After he clicked off the phone, he wondered what he would even need the truck for. Other than to tie up loose ends, he had no reason to rush back to Montana. Aiden was gone. Left him. No longer living at their cabin. Daniel supposed he could stay in Montana. Live like a hermit. His base needs for survival the only spur motivating him.
Was that what God had intended the entire time? Were the clues laid before him? Aiden was mere bait to take him to his final place in the mountains, to live alone, isolated, separated from all other humans?
Hunger pains kneaded his stomach. He smelled no cooking, but it was nearing time when his mother and Elisabeth would start on supper. Heeding his hunger spasms, he left his cell phone on the night table and made his way downstairs.
Thank da Hah everyone was still out of the house. He would not want to face them, not now, not with the crazy emotions he carried around with him that he feared even baby Gretchen might read in his eyes.
In the quiet of the downstairs, he saw down the hall the faint light of a lantern coming from the sitting room. Elisabeth must still be crocheting. He rummaged through the refrigerator and cupboards, deliberately clattering and banging, hoping she would hear him and offer to make him a plate. The shoebox full of his mother’s labels that Kevin had printed for her sat on the counter. She would use the labels for her baked and canned goods. He was glad business had picked up. One less worry for her.
After a few minutes fiddling about and finding nothing to eat—and realizing Elisabeth must be too focused on her crocheting to check the commotion in the kitchen—he wandered back upstairs.
Loneliness settled over him like a fog. He wanted to roll to his side on the bed and snooze again, but the Amish in him still struggled to forgive him for having napped in the middle of the afternoon in the first place.
A glimpse of Aiden’s laptop case that he’d left behind when he’d packed in such a haste beckoned him. Longing clawed at his chest. Was that all that was left of Aiden Cermak?
Trancelike, he looked through the case that seemed to hold onto Aiden’s scent. Finding his digital camera, he sat down on the edge of the bed and clicked it on with a light ding, like the yap of a newborn lamb. After several trials, he found the photo files.
He began looking through the hundreds—maybe even thousands—of stored pictures. His heart leaped into his throat.
A picture of him and Aiden the first day they’d run into each other at Glacier National Park in June. Daniel had had a clean-shaven face, and his hair had been near completely cropped, like a Marine’s. Shellshock shimmered in their eyes. So much disbelief streaking their faces. The uncertainty in Daniel’s expression, but also the excitement, the utter comfort of having seen Aiden again. He hadn’t remembered ever experiencing such exhilaration. Even the rustle of the bashful cottontail had made him laugh out loud in a way he rarely had.
He skipped along the scenic pictures, pictures Aiden had taken of people and places for his freelance articles. He paused at the pictures of their cabin the first day they’d moved in. He missed the cabin already. Had Aiden really abandoned it?
There were even more pictures of them from their numerous hikes into Glacier. And the more recent photos of the both of them in the Swan Range. Their cheeks pressed together as they stood on an overlook with the Flathead Valley in the background. Aiden’s shussly snowman he’d been astonished to build out of August snow. The two of them squatting by their tent, Aiden’s arm outstretched as he took the photo, their faces creasing with smiles. Almost the exact way Elisabeth had sketched them. Aiden holding up a fish fry, no larger than an elm leaf, but he had never been prouder of his catch out of Black Lake using their makeshift rods. And Aiden’s eyes. He never tired of looking into those golden eyes.
Clutching the camera, which had captured a large chunk of their lives together, he had an urge to share the photos with someone. He yearned to reveal how much he loved Aiden Cermak.
Next he came to a photo that wiped the grin clear from his face. The spray-painted threat on Aiden’s door of the old bungalow he’d rented when he’d lived in Henry. And the picture of the splatter from the pumpkin someone had smashed against the front of the house. He was surprised Aiden still kept them saved on his camera.
He’d assumed Reverend Yoder had made those threats. Now, after his confrontation with him, he was sure he hadn’t. Maybe some angry local who despised homosexuals had been responsible. Was that what the threats had been about? Had they never had a connection to Kyle’s death?
