Dark Crossings
Authors: Marta Perry
Tags: #Fiction, #Comics & Graphic Novels, #General, #Anthologies (Multiple Authors)
Circle of faith. Circle of danger. Circle of love?
At the intersection of hope and danger, three Amish women
realize the importance of community…and love
The Covered Bridge
by Karen
Harper
When Benjamin Kline returns to the fold after eight years,
Abigail Baughman welcomes him with an open heart. But all is not well in their
Amish village. Mysterious happenings put Abby in harm’s way, forcing Ben to run
to her rescue. He’s vowed never to let anyone hurt her, and suddenly everything
is at risk—their community, their way of life…and their future together.
Fallen in Plain Sight
by
Marta Perry
Childhood friends Sarah Weaver and Jacob Mast see each other
in a different light when violence shatters their peaceful society. Now a series
of accidents put their faith—and newfound love—to the ultimate test.
Outside the Circle
by
Patricia Davids
Isaac Bowman is an outsider, but Lena Troyer makes the
widower and his daughter feel like part of the community. So when a
deer-poaching ring divides the town, Isaac vows to keep this gentle woman safe
from harm…in spite of the danger to his heart.
Praise for
New York Times
and
USA TODAY
bestselling author
Karen Harper
“A glimpse into the lives of the modern-day Amish…Harper’s
choice of setting and lifestyle for her heartwarming characters adds a fresh
twist.”
—
Publishers Weekly
on
Down to the Bone
“Mystery, intrigue, love—it’s all here. Don’t miss this
fascinating and exciting story.”
—
Rendezvous
on
Shaker Run
Praise for the work of Marta Perry
“In Marta Perry’s
Unlikely Hero,
emotionally charged characters and situations will leave readers
entranced.”
—
RT Book Reviews
“Marta Perry knows how to write romance and
A Mother’s Wish
is another fine example of her
talent.”
—
RT Book Reviews
Praise for the work of Patricia Davids
“This warm and touching story by Patricia Davids will go
hand-in-hand with a warm cup of chocolate or tea. Enjoy.”
—
RT Book Reviews
on
A Military
Match
“Sweet, emotionally rich, and infused with realistic details of
Amish life, this cleverly plotted inspirational romance…is a worthy addition to
the recent spate of Amish romances that are drawing attention.”
—
Library Journal
on
An Amish
Christmas
NEW YORK TIMES
AND
USA TODAY
BESTSELLING AUTHOR
KAREN HARPER
MARTA PERRY
PATRICIA DAVIDS
DARK CROSSINGS
The Covered Bridge
Karen Harper
To my husband, Don, who loves Amish country as much as I
do.
And to the helpful and generous Plain People of Holmes County,
Ohio, who prefer not to be named.
CHAPTER ONE
A
STRANGE
,
SHRILL
VOICE
dragged Abigail from deep sleep. No, it was two voices, one low-pitched, one
high. She huddled under her sheet and quilt, then thrashed against them. Dreams
had haunted her again—of a couple running through a cornfield, whooping in
delight, with Ben leading the way. Ben laughing, knocking over the
stalks…running in crazy circles… Had she been dreaming of Ben and Liddy? No. The
voices were real. She could hear them right now.
Clutching the covers, Abby sat bolt upright. At least the
people weren’t outside her house. Maybe down by the creek, or on the covered
bridge. That often funneled sounds her way. Probably
rumspringa
kids, maybe some she knew. Drinking beer, staying out
late, just as she had during her running-around time. Or maybe it was outsiders
telling ghost tales on the old bridge where, if you shouted loud enough, your
voice echoed.
Ja,
scaring someone about the Amish
girl and
Englische
boy who hanged themselves there
years ago because their love was forbidden.
Despite the fact she was sweating, Abby shivered. She didn’t
believe in ghosts but she knew the story: the Amish girl had argued with her
lover, saying it was wrong to take a life, but he had convinced her to put the
noose around her neck and jump with him into the darkness….
Abby stopped breathing and strained to listen to the
high-pitched voice again.
Ja,
it was a woman’s,
strong and strident. Land sakes, couldn’t they quiet down and let a body
sleep?
Trying to keep calm, Abby fumbled on her bedside table for her
flashlight, clicked it on and shot its beam toward her battery-run clock. It was
4:14 a.m.! Now she’d never get back to sleep. She had to get up before dawn to
make more mushroom chutney and relish for the Saturday farmers’ market. And she
wanted to take a loaf of friendship bread over to her new neighbors across the
creek, plus harvest more mushrooms.
Her feet hit the rag rug on the floor, and she found her
slippers by feel. Though her place was six miles out of town, and the nearest
Amish farm was two miles away, she’d lived here for years, first with both
grandparents and then just with
Grossmamm.
She’d
never felt afraid here, she told herself, and she didn’t now. She knew Wild Run
Woods behind the house, Killibuck Creek—really a river—and the old bridge better
than anyone. And people had better learn to be quiet at night!
