by Karen Harper
“I’d like to clean up his quilting nest in the side parlor,” Mamm had said. “But then he would get upset, and he’ll need something quiet to do while he heals at home. I still say we need to ask his permission before you try to get all our locks changed. Sad world to have to use locks, let alone have to change them. When I was growing up, we hardly ever locked the house and nothing came of it.”
Nothing came of it. The words echoed in Lydia’s head. So much had come into her life lately, most of it bad. But not her growing love for Josh. And not her gratitude that Daad was coming home tomorrow.
* * *
Monday morning early, Ray-Lynn stopped by to tell them that Daad would not be released until 3:00 p.m. Lydia had given Ray-Lynn’s phone as their contact number. She also gave Lydia a note behind Mamm’s back that the sheriff would look into the pill substitution as he investigated Sandra’s death.
As soon as Ray-Lynn left for the restaurant, Lydia hitched Flower to ride into town to the hardware store to ask for their locks to be changed.
“You should be heading straight for the furniture store, not running errands in town,” Mamm had protested.
Ya, Lydia told herself again as she set out, she was ready to have a home of her own, but not with Gid Reich. Maybe one right next door to her family’s home would do.
In town she arranged to have Mr. Fencer come out to change the front and back door locks early that afternoon. That way it would be done before Daad came home, but while Mamm was still there. Lydia wanted to be able to report to her father that she’d recently been at the furniture store so she could assure him things were fine there.
The hired car would pick up Mamm at one-thirty, then bring her parents both back by suppertime. Lydia wanted to be there for Daad’s homecoming. And, as soon as she thought she could ask him, she wanted to talk to him about the quilt he nearly had finished. Was it to be hers and what did the words on the border really mean?
And, hopefully, with that chat, she could assess whether he could be so depressed or upset that he was suicidal. Surely, he had not substituted his own pills, but she was getting used to surprises. Had Sandra or someone else told him that Lydia was searching for information about her birth parents, and he’d been hurt by that?
As she untied Flower’s reins from the hitching post in front of the hardware store, a strange Englische man walked up to her. With a broad smile, he flashed a business card at her. “You’re Lydia Brand,” he stated, not asking a question. “Roy Manning, Cleveland Plain Dealer. I hear the county coroner has ruled Sandra Myerson’s death accidental just as he did Senator Stark’s sister’s. Since you were on Joshua Yoder’s property at the time of both deaths—found both women dead—do you agree with that ruling? And what is your relationship to those women and Mr. Yoder?”
She was tempted to just keep quiet, climb in her buggy and leave. But wouldn’t that look like she had something to hide?
“My relationship with him is that we are next-door neighbors, and I help with his animals. Camels are my favorites, especially the Bactrians like Melly and Gaspar. I think if you research Bactrians and dromedaries, your readers would appreciate knowing the difference, especially at this time of year. Excuse me, please.”
She got up into the buggy, backed Flower out and giddyapped her away, despite the fact that Roy Manning ran for his car and, oh, no, followed her. She wasn’t sure whether she should drive into the sheriff’s to get rid of this pushy, rude man, but what if Sheriff Freeman wasn’t there? And the Amish would never ask for a restraining order against someone. She could park at the Dutch Farm Table, but why lead that man to Ray-Lynn, who would hide her, but then be facing Roy Manning herself? If he asked folks in the restaurant about her, they’d be as upset as when Sandra played reporter there.
No, she’d keep to her plans and head for the furniture store, where she could have someone else take her buggy and hide out in Daad’s office until the reporter left. He reminded her of a bulldog, nipping at her heels.
She drove directly into the horse shed at work and, leaving Flower hitched for someone else to tend, started at a good clip for the back workshop door. Mr. Manning was waiting for her, walking along fast beside her.
