A Time to Heal(65)

They acknowledged each other and the three men sat down in chairs on the porch.

"I'll get right to the point," the investigator said. "Preliminary reports show that the fire in Mr. Bontrager's barn was deliberately set."

Chris stared at him, then Matthew. "You're kidding!"

"I wish I was kidding," said the man whose ID badge identified him as Jim Killinger. "The engine you worked on that day had an accelerant in it."

"It would have had some gas to make it run—" Chris began.

"This was an unusual type of accelerant, not gas."

"Unusual how?"

Killinger looked at Matthew, then at Chris. "It's used by the military."

"I see," Chris said slowly. His heart started beating faster, and he felt sweat trickle down his back despite the coolness of the day. "So that's why you wanted to talk to me . . . because I'm former military?"

The fire marshal just looked at him.

Chris raised his hands. "I don't know where you think I'd get something like that. I've been in a veteran's hospital for the past year. You can verify that."

"Already done."

"I wouldn't do this to you," Chris told Matthew. "Why would I do this to you?"

"He told me that," Killinger said. "And after I did some of my own research on you, I'm inclined to believe he's right."

"Research? What kind of research?"

"I just looked up your military record."

Killinger stood. "I'll take another look around the barn. You haven't let anyone poke around in there, have you?"

Matthew shook his head. "We've just done some boarding up until we're finished harvesting. We're using Phoebe's barn to board the horses."

"I'll be in touch." With a nod, the other man left them.

Jenny opened the door and stuck her head out. "Finished out here? Why not break for dinner before you go back out there?"

Matthew hesitated, and then he nodded. "Sounds good. It'll give me a chance to settle down."

Chris stood. "I think I'll skip it if you don't mind."

"I knew you'd be upset," she told him. "But Matthew and I told him there's no way you'd do something like that."

"Thanks. I appreciate that. But I'm not hungry. I'll see you after dinner, Matthew."

As he walked down the stairs, he heard Jenny sigh. "I knew he'd be upset."

But she was wrong, Chris thought.

He went straight to the dawdi haus and pulled out his backpack, throwing in his Bible and the neatly folded stack of laundry Mary had brought him last night. Fishing in his pocket, he took out the key to the front door and left it on the table near it. Then, after an inner debate, he wrote a quick note thanking them for their friendship and telling them that he needed to get back home. He wasn't sure that was where he was going, but they didn't really need to know any more than that.

Opening the back door, he gave a surreptitious glance to the right, then the left, before slipping outside. When he didn't spy anyone around, he quickly crossed the fields to Hannah and Phoebe's house, hoping that Jenny and Matthew wouldn't look out their window and see him.

Phoebe came to the door and looked surprised to see him.

"Is Hannah home?"

She shook her head. "It's her day to teach quilting classes in town. She borrowed Matthew's buggy."

Holding the door open, she invited him inside.

"I can't stay."

Phoebe eyed the backpack. "Going somewhere?"

He shook his head, looking away from the kindness in her eyes.

"That backpack looks like it's holding everything you've got," she said. "And those shoulders look like they're carrying the weight of the world. Come into the kich for just a few minutes and let me make a sandwich for you to take on the road. And you can sit down and write Hannah a note to tell her what you came to say to her."

How she knew he was leaving he didn't know. But he went inside and sat at the kitchen table and let her make him a sandwich. And while she made it, he took a piece of paper and a pencil out of the backpack and wrote a note to Hannah.

He couldn't tell her the real reason he was leaving, so he just told her that he had to leave and he was sorry he hadn't been able to say goodbye. Pausing, he tried to find the words to tell her how much he'd come to care for her.

Then he decided that it wouldn't do any good. He had a pretty good idea that she was as attracted to him as he was to her, that she'd come to care for him, but it wouldn't have worked anyway, he told himself.

Phoebe walked over to hand him the sandwich and a plastic baggie of cookies, and he tucked them into his backpack.Before he could rise, she laid her hand on his shoulder.

"I saw the fire marshal's car over at the house a little while ago."