Bookends

by Liz Curtis Higgs

  Emilie, who seldom if ever succumbed to her emotions, smiled through a stubborn sheen of tears and stomped across the street, bound on her own holy mission.

  Jonas might be heaven-bent to make her laugh. She, however, was equally determined never to be laughed at again.

  Nathan still couldn’t believe he’d said it, out loud.

  Admitted he had a drinking problem. To Jonas, of all people.

  His pronouncement had gotten the man’s attention. Aroused his sympathy. Unfolded his wallet when Nate mentioned a certain rehabilitation center with a national reputation.

  “It’s a Christian one,” Nate had assured him, knowing that would strike the right note. “They’ve got trained counselors, group accountability sessions, Bible studies, the whole bit. Thirty days, that’s what they say it’ll take to sober me up. Get me on the straight and narrow.”

  A knot of guilt, hard as a peach pit, stuck in Nathan’s throat through most of the conversation. Jonas knew he was a drinker, so no resistance there. His older brother didn’t know how much he drank or how often, but to a Boy Scout like Jonas, one drink was too many.

  It’d taken four shots of Jack Daniels just to screw up the courage to make the call.

  And to make him sound convincingly drunk.

  His sales pitch was embarrassingly easy: Could Jonas loan him another five thousand? Give him thirty days in rehab before he found a good job, started paying it back?

  Jonas hadn’t fought him. Nate almost wished he had—made him work for it, let him keep a shred of pride. Not big brother Jonas. He’d gotten choked up. Told Nate he was proud of him for realizing he needed help.

  Jonas’ only question was how to make out the check.

  “They want the patient to provide the money. Nobody else can admit me. I gotta do it myself, willingly.” Nate didn’t know where he came up with this stuff, but it sure sounded legit. “So if you would, make out the check to me. Yeah, the same hotel address will work. And … thanks, Jonas.”

  He’d hung up Monday morning with another reprieve on the way. The check had arrived Wednesday. Today was Thursday. Another day at the track for some people, but not for Nathan Fielding. He wasn’t planning on messing up this time, no sir.

  He’d already spent two grand on a couple of sharp outfits, a haircut and manicure, a one-month lease on a Jaguar. Had to look good before he hit the greens of San Pablo. He’d forgo the booze for a month and concentrate on his game. Make some new friends. Tap some old ones for favors. Mail Cy enough cash to keep him from sending a muscle-flexer to track him down.

  Nate’s goals had never been more clear.

  Thirty days to freedom.

  He’d be back in the game with the monkey off his back in a month. If Lady Luck saw things his way, he’d be strolling into his brother’s house in Pennsylvania along about March first, toting a suitcase full of designer clothes and ten thousand in loose bills.

  Nate buttoned his Callaway shirt up to the neck and smoothed the collar, checking out his look in the mirror. Yeah. He still had it. The Fielding charm. Plus the street smarts his brothers never needed.

  It would take all that and then some to pull it off.

  But pull it off he would. Or die trying.

  One more phone call like this—after a long week of phone calls like this—and Jonas intended to ditch the whole project.

  Monday, the architect for Carter’s Run—an up-and-coming type from New Jersey—decided he was in fact the next Robert Trent Jones and wanted bunkers added to seven holes. Seven.

  Tuesday, the agronomist from Penn State advised planting another fifty pine trees or risk losing most of his expensive soil—at four bucks a yard—to erosion.

  Wednesday, the local jogging club wanted to know why they couldn’t plan to use the cart paths for their daily morning run. They could, Jonas assured them, as long as they were willing to wear football helmets and shoulder pads to ward off wayward golf balls.

  But it was the latest call that put him teetering near the edge.

  With the additional piece of land Dee Dee had acquired on behalf of the borough, Jonas finally had the dream location for his clubhouse plus an expanded driving range.

  Except someone had forgotten to notify the superintendent in charge of construction about the change in design, so the crew had carved out space for a ten-stall driving range instead of twenty.

  Aiming south.

  Everybody knew practice tees aimed north.

  “North! North!” Jonas shouted in the phone until he was hoarse.

