The Search

by Suzanne Fisher

  “I worked at a department store in customer service. That’s a fancy way of saying I listened to people complain. I didn’t want to do that forever and a day, so I saved my money to go to culinary school.”

  “I remember you and my mother baking together in the kitchen at Rose Hill Farm.” Those eyes of hers, they were mesmerizing. Full of wonder and wisdom for a woman barely twenty-five, if he counted back correctly. “Are you back home now, for good?”

  She didn’t answer right away. “I’m trying to do good while I’m here.” She gave him an enigmatic smile then. She had flour on her cheek, and without thinking, he almost brushed it away. It shocked him that he would even consider touching a woman like that. There were ten years between them, and a world of differences in every way that mattered.

  Still, something about Lainey O’Toole stirred him. He remembered her as a small, worried-looking girl. Simon was a bad-tempered man, lazy and cynical. Even though he lived down the street and passed the house almost daily, Jonah kept a wide path from Simon, and his parents shunned him completely. Jonah saw Lainey’s mother only a few times, tossing food out for chickens that lived under the front porch. He remembered her as a faded-looking woman who had probably been pretty in her youth. Lainey used to slip up to the fence that lined the house, quiet as a cat, and just watch him and his father work in the fields or around the barn. It wasn’t long before his mother coaxed Lainey into the kitchen, teaching her how to bake. Just taking an interest in her, because no one else seemed to.

  And here Lainey O’Toole was, a grown woman, standing in front of him.

  “Jonah . . . ,” Lainey started. Just as she opened her mouth to say something, the sheriff drove by in his patrol car. She snapped her mouth shut.

  And now his thoughts shifted to Bess. “I’d better go. Thank you, Lainey O’Toole.” He held her eyes as he put his straw hat back on his head, then tipped his head to her and hurried down to the sheriff’s office.

  Jonah Riehl had a crooked gait. The good leg did most of the work while the weaker one shuffled to keep up, twisting stiffly from the hip. Lainey knew, from Bertha, that was a lasting result of the accident. Her heart swelled with compassion for the man as she watched him walk down the street, leaning on his cane.

  She had nearly told Jonah about Bess. That first Sunday afternoon, when Bertha told her she knew Bess wasn’t Jonah’s daughter, she had made Lainey promise not to tell him or to tell Bess, either. “I’m the one who needs to do the telling,” Bertha insisted. “And I will. When the time is right.”

  Lainey had agreed, reluctantly. Now she regretted that promise. She hadn’t expected to be spending so much time with Bess, nor did she ever dream she would meet Jonah face-to-face.

  It took her awhile to recognize him this morning, yet once she did, she saw him as he was fifteen years ago, with laughing eyes and a quick wit. When she was just a girl, he used to tease her like a big brother. Never mean-spirited, though. She remembered how kind he was . . . so very kind. He was still kind. And he still had that wavy dark hair, snapping brown eyes, and good-looking face, slightly disfigured by a broken nose. She remembered the day it was broken. He was pitching in a softball game and got hit in the face by a ball. She’d watched from afar and thought she’d never seen a nose bleed so much.

  As she saw Jonah head into the sheriff’s office, she leaned against the doorjamb and crossed her arms. This summer was turning into something she had never expected. Everything—all of her carefully designed plans—was turning upside down. Would things right themselves again? The oven buzzer went off and she went to check on the bread. Or maybe, she thought as she pulled the loaves from the oven, maybe things had been upside down and were turning right side up.

  She set the loaves on cooling racks and pulled off her oven mitts. Either way, she had trusted God with all of this years ago, when she was only ten. And she wasn’t going to stop trusting him now. She would see it through.

  While Bess was making her bed, she heard a car turn onto the driveway of Rose Hill Farm. She looked out the window and felt her stomach twist into a knot. It was the sheriff. With her father.

  She ran downstairs to tell Mammi but found her already on the front porch, ready to greet her son. Like she had been expecting him all along. Bess went outside and stood behind Mammi as the sheriff’s car came to a stop and her father opened the door. He climbed out, pulled his suitcase from the backseat, and turned to the sheriff to shake his hand.

