Return to Grace
In the shadows of a graveyard, a shot rings out…Hannah Esh fled the Home Valley Amish community with a broken heart, throwing herself into her worldly dreams of a singing career instead. But as much as she tries to run from her past, something keeps pulling her back. On a whim, she brings four worldly friends to the Amish graveyard near her family’s home for a midnight party on Halloween.But when shots are fired and one of her friends is killed, Hannah is pulled back into the world of her past. The investigation into the shooting uncovers deep-buried secrets that shock the peaceful Amish village to its core. Determined to prove her value to the community she left behind, Hannah attempts to bridge two cultures, working closely with both handsome, arrogant FBI agent Linc Armstrong and her former betrothed, Seth Lantz, who is now widowed with a young daughter.Caught between Seth and Linc, between old and new, Amish and worldly, Hannah must chose her future. Unless a killer, bent on secrecy, chooses it for her."Harper, a master of suspense, keeps readers guessing about crime and love until the very end." –Booklist starred review on Fall From Pride“Danger and romance find their way into Ohio Amish country…lively and endearing.”—Publishers Weekly on Fall From Pride
Читать Return to Grace онлайн беплатно
For all the friends and family
who love Ohio Amish country, especially to Don for all the great trips there.
1
October 31, 2010
HANNAH ESH HAD SPENT TIME IN THIS AMISH graveyard but never to host a party. She would have given anything not to be here now, especially with her four goth friends, who didn’t even have to dress for Halloween to look weird. But she should talk, because she’d been one of them for nearly three years. Yet more than ever she wanted to go home, and home was the farmhouse just across two fields from here.
“Awesome!” Liz Bartoli, her roommate, said with a shudder as she saw how dark it was without car or neon city lights. There weren’t even electric lights from the nearby Amish properties. “Maybe after we have a bash here, we can all go through that corn maze down the road. An amazing maize maze,” she added with a snorted giggle. “It wasn’t fair of you guys to run through it without us.”
“Kevin and Mike have already seen that. Besides,” Hannah said, “the sign said it’s closed after five and you have to make special arrangements with the owners to go in there after dark.” She’d been upset when Kevin had driven right up to the entry of the corn maze. Then he and Mike had gotten out to tear a ways into it—and come crashing back through one wall of it when they got lost. “And each of us would have to leave a donation,” Hannah added as she opened the unlocked, squeaky gate in the wooden fence surrounding the hillside acre of graves and grass.
“Listen to you!” Tiffany Miles, who worked with Hannah at the recording studio, scolded as she got a blanket out of the trunk. “You can take the Amish girl out of the country, but you can’t take the Amish out of the girl. Rules and regs out the wazoo!”
Kevin Pryor, Tiffany’s guy, found that really funny as he and Mike Swanson, Liz’s friend, hauled the cooler from the trunk of Kevin’s black car. But Hannah wasn’t laughing. Ever since her family’s barn had burned last spring, she’d been more than homesick. She missed her folks, even her daad, the local bishop she’d had a huge falling-out with. She longed to see others, too, but she couldn’t think of that now. Somewhere she’d heard the expression “You can’t go home again,” and it scared her to death that it might be true.
Oh, why had she let her friends talk her into this tonight? Worse, Halloween fell on the Sabbath this year, and that bothered her, too. She should have just given them directions but she figured she’d better keep an eye on them. Since she’d recently broken up with her boyfriend, she’d tried to get out of coming along, but they’d insisted they could cheer her up. Yet being back here, all she wanted to do was cry.
“Perfect place,” Mike said with a tip of his velvet top hat, “for a booze and boos party. Boo! We goths have finally gone ghosting!”
“There are no ghosts here,” Hannah insisted, feeling defensive as they passed her grandparents’ simple tombstones. “Everyone buried here is at peace.” But the truth was she felt haunted by all she’d loved and left behind.
Mike cranked up the volume on his MP3 player. Deathrock music spewed out, heavy drums and synthesizers to a tribal beat, pulsing but sad, so different from the music Hannah had in her head of singing a country song or a hymn, her own voice blending with Seth’s, now as lost to her as all the Amish.
Suddenly, she wanted to strip off the heavy, draped chain necklaces she wore, the fishnet stockings under the ankle-length, purple ruffled skirt and black velvet jacket. To wash off her heavy eye shadow and black lipstick, to hide her spiky, red-dyed hair under a black bonnet.
The guys plunked their stuff down pretty much in the middle of the graveyard before she read the name on the closest tombstone. Oh, no! Not Lena Lantz’s grave, but it was too late to make them move and no way was she going to explain why. Lena had died almost a year ago, so Hannah had not been here then and had only heard indirectly about the tragedy. It was so hard to believe she’d been away from the Home Valley for nearly three years.
Kevin passed around wineglasses and poured. Clumps of clouds hid the moon, but he pretended to howl at it. They clinked glasses and drank the bloodred wine.
“Vampires got nothing on us tonight,” Mike teased, and pretended to bite Liz on the neck while she screamed and giggled. Tiffany got to her feet, twirling the parasol she always carried, even after dark—what an attention-getter, as if goths needed that. She did a jerky dance around the low, matching stone markers with only the deceased’s name, birth and death dates.
“Stop that. Not funny!” Hannah protested when Tiffany pretended to be digging up Lena’s grave with the closed parasol as a shovel. Kevin got up to cavort with her. Suddenly, it was too much. Hannah pictured herself standing nearby with her family and friends when they buried her grandparents … and here lay a young mother, even though she was the woman Seth dumped her for. Hannah hated herself for bringing her friends here where they didn’t belong—and neither did she.
