It occurred to her that if she appeared frantic, anyone who spotted her would assume she’d been up to no good. Gloria rested against the back wall of Mamm and Marlin’s house, considering her best strategy. Her fingers itched to pull the papers from her pocket, yet whatever she discovered would show all over her face when she went inside. She’d already seen too many inexplicable items in Bishop Clayton’s closet to keep quiet about them. What should she do?
Take a leisurely stroll down the hill into the trees, and then amble toward the lodge. That way, if someone in the house spots you, Mamm and Fannie can say you’ve been taking a walk to clear your head.
Taking another deep breath to settle her nerves, Gloria followed her plan. It was difficult to take her time, and to leave the papers in her pocket—except she still had to make it past the Kuhn sisters and Irene when she entered the lodge. She crossed the grassy lawn, admiring the pumpkins, mums, and Indian corn the ladies had arranged on the porch steps, and strolled around to the back. Gloria eased open the door and stepped inside the mudroom, listening carefully.
Laughter broke out in the dining room. “I can play all seven of my letters! Watch this!” Beulah crowed.
Gloria slipped off her shoes and climbed quietly up the kitchen stairway. The ladies’ Sunday afternoon Scrabble game was yet another answered prayer. When she’d closed her apartment door behind her, Gloria walked carefully to her sofa so her footsteps wouldn’t alert anyone downstairs to her presence.
She perched on the sofa and took the two papers from her jacket pocket. The pages rustled slightly as she held them in her trembling hands.
The first page appeared to be a receipt for three clocks consigned to a shop called Simple Gifts in Willow Ridge, Missouri. Nora Hooley, apparently the owner, had signed it at the bottom. It was dated October twentieth of the previous year.
Gloria frowned. Why would Bishop Clayton from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, have such a receipt for clocks among his papers?
The second form was even more puzzling. The printed line across the top said “Riehl Clocks—Riehl Service, Riehl Timely.” It was a handwritten estimate of repairs needed on two antique clocks, along with the charges for the labor and a list of parts required. The penmanship was slightly slanted, unusual because the L’s, F’s, P’s and Y’s had straight lines instead of the loops most folks wrote them with. The total, $657.00, was followed by the words “I will begin work when I receive your payment in full. Cornelius Riehl.”
Why would such a paper concerning clocks be in Bishop Clayton’s crate? Gloria desperately wanted to share her newfound discoveries with someone who could explain them—but who would that be? And of course if she talked to anyone, she’d have to admit that she’d been snooping in the bishop’s closet.
As she rose from the sofa, her headache returned with a vengeance. Gloria’s stomach felt like a ringer washing machine agitating a load of clothes as she gazed out the window—just in time to see Bishop Clayton’s buggy rolling up the road to Lester’s house. She stepped away from the window, imagining that if he spotted her he’d immediately know she was guilty of a heinous invasion of his privacy.
“Dat, what should I do?” Gloria whispered. “I thought it was you steering me to Uncle Lester’s house, but you would never want me to rifle through somebody else’s stuff . . . would you?”
Her dat didn’t answer. The three ladies’ laughter downstairs was the only sound in the house, except for the relentless hammering of Gloria’s heart.
She swallowed hard. Deep down, she knew her father would’ve expected her to confess her wrongdoing—preferably to Bishop Clayton, face to face.
The thought of walking back to Uncle Lester’s house and owning up to her misadventure made her stomach churn even harder. And the longer she stood in the middle of the room, imagining Bishop Clayton’s wrath—the way his face would turn red, and the torrent of Old Testament judgment he would quote as he condemned her to confess at church next Sunday—the more ill Gloria felt.
“Sin is a sickness and guilt erodes the soul,” her father had often preached in his sermons.
For the first time in her life, Gloria believed him.
Chapter Twenty
As Monroe stretched out in his recliner after Sunday dinner for a rare nap, he sensed sleep would evade him. He was trying to keep his concerns about Clayton King to himself, but lately Christine had been quizzing him about the visiting bishop—and about what he planned to do if King took over as the new leader of Promise Lodge.
