She remembered the days when she had cut the pieces for the rose pattern, more than a hundred perfectly duplicated pieces of silk, overlaid and stitched together to make the beautiful rose in the center of the quilt. She thought about the way the rose had shone in the soft light of dawn, the morning of the big storm before she left for the fair. Not one stitch out of place, not one pucker, each piece perfectly placed and bound together.
You are the quilter of our lives. Your hand places us perfectly into the pattern of Your plan for us—a plan that You have always had in mind.
As Jerusha let the wonder of this revelation wash over her, the deep, peaceful voice that she had come to know again in these troubled days spoke to her spirit.
I sent you the Rose of Sharon quilt to awaken you, to tell you that I was reaching for you. But you had forgotten. You thought that the peace you knew before Jenna came into this world was born from your faith, from your husband, from the land. But it was from Me.
“Because you are the Prince of Peace?”
Yes. And Jenny has never known Me in that way. So she has never known peace. Jenny is looking for something out there in the world to give her peace. But she will only find it in Me.
“Then tell me, Lord, how I must pray for Jenny.”
I have a plan for each of My children. But if My sheep cannot hear My voice, they will not follow Me into the sheepfold, where I can guard them and protect them. Jenny needs to hear My voice for herself, not from you or from Reuben. And until she does, she is in great danger. I have no granddaughters, Jerusha—only daughters. That is how you must pray.
Jenny waited until the fluttering and squeaking bats were gone. Her ankle was beginning to throb again, and her left side ached where she had landed when she fell off the cliff. The cave was cold, but it was dry. She was lying on a sandy floor. The dim light from the first rays of the sun filtered through the low entrance and lit the cave enough for Jenny to see around her. She could see that the cave was narrow in the front where the roof came down to the entrance but that it widened out the farther back it went.
The floor was smooth sand except where a few rocks stuck out. Back into the cave a little farther, someone had dug a pit, and she could see that a few pieces of burned wood and ashes from an old fire were still in it. Jenny slowly got to her feet and looked around. She could feel her heart beating in her ankle. There were ledges on the wall, almost like shelves, and the stub ends of candles were stuck on them. Someone had obviously used this place, probably kids.
As she was looking around, she heard a noise from outside. She shrank back against the wall of the cave and cautiously peered out the entrance to see Jorge walking along the trail, following her tracks.
The sun was barely up, but there was enough light for her tracks to be easily seen. Jorge continued walking right past the brush in front of the cave. Jenny’s ruse had worked! He continued on up the trail until he was out of sight.
Jenny sank back down on the floor of the cave, her heart pounding. She waited in fear for him to come back. After a few minutes she thought about hiding from him farther back in the cave. She looked along the shelf where the candle stubs were to see if someone had left any matches. There! A small circular metal tube with a screw-on lid was lying beside one of the larger candles. She picked it up and unscrewed the lid. Inside were about ten perfectly dry wooden matches. There were four candles on the shelf. Three of them were burned almost all the way down, but the fourth stub was fairly large. She gathered all of them up and limped to the back of the cave.
There was an opening in the back wall that she could just barely see. She waited in the silence to make sure Jorge wasn’t coming back, and then she struck a match on a striker inside the lid of the tube. The match flared up, and she lit the candle and held it aloft as she began to walk down the narrow passage until she came to a blank wall. As she stood looking for any other way out she noticed that the candle flame was fluttering. A breeze.
She raised the candle higher. About five feet up the wall was a narrow opening. It appeared big enough to crawl through, but she couldn’t figure out how to get up. Then she noticed a pattern of holes in the wall of the cave leading up to the opening, almost as though someone had cut them for a ladder. She took one of the small candle stubs out of her pocket, lit it, and set it on a rocky projection next to the holes.
Jenny blew out her big candle and started climbing. The first step was easy because she could use her right foot. But when she put her weight on her injured left ankle, the pain almost made her fall off the wall. She gritted her teeth and pulled her weight up using the handholds. Slowly she climbed up the wall until she came to the opening. She put her knee up and used her hands to lever herself up and into the hole in the wall. It was cramped inside, but there was just enough space to turn around in. She leaned partway out and grabbed the smaller candle off the wall where she had put it. It blew out, and then she was in darkness. Jenny rolled over on her back and tried to get the matches out of her pocket. Her ankle was throbbing, and she wanted to give in to the urge to just break down and cry.
The narrow passage she was lying in sloped downhill, and there were loose rocks underneath her back. As she struggled to get the tube of matches out of her pocket, she felt herself begin to slide. She struggled to stop, but when she tried to push her left ankle against the wall, a jolt of pain shot through it and she took her weight off. Desperately she clawed at the walls, trying to get a grip. She slid a few more feet and then, with an agonizing jolt, she jerked to a stop. She tried to move her legs, but the injured one was stuck somehow. She was trapped in the dark.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
A Light in the Darkness
JENNY LAY QUIETLY, THINKING OF what to do, but there was nothing but to stay here for now, stuck somewhere in the dark pit of a cave. Her mind played back a memory buried deep in her youth of another time when she was trapped. It was in a car, and she was very small. She had been cold, looking out of a car window as the wind howled like raging demons and the snow blew fiercely.
