In the Land of Milk and Honey Read Online Free PDF

left at the top of the stairs. Looks like a queen bed containing three bodies. Two girls around four and six and an older woman, possibly the mother, Mary Kinderman.”
    I paused as Danielle’s camera snapped away. I felt the need to take in the scene without interference from technology for a moment. The two girls were side by side in bed, both ashen with hollowed cheeks and purple bruises under their eyes. Their eyes were closed, as if they’d passed in their sleep. The woman was in a nightgown and a thick flannel robe that closed with a fabric belt. She was above the covers and on her side, one hand protectively stretched over her children. Her fingers just brushed the top of one brown-haired head. Her eyes were closed too. On the bedside table were a box of Kleenex, another bottle of Pepto-Bismol, and a partially drunk glass of milk.
    I took a deep breath and resumed the video. “From the position of the bodies, it looks like the mother came in to check on the girls and lay down for a moment. She died here. It’s unlikely the girls were already dead when this happened, or the mother would have gone for help. She looks like she just closed her eyes for a brief nap.”
    Had
the girls been alive? Or was it possible they’d already been dead and the mother, in her grief, had simply lain down andgiven up. But her face looked too relaxed, her body’s position too casual. I thought my first instinct was correct. At least Mary Kinderman had been spared the horror of her children’s deaths.
    In the next bedroom there were two single beds and two deceased boys in them. There was vomit in a bucket by one of the beds, lumpy and vile. A third boy, a young teen, was sitting up on the floor and leaning his back against one of the beds. His arms were around his knees and his face was buried in them. There was defeat and despair in his posture.
This boy knew
, I thought. He knew at least some of his family was dead. He probably knew he was dying too. That especially hurt.
    The last bedroom 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, his 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 above his paper mask were troubled. “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 been on calls to check on a neighbor or to investigate a foul smell and found someone deceased. Many of those deaths were illness-related. But this? An entire family? And so fast too.
    A thought went through my mind—what if this had been Hannah Yoder’s family? All of them dead—Sadie, Ruth, Hannah, Isaac, and the rest—strewn about the house like dolls in adollhouse shaken by an angry child. The idea was unbearable. “According to Jacob Henner, and what I saw in the kitchen, the family’s been sick for a few days at least.”
    â€œCould be food poisoning,” Grady suggested. We both knew that would be preferable to some apocalyptic disease, and more likely too. “In any event, this isn’t looking like a homicide.”
    â€œWhat about poisoning?” I asked. I wasn’t ready to walk away from this, not yet.
    Grady looked at me sharply. “You seen any indication of that?”
    I shrugged. I wasn’t about to tell my boss about
brauche
men and powwow, but I couldn’t completely dismiss Hannah’s fears in the face of this new tragedy. “Whatever it was, it was relatively fast and a hundred percent fatal. Poison would explain that.”
    â€œChrist.” Grady went to rub his jaw and ended up crinkling up the paper mask instead. “Guess I should at least