In the Land of Milk and Honey (2 page)

I pulled i
nto the drivew
ay at the Yoders' farm and turned off my car. I forced myself to sit still for a moment instead of hopping out immediately. I needed to get my head out of my current caseload and hectic mindset before I could appreciate Amish hospitality.

It was early April. The weather had warmed early this year, and the signs of spring were everywhere. The dark brown wooden fence along the Yoders' pasture contrasted with the brilliant green of new grass and the white and purple of early-blooming crocus. The late afternoon light was just turning golden and soft. Several fawn-colored Jersey cows were completely engrossed in tugging up mouthfuls of the new growth. And the little decorative windmill in the center of the kitchen garden on the other side of the gravel drive spun in a light breeze.
The garden was still in its winter hibernation, dormant but cleared. I imagined it held its breath in expectation.

This is why I'd moved back to Lancaster County. Every once in a while I had to remind myself of that before I got bogged down with head-in-the-sand-itis. Feeling better, I grabbed Sadie's present and headed for the house.

Sadie Yoder had turned seven a week ago. This was the first chance I'd had to come by, having snuck out early from an afternoon of tedious paperwork. I'd debated what to get her. Ezra said dolls were acceptable for the Amish as long as they were modestly attired. No glam rock Barbie for Sadie, then. But I didn't want to reinforce the grow-up-and-have-lots-of-babies message, for no reason other than my core streak of feminism and innate rebellion. So I settled on a game of Chutes and Ladders.

I'd struck up a tentative friendship with the Yoders, specifically Hannah and a couple of her daughters, Sadie and Ruth. We were odd bedfellows—a female police detective and Amish womenfolk. But we'd shared a tragedy. Or, rather, the Yoders had tragically lost their daughter Katie, and I'd found her killer. I'd nearly died in the process.

There was guilt and gratitude on their side, and I couldn't even begin to untangle the mare's nest of motivations on mine. I felt protective of Katie's younger sisters and bonded to the family through the sympathy and pain of Katie's murder case—and I was curious. I wanted to learn about Hannah's way of life. Of course, I lived with Ezra, who was ex-Amish. But he couldn't tell
me what it was like to be an Amish wife and mother, and he didn't like to talk about his life before anyway.

Also, if I were perfectly honest, I simply liked coming here. It made me happy. I went up the porch stairs and knocked on the door.

“Hallo, Elizabeth!” Hannah opened the door and welcomed me inside with a smile. She always looked so young for a mother of eleven—slightly built, her dark hair pulled back tight under a white cap and her face without a trace of makeup. Her plain, royal blue dress was covered with a large black apron that had traces of flour on it.

“Hi, Hannah.” I smiled. I wanted to give Hannah a quick hug, but I refrained. Instead, I held up the gift. “I brought Sadie a birthday present.”

“Ocht! You spoil her!” Despite her words, Hannah seemed pleased. “We're making strudel. Would you like to cook with?”

“Sure.” Being in the Yoders' kitchen was soothing. And it would be fun to surprise Ezra by learning how to make something from his childhood.

The kitchen was crowded with girls and young women. The center pine table had been cleared and covered with wax paper, rolling pins, and large bowls of dough and chopped apples. Sadie's face lit up when she saw me. She ran over to give me a hug around the hips. The others all said hello. Sadie's older sisters, Ruth and Waneta, who still lived at home, were there, as was Miriam, who was grown now and had children of her own. There
were two young women I didn't know. Before I could introduce myself, my dark pantsuit was covered by an apron and I was clutching a rolling pin.
En garde
. I bit my lip and refrained from saying it. They wouldn't find it funny.

The sheer volume of strudel they were preparing came as no surprise by now. I'd seen Hannah cook before. Not only did the Yoders have a large family, but they always made extra, either to freeze or to share with the community at some get-together or other. And the two young women I hadn't met before had probably come over to make batches for their own households. Cooking in a group made things a lot more fun.