  “My work here is done,” the sheriff said, leaning out the car window. “Stay out of trouble, Miz Riehl.” He pointed to Bess. “You too.” He made a motion with his hand, two fingers splayed, pointing from his eyes, as if to say “I’m watching you.”

  After he drove off, Jonah took a few strides to the kitchen porch.

  “Jonah,” Mammi said calmly.

  “So, Mom,” Jonah said, just as calmly. “Care to tell me what’s been going on?”

  Then an awkward silence fell, until Billy appeared out of nowhere. “If they’re not going to tell you, I will. Bess had a notion to take the sheriff’s car out for a few spins,” he said. “Three times, from what I hear.”

  Bess popped out from behind Mammi and glared at Billy. What had she ever seen in him?

  “Billy,” Mammi said firmly. “Time to move the bees out to the fields. Take Bess with you.” She turned to Bess. “Get your bonnet. You’ll need it.”

  Bess went into the kitchen and grabbed her big black bonnet from the wall peg. As she passed by her father, he held his arm out wide to her. “Don’t I even get a hello?”

  She leaned into him and felt a wave of relief that he was here. She hadn’t realized how much she missed him. He wasn’t nearly as upset about the police car borrowing as she had expected him to be. But then, her father wasn’t quick tempered. She had never seen him angry, not once. Still, she would know if he was upset with her. This morning he looked relaxed, even a little pleased to be here in Stoney Ridge. She hadn’t expected that.

  “Maybe when you’re done with moving your grandmother’s bees,” Jonah said with one dark brow raised, “we can talk about your algebra grade.”

  She dropped her head. She hadn’t expected that either.

  In the barn, before getting anywhere close to the beehives, Billy rolled down his sleeves, then tucked his pants into his boots. He took out a roll of mosquito netting and covered his hat and face with it. “Better cover up good, Bess,” he said, but she didn’t appreciate his advice. Billy lifted the mosquito netting to help her wrap it, but she turned away from him. “Bess, don’t be childish. You have to protect yourself.” He turned her by the shoulders to face him. As he wrapped the netting around her bonnet, she kept her eyes on the ground. “What are you so peeved about, anyway? I was only telling the truth.”

  She locked eyes with him. “Well, you were wrong. It was Mammi who wanted me to borrow that sheriff’s car. I tried talking her out of it . . . but you know my grandmother.”

  Billy tucked the netting into the back of her apron. “No kidding? That’s too bad.” He sounded genuinely disappointed. “A couple of fellows were asking me all about you. They think you must act all quiet and shy, but underneath . . . they say . . . sie is voll Schpank.” She is daring.

  Oh no. That meant that everyone in town knew about Mammi’s car thievery. “Tell them I’m neither.” She pushed his hand away from her waist and rolled her eyes. They both looked ridiculous, covered up with so much mosquito netting, and she couldn’t help but laugh at the sight, which got Billy grinning.

  “Well, I’ll pass that information along.” He put the netting on the shelf and picked up a matchbox and the smoker, then placed it on the wheelbarrow. “So what’s this about algebra?”

  “I see no reason to study math,” she said firmly. “No reason in the world.”

  “I love math,” Billy said.

  Bess looked at him. “What is there to love?”

  “Math is . . . entirely predictable,” he said. “There’s always
a right answer.”

  “Only for those who make sense of it in the first place.”

  “You’re not looking at it in the right way. Math is based on all the patterns around us. They are constant and repetitious and dependable, like . . .” He looked out the barn window. “Like rows in the fields, ripples in a stream, veins on a leaf, snowflakes. Man-made or natural, those patterns are there. Math is always the same.”

  She had never thought of math like that. She didn’t like to think about math at all.

  Billy picked up the wheelbarrow handles and pushed it out the barn door. He waited until Bess joined him, then slid it shut behind her. They walked down the path to the rose fields. “Isn’t there anything about learning you love?” he asked.

  “Words, I guess. How you can tell by the root the way words get started in the first place. And then how they change over time.”

  “See? Not so different. You’re looking for patterns too.”

  She pondered that for a while and decided he was probably right, but she still felt suspicious about math.

  “Since you’re over being mad, I need some advice.”

  Her heart skipped a beat. Billy came to her for advice? Her madness melted away. “What kind of advice?”