As she wrapped a shawl around her flannel nightgown, another
thought hit her. Maybe the folks who had taken over the old Hostetler house
across the creek had gone down to the bridge and were arguing. If she were the
woman who had just moved into that run-down place, she might be shouting,
too.
By now her curiosity was as awake as she was. In the front
room, she knelt by the window she’d left cracked in the crisp September air, and
raised the sash a bit higher. The woman’s voice wasn’t Amish in tone or rhythm.
Abby couldn’t be sure, but the man must be a modern, too. This part of Eden
County had folks who weren’t Amish, but they all had the good sense not to be
disturbing the peace this time of night.
A light shone from one of the windows on the bridge everyone
called “the Hanging Bridge,” partly because it was suspended from the rocks
above the rapids but also because of the double suicide that had happened there.
She couldn’t imagine taking one’s own life for love. Sad that two young folks
couldn’t see there was so much to live for, even apart. Why, she’d turned down
Elam Garber’s proposal a few months ago, and she felt she had plenty to live
for.
It wasn’t that she didn’t sympathize about true love, Abby told
herself. She’d seen her older sister, Liddy, as well as friends and cousins,
fall in love and get married. But she’d given up on passion and desire ever
since she’d been silly and stupid enough to have a huge crush on Liddy’s
eighteen-year-old come-calling friend, their neighbor Ben Kline. That had been
about ten years ago, when she was a mere kid of fourteen. Thanks to Ben messing
up his life, he hadn’t married Liddy, and had left here for good, jumped the
Amish fence to the big city of Cincinnati. Until she found someone who swayed
her head and heart like he had, she was content to run her business and her
life, Amish to the core and yet a bit on her own, too.
“You’re an idiot!” she heard the woman screech, followed by
something she couldn’t catch. Despite the constant rustle of white water over
rocks below the bridge, the female voice carried.
That’s all she could take, Abby decided. She was going to go
out, shine a light their way, then hustle back here and lock herself in.
She hurried into her kitchen, banging her shin on a log plugged
with oyster mushroom spawn, and got her big flashlight. She’d needed both lights
to gather the mushrooms after dark last night, then pack and store them in the
cellar for sale at the market. She went out the back door, which faced her
mushroom beds and the forest beyond, then hurried around the side of the house
onto the river path. She knew each step in the dark, so she’d wait to use the
large flashlight until she was on the old, now-deserted road that led to the
bridge.
Once she was there, she aimed at the black throat of the bridge
and turned on the big beam.
Ach!
Even pointed away, the
brilliance almost blinded her. The shaft of light illuminated a woman dressed in
black and wearing an Amish prayer
kapp,
so it must
be one of her people. The figure turned toward the light, threw up a hand to
shield her eyes and hissed, “Someone’s coming. Get down!”
The voice was
Englische!
And get down from what? Surely someone wasn’t drunk enough to
jump out a window into the rapids, even though the river was up with all the
rain. They’d be smashed on the rocks below, maybe drowned.
Abby heard something clatter, then a man’s low voice. Not
wanting a confrontation, she clicked off her flashlight, turned and fled, losing
one slipper, but not turning back. In the house, she locked the door and peered
out the kitchen window. Nothing now. No light, no sound. About ten minutes later
she saw red taillights on the far side of the bridge disappear, as if a wild
animal were backing away into the blackness.
* * *
A
FTER
BREAKFAST
, Abby searched hard for her lost slipper and couldn’t find
it. So she fed her buggy horse, Fern, let her out to graze in the small meadow,
then had a hearty breakfast of a honey mushroom frittata and herbal tea before
going to work.
Her wood ear mushrooms—“They are listening!”
Grossmamm
always used to say since they looked like
human ears—seemed perfect as she used her sharpest harvesting knife to cut them
from the stacked logs she’d inoculated with their spawn last year. After she
finished, she’d take that loaf of bread over to the new couple she’d caught a
glimpse of moving in. She couldn’t see them that well through the autumn trees,
but she could tell they were
Englische.
Abby prayed they would be good neighbors, as she intended to
be. A shame they were moderns, but she didn’t mind her half-hour buggy rides
into town for market and church on her own. Unlike most Amish
maidals
with many siblings
,
Abigail Baughman had only one sister, who now lived in Pennsylvania. A
baby brother born too early in a bad birth had taken their mother with him.
Because her parents were forty when she was born, and Liddy seemed so much
older, more like a second mother, Abby had always felt like an only child. She
had lots of friends from her school days, and many cousins, but she had to admit
she’d become a bit of a loner, especially after her
mamm
died and
daad
still traveled so much with his
construction team.
Many Amish girls were married by twenty-four, Abby’s age. She
knew she’d find the right Amish man one day and rear her own family. But he’d
have to live out here where she could pursue the wildcrafting, gathering and
overseeing of the mushroom crops that were, as
Grossmamm
also used to say, “Our bread and butter.”
