Sunny wagged her tail. This was her third litter. She was a good mama, attentive and loving to her pups.
“Who’s the sire?” Mrs. Parsall asked.
“The papa is Copper. He’s likely to be around somewhere, maybe chasing chickens.”
“Ah. They’ll have beautiful pups.” She rubbed Sunny’s glossy stomach. “Just beautiful.”
“I think so,” I said modestly. “Copper has the broad chest and that dark gold. I’m hoping that the pups will inherit their mother’s desire to stay home, though.”
Mrs. Parsall kissed Sunny behind the ear. “A little wanderlust never hurt anyone.”
I laughed. “You’ve not seen Copper being chased by the rooster. He isn’t fond of the dog harassing his hens.”
Mrs. Parsall looked up at me through her bifocals. “This will be your last litter before you do the Rumspringa thing?”
I nodded. As eager as I was to experience Outside, a pain welled in my throat at the idea of leaving the dogs. “It will be. But I’ve been training my little sister about the dogs. She’ll care for them in the meantime.”
“How long will you be gone?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure. I haven’t really thought about how long.” The group of us had talked about going north, to the nearest large city, to rent apartments and find some work. We could be gone a week or a year.
Or . . . a small voice in my head prodded. Or you could be gone for always.
But as much as I wanted to experience Outside, the Plain community was all I’d ever known, and I didn’t know if I had the desire or the fortitude to leave it permanently.
I suppose that was what Rumspringa was for. To test limits and make decisions. Most of the young people in our community came back after only a few weekends Outside, spent at amusement parks or camping. Some made no formal display of leaving. They just wandered to the malls and cities during the day, wearing jeans and makeup and experimenting with cigarettes and fast food in a halfhearted way before being baptized into the Amish faith and giving up those things for good. Very few Amish “jumped the fence” and stayed Outside. But it still seemed possible. Vague, but possible.
Mrs. Parsall smiled. “You are always welcome at my house. You know that.” Her home was empty now that her son and daughter had gone away to college across the country. Though she was very proud of them, I could tell that she was lonely. But contemplating Rumspringa at Mrs. Parsall’s house seemed a bit like a sleepover at a favorite aunt’s . . . not the full experience of Outside that I craved.
I gave her a spontaneous hug and a grin. “Thank you.”
She patted my cheek. “You just have to be careful. There are a lot of dangers out there for a young woman.”
“Don’t you mean for a naive young woman?” I didn’t bristle; my tone was teasing.
“For anyone.” Mrs. Parsall’s pretty moon face darkened. “It’s not like it used to be.”
“My parents went Outside for their Rumspringa,” I said. “They told me to be wary of the intentions of strange men. And smoking and drinking and staying out late.” My parents had raised me to be a so-called nice girl; they wanted me to return as one.
“Not only that. Things have become more violent.” She frowned. “There was a mass murder, not too far from here, last week. A whole family slaughtered in their sleep.”
I shuddered, though the idea seemed unreal as the movie advertisements. “I will have Elijah.”
“Just be very, very careful,” the older woman said. “It’s a dangerous world.”
“You sound like my parents.”
“All parents love their children. You should have heard the lecture I gave my kids before they left the house.” She grinned. “Though they were well-armed with cell phones, checking accounts, laundry soap, and condoms, I still worried.”
“Mrs. Parsall!” I could feel the blush spreading beneath my pale cheeks. Though I had seen the dogs breed many times and knew perfectly well what caused children, I was still uncomfortable with the idea of myself having babies. Or experiencing sex, for that matter. And love . . . love was a mysterious thing. I saw a lot of couples marrying out of a sense of acceptance, of duty. That was a kind of love, but not the passionate love that I saw people emphasize Outside.
“These are the facts of life, m’dear.” Mrs. Parsall chuckled. “Love and lust and laundry soap. Just ask Sunny.”
Sunny grinned her inscrutable canine grin, her pink tongue protruding beyond her teeth. She was a dog and already more wise than I was about such things.
I walked Mrs. Parsall outside the barn, through the golden field back to my house. No one but she and I and the dogs ever came back here, and there was no path worn in the grass. The sun had lowered on the horizon, shining through the leaves of sugar maple trees just beginning to yellow with the coming of fall. I could still feel the warmth of the day through the dark brown cotton of my dress. If I didn’t look up at the trees, I could almost convince myself that it was still summer. Almost.
But our community was bustling with the work of autumn and the activities of harvest: younger children gathered apples from a small orchard; men drove horses with carts containing bales of hay to barns; a group of women was busy gathering grapevines to make wreaths to sell in the English shops for Christmas.
We were a good-size settlement of Plain folk, about seventy families, spread over half a county. We had heard rumors of other Plain communities that were shrinking, owing to the youth and the spell of Rumspringa. And there were tales of other communities that grew so fast, there was no farmland for young families. But not ours. Ours had remained the same size and shape as far back as anyone could remember. There always seemed to be enough land for everyone to have at least forty acres to farm, if they wanted it.
And everyone seemed happy, unaffected by the schisms that seemed so common in other Amish settlements. The Bishop said that was because we stuck to the old ways. Everyone knew what was expected of us. There was no renegotiation of rules every time some new technology flew up a bonnet. The Ordnung was the Ordnung. Period. And we had been rewarded for following the Ordnung: there was always enough work and food and spouses and land for everyone. God provided for his people.
The pumpkin patch that my little sister tended was nearly as ripe as Sunny with distended gourds. There was one particularly large monster of a pumpkin that Sarah had a special fondness for. Twice daily she squatted beside it, whispering to it and petting it. Whatever she was doing seemed to be working—the pumpkin was easily over a hundred pounds, with another month to go before it would be severed from the vine.
