A Christmas to Die For (12 page)

Tyler did as he was told and the flashlight's beam picked out the gray metal circuit box, looking incongruous against a carved oak cabinet that must be at least a hundred years old.

The custodian flipped it open. "There's the problem, all right. Breaker's thrown." He clicked it, and lights came on immediately, gleaming through an open door that led into the sanctuary.

"Let's have a look inside." Tyler moved to the door. "Rachel heard someone in there."

The elderly man followed them into the sanctuary. The lights showed evergreen branches looping around the columns and flowing around the windows. Everything looked perfectly normal.

Rachel stood close to him. "I'd like to walk back through, just to be sure."

He nodded, sensing that she didn't want to say anything else within earshot of the custodian.

Halfway back along the outside wall, she stopped. "This is where I was," she murmured. "When I realized he was coming toward me. I ducked into that pew, ran along it and out the center aisle to the doors."

"He didn't follow you then?"

"I'm not sure. I was pretty panicked by then. All I wanted was to get out."

Hearing a faint tremor in her voice, he found her hand and squeezed it. "You're okay now."

She nodded, sending him a cautioning look as the custodian came toward them.

"Well, if someone was here, they're gone now." He patted Rachel's arm. "Don't like to say it, but most likely it was one of them kids. Their idea of a joke."

"I guess it could have been." Rachel sounded unconvinced. "Thanks, Mose. Do you want me to go back through and turn off the lights?"

"No, no, you folks go on. I'm going that way anyhow."

Touching Rachel's arm, Tyler guided her toward the door, still not sure what he thought of all this. That Rachel had been frightened by someone, he had no doubt. But was it anything more than that?

They walked side by side out into the chilly night and along the walk. He waited for Rachel to speak first. Their relationship was fragile at best, and he wasn't sure what he could say to make this better.

They reached the street before she spoke. She glanced at him, her face pale in the gleam of the streetlamp. "I suppose Mose could be right about the kids. Though I hate to think they'd be so mean."

He took her hand as they crossed the street toward the inn. "Kids don't always think through the results of their actions. I can remember a couple of really stupid things I did at that age."

She smiled faintly. "I suppose I can, too. Well, thank you for coming to the rescue. I hope I didn't look like too much of an idiot."

"You didn't look like an idiot at all." His fingers tightened on hers. "It was a scary experience, even if Mose is right and it was just intended as a joke. I'm just not sure—" He hesitated. Maybe he shouldn't voice the thought in his mind.

"What?" They neared the side door, and she stopped just short of the circle of illumination from the overhead light.

"I've only known you…what? A week? In that time you've been nearly electrocuted by Christmas lights and—well, call it harassed in the church."

Her face was a pale oval in the dim light. "And you've been hit on the head."

"Seems like we're both having a run of bad luck." He waited for her response.

She frowned, looking troubled. "It does seem odd. But the Christmas lights—surely no one could have done that deliberately."

"Not if they didn't have access to them. If they were safely up in your attic until the moment you brought them down to hang—"

"They weren't," she said shortly. "I brought them down the day before. I was checking on them when I realized it was time for the committee meeting."

He didn't think he liked that. "Where were they during the meeting?"

"In the downstairs rest room."

"Where someone could tamper with them," he said.

"Why would anyone do that? They're all my friends. Anyway, how could they have known I'd be the one to put them up?"

"Anyone who's been around the inn would know that."

She took a quick step away from him, into the pool of light. "I can't believe that someone I know would try to hurt me." But her voice seemed to wobble on the words.

"I'm not trying to upset you." An unexpected, and unwelcome, flood of protectiveness swept through him. "I'm just concerned."

"Thank you. But please, I don't want Grams to know anything happened. She worries about me."

"She loves you," he said quietly, prompted by some instinct he wasn't sure he understood. "That's a good thing."

She tilted her face back, a smile lifting the corners of her lips. "Most of the time," she agreed.

"All of the time." Without thinking it through, he brushed a strand of hair back from her face. It flowed through his fingers like silk.

