In the Land of Milk and Honey (20 page)

“You know . . .” he began slowly. “Bein' there made me realize all over again that I could never go back. I'm not . . . Maybe I never was that person. But I couldn't even fake it now.”

I listened, rubbing my thumb over his strong hand.

“I don't want that,” he said firmly, shaking his head. “And . . . and I truly am in love with you, Elizabeth Harris. I was proud of you today.”

His words were warm, and they brought a lump to my throat. I looked out at the countryside as we drove, determined not to
reveal myself as a total sap. I could be a hard-ass when I needed to be. But Ezra Beiler? He could push every single one of my schmaltzy, puppies-and-kittens buttons.

“Maybe you'd be better off with some fancy doctor like that Glen guy, but, the truth is, I'm too selfish to let you go,” Ezra added roughly. “That is, if you still wanna stay.”

“Oh, babe, I don't want him or anyone else. You're all I want.”

He smiled sweetly. “Then I'm a lucky man. And it's time I acted like it.”

“I know I've been at work all hours with this case, and I haven't been there for you—”

“Stop.” Ezra shot me a stern look as he drove. “I'd be a selfish fool to expect you to be home with me at six o'clock when you're helping so many other people with your work.”

“It's not always like this,” I reminded him.

“I know that. And when you're needed, you're needed. The least I can do is take care of things at home and provide whatever support to you I can.”

I sniffled and wiped at my wet lashes. Damn hormones. Damn mascara. “I know that's not the type of woman you grew up with. And it has to be hard for you to accept me being away from home all hours. But I love you so much.”

He abruptly pulled the car off onto a wide dirt shoulder that bordered a cornfield, turned to me, and took both my hands in his.

“If I'd wanted that kind of wife, I could have stayed with the Amish.”

I nodded as if I knew that, but, honestly, I needed to hear those words from him today. I gave him a smile.

He looked down as if self-conscious. “Listen, what's been wrong with me lately is about me, not you. I was cut off from everythin' I knew, and you were all I had. That's too much burden to put on any one person.”

“But I want to be there for you.”

“You are there for me.” He squeezed my hands gently. “But nobody can find a man's happiness but the man himself. I learned that from Mary.”

I swallowed and nodded.

“Just be patient with me. I'm taking steps. . . . I found a group of ex-Amish, and it's been real good to have someone to talk to about things.”

“You have?” I asked, surprised.

“Yes. As soon as you find this killer, I'd like to take you to one of the meetings with me. I'd be glad for you to meet them.”

“I'd like that.”

“And . . . one of the ex-Amish, Jacob, he and his girlfriend go to this small church. Lutheran. I might try it out. I'm not so sure about God and me, but I feel like I need to make peace with
that too, one way or the other.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

Ezra raised an eyebrow, a sparkle coming into his eyes. “You can't agree with me on everythin', Elizabeth. Makes me suspicious. I know your ornery nature.”

I laughed. “I'm sure I can find something I disagree with. Just keep talking.”

He grunted and released my hands, slipped his arms around my waist—rather awkwardly given the seatbelt. I leaned into him and he placed a kiss on my hair. “I meant what I said. I'm real proud of you. You sacrifice yourself to help other people. You're like . . . like a guardian angel, I guess.”

I snorted. “Okay,
that
I disagree with. I'm no angel.”

He rubbed my back. “Good works through you though. That's all I need to know.”

Good works through you
. God, there went those damn hormones. I couldn't love this man any more than I did at that moment. And I had a few hours before I had to report in at the office. Lucky me.

“Let's go home,” I said, kissing his neck. “I've missed you so much. I want to hold you for a while, Mr. Beiler.”

He gave me a last squeeze before pulling away. “Time to break a few speed limits, then.”

I had no
objections.

The watcher wanted to flip off the Amish man who drove toward him in a buggy and stared at him. Instead he dredged up a wide-eyed smile and a wave, hoping to pass as a clueless tourist. The buggy went by, and the watcher observed it through his rearview mirror until it was well past him. He slowed down on the country road, scanning the farms to his right.