“I won’t use your photograph, of course, Ms. Brand. It’s just that you and Mr. Yoder are the best eyewitnesses to both deaths. Not eyewitnesses to the deaths, of course, but the bodies being found. And since one woman was Senator Stark’s sister and the other someone the senator met with—”
Lydia knew she should keep quiet, but she wanted to protect Bess. “It was her son, Connor, who Sandra Myerson spoke to, not the senator.”
“No,” he clipped out, almost at the workshop door, “several Stark Farm Christmas workers I interviewed said that when Sandra went to the tree farm to interview the son—Connor, as you said—Ms. Myerson talked to Bess Stark, too, at length, and they both got a bit vocal, gestured a lot, though Senator Stark won’t answer my questions, either.”
“Excuse me, I’m late for work,” Lydia managed to choke out, but she was now more than upset. Hadn’t Bess said that she had not met Sandra? So why would she lie about that, since Sandra had met and questioned so many others?
She closed the workshop door in the man’s face and asked the men to be sure he did not enter. She rushed to the back offices because, for once, she needed a favor from Gid. He was not in his office but on the sales floor, talking to Naomi.
“A newspaper reporter followed me here, and I don’t want to see him!” she blurted out to them. “He may come around to the front door.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Gid said. He went to the door and then stepped outside, only to come back in to tell them the man was driving away. Lydia hoped the reporter would not return when she left or, worse, go to her house. She didn’t need another Leo Lowe accosting her or upsetting Daad when he got home today. Or running amok in town the way Sandra had, maybe gaining her an enemy who was willing to kill her.
Still breathing hard on the way to Daad’s office, Lydia passed the coffee room and, seeing no one was there, went in. Ya, the bowl of festive-looking M&Ms was there, much depleted from the other day. Plenty of red ones in the mix, but that meant nothing. Whoever changed her father’s pills had probably done it a while ago.
In Daad’s office, she closed the door and sat in his chair, elbows on the desk, fingers gripped together, pressed to her forehead. She had to calm down. She wished she could contact Josh to warn him that at least one reporter had not left the area, that he’d questioned their relationship, that the nightmare was far from over.
And should she talk to Bess about what must be a misunderstanding? She felt bad that Bess had been pulled into Sandra’s death, especially after the loss of her sister. Lydia closed her eyes, picturing again the description of Victoria Keller’s drawings of flying angels who looked like children. That vision blurred with an image of the insides of her broken snow globe, then with the angels on the Father Forgive Father quilt.
She jerked alert when a knock resounded on the door. Gid’s voice. “Lydia, are you all right? That man didn’t hurt you, did he?”
“Come in,” she told him, grateful he had not just walked in as if the office were his again. When he entered, she told him, “No, he was just rude, that’s all. Thanks for making sure he didn’t enter the store.”
“How’s Sol?”
“Coming home this afternoon, so I can’t stay long. But I’d like a complete report of how things are going here—especially good news—so I can lift his spirits when he asks.”
“All right, good idea,” he said, closing the door and sitting down on a chair opposite the desk. She got up and pulled the drapes open to get more light and so she didn’t feel so alone with him. She saw clumps of heavy clouds that might mean more snow, and she sent up a silent prayer the roads would be good for Daad’s return.
“Please tell him, too,” Gid said as she sat back down, “that things are under control, and that you and I will work well together u
ntil he can return. When and if he’s seeing visitors, I’d like to visit him—see you, too, outside the store, of course. But if you or your mother need anything done around the house or barn, just let me know.”
“That’s kind of you,” she said, wondering if he’d already helped himself to things in the house and barn. But now it was time to focus on business. “So, what are the sales numbers since he’s been gone, and what orders and deliveries are still pending?”
* * *
“Glad you don’t have a wheelchair for me, Liddy,” Daad said as he walked into the house with Mamm beside him, holding his arm. “They made me ride clear to our hired car in one.”
“Standard procedure, the doctor said,” Mamm put in.
“Well, ya,” he muttered. “The doctor said a lot of things.”