  They could be fixed. And they would be fixed, he was assured. But wasn’t Mr. Fielding pleased with his eighteenth hole?

  Yes, Jonas had to agree, he was jolly well thrilled. It faced neither east nor west, but pleasantly north, affording a breathtaking view of Lititz and for that matter, of the whole course. And it was a par five, as tradition required.

  If they opened on schedule—and they would, absolutely, open for business on April 9—it would be almost two years to the day from the groundbreaking ceremony.

  And they said it couldn’t be done. Jonas smiled to himself, despite a long, tiring week of hassles and speed bumps. He glanced at his watch. Nearly three. Still enough light to head out to the course, see how quickly they were getting things turned around at the driving range. Plenty of time to walk the perimeters of his eighteenth hole and imagine the rest of the course every bit as finished, every inch as perfect.

  Emilie almost fainted when she answered the phone and heard the news. The map museum curator waited patiently while she scribbled down the information.

  “You’re certain this survey map is authentic? Good, good. Dated 1747. Perfect. No, I realize it’s already been sold—for how much? Oh, good heavens! And the buyer is stopping by for it later this afternoon? How can I ever thank you for calling me first? I’ll be there in minutes.”

  And she would, too. Her mother, feeling guilty about her only daughter trying to manage without a car, had parked her Toyota out front and deposited the keys on the kitchen table that morning. Emilie hadn’t had the heart to tell her that she wouldn’t need the car.

  But that was hours ago.

  Now that the fates had tossed good fortune her way, Emilie needed wheels and then some. Wings would be more like it!

  She gathered her things in record time, nearly skipping out the front door, then eased her arm out of the sling, trying not to groan as a searing jolt traveled across her not-yet-healed collarbone.

  Enough whining, Emilie. You can drive two blocks with this. Grateful the car had an automatic transmission, she steered with a wobbly left hand and arrived minutes later, as promised. She pulled open the heavy glass door with a painful yank and stepped into the semidarkness of the museum.

  The curator was standing outside his office, waving her down the hall. “In here, Dr. Getz.” She hurried past the collection of maps without a second glance, her eyes focused on the door that would lead to her decidedly brighter academic future. Nodding in greeting, not trusting herself to speak, Emilie approached the sacred map, carefully stretched out under a sheet of Plexiglas.

  He offered her a magnifying lens, then stepped back to let her have a look. Easy, Em! She forced herself to breathe, to steady her hands, to think like a historical scholar, not a hysterical woman. Bending over the unframed map, she zeroed in on the current Gemeinhaus site at Elm and Main, noting no such building sketched there, then mentally traced due south for three-quarters of a mile, then southeast for one-eighth mile, exactly as one of her primary sources had described it.

  There! The black ink square was faint, almost as if it had been blotted out later, but it was unquestionably in the right place. The notation in a sweeping script removed all doubt: Gemeinhaus! She placed her own amateurish map, painstakingly drawn on tracing paper, on top of the antiquarian one. The dimensions were different, but the direction was identical: south, then southeast!

  She could drive there. Drive there! Right now, this minute, see it for h
erself, take her measurements, begin to plan the excavation.

  And hope it was a grassy backyard or a fallow cornfield—belonging to a fan of historic preservation.

  “Thank you! So much. Really.” She resisted the urge to hug the smiling curator, then rolled up her makeshift map and practically bowed her way out of the office and back down the hall.

  It was all she could do not to shriek with joy. Joy!

  Ten minutes later, she was elated to find herself crawling up Kissel Hill Road in a borrowed Toyota, following her map inch by inch, marveling at what stretched out alongside her, due east: dirt. Nothing but dirt! Shaped and shoved in odd directions, true, but dirt nonetheless.

  Emilie exhaled a sigh of relief when she passed the library under construction. My! It would have been criminal to put all that to a stop. Thank goodness her notes indicated a point farther southeast.

  She slowed the car, scrambling for her notes. Top of the ridge. Yes, there it was. Steep slope. Yes, that too. Facing the road. Pierson Road, no doubt. There! Poking a triumphant finger at her hand-drawn map, she hit the brake and lifted her head, prepared to find her long-awaited Gemeinhaus site, a small piece of land quietly waiting all these centuries for her to look up and see it.

