Free Secrets of Harmony Grove by Mindy Starns Clark Page B

they might be able to trace his steps backward to see where he was when he first got hurt. Mike barked out orders then, and several cops sprang into action, moving toward the driveway, probably to retrieve some sort of equipment that would help them find Troy’s trail of blood in the dark.
    “Looks to me like someone attempted mouth-to-mouth after pulling him out of the pool,” the medical examiner said. “But I’d wager he was dead and floating at least a little while before that futile attempt at resuscitation.”
    Someone else spoke then, the policeman who had apparently been the one to find Nina unconscious out on Emory’s driveway. He felt that she was the one who pulled out Troy and tried mouth-to-mouth, given that when they found her there were a few flecks of dried blood on her lips and her clothes were soaking wet. In response, the ME said that sounded likely, especially if she had no cuts of her own inside her mouth or anywhere else.
    Listening and watching all that was going on out there, I saw some technicians using what looked like a portable black light, shining it toward the ground around the pool area and then moving outward, over the back corner of the stucco wall, then across the yard toward the grove. If Troy’s wound really had been caused by an animal, I hoped the men would be careful. Lancaster County was made up primarily of farmland, but there were enough wooded areas, especially right around here, that an animal could hide in and maybe even strike again.
    Floyd had said the creature he saw was black, which made me think perhaps it had been a bear. Certainly, Pennsylvania had lots of bears. I myself had seen bear scat many times when hiking in the Poconos—but that locale was several hours from here. Lancaster County was too densely populated for bears to proliferate, though I supposed it wouldn’t be unheard of for a bear to pass through once in a great while.
    Suddenly, Mike emerged from the pool area and spotted me there on the porch, startling me from my thoughts.
    “Sienna?” he asked, moving closer to the screen that separated us.
    “Yes,” I replied, pulse surging, afraid he was about to fuss at me for eavesdropping. Instead, he simply asked if I might have a property survey or something else handy that they could look at, something that would show how far the woods and grove extended, and where it sat in relation to nearby homes and farms. I said I would see what I could find, but a quick search in the office produced nothing.
    Instead, I grabbed a pen and some paper, thinking that at the very least I could draw out a simple sketch for them. I carried the pen and paper into the kitchen, sat at the table, sketched out the property’s front and back, and then added the row of houses across the street. Moving in a circle clockwise, I added Uncle Emory’s house next door and then Jonah and Liesl’s farm after that, around the corner from Emory’s place, with their property line abutting his and mine. Finally, I added the homestead directly behind mine, an old defunct chicken farm. Moving the rest of the way around to the left, I scribbled in thick woods that covered several acres and ended at the road.
    Once all of that was done I added in all the outbuildings I could remember, including my shed and Emory’s barn. I didn’t try to do that for Jonah and Liesl’s farm, though, because as with most Amish farms, it had too many outbuildings to count, much less draw correctly.
    The only area I was fuzzy on was the road that led to the chicken farm. I knew several isolated homes were along in there, but I wasn’t sure where to place them in my drawing, so I guessed. Finally, I drew in the centerpiece of everything here: Harmony Grove itself. Scribbling a wide, flat oval of trees to represent its boundaries, I finished with a wiggly line down the middle for the creek and a little bridge over the creek at the very center.
    Mike came inside just as I was finishing up, took a look at my