Shadows of Lancaster County

by Mindy Starns Clark

  Then again, the way things had been going, maybe the whole situation was just about to become even more complicated.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  STEPHANIE

  August 30, 1812

  My walks have become shorter and much slower of late, as the babe inside has made me quite cumbersome. Sadly, Priscilla was not to be seen in the fields today, though I hovered at the back fence for quite a while, waiting for her. Finally, Samuel emerged from the barn, little Francis tagging behind. He came out and told me with a heavy heart that Priscilla was not well and had taken to her bed. I asked if she had gone into labor, but he said it was quite the opposite, that her womb felt still, as if the child inside had no desire to move at all.

  Concerned, I offered to have the palace doctor visit their home and do an examination, but Samuel politely refused. It was not until we had concluded our conversation and he walked away that I realized how ludicrous my offer must have sounded. Women like Priscilla do not receive visits from palace doctors, not even at the behest of a Duchess. Why must our world be so divided by class when all that really matters is what is inside the heart?

  I already love the child I am carrying so deeply that I shudder to think of what it would be like to be in Priscilla’s shoes, to know that my son was bound to die before he had even had a chance at life.

  September 2, 1812

  Today I received shocking news, shared with me in confidence by one of the palace guards. According to a conversation he overheard between Luise and Leopold, they are preparing to take action if the child I bear is a male. When I asked what sort of action, the guard would only shake his head and indicate by gesture that my child would then be killed.

  Killed!

  My precious son killed!

  I asked why, and the guard said it is because Luise covets the throne for her own son. I wanted more of an explanation, but the guard bid me good day and took his leave, obviously in fear for his life.

  Now I am supposed to be resting in my room, but I cannot rest. I cannot breathe! Here is what I do not understand. The marriage of Luise and the Grand Duke was left-handed! Everyone knows the descendant of a morganatic union carries no right to title or property or privilege. How then could Luise’s son inherit the throne, even if my own child were not in the way? Tonight, I must speak to Karl in private and ask him how this could be possible.

  Could my own in-laws really be plotting the murder of my son?

  TWENTY-NINE

  ANNA

  “You type fast.”

  I looked up from the keyboard to see the little girl who had come there with the sports team.

  “That’s because I use a computer everyday. I’ve had a lot of practice.”

  “My dad uses computers everyday too.”

  Glancing over the girl’s shoulder, I could see that the team members who had finished eating were starting to get restless.

  “My favorite color is purple,” the girl announced, pointing at my purple sweater, one of the ones I had borrowed from Lydia.

  “Well, my favorite color is blue. I think we’re backwards,” I replied. Pointing at her royal blue jersey with white letters across the front, I asked, “What does the ‘CCS’ stand for?”

  “That’s my school. I help my mom with the spirit squad. We got to use the pom-poms today.”

  Before I could reply, the girl’s mother noticed our conversation and called out to her daughter.

  “Melana! Don’t bother the nice lady!”

  “It’s not a problem,” I assured her, but the girl quickly told me goodbye and trotted off to join some of the teens who had gathered near the gumball machines behind me.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said after the child was out of earshot. “She’s our little spitfire.”

  “She’s adorable,” I replied. “No need to apologize.”

  The boy asked his father for a quarter, and then he got up and also headed for the machines. As he walked past, he gave me a shy smile, his handsome eyes a deep brown.

  Gathering my thoughts, I tried to decide what to do next. Bobby had mentioned Hershey in his email to Remy Villefranche, so I looked for emails with “Hershey” in the subject line. The first one had come in two weeks ago from an email address I didn’t recognize and contained just two sentences: I saw your note on the bulletin board at school. I never use my locker. You’re welcome to it.

  Bobby had written back the very next day.

  Thanks, it’ll be a lot easier if I can leave my papers and stuff there and not have to lug them back and forth. I need the locker # and combination. Once I get that, I’ll send you the $20 for the month. I shouldn’t even need it that long, but you can keep the change.

  The person had responded within the hour.

  The locker is in Whitehall Commons, first floor, #329. Combination is 5475. Just send the check to the school post office, box 718.

  I jotted down the information and then read the final note, which had been written by Bobby a few days later.

  Thanks again. Found the locker, opened it with no problem. Check is in the mail.

  As I sat there puzzling over their exchange, the little girl ran past me, bounding toward her parents with a bright yellow gumball clutched in her hand.

  “Mason got purple and he won’t trade!”

  “Fine, here,” the brother said, running after her before the parents could intervene. He grudgingly made the trade, and I smiled at their interaction, thinking how much they reminded me of Bobby and me at that age.

  The rest of the group was getting up to leave, carrying their trays to the trash and making quick runs to the restroom. Finally, the two adults managed to herd the children and teens out the door, the woman giving me an apologetic smile and a wave as she went. I waved in return, hoping she knew they hadn’t been a bother.

  Still, the quiet left in their absence was nice. Back at the keyboard, I did a web search for “Whitehall Commons” where the locker Bobby had apparently rented was located, and it came back with the web address for the medical school in Hershey.

