“Yeah, it would help immensely if I could study its structure,” he said, lifting his eyebrows and looking intrigued by something. He had left his mouth wire in his truck. She wondered if he wanted to make her feel more at ease with him, which probably wasn’t going to happen, because he just plain disturbed her somehow.
“Feel free to look around,” she said, noting he at last pulled his gaze away from her to glance high and low inside their barn. “So,” she went on, “I was helping Mamm—my mother—serve food behind that long table there, and I came across this threshing floor—”
“Still used for threshing at harvest time?”
“Sometimes, but we haul modern gasoline threshers now, pulled behind the horses, of course.”
“But animal horsepower pulls them, so they’re not actually fueled by gasoline? That means the hay baler Bishop Esh says he lost in the fire would not have had gasoline in it even off-season?”
“Right—modern equipment but real horsepower.”
“In your field and the Eshes’, I saw them—beautiful horses, big as the Budweiser team. But go ahead. You walked to what spot before you saw the fire. And what did it look like then?”
“I honestly don’t know what time it was, if you need to know that—”
“I have the exact moment the call came in, so that will help.”
“Anyway, I shouted for someone to call the fire department. Later, Jacob told me he’d called it in on his cell phone.”
“Right. I have that info from the sheriff.”
“When the buzzers alert the volunteers, it takes a while to get to the firehouse and then here,” she said as she led him out of the barn.
“I’ve got all that and will be checking everyone out.”
“Oh, sure, to get their descriptions of the fire, too. So I would say I was right here when I saw the golden glow in the distance, which was growing fast and turning orange. And it seemed to start high, then burn downward.”
“Really? That could be a key clue.” He was taking notes with just a regular ballpoint pen on paper now, nodding, looking across the fields where she pointed.
“I thought at first the fire might be the headlights of Jacob’s fancy car,” she added.
“If he was exiled, why—”
“Shunned.”
“Okay, shunned. Then why was he here?”
“It really doesn’t have anything to do with the fire,” she assured him, hesitant to get into all that about Jacob’s past, especially how it meshed with hers.
“You need to let me decide that, Sarah,” he said, turning to her. “Just in case the cause of the fire is incendiary and criminal, I have the right to investigate anyone who could have caused it, even make an arrest.”
“You’re a policeman, too?” she blurted. Although her people rendered to Caesar what was Caesar’s and got on just fine with Sheriff Freeman, the Amish way was to steer clear of government authorities like the ones who had persecuted—burned to death by the hundreds—her people in Europe centuries ago. Her grossmamm, Miriam, was always reading to her from the Plain People’s heirloom book, the Martyrs Mirror—talk about horrible burnings!
“I’m a law officer under certain conditions,” he said. “So what’s with this Jacob Yoder I’ve heard mentioned more than once? He was shunned by Bishop Esh?”
“By all of the church, really. I—it will take some explaining.”
“Then we’ll do it in a later interview. Go ahead and take me across the field the way you ran last night and tell me how the fire appeared to change as you got closer, how the flames spread.”
Happy to have a topic besides Jacob Yoder, she nodded, looking up into his intense gaze again before walking toward the fringe of the plowed field. In his work clothes, Daad came out of the house, and she told him where they were going. He nodded and headed for the barn past the grossdaadi haus where Sarah stayed at night with her grandmother and where poor Martha had been stuck during all the excitement.
“Wait a sec,” Nate said so loudly she jumped. “Your barn doesn’t have lightning rods. The Esh barn didn’t, either?”
“Lightning rods show dependence on man, not God. If the Lord wants to protect a barn, He will.”
“Then, ultimately, if the fire was arson, God’s to blame?” Nate challenged, frowning.
“Not to blame,” she insisted, but she’d never thought of it that way. She supposed there were other sides to some of the things she’d been taught since birth. “We live in an evil world,” she went on, her voice more strident. “The Lord might allow it for a lesson, for our better good, to teach humility or bring our people closer—all positive things, gifts from above. We will work together to rebuild, to raise money for that if we must.”
“So I heard. On the other hand, at least you don’t have electrical wires coming in that could have caused a spark. I didn’t mean to criticize your beliefs, Sarah. I’m just used to lightning rods on barns. Those or smoke alarms or fire extinguishers can save lives and buildings. And maybe God gave the inventors the ideas for those things through inspiration, like positive, useful gifts from above.”
She had to admit that, in his own way, he was right. She must remember, she told herself, that this man was here to help them but that he was not one of them. She had to keep her fences up, however much she wanted to work with him to help the Eshes.
So, with Nate MacKenzie at her side, she plunged into the field following the trail of her frenzied footsteps, back toward the burned barn.
3
SARAH HEARD THE PURR OF A BIG MOTOR EVEN before she peeked outside the barn where she was cleaning up the danze debris. As if her thoughts had summoned him, Nate MacKenzie had returned in the masculine-looking vehicle that had a woman’s name. After Sarah had walked him across the field and back, he’d driven VERA over to the Eshes’ again to do some preliminary work, but now, midafternoon, here he was.
“Hi, again,” he called to her as he headed for their back porch but then did a U-turn toward her.
He came over, carrying something in a sealed plastic bag, wearing his sunglasses this time. They wrapped around his eyes like dark brown twin mirrors in which she could see herself getting larger as he came closer. At least she’d washed up and changed clothes but, not planning to go out in company, she still didn’t wear a proper bonnet over her clean prayer kapp.
“I did an initial walk around the ruins,” Nate said, stopping at the bottom of the banked entrance to the barn. “Every thing’s still too hot to sift through and may be for a couple of days.”
“Sift through? All the ruins?” she asked. That meant he’d be staying for a while.
“I may not have to, actually, to get proof of arson, though I’ll need details for my report that point to how and who. The why may be harder to come by, but I found something key to my investigation. A rubber band around a bunch of about twenty matches,” he said, lifting the plastic bag so she could see what was in it. “I found them on the ground about thirty feet from the back of the barn—not in this bag, of course. Bishop Esh says no one smokes in his family, nor does he keep matches around like this to light their kerosene lanterns.”
“Oh, no!” she blurted. “But why would kids who might be smoking on the sly put a bunch of matches together with a rubber band?”
“So some of the kids in the neighborhood last night