Plain Killing (10 page)

“Don’t worry,” Rachel assured her. “We won’t tell.”

“You and Enosh, you like each other?” Mary Aaron asked.

“
Ya,
but not as boyfriend and girlfriend. Enosh is my friend, like a big brother.” She got up to brush sand out of Evelyn’s hands. “No, Baby, don’t put it in your mouth. Dirty.” She returned to the bench.

“Do you think the DeStephanos might have taken Beth or Hannah in, after you left? There was also a girl named Lorraine Yoder.”

Lucy shook her head. “Emmett passed right after I left. Mary went into one of those retirement places near her daughter.”

Rachel tried not to become frustrated. “And the family Enosh is staying with now, they didn’t help Beth?”

“No. I’m sure of it. And none of the other families we know of helped her,” Lucy insisted. She seemed more comfortable, now. “I’m sure of it. It’s a small community—people who help Amish kids leave their life. I’d have heard of any other girls from Stone Mill.”

Rachel looked at her, trying to assess if she was telling the truth.

“If I knew anything that would help, I’d tell you,” Lucy said. “It’s terrible that somebody did that to Beth, but maybe she met a bad person and it just happened. It would be scary if you didn’t have a safe place to sleep or to work.”

“And the other girls, Hannah and Lorraine?”

Lucy shook her head. “Just me and Enosh, we’re the only ones from Stone Mill I know.”

“Your mother must be bad worried about you,” Mary Aaron said. “Especially since Beth’s murder.”

Lucy lowered her lashes. “She doesn’t know where I am, but she knows I’m all right. I send her a letter every two weeks. Sometimes, I send a money order for the children. Maybe one of them needs new shoes or medicine. I help when I can.” She hesitated. “I think one of my sisters wants to come out when she gets to be eighteen. Then I’ll find her a job, and we can get an apartment together. But not yet.”

“Your mother knows you are in State College?” Rachel asked.

“
Ne.
She didn’t want to know where I was. That way, if
Dat
or the preacher asks, she can say she doesn’t know. She has a post office box. I send the letters there. And I have a post office box, too, but in a different town.” She offered a wan smile. “I’d rather not say where. She writes me back, sometimes.”

“So it’s a secret from your father?” Mary Aaron asked. She squeezed Lucy’s hand. “Is he strict?”

“I know he worries about my soul,” Lucy admitted. “Someday, I’ll go home so they can see how well I am, but probably not for a long time. I’m going to get my high school diploma. Then I can go to college and get a certification in child care. I want to teach nursery school. I think maybe I can do that.”

Rachel smiled back at her. “I think you can, too. I think you can do anything you want to do. Do you like working for Evelyn’s family?”

“I do. They’re good to me. They bought me a car and helped me study for my driver’s license. I wouldn’t want to leave Evelyn yet. She needs me. But when she’s old enough to go to preschool, I have to get a better education. I miss home, but I’m never going back. Not to stay. It’s good for a lot of people, but it isn’t the life for me.”

Rachel glanced at Mary Aaron. It was time to go. She was disappointed that Lucy hadn’t been able to give them any information on where Beth had been in the time between when she had left Stone Mill and been murdered there, but she was glad to hear how well Lucy was making the adjustment from Amish girl to English. She was glad for Lucy; glad, too, that Lucy was using an assumed name. If someone was stalking Amish girls, she would be safe. Who would know?

After they said their good-byes and promised to keep in touch, Rachel and Mary Aaron started to walk away.

“Wait,” Lucy called after them.

They turned back.

“There’s something,” she said hesitantly. “It might be nothing, but . . .”

“But what?” Rachel asked.

“I heard a rumor once.” Lucy met Rachel’s gaze. “It was at a singing. A boy from another district—I don’t know his name. We were talking about leaving, you know, just about what if we did, and . . . he said that he’d heard that somebody in Stone Mill would help kids.”

“Did he say who?” Rachel walked back to Lucy.

Lucy shrugged. “If he did, I didn’t hear. At the time, I hadn’t cared because I hadn’t thought about leaving. I don’t know if there was any truth to it.”

“So you don’t know if it was a man or a woman?”

She shook her heard. “An Englisher, I guess, but he didn’t give a name.”

Rachel glanced at Mary Aaron, then back at Lucy. “If anything else comes to you, or you hear something, promise you’ll call me.”

“I promise.” She patted the pocket of her dress. “I have the card you gave me with the B&B phone number.”