“What’s going on with him?” Christine had asked over their dinner of vegetable beef soup and corn bread. “The way he spouted off at the wedding, I thought he’d be making his big changes by now. Why’s he keeping us in suspense?”
Monroe had replied, truthfully, that he didn’t know—and that he and the three preachers were waiting for King to make the first move. “King will probably preach about his plans for Promise Lodge at church next Sunday,” he’d replied. “God moves in mysterious ways, and so does the man from Lancaster County.”
Christine’s expression had told Monroe she wasn’t buying his answer. Other neighbors had expressed similar doubts about King’s silence, and as days went by the situation would only become more problematic. But what could he do? Amos, Marlin, and Eli agreed that if they confronted Clayton with the information Annabelle had shared, he would bolt before they figured out who he really was. Monroe had prayed daily over the situation, but God seemed as unresponsive as King.
God is not unresponsive, Monroe reminded himself as he settled into his recliner. God knows exactly what’s going on, and He has a reason for waiting this out.
Or, the more contentious voice in his head chimed in, God’s given you plenty of clues and you’re missing His point. King’s a clever man. He’ll make his next move in his own gut time.
Monroe sighed as he closed his eyes. A thousand thoughts about what he’d do if King closed down his Clydesdale business—or told him he could no longer live at Promise Lodge—had plagued him over the past week. The new home and the new wife God had provided him had changed him so completely that Monroe dreaded anything that threatened his wonderful life, even if a bogus bishop had no real power.
It was the waiting that kept him up nights.
As his thoughts circled like suspicious dogs, Monroe heard a knock at the front door. “Stay right there, Monroe, I’ve got it,” Laura said as she came from the kitchen.
He settled deeper into his chair. Christine’s daughters were yet another blessing God had granted him since he’d come to Missouri.
“Gloria!” Laura called out moments later. “Come in! It’s gut to see you.”
“I, um, had to get out,” Gloria whimpered. “It’s gut to see you, too, Laura, but I came to speak with Bishop Monroe. Something awfully . . . important has come up.”
The tremor in the young woman’s voice alerted Monroe to her distress, so he immediately lowered his recliner. “Come on in, Gloria,” he called across the room.
She shook her head as she watched him sit up and find his slippers with his feet. “I—I didn’t mean to interrupt your nap, Bishop—”
“I wasn’t asleep,” he assured her kindly. He’d often seen Gloria’s brown eyes widen with flirtation when she’d been pursuing Roman Schwartz and Allen Troyer, but she appeared deeply troubled as she stood in the doorway. “What can I do for you, dear? Has something gone wrong at home, or with your mamm, or—”
She quickly shook her head. “I—I need to talk to you. Only you, Bishop,” she added with an apologetic glance at Laura. “I’ve gotten myself into a bit of a . . . pickle.”
Monroe’s insides tightened. After hearing Laura’s account of the Helmuth brothers’ bet, the last thing he wanted to hear was that Cyrus had gotten Gloria in the family way. She was impulsively desperate about being twenty-three and still unmarried—and Monroe hoped that for her mother’s sake, Gloria wouldn’t go through an unwed pregnancy the way her younger sister had done.
> “Let’s talk in my office,” Monroe suggested, gesturing toward a short hallway. “Would you like some tea or coffee? Something to munch on?”
Gloria shook her head. She walked quickly ahead of him into the room where he kept his Clydesdale accounts, and perched on the chair facing his big desk. As Monroe closed the door, he prayed for guidance.
Without any preamble, Gloria yanked two folded sheets of paper from her jacket pocket and tossed them onto his desk as though they were burning her fingers. “I have a confession, Bishop Monroe,” she whispered. “Something—I thought it was Dat’s spirit, but maybe I was just hoping for his help, you know?—made me go into Uncle Lester’s house and upstairs into Bishop Clayton’s room and into his closet, and that’s where I found these,” she continued in a breathless rush. “I—it was wrong of me to do that, but these papers aren’t all I found in there.”
Monroe’s eyebrows went up as he reached for the papers. “How’d you know Bishop Clayton wasn’t at home?”