Outside the car window was ice, but there was a hole and water splashing. Then a man’s face rose up out of the water. Jenny thought the face would see her, but the eyes were raised to heaven and the lips were moving soundlessly. It was a man with stringy hair, and he was struggling to get out of the water, but the edge of the hole kept breaking. And then he looked straight at her and reached for her—but suddenly he disappeared under the water. The wind howled and the snow slowly covered the window bit by bit until she couldn’t see the hole anymore.
The roar of the wind had grown louder, and Jenny felt the cold encase her body…and then something wonderful happened. She heard a sound like a scraping at the window. She looked up and saw something moving outside, brushing and cleaning the snow away from the glass. The movement continued, and suddenly the little girl was looking up into the most beautiful face she had ever seen. The eyes stared back at her, and the mouth opened in surprise. It was her mama! She was kneeling in the snow, looking at Jenny through the window.
Jenny cried out, “Mama, Mama, I’m here! Mama, come find me!”
Jenny could see her mama struggling with the door of the car, but she couldn’t open it. Her mama got up and went around to the other side of the car. The door slowly opened, but then everything got mixed up. Her mama was in the car with her, and they were huddled together, and then her mama was gone but she was covered by something like feathers—and then her mama was back and she was wrapping Jenny in something wonderfully warm and soft, and Jenny could see there was a flower, a rose. And then her mama was carrying her through the howling wind, and Jenny was safe and warm in the quilt.
The memory faded, and Jenny returned to reality as a stab of pain shot through her, almost causing her pass to out.
I’m in a cave, and I slid down. I may have fallen a long way. I was dreaming about the car again. I was back in the car by the pond, and I was freezing to death, and my mama found me and wrapped me in a warm quilt.
Jenny thought about the quilt. Her mama had called it the Rose of Sharon. It had been Jenna’s quilt, but her mama used it to save her when she was lost in the big storm, and then it was her quilt. She remembered the last time she had seen it a few years earlier. She came home and couldn’t find her mama, and she looked all through the house. Then she peeked in her mama’s sewing room. Jerusha was sitting in her rocking chair, holding the quilt close to her, tears glistening down her cheek.
“Mama?” she asked.
“Come in, dochter,” Jerusha said, and she did. She stood at her mother’s side and looked down at the quilt.
“That’s my quilt,” she said. “The one you wrapped me in to save my life.”
“Yes, Jenny, this is your quilt,” Jerusha said. “It’s a strange and wonderful story, how it came to be yours.”
Jenny sat down at her mother’s feet and laid her head on Jerusha’s lap. “Tell me again, Mama,” she said.
Jerusha laid her hand gently on her daughter’s head and began to stroke her hair as she spoke.
“I made this quilt for our Jenna when I was running away from God and from my faith. This quilt was my way out. But then God led me to you, and I had to make a choice—hold on to my pride and keep the quilt unspoiled, or use it to save you. I made the right choice.”
You had to make a choice to save me, and the way you saved me was to ruin the quilt.
“And how did you get me?” Jenny had asked.
“No one knew where you came from or who your parents were,” Jerusha said. “By the time the police went to Jepson’s Pond to pull out the car, it was already spring. In the bottom of the pond they found the body of a man. He had been there too long for them to take any fingerprints. When they checked on the car, they found that it was stolen in New York City. He may have been your father, but no one knows.”
He may have been my father, but he hurt me, and he did something bad to my first mama.
Jerusha kept telling the story. “Well, since you were all alone, we applied to take you into foster care while the authorities looked for any relatives. That was a fruitless search, so we adopted you, and that’s how you became our daughter. And a wonderful daughter you have been.”
“Mama, did you ever regret having me instead of Jenna?” Jenny asked as she looked up into her mother’s face.
“Jenna was a wonderful child. She already had a special relationship with the Lord when she died. It was an easy and pleasant task to raise her.”
Jenny wondered what her mama had meant about Jenna already having a special relationship with the Lord. As she lay in the darkness of the cave, she tried to remember the rest of the conversation.
“You were a stronger child than Jenna, more determined and self-willed. God knew that you needed your papa and me to raise you, to bring order to your life, and to give you the opportunity to have a relationship with Him,” Jerusha said.
Jenny wondered how being stronger made her different from Jenna. Wouldn’t that make her better? And then Jenny remembered a scripture verse she had been taught as a child. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.
Jenny lay in the dark, pondering what that meant. It didn’t make sense to her. She had always been able to solve her problems by exerting her own will. She took pride in her ability to work her way through any difficulty and solve the problem with her mind and her knowledge. Jenny closed her eyes and thought about her childhood. It had been difficult, but somehow she had always found a way to get through the hard times. Or had she? She thought about what her mama had said to her that day as she told her the story of the quilt.
“Who knows what would have happened to you or me or your papa if God had not put us together? We all needed each other.”
