LITMIR.BIZ

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planes and sanders to create this thing of beauty in the window couldn’t shave himself without slicing into his own skin? It made no sense to her.

      Belatedly, she realized him shaving at all made no sense, not against what she understood of the community he lived in.

      “You have no beard,” she said.

      Any softening she’d seen in him vanished with that simple observation.

      “I don’t deserve that symbol,” he said. His voice was harsh, as if even saying the words were part of some punishment he was bound to endure.

      Emma knew Amish men grew their beards—but not mustaches—when they married. In this sect it was a symbol, as he’d said, of that passage to adulthood. She also knew from the file that his wife had died in childbirth three years ago. Did becoming a widower mean the beard had to go? It wasn’t as if they could wear black as a sign of mourning—they always wore black. The women were allowed some color, if mostly darker shades of blues, greens, browns, but the men seemed to dress mostly in black, sometimes blues.

      It was very strange, she thought. She’d grown up seeing the “plain people” all the time; she’d thought nothing of it, didn’t find them strange, just different. Her mother had given her a simple explanation of their ways when she’d been a child, and she’d accepted it in the way of a child, been secretly glad she didn’t have to wear a dress all the time and thought little more about it than that.

      But now, looking at this man, in his simple black trousers, clean, white shirt and suspenders, she found herself picturing what he would look like in the clothing of her world. Put him in a pair of jeans and even that same white shirt, lose the suspenders and the hat, and women would be beating a path to his door.

      And she had a sinking feeling she might be first in line.

      With an effort larger than she’d had to make in a long while, she forced herself to concentrate on the matter at hand.

      “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude on your personal decisions.” She tried for a lighter touch. “But you might want to take it a bit easier with that razor.”

      His hand moved, as if he were going to instinctively touch the fresh cut. But he stopped short, curling his fingers away at the last moment. His hand, she noticed, was strong, well used and marked with a couple of small scars. Yet his fingers were long, graceful, and she glanced at the piece in the window once more. Artist definitely applied, she thought.

      “That I shave seems everyone’s business. How I shave is mine.”

      There was an edge in his voice. So Mr. Troyer had a touch of temper, she thought. Or she was seriously rubbing him the wrong way. An awful thought struck her. Was he somehow aware, had he sensed her reaction to him? Had she let it show? Had it been so long since a man, any man, had stirred such interest in her that she wasn’t able to hide it even in this most inappropriate of situations?

      Or was it simply that he was worried about his sister? That certainly would be enough to put anyone on edge. Although she wondered about that “everyone’s business” comment. Wasn’t that part of his culture, to play down the individual to maintain the cohesiveness of the community? Yet something was obviously eating at him.

      “Why do you shave?” she asked, her curiosity genuine and stemming from a source she didn’t care to examine just now. “Is it because your wife died?”

      His jaw went rigid. “I do not speak of her to strangers. Especially English.”

      Then his initial look of shock faded, she guessed as he realized she likely knew more than any stranger would. And she had her answer now; his eyes did indeed darken in moments of emotion. In particular anger.

      “I’m sorry,” Emma said, knowing she’d crossed a line and uncomfortably aware she’d done it with little justification. She was usually in much better control of herself than this, and she’d better get back to that in a hurry.

      “It is enough I have the elders threatening me with sanction, my friends telling me it is time to move on,” he muttered.

      Then he stopped himself, looking a bit like she felt, as if he were unused to speaking when he didn’t mean to. Threat of sanction? For shaving? Was that what he was upset about?

      She remembered her father once explaining to her that the Amish, as every human, got angry. But they, unlike too many in the outside world, controlled their anger. They had faith in God’s will, and to become angry over something that happened was, to them, to question that will. At the time Emma had been fascinated, but years later a fateful day had made the idea of God’s will hard for her to even think about rationally.

      But that had no business intruding on what she was here for. Yet something about the way he’d sounded made her say one more thing.

      “My parents were killed over a decade ago. I miss them every day of my life. It will never be time to ‘move on’ if that means forgetting them,” she said quietly.

      Something flashed in his eyes then, something that seemed almost like gratitude. And when he spoke, there was a note of conciliation in his voice.

      “You have questions you wish to ask?”

      “You built that birdhouse, too?”

      He blinked. “I … Yes.” His brows furrowed. “That cannot be what you wanted to ask.”

      She’d succeeded in throwing him off his guard, at least.

      “It’s not one of the questions I must ask,” she said. “Please understand these are questions that must be asked of everyone, because of the nature of these cases. Many of them you may have already answered to local authorities, but I must ask them again.”

      “I will tell you everything I can, if it will help you find my sister and her friends.”

      Those gray eyes watched her steadily, and for a moment she lost track of what she’d intended to say. Which made no sense to her. She was no stranger to powerful men. She was a Colton after all, and it ran in the family. Not to mention the men she worked with. And then there was that little fact of the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue being her “Uncle Joe.”

      Yet none of them had ever made her so addle-headed or disconcerted as this man did.

      She cleared her throat and began to ask the questions. For now they were, as she’d said, routine. She and Tate had agreed, before he’d headed back to Philly to pursue that end of the investigation, that it was unlikely that the suspects would come out of the tight-knit Amish community. Not impossible—they were humans like anyone else—but they were held together by their faith and that sense of responsibility for each other that was often lacking outside their society.

      As she went through the questions—confirming what she’d read in the file about the date and circumstances of Hannah’s disappearance, Hannah’s friends and the last to have seen her or them, and adding a few more—Emma’s mind was stubbornly gnawing away on other unsettling thoughts. And as she reached the end of the string of standard questions, she reached a rather unsettling, if not downright embarrassing, conclusion.

      She had always thought of Amish men differently. It probably stemmed from growing up familiar with them, and the differences between them and the strong, powerful Colton men. She’d spent years watching women fall for brothers, cousins, all of them. She knew what sent them into raptures—although privately she’d been laughing, thinking if they’d grown up with those Colton men they might be singing a very different tune.

      By comparison, the Amish men she’d seen so often as a child had seemed almost another species. Like priests or nuns or monks or anyone else focused on religion. Not less than human, just a different persuasion of human.

      Whatever the cause, she’d never had reason to modify that childhood perception, that Amish men were so religious and staid and proper they had little interest in other things. Now that seemed silly. She knew perfectly well the Amish were given to large families, but as an innocent child

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