In the Land of Milk and Honey

The last room on the left was the parents' bedroom. There was a man in the bed. He was on his back, and I could see his full, long beard and bloodless face, eyes closed. He had to be the family's father, Thomas Kinderman. Grady was standing next to the bed, arms folded in his yellow hazmat suit. He walked over when he saw me. Danielle began to photograph the body.

Grady's eyes were troubled above his paper mask. “No signs of foul play. Nothing environmental . . . You ever seen anything like this, Harris?”

I shook my head. When I'd been a beat cop in New York, I'd occasionally been on calls to check on a neighbor, or investigate a foul smell, and found someone deceased. Many of those deaths were illness-related. But this? An entire family? And so fast too . . .

There was a loud knocking from downstairs. Someone was pounding on the front door. Grady and I looked at each other and both headed down. When Grady opened the door, the neighbor, Jacob Henner, was standing there with an officer in uniform. Jacob's face was wild. . . .

What now?
I thought, feeling a new wave of dread.

KINGDOM COME

IN THE LAND OF MILK AND HONEY

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

This book is an original publication of Penguin Random House LLC.

Copyright © 2016 by Jane Jensen Holmes.

Excerpt from
Kingdom Come
by Jane Jensen copyright © 2016 by Jane Jensen Holmes.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jensen, Jane, author.

Title: In the land of milk and honey : an Elizabeth Harris novel / Jane Jensen.

Description: Berkley Prime Crime trade paperback edition. | New York : Berkley Prime Crime, 2016. | Series: Elizabeth Harris ; 2

Identifiers: LCCN 2016009050 (print) | LCCN 2016015740 (ebook) | ISBN 9780425282908 (softcover) | ISBN 9780698407213 ()

Subjects: LCSH: Women detectives—Fiction. | Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | Amish—Pennsylvania—Lancaster County—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths. | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Police Procedural. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3560.E583 I5 2016 (print) | LCC PS3560.E583 (ebook) |

DDC 813/.54—dc23

LC record available at /2016009050

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley Prime Crime trade paperback edition / August 2016

Cover art:
Amish buggy
© Willard/iStock/Thinkstock;
Landscape
© Mischa Keijser/Plainpicture.

Cover design by Sarah Oberrender.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For my husband,
who gave up a lot to move back to Lancaster County with me.
Love you Farmer
Bob!

Thanks to Kim Fielding for assisting me on criminal justice issues and my agent, Shawna McCarthy, and Berkley editor Katherine Pelz for encouraging the creation of this book. This story was inspired by the dedicated, passionate, and hardworking people in the Lancaster local foods
movement.

Lancaster County, Penn
sylvania, April 2015

“Mama! Mama!”

The strained cry pulled Leah from a fevered dream in which she'd been sewing and sewing. The stitches fell apart, disintegrating as she frantically worked. It was something important and she had to finish it . . . a bridal dress.

No. A shroud.

“Mama!”

Leah sat up in bed. Beside her, Samuel was asleep. She touched his forehead. It was still hot and dry with fever. But it wasn't Samuel who had called for her. It had been a child's voice. She left her husband to his fitful rest and went out into the hall in her white cotton nightgown and bare feet.

Coming!
she thought. She left the reassurance unspoken because it was the middle of the night, and she didn't want to wake the rest of her children.

A shining band of lantern light peeked out from under the door of the upstairs bathroom the children all shared.

She knocked lightly. “
Hast du mich gerufen
?” she asked, her voice low.
Did you call me?

“Mama!” Breathless and weak, the cry came from behind the door. Leah opened it.

On the floor by the toilet lay Mary. She was pale as snow. Her thirteen-year-old body had recently begun to develop a woman's shape, but she looked years younger now. Her long dark hair, loosened for bed, was sheeted around her, damp and oily at her brow. Her eyes were closed. One of her hands twitched weakly as if it wanted to reach for her mother. The smell of vomit and bile, sharp as the January wind on the open fields, hit Leah in the face. The lid of the toilet was open, small amounts of bile the only evidence of Mary's heaving. Her stomach was empty, poor thing. But the back of her nightdress was stained brown.

“Oh, Mary!” Leah fought her own nausea, exacerbated by the smell, and bent to help her daughter. She managed to get Mary sitting up and stripped off her soiled nightgown and undergarments. She cleaned Mary up with a wet rag and bundled all the stained cloth up together. Leah enumerated the tasks in her head. She had to put Mary in a clean nightgown and get her back into bed. And she had to see to it that Mary drank a glass of water too.
The doctor said water was important with all the vomiting and diarrhea, but it was hard to get the children to drink it. When they did, it often came right back up. After Mary was settled, Leah had to open the little window in the bathroom to air it out and take the dirty bundle down to the laundry room.

Mary was trembling like a leaf in the breeze, her eyes bleary. But at least she was able to sit up by herself. Leah draped her in a few towels to keep her warm and went to fetch a clean nightgown.

As she passed the boys' room she heard the muffled sound of crying—miserable, lonely gasps. She hesitated, wondering if she should first get Leah's nightgown, but the sound was too worrying. She pushed open the door to the boys' room.

“Aaron!” She hurried to the child's side. Six-year-old Aaron, who looked so much like his papa with their identical sandy-colored Amish haircuts, was sitting up on the lower bunk. He was crying, quietly but full-out, his mouth wide open.

She pulled him into a hug and checked his forehead. His fever seemed to have broken for the moment. His skin was clammy and covered with sweat.

“Was ist das?”
she tsked quietly. Across the room in the other set of bunk beds, Mark, her twelve-year-old, was asleep on the upper bunk. He had his back turned to her. The bottom bunk the boys used for playing—at least until little Henry outgrew his crib.

“
Ich hatte einen Albtraum
,” Aaron sobbed. A nightmare.

Leah felt a touch of relief. At least Aaron was not as sick as Mary, or as he himself had been earlier that evening. Maybe he was on the mend. Maybe they all would be soon, and her own nightmare would end.
“Es war nur ein Traum. Schlafen tu.”
It was only a dream
.
Go back to sleep.

She tucked Aaron in, his eyes already drooping, and straightened up from the lower bunk. Her back ached deep and low, and she put a hand to it, rubbing. Chills ran though her, shaking her so hard the wooden boards beneath her feet creaked.
Dear God, let this terrible flu pass soon.
She should fetch her shawl. But first—Mary's nightgown.

She turned to go but decided to check on Will first. He was in the bunk above Aaron's. Her fourteen-year-old had been very ill all day, refusing food and going to bed at six o'clock after dragging himself through the daily chores. The cows had to be milked, no matter that the entire family was sick as dogs.

She stepped closer to the top bunk, went up on her tiptoes, and reached a hand out to touch William's forehead. He was a barely distinguishable shape in the dark. Her fingers touched wetness, partially dried and sticky. It was around his mouth, which was slack, open, and felt oddly firm. The smell of something foul came from where her fingers had been. Alarmed, she drew back her hand and paused for only a moment before reaching for the Coleman lamp on the bedside table. She turned it on. Keeping the other boys asleep was no longer the foremost concern on her mind.

“Will?” She blinked as her eyes adjusted to the light. She stepped on the lower bunk and pulled herself up to look at her son.

A moment later her scream echoed through the silent house like a
gunshot.