Niklas may not want her to visit Jacob, but since it had been almost four months since she’d seen Emil, surely Niklas would give her permission to visit the man she’d agreed to marry.
Jacob flung open the doors to the Second National Building and Loan and marched inside. Adam Voepel’s heels clicked across the polished floor behind him, but the older man didn’t say a word.
“Who’s there?” Frank called out from his office, and when Jacob stormed through the door, the color drained from the man’s face. His old boss muttered something, his eyes volleying between Adam and him, and then Frank fumbled for his telephone. Hurrying to the desk, Jacob took the earpiece from Frank’s shaking hand and hung it up.
Jacob sat in the chair beside Frank’s desk, but Adam stood waiting by the door. Frank’s eyes were on Adam.
Jacob leaned forward. “I didn’t embezzle your money.”
Frank broke his gaze away from Adam. “You took thousands of dollars.”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t me.”
Frank reached over and unlocked the safe near his desk. Shuffling through the paperwork, he picked out a ledger and shoved it toward Jacob. “How do you explain this?”
Jacob opened the book and thumbed through it. It was the ledger they’d used to record transactions when he was working at the bank. His initials, as well as the initials of the other clerks, were scattered across the pages.
At one time this had been his livelihood, recording all these notes. Even during last year’s panic, he’d thrived on numbers and serving the people who came to deposit and withdraw their savings. But his days at the bank seemed like a lifetime ago. He’d gone from a comfortable job, working behind a cage, to the backbreaking work on the dredge boat. Still, it was honest work, and he did it honorably…just like he’d worked honorably during his years at Second National.
He pushed the ledger back toward Frank. “I don’t see anything in here to explain.”
Frank didn’t blink. “You can explain why Orwin found the journal in your house.”
“My house?”
“He found it under your bed.”
Jacob glanced behind him at the window. “Where is Orwin?”
Frank’s face paled again. “He’s out today.”
“Why would I take your ledger, Frank?”
“To cover your steps.”
Jacob dug into his inner pocket and pulled out four dollars, the remainder of his earnings. “This is all the money I have to my name.”
Frank’s lips shook again. “Where did the rest of it go?”
“I didn’t embezzle your money.” Jacob stuffed the bills back into his pocket. “I’ve been working on a dredge boat in Iowa to earn a living.”
“A dredge boat?”
Jacob reopened the ledger. “Nothing seems amiss here.”
“No, this book is just fine.” Frank lifted another book from his safe and flipped the pages until he found a specific record. “This is the problem.”
Jacob glanced down at Charlie Caldwell’s account. The page was riddled with withdrawals from January to April, many initialed by him. Jacob had been at the bank every day, but he didn’t recall seeing the judge except on the occasion when he won some money gambling and wanted to keep it in a safe place. Of course, he’d handled hundreds of transactions this spring and couldn’t remember everything, but he certainly didn’t remember Caldwell withdrawing that much cash either.
He reached for the first ledger, the one Frank had initially showed him. The ledger listed surnames from A to E. Opening the cover, he turned pages until he found Charlie Caldwell’s record. In this book, not a single dollar on Caldwell’s account had been drawn out.
Glancing back up at Frank, he swallowed hard. “What does this mean?”
“Someone was recording the withdrawals, but instead of giving Caldwell the money, he pocketed it.”
“Does Caldwell know?”
“He came in a few weeks back, asking for his money.” Frank rapped his fingers on the desk. “I’ve given him most of it.”
“And the bank’s surplus?”
Frank shook his head. “It’s gone.”
Jacob tapped his foot on the floor, turning the pages of the ledger, although he wasn’t really reading. Someone had planned well for this, pilfering the surplus a little at a time so Frank wouldn’t notice the money slipping out the door. Still, they must have known that Frank would discover the missing money eventually. They probably prepared well for that inevitability.
Jacob slammed the ledger shut. “Why exactly was Orwin in my house?”
“I asked him to try to find you,” Frank said. “You were gone, but he found the ledger instead.”
“I need to speak to Orwin.”
Frank shook his head. “You can’t.”
“Why not?”
Frank cleared his throat. For a moment, Jacob didn’t think he was going to answer. “He’s contracted diphtheria.”
“Diphtheria?” Jacob stood up and slapped his cap onto his head. “I’m going to speak with him anyway.”
“But he’s been quarantined….”
“I won’t get too close to him.”
Frank stood up on the other side of the desk, the earpiece in his hand again. “I can’t let you leave.”
Jacob heard Adam’s boots click behind him as the man joined his side. “I will go with him.”
Frank’s eyebrows narrowed. “Who are you?”
“Adam Voepel.” He stretched out his hand. “I’m an Elder of the Amana Society.”
“The what?”
“The Amana Society,” Adam repeated. “We are a religious community in Iowa.”
Frank’s fingers ran down the phone cord. “A commune?”
“We live faithfully together.”
Frank kept his eyes on the man. “I can’t trust you—”
“Yes, you can, Mr. Powell. I answer to the Almighty.” Adam turned toward Jacob. “You’re not going to run away again, are you?”
Jacob shoved his hands into his pocket. “I never ran away.”
