Kansas Troubles (20 page)

“Probably.”

“Well, I’d better get going.” We said our goodbyes, and I stopped briefly at McDonald’s to use the phone to call Fannie, the owner of the fabric store in Miller. She said she’d send her daughter down to Hannah’s farm to let her know I’d be there in the next couple of hours. I drove into Wichita and dropped Daddy’s hat off at Shepler’s, promising the young man in the hat department my everlasting gratitude and a twenty-dollar tip if he could manage to clean, steam, and shape it into a semblance of its former glory. Then, pulling out my map, I decided to take backroads to Miller and enjoy some rural Kansas scenery.

To keep my mind from wandering back to last night’s scene between Gabe and me, which I definitely wasn’t ready to deal with yet, I turned my thoughts to Tyler and the strange group of people who surrounded her. Who was she? Gentle, torn ex-Amish woman who just wanted to use her musical gift? Or cold, ambitious artist who would do anything, including sleeping with someone else’s husband, to make it to the top? Both? Neither? Somewhere in between? As miles of fields full of stubby wheat stalks rolled by, I listed in my mind the people who could possibly want Tyler dead and why. Lawrence and their mysterious relationship; his daughter, Megan, and their rivalry for Rob; Rob himself, though I couldn’t imagine why. Then there was Tyler’s husband, John, who couldn’t remarry and have children while she was alive, and Hannah’s husband, Eli, for who knows what reason—maybe for putting Hannah at risk of being shunned, too? The Amish were longshots because of their passive beliefs, but deep down I had to agree with Dewey; being human made them as capable of murder as anyone else. Then there was Cordie June, who I could very easily see murdering anyone who got in her way on the road to stardom. And of course Janet, because of jealousy. More crimes are committed because of that complex emotion than for any other reason, Gabe once told me. I thought about myself and what I’d do if I caught some woman with Gabe. Then, though I fought it, my thoughts turned to what Gabe had said about my always comparing him to Jack. To be truthful, I didn’t really understand it on an emotional level, though intellectually I could see his point. He’d been divorced so long, I never even thought about his ex-wife, Lydia, who lived in L.A. and was some kind of high-powered corporate attorney. Maybe I’d understand his feelings a little better if I were faced with seeing her or being reminded of her every day. Driving past the neat Amish farms outside Miller, I wondered if the life of these plain people, so structured but also so predictable, might be an easier, less stressful way to live.

In Miller, Fannie’s Fabrics and Notions was a separate, wooden clapboard building in front of what appeared to be a private home. As with most of the buildings in Miller, there was a long rail in front for her Amish customers’ buggies. A set of cheerful sleigh bells attached to the front door announced my arrival. The room was empty, so I wandered around, looking at the bolts of colorful fabric and at the products that told me this wasn’t your ordinary chain fabric store. Hats of yellowish straw and black felt with flat crowns and wide brims, lined the high shelves in sizes to fit every Amish gentleman from age two to ninety-two. In the back, there were plastic bins containing packages of women’s white cotton underwear, men’s plain cotton handkerchiefs, books of stories for children that could have been written in the nineteenth century, and thin blue books titled
Favorite Songs and Hymns.
I picked up a hymn book and leafed through it. Many of them were old hymns I’d grown up singing at First Baptist in San Celina—“The Lily of the Valley,” “When We All Get to Heaven,” “Up From the Grave He Arose.”

“That’s the wilder music used for Sunday night singing,” a voice said behind me. I turned and faced a heavyset woman in a pink calico dress. Her gray hair hung in a long thick braid down her back, reminding me of Dove. “That’s when the Amish young people do their courting. They sing the songs in German first, then in English. You must be Benni. I’m Fannie.”

“That’s me,” I said, smiling. “So what do they do after they sing?”

She gave a high little laugh, her shiny round cheeks bringing to mind one of the munchkins in the
Wizard of Oz.
“What all red-blooded teenagers do everywhere. They pair up, and the boys take the girls home in their buggies, racing each other, showing off and hoping to sneak in a little kissing before they reach the girl’s farm.”

“That’s hard to picture,” I said. “They all look so innocent.”