Rachel hesitated. “Lucy . . . if we hadn’t come back today, would you have ever called me?”

But Lucy only smiled and walked over to scoop Evelyn out of the sandbox. “Come back to visit,” she said. “You, too, Mary Aaron. I have Wednesday and Sunday off. You can tell me all the news from Stone Mill.”

 

It was Saturday evening before Rachel saw Evan again. He picked her up at the B&B at seven thirty sharp.

“Anything new on the case?” she asked him as he held the car door for her.

“Nothing. And I’m starting the three-to-eleven shift on Tuesday. Back on the road.” He closed her door, went around the car, and climbed in behind the wheel. “I have a feeling my investigation days are over.”

She sat back in her seat and gazed out the window as they pulled out of her drive and onto Main Street. She’d called Evan Monday evening to tell him about the rumor that someone in Stone Mill was helping Amish young people to leave the valley and enter mainstream culture, but he hadn’t been impressed. He’d said he would pass on the information but that some Amish kid trying to impress a girl at a teenage gathering didn’t hold much credibility.

They were on their way to Huntingdon to Evan’s favorite restaurant, an authentic but modestly priced Italian place. It had been a busy week, and Rachel would have been satisfied to go to his house for their usual spaghetti and meatballs, but Evan had his heart set on taking her out for a
real date
. So she’d worn an azure-blue dress with a modest V-neck and lacy cap sleeves. She was glad she had because he’d shown up at her house in a dress shirt and tie.

“The truth is, we don’t have much evidence in the Glick case,” he told her. “A few partial boot prints that might not even have been from the day Beth was murdered. Men’s work boot, size 10. Could be anyone’s. The case is pretty much cold. You don’t get anything in the first forty-eight hours”—he shook his head—“the chance of ever solving the case goes down significantly.”

“And now it’s been almost three weeks,” she mused.

He turned to look at her and smiled. “Let’s talk about something else. Want to listen to the radio?”

“Sure.”

So they drove through the warm twilight with the air-conditioning on high and the radio playing pop songs from the ’90s.

A few miles from Stone Mill, he turned off the steep road that climbed out of the valley and drove a short distance down a gravel lane that led to a picnic area beside a waterfall. Dusk had already fallen as he parked the SUV.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Thought maybe you’d like to see the waterfall at night. Reservations aren’t until eight thirty.”

He got out of the car and came around to her door. He took her hand, and they walked across the open area to a table and benches. Rachel was a little apprehensive; she’d heard that teenagers sometimes came here to make out. Surely Evan didn’t have any ideas in his head. He knew her better than that, didn’t he?

But Evan was a perfect gentleman. He spread his sports jacket on the wooden bench for her to sit on and sat beside her. It was peaceful, with the rush of water and the cool mist in the air. Around them, small animals rustled in the forest and frogs chirped and croaked. “Thank you for bringing me,” she murmured. “It’s so beautiful here.”

He cleared his throat and took her hand. “Rachel, how long have we been friends?”

She felt a warm rush of emotion. “Three years, I suppose. Since I came home to Stone Mill.”

“And neither of us is getting any younger.”

“What?” She looked at him.

He exhaled, and she realized he was nervous. Now she was curious. What on earth was going on?

“I . . . need to tell you something, and you need to listen and not interrupt. If you interrupt, I’ll lose my nerve and look even stupider.”

She looked at him, now a little wary. “Evan—”

“Rachel, I’m just going to say it,” he cut in, taking her hand. “I’m just going to . . . come out and say it.” He took a breath. “Will you let me court you?”

“What?” She turned on the bench so that she was facing him more directly. She didn’t know what she’d expected him to say, but that wasn’t it.

“I love you, Rachel. I think you know that. I haven’t pushed you because I know how you are. But I know you care for me. And I’ve been thinking that we should do this the Amish way. So you’re comfortable. I want you to walk out with me.” He was gaining momentum. “And if we find that . . . we’re . . . happy together, I want us to move forward. With marriage,” he added quickly.

Among the Plain people, young people courted for months, sometimes years. While they did, they went out exclusively with each other. It was a trial engagement, and either the man or the woman could break off the relationship at any time without losing face.

“Evan, that’s very sweet, but . . .” She looked away. She’d thought they were just going for a nice dinner. She hadn’t expected any sort of serious conversation. She wasn’t really prepared for it.

