Chapter 22
The line of buggies and a few cars and pickup trucks parked on the roadside at the Miller farm stretched out so far that Jojo couldn’t even see the house.
When they finally reached the room where the child was laid out, Jojo felt the weight of sorrow like a palpable thing.
Like the other shooting victims, the little girl had been brought home directly from the mortuary as soon as the body was released.
She had been dressed in a simple white dress, a pale blue apron with a white prayer covering, and she lay as if asleep in the box that was just the right size.
Jojo was sure Luke Fisher had made it sometime in the long hours since last night.
As she and Jonas fell in line to pass quietly past the coffin, Jojo looked through an open doorway into a bedroom and saw Sarah Ann’s mother seated on the side of the bed with a woman on each side of her, holding her hands. She was crying softly.
There was a couple who were sort of stationed at the far end of the coffin, and Jojo assumed that they were Sarah Ann’s grandparents. The man standing on the near end was probably her father. He spoke to Uncle Jonas.
“Good to see you, Jonas.” He reached out and shook Jonas’s hand. “And you … Joanna?”
“Yes, I’m Joanna.”
“Good of you to come.” Then his face registered recognition, and he realized who she was. “You were there last night, weren’t you?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Martha told me about how you helped her and I’m grateful. God bless you, child.” He reached over and patted her hand.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said.
At the word “loss,” the man’s eyes shot to the coffin, and he involuntarily sucked in a gasp, then stifled a sob.
“She’s with our Lord now. She’s in heaven.” Then he looked back at Jojo and squeezed her hand tighter. “But I’m gonna miss my baby girl.”
Now Jojo found herself standing beside the little girl in the box.
She had pale blonde hair. Jojo had noticed that the night before.
It was so pale it was almost white, and Jojo knew that she must have blue eyes to match that pale hair.
She had a spray of freckles on her nose and a little pointed chin, and images flashed through Jojo’s mind of the things that little girl would never do, the wedding dress she’d never wear, the child of her own she’d never hold.
A monster with a rifle had stolen her future, and again Jojo felt the wave of anger flow over her.
She bit it back and stepped out of the way so the couple behind her could move forward.
When she looked up, she saw that Martha Miller was studying her from the bedroom.
Their eyes met and locked for a moment, and then she saw Martha say something to the woman who was holding her hand.
The woman looked up at Jojo, glanced back at Martha, and nodded her head.
Then she rose to her feet and left the bedroom, made her way purposefully through the crowded living room, weaving among the people in quiet conversations, and approached Jojo.
“Martha would like to have a word with you, Miss Joanna,” the woman said, “if you don’t mind?—”
“Of course I don’t mind.” Jojo followed the woman back to the bedroom, and when she got there, Martha Miller was alone.
She spoke to the woman who’d accompanied Jojo. “Could you leave us for a few minutes in private? Just for a few minutes?—”
The woman nodded, and with an uncertain look on her face, turned and left the room. Martha looked up at Jojo. “Would you close the door, please?”
Jojo went to the door and closed it.
The woman patted the bed next to her. “Here, come sit by me.”
Jojo sat.
The woman looked terrible, her eyes were red and swollen, her face puffy, and even though her kapp was starched and neat, it was sitting a little askew on her head.
“I just wanted to thank you, personal, for what you did last night. That was very kind of you.” Before Jojo could respond, she continued.
“I don’t really remember much about it—just running to the buggy.
And then I remember being there and trying to find my baby, my Annie.
And I remember your face, your kind face. And I thank you.”
Jojo could think of nothing to say so she reached out and took the grieving mother’s hand and squeezed it. She assumed that all Martha wanted was to express her gratitude and she started to rise.
But the woman held onto Jojo’s hand and took a deep breath. “I know you’re a righteous person because I can see it in your eyes. My husband says I’m good at that—judging other people, whether they were kind and good or maybe not so good. I’ve always been able to tell.”
Jojo didn’t know what to say, so she still didn’t say anything.
“And I can see right now the concern on your face for me, a stranger. You don’t know me, but you’re being good to me because the Lord put it in your heart to be good.”
