Finally Jotham said evenly, “That’s a good story. Do you have any actual proof of what you just said?”
I couldn’t stop my eyebrow from lifting. Jotham’s passive aggressive behavior was not something I expected at all.
“Right now, it’s just hypothetical, but if you have any information to add, it could easily become a solid case,” I challenged.
“Are you a Christian, Serenity?” Jotham suddenly asked.
The swift change of subject made me lean back against the headrest. Wariness had settled deep into my bones by the time I responded. “Yes, I consider myself one. But I don’t go to church on a regular basis, and I’ve seen enough horrible things during my time as a cop that I am somewhat a bitter believer. But what do my religious beliefs have to do with anything?”
“It might help you understand our people a little bit better. For instance, I know that God is real and that He affects everything that happens everywhere. And that He punishes those who sin against His laws, not the Amish elders or your judicial system.”
I shook my head slightly and smiled tightly. I was too exasperated to respond right away. I thought for a moment and then said with a measured sigh, “I’m sure God punishes sinners in His own way, but without law and order, humanity would slip into sheer chaos. The good people would be cut down by the bad guys. That’s why I became a sheriff. I wanted to help people. And I want to help you, Jotham. I can see that something is weighing heavily on your mind. Why don’t you just let it go, and do the right thing?”
Jotham turned to stare at me. His one good eye shined extra blue as the sunlight shone in through the window. He smiled sadly. “There isn’t always agreement about what is the right thing.” He gripped the door handle and said, “I really should be going. I’m sure Rowan is wondering where I am.”
Knowing that I was about to lose any chance of help from Jotham, I blurted out, “Asher was the one who set the Gentry fire, wasn’t he?”
Jotham paused, his back to me. I could feel the heavy weight of his thoughts in the air as if they were raindrops in a summer storm. When he finally spoke, disappointment washed over me in a cold rush.
“I have nothing to say regarding Asher.”
Jotham abruptly left me alone in the car, the thump of the door closing loudly in my ears. I continued to watch him walk to his horse, untie it and hop into his buggy. He snapped the reins and sped away at a hasty trot down the driveway.
I sighed. Dammit.
The sight of Anna King running a few steps and then stopping on the gravel in front of my car caught my attention. I opened the door and asked loudly, “Were you trying to catch Jotham?”
Anna’s face brightened when she saw me. She walked over and shifted her weight, hoisting a large box onto her hip. “Hello, Serenity. I wondered where you had gotten off to. I think Rowan and the girls were curious also.”
“Something came up and I had to go check it out. Do you need a ride?” I asked hesitantly.
Anna smiled. “Oh, that would be lovely.” She made an effort to take a breath as she moved the obviously heavy box to her other hip. I jumped out of the car and went to open up the trunk for her.
“This is supper for Rowan, his family and everyone else working over there.” She paused from talking to ease the box into the trunk. “Libby Mast and Martha Yoder helped me prepare the food in Libby’s kitchen after the service,” Anna went on to explain.
Once Anna was seated in the passenger seat that Jotham had just vacated, I nodded for her to put her seatbelt on.
She blushed. “Yes, silly me. I always forget to do that when I ride in cars.” As she was buckling, she asked, “Where’s Daniel?”
Some of the Amish had stronger accents than others. Rowan and Jotham, for instance, spoke with a strong foreign lilt, while Anna sounded the same as any Midwesterner. The comparison briefly passed through my mind as I glanced at Anna and replied, “He’s in the hospital. He was shot this afternoon.”
The look on Anna’s face was priceless. Her jaw dropped and her gray eyes widened. I quickly added, “He’ll be all right. It was only a grazing wound.”
“Why did someone shoot him?” Anna exclaimed.
“We went to Asher Schwartz’s trailer to ask him a few questions. Asher never came to the door, but two very large Pit Bulls attacked us and then Daniel was shot by an as-of-now unknown assailant.”
“Oh, my,” Anna said as she glanced out the window. After a moment of silence, she found her voice again. “Asher Schwartz is a troubled man,” she paused and met my gaze with frightened eyes, “He’s been hanging around with some of the teenagers lately. And I don’t like it one bit.”
I suddenly realized that maybe I’d been talking to the wrong people all along. Anna was new to the community and she had a certain measure of normalcy about her that most of the other Amish whom I had come in contact with were absent of. The pretty young woman might actually help me.
“Anna, I’ll be honest with you. Asher has some serious convictions against him, which include narcotic sales, battery assault and domestic violence. I already know that he’s a bad guy. What I don’t understand is why your community is tolerating his presence here…and why Sheriff Gentry is afraid to go after him, too.”
Anna’s mouth spread into a grim line. I could tell by the faraway look in her eyes that she was in deep thought. When she finally came out of her trance, I was happy to see steady determination on her face.
“I don’t know anything about the sheriff, but I can tell you that Bishop Fisher and the other ministers don’t want to deal with him on any level, even to protect our young ones.”
“How do you know this?”
“Several meetings have been held on the subject. There are those in the community who are willing to go against Asher Schwartz, but the leadership will have none of it. I personally had to speak to the congregation about some of the interchanges that I’d witnessed going on around the schoolhouse after hours. But Abner wasn’t interested in listening to anything I had to say.”
