Secrets in the Grave (Serenity's Plain Secrets Book 3) Read Free Page B

something like that was foolish. I’d learned long ago that the Amish weren’t the pacifist people I’d assumed they were. Reality checks sucked.
    Daniel walked out through the front door behind his mother and I knew my day was completely shot to hell.

    “What’s the boyfriend doing here?” Todd’s lips twisted.
    “He used to be Amish and his entire family still is. It’s not so strange for him to be present,” I said as convincingly as I could. Inside though, I was wondering the same thing.
    The three of us were making our way across the yard when the front door opened again. This time, EMPs exited the house with a gurney.
    “Dammit,” I muttered under my breath, breaking into a jog. Todd and Bobby followed on my heels. Bobby huffed at the exertion and Todd’s keys jingled on his belt.
    The crowd split to allow us to pass through. I caught a glimpse of the bishop and James Hooley joining the back of our parade up the porch steps. The pots filled with pansies on each side of the doorway made the young woman’s death seem more surreal than it already did.
    “Why did you move the body?” I demanded of Raymond, at the front of the gurney. Lucky for Beth, she was at the back.
    Raymond’s eyes rounded and his slender face flushed. He was tall, gangly and a bit awkward at times. Beth was a firecracker.
    “I didn’t know there was any kind of investigation planned.” Raymond thumbed over his shoulder. “Jeremy gave us the go ahead to bag her.”
    “That’s right,” Beth added from the house. Jeremy was further back in the room, talking to a teary-eyed, older woman and a much younger one, who stared ahead in shock.
    I inwardly groaned. I hated dealing with grieving families. It was impossible to be respectful of their loss and ask nosy questions.
    I risked a glance at Daniel, leaning back against the porch railing. When our eyes met, he smiled.
    It was annoying how a million butterflies took flight in my stomach like I was a sixteen-year-old school girl. I swallowed.
I’m thirty-four and way too old for weak knees in the presence of a man. Even a tall, well-muscled and handsome one like Daniel
.
    “So. How long have you been here?” I asked.
    Daniel shrugged and glanced at his mother. The two weren’t close, so their being together was intriguing in itself.
    Anna spoke quietly to Daniel in the Pennsylvania-German dialect of the Amish. I had no idea what they were saying, but I didn’t need to understand. Anna didn’t take her eyes off me while she talked, and I was good at reading voice fluctuations and body language. She was disturbed, and not in a grieving way, either.
    Daniel turned back to me. “About ten minutes. Fannie Kuhns was my mother’s niece and my cousin.” He paused as if deciding whether to say more. The tension on the porch was palpable. Todd stood quietly beside me, and Bobby whispered back and forth with Beth. I could hear the scribbling of his pencil in his notebook. I was too distracted to catch everything, but the gist was that Bobby wanted basic information about the state and location of the body without having to open the zipper in front of the entire community.
    “Ah, my father contacted me this morning. He had something important to talk about.” He shook his head at my questioning eyes. “This isn’t a good place to discuss it. I’ll tell you everything later.”
    “We don’t have the luxury of waiting for this conversation. It needs to be taken care of now,” Bishop Esch announced,stepping onto the porch. He stopped in front of me and pointed into the crowd. “You must arrest that man.”
    Several of the Amish men moved aside, leaving one standing alone.
    I stared at the man. He was tall, straight-backed and smirking slightly. There was a sprinkling of gray at his temples. The rest of the brown hair poking out from under his hat was curly. His beard was long and thick. The top few buttons of his ivory shirt were unbuttoned. His boots weren’t muddy like the other