“Uncle Lester said he’d gone to the church service in Coldstream today. He went on and on about how much Bishop Clayton had helped him, because they’ve both lost their wives.” Gloria paused, her expression tightening. “Then he said, ‘What if Bishop Clayton has it right? What if we have gotten too progressive at Promise Lodge?’ He compared Bishop Clayton to my dat, saying we’re doing things that Dat would never have allowed if he was still the bishop.”
Monroe’s eyes widened. This was the first time he’d heard that Bishop Clayton had befriended anyone—or convinced any of the Promise Lodge residents that his preaching might be on target. “And Lester wasn’t teasing?” he asked gingerly.
“Oh no, he was dead serious.”
Monroe paused, watching Gloria closely. “So what happened then? I can tell your uncle’s words affected you deeply.”
“Jah, they did,” Gloria agreed. “We’d been talking to Marlin about when Bishop Clayton would take over, and it didn’t sit right with me. Everyone—except Uncle Lester—has their doubts about him, so I sneaked into the house and went into Clayton’s room,” she admitted as she looked away. “When Mamm and I go there to clean, Bishop Clayton always stays right there with us and insists that nothing needs to be done in the closet. And—and now I know why.”
Again Monroe’s insides tightened, but for a different reason. When he glanced at the first page she’d given him, which had come from a shop in a town called Willow Ridge, nothing rang any bells. He’d seen signs for Willow Ridge when he’d first come to live in Missouri, but he’d traveled quite a ways north of that town to reach Promise Lodge, so the name of the Simple Gifts shop meant nothing to him. The moment he set eyes on the second page, however, he recognized the distinctive handwriting on the letter King had shown him, supposedly from the Council of Bishops.
“‘Riehl Clocks,’” he read softly. “‘Riehl Service, Riehl Timely’” . . . because Cornelius Riehl, who’d signed this estimate for repairs, was the owner of the clock business.
Monroe felt dizzy. The missing piece of the puzzle he’d been praying for was in his hands—and all because Gloria had sneaked into King’s closet.
“I found the papers in a crate—grabbed a couple of sheets willy-nilly because I was afraid he’d come home and catch me,” Gloria continued in a nervous whisper. “He also had an English man’s suit with a shirt and necktie hanging in the back of his closet. And in a suitcase, he had a laptop computer.”
Monroe gaped at Gloria. The more he heard, the more he wondered if Clayton King—who also went by Cornelius Riehl—was even Amish. Along with being a phony bishop, was he also a clockmaker with a reason to pass himself off as Plain? Monroe couldn’t imagine that many English men were named Cornelius these days—and Riehl was a common Amish surname—but what if this was another fake identity? And Monroe still had no idea why this man had come to Promise Lodge.
“What does this mean, Bishop Monroe?” Gloria asked in a childlike voice. “Dat would’ve made me go straight over to Bishop Clayton and confess that I’d sneaked into his closet—”
“Don’t say a word about this, Gloria!” Monroe blurted. He caught himself, hoping his voice hadn’t carried through the walls. “What I mean is, I’ve been keeping some other information about Bishop Clayton under my hat until I knew what to do about it. And now that I’ve seen these papers, I know what I need to know, but I still don’t know what to do. Does that make sense?”
Gloria’s face relaxed into a smile. “I know just how ferhoodled you feel, Bishop,” she murmured. “It was wrong of me to go into that closet—and if you want me to confess at church, I will, but—”
“Far as I’m concerned, you’ve just confessed to me, Gloria—and we’re going to leave it at that for now,” Monroe interrupted. He held her gaze somberly. “You realize that you can’t say anything about this to anybody else, right? If Clayton King—who is also Cornelius Riehl—gets wind that we’re on to him, he’ll be off like a shot before we can learn the whole truth. There’s something terribly wrong going on here. Do you understand that, Gloria?”
She nodded solemnly.
“Everything this guy’s told us is a pack of lies—serious lies,” Monroe continued cautiously. “We’ll only get the real story if we ask somebody else about him—”
“Like Nora Hooley in Willow Ridge?” Gloria whispered.