Lydia kissed his cheek and helped him take his coat off. She meant to propel him clear into his favorite chair in the living room, but he sat down at the table while Mamm bustled past with their things. Lydia heard her go upstairs, heard the bathroom door close.
Should she dare to bring up the Christmas quilt already? No, she’d have to wait a bit, until he was better rested. She had no doubt there would be plenty of times when her parents were not together.
“Liddy,” he said in such a quiet voice that she sat in the chair across the table to hear him better. “You found the pills, the fake pills, in my quilting room, right?”
“Ya, after searching everywhere else.”
“So you saw the quilt—your Christmas gift.”
“I was hoping it was to be mine. It’s so beautiful, Daad. I just love everything about it. It reminds me of Josh’s animals, the manger, of course. I love the angels that remind me of the snow globe you gave me so long ago from—” she lowered her voice even more “—from my other mother.”
His eyes teared up. Oh, no, she didn’t want to get him emotional the moment he got home. Would asking about the words so carefully sewn on the quilt’s border upset him even more when he should just be resting?
But Mamm bustled back downstairs and took over the early supper of soup and sandwiches Lydia had begun.
“Well,” Mamm said, “we are both happy to have our Sol home. We’ll find out who changed those pills. Someone will tip their hand.” Without looking at them, she picked up a pot holder and tipped the big pan of steaming noodle soup into the three waiting bowls.
22
By Wednesday, Lydia felt things were looking up. Daad seemed to be adjusting well to his new medicine. Since both she and Gid had assured him things were going well at the store, he seemed content right now to stay home, resting and working on his quilt. He hadn’t noticed the door locks had been changed, and they hadn’t told him about the intruder yet. Today was mild, clear weather for the tableau at Ray-Lynn’s church. And, as busy as she’d been with her parents and at the store, she would finally see Josh tonight.
Best of all, she had managed to have another reassuring talk with Daad when Mamm was upstairs. Her parents were going to drive by the manger scene later tonight. “We always support out daughter!” was the way Mamm had put it.
“I was wondering about the words on the border of the quilt,” Lydia had told Daad, coming back into the kitchen where he was lingering over apple pie, coffee and the Amish newspaper The Budget. “‘Father, forgive’ is a Bible quote, but one I usually think of more at Easter time.”
He put the paper down, looked up at her and said, “But we all have to be reminded to forgive—even those we love.”
“True. Everyone makes mistakes,” she’d said, trying to help him when he started to look a bit upset.
“Another good Bible quote, ‘For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,’” he added, his voice catching. “I know the quilt border can be read as ‘Forgive Father’ as well as ‘Father Forgive.’ I’ve done my share of things to be forgiven for, if you want to read it that way.” He cleared his throat, then coughed and reached for his coffee.
“Me, too, of course,” she’d said, still wanting to bolster him. She wished she hadn’t brought the quilt up again. “And a lot of times problems come from going about the right things the wrong way.”
He’d lifted his gaze and met hers. She’d had the oddest feeling he was going to say something else. He bit his lower lip as if to hold words back before he looked down into his cup, seeming to seek some answer there. Lydia almost blurted out that she was sorry she’d involved Sandra in her quest to learn more about her birth parents but that she had been desperate.
“Well, it’s a beautiful quilt,” she’d said in a rush. “One I will always treasure.”
“As you and I will always treasure our time together. Time is precious, Liddy. Time and trust.”
Now why, she wondered a short while later, as she walked down their driveway to wait for Josh to pick her up in his buggy, had Daad not said, “Time and love?” But “Time and trust”? She trusted him and always had, so why did he say it that way?
She looked down the road, and here came the traveling menagerie: first, Josh’s buggy and, behind him, going just as slow, Hank’s truck. Hank was pulling an open, penned load of animals in the truck bed, a camel’s head showing above the cab as if the beast was driving and had stuck his big, shaggy neck out the roof. Oh, it was Melly.
