"How can you say that? You've been behind this joint project all along."

"I still am. But it is true that it has been our way to live separately for hundreds of years."

"Are you dropping out, too?" Mo widened her stance, a hand on her hip.

"I promise to talk to them." Rufus set aside the thought of Ike Stutzman's vehement opposition. "But I am not going to move forward without Karl."

Mo groaned. "Oh, Rufus, why can't you let that go? If we hadn't involved Karl, maybe the explosion would not have happened in the first place."

"The man has burns all over his arms and neck."

"I know. And I feel bad for him, as rotten as he is. But we can't risk the project for him."

"We have time," Rufus said. "While Karl is healing, we'll keep talking."

Mo sucked in her lips. "You don't think Tom Reynolds will back out, do you?"

Rufus adjusted the tilt of his hat. "I couldn't say."

By Wednesday afternoon Annie's cell phone had been missing for two days. She picked up the telephone in the shop and dialed Tom's number. No, he had not seen her phone in his truck.

She hung up and pulled a phone book from beneath the counter, found the number, and dialed the hospital in Canon City. Following a system of automated prompts, she finally reached a nurse in the emergency room who left her on hold so long Annie was about to hang up and start over again. In the end, though, the lost and found box did not yield Annie's phone, either.

The shop door jangled, and Annie switched to customer alert mode. But rather than customers, Mark and Luke Stutzman entered.

"Our mamm asked us to see what you've decided to keep in the shop," Mark said.

Annie gestured to the shelf Mrs. Weichert had arranged. "The blackberry jam does well, and the embroidered pillowcases."

"I'll tell Beth. She is the one who makes the pillowcases."

Of course she was. Miss Perfect Stitches. Annie forced a smile. "Well, if she has more, I'm sure Mrs. Weichert would like to have them. They've been popular."

"We can take anything that is in your way," Mark said.

"Mrs. Weichert is not here, but I'll look in the back room."

Annie crossed the store, vaguely aware that the boys were following at their own pace. In the storeroom, she riffled through Edna Stutzman's crates.

Well, Edna's work and Beth's. Maybe the other girls had contributed something, but Annie suspected the superior stitchery that customers had been admiring was Beth's. A full-sized quilt had lasted barely two days on display, despite a price even Annie thought was outrageous.

Some pot holders and small wooden toys had not sold, and Mrs. Weichert had returned them to the back room. Annie placed them in a crate and applied her own discretion to finish filling it. The sound of shuffling just beyond the door told her the boys had finally come to the back of the shop, where she knew they would wait politely. She picked up the crate, pausing to gain a firm grip.

The boys were speaking rapid Pennsylvania Dutch to each other. Annie strained to understand something. She had been hearing this language in the Beiler home and around tables after church services for eight months, and if pressed, she was capable of bits of polite conversation with speakers who indulged her with a reduced speed. But the words spewed too swiftly from the boys. Annie understood only fragments that did not seem to connect logically.

But one word was unmistakable, and she heard it four times.

Joel.

And another. Phone.

Behind Annie, the building's back door opened to a rush of spring air.

"I saw the buggy," Mrs. Weichert said. "I figured the boys were here."

"I was just gathering some things that aren't selling."

Mrs. Weichert ran a hand over the contents of the crate. "You've chosen well. I'll talk to them." She took the crate from Annie's arms.

At the back of the shop, the boys switched to polite English.

The shop's phone rang, and Annie moved to the counter to answer it.

"Come get your bike," the caller said. "We're finished with it."

Thirty-Four.

Annie lowered her bicycle to the ground in the same spot where she had left it two days ago. She took the hill faster this time, curious to see what the spot looked like now that the crime scene tape was gone. Finding her lost phone among the singed brush seemed unlikely, but she had nothing to lose by looking.

She stood on the hill, staring at the rock, and wondering what the boys could have thought they were accomplishing by trying to blast out a chunk of the hillside with a homemade bomb.

Unless they accomplished exactly what they intended.

She hated to think any of them were capable of hurting Karl-and certainly not Joel. It just did not make sense.

Annie kicked around in the dirt. Rain the previous evening had wiped out footprints and washed blackened brush into stripes down the incline. She set her feet squarely in the place where Karl Kramer had lain, and memory sparked. Her hand had still clenched the phone when she boarded the ambulance. She had it when she answered questions in the emergency room. After that, she was unsure.

Wandering back toward her bike, Annie wondered if the sheriff 's officers had found anything useful among the footprints and tire tracks that had crowded the ground. Sophie's revelation that Annie was under suspicion for the explosion simmered in her mind. When Annie reached her bike, she yanked it up with fresh determination. If Joel had something to do with this, she was going to find out. And for Carter's sake, Annie hoped that what she suspected was not true.

