Upon A Winter's Night

by Karen Harper

  “Best scenario,” he said, “Sandra was just trying to find out more information on your parents to help you out.”

  “Worst scenario?” she prompted.

  “She’s trying to ruin our friendship. But why? She knows there’s no future for the two of us—her and me.”

  “Maybe she thinks she’s onto something she can turn into a scandal to get publicity for her writing. You know, sell it to make money.”

  “Or maybe she’s trying to learn something about Bess Stark by casting a wide net. Gain influence, find bigger topics to write about, though politics is hardly Sandra’s field of study. But she did refer to Bess as Snarky Stark.”

  “Which means what?” Lydia demanded, feeling instantly protective of Bess.

  “Snarky? Like sarcastic, smart-alecky.”

  “But Bess is not that way.”

  “Not to you. Not around here. But she is a public person, a politician, who has to take a stand and defend it. Lydia, I read the Columbus paper for four years. She’s what they call a mover and shaker, and she has a staff that would go to the wall for her—protect her at any cost.”

  “Well, we’re not involved in that part of her life. We know what a good person she really is.”

  Under the watchful gaze of mother cat, they went back to petting the tiny balls of fur that had newly opened their eyes. Josh said, “You should have told me you were going to interview someone who knew your father.”

  “With Sandra grilling anyone and everyone at the restaurant, I thought I’d just do it myself, without getting you involved again.”

  “But someone still played us for fools, tried to scare or warn us, but of what? I think, next time you plan a detective expedition, I should go, too.”

  “It’s your busiest time of year, Josh.”

  “But with all the volunteer hours you’ve put in with me, I can afford to go with you. Okay, I can see you have something else in mind. What’s up next?”

  “I want to talk to the woman who tended Victoria Keller, not the one in Cleveland but the one who lives closer.”

  “Connor probably scared both of them,” he said, “but I hope she’ll talk to you.”

  “Could he be behind any of this?” Lydia asked. “Maybe he knows his aunt did have something sane to say and he’s afraid we’ll find out what that is.”

  “Ya, but you said Gid Reich saw you leave with Sandra. So maybe he’s seen other things, following you. Like us making snow angels, like you leaving work early and heading for Amity. Maybe he sees me as some sort of rival and he’s out to warn or scare us. Besides, as you know, hefting around that camel saddle is not easy, and he looks stronger than Connor.”

  Lydia heaved a huge sigh. She’d had to drag it on the ground after she took it off Flower and then had to winch it into the back of the buggy with the rope Flower was tied with. Josh had been shocked when she’d returned it. Now she said only, “Gid has changed his coat of many colors lately—turned kind, more polite.”

  “Ya, so you said. And you said that former caretaker lives about twenty miles away. That’s a long buggy ride. How about we save time and horses and have Hank drive us? The three of us can stop for lunch somewhere. Besides, I need to check out the town square in Hillside where we’ll take some of the animals next weekend, and that’s up by where she lives, right?”

  “After what’s happened today, we can hardly say we’re mixing business with pleasure.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, reaching out his hand to slowly trace the slant of her cheek and jaw, then her chin and throat with his knuckles. He stopped just above her collarbone, but it was as if he stroked her clear down to her toes. “I owe you big-time for getting that camel seat back for me,” he went on. “And I’d like to pay up, but not with a roll in this old straw—you’d have it in your hair and clothes when you went back home to the lion’s den, if you’ll excuse me for putting it that way. But being near you does give me pleasure.”

  Of all the things that had frightened Lydia today, this scared her the most. That is, that she would risk her reputation and her future and her parents’ goodwill to want to roll in the straw with this man right now. She wanted to throw herself in his arms and tell him how much she loved and needed him. But that might scare him, too, as much as angels being made to look like devils with a pitchfork drawn in the snow. So she just turned her head real fast and planted a kiss on his cheek, then jumped up and made for the ladder. It was a long ways down, and she liked it up here. After all, David Brand had liked heights.

  “I’ll take you up on the ride with Hank on Saturday if you can arrange it,” she said, poised at the top of the ladder. “Meanwhile, I think our enemy is Sandra. She can drive that car fast from place to place and she was already at the Rabers’ house. Maybe we’ll find she’s been to see Anna Gingerich, too.”