“Oh, the Amish aren’t any different from anyone else in that respect,” she said. “There’s been more than one
Hochzüt
that’s been
wenn’s pressiert
, believe you me.” She spoke the German-sounding words with ease.

“What?”

She lowered her voice. “
Wenn’s pressiert
. When the wedding is urgent because a little one is expected.”

“Hanky-panky among the Amish?” I said, surprised.

“Well, you have to say this for them. They never have any illegitimate children. If an Amish boy gets an Amish girl pregnant, there is no argument about what he has to do. We English should be so responsible.”

“English?” I asked.

“It’s what the Amish call anyone not of their faith,” she replied.

“You know a lot about the Amish.”

“My grandmother was plain. She married outside the church, though, and that’s why I’m Mennonite today. You’ll find many of the old families around here have Amish in their background. I sent Esther, my granddaughter, to let Hannah know you were coming, and Hannah said she’d be by about twelve-thirty, right after she prepared Eli’s dinner. Is that okay?”

I glanced at my watch. It was eleven-thirty now, and I was beginning to feel hungry. “That’s great. Is there somewhere I can get some lunch?”

“Miller Cafe up on the highway is good and cheap.” She gave her jolly little laugh again. “And the only place in town to eat.”

“Sounds perfect,” I said and started to walk out. Then I remembered something. “Excuse me, but may I ask you a question?”

Her eyes widened with curiosity. “Certainly.”

“Did Hannah tell you she gave me her sister’s bank book?”

Fannie’s face grew serious. “Yes, she did. What did you do with it?”

“I gave it to my husband, like she asked. But he had to give it to the police in charge of the investigation.”

“We assumed that is what would happen. But Hannah didn’t want the money, so maybe it is best.”

“Well, I just have a question about it—about her sister. When exactly did she give it to you?”

Fannie sighed. “Two days before she was killed.”

“How was she acting?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did she act like she was, for example, afraid or maybe anxious about something?”

Fannie rested her chubby elbows on the wooden counter. “I didn’t talk with her long. I was very busy that day. My grandchildren were visiting, and it was crowded here in the store. She just pulled me aside and asked me to hold onto the envelope until she came back for it, and to give it to Hannah if anything happened to her. She seemed fine. A little tired maybe. A little sad. But she seemed that way every time I saw her, as seldom as that was, and I just assumed it was because of the type of life she led. I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re looking for.”

“It’s all right. I don’t really know either.”

At the busy cafe, I sat in a back booth and watched the young Amish waitresses serve customers who appeared to be mostly truckdrivers whose route passed Miller, or local farmers. The girls were all dressed identically in below-the-knee pastel dresses with oversized puffed sleeves. They looked so fresh and untouched, I could well imagine the appeal they must hold for men. I assumed this was the cafe where Tyler once worked. In the background Sammy Kershaw eulogized in song the queen of his doublewide trailer with her cheating black heart and pretty red neck. The laughing, innocent faces of the Amish girls didn’t seem to comprehend what he was singing about. But then again, who knows what dwells in the heart of another person?

I dug enthusiastically into the special of the day—chicken and dumplings. The meat was white and tender, the gravy smooth and buttery-tasting, the dumplings light with just a hint of doughiness inside. It was the first completely relaxed meal I’d had since leaving California. I lingered over my blackberry cobbler and flipped through the book I’d just purchased about the Amish, reading paragraphs here and there and studying the pictures. Then I got serious and looked up “shunning” in the index. Apparently there were many behaviors that could bring on the community’s complete rejection of one of their members: adultery, being a drunkard, blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, disobeying some prescript of the
Ordnung
, the unspoken rules of the local congregation. But the most deplorable of all, as Becky told me, was leaving the church after being baptized into it. Maybe it wasn’t as predictable and easy a way to live as it appeared. Not if you were at all different.

A black buggy I assumed to be Hannah’s was parked in front of Fannie’s Fabrics when I came back. Inside the store bolts of fabric were already laid out on the cutting table.

“Benni!” Hannah said, her voice warm and delighted. “I was so happy when Fannie told me you were coming. Come and see what I’ve picked out.”

