“Abigail, what happened to Leroy?”
“It was his own doing, but I can’t fault him. He couldn’t have known it would cost him his life.” A sound of despair squeezes from her throat. “The day before Leroy and I were supposed to run away together, while I was away cleaning house for a neighbor who’d just had a baby, he came here to ask my datt for permission to marry me. Jeramy was here. My datt. My brother. Mamm. Can you imagine?” A breath shudders out of her. “But there were too many hard feelings. Too much hatred. The men argued, especially Jeramy and Leroy. So much that my mamm asked them to leave the house. And so they came here, to this barn, to talk.” She spreads her arms to indicate the very building in which we’re standing. “But the talk quickly turned to an argument. Jeramy and Leroy fought. Somehow, Leroy fell from the loft into the pen below. Struck his head on the concrete.” As if envisioning the scene in her head, she looks down at the pen. “He never woke up.”
“How do you know all of this?” I ask. “Did Jeramy tell you?”
She nods. “When I read about the discovery of those bones and the ring, I knew it was Leroy. And so I asked Jeramy. Finally, after all these years, he told me the truth.”
I think about the remains and evidence of tooth marks on the bones, and I wonder if she knows the hogs fed on her lover’s body, possibly while he was still alive.…
“Jeramy and Leroy fought about you?” I ask.
“And ideology.” She offers a sad smile. “I was a pretty girl back then. Both men were in love with me. I supposed I loved both of them, too, but in different ways. Jeramy was the stable one. Handsome. Upstanding. The one everyone respected.” Her smile shifts; the secret smile of a woman in love. “But it was Leroy with all of his crazy dreams that set my seventeen-year-old heart on fire.”
“Was Leroy’s death an accident?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“After Leroy fell into the pen, did anyone try to help him?”
“Jeramy said they did, but … who really knows? People lie to suit their needs.” Slowly, she uncoils the leather rein, letting one end fall to the floor. “After Leroy fell, Jeramy, my datt, and my brother ran down to help him. But Leroy was gone. Hit his head. Jeramy said he wanted to call the English police, but Datt forbade it. Instead, they buried him in the crawl space of that old barn.” Kneeling, she loops the leather rein around a support beam and runs the free end through the loop. “Right where those Boy Scouts found him. He’d lain there all these years. Alone.”
“You said Leroy had a car,” I say. “What happened to it?”
“After dark, Jeramy and my brother drove it down to Beach City. They found a back road and drove it into the lake.”
I look out the door at the beautiful rolling hills beyond, and I’m surprised by the twinge of melancholy in my chest. Such a sad story. A young life lost. And many more ruined. “That’s why you poisoned Jeramy?” I say. “Why you tried to poison your parents?”
“Yes.”
“What about your brother?”
She looks down at the floor, shakes her head. “I couldn’t—”
A sound from behind turns me around. Alarm reverberates through me at the sight of Reuben Kaufman standing twenty feet away, a .22 rifle leveled at my chest.
CHAPTER 28
For an instant, I’m not sure if I’m more shocked by the image of Reuben Kaufman out of his wheelchair and standing on his own power—or the sight of the rifle. His finger is inside the trigger guard. The muzzle is steady. Next to me, Abigail goes perfectly still. We stare at him in silence. Tension knifes the air.
“Mr. Kaufman, put down that rifle.” I’m keenly aware of the .38 against my hip. My lapel mike at my shoulder. Either would only take an instant to reach, but there’s no way I can do it before he gets off a shot.
“I need you to put down that rifle,” I repeat. “Right now. Before someone gets hurt.” I motion toward Abigail. “Your daughter.”
Never taking his eyes from me, he addresses her in Pennsylvania Dutch. “Go to the house.”
Abigail doesn’t move. Instead, she looks at her father as if recognizing him after a long separation. “I know you were there. All these years … you knew … about Leroy, and you never told me.”
“He was a maulgrischt.” A pretend Christian. “I protected you. I saved your soul. Now go to the house with your mother and let me take care of this.”
She moves toward him.
He doesn’t take his eyes off me. “You. Get over by the hay door.”
I’m ten feet from the door, but I have a clear view of the pen below, where a dozen or so massive hogs mill about, sows and boars, and half-grown piglets. More of them have noticed our presence and lift their heads to look up at us.
“Mr. Kaufman, people know I’m here,” I tell him. “The police are on the way. You can’t possibly get away with this.”