  A medical school? Was that where Bobby had been spending his time since he got suspended? It sure sounded like it, especially if he had needed to rent a locker. Though his email made it sound as if he needed the locker for convenience, I had a feeling it had more to do with keeping certain things hidden from Lydia.

  Just to make sure that I wasn’t way off base, I looked up a phone number for the main administration office at the medical school, called on my cell phone without disconnecting the charger, and pressed a series of buttons until I had a human being on the phone. When I asked if there were lockers in Whitehall Commons, the woman just laughed.

  “No, hon. They’re all rented out for the semester. You could try putting a note on the bulletin board in the student union, asking to share. That’s what some of the kids do.”

  “Okay. Thanks anyway,” I said, thrilled to have confirmed exactly what I wanted to know.

  I hung up, thinking that though there was a good chance Bobby had cleared out the locker before he disappeared, there was just as good a chance that the locker would be full, a veritable gold mine of information.

  Quickly, I signed off both computers, packed up my laptop, and headed to my car, surprised as I did to see that it was after three o’clock. With slow Saturday traffic, I knew the drive from Exton to Hershey would take a while, so I got onto Horseshoe Pike and settled in for the ride, my mind rolling over and around all I had learned thus far. Reed called a while later, just as I was crossing over the Turnpike, to give me the information he had learned about the accident site.

  “First of all, the police discovered tire marks that prove Bobby was forced off the road by someone else.”

  I shuddered, trying not to picture my poor brother fleeing in terror as some vehicle slammed up against him and tried to force him over the side of a cliff.

  “There’s one more thing,” Reed continued. “Police found physical evidence of injury a little further down the hill fr
om the motorcycle.”

  “What kind of evidence?”

  “There was blood spattered out in a pattern consistent with a body hitting the ground at a high speed. Obviously, they don’t know yet if it was Bobby’s blood, but that’s what they’re assuming for now. From there, they found signs that he made it to the farmhouse, though the family that lives there is out of town, according to a neighbor. Police say that Bobby broke in, did a few things, and then left. On the kitchen table, they found some cash and a note.”

  “Cash and a note? What did it say?”

  “Hold on a second. I wrote it down ’cause I knew you’d want to hear it word for word.”

  I waited, listening as he rustled through papers. “Here it is. ‘Dear Homeowners, I’m sorry about the mess I’ve made. I hope this is enough to cover the broken glass, the clothes I took, and the bandages and medicine and stuff. I don’t have enough to pay for the tractor, but I’ll see that it gets back to you eventually. Thanks and, again, I’m really sorry.’ He signed it ‘B. Jensen.’ ”

  “So he survived the accident,” I said, letting out the breath that I had been holding.

  “Sounds like it, yes.”

  “Then he made his big escape on a tractor?” I asked incredulously.

  “On an Amish farm, Anna, it was probably that or a scooter.”

  “Don’t Amish tractors have metal wheels so they can’t be used as transportation?”

  “Yeah. The police are thinking that because of Bobby’s injuries he only used it to get as far as the nearest car or bicycle or horse or whatever else he could steal that would go faster and farther. They’re conducting a pretty intense search for an abandoned tractor. They think if they can find that, that will help them narrow in on how he really got away.”

  “Can’t they just follow the tread marks?”

  “No, the ground’s frozen so there weren’t any. No snow that night, either, so no tracks. They can’t even tell if he went onto the road or stuck with grass. They have calculated how far he could’ve gone on a full tank of gas, so that’s the search area they’re focusing on first.”

  “Someone must have seen him. It’s not like an injured man driving around on a tractor would have gone completely unnoticed.”

  “That’s why they’re canvassing the neighborhood.”

  After we concluded our call and hung up, I thought about all that Reed had said. Surely, Bobby must have known that leaving a note would tip off the police and give them parameters for a search. Sick to my stomach that my brother’s disappearance had now turned into a manhunt, I wondered if there had been some method to Bobby’s madness in leaving that note or if his injuries had included a big knock to the head and he just wasn’t thinking clearly. Either way, I couldn’t help but picture my brother, bleeding and in pain, dragging himself all the way to that farmhouse only to find no one home, no phone, and no good form of transportation. I said a quick prayer once again for him and kept driving, more determined than ever to find him as quickly as I possibly could.

  When the delicious smell of chocolate filled the air, I knew I was getting close to Hershey. Breathing it in as I went, I found the medical school and turned onto the campus. Soon I had parked and made my way inside and was standing in front of locker number 329, punching in the combination of 5475.

  With a pop, the door unlocked, and I swung it open to reveal a notebook, file folders, and a big stack of loose papers. Pulling out a few pages, I held my breath as I flipped through them, looking for Bobby’s handwriting. Sure enough, this stack of stuff belonged to him.

  Heart racing, I grabbed the entire pile, but as I pulled it out, a ring of keys slid from among the papers and clattered to the floor. Picking them up, I saw that one of them wasn’t a regular key, like for a house or a car. It was smaller than that and round at the bottom. Slipping the whole ring into my pocket, I closed the door of the empty locker and returned to the main lobby, where I had seen some study nooks. I chose one that was off by itself, plopped the heavy pile of papers onto the table, and pulled out the keys to study them some more.