  “I just hope,” he said, following her to the ladder, “she doesn’t get in cahoots with Connor.”

  Lydia didn’t know what cahoots meant, but she got the message. Connor had always seemed like he had a big bone to pick with her. Yet Lydia trusted Bess Stark when Sandra evidently didn’t.

  As for the pitchfork that was drawn in the snow angels’ joined hands, devils were often pictured with them, but around here, pitchforks were just useful tools anyone could use. Josh often pitched hay to his animals with one. She’d seen workers at the Christmas tree farm use pitchforks to shake the snow off trees after a storm. Connor had used two of them at once when she saw him knocking dead needles off the trees he was spraying. Why, even Daad, who didn’t farm a lick, had two of them in their barn.

  10

  On Saturday morning, the first day of December, Lydia sat between Josh and his driver, Hank Habeggar, as Hank drove them northwest into the next county, following the sheriff’s directions, to the home of Anna Gingerich. Always flexible and cheerful, Hank took all Josh’s phone calls and made deliveries of animals and their supplies. Hank was Mennonite, a group often confused with the Amish but much more liberal. Cars, phones, electricity, college for their kids, some TV—it was a much bigger world for the Mennonites, but they shared many of the same core beliefs as the Amish.

  Lydia liked Hank, though she didn’t know him very well. With his red hair and beard, freckles and easy grin, he seemed younger than he was—probably in his late thirties. He had a wife and four kids and made a living doing odd jobs for various people in the area. He didn’t seem to be aware of continually whistling off-key, but apparently it only bothered her and the donkeys. It occasionally set them to braying, and that made the perfect chorus.

  “Do you want me to go in with you?” Josh asked her as they turned onto Willoway Road, the street they had listed for Mrs. Gingerich.

  “I think it would be easier on her if you didn’t. You know, woman to woman.”

  “What reason are you going to give for talking to her?”

  “I’d like to tell her the truth, but I don’t want things getting to anyone else. I will ask her if Sandra’s been to see her, though. But for openers—I’m not sure.”

  Hank’s whistling stopped. “I’d say it’s that run-down house there.” He pointed. “Yep, 1650. See the mailbox?”

  “I was expecting a farmhouse,” Lydia admitted, looking at the small home with siding and a chimney that needed work. “But then, if she was well-off, why would she be getting a ride clear into Homestead every day to tend an ill woman?”

  “No wonder she’s still here,” Josh said as they pulled in the cinder driveway. It crunched under the unshoveled snow, which also weighed down the untrimmed hedges. “Not enough money to leave for a while, maybe no money to get clear in from Cleveland like the other caretaker. What was her name, the one the sheriff said lived farther away?”

  “Sarah Miller. The sheriff has her address, too, but let’s just see how this goes.”

  “We’ll wait in the car. You need us, just come to the back door.”

  “She may not even be here.”

  “Someone’s he
re,” Hank observed. “I see a little trail of smoke out the chimney.”

  Lydia had to watch her steps on the back walk and concrete stoop, which were both glazed with ice under snow. She knocked on the door. Waited. Knocked again. There was no screen or storm door. She looked back at the men in the truck and shrugged. But she breathed in the scent of woodsmoke, and no other house was nearby. As she turned back to knock again, the dark blue door curtain quivered. Two eyes in a pale face under a prayer kapp looked out.

  Lydia raised her voice. “Hello! Are you Anna Gingerich? I’m Lydia Brand from Homestead. Please, can I ask you a couple of questions?”

  The lock turned; the door opened about an inch. “From Homestead? Are you sent by Connor Stark?”

  “No. I came on my own. I think Victoria Keller may have been trying to find me the night she died. I would be grateful if you could tell me what she was like—even when she was so ill.”

  “Those men not coming in?”

  “No—friends. They’ll wait for me.”

  “You could ask your town sheriff. I talked to him.”

  “I’m asking for myself. Please, I—”

  The door swept open with a strong smell of woodsmoke from within. Didn’t this woman know how to vent her stove or fireplace?