We settled finally on a Hole in the Barn Door pattern, one that had been a favorite of mine since I was a little girl. I chose navy blue and maroon with a pine-green border, leaving the quilting pattern to Hannah’s discretion. I insisted on paying for the fabric and giving her a hundred-dollar cash deposit.

We stood outside discussing stitching patterns while I petted her horse, a brown Standardbred with a mischievous glint in its eyes. She told me about a unique pattern her great-grandmother designed when she first came to Kansas at the turn of the century. In response to her new surroundings, she’d incorporated tiny sunflowers into a traditional feather-spray stitching.

“It doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever seen,” I said.

“Would you like to come out to the farm and trace it?” she asked. “And you are more than welcome to share it with your friends.”

“That would be wonderful. The quilters at the co-op are always looking for new patterns.”

“Then you must come.” She turned to Fannie. “Perhaps to save time, Esther could drive the buggy back, and I could go with Benni in her car.”

Fannie nodded. “Esther loves driving your buggy.” “Are you allowed to ride in my car?” I asked, a bit taken back, though I remembered the Amish man, whom I was assuming was John at this point, leaving in a car the night he argued with Tyler.

Hannah and Fannie exchanged amused looks. “We can ride in cars,” Hannah said. “We just can’t own them.”

“Oh,” I said, not saying what I thought and hoping it didn’t show on my face. That seemed awfully convenient to me.

“We don’t have anything against cars, Benni,” she said in her soft voice. “We just feel that owning them would make it too easy to go out into the world and be influenced by other, more harmful things.”

“I see,” I said, embarrassed as always at my inability to hide my feelings. When I started the car, the radio blasted Dwight Yoakam wailing he was a thousand miles from nowhere. He’d obviously visited Miller. I switched the radio off quickly, afraid that listening to it was somehow against Hannah’s beliefs or that it might remind her of Tyler.

She briefly touched a thin, work-roughened hand to my arm. “It’s your car, Benni. You can play whatever you please on the radio.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, but kept the radio off anyway.

In front of the house, Emma and Ruthie were having a tea party under the solid shade of a small willow tree. Inside, Hannah directed me to the living room while she went upstairs to find the pattern. Next to a large rectangular window she had set up a small quilting frame where she was working on a mulberry, tobacco-brown, and cream Tree of Life baby quilt, a pattern I knew from my reading was not common among traditional Amish except where they’d been influenced by outside sources, as the Midwestern Amish were. On the table next to her chair sat a twig basket full of pieced quilt squares. I picked them up and saw some picture postcards at the bottom of the basket. Their edges were soft, as if they had been handled often. I took one out and immediately recognized the white marble Arkansas state capitol. I hadn’t seen it since I was a child and traveled on Amtrak cross country with Dove to visit her only sister in Sugartree, Arkansas, about fifty miles north of Little Rock. There were three other cards—one of Little Rock’s famous rose gardens, one of Murray Dam, and one of the Old State House. Being human (and Dove’s granddaughter) I turned them over to read the message and see who they were from. They were addressed to H.S. in care of Fannie’s Fabrics, Miller, Kansas. No message. I peered closely at the blurry postmarks. Little Rock, Arkansas. The dates ranged from July 2 to December 17 of last year. I had a good hunch that the cards were probably from Tyler communicating with her sister in a way that wouldn’t get Hannah in trouble. What in the world was Tyler doing in Little Rock for six months? Did it have anything to do with all that money? I struggled to remember the date the account was opened, but it hadn’t been important enough at the time for me to make a note of it.

Behind me, a gruff voice said, “Is Hannah home?”

I guiltily shoved the postcards under the quilt squares in my lap and faced the unfriendly voice. John Stoltzfus stared at me from the doorway to the kitchen, his long face creased and somber.

“She’s upstairs getting some quilt patterns for me to trace,” I said as I set the quilt squares and postcards back in the basket. “We met before. I’m Benni Harper.”

He nodded and held up a paper bag. “My sister sends some plums. Tell Hannah I will put them in the kitchen and be out in the barn with Eli.”

“Okay,” I said. He turned abruptly, and a moment later I heard the back door slam.