surely, with his sprained ankle, he hadn’t hiked higher up the hill. He’d no doubt reappear when he saw the stranger was gone. She got the hand sickle, which she kept good and sharp, picked up a big basket and started back outside, still thinking about Connie Lee, her husband with the strange name of Chang and injured son, Sam. Was that really Samuel, a good biblical name? And in Connie Lee’s world, was that little gun just what this sharp blade was to Ella, a part of her she didn’t even think as a weapon? Because, in Amish country, what could she be afraid of?

      Ella startled and almost cut herself when she glimpsed a man standing right outside her kitchen window. Oh—Andrew! But what…why?

      Ella hurried outside and around the corner. “Were you hiding there while she was here?” she asked him. “Did you hear anything she said?”

      “I saw she looked Chinese, like the driver who wrecked his car,” he said only, not looking at her, but staring at his feet. His crutch rested against the side of the house.

      “What is it? What about the Chin—”

      “Never mind. But look at this,” he said, pointing at the damp soil beneath her window. “I came down the hill and watched from around the corner to see what was going on and noticed footprints in the ground, pointing inward. See?”

      “Ya, well, it rained last night and a couple of days ago. Seth did me a favor and cleaned these windows outside, so that’s probably why the prints.”

      “Would he have cleaned every window? Because I’ve almost made it all the way around now and there are the same prints.”

      She went with him. He was right. And, for sure, not Seth’s prints, not those of any Amish man, she reckoned, because they were pointy toed with a distinct separate heel, like maybe cowboy boots.

      “Not Seth’s,” she said, shaking her head. “Not even Amish.”

      “And recent. Maybe made last night, with the rain and all. Let’s go see if they’re at the farmhouse too.”

      They were, around all the lower windows, which Seth had not cleaned. The hair on the back of Ella’s neck prickled. Could this be related to that huge eye she imagined on the hill?

      “What about the sheriff?” Andrew asked, his voice urgent.

      Again, she agonized, what and who was this man hiding from? Despite the fact she was sweating, she shivered. Maybe the prints had been made by someone who wasn’t used to mud, so in the dark he didn’t think about leaving a kind of calling card.

      “I—I think the sheriff just wears black shoes,” she told him. “And why would he come here and look in after being here last night?”

      “Maybe he knows there’s something fishy about me—but why your place, too, unless he thought I’d be living there and that you were still here in the farmhouse? Can you think of anyone around here who wears boots? That woman wasn’t wearing boots, was she? They could be a woman’s.”

      “Andrew, she was at her son’s bedside in a hospital last night. She says they’re moving him to the Cleveland Clinic, so—”

      “I’m sorry to involve you in my problems, and if I thought there was one moment of danger for any of you, I’d leave.”

      “And go where?” she challenged.

      Their eyes met and held as happened far too many times. Ella gripped the hand sickle hard in her hand. For one moment, she thought she should tell him about the reflection she’d seen on the hill last night, but it surely had been one of those tin pans catching wayward light. She didn’t want him to be more upset, or to think he’d have to leave.

      “Let’s tell my father about these prints, and we’ll keep an eye out,” she said, longing to comfort him. “My sister Barbara has a come-calling friend from the next farm over, so I’ll ask her when she gets home if it could be Gabe, but he must know she’s not here.”

      Ella reached out her free hand to touch his arm. The man was so tense he felt like a carved piece of wood. “Don’t fret,” she said. “Let’s just sniff some lavender, okay? It’s supposed to be as calming as it is stimulating.”

      “Sniff some lavender,” he repeated with a little shake of his head. He sighed, and his shoulders heaved as if he was trying to force himself to relax. “As for stimulating,” he told her, “I find peaceful, pacifist Amish country very stimulating.”

      His eyes took her in again. What a shift of moods. The man was teasing, almost flirting now—wasn’t he? How she wished she understood worldly ways better.

      “So tell me everything our visitor talked about,” he said as he leaned on his crutch and they started back up the hill side by side. “Did she seem to have a foreign accent?”

      “There’s something about you and the Chinese,” Ella blurted, when she’d meant to keep her own counsel.

      “Have you ever heard of the ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, Ella?”

      “No. Meaning keep my nose out of it?”

      “Truth is, I like your nose—and quick mind—but the less you know, the better.”

      “I have heard of the ‘inquiring minds want to know’ policy.”

      “You are so honest and open, and I can’t be either, not now at least. Can you trust me enough that we can still be friends—as well as boss and slave, of course.”

      She could not stop her laughter any more than she could stop wanting to be around this mysterious man. Whatever danger he was in, he was dangerous too—at least to her usually careful and controlled secret self.

      5

      RAY-LYNN STOOD WITH her sack of two turkey sandwiches, dill pickles, slaw and raspberry iced teas in the sheriff’s office, waiting for Jack to finish a phone conversation. Lately her attempts to rebuild a relationship with him seemed destined to be overhearing snatches of his conversations with others. Only this time, she knew who he was talking to.

      Standing at the back of the reception area near the short hall to his office, she’d figured out he was talking to FBI Agent Lincoln Armstrong, who had helped him solve a murder case here in town. Meanwhile, Ray-Lynn kept up sporadic chitchat with Doreen, the sheriff’s day shift phone receptionist and dispatcher. Doreen was only twenty-two and fairly new to Homestead, СКАЧАТЬ