He was getting pissed off. It was Tuesday afternoon and the second day he'd wasted
hours
driving around the back roads of Lancaster County. Yesterday he'd tried south, around Quarryville. Today he'd gone in the opposite direction and was now up north near Denver. He still wasn't having any luck.

It was easy enough to tell which farms were Amish. Most of them had clothes hanging out on a line. Some had windmills or buggies parked outside. And unless the weather was shitty, there
were usually people hanging around, especially kids. But something had changed. Some paranoia had poured through the community like red paint, making his life much more difficult.

They were watching
.

Before, it had always seemed to him that they ignored the cars that passed by, belonging, as they did, to outsiders. They ignored the cars and they ignored the drivers, dismissing his relevance from their reality. That had always annoyed him, as if he wasn't good enough to be acknowledged. But he knew it was stupid to be annoyed. Why should the fox complain if the chickens chose to pretend it wasn't there?

The problem was, they weren't doing that anymore. As his '04 Corolla cruised past farms, people stopped what they were doing and watched him go by, as if they were making sure he drove on and was gone. And that wasn't all.

Yesterday he'd seen three Amish kids in the yard of a farmhouse and a lone cow in the pasture. He'd noted the address and had driven back there at sunset. He'd parked down the road a ways to watch. For the first time, he felt nervous and exposed parking on the side of the road, even though he had a cover story about being lost (map on the passenger seat) if anyone approached him. He trained binoculars on the house. His mother had gotten the cheap pair for him for his twelfth birthday. At the time, he'd made up a story about wanting to learn bird calls, but the truth was, he'd been hoping to see the woman who lived next door naked.

Through the somewhat fuzzy lenses he watched a man and
boy come out of the house and walk to the barn. The boy was carrying a lidded bucket, obviously for the milking. The watcher leaned forward with interest. He was astonished to see them reach the barn door and the man fiddle around with . . .
a lock.

There was a large padlock on the barn door. The man opened it with a key and went into the barn with the boy.

Fucking hell. He'd never seen the Amish lock up anything. Was this a one-off? Maybe the farmer kept something valuable in the barn. But the watcher didn't like it. In the gathering gloom of dusk, he shoved his car into gear and drove by a few other farms with dairy cows he'd noticed previously that day, slowing down to train the binoculars on the barns. Locks. He saw more locks.

Feeling a surge of rage, he slammed on the accelerator and peeled away, heading back toward Route 23 and Lancaster. He was
done
.

As he drove he slowly calmed down. He didn't get angry often. Bullshit emotions. He was above all that.
Don't get mad, get even
. That's what the strong did, right? Like Ragnar on
Vikings
. Calmly take it all in without saying jack shit. Then, when it's time to act, have no mercy. But today had been surprising, and it fucked with his head.

The more he thought about it though, the more he figured maybe it wasn't such a bad thing.

The Amish were afraid. That made him smile. He was having an impact. That's what he'd wanted, wasn't it?

But if they were watching out for strangers, locking up
their barns, that meant they were on the lookout for a person, not a plant. And if they'd figured that out, the police probably had too.

Or maybe not. The Amish didn't necessarily listen to the police, much less tell them their business.

And maybe it was time he upped his game anyway. He was clever, wasn't he? If they thought he couldn't get past a padlock or two, they were dumber than a pig running after a bacon truck. He just had to figure out how to adapt his strategy. And when he did, the scythe would fall.

—

Two days after I'd met with the Amish congregation, Grady and I agreed on the final details of a plan. He insisted we run it by Lumbaker, the chief of police, just to get “an objective opinion.” But really, I figured, it was to cover our asses. I was not averse to getting Lumbaker's input. I needed all the professional objectivity I could find. And when Lumbaker agreed to what I outlined, I was almost sorry.

Good works through you
.