“This can’t come as a surprise to you. Did you think we could go on for years just being friends?” He was very close, not threatening, just Evan, big and solid and comfortable. “I know you want children, a family of your own. And I don’t see you—”

“Evan, please.” She put two fingers of her free hand over his lips. “I do care for you, but things are so crazy now.” She looked away, and then made herself look at him again. “I don’t think I can do this right now.”

“What do you mean?”

She exhaled, trying to find the right words. She didn’t want to hurt Evan’s feelings. She didn’t even know that she wanted to turn down his offer . . . She just . . . She closed her eyes, then opened them again. “I mean that, right now . . . today, I can’t think about this. I can’t get Beth and what happened to her out of my mind. I think about her day and night. I can’t think about my personal life right now, and I need to be absolutely sure because . . . for me, marriage is forever.” She looked down and then up at him again. “I guess what I’m saying is that I need more time.”

He pulled his hand away from hers. “And people say it’s always the guy who’s afraid of commitment.”

The next night, it was eleven thirty when Rachel climbed the stairs to her third-floor bedroom. Most of her weekend guests had checked out, but two couples remained. The Barbours, Les and Bonnie, had just returned to the United States from Australia. He was an engineer who specialized in designing dams, and he and his wife had spent many years living abroad. They were friendly and interesting, so much so that she’d invited them to share a late supper with her. She and the second couple, Jenny and Charles Abernathy from Vermont, had spent an evening in lively conversation with the Barbours, sharing their experiences in Europe, South Africa, and Queensland.

The Abernathys were return guests, so Rachel felt like they were old friends. This was their third visit to Stone Mill, and Rachel enjoyed their company more each time they came. Having visitors like the Barbours and the Abernathys was a delight, but she’d found most of her guests to be pleasant. Days like this were why she’d decided to open the B&B.

Sophie shot up the stairs ahead of her. Bishop followed, tail swishing back and forth.

Evan had accompanied her to church services that morning, but his manner had been reserved, and after worship he’d said something about visiting his mother and made a quick good-bye. Rachel thought it just as well. She didn’t want to rehash the previous evening’s discussion about the two of them courting. She’d been honest with him; she
wasn’t
sure how she felt about him. Certainly she cared deeply about him; maybe she even loved him. But agreeing to spend the rest of her life as his wife was a big commitment. She couldn’t make such a life-changing decision right now. Maybe after Beth’s killer was found . . . after Lorraine and Hannah were found, maybe then she would feel differently.

Upstairs, Rachel undressed, grabbed a fresh terry cloth robe, and stepped into the hot spray of her shower. The water was amazing. Her bathroom, with its heated tile floor and rain showerhead, was her one luxury in her private living quarters. And the girl who’d grown up using an outhouse reveled in it. Whatever challenges tomorrow would bring, she’d be better prepared after a relaxing shower, organic melon shampoo, and a good night’s sleep. She had just stepped out onto the rug and was wrapping her hair in a thick towel when the phone on her desk rang. It wasn’t her cell, which might have been Evan, but the landline. The B&B number.

“Who in the world would be calling me at this hour?” she grumbled to Bishop. Clutching a thick terry cloth towel around herself, she made a dash for the phone.

“Hello?” The line hummed, but no one spoke.
A wrong number?
“Hello?” she repeated. “Stone Mill House.” Still nothing. She considered hanging up; it was probably a wrong number, or maybe a prank call. “Stone Mill B&B,” she repeated. This time she couldn’t keep the faint annoyance out of her tone. “Is someone there?”

Rachel heard a girl’s voice, a low whisper. “Rachel? Rachel Mast?”

Rachel couldn’t make out what she said next, but whatever it was, the woman was speaking Deitsch. “Who is this?”

“. . . Hannah. Hannah Verkler.”

Rachel clutched the receiver tighter, feeling almost as if she were speaking to a ghost. “Hannah? Oh my goodness. I . . . it’s so good to hear from you. Mary Aaron’s been so worried about you.”

“I need help.”

The hair prickled on the nape of Rachel’s neck. “Okay. Tell me—”

“I don’t know what to do,” she went on, almost as if she was talking to herself. “There’s nobody else to ask.”

“Hannah, are you in danger? If you are, call 9-1-1. The police will—”

“No!”
she said. “No police, no police,” she repeated. “Promise me you won’t involve the police.”

“Okay,” Rachel said.

“I need you . . . someone to come and get me. Please?” Hannah’s voice broke on the last word.

