Read Online Fall from Pride by Karen Harper - Free Book Online

trailers to go through a window. Sarah’s wooden ladders and scaffolding had been burned from outside the barn—but had they been used by the arsonist first?
    â€œSo how is VERA as a home?” she was asking.
    â€œCozy, maybe too cozy. I’ll show you around, and then you’ll see what I mean.”
    He didn’t say so but he found the confines of the VERA’s high-tech combination of lab/office/storage/bathroom/bedroom a little claustrophobic, especially out here in the wide-open Home Valley surrounded by rolling hills. If the weather stayed mild and dry, he planned to keep sleeping out under the stars. It brought back the best memory he had of his dad when they used to camp out in Southern Ohio down by Old Man’s Cave, before his whole childhood went up in flames.
    â€œBy the way,” he said when their mutual staring in silence stretched out a bit too long, “you’d better stay in the house if you don’t want to be interviewed. As you can see by their vehicle, the TV folks are still here.” His BlackBerry tone sounded, and he looked down to see if it was his boss again. “I’ve got to take this,” he told her. “It’s my foster mother, and I always take her calls.”
    â€œFoster mother?”
    â€œI’ll explain sometime.”
    â€œI’ll head straight in with the food and come out with the Eshes when you announce the arson,” she said with a snap of her reins. “Unless someone tells the TV people who I am, they won’t notice me separate from the others at all.”
    But even as he took the call, he couldn’t help thinking that Sarah somehow stood out. Even among the Plain People, she didn’t seem plain at all.
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    Everyone ate before hearing Nate’s verdict, maybe, Sarah thought, to fortify themselves for what was to come. Then, too, though no one said so, it was possible the bishop was hoping the media outside would leave them alone to hear about the autopsy of the barn fire in private. That’s what it felt like, Bishop Esh had said, an autopsy of his dead barn, with the burial and then, hopefully, the resurrection yet to come.
    At the Esh table the number of guests swelled, but then Mamm and Lizzie had sent over enough fried chicken, biscuits, gravy, applesauce, chowchow, dandelion salad, schnitz pie and rhubarb crunch to feed an entire work crew. Churchwomen were taking turns sending a noon meal to the bishop’s family for a while. The Eshes had insisted that Sarah, Nate and Mike Getz, who showed up and had just done an interview with the Cleveland TV station, join them. Also, two church elders, Reuben Schrock and Eli Hostetler, who both had Sarah’s squares painted on their barns, dropped by in time for dessert and coffee.
    Sarah saw that Nate ate like a field hand, after they’d just had that talk about his gaining weight. And she also noted that Nate watched Mike Getz like a hawk.
    â€œI know now it was a bad move,” Mike, a big guy with a shaved head and goatee, admitted. “I shouldn’t have rushed inside to try to pull some of the buggies out, but the barn looked like a goner and I wanted to save something.”
    He ate with his left hand since his right was in a cast. Sarah could see the clean, white plaster had writing on it already, including in pink ink, “Love Ya! Cindee” and a large heart. Mike’s head seemed to sit directly on his broad, slantedshoulders—a man with no neck, and not, she thought, a lot of sense.
    â€œBut a broken bone’s a small price to pay,” he went on, his mouth partly full, “to help a neighbor.”
    Strictly speaking, Mike wasn’t a neighbor of the Eshes but lived much closer to Elder Reuben Schrock and his family, over on Fish Creek Road.
    â€œHave you rushed into other buildings on fire?” Nate asked. The entire Esh family, along with Sarah and Nate, had eaten first and it was mostly men at the