We rolled out the dough, cut it into large square sheets, sprinkled on a sugar-cinnamon mixture, added raisins and nuts to some and not to others, and layered on small slices of apple before rolling them up and brushing the tops with melted butter and powdered sugar. The bushels of last fall's apples were from cold storage, according to Hannah. Those that hadn't been eaten over the winter had to be used up before they went bad. They were a tough-skinned green variety, and they were pared and chopped in an endless assembly line. And while trays of rolled strudels sat and rose in the warm kitchen, more and more and more were made.

It was a repetitive task that soothed me after a long week of work. This past week I'd investigated a man who'd killed his wife accidentally during a heated argument, a Jane Doe found near the highway, and a baby whose supposed crib death I suspected was really abuse. It all melted away under the steady motions and the pleasant singing in complicated-sounding German words.

I couldn't contribute much to the singing or the conversation. With the older Amish, most of my life was topic non grata. I was living in sin with Ezra Beiler, who was, in any case, an Amish man who'd taken the church vows and then left the Amish, and was therefore shunned. And my work as a homicide detective wasn't something Hannah cared to have her girls learn much about, even if she did respect it. But Sadie, as usual, had a million nonsensical questions for me like
Do you like grass?
and
Do you have red birds at your house?

The last strudels were rolled. A few of the dough logs were stuffed into the warm oven, but most were wrapped in cling film for later baking. Hannah's guests left with cheerful good-byes and boxes bursting with strudel. Sadie opened her birthday present, thanked me for the “most wonderfullest gift” and ran off with Ruth and Waneta to play the game before supper.

I washed the dough off my hands at the sink. The window above the basin overlooked the fields outside. The sun was sinking, and I saw Hannah's husband, Isaac, and two of her boys heading home on a plow pulled by two horses. It was getting late—time to let Hannah get to their evening meal. Besides, the sight made me long sharply for Ezra, who would be ending his own day about now.

“Thank you for allowing me to stay,” I told Hannah. “This was just what I needed to relax.”

Hannah was placing two wrapped, unbaked strudels into a bag for me to take home. She paused, an odd look on her face, like she wanted to say something but wasn't sure if she should.

“What is it?” I asked.

Hannah looked troubled. “I meant to speak to you. . . . It is about a bad business.”

“Of course.” I stepped closer to Hannah and leaned against a counter, making it clear I was happy to listen.

Hannah sighed. “There ist some trouble lately, among the people in our church. Now a boy has died.”

“Trouble? What kind of trouble?”

“My friend Leah Hershberger, her whole family is sick. They called in a doctor, and he said it was the flu. But . . . there has never been such a flu. So sick they were, and her son William, only fourteen and strong before now—he died from it.”

“I'm sorry, Hannah.” It was disturbing. There'd been word in the news that the flu was particularly virulent this year. Everyone at the station had been given a flu shot last November. But this was the first I'd heard about a local child's death. Of course, if he'd died from a virus, it wouldn't have come to the homicide team.

“Another family, the Knepps, got ill such like too. I hoped, maybe, you could look into this?” Hannah asked, her face uncertain.

I didn't understand. “How do you think I could help? It sounds like a case for a doctor, not the police.”

Hannah tugged at her cap self-consciously, her eyes downcast. “Some believe it is not a normal sickness but
hexerei,
a curse.”

I blinked rapidly as my mind tried to catch up. A
curse
?

Hannah looked up, her face hopeful. “There is a man, a
brauche
man. He holds a grudge against our church. Maybe if you could just look things over, say what you think. I don't know what to believe myself, but if it is a curse . . . I don't ask for myself, Elizabeth, but for Leah and her children, and for my own children too.”

I felt out of my depth, like the floor had gone wonky beneath my feet. A
curse
? What could I say?

“I . . . would be happy to take a look into the boy's death.”

Hannah's face lit up with a grateful smile. “I knew you were a gut friend to us. Thank you.”

—

Lancaster General Hospital was a big and open space, surprisingly modern and new. I was used to the old hospitals in Manhattan, with their cramped corridors and smell of centuries past. Like all things in Pennsylvania, this hospital's corridors were extra wide and ceilings extra high, as if its citizens could be counted on to be oversized, its families overblown, as if the population, in posterity, could only get bigger. There was something endearingly optimistic about that.