There was a burst of loud music and then a staccato rapping that could have been a fist against a closed door.

“I have to go,” Hannah said quickly. She sounded terrified. “He’s coming.”

“
Who’s
coming?”

“I have to hang up. I’ll try to call back,” she said shrilly.

“You have to tell me where you are. I can’t just—”

The banging started again.

“I’m serious about the police,” Hannah whispered into the phone. “If you call them, you’ll never hear from me again. No one will.”

“Don’t hang up,” Rachel said quickly. “I’ll come. You have to tell me where you are.”

“New Orleans. Above the—”

Rachel heard a loud bang, then a gruff male voice, and abruptly the line went dead. “Hannah? Hannah?” she called into the phone.

Seconds passed, and then she heard the familiar computer-generated recording: “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again.” It was followed by a loud, pulsing tone.

Rachel hung up and went into the bathroom to retrieve her robe. Pulling it over her still-damp body, she went back into the bedroom. She stared at the phone, willing it to ring again. It didn’t. She picked it up and clicked the receiver to see if she still had a dial tone. She hung it up again.

She didn’t know what to do. Had the call been real? Was that Mary Aaron’s friend Hannah, or was it someone’s idea of a bad joke?

The call couldn’t have been a joke. The woman on the other end had seemed so desperate. No one was that good an actor, were they?

“Call me back,” Rachel murmured. “Hannah, call me back.”

But what if she didn’t?

Rachel started to pace. Her pets—Bishop on the bed, Sophie on a throw rug—watched her.

Hannah had said she was in
New Orleans
. What would Hannah Verkler be doing in Louisiana?

For a few seconds, Rachel closed her eyes and uttered a silent prayer for Hannah’s safety:
You’ve kept her safe this long. Could you do it a little longer?

When she opened her eyes, she knew she had to go to New Orleans.

Of course she couldn’t go to New Orleans.

Common sense warred with impulsiveness. She had guests. She had a business to run. She just couldn’t take off on a wild-goose chase, could she? She’d never been to New Orleans, but she knew it was a large city. She’d never find Hannah. The phrase
finding a needle in a haystack
came to mind.

Rachel unwrapped her hair from her towel and went to the bathroom for a wide-toothed comb.

It was the middle of the night. Tomorrow would be soon enough to sort this out . . . to decide what was best to do.

But waiting until morning was easier to say than to do. In front of the bathroom mirror, she blow-dried her hair.

Evan should be off work by now. It would be easy to reach him, but she’d given her word to Hannah. No police. Evan was her friend and she trusted him, but he was also a cop. If she went to him for advice, would he feel compelled to report the call to Sergeant Haley as a possible lead in the Glick case? Hannah had said that no one would ever hear from her again if Rachel contacted the police. Did she mean
she
wouldn’t contact anyone again, or had she meant something more sinister? If the police became involved, would Hannah’s life be in danger?

If she didn’t go to Evan, there was only one person she could confide in. Mary Aaron. But lights-out was at ten o’clock at Uncle Aaron’s. Mary Aaron had no cell phone, and short of going to her house in the middle of the night and throwing stones at her bedroom window, there’d be no reaching her until morning.

Another half hour of waiting for the phone to ring put Rachel past the point of caution. She reached for her cell and punched in the single digit for Evan. “Hey,” she said when he picked up. She could hear voices, the wail of a country western singer, and the rattle of glasses in the background. “You at a bar?”

He chuckled. “When have you ever known me to go into a bar except to break up a fight? I stopped at the diner for a bite with Pete after our shift.”

Pete was one of the veteran corporals at the troop, an older guy who’d taken Evan under his wing since he’d been assigned there. “How was your shift?”

“Five hours of nothing and then a pileup about a mile from the troop. Failure to yield the right-of-way. Three cars, one of them a trooper’s personal vehicle, but she’s fine, and it could have been a lot worse.” He said something she couldn’t hear, probably to Pete, then back into the phone, “What’s up? I know you didn’t call me at this hour to chat.”

“Will you be leaving soon?” she asked. “I wondered if you could stop by for a few minutes. I’ll put the teakettle on. Unless you’d rather I make coffee.”

“You want me to come over, now? Tonight?”

“It’s important, Evan. Otherwise, I wouldn’t ask you—”

“I’ll be there in half an hour.”

 

“I don’t know. It sounds suspicious. It could be a hoax,” Evan said when she’d finished telling him about the mysterious phone call—after he’d agreed that their conversation was strictly off the record.

