Sworn to Silence

exhaustion from earlier is gone. In its place is the steel resolve to find a monster.

As if realizing I’m finished here, the doctor snaps off his latex gloves. “I’ll call you as soon as I finish.”

“Thanks, Doc. You’ve been a huge help.”

I’m midway to the door when I remember I have one more question. “Do you have the complete autopsy reports on the vics from before? I’ve only got the summaries.”

“I believe they’re in archive, but I can get them.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d pull everything you have and send copies to my office ASAP.”

He holds my gaze, and his expression darkens. “I was just out of my residency back then, Kate. I assisted Dr. Kours on all four autopsies.” He laughs, but it’s a humorless sound. “I swear to God I almost went into dentistry after seeing those bodies.”

I don’t want to hear what he’s going to say next, but I don’t turn away.

“You see something like that and it sticks with you.” He crosses to me. “Amanda Horner died exactly the same way as those girls.”

Though I’d anticipated this moment, his words send a chill through me.

“I’m sure you noticed that the number carved into the victim’s abdomen jumps from nine to twenty-three,” the doctor says. “That concerns me.”

“We’re not even sure if we’re dealing with the same killer,” I reply. “Could be a copycat.”

He tosses his gloves into the biohazard receptacle. “I don’t want to believe there is one man, let alone two, who are capable of this kind of evil. I sure as hell don’t want to believe they sprang from this town.”

He removes his glasses and wipes the bridge of his nose with a handkerchief, and I realize this veteran doctor is upset by the things he’s seen today.

“It’s his signature,” he says. “I’ll stake my career on it.”

I stare at him, telling myself he’s wrong. But for the first time, a tiny grain of doubt assails me. Some little voice in the back of my mind demands to know if, in the hysteria and horror of that dreadful day sixteen years ago, the shotgun blast failed to do the job.

For half of my life I’ve believed I took a man’s life. I’ve forgiven myself and asked God to do the same. I rationalized my actions, my silence, the silence of my family. Somehow, I learned to live with it. This murder makes me question all of it.

“Kate?” The doc’s bushy white brows knit in concern.

“I’m okay,” I say quickly and start toward the door. I feel the doctor’s eyes on me as I yank it open. By the time I step into the hall I’m sweating beneath my uniform.

There’s only one way to find out if the man I shot all those years ago is dead. To do that I need to talk to two people I’ve spoken to only a handful of times since. Two people who were there the day my life was irrevocably changed by violence. The day a fourteen-year-old Amish girl picked up her father’s shotgun and killed a man.

Or did I?

CHAPTER 5

I sit in the Explorer in the hospital parking lot for five minutes before I’m able to function. My hands are still shaking when I hit the speed dial for dispatch. Mona picks up on the first ring.

“I want you to compile a list of abandoned homes, properties and businesses in and around Painters Mill,” I say without preamble. “Say within a fifty-mile radius.”

“Anything in particular you’re looking for?”

“Just make the list. I’ll fill you in on the details when I get back to the station.” Putting the SUV in gear, I head for the highway and try not to think too hard about what I have to do next.

My brother, Jacob, his wife, Irene, and my two nephews, Elam and James, live on a sixty-five-acre farm on a dirt road nine miles east of town. The place has been in the Burkholder family for eighty years. In keeping with the Amish tradition, Jacob, the eldest and only male child in our family, inherited the farm when my mother passed away two years ago.

At the mouth of the gravel lane, I jam the Explorer into four-wheel drive and muscle the vehicle through foot-deep snow, praying I don’t get stuck. The familiarity of the farm strikes me as I barrel closer at a too-fast clip. A small apple orchard lies to my right. The bare-branched trees seem to glare at me in stern judgment from their white winter blanket.

I’m an outsider here, a foreigner trespassing on sacred ground. That fact has never been more evident as I enter the world of my past. I’m a stranger to the people I once knew intimately. I rarely visit. I barely know my two young nephews. It hurts knowing they’ll grow up and never know me. As much as I want to make things right, some chasms are simply too treacherous to traverse.

To my left, six milk cows huddle around a feeder mounded with snowcrusted hay. Ahead, the lane veers right where ruler-straight rows of cut corn usher my eyes to the farmhouse beyond. It makes for a pretty picture in the snow, and for a brief moment I’m reminded of a simpler time. A time when my sister and brother and I ran barefoot and carefree through wheat fields and played hide-and-seek among tall rows of corn. I recall winter days filled with hours of ice hockey with our cousins on Miller’s pond. I remember a time when our only responsibilities were milking the cows and goats, feeding the chickens, helping Mamm snap beans and, of course, worship.

That childhood bliss ended abruptly in the summer of my fourteenth year. The day a man by the name of Daniel Lapp came to our house with murder on his mind. I lost my innocence that day. I lost my ability to trust. My capacity to forgive. My faith in both God and family. I nearly lost my life, and in the weeks following many times I wished I had.

I haven’t been here since Mamm’s funeral two years ago. Most Amish probably think avoiding my siblings the way I do is shameful. But I have my reasons.

I never would have returned to Painters Mill at all if it hadn’t been for my mother’s diagnosis of breast cancer three years ago. But Mamm and I had always shared a special bond. She’d been supportive of me when others had not—especially when I informed my parents that I wouldn’t be joining the church. I wasn’t baptized after my rumspringa or “running around” period. Mamm disapproved, but she never judged. And she never stopped loving me.

At the age of eighteen, I moved to Columbus and spent the next year broke and miserable and more lost than I’d ever been in my life. An unlikely friendship and, eventually, an even more unlikely job saved me. Gina Colorosa taught me how to not be Amish and gave me a crash course in all the wicked ways of the “English,” or non-Amish. Ravenous for new experiences, I was a quick study. Within a month of knowing her, we were roommates living on fast food, Heineken and Marlboro Lights 100’s. She was a dispatcher with the Columbus PD and helped me land a job answering phones at a police substation near downtown. In the following weeks that minimum-wage position became my world—and my salvation.

Gina and I enrolled in the community college, our collective sights set on criminal justice degrees. It was one of the most satisfying and exciting times of my life. Mamm took the bus to Columbus for my graduation. Riding in a motorized vehicle was a direct violation of the Ordnung, the rules of our church district, but my mother did it anyway. For that, I’ll always be thankful to her. I introduced her to Gina, and told her we were going to enroll in the police academy. Mamm didn’t understand, but she never condemned me. It was the last time I saw her before her diagnosis of cancer. Datt passed suddenly of a stroke six months after I graduated. I didn’t return for his funeral. But I came back for Mamm. To be with her during her final days. To help with the farm. That’s what I told myself, anyway.

But in all honesty, my roots had been calling to me for quite some time. Looking back, I realize it was more than my mother’s impending death that brought me back. Deep inside I knew the time had come for me to face my family—and a past I’d been running away from for over a decade.

A week after Mamm’s death, as my sister Sarah and I went through her things, two town councilmen drove out to the farm. Norm Johnston and Neil Stubblefield informed me that chief of police Delbert McCoy would be retiring in a month. They wanted to know if I was interested in replacing him.