Finding Mercy

by Karen Harper

  “Keep clear of it. Go on back to the bishop’s house and wait there. I’ll check it out right now.”

  “But Hannah will worry about me. You know she does.”

  “You can explain to her later. Just do what I said, and I’ll look into it.”

  He punched off. Yes, she should do as he said, but what if she could help someone the way others had helped her? The old Ray-Lynn, the one who was so outgoing, feisty and strong—she had to get her back so she could be the woman Hannah and Jack both assured her had made him fall in love with her. How could a take-charge man like Sheriff Jack Freeman ever love a wimpy, wishy-washy, scared little rabbit? Ding-dang, she still had to recover her old self!

  She turned on her brights, put the van into Drive and headed down the road toward where she’d heard the crash.

  * * *

  Alex’s first reaction when the car roared down the road toward him was to dive out of the way, not even be seen. At least the roar hadn’t included gunfire. Since Atlanta, he’d been paranoid about loud sounds, about vehicles backfiring or even speeding up. If there was a contract out on his life, did he just have to fear guns or could someone try something else? A car accident would look a lot more natural than bullets in the brain.

  Praying his location had not been compromised again, he leaped off the narrow road. The speeding car had barely missed him as it vaulted up and over the next hill ahead—and then the crash.

  At least the ditch where he’d landed was dry, but when he got to his feet and tried to climb out, he realized he’d twisted his left ankle. Idiot! He’d been so desperate to run for a while, savor the safety and freedom of this place. Now how was he going to get to that wreck, get back to the farm and the Lantzes?

  He had to go up and over a hill to see if he could help. When others came, he’d have to fade away, try to cut through the woods past the pond Eben had showed him on his tour this evening.

  Alex limped up the hill, which seemed endless. A sharp pain stabbed his ankle with each step. What else bad could happen to him? His past in ruins, his life endangered, probably a price on his head. But he couldn’t just leave someone who might be hurt or dead. As much of a jerk as the driver had been to speed on these hills, Alex couldn’t leave someone in need, no matter if his own hide was in danger.

  Running footsteps behind him. What if this was a setup? Someone tried to flush him out with the headlights, tried to hit him, but he’d jumped aside, now they’d make sure…

  He hunkered down just off the road—no ditch this high on the hill—and saw a person running toward him. A woman? Her light-colored apron and the white cap Amish women wore seemed to glow in the dark. His eyes had adjusted after staring into the headlights of that car.

  He stood and limped onto the berm of the road. The woman running toward him stopped. “Andrew? Oh, thank the Lord, you’re all right! I heard that car crash like it hit something.”

  “I sprained my ankle getting out of its way. Can I lean on you? I’m pretty sure the crash was just on the other side of the hill.”

  “Oh, ya, sure. Is it bad? If it hurts too much, I can just go see. That crash was loud. Surely someone else will come. They didn’t hit a buggy, did they—or if you didn’t see it, only heard it…”

  He could tell she was nervous too, and not only because of the wreck. Did she not want him to touch her, put his arm around her shoulders? Ella was pretty, the lavender lady, with the white-blond hair and pale blue eyes. She had a great bod her Amish garments could not quite hide and an almost angelic face, framed by that stiff white cap. Unlike her mother and grandmother, Ella had her feelings written plain on her face, emotions that flitted past and changed. He’d been upset to hear he was being given her bedroom, but Mrs. Lantz had assured him that Ella had already planned to move to the small house on the other side of the garden and her big field.

  “Okay, sure, lean on me,” she told him, stepping closer. Strange that, just as he reached his arm to touch her, the new moon popped over the horizon behind her head. Its sickle shape didn’t give them much light but, in the midst of his fear, it seemed strangely like a celestial smile.

  * * *

  At the bottom of the hill, the side of a small, red sports car was wrapped around a big tree. And the hood of the car was evidently on fire. As they trudged toward it together, their awkward gait—Alex was now half hopping, just putting pressure on his good leg—reminded Ella of a three-legged race.

  When they got there, they both gasped. It looked as if the red car itself bled strings of blood. No—Ella saw it was spools of shiny, red cord that had been thrown out of the car.