The optimism was nowhere evident in the patient room I entered.

Samuel Hershberger and his young son Aaron shared a large room, each in his own bed. Both were sleeping.

Samuel looked to be in his early forties. His long brown bangs and unkempt beard clearly identified him as Amish, even though
he wore nothing but a hospital gown under the blankets. He must have lost a lot of weight, because the skin on his face appeared as if laid over a skull—drawn, loose, and colorless. An IV drip fed steadily into his veins. He appeared to be resting peacefully. I knew what it would take to get an Amish farmer like Samuel Hershberger into the hospital—near death. The loss of their son William must have been a wake-up call.

Aaron was quite young, maybe five or six. He was turned on his side and, although clearly ill, had a healthier skin tone than his father. He would probably make it, I thought. I certainly hoped so.

I decided not to wake them. There wasn't much Aaron could tell me, and Samuel looked too sick to disturb. Instead, I went off in search of their doctor. This wasn't how I'd planned to spend my Saturday off, but a promise was a promise.

—

“I can't say for certain
what it is,” Dr. Kirsch said, being perfectly blunt about his ignorance.

Thanks to my badge, I'd gotten the doctor to speak to me about the Hershbergers. I left out the fact that my investigation was in no way official.

“My best guess is it's a particularly virulent viral infection. But these things often remain undiagnosed. Both Hershbergers' blood work shows severe hyperchloremic acidosis, which can result from prolonged diarrhea and vomiting. We're giving them IV fluids. It's the best we can do for now. They should pull through fine.”

“Do you know why the fourteen-year-old son, William, died?”

“Dehydration, possibly kidney or liver failure. I doubt there'll be an autopsy. There usually aren't with the Amish unless it can't be avoided. His mother said the whole family had been sick for three days, and William wasn't keeping liquids down. He worked on the farm that day too. His body just gave out.”

Kirsch was an older man, early fifties, stocky, with a superior air. He clearly was a busy man and not overly curious about the medical mystery of the Hershbergers.

“If it's a viral infection you don't recognize, wouldn't it be the procedure to call in the CDC?” I asked.

Dr. Kirsch looked incredulous. “Well . . . no. Not without a lot more evidence that it's something unusual. It's flu season. There are dozens of common viruses going around. If we called the CDC every time we had a patient with flu symptoms, we'd need a CDC the size of the U.S. military.”

“But a boy died.”

Kirsch squinted impatiently. “There have been over forty deaths from flu so far this season alone in the U.S. It's tragic, but it happens. Dehydration can be very dangerous.”

I pulled out my notepad—not because I really needed it, but to reinforce the message that I wasn't some dim relative he could bully. “Mrs. Hershberger says the entire family came down ill at the same time, overnight. There were also severe chills and tremors. Isn't that unusual for the flu? People in a family would normally get sick in waves, not all at once.”

“It depends on when and how they were exposed to the virus.” Kirsch leaned forward, elbows on his desk. He seemed to be taking me a bit more seriously, but I sensed defensiveness in his tone. “If they were all exposed to someone who had the virus—say, at the same church meeting—it's conceivable they would fall ill at the same time. And chills and shivering are to be expected with severe flu.”

“What exactly did their blood work show?”

Dr. Kirsch opened the file on his desk. “I can't show you the results without permission from the patients, but in regards to this flu scare, the blood work is about what you'd expect. Electrolyte abnormalities, hemoglobin and red-blood-cell counts are elevated, and the acidosis . . . that's all typical for severe dehydration.”

“Does it actually show the virus?”

“Viruses are detected via a swab culture, not blood work.”

“And was a swab culture done?”

He gave a subtle huff. “No. Confirming the influenza virus via a swab test wouldn't change the treatment.”

“I understand. Still. My i's dotted and t's crossed—you understand. Is it possible for you to administer a swab test now and confirm that it's influenza? Just for our records?”