Securing her helmet, Annie put the bike in motion and let gravity pull her down the slope and back on the main road. Hours of daylight remained at this time of year, plenty of time to pedal to the storage site and look for anything that might be have changed since the last time she was there. Grateful to be on pavement again rather than in the uneven brush of the hillside, Annie pedaled harder.

Lost in her thoughts, she did not hear the car approach from behind. She felt its wind as it whizzed by-a little too close for comfort-and She gripped her handlebars more firmly.

It was a blue Prius, just like the one she used to own. The vehicle slowed ahead of her, and in watching it, Annie lost her concentration. She strayed off the pavement onto the gravel shoulder, where she lost her balance. Putting out one foot, Annie managed to avoid toppling, but it was not a gracious moment. She got off the bike and pushed out her breath. Ahead of her, the blue Prius stopped abruptly on the side of the road.

The driver's door opened. Ruth Beiler got out. Annie grinned.

"Whatever you were thinking about the crazy driver, you can keep to yourself." Ruth beamed and dangled the car key. "It's all true, but just don't say it."

"You're driving!" Annie laid the bike down to embrace her friend with both arms. "I assume you're doing it the legal way."

Ruth laughed. "Of course." She pulled her wallet out of her skirt pocket and extracted a long rectangle of paper. "The State of Colorado made it official yesterday."

Annie glanced at the car. "Yesterday? And you drove all the way down here by yourself?"

"When I heard what happened, I knew I had to."

Ruth bent her head in toward Annalise, admiring the sheet of paper that gave her the freedom to stand on this road at this time.

"My friend Lauren gave me driving lessons," she said. "I was nervous about taking the road test, but she said I was ready."

"And she was right!" Annalise leaned against Ruth's shoulder. "I'm so glad to see you. Does your mother know you're coming?"

Ruth shook her head. "Only Elijah knows."

"Elijah?"

"He called and told me what happened to Karl, and that you and Rufus were there."

"It wasn't really an emergency. Rufus and I are fine."

"Elijah didn't know that when he called. He just knew you were at the hospital. I think it rattled him that it happened at... our rock."

"I didn't know you were speaking to Elijah these days."

Ruth looked away. "I'm not. Not exactly."

"What does 'not exactly' mean?"

A car rumbled past, and Ruth step farther off the side of the road. "Elijah writes, and I don't answer. I did for a while, but it's wrong, so I stopped."

"Why is it wrong?"

Ruth shook her head. "It can't be anything. I was not fair to him when I left on our baptism day. He only got baptized because he thought I was going to do it, and then I left. Now he's baptized, and we can't be together."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm going tell him once and for all."

Annalise tilted her head to one side. "You've said that before."

Ruth kicked a rock. "I know. But it's wrong. I have to stop it before we do something Elijah would have to confess to the elders."

"You're trying to protect him?"

Ruth nodded.

"Because you care for him?"

Reluctantly, Ruth nodded again. She hoped Annalise would not comment on the blush that that warmed her face and neck.

"Elijah is a grown man," Annalise said. "He can make his own choices."

"I don't want him to choose to leave because of me any more than Rufus wants you to choose to become Amish because of him."

"This sounds like a conversation that shouldn't be happening on the side of the road."

"Why are you here, anyway?" Ruth asked, pointing down the lonely highway.

"I lost my phone."

"And?"

"And I just wanted to go back and see where it happened again. I'm trying to make sense of it. I have pieces, but they don't add up."

"Where are you going now?"

Annalise hesitated, but Ruth waited.

"Well," Annalise said, "since you have your driver's license and a car, maybe you'd like to give me a ride."

"Anywhere," Ruth answered. "What about the bike?"

"I happen to know how to put the backseat down in that car. We'll jam it in somehow."

Ruth followed Annalise toward the Prius, where Annalise swiftly pulled a couple of levers.

"Are you sure about this?"

Annie pushed the car door closed and glanced across the open space ahead of them. "Sorry to drag you so far off the road, but I knew the Prius could handle it."

"I'm sure you know more about the car than I do," Ruth said, "but what are we looking for?"

"I'm not sure. Clues."

"Clues?"

"Just follow me."

"Why did we have to park in the trees?"

"You'll see."

Annie led the way, hearing the hesitancy in Ruth's steps.

"I don't think I've ever been here before," Ruth said. "How can that be?"

"I think that's what they're counting on."

"Who's 'they'?"