Hopeless, he replaced Aiden’s camera in the front compartment of his laptop case. He was about to withdraw his hand when something inside caught his attention. An envelope. He pulled it out and turned it over in his hands.
Mark’s letter, inviting them both to the wedding.
Aiden had saved the letter since August and had brought it along with him to Illinois. But what for? Some kind of an affirmation as to why they were there, like a horse hitched to the shaft? Aiden’s head always ruminated with romantic, idealistic notions, Daniel mused, missing him more and more each minute.
He took the letter out of the envelope and, nearly brushing the thin paper against his beard, reread it for the first time since he’d retrieved it from the mailbox at the bottom of the gravel lane back in Montana.
Laying the letter in his lap, he shook his head. Aiden had probably wanted to save the letter for a keepsake. Yet Mark’s letter symbolized the entire demise of their relationship. A letter calling them back to Illinois, to celebrate the union of a man and woman, while his union had fallen in a heap to the ground like a broken bale of hay.
A letter had brought everything about. A harmless letter from one brother to another. A simple invitation to a wedding.
Had Mark sent the invitation knowing he and Aiden had been living together?
He was about to shove it back into the case when a second bi-folded piece of paper, pushed farther toward the bottom, grabbed his eye. Another letter Aiden had saved? Who was this one from? When he unfolded the crisp white note, written on the stationery of the Harvest Sunrise Inn Bed and Breakfast, he nearly fell backward and off the bed. In large block lettering in red ink, it read: I TOLD YOU ONCE, WON’T TELL YOU AGAIN – GET OUT OF TOWN!
Chapter Twenty-Three
INCREDULITY raced along Daniel’s spine and down his arm, shaking the note in his hand like the leaves of a sycamore tree in a furious breeze.
He strived to compose his thoughts so that he might understand. To comprehend the events that had at some point unraveled right under his nose while he’d aimed desperately to spare Aiden from harm.
No wonder Aiden had fled town like a raven frightened from a field. Who could blame him? He had had enough. Of course Aiden wouldn’t have bothered telling Daniel about the note. Daniel had not provided Aiden with a single reason to seek his confidence. He had shown him almost no compassion. Pushing him away their entire stay in Henry. The rancid note had been the last straw.
If only he could hold and comfort Aiden.
Forcing himself to gaze at the note again, he wondered when Aiden had received it, and from whom. Had someone staying at the inn left it for him to find?
Tormented with despair, he finally let the note jitter loose from his broad fingertips. It lay by his boots like a dead bird, struck down in flight. Like his and Aiden’s relationship.
But something about the note ate at him more than its implications.
Looking down, he tilted his head and screwed up his eyes to read the note horizontally from the askew position against his boot. Something about the handwriting. He brought the note closer to his eyes. The lettering was near perfect. Angular block letters, all of them in capitals. Few people he knew wrote like that. Where had he seen handwriting like that before? Someplace recent.
He rustled through Aiden’s laptop case and clasped the digital camera. Skimming the photos again, he came to the frightening message spray painted on Aiden’s door. He compared the photograph with the note. They were wr
itten with the identical block lettering, he was certain. Was it possible the same person had wanted to finish what he had started more than a year before?
Dropping the camera onto the bed, he raced downstairs.
Where was it? On the counter. The shoebox with his mother’s labels. He grabbed it up and ran back upstairs.
He compared the handwriting on the shoebox with the note from the inn and the spray painted threat. Identical. At least they appeared to be. If only he had the threatening letter Aiden had received in his mailbox last year to make extra sure.
Prickling fear inched its way through Daniel’s entire body. He stiffened. Collecting his thoughts, he jumped from the bed and realized what he had to do.
“Daniel—” Elisabeth’s voice trailed after Daniel as he sped past her for the front door.
He stopped right before stepping outside, his jacket clenched in hand. Their eyes locked onto each other.
“Where are you going in such a hurry?” she asked him.