Monroe suddenly had a whole new appreciation for the way Gloria Lehman’s mind worked. She’d always come across as a boy-crazy, impulsive young woman, sometimes without the sense God gave a goose, but she’d just handed him the answer he’d been looking for.
“We can start with her, jah,” he murmured as his mind raced. “Trouble is, if the preachers and I take off for Willow Ridge and King gets wind of it—”
“What if I go?” Gloria piped up. “What if Laura goes with me? We could say we wanted to shop in Nora’s store and—”
“You’re not telling anybody anything, remember?” Monroe reminded her quickly. “It takes a couple hours to drive there, if I recall correctly. If something really crooked is going on, however, I can’t risk letting you girls go—”
“So what if Cyrus and Jonathan drive us?” Gloria blurted triumphantly. “They owe us that much for the way they played games with our feelings, jah? They’ve been asking for a chance to make it up to us—”
“And when folks see the four of you leaving, they’ll assume it’s a date,” Monroe murmured as he mulled over the possibility. After conducting several sessions of church instruction for Cyrus and Jonathan, he trusted them—believed they were responsible young men who’d made one crazy mistake in the way they’d treated Gloria and Laura.
And what guy hasn’t messed up with women? Monroe’s thoughts teased.
“I’d also feel better about you young people going because who knows what King might do if all of us church leaders are gone at the same time?” he mused aloud. “I don’t want anybody starting rumors about why I might’ve left Promise Lodge with our preachers, either—or what I might be doing if I go alone.”
Monroe gazed at the pretty brunette sitting across the desk from him. Not long ago the thought of sending Gloria on a fact-finding mission would’ve been out of the question, yet it seemed she’d provided the answer to his most urgent prayers.
“It’s true that your dat would’ve been running things differently if he were still our bishop,” he said softly. “But maybe it was his spirit guiding you, Gloria. Maybe Bishop Floyd realizes we need some heaven-sent help to deal with Cornelius Riehl. Jah, sneaking into that closet was wrong, but sometimes desperate situations call for desperate measures.”
The shine in Gloria’s eyes made Monroe glad he’d said that. He was also pleased about entrusting this mission to her and her friends. A lot of people would be happy if the Helmuth brothers became engaged to Gloria and Laura, because it meant two more young couples would be staying at Promise Lodge to start their families.
He took a pen and paper from his desk drawer. “I’m goi
ng to write a note for you to take along to the bishop of Willow Ridge. Once you locate Nora Hooley and her shop, she can direct you to him—so you can ask him to call me,” Monroe said as he thought through the details. “I’ll ask Sam and Simon to give their cousins the day off tomorrow, so you four can leave first thing. After all, we’re talking about the future of our home here, and we need to move quickly on this.”
Gloria nodded, wide-eyed. “I—I’ll be happy to go, Bishop Monroe,” she whispered. “I really do like Cyrus. . . .”
Monroe gently clasped her wrist. “He really likes you, too, Gloria,” he said, feeling happier than he had in days. “I’m glad you’re giving him another chance. We guys mean well, but sometimes we get crazy around girls who make us want to behave like adults and take life more seriously—but you didn’t hear me repeat what Cyrus said about you, okay?”
Chapter Twenty-One
“Off we go!” Cyrus crowed from the backseat of the buggy his brother was driving. “We’ve got directions to Willow Ridge, we’ve got the day off—and best of all, we’ve got two cute girls willing to spend time with us again.”
He turned to Gloria, waggling his eyebrows. “I told Jonathan it was his turn to drive because I wanted to focus on you instead of on the road. What a great way to spend a sunny Monday, ain’t so?”
Gloria’s smile was demure and hinted at secrets. “It was a nice surprise when Bishop Monroe decided we four were perfect for the . . . adventure that’s presented itself,” she agreed. “And denki to you fellows for coming along. He wasn’t going to let Laura and me go by ourselves.”
After Jonathan guided the horse onto the shoulder of the state highway, he glanced over his shoulder. “What sort of adventure are we talking about? Bishop Monroe didn’t say much about it, except to tell Sam and Simon our help was important for securing the future of Promise Lodge. That got everyone’s attention!”
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