Fall From Pride. Karen Harper

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СКАЧАТЬ carrying the two injured firefighters—Levi Miller, Amish, and Mike Getz, Englische—to the regional hospital had pulled away. Both had been struck by debris when a flaming beam fell and temporarily trapped them before they were rescued. Word was that, despite broken bones, both were expected to recover just fine.

      Jacob had been asked to go, but other than that, no one had left. It was as if the circle of Home Valley neighbors were mourning a mutual, fallen friend. Since the Amish held worship services in their homes or barns every other week, and it was an off Sunday, many had buggied in. Others had arrived, including Ray-Lynn Logan. The owner of the Dutch Farm Table Restaurant in Homestead had parked next to the sheriff’s car and was handing out doughnuts and coffee. Ray-Lynn was Sarah’s friend and an outspoken admirer of her painting skills.

      Sarah was exhausted and filthy, but to please her devastated hosts, she sat at the Eshes’ kitchen table to eat. Mattie Esh and her two oldest daughters, Ida and Ruth, both married and living nearby, were turning out scrambled eggs and bacon to be washed down by hot chocolate. Sarah had been thanked repeatedly for spotting the flames and for rushing here to warn the family. But she still felt as if someone had died, not only the old barn, but the painted square that had meant so much to her.

      “Still can’t figure a cause,” Bishop Esh muttered to his wife. “No kerosene lantern out there, no green hay to smolder in the bays or loft, no lightning storm, and at night.”

      “God’s will,” Mattie told him, tears in her eyes. “We may not understand His ways but must learn to accept.”

      “So who’s the preacher now?” her husband said, his voice tired but kind. “We’ll rebuild, Lord willing.”

      Sarah offered to help clear the table, but they wouldn’t hear of it, so she went outside again. She wanted to head home to wash up and relieve Martha from taking care of their grandmother, but she just couldn’t leave yet. If—when—the Eshes rebuilt, would they want another painted square? It had gone a long way that the bishop had let her put one on his barn, even though it was fairly small at first. What was worrying her most was that some of Gabe’s friends at the danze last night had been smoking around her family’s barn. It was a fair distance across the field, so surely none of them had sneaked over here to get more privacy for their doings, then carelessly thrown a butt or match down. The Amish never locked their barns, even if, in these modern times, some had begun to lock their homes.

      From the back of her van’s tailgate, Ray-Lynn, still handing out coffee in paper cups, motioned Sarah over. The Kauffman women, Sarah’s mamm and married sister, Lizzie, made the half-moon pies for Ray-Lynn’s restaurant, and Sarah delivered them fresh daily in her buggy. Like most everyone else around, she loved to talk to Ray-Lynn. Even in the grief of this morning, she was like a spark of sunlight.

      The shapely redhead was about to turn fifty, a widow whose dream had always been to have her own good homecookin’ restaurant in Cleveland—that is, before she’d fallen in love with Amish country. Her husband had suffered a drop-dead heart attack six years ago, just before they were to buy the restaurant, once owned by an Amish family who couldn’t keep up with the state’s increasingly strict health inspection codes.

      But newspaper owner and editor, Peter Clawson, had gone in as Ray-Lynn’s partner, and she had made a real go of it, expanding to three rooms and a big menu. The Dutch Farm Table was the most popular place to eat and meet in town for both the local English and Amish, and, of course, tourists. They used to come by the busload, though they’d been in shorter supply lately in the far-reaching American recession.

      “Good for you to spot that fire, Sarah,” Ray-Lynn said, and gave her a one-armed hug. “Gonna get your name in the paper again.”

      “It didn’t save the barn. Maybe you can tell Mr. Clawson not to overdo it, especially so soon after that article about my barn quilt squares.”

      “It may be a biweekly paper, but he’s putting out a special edition over this. I’ll bet we get folks here to gawk at the burned barn, let alone your other paintings. And if the Cleveland or Columbus papers pick this up, especially if it turns out to be foul play—”

      “Foul play? Did you hear that someone set the fire?”

      “The sheriff just wants all the bases covered, so he called the state fire marshal’s office,” she said with a roll of her snappy brown eyes. “But barn burning’s not the way we’d like to get buyers and spenders ’round here, is it? Personally, this painting,” she went on, pointing at the patch of empty sky where Sarah’s quilt square used to be, “was my favorite so far. Hi, ya’ll,” she called to someone behind Sarah as she gestured them over. “Coffee here, doughnuts all gone.”

      Though Ray-Lynn had lived in Cleveland with her husband for years, it was no secret she’d been born and bred in the deep South, so she drew her words out a lot more than most moderns did. She even had a sign in the restaurant over the front door that Sarah had painted. It read Southern Hospitality and Amish Cooking—Ya’ll Come Back, Danki. And she was always trying to talk Sarah into painting a huge mural of Amish life on the side wall.

      Secretly, Sarah yearned to paint not static quilt patterns but the beauty of quilts flapping on a clothesline, huge horses pulling plows in spring fields, rows of black buggies at church, one-room schoolhouses with the kinder playing red rover or eckball out back, weddings and barn raisings….

      But all that was verboten. No matter what Ray-Lynn urged, Sarah knew an Amish painter could never be an Amish artist.

      The moment he turned off the highway onto the narrow, two-lane road at the sign Homestead: 4 Miles, Nate MacKenzie felt as if he’d entered a beautiful but alien world. Another road sign bore the silhouette of an Amish buggy, so he cut his speed way down. Farmers plowing or planting in the fields used four-horse hitches and all wore black pants, blue shirts and broad-brimmed straw hats. Here and there, little boys dressed the same way as their elders, and girls in long dresses and white aprons fed goats or played some kind of beanbag game barefoot. Clothes flapped on lines and no electrical or phone wires existed around the neatly kept houses, which all boasted large vegetable gardens. Though the roads were nearly empty, he passed one black buggy and saw many others sitting beside barn doors or in backyards. The fields, even the woodlots in this broad valley, seemed well tended, almost as if he had driven his big vehicle into a painting of the past.

      He noted a beautiful painted square, of what he wasn’t quite sure, on one old barn. Despite his need to get to his destination—“Two miles on Orchard Road, then turn left onto Fish Creek Road,” his sweet-voiced GPS recited—he slowed and craned his neck to look at the painting. The design was amazingly modern, yet he figured it was something old-fashioned. Not a hex sign, for sure. A quilt? Maybe they sold quilts at that old farmhouse.

      He turned his eyes back to the road and tried to shake off his exhaustion. He’d felt burned out from too much work lately, but he’d managed about five hours’ sleep before Mark called, enough to keep him going. He thrived on adrenaline, one reason he loved this job, though this case could be a bit of a challenge with the unusual culture and all.

      At age thirty, Nate MacKenzie was the youngest of the state’s twenty-one arson investigators. Though he’d told no one but his foster mother, his goal was to work his way up to become a district supervisor and then chief. He had both law enforcement and fire training. He saw himself as a detective who dealt with the remnants of a crime, the clues hidden in the rubble and ruins. After the tragedy that had happened to his family, his career was his calling, his only real passion.

      He passed a one-room schoolhouse with a set of swings and a dirt baseball diamond. Man, it reminded him of something from the old show Little House on the Prairie. But surely a group СКАЧАТЬ