  “Stay back,” Alex ordered her, and took his arm from her shoulders. “I’ll see if someone’s still inside.”

  “You can’t—your ankle. I’ll check.”

  “No! If that fire spreads, the gas tank might blow!” he shouted, and made a grab for her. He missed and only snagged his fingers in her prayer kapp, which pulled off and yanked her long, pinned-up braid free. The weight of it slapped between her shoulder blades as she ran. She was pretty sure she heard a couple of curse words from Cousin Andrew.

  He was right about a possible explosion. She smelled gas. She’d have to hurry. Passenger side crunched in. Driver’s door open. No one in the car, maybe got out, but to where? Been thrown out?

  “No one here!” she started to shout back to Andrew, but he’d come up right behind her. He tugged her back so hard by an elbow that she almost flew off her feet. She banged into him. He fell back, but she balanced them before he pulled her away. His face, lit by the fire, looked like a mask of anger. What was this man really like?

  “Get back, I said! You could be killed if that blows!”

  Limping, he managed to drag her across the road and shoved her into the ditch, just as the car went up in flames with a big boom! Clinging together, they huddled in shallow water among grass and weeds. The light and heat slapped them, a hundred times worse than an open oven door or roaring fireplace log. Light all over—no, that was headlights up on the road. Someone was here to help! And here she was in Andrew’s arms, clinging to him.

  Ella clambered up and out of the ditch, dripping wet, her snagged braid spilling her hair loose. Despite the headlights in her eyes, she could see someone was getting out of a van.

  “Ella? Ella, you okay? It’s Ray-Lynn. The sheriff’s on his way. What happened? Whose car?”

  “Don’t know, but he didn’t burn up with it. I went to get him out but he was gone.”

  “We’ve got to find him, like you and Hannah found me, saved me. I— Oh, who’s that?”

  “This is our cousin, Andrew Lantz from Pennsylvania, visiting us for a while. We were— We both heard the crash.”

  Ella could see Andrew was already searching among the charred trees along the road, using a Y-shaped branch he’d found for a crutch. “Here!” he shouted to them. “He’s back here!”

  They ran to him, bent over a prone form. It seemed one unwound spool of the crimson cording pointed right at him. A young, dark-haired man lay sprawled half in the ditch on this side of the road. When Andrew turned him over to see if he was breathing, they saw he looked Asian. Andrew gasped.

  “You know him?” Ray-Lynn asked.

  “No—just surprised. Chinese, I think, and here—in Amish country.”

  They could hear the sheriff’s siren coming closer. Andrew’s head jerked up, turned toward the sound.

  “It’s all right,” Ray-Lynn said. “Just the sheriff. He’ll call the authorities for help, and we can tell them what happened.”

  Ella took off her apron and covered the unmoving man.

  “He’s breathing, has a pulse,” Andrew said as he rose and moved away.

  Ella bent over the injured man while Ray-Lynn walked away to flag down the sheriff. He jumped out of his squad car with a bright flashlight. Ella saw him give Ray-Lynn a quick, one-handed hug and whisper to her, though his words carried on the wind.

  “Don’t you let this flash you
back to your own accident. You done good, honey, you and Ella and— Where’d that Amish guy go?”

  Ella looked around as Ray-Lynn filled the sheriff in, and he came over to look at the unconscious victim. Unless Andrew had dived back into the ditch, he was nowhere to be seen, and with that sprained ankle. Then in the scarlet reflection of the sheriff’s pulsating light bar, she saw he was crosscutting the field that led toward the pond and the more distant farm, moving jerkily with that homemade crutch.

  Like a real Amish man, was he just humble, not wanting to take credit for helping to save someone’s life—if the car’s driver lived? Or was it because he had his identity to hide and even the sheriff could not know about his being in that protection program? Or, she thought as the new, local newspaper editor, Lucinda Drayton, pulled up, was Andrew just making sure he wouldn’t be interviewed or photographed?

  Ms. Drayton slammed her car door and ran toward the sheriff shouting, “What happened?” Ella would have to tell Andrew that the new editor was real good about not showing Amish faces. Didn’t he know he’d have to talk to the sheriff later?