About ten o’clock, after making a kettle of mushroom chutney,
left on the stove to cool, Abby changed her work apron and shoes, donned her
bonnet over her prayer
kapp
and packed up the loaf
of friendship bread. It wasn’t quite hunting season yet for deer or wild turkey,
only for squirrel, but she locked the door behind her. Last year two
Englische
hunters had scared her to death. She’d come
back from gathering precious morels in the woods and walked into her kitchen to
find them getting drinks of water.
As she set out, still skimming her gaze across the ground for
her lost slipper, she jerked to a stop. Two sets of tracks—and hers—marred the
mud by the path where she’d watered her ever-thirsty shaggy mane mushrooms
yesterday. One print was smaller than the other, but they could have belonged to
either sex. The mud was so wet that only the shape of the shoe was there, not
tread marks.
Abby followed the footprints toward her house and around the
edge of the bed of wood chips that boasted her big parasol mushrooms, then lost
them where the sawdust trail began. In the meadow behind the fence, Fern was
cropping grass. The gentle mare looked up at Abby as if to ask, “What? What’s
wrong?”
“Nothing,” Abby answered, and headed down the path toward the
bridge again. Just someone passing through? Squirrel hunters? She’d heard some
distant rifle shots yesterday. Had Elam come to pester her again, maybe with
Ruth Yutzy, the new girlfriend he’d been showing off? Or maybe the tracks
belonged to the people who had been on the bridge? But she hadn’t seen or heard
anyone follow her last night. Keeping an eye on the woods, she continued down
the path.
Several covered bridges in this area drew occasional visitors,
but none were used much anymore. The Hanging Bridge, once called the Homestead
Bridge after the nearby town, had been built of white oak in the 1870s. It was
wearing well, partly because its roof and some support beams had been restored
about a decade ago. The foundations were planted firmly in the bedrock ledges
above Killibuck Creek, and a web of trusses supported the plank flooring and
roof. Six square openings were cut into each side of the 140-foot span to let in
light, but they weren’t big enough that horses could see out and get spooked by
the rushing water beneath.
A weight limit on motor vehicles was posted at each entrance.
Once painted red, the weathered boards had now faded to a soft, pinkish gray.
Years ago when
Mamm
and
Daad
used to bring her and Liddy out to help
Grossmamm
harvest her crops, Abby had thought the bridge looked like
a big old barn hung right over the river. It must also look like that to the
barn swallows that flew in and out and suspended their cup-shaped, mud pellet
nests from the beams and rafters.
As she passed the point on the bridge where she’d seen the
woman last night, she noted nothing unusual. At least whoever it was hadn’t made
a campfire, like some careless kids last year. The char marks from the flames
that could have caught the entire bridge on fire still showed. Abby pictured
again how the woman’s white
kapp
had glowed and her
white palm caught the light when she’d thrown her hand up. Of course she could
not have been wearing a prayer
kapp,
Abby realized
now, because something had glittered on her wrist. No Amish woman ever wore gold
or jewels, not even a wedding band.
Abby breathed in the clear, crisp air as she headed down the
path on the other side of the river. The neighbors’ house was not directly
across from hers, but almost. When the leaves dropped, she’d be able to see in
their windows, as they would hers. Then it hit her: could the new couple have
been walking around her house after they’d argued on the bridge last night? It
was obvious she was the one who had shone the light on them. Maybe they’d picked
up her slipper… But it would be rude and unkind to ask.
She shook her head to clear it, and sent up a silent prayer for
peace of spirit and good relations with her new neighbors. Besides, this close,
the long-abandoned house didn’t look as forbidding. A curl of sweet-smelling
smoke wafted from the chimney. A well-kept black truck with large pieces of wood
stacked neatly in its bed sat in the gravel driveway. The windows she’d seen the
woman washing yesterday gleamed in the sun. If it wasn’t farm market day
tomorrow, Abby would volunteer to help her get settled. Maybe she would
later.
She walked up on the porch, which creaked, but a new-looking
swing for two, painted a fresh white, was hanging from two shiny chains. She
noted that from the swing the couple could see her house and mushroom patches
through the yellow and orange leaves.
Before she could knock, the door opened. Abby stumbled back a
step and drew in a sharp breath. Her heartbeat kicked up and her pulse began to
pound. A tall man stood there, broad-shouldered, blond with intense eyes as
green as grass. He was dressed modern, in jeans and a bright blue flannel shirt,
but she knew instantly who he was. Though he’d been gone ten years, he was still
under the
bann,
ostracized by and forbidden to the
Amish.
Before her stood the man of her girlhood dreams, who now
tormented her in nightmares. Ben Kline, her sister’s come-calling friend. A man
Abby had once silently, sinfully adored.