Jojo had no idea where she was going with this.
The woman took another breath. “I know who you are. You spent your life being a police officer. I mean, you’ve been enforcing the law and such, yes.” The woman took one large breath then, let it out and looked square in Jojo’s face. “I want you to find the man who shot my daughter.”
Jojo couldn’t have been more surprised if Martha Miller had slapped her. “You what?”
“You heard what I said. I want you to find the man who killed my Annie.”
“Why me? I don’t understand why?—”
“Oh, yes, you do. Of course you do.” Martha got up and started pacing back and forth in front of the bed. “Of course you know. You’re … one of us. You were raised one of us, and I know that deep down in your heart you will always be Amish.”
Jojo thought that the woman was probably right about that, but still …
“Ma’am, you don’t have any idea the resources the police will bring to bear on finding the person who shot your little girl and all those other people.
The state police, the sheriff’s department, the FBI, the ATF.
They started looking for the shooter last night.
He killed seven people. I’m sure they’ll find him. ”
“I’m sure you can find him. You and only you. Because you are a child of God and God will help you find that monster.”
“Mrs. Miller, I can’t. I?—”
The woman turned then, and her eyes were on fire, her face a rictus of anger and grief. “They brought me my little girl and I cleaned her up. I saw what he did to her.”
And it hit Jojo then how horrible it had been for the families of all the Amish victims. They didn’t have even that thin cultural veneer to separate them from the reality of death.
The people in town could step back behind a veil of denial provided by a culture used to hiding the ugly and putting a good face on reality.
The families of the shooting victims in town would see their loved ones in caskets lined with satin, their hands clasped over each other, their faces looking lifelike because of the morticians’ skill applying makeup.
Jojo understood better than most people what had been cleaned up by funeral homes, the ugliness of death.
She’d seen people blown apart, arms and legs gone, blood?—
But she had never had to clean and dress the body of an innocent little girl whose chest had been ripped open by a gunshot.
The curtain in Jojo’s mind that hid what she would not look at, slipped a little, just enough to let in ugly purple light …
an innocent little girl whose chest had been ripped open.
Jojo ground her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut, felt herself sliding.
She held on with all her mental strength as the world of reality tilted and she began to slide down off the edge of it into a world of heat and sweat and sand and screaming and bullets and?—
“Miss Joanna.”
She heard Martha Miller call her name, but it seemed like the voice came from a long way away.
“Miss Joanna!”
Jojo opened her eyes, fully expecting to see sand, gutted vehicles, and a cloudless blue sky with the sun burning a hole in it. What she saw was the anguished face of this Amish woman whose kapp had slid slightly sideways on her head, but no one had wanted to mention it to her.
“I’m sorry. I—” But there was no explanation, no way to explain it without pulling the curtain back and looking at what hid behind it and Jojo just flat out could not do it. “I’m so sorry, ma’am, there’s no way I can?—”
“There was a hole in my little girl’s chest. Her … heart … her heart was gone.”
Jojo froze.
“Please find the monster who ripped out my little girl’s beating heart.”
Jojo wasn’t really sure afterward exactly what she had told Martha Miller, exactly how she had capitulated, what words she had used to say she would help.
All she knew was that she would do anything she could to lessen the grieving mother’s pain, and if it would make her feel better to know that Jojo, “one of us,” an Amish was trying to find her daughter’s killer then Jojo would give her that.
“God will help you, child,” Martha said to Jojo’s back as she left the room. “We’ll all pray, and God will guide you.”
Jojo didn’t turn around. She just nodded her head without speaking and went out into the crowd to find Uncle Jonas.
They came out on the back porch and crunched through the snow to the front of the house.
It sat on a little rise, and Jojo looked out across the yard at the lane jammed with buggies as far as she could see in both directions.
The community had come together to care for the bereaved and to help them carry the burden of their grief.
Jojo was burdened, too. But not by grief. By anger. It flowed through her in red-hot waves that made her face flush, and she ground her teeth to push it back. Maybe God would direct her to the killer, but she would let that anger fuel her.
Oh, yes indeed, she would. She would let it give her strength.