Page 39 of A Gathering of Secrets

“Why do you say that?”

He flips on the saw, cuts the board, tosses it with a good deal of vigor, and it clatters onto the stack.

“Elam.” I say his name firmly. “Talk to me. Please. It’s important.”

He leans against the bench, and skewers me with a hard, uncomfortable look. “I guess you’re pretty smart for putting two and two together.”

My heart jumps, wondering if he’s just made some sort of bizarre confession.

He sees my reaction and his mouth twists into an unpleasant caricature of a smile. “Wish I could make it easy for you, but … I didn’t do it.” He shrugs, a coiling of muscles beneath his shirt. “I didn’t figure things out until … after.”

“Figure what out? After what?”

“Why she did it,” he says. “I blamed myself for a long time. I mean, she was … sensitive about things. I figured I’d done something wrong or hurt her in some way. I thought I’d put too much pressure on her.” His face colors, another emotion he’s not comfortable with, and he mutters a curse beneath his breath. “I wanted to … you know. She didn’t. I mean, she wouldn’t … until we were married. She was clear about it. And she was … pure. After she died, I thought I was the reason she did it. I mean, I’d wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night and I’d see her with that rope around her neck…”

I wait.

“My mind would just … run with it. Replaying all these things she’d said to me in the weeks before she died. It wouldn’t stop.” Shaking his head, he makes a sound I think is supposed to be a laugh, only it’s not. At some point, he’s begun to sweat—his forehead and upper lip; the keloid scar glows bright pink. He doesn’t seem to notice. “It’s like she was trying to tell me something from heaven. Or hell, maybe.”

“Tell you what?”

He hesitates. “She never came right out and said it. So I’ll never know for sure.”

“Said what?”

“I think Gingerich … I don’t know. I think he did something to her. Something she didn’t want him to do.”

I feel myself recoil, but I’m not sure if it’s emotional or physical. I try to cover it, find myself hoping he didn’t notice. I remind myself this case isn’t about me or my past. Not even close. But I remember all too well what it was like to be a fourteen-year-old Amish girl. I remember all too well what it was like to be innocent and then feel that first brutal punch of shock when I learned that violence existed in my small, perfect, and safe world.

In the back of my mind I wonder if he knows Emma Miller was pregnant when she died.

“What did he do to her?” I ask.

For the first time he becomes aware of his surroundings. He looks around as if to make sure no one is listening. “Look, Dan Gingerich did some work for the Millers a few months before Emma died. He was over there all the time. It took me a while to figure it out, but that was about the time when I noticed … changes.”

“What kind of changes?”

He shrugs, but his body language tells me he does, indeed, know. “Emma wasn’t much of a talker. She was kind of shy. Liked to keep the private shit private. But she … stopped laughing. She stopped looking at me the way she had before. She just, I don’t know, changed. I’d never heard her say anything bad about anyone, but she didn’t like Dan Gingerich.”

“Any idea why?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Elam, you know Emma was ime familye weg when she died, don’t you?” “In the family way” is the Amish term for “pregnant.”

He sucks in a breath, looks away. “Yeah, I found out about that.”

“She didn’t tell you?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t see how she could have.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was innocent. I mean, I thought…” His gaze meets mine. This time I see something sharp and hard in his eyes. Even for an Amish man, an emotion that if unleashed could fester into something unpredictable and dangerous. “We never…” He looks away. “You know.”

“Is it possible she was seeing someone else?”

His smile is bitter. “You know I’m going to say no. Dumb fucking guy always does, right?”