I hoped to God Ezra was right and that my existence on this planet wasn't about to become a liability for a family I cared about very much. I tried not to second-guess myself. I knew the plan made sense. But it was one thing in theory—another thing entirely face-to-face.

Grady went with me to the Yoders' home, and we were soon seated at the kitchen table. There we sat: tough guy Grady, me,
and a middle-aged Amish couple: Hannah and Isaac Yoder. It was like a gathering of mismatched odds and ends, certainly no one's idea of a dream crime-fighting team. I turned down Hannah's offer of coffee. My stomach was a mess already.

Grady nodded at me, and I laid out my plan, trying to keep my voice steady and reasonable.

“So . . . you want us to lure the killer here?” Isaac summed up. He spoke slowly, as if he doubted he'd heard me right.

My hands gripped each other in my lap. “I hate to ask it of you. I realize it sounds desperate, but I guess we are. We need a way to
find
him. The area's too big; there are too many farms. We need to be able to guess where he's going to strike next. I thought of you because I know you're strong and reliable, both of you. And I hope there's some trust between us.”

I was going to go on, to repeat our reassurances for their safety, but Hannah spoke up, her voice firm. “Of course. Please let us help. None of us will feel safe as long as he's out there.”

Isaac nodded. “We must help. I wanna see you catch this man once and for all. He should face the consequences of his actions. We'll do whatever you say.”

I breathed a shaky exhalation of relief and gratitude. There was a lump in my throat. “Thank you.”

“If the good Lord can use us to s
top this, who are we to say no?” Isaac asked.

Amen to that. Only, for God's sake, let nothing go wrong.

“
Yo, James! Where are you, Mars? I said, what're ya doing this weekend?” James Westley's roommate, Billy, waved a hand in front of James's face. He'd been sitting at his desk in their dorm room, so lost in thought that he hadn't even heard Billy come in.

“Sorry,” James muttered. “Studying, I guess. Laundry.”

“Dude! Way to live on the edge. You gotta slow down. That fast lane'll kill ya.”

“LOL,” James said flatly. He smoothed the pages of the textbook under his hand. He had to read three chapters by tomorrow, but he couldn't focus.

Billy snorted. “What's up? Something's been bugging you for the past few days.”

If even Billy noticed, it was pretty damn obvious. Billy's attention was usually reserved for things that wore pink panties or had a head of foam. James had tried to put his fears in the back of his mind, but they kept floating up like a piece of shit in a toilet. James had lied to that hot female detective, Harris. The thing is, James wasn't a rat. He
really
wasn't a rat.

In his sophomore year of high school, he'd hung around with a group of guys who liked to party. They'd smoked in the third floor boy's bathroom at school. The teachers could never catch them at it because they would stand in a circle and pass around one cigarette. The minute a teacher walked into the bathroom, whoever had the butt would toss it in a toilet. And then they'd all lie their asses off. It was the sort of thing where you had to be caught with the ciggy in your hand to get written up.

Well, one day, James had the cigarette, and he was telling a story and he got distracted. So did his friends. The next thing he knew, he had the butt between two fingers and was staring right into the face of a teacher. Busted.

The asshole principal had offered James a choice: provide a list of all of the boys he'd seen smoking in the bathroom or take ten days detention with no ability to make up his work. James had taken the detention, and he'd been a hero for it with his friends.

James Westley didn't rat.

People are dead. Children.

It wasn't his business anyway. He was in college now. And probably what he knew had no relevance to anything. He
didn't
know the killer. He couldn't. The person he knew would never do that. It was a coincidence. Just because he'd discussed that paper with someone back in high school didn't mean they had anything to do with the deaths in Lancaster. He'd just cause a lot of grief for an old friend. Well, not a friend exactly, but . . .

Someone
did it. Probably someone no one would suspect.

“Earth to James!” Billy yelled.

“Huh?”

“I asked if you wanted to go to karaoke night at the Shandygaff on Wednesday. A bunch of us are going.”

“I dunno. Maybe. Hey, can I ask you something?”

