“Good to see you again, Martha.” We shake hands. “I’m working on a case,” I begin, speaking loudly enough for the other women to hear. “I’m looking for an Amish woman, a quilter or seamstress with the initials ‘A.K.’ She made an heirloom-quality quilt back in 1985 and embroidered her initials in the corner.”
“What’d she do?” whispers the young woman who’d been behind the counter when I walked in.
The question earns her a sneer from the woman sitting next to her.
“What was the pattern?” one of the other women asks.
“Center star,” I tell her. “The colors are unusual, mauve and cream and black.”
“A.K.” Martha’s brows knit. “Hmm. Let me think.” She glances over her shoulder at the women and asks in Pennsylvania Dutch, “Who was it that used to use all that pink the Englischer tourists like so much? Anna? Ada? She’s from down south, I think. Always got a pretty penny for her quilts.”
A tiny woman with silver hair and rheumy blue eyes looks up from her needlework. “Little Abby Kline used to use a lot of pink. Been known to add her initials to her work, too. I’ve known her since the day the Lord brought her into this world. That girl’s been making quilts since she was nine years old.”
A second woman straightens and levels her gaze on me. “Almost forgot about little Abby. I made a wedding quilt for her when she married Jeramy Kline. Gosh, that’s been thirty years ago now.”
“Thirty years and four babies,” another woman adds, as she leans forward and bites a thread to sever it. “All grown up now.”
“She doesn’t come into town much anymore,” one of the younger women comments.
“Saw her at the grocery last week,” says another woman as she pulls a needle through fabric.
Pennsylvania Dutch was my first language and even after so many years of speaking only English, my brain switches to my native tongue with surprising ease. “What was her maiden name?”
“Kaufman,” one of the women says.
The last thing I want to do is start speculation or gossip, but I need information. Evidently, these women are well versed on goings on within the Amish community, so I take the risk. “Do any of you remember if Abigail knew Leroy Nolt?”
The eyes of the older woman—the one old enough to remember Nolt’s disappearance—attach to mine. “Little Abby was always with Jeramy,” she tells me. “Always.”
The youngest woman’s eyes go wide. “Does Abby have something to do with those bones?”
No one looks at her. I don’t answer her question.
The eldest woman goes back to her sewing. “Little Abby never had eyes for anyone but Jeramy.”
“Leroy Nolt was a Mennonite,” Martha says. “Abby and her family are Swartzentruber.”
“The two don’t mix if you ask me,” one of the other women says.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard those words, and they annoy me as much now as they did when I was an angry and rebellious teen. While Mennonites and the Amish share a common Anabaptist heritage, the differences are vast and include everything from the use of electricity to the ownership of cars. The most significant difference, however, is the tenet of separation, which is central to the Amish but not part of the Mennonite way. Most Amish I know mingle freely with their Mennonite neighbors, but as in all cultures, there are those who are intolerant.
The old woman looks up from her needle and thread and levels a blue-steel gaze on mine. “Katie Burkholder, I think you’d be best served if you kept your feet under your own table.”
CHAPTER 14
Abigail and Jeramy Kline live on County Road 19 just south of the Holmes County line. It’s a hilly, curvy road that cuts through farmland and forest and is bordered by a guardrail that’s seen more than its fair share of collisions. The house and barn are close to the road, by Amish standards anyway, and are set into a slope. At the mouth of the driveway, a hand-lettered sign tells me FRESH BROWN EGGS. AMISH QUILTS. (NO SUNDAY SALE!) Towering trees surround the plain farmhouse to my left. Ahead is a cornfield with razor-straight rows of corn that’s already hip high. In the yard, a tractor tire on a rope dangles from the branch of a maple. The barn is white with a cinder-block foundation lined with a profusion of hostas. In a small pen adjacent to a shedrow, a sleek Standardbred mare reaches through a broken rail to nibble grass already shorn to dirt. Beneath the overhang of the shedrow, a black windowless buggy with wood-and-steel wheels is parked, its twin shafts resting on concrete blocks, and I’m reminded that this family is Swartzentruber.
I park adjacent to the house and take the sidewalk to the porch. I’m about to knock, when I spot the Amish woman hoeing in the garden to my left. I leave the porch and start toward her. She’s so intent on her work she doesn’t notice me, so I call out to her. “It looks like you’re going to have a bumper crop of tomatoes this year.”
She startles and nearly drops the hoe, pressing her hand to her chest and then laughing at herself. “Oh my goodness! I didn’t see you pull up.”