In the back of my mind I wonder if he already knows about the murder. The Amish strive to believe they are a separate society from the English, but I know that isn’t wholly true. My sister works in the Carriage Stop Country Store in town. Most of the customers are English tourists and townspeople. A healthy grapevine runs the length of this town. If you have ears, you hear things. Even if you’re Amish.
Shoving my hands into my pockets, I walk deeper into the shadows of the barn, taking a moment to get my thoughts in order. The earthy smells of animal dung and hay remind me of childhood days spent in this barn. Ahead, four jersey cows, their pink udders swollen with milk, stand head-in. To my right, a dozen red and white mailboxes fashioned to look like farmhouses line shelves built from pine and cinder block. I see intricately built birdhouses and rocking horses with genuine horsehair manes, and I realize Jacob is as good with his hands as our father was.
I hear Jacob behind me and turn to him. “A girl was murdered in Painters Mill last night,” I begin.
He stands a few feet away, his head cocked, his expression circumspect. “Murdered? Who?”
“A young woman by the name of Amanda Horner.”
“Is she Amish?”
It annoys me that it matters to him. But I don’t voice my feelings. There are too many boiling inside me. Once I open that Pandora’s box, I’m afraid I won’t be able to close it. “No.”
“What does this murder have to do with me and my family?”
I give my brother a hard look. “The woman was murdered exactly the same way those girls were killed in the early 1990s.”
His quick intake of breath is but a whisper in the silence of the barn. He stares at me as if I’m some outsider who’s come here to wreck his world.
“How can that be?” he says after a moment.
The same question roils inside me like a storm. Because I have no answer, I stare back at him and try desperately not to tremble. “I think it might be the same guy.”
I see Jacob’s mind dragging him back to that terrible day. A day that devastated everyone in our family, but most of all me. He shakes his head. “That’s impossible. Daniel Lapp is dead.”
I close my eyes against words I’ve believed for sixteen years. Words that have caused me insurmountable pain and guilt for half of my life. When I open my eyes and meet my brother’s gaze, I can tell he knows what I’m thinking. “I have to be sure,” I say. “I need to see the body.”
He looks at me as if I’ve asked him to renounce God.
It wasn’t until weeks after the incident that I found out Jacob and my father buried the body. Horrific nightmares had been plaguing me. One night I woke screaming in my bed, certain the man who’d tried to kill me was in my bedroom. But my big brother came to my side. Jacob held me, and in the warm comfort of his arms, he revealed that Datt had buried the body in a defunct grain elevator in the next county, and he would never hurt anyone again.
“You know where he is buried,” Jacob says. “I told you.”
I know the place. The old grain elevator has been abandoned for twenty years. I’ve driven by it hundreds of times. But I’ve never stopped. I’ve never looked too closely. I rarely let myself think of the secrets buried there. “I need your help.”
“I cannot help you.”
“Come with me. Tonight. Show me where.”
His eyes widen. I see fear in their depths. My brother is a stoic man, which makes his reaction even more profound. “Katie, Datt did not take me inside. I do not know where—”
“I can’t do it alone. The elevator is a big place, Jacob. I don’t know where to look.”
“Daniel Lapp could not have done this terrible thing,” he says.
“Someone killed that girl. Someone who knew details about the murders that were never released to the public. How do you explain that?”
“I cannot. But I saw . . . his body. There was blood . . . too much for him to have survived.”
“Was he still bleeding when Datt buried him?” Dead men don’t bleed. If Lapp was still bleeding at that point, he was alive. He could have dug his way out of a shallow grave and survived . . .
“I do not know. I do not wish to be part of this.”
“You already are.” I step closer to my brother, invading his space. This surprises him, and he steps back, looking at me as if I’m a dog with contagious mange. I raise my finger, shove it to within an inch of his nose. “I need your help, goddamn it. I need to find the remains. There’s no other way.”
He stares at me, as stoic and silent as a statue.
“If I don’t stop this son of a bitch, he’ll kill again.”
Jacob winces at my language, and a small, twisted sense of satisfaction ripples through me. “Do not bring your English ways into my home.”
“This has nothing to do with Amish or English,” I snap. “This has to do with saving lives. You stick your head in the sand and more people could die. Is that what you want?”
My brother drops his gaze to the dirt floor, the muscles in his jaws clenching. When he raises his eyes to mine, they seem ancient. “For sixteen years, I have asked God for His forgiveness. I have tried to forget what we did.”
“You mean what I did, don’t you?”