  “Cold in and out,” Mrs. Gingerich said. “Best keep your cape and bonnet on.”

  “That’s fine. I’m sure you’re busy.” Lydia stepped in. “I won’t stay long, but I would be grateful for anything you can tell me about Victoria Keller that might give me an idea why she wanted to contact me.”

  “Who says she did?”

  “I—she had a note with her, and it seemed to be addressed to me. I’m the one who found her, got her help, but it was too late.”

  “Too late for her for years,” Mrs. Gingerich said, closing the door and gesturing for Lydia to sit at a square Formica table in the small kitchen. The gaunt woman, who was probably in her sixties, sat across from her but didn’t pull her chair up. She seemed stiff and wary. She wore a coat over her clothes. The smoke inside the house made Lydia’s eyes sting and water. It looked as if the woman had been crying, but it might just be the bad ventilation.

  Suddenly, Mrs. Gingerich said, “She liked to draw, not good but kind of like cartoons in the newspaper. You know, telling a story.”

  That fit what Bess had mentioned at the funeral. “The same story?” Lydia prompted. “Different ones? Did they make any sense?”

  “To her, I s’pose. At least it kept her quiet and occupied for a little while, but she looked real angry, almost fierce, when she drew them.” Mrs. Gingerich slanted a glance toward the kitchen’s only window. She obviously didn’t want to meet Lydia’s intense gaze. “Victoria was always upset and restless, but Mrs. Stark—Victoria’s sister, not the younger one—said never to tie her down. You swear you’re not here for Mr. Stark?”

  The woman seemed not only nervous but genuinely afraid of Connor. Lydia hardened her heart toward him even more, but, of course, he had been upset with the caregivers that Victoria got out of the house. And it had caused her death.

  “No, I am not here for him but for myself. Did she tend to repeat her drawings?”

  “Oh, yes. Sorry I don’t have any of them left. I used them for fire fuel here. But her stories, ya, I guess. Her reaching for a baby with wings, like a baby angel, and it flying away. In the last square each time, it flew high out of the picture.”

  Lydia sat stunned. Perhaps Victoria had had a child out of wedlock and decided to give it away—or was forced to. Or it died and she pictured it flying toward heaven. But what could that have to do with her? Victoria had never lived near Homestead until recently. But if the demented woman was obsessing over a child she lost, could she have gazed out her window, seen Lydia coming and going and decided she was her child?

  “Did the baby with wings look like a cherub? Are you sure the woman in the drawings was Victoria?”

  “A cherub, maybe,” Mrs. Gingerich said, finally meeting Lydia’s eyes. “She drew her own self really good. I could tell right who that was. But after drawing the same thing each time, she got even angrier and scribbled it out real hard. So I didn’t feel bad bringing the papers home to burn, and I sure didn’t want Mr. Stark to know we let her have pens and paper.”

  “Why would that have upset him? Was he afraid she’d hurt herself with something sharp?”

  “’Cause he would want her tied down in bed— Oh, I know he would, but he didn’t dare because of his mother. And here he blames me and Sarah when she managed to get out!”

  “He hasn’t threatened you, has he?”

  “He scairt Sarah for sure, and she was glad she lived a far piece away. Me, I’m a widow, want to stay here, got nowhere else to go. If it weren’t for my church, especially now, I’d scarce get by.”

  “Did you ever overhear things about Victoria’s past—from her or from the family?”

  “I was told she was a maiden lady, liked to write and draw. No children, of course, like me. And you thought Victoria had a note for you? Doubt it. The Starks were right about one thing. Nothing she did made sense, all gibberish.”

  “But did she always speak the same gibberish, like the drawings were the same?”

  “Why, mostly she said things like, ‘Got to tell the truth. Got to let them know. I have to tell the truth. It’s not right. Taken away, not fair...’ On and on like that.”

  “She said ‘taken away’?”

  “Oh, ya. She was always fussing they’d taken her away from her home or the clinic and brought her to their house. That’s what Sarah and I figured. Her career, her independence—her family took all that away, she must have meant, when, of course, it was her failing mind. But she needed to be cared for. She was always seeing other things that wasn’t there. She could look right through you, like you was a ghost, when more like, she was.”