Billy sat down on his bed, giving James a curious look. “Sure. What is it?”

James heaved a sigh and scooted around in his chair. “Okay, so let's say hypothetically there's this guy. . . .”

O
n Friday, the eighth of May, almost seven weeks after the death of Will Hershberger, a Harrisburg news crew broadcast a special segment from Lancaster Central Park. The reporter, Juliet Lindsay, interviewed a serious-looking Amish man on camera.

“Hi, can you tell us your name?”

“I'm Isaac Yoder.”

“Are you a dairy farmer, Mr. Yoder?”

“I farm lots of things, but I do have a half dozen cows we milk, 'tis so.”

“And how has this milk crisis been affecting you?”

“I sell to a dairy, and the dairy stopped takin' my milk. They say their customers are afraid of Amish milk, even though they pasteurize it.”

“I'm sure that's having a real impact.” Juliet, her blonde hair neatly sprayed into a bob, nodded sympathetically.

“There's nothin' wrong with the milk.” Yoder shook his head grimly. “I've got ten children at home, and we're all drinkin' it right from the cow. There's nothin' healthier for youse. And what we don't drink, I bring here to the protest now that I can't sell it.”

“What kind of impact have these tragic deaths—particularly the Kinderman family and the Troyers—had on the Amish community?”

Yoder wiped his face wearily. “We have terrible sorrow over these deaths, especially the children. We pray for God's mercy that no more will have to go through such things.”

Juliet awkwardly patted Yoder's arm. “Me too, sir, me too. Do you live close to any of the farms that were affected?”

Yoder shook his head. “Not at all. People don't realize how big an area this is. I live on Harvest Drive in Paradise. My neighbors are all Amish, and they haven't had any trouble either, thank the good Lord.”

“Thank you for speaking to us, Mr. Yoder. I wish you the best.”

“You're welcome. God bless.”

—

T
here wasn't good cover across from the farm, only an open cornfield, its green stalks still too low to hide more than a small dog. The watcher cut the engine on his car and rolled it to a stop on the shoulder just far enough down the road that he could still study the farm without drawing their attention.

He got out and pretended to fiddle with his phone. It was a sunny day in May, and it grew warm in the late afternoon, which sucked since he was wearing his black hoodie. It was too warm already, and his scalp grew increasingly hot and itchy, but he kept the hood up just in case. Only a loser couldn't suck it up when he had to. The watcher sat on the front of his car pretend-texting with his phone in case anyone passed. He watched the farm from under his hood.

The Amish guy who owned the farm, Yoder, had been on the news yesterday. It was almost too good to be true. Maybe it
was
too good to be true, but he had to at least check it out. You saw an opportunity, you grabbed it. That didn't mean you had to be stupid about it. He wasn't moving in until he was sure it was safe.

But Amish didn't lie, right? And they didn't pull ambushes. He was pretty sure Yoder was exactly what he appeared to be. It made sense that the guy was going to talk about how safe his milk was—he sold the shit. He had to look like he trusted his own product, right? That's probably why his family was still drinking it, and why he'd agreed to be interviewed on TV. Money talks, even to the Amish.

Ten kids.
That meant a body count of at least twelve, maybe more if they had gran or gramps living with them.

The farmer, his wife, and his cookie-cutter offspring came and went from the house to the barn and fields. They were like ants on a hill from where he was sitting. A little girl of about seven skipped around with a basket in her hands, her feet bare. She was pretty with dark brown hair. He watched her until her mother opened the door and yelled something. The little Amish girl ran inside.

Oh, the watcher wanted this one. He wanted it bad. But he felt uneasy. He couldn't stop looking behind himself, down the road and across the fields, half expecting to be approached by the police or even just neighbors.

Hold it together. Don't be a candyass
.

There was nothing illegal about stopping on the side of the road. He had a story ready about a call from a sick family member. He'd say he didn't want to drive while he was upset, so he was waiting for a call back. That was what a good citizen would do, right? That was fucking responsible.