He could no longer lie to her. He wanted suddenly to tell her everything, to declare his love for Aiden. Shout loudly enough that the neighbors—even the ministers—would hear. Time for the falsehoods to stop.
Elisabeth continued to look at him, her eyes wide, almost frightened looking, yet the softness of her mouth encouraged him on.
“I’m going to find Aiden Cermak,” he said, unblinking.
“Then go,” Elisabeth said after a pause. “Go find him.”
He waited, wanting to say more. Needing to say more. To clarify any confusion or ambiguity about what he had meant. “We… we’re more than friends.” He looked at her straightly. “We… we been living together in Montana. I… I can’t live without him. He’s my world now. He’s everything to me. Everything I got.”
Elisabeth’s blue eyes gaped so wide he feared he might fall into them. For a moment, Daniel believed he and Aiden had misjudged her—like they had Reverend Yoder—that she had been ignorant about the depth of their relationship. She had drawn their portrait as one would any two friends. Nothing more. She was shaken and disgusted to hear such a confession from her brother. Then he saw her gaze fall over his right shoulder. He spun to look. Standing under the doorframe, his hat trembling in his hands, was his father.
DANIEL turned back to face Elisabeth. The alarm in her eyes verified what he’d suspected. Their father had overheard everything.
Staring back at his father, knowing he had walked in on him in the same way Reverend Yoder had when he and Kyle had been kissing in the barn all those years ago, he shook in his boots. The return of the same nightmare.
Yet the terrible memory dashed through his mind like a magpie whooshing over the snow-blanketed farmland. The horror failed to well up inside him the way he had expected.
Alarm at seeing his father softened.
A buoyant gladness found its way inside his chest and tightened his throat as the sensation worked its way to his head, filling him with a breath of delight he hadn’t experienced since running across Aiden in Glacier National Park so unexpectedly back in June.
What struck him was the relief that massaged him—and how little his father’s dismayed expression bothered him.
With everything out in the open, he no longer agonized over the family discovering his secret. Indecisions evaporated out of the door and into the snowy sky.
Uncertainties and fears disappeared.
He wanted to be with Aiden Cermak, and no one could stop him. Not the ministers, not his father. Not his own reservations.
Wordless, he raced past Samuel, nearly pushing him into the doorframe, leaving behind the trademark wide-brimmed hat on the wall peg. Snow had begun to fall, and the tickling flakes on his nose annoyed him. He was about to rush into the barn for Gertrude when he discovered her already hitched to a buggy in the driveway. David was in the process of undoing her trace. Daniel stopped him. David backed away, bewilderment etched on his face. Daniel rebuckled the trace in a fury. In his peripheral gaze, Elisabeth stepped onto the porch, wearing what looked like a subtle grin. Samuel wobbled behind her, raking fingers down his scraggly, gray beard.
David strolled closer to him. “Daniel….”
Impatient, Daniel barked, “What?”
He stared at Daniel a moment, his mouth opened slightly, as if his words fought to part with his lips. “Are you… are you going to find Aiden?”
Daniel inhaled. Had young David pieced together everything? Or perhaps he had overheard too. Yanking firmly on Gertrude’s trace, Daniel looked long at David. Despite everything, he grinned.
“Go on,” he said, placing a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Go on and help Elisabeth and Dad with the afternoon chores.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
HE HAD Gertrude at galloping speed, leaving the lane behind him in a plume of snow. Once on Henry’s main street, he slowed her to a reasonable pace. Observant of the English traffic laws, he impatiently waited for each blaring red light to change to green before continuing.
A few blocks from The Henry Blade, he parked Gertrude along the street, as close to the snow berm as possible. The village administrators frowned upon buggies parked along the street. They preferred the Amish to park their buggies in the slender side lots, out of the way of traffic, to prevent the horses from getting spooked. But Daniel paid no mind to that village ordinance.
He hitched Gertrude to a parking meter and hurried down the sidewalk, empty of pedestrians. Tormenting fears wrestled with him. He remembered that dream he’d had, the one in which the ferocious grizzly bear abducted Aiden. Was he jumping to conclusions? But the raking instincts scratched and scraped until the bloody images filled his head, and he was powerless to shake them loose.
