Return to Grace

Ray-Lynn bit her lower lip so she wouldn’t say what she was thinking about Jack. Mentioned her? How nice! Or was this woman trying to get her even more angry with Jack, to drive a bigger wedge between them?

“Since it’s a small town and all,” Lillian went on, “I figure we’d cross paths and better get the worst over.”

“If this is the worst, that would be great. Will you be staying long? I’d heard somewhere you were fed up with small-town life—and your ex-husband, for that matter.”

“Live and learn,” she said with a little shrug and her hands on her hips. “And please, call me Lily. I’m back, maybe for good.”

Or for bad, Ray-Lynn thought, gripping her car keys so hard they bit into the palm of her hand. Surely this woman, however much nerve she had, wasn’t going to ask for her old job back at the restaurant. And, as she suddenly turned tail and jogged away with a jerky little wave, Ray-Lynn had the worst feeling she wasn’t going to keep up this polite facade to ask Ray-Lynn to give up Jack, either. Oh, no, she was just going to try to take him.

“You okay about this?” Linc asked Hannah as he stopped his car where Kevin had parked his along the road by the maze the night of the shootings. They’d planned this all out, and he’d explained everything to her parents, but she still felt shaky about it.

It was even a similar night, Hannah thought as she glanced out the windshield, with the moon mostly hidden by clumps of clouds. Just as when she’d been with her friends, she eyed the big maze sign with its rules: No Smoking! Stay on the Paths! Hold Kids by the Hand! Do Not Touch Displays! Enjoy Half Mile of Scary Fun!

“Yes. I said I wanted to help and I do,” she told Linc. “I admit it wouldn’t be the same in broad daylight. Sorry I didn’t think to tell you sooner, but our quick stop here that night—it just slipped my mind at first.”

“I understand. I cleared it with the Meyers brothers this afternoon, played up that you didn’t approve of Kevin and Mike running through here and that you said they’d have to pay. George and Clint said they’d stay in the house so we could replicate the trespassing. They seemed pretty calm about it, said it’s happened before that people ran through without paying and tampered with the displays or the maze itself. The only thing they said I could slightly construe to be self-implicating was that they don’t want people to make their own paths because it ‘riles’ them. ‘We laid it out and no crashing through our corn barriers!’”

She had to smile at Linc’s mimicking of the brothers. “They’re not the usual type of kind English neighbors around here,” she explained. “But if they’re guilty of the shootings, anything they say isn’t to be trusted—such as they’ll stay put in their house tonight.”

“In my book they’re a step down from rednecks, like you said Ray-Lynn called them. But that type doesn’t want the FBI breathing down those red necks, believe me. They’ll stay put tonight. Besides, they’re entertaining a lady.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Yeah, well, the lady’s their momma from the other side of town. It’s her birthday. They got a cake and all. Listen, Hannah,” he added, his voice suddenly much more serious. He turned even more toward her and reached across her to firmly grasp her right upper arm. “I know you’re not big on this reenactment tactic, but it may help. You may remember even more.”

“But I barely went into the maze that night, just a little ways to yell at them to come out. I went in the entrance and took one turn and it seemed so dark. By the time I started walking back toward the car, they came bursting out through the maze wall.”

“Anything else you recall, just let me know, honey.”

Honey? It was no doubt a slip of the tongue. He’s probably meant to say Hannah. But he still held her arm, stroking it with his thumb as if to calm her, but it didn’t. It had the opposite effect.

“All right, let’s go,” she said, and pulled away to fumble with her door handle, which was still locked until he clicked something so she could open it. The big print sign with the maze rules—Stay on the Paths!—was knocking against something in the wind. It scared her when Linc drew his gun, though he just held it down at his side. In his other hand he held a sturdy flashlight with a bright beam. That made her feel a bit better, as had their earlier heart-to-heart talk today.

Trying to figure him out as a person, not just as an investigator, she’d asked him if he had a family.

“Sure—two brothers who live out near Denver, one of them a police chief. I have nieces and nephews galore. But married with kids? No. Came close, but it wouldn’t have worked out, anyway. Sometime I work 24/7, seven days a week, then can leave on a moment’s notice and be gone for days, like this assignment. Since Quantico—that’s our training site in Virginia—I’ve been busy climbing the Bureau’s ladder—that’s another name for the FBI. My college degree was in finance, but white-collar crimes bored me stiff.”

“So now you’re in a group that looks into murders?”

“Right, violent crimes. Amish country is the last place I thought that would ever take me. If I make it to retirement age at fifty, I don’t know if I could take a place this peaceful.”

“Age fifty? But that’s so young to retire.”

“Only twelve years away, but I’ll find something else to do. Maybe help build barns,” he’d said with a chuckle, though she couldn’t see what was funny about that. And she thought someone that busy could still be lonely, but she didn’t say so yet. Right now, as they approached the maze, that gun was making her feel more jumpy than safe.

“You sure you need the gun?” she asked as her courage wavered again.

“Just a precaution, since I can’t see around the next corner. So how scary are the displays in here?”

“I came through once with Seth in our rumspringa years, though we weren’t supposed to because the bishop—my father—didn’t approve of this place with its witches and fake dead bodies. It’s not like things jump at you, at least not back then. They’re mostly stuffed, but some look real, even though most folks come through in the daylight, unless you make special arrangements with the Meyerses for a group after dark and then they watch you like a hawk.”

“Yeah? Then I’ll bet they would have been upset at unannounced night visitors, especially weird-looking ones making noise.”

Despite fitful moonlight and Linc’s flashlight beam, it was instantly darker inside the maze. The dry cornstalks rustled and seemed to press in on them. Shadows leaped from everywhere.

“Okay, so the guys probably turned to the right here,” he said, darting his beam into the blackness.

“I’m not sure, but they did eventually emerge from the right side of the maze, over this way. But they were inside here long enough that they could have gotten a lot farther than this.”

“The Meyers brothers must know this labyrinth in their sleep. They could have been in here, nearby, and Kevin and Mike wouldn’t even have known it.”

Hannah gasped when they walked through fake, suspended cobwebs—yarn?—around the next turn, but Linc just shoved them away with the flashlight. The beam bounced across his face. It almost made his features look like a fright mask she’d seen uptown in the drugstore near Halloween. While Hannah hung back a bit, Linc peered around another corner. It was all she could do to keep from taking his arm, clinging to him.

“Don’t look here,” he said, stepping back almost into her. “It’s a gross ghoul or zombie in an open coffin. Tell you what, let’s do this backward since you do know where they emerged from. They should hand out maps of these paths.”

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