In the Land of Milk and Honey Read Free

were, and her son William, only fourteen and strong before now—he died from it.”
    â€œI’m sorry, Hannah.” It was disturbing. There’d been word in the news that the flu was particularly virulent this year. Everyone at the station had been given a flu shot last November. But this was the first I’d heard about a local child’s death. Of course, if he’d died from a virus, it wouldn’t have come to the homicide team.
    â€œAnother family, the Knepps, got ill such like too. I hoped, maybe, you could look into this?” Hannah asked, her face uncertain.
    I didn’t understand. “How do you think I could help? It sounds like a case for a doctor, not the police.”
    Hannah tugged at her cap self-consciously, her eyes downcast. “Some believe it is not a normal sickness but
hexerei,
a curse.”
    I blinked rapidly as my mind tried to catch up. A
curse
?
    Hannah looked up, her face hopeful. “There is a man, a
brauche
man. He holds a grudge against our church. Maybe if you could just look things over, say what you think. I don’t know what to believe myself, but if it is a curse . . . I don’t ask for myself, Elizabeth, but for Leah and her children, and for my own children too.”
    I felt out of my depth, like the floor had gone wonky beneath my feet. A
curse
? What could I say?
    â€œI . . . would be happy to take a look into the boy’s death.”
    Hannah’s face lit up with a grateful smile. “I knew you were a gut friend to us. Thank you.”
    â€”
    Lancaster General Hospital was a big and open space, surprisingly modern and new. I was used to the old hospitals in Manhattan, with their cramped corridors and smell of centuries past. Like all things in Pennsylvania, this hospital’s corridors were extra wide and ceilings extra high, as if its citizens could be counted on to be oversized, its families overblown, as if the population, in posterity, could only get bigger. There was something endearingly optimistic about that.
    The optimism was nowhere evident in the patient room I entered.
    Samuel Hershberger and his young son Aaron shared a large room, each in his own bed. Both were sleeping.
    Samuel looked to be in his early forties. His long brown bangs and unkempt beard clearly identified him as Amish, even thoughhe wore nothing but a hospital gown under the blankets. He must have lost a lot of weight, because the skin on his face appeared as if laid over a skull—drawn, loose, and colorless. An IV drip fed steadily into his veins. He appeared to be resting peacefully. I knew what it would take to get an Amish farmer like Samuel Hershberger into the hospital—near death. The loss of their son William must have been a wake-up call.
    Aaron was quite young, maybe five or six. He was turned on his side and, although clearly ill, had a healthier skin tone than his father. He would probably make it, I thought. I certainly hoped so.
    I decided not to wake them. There wasn’t much Aaron could tell me, and Samuel looked too sick to disturb. Instead, I went off in search of their doctor. This wasn’t how I’d planned to spend my Saturday off, but a promise was a promise.
    â€”
    â€œI can’t say for certainwhat it is,” Dr. Kirsch said, being perfectly blunt about his ignorance.
    Thanks to my badge, I’d gotten the doctor to speak to me about the Hershbergers. I left out the fact that my investigation was in no way official.
    â€œMy best guess is it’s a particularly virulent viral infection. But these things often remain undiagnosed. Both Hershbergers’ blood work shows severe hyperchloremic acidosis, which can result from prolonged diarrhea and vomiting. We’re giving them IV fluids. It’s the best we can do for now. They should pull through fine.”
    â€œDo you know why the fourteen-year-old son, William, died?”
    â€œDehydration, possibly kidney or liver