The race down the sidewalk was like an endless trudge through a narrow tunnel. He saw little, heard little, perceived little of the snow and slush under his boots. Only his apprehensions, churning like the belt on a threshing machine, propelled him.
Relief stole his breath when he saw the bright fluorescent lights fill the window of the newspaper office. The hardworking newspaperman would be at work. He went to open the door, but to his surprise, it was locked. The cardboard Santa hanging from it seemed to mock him.
He peered inside the window, craning his neck to see through the frosty glare. No one was visible. Someone must be inside, due to the icy buildup. Human breath had iced over the cold windowpane. He pulled on the door lever some more. It would not give.
Breathless with determination, he banged on the door with his bare hands, leaving large-sized prints on the glass from the heat of his tight fists.
“Kevin Hassler, Kevin Hassler, you in there?” He pounded harder, craning his neck to get a better look inside. His heavy rapping dislodged the Santa from its adhesive, and it fell to the floor, sliding under a chair.
He shouted louder, his neck stretching with each pronunciation of Kevin’s name.
Daniel’s head reeled. Who and what was he dealing with?
Despite the uncertainties, one thing was clear: Aiden, wherever he was, was scared and alone. And Kevin Hassler, who had said he’d dropped Aiden off at Champaign’s airport, was responsible.
He was about to leave and head to Kevin’s home outside of town when the middle-aged man’s figure appeared through the blurry window. Kevin looked to be scurrying for his desk and reaching for a phone. He was on the verge of dialing when Daniel’s face appearing in the window froze him.
Daniel tore one of his hook-and-eyes off his shirt, elongated the fastener, and used it to pry open the lock. He flung open the door, nearly tearing the heavy chrome frame off its hinges. Kevin set down the receiver and edged toward the back room.
Little doubt now. The lid on the shoebox, filled with the labels Kevin Hassler had printed for his mother, with the same handwriting as the threats, including the most recent from the Harvest Sunrise Inn. Kevin had been the one behind them all. Guilt stained his entire trembling face.
“Why did you do it? Why did you threate
n Aiden?” Daniel whispered.
From the start he detected Kevin had been drinking. Drinking heavily. Daniel smelled the bourbon everywhere. The stench hit him like a blast from a hose. He winced, pushed aside the irritation.
Kevin stumbled. He pulled himself up by the printer stand and inched backward like a frightened hound.
“Stay… stay away from me,” he said.
“Why? Why?” Daniel pushed back a swivel chair and shoved aside the two desks as if they were made of plasterboard instead of sturdy medal. “Why did you want to frighten Aiden?”
“Frighten? What do you mean?” Kevin’s voice was high-pitched, his gray lips twitching.
“You know what I’m talking about. Don’t play games with me, Kevin Hassler.”
“What… what games?” His glasses teetered from his nose. He straightened them. Daniel wanted to knock them off his pale, treacherous face.
“I want to know. Why did you do it?” he said again.
“I… I haven’t done anything.”
“That’s a lie. I know you wrote those threatening messages. I know all about it. You can’t lie to me. You probably even tossed that pumpkin at his house last year.”
“I told you, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Now keep back.”
“Do you know where he’s run off to? Do you?”
“I already told you on the phone, I dropped him off at Willard Airport, I even helped him inside with his bags. I don’t know where he flew to.”
“His bags? He only had one.”
“Well, you know what I mean. It’s just an expression.”
Like the snowmelt gathering at his boots, everything fell into place. Certainty no longer eluded him. The gnawing visions haunting his mind were real. It was far more horrific than what he had assumed. Kevin Hassler had done something to Aiden.
“Have you put your dirty clutches on him, Kevin Hassler, have you?”
Daniel kicked aside a wastebasket, spilling its contents, and stepped closer to Kevin, mere inches from his quivering face.
Between Two Promises Page 20