  What she saw instead was Jonas Fielding.

  The man was wearing a self-satisfied smile and looking off in the distance, paying no attention to her arrival.

  Scooping up her tools of the trade, she opened the door with her knee, shoved it closed with her foot, and picked her way across the dirt, realizing for the first time what strange levels and slopes had been carved into the soil.

  “Jonas.” She raised her voice when he didn’t respond. “Jo-nas!”

  He glanced over then, regarding her with mild amusement. “Well, well. Dr. Emilie Getz, here to show me her latest research, I suppose.”

  “You’re standing on it, Jonas!” She reached his side, breathless with exertion and excitement.

  “Correct.” He nodded proudly and threw out both arms. “Isn’t she a beauty?”

  Emilie’s jaw dropped. “Then you knew all along? That … that this was the spot?”

  He nodded again. “Of course. Since the earliest design sketches.”

  Her voice shot up an octave. “You knew and you didn’t tell me?”

  The gap between his brows narrowed. “Why would I tell you, of all people, Emilie?”

  She didn’t even try to mask her hurt. “I know I’ve been rather … chilly of late, but I did think we were still friends.”

  “Friends, yes. But since when did you care about my eighteenth hole?”

  His what? Who had eighteen of anything?

  At most, she counted four separate Gemeinhaus locations in Lititz. Nothing close to eighteen.

  “You’re not making any sense.” She exhaled, marshalling every ounce of patience she had left. “Today I saw a map that tied all the loose ends of my research together in one very tidy knot. And this—” she swept her left arm in a circle—“this is the exact piece of property where that first common house was built. Isn’t that glorious news? The minute I have the owner’s permission, I intend to assemble a crew and begin excavation.”

  She hadn’t noticed his eyes turning into slits. Dark slits at that, except for two fiery spots in the centers.

  Why, the man looked like the very devil himself!

  “Jonas? Is … ah … something … wrong?”

  Thirteen

  A woman is like a tea bag—you can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.

  NANCY REAGAN

  “Beth, you don’t understand!” Emilie paced the floor, waving her arms in abject frustration. “The man was livid. Livid! Foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.”

  “Boy, sorry I missed that.” Beth’s airy giggle didn’t help things.

  Emilie watched, still huffing, as the younger woman bent over Sara’s purple-and-green masterpiece, murmuring motherly encouragement before looking up to meet Emilie’s flint-sharp stare.

  “Look, Em.” Beth’s voice, unlike her own, was gentle, soothing. “It’s been five days. Maybe he’s calmed down enough to discuss—”

  “There’s nothing to discuss!” Emilie snapped. Emilie never snapped. She was a cool-thinking, level-headed, facts-not-feelings woman. He was a snarling, ill-trained German shepherd, guarding his precious putting green as if it mattered, as if seventeen holes of golf weren’t enough for any man. Honestly!

  The preservationists were on her side. She’d spent most of Friday evening on the phone with a trusted peer from Moravian College in Bethlehem, describing the scenario, ascertaining what procedures were required to stop construction on the golf course and put together an experienced archaeological crew.

  All weekend, she’d sketched and planned, borrowing her mother’s car again to drive out to the site and take measurements, make guesstimates. She took the long way around, heading east on Main to Pierson Road, steering clear of a particular house with a black Explorer parked in the driveway.

  Things had gone swimmingly until Monday, when she’d spent the better part of the afternoon arguing with a certain short-haired land developer who insisted the steering committee—and soon enough, the whole town—would be on his side, eager to see their golf course open on April 9. Fully operational. On schedule. Without—in his words—“any unnecessary dillydallying from a bunch of eggheads.”

  This morning—Groundhog Day—when Punxsutawney Phil peeped his head out long enough to see his shadow and offer his prognosis of six more weeks of winter, Emilie pictured Jonas at Carter’s Run, sticking his head out of the eighteenth hole and making his own dire prediction: six more weeks of stubborn resistance.

  Talk about a ground hog! The name fit the man to a T.

