Fire in the Night by Linda Byler Page B

but so seriously it seemed as if they were threatening.
    Mervin shook his head no. So did Suzie, pure innocence shining from her untroubled gaze, a clear testimony of her genuine goodness, a repeat of Priscilla.
    Then Mervin began to cry. Dat looked sharply at Mam, questions clouding his eyes.
    Speaking in hiccups, his English broken and mixed with Pennsylvania Dutch, the way little Amish children do, Mervin said he’d found it.
    “When?” the officer asked intently, bending low.
    “When the barn burned.”
    “Which side of the barn?”
    “Over there. Where the heifer pen was.”
    “You’re absolutely sure you weren’t playing with the lighter?” Dat asked, his face stern and serious.
    Mervin nodded, his blond hair wagging over his ears. His guileless eyes stared straight into Dat’s, which was not lost on the officers, who were acquainted with every trick humankind could imagine, and then some.
    “Then why did you hide it?”
    “You mean, in there?” Mervin pointed to the garden shed. “I was afraid you would think I started the fire, and I didn’t.”
    Marvin lowered his head, the silky blond, brownish hair falling over his eyes, a curtain to allow him time to compose himself, to decide to be forthright.
    “Dat, I just crumpled some old newspapers and—I wanted to see how high the fire goes, how fast it spreads.”
    Lifting his head, he stared wild-eyed at the officer standing closest to him.
    “I didn’t do it,” he burst out.
    The officer nodded, his eyes liquid and kind.
    “Well, we could take the lighter, get the fingerprints,” said the other, “but I doubt if it would tell us much. Arsonists always wear gloves of some sort. Or almost always.”
    “Is there anything we can do to make the community safer? Members of the congregation are sleeping very little, if at all, imagining this arsonist on the loose, afraid they’ll be the next victim.”
    “As far as you personally doing something to help? No. If someone has an old, especially prized barn, or lives close to the road with the house a good distance away from the barn, yes, there is something they can do. They can always sleep in the barn. It’s the only sure way to hear anything. Or get an extremely good watchdog, trained to bite intruders, which is questionable. What if a person stops and gets out of a car during the night for reasons other than lighting a fire?”
    Dat nodded soberly. “So we’ll have patience. Wait. See how it goes, right?
    “About the only thing we can do at this point.”
    Priscilla turned to go back to Dutch, but Mam called her back. Pea wire was cumbersome, unhandy, and Dat had corn planting to do. It was late in the season.
    Sarah smiled and said goodbye to the officers.
    No one like Mam to bring you straight back to reality, plunk you down in the middle of it, and put you to work.
    Dat was the kindhearted one, the dreamer who colored your days with different shades of jokes, laughter, smiles, little sayings, or poems. Mam was a hard-core realist.
    Grumbling to herself, Priscilla walked slowly to the roll of pea wire. With her foot, she sent it rolling slowly across one of Mam’s prized geraniums.
    “Priscilla Beiler! Now look what you did!”
    Mam almost never shouted. When she did, it was stentorian, fierce in its power to bring the offender straight to their knees in repentance.
    “Sorry, Mam.”
    “I should think so.”
    Bending, Mam plucked off pieces of the broken geranium, held them tenderly in her cupped hands, and scuttled to the house. An air of righteous indignation hovered over her white covering, its wide strings flapping behind her.
    Sarah stood, her hands on her hips, surveying the damage.
    “One geranium gone,” she said, wryly.
    “Boy, she got mad.”
    “Well, you need to be careful.”
    “I didn’t try to roll that wire over the geranium.”
    “Dat spoils you, Priscilla.”
    “I know. I love my Dat.”
    Sarah smiled and continued pounding wooden stakes into the ground, remembering