Her eyes widened. Darkened. He heard the faint catch of her breath. Knew that his own breathing was suddenly ragged.

He took her shoulders, drawing her toward him. She came willingly, lifting her face. The faintest shadow of caution touched his mind, and he censored it. His lips found hers.

Astonishing, the flood of warmth and tenderness that went through him. The kiss was gentle, tentative, as if Rachel were asking silently, Is this right? Do we want to do this? Who are you, deep inside where it's important?

She drew back a little at last, a smile lingering on her lips. "Maybe we'd better go in."

He dropped a light kiss on her nose. "Maybe we'd better. Your grandmother will be worrying."

But he didn't want to. He wanted to stay out here in the moonlight with her as long as he could. And he didn't care to explore what that meant about the state of his feelings.

Barney trotted along Crossings Road next to Rachel, darting away from her from time to time to investigate an interesting clump of dried weeds or the trunk of a hemlock. She smiled at his enthusiasm, aware that they were coming closer to the farm with every step.

And that Tyler was there. She'd really had no intention of coming back here or seeing Tyler this afternoon. But Grams had said Rachel was driving them crazy tinkering with the Christmas decorations, and that everything was as ready as it could be for the guests who'd be arriving late this afternoon. Why didn't she take Barney for a walk and get rid of her fidgets?

The dog, apparently remembering their last excursion, had promptly led her down Crossings Road to the Hostetler farm. They reached the lane, and Barney darted ahead of her. She could see Tyler's car, pulled up next to the porch. He'd told Grams he was trying to identify the rest of the furniture today.

To say that she had mixed feelings about seeing Tyler was putting it mildly. She'd appreciated his help the previous night. He'd managed to submerge whatever doubts he had about her story and given her the help she needed.

As for what had happened—she stared absently at the clumps of dried Queen Anne's lace in what had once been a pasture.

Surely she could think about it rationally now. Little though she wanted to believe it, Mose's suggestion was the only sensible one. One or more of the teenagers, motivated by who knew what, could easily have flipped the switch to turn the lights off. Maybe they'd thought it would be funny to give her a scare in the dark.

Well, if so, she'd certainly gratified them by bolting out the way she had. She should have turned the tables on them and grabbed that person in the sanctuary.

She couldn't have. Cold seemed to settle into her. Even now, in the clear light of day with the thin winter sun on her face, she couldn't imagine reaching out toward that faceless figure.

Her steps slowed, and Barney scampered over to nose at her hand. She patted him absently.

Maybe it had been her imagination. She sincerely hoped it had been. But that sense of enmity she'd felt, there in the dark in what should have been the safest of places, had simply overpowered her. She'd reacted like any hunted animal. Run. Hide.

She forced her feet to move again. Just thinking about it was making her feel the fear again, and she wouldn't let fear control her.

Remembering what had happened afterward was disturbing in a different way. She couldn't stop the smile that curved her lips when she remembered that kiss. It had held a potential that warmed her and startled her. It certainly hadn't clarified things between them—if anything, she felt more confused.

And then what he'd suggested about the Christmas lights—well, it couldn't be, that was all. Except that his words had roused that niggling little doubt she'd felt every time she looked at the lights.

And he was right. Anyone who was there that night could have guessed she'd put them up. It would have been the work of a minute to strip the wires.

Not a surefire way of hurting her, but a quick and easy impulse.

Tyler had left someone out, though. Himself.

He'd had access to the lights, too. And he'd come here convinced that her family was guilty of something in relation to his grandfather's death.

Was he really just after the truth? Or did revenge figure in somewhere?

Ridiculous, she told herself firmly. He wasn't that sort of devious person.

But still—maybe that was all the more reason not to see Tyler alone today. She'd reached the house, but he wasn't inside. Instead she spotted him where the ground sloped up behind the barn.