Frank hung up the phone before the police precinct answered his call. Part of him had thought he might track down Jacob Hirsch eventually, but he’d never expected the man to walk through his door. And he certainly wouldn’t let him walk away again.
He liked Jacob, and he hoped Jacob was innocent of the crime, but that didn’t explain who had stolen the bank’s money. If he was going to keep the doors of Second National open and keep himself from being sued, he needed to find out what happened. Perhaps Jacob would lead him to the truth.
As he walked into the lobby, he buttoned his morning coat and slipped his tall hat off the rack. He stopped to lock the bank doors and then motioned for a hansom cab. As Frank clung to the side of the cab, the driver and horse whisked him through the hectic marketplace, toward Lake Street.
What did Jacob hope to accomplish at Orwin’s house? If his nephew had known anything about the missing money, Orwin would have told him. After all, the entire bank would become his after Frank retired. There was no reason for him to hide it.
The driver pulled up half a block away from Orwin’s small house. Jacob and Adam were already there, opening the picket fence that wrapped around Orwin’s neat lawn. Instead of getting out, Frank waited in the cab and watched.
Jacob knocked on the door and then knocked again, but no one answered the door.
Despite their determination, the self-exalting and self-empowered shall fall. Like water, they will not remain stable during times of trial and trouble.
Christian Metz, 1842
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Iowa River bubbled and swirled under the bridge as the rain-soaked horses plodded toward Amana. Cassie leaned over Liesel’s lap, looking through the small buggy window to watch the water rush below them, but Liesel forced herself to focus on the trees ahead. The draft horses’ gait slowed along the muddy bridge, and Otto Müller clicked the reins. The hooves moved a bit faster, but not fast enough for he
r.
Water dripped down the glass window, and she was grateful that Niklas not only gave them permission to come to Amana but insisted that Otto take them in the buggy after the morning service. She and Cassie never could have come in this downpour without it.
She glanced down at the river and scooted forward so Otto could hear her from the rear seat. “Does the water seem high to you?”
He clicked his tongue. “The highest I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
Otto had come with the Society from New York in the 1850s, so he’d driven wagons and buggies across the Iowa River for a good forty years now.
“Is it safe to cross?” She asked.
“Ach,” he said, as he flicked the reins again. “It’s a little too late for us to wonder now.”
Seconds later, the horses trotted off the bridge and into the forest, and Liesel eased back against the cushioned seat. They wouldn’t be swept away by the river, at least not today.
Cassie scooted closer to her, looking up. “Does the river scare you?”
“No…,” Liesel began—but that wasn’t true. The river terrified her. “Yes, it does.”
“Papa loves the water.”
“Your Vater knows how to swim.”
Jacob had probably never read Der Struwwelpeter as a child either. He didn’t know that Johnny Look-in-the-Air almost drowned in the river.
“Does your papa know how to swim?” Cassie asked.
“No.”
“Hmm…” Cassie’s gaze wandered across the trees as they trotted out of the forest. The flooded land ahead looked more like a lake than a field. “What does he know how to do?”
“Well, mein Vater can build just about anything with wood. And he is a really good leader. All sorts of people come to him with questions, and he helps manage the community’s money.”
Cassie nodded, looking much older than her four years. “My papa ravages money too.”
She laughed and started to correct the girl, but Cassie kept talking. “What about your mama?” the girl asked. “What does she like to do?”
Liesel looked at the horses as they walked through the water, their beautiful manes drenched by the rain. What did her mother like to do? “i don’t know.”
“My mama liked to give me kisses,” Cassie said. “And she liked to sew. She made me the prettiest dresses when I was a baby.”
“I’m sure she loved you very much.”
The girl’s head bobbed up and down. “That’s what Papa says.”
“Do you remember her?”
“A little.” Cassie reached for Liesel’s hand and sighed. “Not so much.”
Liesel squeezed her hand. “I don’t remember mein Mutter much either.”
“Is she in heaven too?”
Liesel pressed her other hand against the cold glass. “I don’t think so.”
“Well…where did she go?”
“No one knows.”
In front of them was the village of Amana, cloaked in a mantle of gray. Grapevines laced the trellises at the edge of town, and the woolen mill towered in the distance. On the hilltop above Amana was the smallest village in the Colonies, East Amana. Most of the three thousand sheep needed for the woolen mills were kept in East Amana’s immense barns on the village’s edge, and their bleating could be heard across the valley.
Liesel’s father had been born in Ebenezer, New York, and his family migrated to Iowa in the 1850s. Her mother’s parents were from Iowa City, and they joined the Society soon after the migration.
Her parents married in 1862 and Main Amana became their home. They were married almost a decade before she was born, but something had happened to her mother after Liesel’s birth. Something her father never discussed. Liesel was born in Amana twenty-two years ago, but when she was three years old, her mother decided she didn’t want to live as an Amana any longer. Her mother left the Society in 1875, and Liesel grew up without brothers or sisters or a mother.
The years passed, her father refusing to speak about her mother, though he never married again. She suspected that her father still loved the woman he’d married so long ago.
