The Covered Bridge

By Karen Harper

Available for the first time on its own, a thrilling mystery by New York Times bestselling author Karen Harper

When Benjamin Kline returns to the fold after eight years, Abigail Baughman welcomes her neighbor with an open heart. But all is not well in their Amish village. Abby overhears some suspicious activity, and it lands her in harm's way, forcing Ben to come to her rescue. He vows never to let anyone hurt her, even though secrets in his past threaten to put everything at risk—their community, their way of life…and their future together.

Originally published in the 2012 Dark Crossings Anthology

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781460395516

Karen Harper

New York Times and USA Today bestselling author KAREN HARPER is a former Ohio State University instructor and high school English teacher. Published since 1982, she writes contemporary suspense and historical novels about real British women. Two of her recent Tudor-era books were bestsellers in the UK and Russia. Harper won the Mary Higgins Clark Award for Dark Angel, and her novel Shattered Secrets was judged one of the best books of the year by Suspense Magazine.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

A STRANGE, SHRILL VOICE dragged Abigail from deep sleep. No, it was two voices, one low-pitched, one high. She huddled under her sheet and quilt, then thrashed against them. Dreams had haunted her again—of a couple running through a cornfield, whooping in delight, with Ben leading the way. Ben laughing, knocking over the stalks…running in crazy circles… Had she been dreaming of Ben and Liddy? No. The voices were real. She could hear them right now.

Clutching the covers, Abby sat bolt upright. At least the people weren’t outside her house. Maybe down by the creek, or on the covered bridge. That often funneled sounds her way. Probably rumspringa kids, maybe some she knew. Drinking beer, staying out late, just as she had during her running-around time. Or maybe it was outsiders telling ghost tales on the old bridge where, if you shouted loud enough, your voice echoed. Ja, scaring someone about the Amish girl and Englische boy who hanged themselves there years ago because their love was forbidden.

Despite the fact she was sweating, Abby shivered. She didn’t believe in ghosts but she knew the story: the Amish girl had argued with her lover, saying it was wrong to take a life, but he had convinced her to put the noose around her neck and jump with him into the darkness….

Abby stopped breathing and strained to listen to the high-pitched voice again. Ja, it was a woman’s, strong and strident. Land sakes, couldn’t they quiet down and let a body sleep?

Trying to keep calm, Abby fumbled on her bedside table for her flashlight, clicked it on and shot its beam toward her battery-run clock. It was 4:14 a.m.! Now she’d never get back to sleep. She had to get up before dawn to make more mushroom chutney and relish for the Saturday farmers’ market. And she wanted to take a loaf of friendship bread over to her new neighbors across the creek, plus harvest more mushrooms.

Her feet hit the rag rug on the floor, and she found her slippers by feel. Though her place was six miles out of town, and the nearest Amish farm was two miles away, she’d lived here for years, first with both grandparents and then just with Grossmamm. She’d never felt afraid here, she told herself, and she didn’t now. She knew Wild Run Woods behind the house, Killibuck Creek—really a river—and the old bridge better than anyone. And people had better learn to be quiet at night!

As she wrapped a shawl around her flannel nightgown, another thought hit her. Maybe the folks who had taken over the old Hostetler house across the creek had gone down to the bridge and were arguing. If she were the woman who had just moved into that run-down place, she might be shouting, too.

By now her curiosity was as awake as she was. In the front room, she knelt by the window she’d left cracked in the crisp September air, and raised the sash a bit higher. The woman’s voice wasn’t Amish in tone or rhythm. Abby couldn’t be sure, but the man must be a modern, too. This part of Eden County had folks who weren’t Amish, but they all had the good sense not to be disturbing the peace this time of night.

A light shone from one of the windows on the bridge everyone called the Hanging Bridge, partly because it was suspended from the rocks above the rapids but also because of the double suicide that had happened there. She couldn’t imagine taking one’s own life for love. Sad that two young folks couldn’t see there was so much to live for, even apart. Why, she’d turned down Elam Garber’s proposal a few months ago, and she felt she had plenty to live for.

It wasn’t that she didn’t sympathize about true love, Abby told herself. She’d seen her older sister, Liddy, as well as friends and cousins, fall in love and get married. But she’d given up on passion and desire ever since she’d been silly and stupid enough to have a huge crush on Liddy’s eighteen-year-old come-calling friend, their neighbor Ben Kline. That had been about ten years ago, when she was a mere kid of fourteen. Thanks to Ben messing up his life, he hadn’t married Liddy, and had left here for good, jumped the Amish fence to the big city of Cincinnati. Until she found someone who swayed her head and heart like he had, she was content to run her business and her life, Amish to the core and yet a bit on her own, too.

You’re an idiot! she heard the woman screech, followed by something she couldn’t catch. Despite the constant rustle of white water over rocks below the bridge, the female voice carried.

That’s all she could take, Abby decided. She was going to go out, shine a light their way, then hustle back here and lock herself in.

She hurried into her kitchen, banging her shin on a log plugged with oyster mushroom spawn, and got her big flashlight. She’d needed both lights to gather the mushrooms after dark last night, then pack and store them in the cellar for sale at the market. She went out the back door, which faced her mushroom beds and the forest beyond, then hurried around the side of the house onto the river path. She knew each step in the dark, so she’d wait to use the large flashlight until she was on the old, now-deserted road that led to the bridge.

Once she was there, she aimed at the black throat of the bridge and turned on the big beam.

Ach! Even pointed away, the brilliance almost blinded her. The shaft of light illuminated a woman dressed in black and wearing an Amish prayer kapp, so it must be one of her people. The figure turned toward the light, threw up a hand to shield her eyes and hissed, Someone’s coming. Get down!

The voice was Englische!

And get down from what? Surely someone wasn’t drunk enough to jump out a window into the rapids, even though the river was up with all the rain. They’d be smashed on the rocks below, maybe drowned.

Abby heard something clatter, then a man’s low voice. Not wanting a confrontation, she clicked off her flashlight, turned and fled, losing one slipper, but not turning back. In the house, she locked the door and peered out the kitchen window. Nothing now. No light, no sound. About ten minutes later she saw red taillights on the far side of the bridge disappear, as if a wild animal were backing away into the blackness.

* * *

AFTER BREAKFAST, Abby searched hard for her lost slipper and couldn’t find it. So she fed her buggy horse, Fern, let her out to graze in the small meadow, then had a hearty breakfast of a honey mushroom frittata and herbal tea before going to work.

Her wood ear mushrooms—They are listening! Grossmamm always used to say since they looked like human ears—seemed perfect as she used her sharpest harvesting knife to cut them from the stacked logs she’d inoculated with their spawn last year. After she finished, she’d take that loaf of bread over to the new couple she’d caught a glimpse of moving in. She couldn’t see them that well through the autumn trees, but she could tell they were Englische.

Abby prayed they would be good neighbors, as she intended to be. A shame they were moderns, but she didn’t mind her half-hour buggy rides into town for market and church on her own. Unlike most Amish maidals with many siblings, Abigail Baughman had only one sister, who now lived in Pennsylvania. A baby brother born too early in a bad birth had taken their mother with him. Because her parents were forty when she was born, and Liddy seemed so much older, more like a second mother, Abby had always felt like an only child. She had lots of friends from her school days, and many cousins, but she had to admit she’d become a bit of a loner, especially after her mamm died and daad still traveled so much with his construction team.

Many Amish girls were married by twenty-four, Abby’s age. She knew she’d find the right Amish man one day and rear her own family. But he’d have to live out here where she could pursue the wildcrafting,