Mrs. Parsall leaned against the bumper of her old blue station wagon. She pulled her keys from her pocket, gave me a one-armed hug. “You take care of yourself, kiddo.”
I grinned against her shoulder. But something dark against the blue sky caught my attention. I squinted at it, first thinking it to be a bird. But it wasn’t a bird at all.
I stepped back from Mrs. Parsall, pointing at the sky. “Look!”
A dark dot buzzed overhead, growing larger. It was a hel-icopter, flying so low that I could hear the whump-whump-whump of its blades. It was painted green with a white cross on the side, seeming to wobble in the blue.
Mrs. Parsall shaded her eyes with her hands, shouting to be heard above the roar. “It’s Life Flight.”
“It’s a what?”
“It’s a medical helicopter. From a hospital.”
“It shouldn’t be doing that, should it?”
“Hell, no. It—”
The helicopter veered right and left, as if it were a toy buffered by a nonexistent tornado. The breeze today was calm, stirred by the helicopter blades and the roar. I thought I saw people inside, fighting, their silhouettes stark through a flash of window, then lost in the sun. The helicopter made a shrieking sound, the whump-whump-whump plowing through the air as it bumped and bucked. It howled over us, so close that I could have reached out and touched it if I’d been standing on the roof of our house.
Mrs. Parsall grabbed me and flung me to the ground. I shoved my bonnet back from my brow in enough time to see the helicopter spiral out of control, spinning nose over tail into a field. It vanished above tall tassels of corn.
For a couple of heartbeats, I saw nothing, heard nothing.
Then I felt the impact through my hands and the front of my ribs, bit my tongue so hard I could taste blood. Black smoke rose over the horizon.
“Oh no,” Mrs. Parsall gasped.
I scrambled to my feet, began to run. I heard Mrs. Parsall behind me, the jingle of her purse strap. I dimly registered her voice shouting into her cell phone. I ran toward the fire, across the grass. I swung myself up and over the barbed-wire fence, mindless of the scratching on my hands and in my skirt.
I plunged into the stalks of corn, taller than me, following the smell of smoke and the distant crackle of fire. I was conscious of the brittle yellow stalks tearing at me as I passed and realized that they were too flammable this far into the season. If the fire got loose in the corn, we’d have no way to stop it.
But my immediate concern was the people on the helicopter.
I ripped through the field and shoved aside blackened stalks of corn to view the site of the crash. The heat shimmered in the air, causing my eyes to tear up. I lifted my apron to cover my nose against the smell of oily smoke.
Fire seethed above me in a black and orange plume, curling around the husk of the dead helicopter. The bent and broken tail jutted out from the ground at an odd angle. The cockpit had broken open, flames streaming through the broken glass.
And I swore I saw something moving inside.
Chapter Two
I squinted into the sizzle of the heat, sucking in my breath. A hand slapped against the cracked glass of the window, slithered out the broken edges. Something alive.
Instinctively, I stepped toward it. I clambered over a smoking piece of metal and climbed up on the bent nose of the helicopter. I cried out when I braced my hands against the metal—it was hot as an iron. Tears streaming down my face from the smoke and the fumes, I reached out to the bloody hand and clasped it in mine.
It ceased twitching and writhing at my touch, and for an instant all was still. I didn’t feel the searing heat of the metal through my apron and dress. I even ceased to hear the crackle of fire. I only sought to give some bit of comfort to the person in the wreckage. For that moment, we connected. The hand felt still in mine, as if soothed by my presence. I could see that it was a man’s burly hand. I saw a green sleeve of a jacket pulled past his wrist, slick polyester from a manufactured uniform. I thought that he must be the pilot. He gripped my hand tightly. I could feel the fear pulsing in his palm. I did not know what I intended to do, only that I could sense the desperation clasped in my fingers.
Suddenly, his arm jerked, and sound came rushing back to me. I heard him scream, and he clutched my hand tighter, so hard that I cried out. He pulled against me, and I felt myself sliding against the hot metal, into the wreckage.
But it wasn’t the pilot pulling me. He was still screaming as he was dragged back into the wreckage . . . by something else. I peered into the smoke-encrusted glass and saw a pair of red eyes, glowing with reflected light like a cat’s in the smoky darkness.
My heart lurched into my mouth. Whimpering, I struggled against the urge to extricate myself from the viselike grip—I wasn’t sure if I was trying to pull him free, or me free of him. But his fingers spasmed around mine, and I was lifted off my precarious balancing point on the helicopter nose.
“No!” I cried, yanking back with all my might. I might be small, but I was strong from years of hard work. I braced my shoe against a crease in the metal . . .
. . . and a splash of blood struck me in the face like a slap.
I gasped. The blood and sweat in my palm slipped against the pilot’s, and his hand slid free. His arm lashed back into the cockpit, like a fish on the end of a line, and I landed hard on my backside on the scorched ground.
My spine ached from the impact, and I stared up at the glass, dazed. I heard another short scream, then nothing. My fingers wound in the burnt grass, and my heart hammered. I knew, deep in the core of my being, that there was something terrible in there . . .
“Katie!” I felt arms around my waist, hauling me to my feet. I blinked stupidly at Elijah, who gaped open-mouthed at my face.
I looked down. My chest and apron were spattered with blood, as if I’d slaughtered a pig. My stunned gaze slid back to the wreckage. I could hear popping noises inside the metal shell, like popcorn in a kettle. “The pilot is in there,” I whispered. “We have to help the pilot . . .”
“Get back!”
A familiar voice thundered over us. It was a voice from Sunday church service. The voice of the Bishop. He stood yards from us, holding a shovel, his salt-and-pepper beard damp with perspiration. Other Elders had materialized from the corn, sparks bright against their black clothes.