“You’ve seen Asher talking to the kids after school?” I said the words slowly enough to emphasize the importance of my question.
“Yes, I have. I’ve even seen some of the English kids with him,” she took a deep breath and admitted, “I don’t know this Asher fellow at all, but there is just something about the man that makes me very uncomfortable.”
“You have good instincts,” I told Anna.
Even before I pulled into Rowan’s driveway, I quickly counted up nine buggies parked beside the house and a flurry of dark clad men with beards moving about the barnyard. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Anna quickly smoothing her blonde hair neatly beneath her cap. She then flattened the front of her dress in an anxious movement. I didn’t even try to hide my smile.
“You obviously have a thing for Rowan, so why don’t you go ahead and tell him,” I said seriously.
Anna’s pale cheeks suddenly heated to a cherry red color as she exclaimed, “Is it so very noticeable?”
I nodded nicely. “Yeah, to me anyway, but who knows about Rowan. Men can be awfully dense in that department.”
I parked in front of the cabin and turned off the engine. Anna reached over and touched my arm. “I don’t know what to do. Sometimes I think that he may be fond of me, but other times he seems so distracted.”
I absorbed what she said. There were two Amish men who I wasn’t familiar with pushing debris around with Bobcats and several other men putting the last strips of tin on the brand new framework. Rowan had mentioned that morning that the men would be constructing a temporary shed that would be large enough for him to park his borrowed buggy and harness in, but I was surprised to see it almost completed only hours later.
Rowan was up on the ladder, and Jotham and Gabe were working together to hand the tin up to him as sprays of snow gusted up around the
m from the wind. The sight of the man who was Gabe’s biological father working so closely beside the only dad Gabe had ever known was brow rising, for sure. Perhaps everyone would be better off if Gabe never knew the truth. In the real world, father and son would never have moments like this, but here in the Amish one, there would be a lot of opportunities for interaction on a regular basis. I dismissed the thought, feeling the twinge of a headache blossoming. There were just too many issues to think about around here. It was almost maddening at times.
I turned back to Anna’s expectant face and said, “Rowan has secrets that are eating him up inside. I don’t believe that he’ll ever be happy or at peace until he faces his demons. Maybe you can help him along with that.”
Anna slowly nodded. “That’s very sound advice from an Englisher,” Anna commented and then added, “I’ll see if he’ll talk to me.”
“I hope that once he’s opened up to you, he’ll be willing to talk to me about it. I think his demons are shared by a few other people as well.”
“I understand. And I’ll do what I can,” Anna assured me. Almost as an afterthought, she said, “You’ll stay for dinner won’t you?”
“No, I’m going to head over to the hospital to check on Daniel.”
Anna smiled mischievously. “I know you told me earlier that he wasn’t your man, but I must speak up and say that I think he very much wants to be.”
I glanced away and then back again. “I’m kind of in the same boat as you are, Anna. I’m afraid to take the plunge.”
“If I can do it, so can you. We both deserve to be happy, don’t you think?”
I smiled at her naivety. “I’m not really sure if true happiness exists.”
“Of course it does!” Anna exclaimed. “You mustn’t lose hope.”
After I opened the trunk, I found myself suddenly in Anna’s tight embrace. I wasn’t used to being hugged by near strangers, and women even less so, but I swallowed down the discomfort and returned the woman’s squeeze anyway. I wasn’t sure who needed the hug more, me or her.
After we said our goodbyes, I gladly jumped back into the car. The sun had just dipped behind the low rise of hills and with the darkening sky, came an even more bitter cold. I turned around in the driveway, shaking my head at the men who were still working, but impressed at the same time.
I had to slow and pull off to the edge of the driveway as an oncoming pickup truck passed by. There was a dent on the backside of the bed that grabbed my attention and I only caught a glimpse into the cab, but it was enough to see Mariah sitting in the passenger seat beside Damon Gentry. Seeing the pair together again instantly bothered me in some inexplicable way that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. And then something else teased at the corner of my mind, trying desperately to open up into understanding.
I continued to think on it until I was about a mile from Rowan’s farm and then it hit me with the force of a train wreck.
I had seen that exact same blue truck earlier today—parked not too far behind Asher Schwartz’s black charger in the trailer park.
22
The smile that lit up Daniel’s face when I walked through the door into the hospital room warmed my insides. I crossed the room quickly and pulled up the hunter green plastic wooden-armed chair to the bed. After I was sitting down, I finally met Daniel’s hopeful looking gaze.
“How are you feeling?” I ventured.
Daniel shrugged. “Not too bad. The nurse was just in here. She gave me some more pain meds. Reckon I won’t feel anything for another day or two.”
“Do you know when you’re going to be released?”
Daniel’s smile faded. “I think if you talk to the doctor, you might be able to spring me sooner, but right now, he’s talking about tomorrow morning.”
“That’s not that long,” I scoffed.
Daniel looked at me pleadingly. “I don’t want to stay in here until then. You need my help.”