  Anna Gingerich shuddered. Lydia did, too. Not from the cold in here but from the thought of a talented, bright woman trapped in her own mind, haunted by something she could no longer grasp. And that baby? The note read, To the girl Brand baby... Your mother is alive. Victoria Keller must have overheard the name Brand. After all, they were the Starks’ neighbors, and Lydia’s house could have been visible from Victoria’s rooms.

  “Mrs. Gingerich, did Victoria spend much time looking out the windows of the top floor? That is where she was kept, right?”

  “Oh, ya. I got to admit the downward view of the valley was real pretty, but she liked to look at the sky. Looked up, always looking up. Had a nice big room with north and west windows. I think she was looking for something in the sky and sometimes she cried when the sun went down.”

  “You have been so kind and helpful. Has anyone else besides the sheriff been to question you about this?”

  “No one. I shouldn’t even talk to you, so please, don’t you tell anyone in Homestead.”

  Well, Lydia thought, at least Sandra had not beat her here. “Mrs. Gingerich, would you mind if my friends came in just to see why it’s so smoky in here? Maybe there’s a stuck flue in the chimney or—”

  “Oh, no! Used to it. No men in this house since my Silas passed, ’cept the bishop, that’s all right.”

  Lydia wondered if the woman was still afraid that Connor had sent the men, but at least she’d been kind to her. The Amish were that way, and how she’d like to help this woman somehow, especially since she’d heard Connor had refused to pay the caretakers for their last month’s work. She realized also that this was the first Amish home she’d ever visited where she hadn’t been offered something to eat or drink. Perhaps Anna Gingerich had nothing to offer.

  As the woman showed her out, Lydia managed to drop a twenty-dollar bill from her pocketbook onto the faded, gray linoleum floor.

  * * *

  “So how did it go?” Josh asked as Hank drove them out of the Gingerich driveway and turned toward the little town of Hillside. He’d been real nervous while Lydia was inside. He was feeling overly
protective of her lately.

  “I’m actually not sure she told me anything useful. Victoria did draw the same thing repeatedly, though, and there was a baby involved. I’m wondering if she didn’t just long for children she never had, and she got stuck on that. Mrs. Gingerich is very poor and afraid of Connor.”

  Josh asked no more, partly because they hadn’t told Hank about the note or Lydia’s being adopted and her search to find out about her birth parents.

  When Josh patted her arm, Hank put in, “Lots of folks in town should be afraid of Connor. Instead, they vote for him, think he’s the best thing since sliced bread. Too much power and, with him, maybe not well used. It’s like he wants to be his mother but on a smaller scale.”

  “Smaller scale for sure,” Josh said. “But he doesn’t have Bess Stark’s warmth or personality.”

  “That’s the truth,” Lydia agreed. Josh noted she’d finally stopped gripping her hands together so fiercely in her lap. For the first time since she’d shared her quest with him, he hoped Lydia would just let it go. She knew who her real parents were now, and they were gone. Victoria, if she’d ever known anything, was gone, too, and he thought that was a wild-goose chase. He’d have Hank phone Sandra today and tell her to stop stirring up trouble. He realized that he wanted not only to protect Lydia, but to win her heart and hand. Now, if only he could find some way to get Gid Reich out of her life.

  * * *

  Sunday evening, Lydia tried to concentrate on the talk over supper. Sometimes it turned into a three-way conversation among Gid and her parents while she just nodded and smiled until someone prompted her with a question or comment. Her mind kept straying to Anna Gingerich’s descriptions of Victoria, then skipped to Mr. Raber’s insisting she was born before her time.

  She also kept recalling how, after they had talked to the committee for the Hillside town square manger scene yesterday, she had waited in the truck while Hank called Sandra on his cell phone for Josh. The message was not to come back to the Home Valley until they called her again, but Lydia had seen Josh take the phone from Hank and speak to her himself. He looked pretty upset, pacing, gesturing. Hank had moved away as if to give Josh privacy. When Lydia had asked Josh later what he’d said to Sandra, he’d just told her not to worry about it and put her off.