  Sheriff Freeman told Ms. Drayton, “Don’t know much yet. That license plate’s almost toast, but I’m gonna call in what I can see of it. We got an injured man on the ground. Squad’s coming.”

  He walked back to his car and bent inside it to get some sort of telephone from the seat. Ray-Lynn knelt by the victim, and Ms. Drayton started photographing the still-smoldering wreck. In the reflected headlights, her short, sleek silver hair looked like a prayer kapp.

  Ella walked over and told Ray-Lynn, “I can answer the sheriff’s questions tomorrow, but I’ve got to get back right now.”

  “I can take you home, but it will be a while. Where did your cousin go?”

  “He’s new—shy, too. I’ve got to go see if he’s okay,” Ella said, and hurried away as she heard other sirens coming closer. Even though Andrew was hiking toward the place she never wanted to so much as see again, she cut through the trees the way he had, toward the pond.

  3

  ELLA HURRIED TO catch up with Andrew, but he had a good start on her, even using his makeshift crutch. Whatever he was hiding must be bad if he didn’t even want to meet the sheriff.

  She wasn’t planning to go near the pond now, just skirt around it, but she needed to be certain he’d make it back to the farmhouse. She’d get Grossmamm Ruth to tend to that ankle with a poultice or a wrap.

  Oh, no, he was making straight for the water. It was all worse in the dark, with the trees hunched over it, because it had looked like that when she’d met her best friends Sarah and Hannah there that night so long ago. Back then, Ella had been the wildest of the three, planning pranks, urging the others to sneak out at night. Scolding her once, Mamm had called her a daredevil, but even that bad name hadn’t stopped her adventures.

  That night, they’d taken off their clothes to keep them dry and, stripped bare, had gone into the cold water.

  “Ooh, goose bumps already!” Sarah had said. “I’m gonna get out and just sketch the scene.”

  “Of us naked?” Ella had challenged, and they’d all giggled. “Just swim around a little and you’ll warm up. Hannah’s not complaining.”

  “It’s ’cause my teeth are chattering too hard!” Hannah had cried, chin-deep in the pond.

  And then, somehow, amidst the laughter and the kidding, the kicking and the splashing, it happened. In the middle, where the coldest water came in from a deep stream that fed the pond, it seemed an evil, icy hand reached for Ella and pulled her around and down.

  Had she put her own head under? In their horseplay, had she inhaled or swallowed water? Later, she could never remember. It was black and wet, and she held her breath, but her air was gone and a darkness like death sucked her in. She struggled, but it was too strong until someone grabbed her long hair and pulled and then…

  The next thing she remembered was lying on the bank, spitting up water, shaking, gasping with her friends bending over her. Later, when she could breathe and talk, she begged them not to tell her parents what had happened—what had almost happened.

  But she was changed after that. Hannah and Sarah knew it. Ella admitted it. Her parents saw it as an improvement. The daredevil had drowned and a more careful Ella was born that night, fearful the Lord had scolded her, shaken her.... Ever since, she’d lived with the curse of the sudden, drowning moods that she hid from everyone, however hard that was in such a tight community. Oh, they knew she was moody, a bit of a loner, a hard worker tending her lavender. But they never knew she carried with her the burden of the blackness, the wet, drowning fear of…

  “Ella? I thought you’d stay with them.” Andrew’s voice jolted her. She saw pale moonlight sliced through the opening in the trees enough for him to see her too. He was sitting on the bank of the pond with one leg in it. “Your dad showed me this pond and said the water was cold. I needed to soak my ankle. I should have soaked my head for getting in that mess my first night here, but I’m glad we could help whoever that was. I think he’s going to live.”

  “I pray he will,” she called to him, staying put at the edge of the clearing, leaning back against a big maple as if glued to it. No way was she getting closer to that water—or to him again. “You reacted like you knew that injured man.”

  “No. Just surprised to see an Asian man in Amish country, which was stupid of me. I—I used to know some Chinese, and that’s what I think he was, American-Chinese, of course.” His voice had a slight tremor to it. “I didn’t expect him here, that’s all.”