  Two were unremarkable, but the third one, the round one, had the word “Steelcase” on it, which led me to believe it was for a filing cabinet. My mind raced, wondering if that cabinet was somewhere here on campus, back at Bobby’s apartment, or maybe even at the lab.

  Thinking of the lab, I remembered Dr. Updyke saying Bobby had been suspended for trying to access restricted information there. In my mind, I had pictured him hacking into something off-limits in the computer, but I realized now he had probably been hunting down papers or files in the office. This very key, in fact, might be the one that unlocked drawers that held the information he sought. The question was, had Bobby found what he was looking for, or had he been caught too soon?

  For now, I slipped the keys onto my key ring, tucked them away in my purse, and turned my attention to the pile of papers. I went through them carefully from top to bottom.

  Just as in Bobby’s email, many of his papers related to a genealogy search, including a handdrawn chart of our family tree. Bobby had written it out on a big piece of paper, and I unfolded it to see that he had tracked himself backward through our father and grandfather, on up the line to a man named Samuel Jensen, who was listed as our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.

  Other than the genealogical stuff, the rest of the pile consisted of handwritten notes and photocopies of textbook pages, all relating to genetic disorders that seemed to be common to the Amish—things with names like glutaric aciduria and Crigler-Najjar syndrome and medium-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency. Bobby had highlighted various paragraphs, but most of the terminology was way over my head. The best I could tell, it looked as though doctors had made progress in isolating the genes that caused such disorders and that the Amish might someday be helped by “gene therapy at the eight-cell stage.” The next paragraph, however, made it sound like something they weren’t likely to do even if the technology was available:

  Though in vitro fertilization is not specifically prohibited by the Ordnung, the practice is not common among the Amish, primarily due to the hefty price tag, the time involved, and the overriding sense of tampering with God’s will. The far simpler process of preimplanation genetic diagnosis and selection is not an option for this population due to the subsequent destruction of unsuitable embryos.

  I put that page aside and moved on to the next item, a newspaper article titled “Gene Hunters Explore Founder Effect.” The article explained in simple terms the whole Amish-genetic phenomenon that Reed had told me about, saying that more than one hundred and fifty thousand Amish in America could trace their roots back to only two hundred common ancestors who had immigrated from Europe in the eighteenth century. Through generations of intermarriage among the descendants of those immigrants, the recessive genes that were diluted in general populations remained captive in the closed Amish society. With each generation, the odds increased that carriers of the same rare disorders would marry and produce afflicted children—hence the “founder effect.”

  Among the gene hunters who were interested in this unique population, the article said they fell into two camps: those whose research was beneficial to the Amish and those who were merely taking advantage of them for material gain. The nonprofit Clinic for Special Children, located near Strasburg and founded by a world-renowned pediatrician, was cited as “a perfect example of give-and-take between researchers and patients,” ably succeeding in its dual goals of caring for the patients who suffered from rare disorders and advancing research into causes, treatments, and cures.

  In contrast, the article said, some research labs that focused on the Amish were “merely take and no give,” the types of places where Amish blood was collected for study and eventual profit in genetic engineering without regard to those who were currently suffering. Though the author didn’t come out and say it, I had a feeling that the WIRE fell into that latter category, especially considering that the lab was primarily
for research rather than treatment, not to mention that Wynn Industries was a for-profit pharmaceutical company. For them, it was all about the bottom line.

  I put the article aside and picked up the last item, which looked to be a printout of some lab tests. Reading carefully, I saw that the person tested was Isaac Jensen, and that he had had a negative result for Wolfe-Kraus syndrome. I sat back, suddenly remembering the look that had passed between Grete and Lydia last night at the dinner table. A surge of nausea rose in my throat as I realized that something must be wrong with Isaac.

  Did he have a rare Amish disorder despite the fact that only one of his parents was Amish? Obviously, Bobby had been concerned enough about his son’s health to have him tested for WKS, and probably without Lydia’s knowledge. Once the results had turned out negative, Bobby’s next step must have been to come here and do research, trying to figure out what could be wrong with his son. That would explain the notes and textbook copies in the pile, but what about the genealogical stuff? Was Bobby looking for genetic clues for some disorder in our family tree? As far as I knew, there had been no Amish blood in our family’s past—though considering that our forefathers had lived in Lancaster County, I supposed it could be possible.

  I looked again at the names on the chart he had made.

  Samuel Jensen—great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather

  Karl Jensen—great-great-great-great-great-grandfather

  Jonas Jensen—great-great-great-great-grandfather

  Peter Jensen—great-great-great-grandfather

  William Jensen—great-great-grandfather

  Otto Jensen—great-grandfather

  Henry Jensen—grandfather

  Charles Jensen—father

  Bobby Jensen

  Near the top, Bobby had drawn an arrow pointing from Karl Jensen to his father Samuel. Beside the arrow, in a small notation, he had written Y-DNA46 says no genetic connection.