They were sitting at the little table in the kitchen. He stirred honey into his mug of Earl Grey, tasted it, and then added more.

“She sounded sincere.” Rachel cupped her mug between her palms, waiting for her tea to cool. “I don’t know, I think it might have been her.” She thought for a minute. “No, the more I think about it, the more I’m
sure
it was Hannah.”

“Think about it. If it was really Hannah, if she had access to a phone and could call you, she could have called 9-1-1,” Evan reasoned. “Does it make sense that someone in danger would call a stranger halfway across the country?”

What he was saying made sense. Perfect, logical sense. But Englisher sense, not Amish sense. “Would it be possible to trace the call? To find out if it
did
originate in New Orleans?” She looked up at him across the table. She was in her bathrobe over PJs, him still in his uniform. “That would prove it was genuine, wouldn’t it?”

His eyes narrowed. “I could get in a lot of trouble for trying to trace a call, Rachel, for nonpolice business.”

She gave him what she hoped was her most appealing look. “You know somebody who could do it, though, unofficially, don’t you?”

He frowned. “Your caller was probably some Amish teenager, maybe even Lucy.”

“I don’t think so. Lucy’s not a teenager anymore, and she’s not the type of person to want to cause harm. Even as a joke.”

“You’re quick to judge someone you’ve just met.”

She considered his statement before shaking her head. “If I make an error in judgment, I’d rather it be that I’m too trusting rather than being too cynical. Isn’t that what you always tell me about upholding the law? Treat everyone as you’d want them to treat you?”

“I do try to do that, but I don’t look at the world through rose-colored glasses. In some ways, Rachel, you’re still naïve. The Amish I meet are no better and no worse than anyone else.”

Bishop jumped up into her lap, and she gave her attention to the big Siamese, petting him and scratching under his chin as a way to keep from answering immediately. Finally, she said, “Lucy didn’t call me pretending to be Hannah. We just talked to her. I would have recognized her voice.” This would have been the time to confess to Evan that she and Mary Aaron had gone back to talk to Lucy a second time, but she was afraid that confession would lead the conversation away from the problem at hand.

“Okay, so if not Lucy, then someone else who knows we’ve been asking around about the missing girls.” He toyed with his spoon before looking up. “I was trying to give you a little space, but . . . have you given any thought to what we were talking about last night? About us?”

It wasn’t something she wanted to revisit tonight, but she nodded. “I have, I’ve thought about it all day, but I stand by what I said last night. I’m too distracted, Evan. I can’t get Beth’s death off my mind. Once this is behind us . . .” She trailed off and smiled at him. “Please, Evan. This call may be the first break we’ve gotten. I need to know if the call came from New Orleans.”

“Highly unlikely.”

“But if it did?”

“It would prove that your call originated in Louisiana. And what then? Are you going to run down there and start knocking on doors?”

She shrugged. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do, but one thing she
did
know: If Hannah Verkler had reached out to her for help, she couldn’t turn her back on her without even trying.

 

Rachel caught a few winks of sleep between four and six, but then gave up trying and got up for the day. She desperately wanted to talk to Mary Aaron, but she kept hoping that Hannah would ring her back or that Evan would come through with information on exactly where the call had come from. He hadn’t said he would look into it. In fact, when he left her house, he had said he wouldn’t have the call traced, but she just kept hoping he’d have a change of heart. She understood that it was breaking the rules and that Evan was all about rules, but who would it hurt?

Rather than just sitting around all day, waiting, Rachel threw herself into the list of to-dos around the house. She packed a picnic lunch for the Barbours, called back prospective visitors, and cleaned the gift shop—dusting, scrubbing, and rearranging with a passion. She checked the Abernathys out, and before leaving, Jenny ordered a baby quilt and a handcrafted maple cradle. They were expecting a first and long-awaited grandchild, and it seemed that they loved the cradles Rachel’s brother Paul made.

Twice the phone rang and Rachel dropped everything, literally, to run for it, hoping that it would be Evan or Hannah. Neither were the calls she was hoping for, although one was a three-day reservation for two couples traveling together. By one o’clock, Ada had housekeeping well in hand and was baking an apple strudel. Hulda had walked over from next door and volunteered to watch the office for the afternoon. Rachel couldn’t wait any longer. She had to talk to Mary Aaron to see what she’d make of the previous night’s mysterious phone call.