Fall From Pride. Karen Harper

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      5

      IT WAS ARSON. BY NOON, NATE KNEW FOR SURE. He’d been interrupted more than once by curious Amish or others. Bishop Esh had said he trusted Nate’s judgment so, with two of his sons, he was planting a cornfield to the south.

      Nate had stonewalled the Cleveland reporter and her cameraman, though they still hung around by their van which read News Live at Five. He’d phoned the state fire marshal from the privacy of VERA. It was going to be an interesting case file. He hoped he wouldn’t be recalled until the area supervisor returned from his daughter’s wedding in Hawaii. He’d told Mark he had some leads already, though he hadn’t told him he was convinced that there’d be another arson. He had nothing to back that up but his instincts, and Mark was a just-the-facts guy.

      As he left VERA, Nate saw Sarah driving her buggy into the lane. His insides flip-flopped—probably, he told himself, because the reporter had asked him if he knew where Sarah was and he’d said no. He hadn’t exactly lied. She could have been anywhere on the three miles of road between here and the restaurant in Homestead.

      “How’s it going?” she asked as she reined in.

      “Arson for sure,” he told her. “I’m going to point out the evidence to the bishop when he comes back for lunch.”

      “We call it dinner,” she said, “and I’ve got it right here all packed up in my buggy. A lot more food than you moderns are used to, I bet, but we’ve all been up early working hard—you, too.”

      “If I ate like your people, I’d gain more than evidence about an arson around here.”

      “You could afford to gain some weight,” she said, then blushed. “I mean, someone who jogs and walks all over like you do, even though you drive your truck, too.”

      “VERA’s a gas hog, but I still call her my home away from home. But I’m now as much of an expert on banked, three-story barns as I am on VERA.”

      Twice he’d spent late hours online and learned that banked barns were also called German barns—no surprise there. What was banked was the slanted, hard-packed earth leading up to the broad double doors. The only other entry was in the stone-constructed lower level. Originally, that was where the barn animals had stalls, though he’d observed that the local Amish kept their horses in stalls and their buggies stored on the second level called the threshing floor. A haymow or loft was on the third level under a peaked roof with a cupola on top to aerate the barn. Windows were small and minimal but threw enough light inside, especially if the double doors were open.

      The most important thing he’d learned was that the window or windows were all on the third level. So the arsonist had to have been up in the loft or on a ladder to get lit trailers to go through a window. Sarah’s wooden ladders and scaffolding had been burned from outside the barn—but had they been used by the arsonist first?

      “So how is VERA as a home?” she was asking.

      “Cozy, maybe too cozy. I’ll show you around, and then you’ll see what I mean.”

      He didn’t say so but he found the confines of the VERA’s high-tech combination of lab/office/storage/bathroom/bedroom a little claustrophobic, especially out here in the wide-open Home Valley surrounded by rolling hills. If the weather stayed mild and dry, he planned to keep sleeping out under the stars. It brought back the best memory he had of his dad when they used to camp out in Southern Ohio down by Old Man’s Cave, before his whole childhood went up in flames.

      “By the way,” he said when their mutual staring in silence stretched out a bit too long, “you’d better stay in the house if you don’t want to be interviewed. As you can see by their vehicle, the TV folks are still here.” His BlackBerry tone sounded, and he looked down to see if it was his boss again. “I’ve got to take this,” he told her. “It’s my foster mother, and I always take her calls.”

      “Foster mother?”

      “I’ll explain sometime.”

      “I’ll head straight in with the food and come out with the Eshes when you announce the arson,” she said with a snap of her reins. “Unless someone tells the TV people who I am, they won’t notice me separate from the others at all.”

      But even as he took the call, he couldn’t help thinking that Sarah somehow stood out. Even among the Plain People, she didn’t seem plain at all.

      Everyone ate before hearing Nate’s verdict, maybe, Sarah thought, to fortify themselves for what was to come. Then, too, though no one said so, it was possible the bishop was hoping the media outside would leave them alone to hear about the autopsy of the barn fire in private. That’s what it felt like, Bishop Esh had said, an autopsy of his dead barn, with the burial and then, hopefully, the resurrection yet to come.

      At the Esh table the number of guests swelled, but then Mamm and Lizzie had sent over enough fried chicken, biscuits, gravy, applesauce, chowchow, dandelion salad, schnitz pie and rhubarb crunch to feed an entire work crew. Churchwomen were taking turns sending a noon meal to the bishop’s family for a while. The Eshes had insisted that Sarah, Nate and Mike Getz, who showed up and had just done an interview with the Cleveland TV station, join them. Also, two church elders, Reuben Schrock and Eli Hostetler, who both had Sarah’s squares painted on their barns, dropped by in time for dessert and coffee.

      Sarah saw that Nate ate like a field hand, after they’d just had that talk about his gaining weight. And she also noted that Nate watched Mike Getz like a hawk.

      “I know now it was a bad move,” Mike, a big guy with a shaved head and goatee, admitted. “I shouldn’t have rushed inside to try to pull some of the buggies out, but the barn looked like a goner and I wanted to save something.”

      He ate with his left hand since his right was in a cast. Sarah could see the clean, white plaster had writing on it already, including in pink ink, “Love Ya! Cindee” and a large heart. Mike’s head seemed to sit directly on his broad, slanted shoulders—a man with no neck, and not, she thought, a lot of sense.

      “But a broken bone’s a small price to pay,” he went on, his mouth partly full, “to help a neighbor.”

      Strictly speaking, Mike wasn’t a neighbor of the Eshes but lived much closer to Elder Reuben Schrock and his family, over on Fish Creek Road.

      “Have you rushed into other buildings on fire?” Nate asked. The entire Esh family, along with Sarah and Nate, had eaten first and it was mostly men at the table now, with Sarah and Esh daughter Naomi clearing dishes and serving more pie and coffee. Naomi was betrothed, and Sarah knew how badly she missed having her older sister Hannah here to help plan for the big event next autumn. Well, Sarah thought, maybe she and Ella could somehow convince Hannah to attend that day—if Sarah could talk Ella into building bridges with Hannah.

      “I’ve always done what I could,” Mike Getz was telling Nate. “I’ve been working with the volunteer department since I was twenty—for six years. Man, I think your job must be really fascinating, Mr. MacKenzie.”

      “It is,” Nate said, “and I’d be happy to talk to you about it. I always like to meet dedicated firefighters.”

      Mike Getz just beamed. As she stood in the doorway to the kitchen, Sarah wondered if Mike had just gone to number one on Nate’s list of suspects.

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