  She wondered if Andrew had been a travel agent. Or what if he was a spy against the Chinese and that’s why he had to hide out? No, that was crazy.

  “Is the cold water helping your ankle? My grandmother is good at tending to things like that. I can head home and bring a buggy closer so you don’t have to walk far.”

  “I think I’ll be able to make it with this crutch. I apologize for leaning on you earlier.”

  “Oh, that’s fine. We all have to do that—lean on each other. You know, you still might have to answer some questions from the sheriff. The woman who owns the local newspaper showed up too. She’s pretty nice, though, not like the man who owned it before.”

  No answer from him but a huge sigh. Silence. Just an owl’s whoo-whoo, wind rustling the leaves overhead and the ripple of the water where he moved his foot in it.

  “You can tell me if I’m out of line,” he said, not looking at her now, “but are you afraid of me? Or is there some rule about not getting too close to outsiders or to men for unmarried Amish women?”

  “Oh, no—not like that. I’m just—wary of the water.”

  “Oh. The pond. Your dad said it’s deep. You mean you can’t swim.”

  “I used to. Liked it, even, but not now.” She almost blurted out more. She had a strange urge to confide in this stranger when she’d not even told her own family. Nor had she shared her near drowning with her come-calling friend, Eli Detweiler, though they were once, briefly, betrothed. But Eli would not—could not—give up his liquor after rumspringa, and there was no way she was going to trust him to be her husband and the father of her children—or to know the deepest, fearful secret of her heart.

  Wide-eyed, drawn to Andrew but not going closer, she watched him stand unsteadily. He still had his makeshift crutch. She almost ran forward to help but stayed put. He kept his shoe and sock off; they dangled over one shoulder. It was even a big step for her to be this close to that water, looking at its cold, pale face.

  “I’ll run ahead and bring Daad back with the buggy,” she said, and started across the fringe of the clearing. “I can drive it through the Kauffman farm, then I’ll call for you.”

  “No, don’t walk all that way alone in the dark,” he insisted. “It’s bad enough for me to be out here alone. Since you said it’s okay for us to be close, I can make it with this crutch and you.”

  It’s okay for us to be close… His word snagged in her mind. A
while ago he’d said, they had to lean on each other. I can make it with this crutch and you. She’d wanted someone to trust and tell her deepest fears to for so long, someone strong to rely on. Since Andrew wouldn’t be here long, maybe she could confide in him, and then he’d be gone and she could go on alone....

  She shook her head to clear it, then remembered her kapp was gone and her hair was loose and wild. When she turned against the breeze, her tresses, silvered by moonlight, blew in her face. Though an Amish woman only unbound her long, uncut hair for her husband in their marriage bed, Andrew limped closer, his eyes taking her all in.

  “Yeah, I suppose I’ll have to speak to the sheriff,” he said as they started off together, away from the pond. He didn’t touch her this time, and they moved slowly. “But I’m pretty sure Mr. Branin hasn’t informed him yet about my being undercover here. And the last thing I need is a newspaper interview.”

  “Maybe I can help, at least with Ms. Drayton at The Home Valley News.”

  “You’ve helped already, just by being here, by caring about what happened to me.”

  He turned slowly sideways to stare at her. Up this close, with his face etched by moonlight, she could see how thick his eyelashes were, see the little squint lines at the corners of his blue eyes and the worry line on his broad brow. Suddenly self-conscious, she pulled her hair back behind her head, twisting and knotting it into a horse tail. When her gaze locked with his, she nearly stumbled, and it was he who reached out to briefly steady her.

  Lightning leaped between them, something unspoken but understood. They both had secrets. They both had a new friend.

  * * *

  Alex was not used to being fussed over by women. By anyone. Yet the fact that Ella and the woman she called Grossmamm Ruth were tending to him was strangely comforting. It made him miss his own grandmother, now lost to him by her dementia.

  His father had always tried to make him grow up too fast, which turned out to be a good thing when he lost both his parents in a boating accident when he was thirteen. Until he was eighteen, he’d lived off and on with a New York City legal guardian with vacations with his grandmother at her place in Nassau—lovely but lonely. She was being tended there now by a full-time caregiver and wouldn’t recognize him even if he did visit.