As she grew up, Liesel had heard the whispers of other colonists, and sometimes she heard them today when she was working around the older women. No one faulted her for her mother’s decision, but she felt as if she were marked for life, like the others expected her to leave for the world as well.
They were wrong. She would never leave the Amanas.
The buggy wound through Main Amana, and Otto turned onto a side street. Her father lived in a brick home right beside the church. Before Liesel stepped out of the buggy, she opened her umbrella and motioned for Cassie to follow. The girl eyed the umbrella and the storm clouds overhead.
“It’s all right,” Liesel said, but Cassie shook her head.
Sighing, Liesel retracted the umbrella, and when she held out her wet hand, Cassie clutched it. Rain drenching their hair and dresses, they ran toward Albert Strauss’s home.
Jacob curled up the collar on his raincoat and knocked again on Orwin Tucker’s front door. A quarantine notice was plastered across the pale green paint, but he ignored the warning. He’d already been exposed to the disease…and he’d taken the antitoxin. God, in His mercy, had spared him from the disease, and now he needed to find the truth to clear his name…and return to the Amanas.
Instead of venturing into the rain this afternoon, Adam opted to stay back in the boarding room he’d rented for a week and pray. Jacob fought his generosity at first, wanting to pay his share for the room, but he’d swallowed his pride and let Adam pay. Even though they were hundreds of miles away from Homestead, the Society continued to provide for both of them.
The Elders may have sent Adam with Jacob to keep him accountable, but since they’d arrived in Chicago, Jacob realized that Adam Voepel was trusting him to do the right thing. The man hadn’t expressed it in words, but Adam seemed to believe he hadn’t stolen the money. If he thought Jacob was a thief, he never would have let him come to Orwin’s house unescorted.
Jacob wouldn’t run, and Adam knew it. Everything that was important to him was in Amana. The only reason he had come back to Chicago was to clear his name.
Jacob rapped his fist on the door again.
Yesterday he’d seen someone at the window peeking out at him. All he wanted to do was ask a few questions, like how Orwin had come into possession of a second set of ledgers, because he knew for certain that Orwin didn’t find the ledgers under his bed.
The curtain moved in the window beside him, and he saw the face again. A woman. He pointed to her to open the door, and she shook her head. When she disappeared from the glass, he pounded on the door again. She could ignore him, but he wouldn’t leave until he could speak with someone inside.
Seconds ticked by, and he lifted his fist to knock again. The lock clicked, and the woman he’d seen in the window opened the door. She couldn’t have been much older than twenty-five, but her face looked aged. Hair escaped in frazzled strands from her bun, and her once-fashionable dress was soiled.
She tapped on the notice. “Can’t you read?”
“I need to speak with Orwin.”
“Go away.”
He didn’t falter. “I’ve already been exposed to the disease.”
“Go away,” she repeated, motioning with her hands for him to leave.
“And I’ve taken the antitoxin.”
She eyed him warily. “Why do you need to speak with my husband?”
“I have some questions about the bank.”
“That’s no reason…”
“Urgent questions,” he interrupted. “About the books. If we don’t straighten this out, he’ll be livid when he returns to work.”
“I don’t know if he’ll be returning….” Her voice shook, but she slowly opened the door. “It’s your life, mister.”
Mrs. Tucker stepped aside, and he slipped into the sitting room. Deep red curtains decorated the sitting room along with a table of potted fe
rns, and above the piano was a portrait of Orwin and his family. A boy and a girl about Cassie’s age sat on the rug near the piano, jacks scattered around their feet. Both children watched him intently, but neither spoke.
“Hurry, now,” Mrs. Tucker said, shooing him away from her children.
It wasn’t hard to find Orwin’s sickroom; the rancid smells of whiskey and urine saturated the hall. Orwin lay against a pillow, his neck swollen and open sores festering on his cheeks and arms. The man opened his eyes and blinked, staring at Jacob like he’d returned from the grave.
“Hello, Orwin.” He twisted around a chair to face the sick man’s bedside. “I’m sorry to hear you’ve been ill.”
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
Jacob sat down on the chair. “I thought you’d want to see me.”
Orwin coughed. “What did you do with the money?”
Anger lanced his chest, and he wanted to reach out and shake the man in front of him, no matter how sick he was. “You know I didn’t take the money.”
“Frank will prosecute you. He will get it back.”
Jacob scooted the chair a few inches closer. “Where did you find that ledger?”
Orwin ignored his question. “You can’t steal all that money and get away with it.”
“This is an opportunity for you to do the right thing, Orwin. You can pay back all those who’ve lost their money before it’s too late.”
Orwin shook his head. “You pay them back.”
“The money doesn’t belong to you, Orwin. If the bank goes under, it’ll put hundreds more people on the street. These people trusted you and Frank, and you’re failing them.”
“Failing them? God is the one who’s failing them.”
“This isn’t about God. It’s about man’s greediness.”
“Do you believe in God?” the man asked.
“Very much.”
The man smirked. “He took your wife.”
“God has taught me much over the past month,” Jacob said slowly. “Most of all, He’s taught me to trust in Him.”
Love Finds You in Homestead, Iowa Page 18