  The Landis living room could barely contain Emilie’s mounting fury. Her jaw in a gridlock, she nearly shouted the words. “I just wish Jonas Fielding would … would …”

  From the corner of her eye, she watched as Beth’s features lost their sparkle and Sara grew quiet for the first time that day.

  The silence in the room swelled with the energy of her outburst. Settle down, Em! It took a moment to slow her breathing and steady her voice, to gather her scattered emotions and bring them under control.

  “Goodness, listen to me carrying on so.” She eased down onto an ottoman, carefully skirting Sara’s open box of watercolors. “What a frightful way for me to behave, ladies. I hope you can forgive grumpy old Dr. Getz.”

  Sara’s lower lip poked out and her little blond head shook back and forth in protest. “You are a grump, Em-ee-lee. But you are not old.”

  “Oh, Sara.” Emilie slipped to her knees and hugged the child with her left arm, fistful of crayons and all. “Thank you, little one.” Swallowing the unexpected knot in her throat, she whispered in Sara’s ear, “How did you know I needed to hear exactly that today?”

  From the sidelines Beth chuckled, her sunny disposition back in place. “Kids have an uncanny knack for figuring out adults.”

  “Even when we behave like children?” Emilie pursed her lips together, slipping back onto the ottoman and smoothing her straight black wool skirt. “I truly am sorry to be so … so …”

  “Unreasonable?” Beth’s teasing tone softened the truth of it.

  “Guilty as charged, I suppose.” She lifted her hands then dropped them just as quickly, feeling overwhelmed again. “But isn’t Jonas being difficult, too?”

  “Absolutely.” Beth nodded. “Rock-solid ridiculous, if you ask me.” She continued sorting through Sara’s box of markers, tossing out all the orphans without matching caps. “He knows you’ll haul in the big guns of the academic world and bring his bulldozers to a grinding halt if he doesn’t find some way to work things out.”

  Emilie groaned and shook her head. “There’s nothing to work out, Beth.” She stood again, fidgeting with her long silver necklace. “As long as there’s a tiny hole with a skinny flag on that corner of his property, I can�
�t get to my Gemeinhaus.”

  “From my viewpoint, Em, you have two choices. One is to fight him tooth and nail, which could take ages and make a lot of folks unhappy with you for interfering with their golf course.”

  “Well!” Emilie bristled. “They’ll just have to swing their clubs somewhere else.”

  “Now who’s being unfair?”

  “Okay, okay.” Emilie blew out a deep breath, trying her best to stay calm and think logically. “I can fight him—which, believe you me, is my strongest inclination—or I can do what? You said I had another choice.”

  Beth’s grin was anything but angelic. “Win him over.”

  “What? Win him—!” Emilie rolled her eyes. “Are you suggesting I try and convince that … that destroyer of antiquities that history matters more than golf? Ha! Some chance I’d—”

  “No, Em.” Beth rose and planted her hands on her hips, the grin broadening. “I’m suggesting you convince Jonas that you matter more than golf.”

  A host of odd sensations—cold chills then warm, weak knees then a light-headed feeling—assailed Emilie’s body. “But I don’t matter to Jonas Fielding one bit! That.… well, that whatever it was … ended before …”

  Beth ignored her, turning instead to her daughter. “Sara, it seems Dr. Getz is having a hard time figuring out how she feels about Whale Man. What do you think?”

  Sara’s mouth scrunched up into a freckle-framed bow as she studied Emilie for a moment before grabbing a bright pink marker. “Em-ee-lee is this color. I think that means she likes him.”

  Beth laughed, first squeezing her daughter’s hand, then Emilie’s. “I think so, too, sweetie. Know what else? Whale Man also likes our Em-ee-lee.”

  Humph. Emilie, despite her definite blush, would not allow herself to succumb to such sentimental claptrap. “Our nonexistent feelings for one another are beside the point.”

  “And that’s where you’re dead wrong, Emilie Getz.” Beth’s smile faded to a thin, determined line. “Your feelings for one another are the only point that matters. Not golf, not history—two people. A man and woman who care deeply about each other, whether they’ll admit it or not.”