Now it was my turn to smile. The last time that I had seen Daniel, his face had been ghostly white and there had been pain in his eyes, but at the moment, his face was flushed with healthy color and his eyes crinkled at the corners in annoyance. I took the chance and continued to meet his steady gaze. I was almost distracted by his sculptured, full lips and the thought of kissing them, but I controlled myself.
“You were shot today at close range with powerful ammo...and you were severely bitten by a large Pit. You’re lucky that you aren’t dead,” I chastised. It was much easier to be harsh with Daniel then to risk being nice and having him start flirting all over again.
“The shooter obviously didn’t want to kill me or I would be dead,” Daniel smartly pointed out.
I was impressed. “That’s a very good assumption and one that I’ve already made.” I paused and leaned back in the incredibly uncomfortable chair. “It was Asher, Julian…or Damon who shot you.”
Daniel’s eyes widened considerably. “Damon Gentry—what does he have to do with any of this?”
“I don’t know yet. But afterwards, I saw Damon in Rowan’s driveway with Mariah again, and it was definitely his dark blue extended cab pickup truck that I’d seen parked in front of Asher’s Charger.” I sighed heavily in irritation and went on to say, “I’ve ran it through my mind a hundred different ways and I still can’t come up with any logical reason for his connection to Asher. Well, besides buying drugs of course.”
“What did the sheriff say about all this? He must have recognized his grandson’s pickup parked at the scene,” Daniel said as he sat up straighter. The cords to his IV got tangled around the armrest to the bed and he snorted and tugged them free.
“Oh, I’m sure old-man Brody knows that his son is involved with Asher. That might even be the reason that he seems to be protecting Asher at every turn. Asher probably has some major dirt on Damon…and maybe even some of the police and officials in this town. What I don’t get is how any of this ties into the arsons.”
Daniel thought for a moment and then said, “It must be Asher burning the barns down as revenge against the Amish for shunning him.”
“I don’t think it’s that easy of an answer.” I twirled a blonde lock around my finger, thinking. “There must be something that I’m missing.”
“Well, we know that Asher is into all kinds of criminal activities, so it’s probably safe to assume that he’s our man. Can’t you go over Sheriff Gentry’s head on this, and bring in other law enforcement?”
I really liked the way Daniel’s mind worked. He was similar to me in many ways, but he wasn’t going nearly deep enough on this one.
I nodded slowly. “Sure, I can get the Indiana State Police involved…but I’m not ready to do that just yet.”
“Why not—if the sheriff isn’t cooperating with you and you know that his own grandson is involved with our main suspect then he’s completely compromised. Meanwhile, barns are still burning down, and I was even shot. Something has to be done quickly, Serenity,” Daniel implored.
“You’re absolutely right. I’m just waiting on a phone call.” Was it just mere coincidence, or something more that caused my phone to suddenly vibrate in my pocket at that very moment? I’d never know for sure, but when I pulled the phone out, it was just the person I wanted to talk to.
“Todd, what do you have for me,” I said without wasting time with a proper hello first.
Todd took it in stride and said, “I think I have your woman.”
I held my breath while Todd told me the name and information that I needed, only exhaling when I said, “Thanks Todd, you should get raise for this one. I think that I’ll be home sooner than I originally thought.”
I hung up and put the phone back into my pocket. My gaze met Daniel’s anxious face.
What did Todd say?”
“You were right. Asher is our man,” I replied, standing up.
“Whoa, where are
you going now?” Daniel lightly grasped my arm and tugged me in closer. The worried frown on his face made me pause. It felt good that he seemed to care so much.
“I have enough information for an arrest.” Seeing him about to rise, I put my hand out to stop him and my fingers touched the hard warmth of his chest. But I didn’t flinch away this time. “Don’t worry, Daniel. I have this under control. If Brody won’t help me, the state bureau and the FBI are on my speed dial. You have to stay here and rest. My plan is for us to be on our way home by tomorrow evening.”
Daniel hesitated for a moment. When his brown eyes suddenly darkened, I knew exactly what he wanted before he said a word.
“I already know that nothing I have to say is going to change your mind on this one. But it sure would be nice if you gave me a little kiss before you left,” Daniel said softly.
The tentative way he spoke made me feel a mixture of guilt and stupidity. Daniel had proven himself in many ways since I’d first met him, and here I was still giving the man a hard time. I wasn’t just attracted to Daniel; I was reluctantly falling in love with him. And even though I was completely jaded and messed up in the relationship department, I was beginning to lean towards at least giving him a chance.
My thoughts were still waging war as I leaned down. I caught a whiff of the musky cologne that had become so familiar, and for a moment, I forgot everything else. My lips softly touched Daniel’s forehead. I savored the instant of having his warm skin beneath my mouth and then I began to pull back.
Daniel’s hold on my arm tightened and he reached up with his free hand, placing it behind my head. For a second we made eye contact, and the next thing I knew our mouths were moving against each other. The pressure of his hand tangled in my hair and the movements of his tongue with mine sent mini jolts of pleasure coursing through my body.
I was losing myself to him when I heard a vague noise somewhere way off in the distance. The second time the throat clearing sound was easily recognizable and I pushed away from Daniel in a hurry. Daniel must have heard it too. He let me go without complaint for a change.