Jenny considered those words. Her mama said that God had put them together and that their lives might have been different if He had not made them a family. As she lay alone in the cave, she began to see things in a new way. All her life she had believed that people made their own way through life—they used whatever talents they had to face each day and somehow make it through. But now she was beginning to see that behind her life, a hand had been guiding and directing her. What if the bad man hadn’t crashed the car? What if her mama hadn’t been out in the storm? What if her mama hadn’t made the quilt for Jenna, and what if she hadn’t had it with her to wrap Jenny in and save her? The quilt! There was something about the quilt that she needed to understand.
Her mama had told her that she had come upon the beautiful silk she used for the red rose by accident. But was it really an accident? All the pieces that made up the quilt were somehow like her life, stitched together in a perfect pattern, yet done so skillfully that even when she looked closely, Jenny had never seen how it was fitted together. It was just a quilt, wasn’t it? But as she thought about it, she remembered how difficult it was for her to even stitch, much less make a beautiful quilt the way her mama did.
Another stab of pain shot through her leg. She reached down and carefully pulled her right leg out straight. Her injured left leg was wedged against something, and she tried to pull it loose, but it wouldn’t budge. She gasped with the pain.
She had to get out of this place. No one would ever find her. It was up to her now. She reached out her hands and felt the walls that were close to her on both sides. She was in some sort of a narrow passage that slanted upward toward the place where a dim light was now coming in as the sun outside rose. She had slid down on the rocks when she was trying to find the matches to light the candle. She tried to sit up, but the pain in her side and leg was too much to bear, and she fell back.
She lay there helpless, and it occurred to her that all of the times that she had saved herself had only led up to this moment, and now she didn’t know what to do or how to get out of her predicament. She thought of what her mama had said—that she was stronger than Jenna but that Jenna had a special relationship with the Lord. And then, almost like an audible voice, the words came to her. My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.
Like a light in the darkness it came to her. God had been waiting all these years for Jenny to place her complete trust in Him. He was the Master Quilter who had stitched her life together with her mama’s and papa’s lives so seamlessly and so perfectly that she had never even seen how He had done it. He had given her mama the quilt, and the story of their lives was written there. She thought about the quilt, torn and stained but still beautiful.
She could see it. God wanted her to let Him be Lord in her life, to put down her plans and her desires. Suddenly she realized that it wasn’t finding her real mother that would give her peace, it was finding Him and placing her life in His hands, letting Him wrap her in His love and care.
Just like my mama wrapped me in the quilt.
And again, like an audible voice, the words of a psalm her mother taught her came to her. He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty…He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust.
And then Jenny remembered the wings, the feathers. She had been freezing in the car, and someone or something had come and covered her with something wonderfully warm that felt like…like…like feathers! And then Jenny knew that He had always been with her and that He had been waiting for her to see how much He loved her and cared for her and how much He wanted her to trust Him completely. And in that moment she put down her burden and spoke to her God.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Reunion
“OKAY, WE’VE GOT TWO ARMED AND DANGEROUS MEN out in the woods looking for the girl,” Sheriff Gary said to his men. “Johnson, I want you and Henderson to make sure these three we apprehended are turned over to the state troopers and taken back to Wilkes-Barre. There’s an ambulance on its way up the hill. The wounded man will go back in that along with one of the
men that came with the PSP.”
The sheriff turned to Jonathan. “Well, son, so far your directions have been spot on. So you spent a lot of time up here when you were a kid?”
“Actually, sheriff, that wasn’t so long ago,” Jonathan said. “I’m only nineteen, and I was up here just two summers ago. I’ve been coming up here every summer since I was six. I caught my first fish in Bear Lake.”
“Good,” Gary said. “So what’s the lay of the neighborhood?”
“The creek in the ravine behind the cabins comes down from the ridge above the lake and splits—part goes down the north leg of the ravine and feeds the lake, and the other branch goes south down the ravine toward Tannery road, dips under a bridge, and then runs down on the south side of Tannery until it levels out and flows into Spruce Swamp. The woods up here on top are full of brush, but there aren’t a lot of places to hide.
“If you get across Tannery and follow the ravine down to the bottom of the hill, you come to a really swampy area, and anybody who walked in there would get stuck bad, believe me. I would park my bike on Tannery and use the ravine to get up the hill and down to the lake because you can’t see into it from the cabins up on top. The folks who lived here before weren’t very friendly, so I had to be cool and stay out of sight.”
“So where might Luis and his partner be?” Bobby asked.
“The ravine cuts the woods in half, so if they were still up on top they most likely would have run into the troopers coming up the hill,” Johnny said. “Jenny would have seen the police too if she was up here, and she would have shown herself. So my guess is that somehow she got down into the ravine, and the crooks followed her down there after we came up.”
“You should probably have them sweep the woods on top of the hill, starting at the ravine and working east until you come to the road,” Bobby said to Gary. “Tell them to send a couple of men up the ravine from the road. The rest of us can get down into the ravine and search it down to the road and over to the lake.”
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