For a moment she didn't know what he was doing, but then she realized. That tangle of brush and rusted fence was a small cemetery, of course. There were plenty of them, scattered throughout the township, most of them remnants of the earliest days of settlement. Some were well kept, others abandoned. This one fell into the abandoned category.

Tyler seemed totally absorbed. He hadn't noticed her. Good. She'd turn around and go back to the inn—

But before she could move, Barney spotted Tyler and plunged toward him, tail waving, letting out a series of welcoming barks. Tyler looked up and waved. Nothing for it now but to go forward.

Tyler climbed over the remnants of the low wrought-iron fence and stood, waiting for her. Barney reached him first, and Tyler welcomed him, running his hand along the dog's back and sending Barney into excited whines.

"Hi." He surveyed her, as if measuring the amount of strain on her face. "How are you doing? I wondered when I didn't see you at breakfast."

"I'm fine," she said quickly. "Just fine. Grams thought I could use a sleep-in day before the weekend guests get here, that's all."

He nodded, as if accepting that implication that she didn't want to discuss the previous night.

"How did you make out with the furniture?" she asked quickly. "Grams said you were trying to get through the list today."

"I managed to do that, but I'm not sure how far ahead it gets me. There are certainly plenty of things missing, and I can make up a list to give the chief. But there's no way of knowing when anything disappeared. My grandfather could have sold some of it himself, for all I know."

She could understand his frustration. He was finding dead ends everywhere he turned.

"So you're investigating the family cemetery, instead."

"Not so much family, as far as I can tell. Most of the people buried here seem to be Chadwicks, dating back to the 1700s."

"The land probably originally belonged to a family called Chadwick. Once it came into Amish hands, they'd have been buried in the Amish cemetery over toward Burkville."

He knelt, straightening a small stone that had been tipped over. "Miranda Chadwick. Looks as if she was only three when she died."

She squatted next to him, heart clenching, and shoved a clump of soil against the marker to hold it upright. "So many children didn't survive the first few years then. It's hardly surprising that people had big families." She touched the rough-cut cross on the marker, unaccountably hurt by the centuries-old loss. "They grieved for her."

He nodded, his face solemn, and then rose, holding out his hand to help her to her feet.

She stood, disentangling her hand quickly, afraid of what she might give away if she held on to him any longer.

He cleared his throat. "So you said the Amish are buried elsewhere?"

"The Amish have a church-district cemetery—at least, that's how it's done here. Just simple stones, most of them alike, I guess showing that even in death, everyone is equal."

"But my grandfather had left the church by the time he died." Something sharp and alert focused Tyler's gray eyes. "So where would he be buried?"

"I don't know. Maybe my grandmother—"

But Tyler was already moving purposely through the small graveyard, bending to pull the weeds away from each stone. Feeling helpless, she followed him.

Chadwicks and more Chadwicks. Surely he wasn't—

But Tyler had stopped before one stone, carefully clearing the debris from it, and she realized the marker looked newer than the others.

Why this sudden feeling of dismay? She struggled with her own emotions. It didn't really make a difference, did it, where Tyler's grandfather was buried?

She came to a stop next to him, looking at Tyler rather than the stone. His face had tightened, becoming all sharp planes and angles.

"Here it is. John Hostetler. Just his name and the dates. I guess my mother held to Amish tradition in that, at least."

She couldn't tell what he was feeling. She rested her hand lightly on his shoulder. Tension, that was all she could be sure of. She focused on the marker.

John Hostetler. As Tyler said, just date of birth. Date of death.

Date of death. For an instant her vision seemed to blur. She shook her head, forcing her gaze to the carved date. It was like being struck in the stomach. She actually stumbled back a step, gasping.

Tyler was on it in an instant, of course. He shot to his feet, grasping her hands in both of his. "What is it?"

She shook her head, trying to come up with something, anything other than the truth.

Tyler's grip tightened painfully. He couldn't have known how hard he was holding her. "What, Rachel? What do you see when you look at the tombstone?"

She couldn't lie. Couldn't evade. Couldn't even understand it herself.