A Perfect Square Read Free Page B

way.”
    “Floated?” Deborah reached for the strings of her prayer
kapp
, ran her fingers down the length of them.
    “We’re on the south side,” Taylor said. “Wind’s been from the north for several days.”
    He studied the scene a moment longer, then looked back down at his pad. “County should be here in a few minutes. Let’s finish up with your initial statement. After you determined it was a person, what did you do?”
    Deborah tugged on her prayer
kapp
and looked back toward Joshua. He was running in circles around Esther, playing with a long reed of grass. Soon he’d be finding something to put in his mouth he shouldn’t. “I insisted they come away, come back from the water and the flowers. I didn’t want the children to realize what they were seeing and grow upset. I pulled Esther and the children down the path toward the buggy and then moved the buggy a little farther down the lane.”
    Deborah peeked around Taylor’s uniformed shoulders to catch another glimpse of the group still waiting on her.
    “Why did you move the buggy, Deborah?”
    “What?”
    “The buggy? It was originally parked there, right?” He pointed to a spot approximately a hundred feet from where Esther and the children now waited. The same spot he had stopped to examine earlier. “Why did you move it farther away? The children couldn’t see the body from where you were parked at first, so why did you move it?”
    Deborah smiled, remembering what Callie had told her about an investigator’s attention to detail. “Cinnamon was nervous, spooked from the moment we stopped. Once Esther and the
kinner
came back to the buggy, the mare seemed even more agitated. You might think it sounds
narrisch
, but I believe she smelled death in the air. I wanted to move her so she would calm.”
    Taylor rubbed a finger across his white, bushy eyebrow as he considered her reasoning. After a moment he seemed to accept it and wrote an additional notation on his pad.
    “And then?”
    “Esther stayed with the children and the buggy — where she isright now, and I ran to Reuben’s house. He took his buggy to the phone shack and called you.”
    Turning his attention toward Reuben, Taylor mumbled, “All right. That’s all for the moment, but I still need to take a full statement from Esther. And I’ll want you to stay around in case I have any more questions.”
    “The children — “
    “I asked the dispatcher to send someone out to your house when Reuben mentioned you were here. Jonas should be here soon.”
    As if his words had the power to produce the people she loved, a buggy and a truck pulled down the lane.
    Deborah turned and hurried toward them, already feeling Jonas’ arms around her, his dark eyes assuring her all would be fine. But something caused her to glance back.
    When she did, what she saw surprised her nearly as much as the floating corpse.
    Reuben had turned, ready to face Taylor’s questioning, and for a fleeting moment, Deborah saw a look on his face. It was one she was familiar with. One she had felt often enough when she’d miscut a bolt of cloth or spoken too harshly to one of the children.
    Reuben’s look, though, was tinged with such pain, colored with such heartache, that Deborah’s hand went instinctively to her throat.
    It might have been only for one brief second when his thoughts were unguarded, might have been something that Officer Stan Taylor missed as he looked down at his pad to begin a new page of notes, but Deborah clearly saw how Reuben’s expression was temporarily consumed by regret.

Chapter 3
    S AMUEL WATCHED the
Englischers
from his hiding spot in the woods. He’d known the moment the taller woman started around the south side of the pond that she’d find Katie’s body. If he were honest with himself, he’d prayed for it. The thought of her spending one more hour in the water would have split his heart right in two — if there was anything left of his heart to split.
    He clutched his hat