A car honked and went around the slow-moving vehicles on the two-lane road. Lydia was pretty sure her usually well-behaved Melly actually spit at the car as it roared past.
Josh pulled over onto the berm for her while Hank put on the brakes to wait.
“Slow going!” Josh called to her. “I brought Melly instead of Gaspar since you were going to be there.”
“I like things slow lately,” she said, climbing up beside him. She saw in the backseat he had the crèche filled with straw for the baby Jesus.
They made a strange parade to the Community Church, but at least it was on this side of town. Lydia’s heart lifted even more. Daad was healing, Mamm was off her sleeping pills and had been a bit calmer lately—and she was with Josh in his buggy, as if she really was the woman in his life. The reporter from Cleveland had not been back, Gid was keeping his distance at the store. And she was going to get to speak with Nathan Hostetler tonight, one of her birth mother’s cousins. Considering the tragedy of two deaths lately, and the fact Josh had briefly come under suspicion for Sandra’s, but was now in the clear—oh, ya, things were definitely looking up.
A crowd awaited them at the church where the three-sided manger had already been erected. The risers for the church choir were set up to one side. Several large lights on poles dispelled the twilight shadows. It would soon be dark, but those beams would illuminate the tableau. Dangling from a wire, a bright six-pointed star outlined by blue bulbs hung above the manger. Straw was strewn on the ground, and Josh took the crèche out of the backseat to put it in its place.
Striding here and there, Ray-Lynn looked nervous. Unlike the other folks, costumed in plain or fancy robes waiting to become characters in the tableau, she was in slacks and a long coat—camel hair, no less.
“Glad you’re here!” she called out as she ran over to the truck. She was carrying a clipboard with papers fluttering from it, but at least the wind was fairly mild. “A few folks who got the time wrong have been by already. Hank, Josh, we’ve checked the angel platforms more than once, but when you get the animals unloaded, can you take a look at that, too? We don’t need our angels taking a header into the roof of the manger during ‘Silent Night.’”
Lydia went to watch Melly amble down the ramp Hank had attached to the truck bed. When the animal saw Lydia, she smacked her lips—her form of an air kiss.
“I love you, too, big girl!” Lydia told her, and took hold of her bridle while Hank and Josh unloaded the ox, donkey and four sheep, then put them in a makeshift pen away from the road.
As Lydia led Melly in that direction, a flash went off in her face. For a moment, she couldn’t see. Melly balked, snorted and let out a low screech. S
he jerked her bridle from Lydia’s hand and took off.
Afraid Melly would head for the road and be hit, Lydia watched the camel charge toward a dark figure in the parking lot instead. Bright red-and-blue spots pulsed in both her eyes from the flash, making it difficult to see clearly.
“Melly!” she shouted. “Melly, stop! Stay!”
Josh and Hank came running, but Lydia chased the camel and got to her first, just as another bright light flashed. Photographs! Who was crazy enough to take flash pictures in Melly’s face—or photograph an Amish up close?
As she grabbed Melly’s bridle to turn the big beast around, Lydia’s eyes cleared enough that she could make out the reporter Roy Manning with a camera.
“I should have let her run you down!” Lydia shouted.
“Get away from here!” It was Josh, followed by Ray-Lynn.
“Get off our property right now, sir, or believe me, I’ll tell the sheriff. He’ll be here any minute.”
“I just took a couple of pictures!” the man shouted, but he edged away from them. “Ms. Brand here gave me a lecture on camels, so I thought I’d get a picture of her with one. But I’ll trade it for an interview.”
“Leave right now!” Josh ordered. “You do know that camels attack on cue, don’t you?”
“Sic that thing on me, and I’ll sue!” he yelled, but he headed for a car parked in the church lot, revved the engine as if it were angry, too, and drove away.
Josh looked furious as they led Melly, still sputtering, back toward the holding pen. “I think he got me in the background of the photo, too,” he muttered to Lydia.