  “I’ll tell you more when we’re done. I need to concentrate.” Billy pushed the wheelbarrow down to the beehives in the back of one rose field. As they approached the hives, the buzz grew louder. He lit the smoker and waved it all around the stack of hives. She noticed that he sang softly to the bees as he worked. It touched her, that gentle singing. It was one of the hymns from church, sung in a slow, mournful way. He told her his singing calmed the bees; that they were smart creatures and appreciated a good tenor voice when they heard it. She rolled her eyes at that but couldn’t hold back a smile.

  Carefully, Billy lifted a hive onto the wheelbarrow as Bess held it steady. A few stray bees buzzed around them, curious. They rotated the hives among the fields where the roses were in bloom. It made for more honey, Bertha had taught him. The bees didn’t have to work so hard on the gathering and could concentrate their energies on the honey making. He took one more hive and gently placed it on the wheelbarrow. When he was finished, he emptied out the smoker and they headed to the barn. About halfway there, Billy stopped to make sure the bees weren’t swarming, indignant that their homes had been moved. Satisfied, he told Bess she could take off the netting now.

  He helped her unwind it from around her bonnet, carefully rolling it up again to reuse. “Yesterday afternoon, I went to the lake and saw the truck dumping the sawdust. Backed right up to the shoreline and lifted the truck bed up and dumped. Deep enough so that it all sank.”

  She pulled the big gloves from her hands. “Did you say anything to the driver?”

  He shook his head. “No. I stayed out of sight.”

  “What are you going to do with that information?”

  “That’s what I don’t know. That’s the part I need your advice about.”

  Her heart skipped another beat. Maybe Billy was finally starting to notice her. She admired how much he cared about the lake. He was genuinely troubled about it.

  “If I tell my father about it, he’ll only say that we need to let English problems be English problems, and Amish problems be Amish problems.”

  “Is that what you think?” she asked.

  “I can’t just do nothing and let the lake die. God gave us this earth to care for properly. But my father is right about one thing too. It’s not my place to get the law involved. It’s not our way to demand justice. We leave those matters in God’s hands.”

  Bess shrugged. “It’s just letting consequences have a place. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “Still,” he said, hesitating, and she knew. These kinds of situations were complicated. How could they care for God’s earth and not want the lake to be protected? And yet by protecting the lake, they would need to get involved with the law. Billy lifted the wheelbarrow handles and started walking carefully to the rose fields. Bess followed behind, thinking hard.

  She stopped as a new idea bubbled up. “Maybe there’s something in between.”

  He turned his chin toward her. “I’m listening.”

  She took a few steps to catch up to him. “Every afternoon, I’ve been going to the bakery to visit with Lainey. There’s a newspaperman—Eddie Beaker—who comes in after three so he can buy Danish for half off. He’s always asking Lainey if she’s heard any big news stories. Even not-so-big stories. Any story at all, he said. Just yesterday I heard him complaining to her that he doesn’t like summer. Said it’s too hot and it always makes for slow news months.”

  Billy stopped and spun around to face her. “You think maybe he could break the story?”

  She nodded. “Mammi says Eddie Beaker is ‘a wolf in cheap clothing.’ ”

  Billy smiled, then stroked his chin. “Bess Riehl, du bischt voll Schpank.” He tapped his forehead. “Und du bischt en schmaerdes Maedel.” You are daring. And you’re a smart girl.

  Jonah leaned against the doorjamb at Rose Hill Farm and looked around the kitchen. It hadn’t changed, which comforted him somehow. The wrinkled linoleum floor, the pale green walls and ceiling. Even the bird clock on the wall was the one he had grown up with. He used to think that clock was irritating. Now, it seemed endearing. “I see that the early rain has been good for the roses.”

  “Now we need sunshine to keep them dry and blooming,” his mother completed his thought.

  He hung his cane on the wall peg and put his straw hat on top, then sat in a chair. It was the same chair he had always sat in. He knew it would always be his chair. His place in the family. “Bess seems happy. She’s as brown as a berry. Looks like she’s gaining some weight from your good cooking.”

  Bertha nodded in agreement. “She came here looking as brittle as a bird. Now she’s as fat as a spring robin.”

  Hardly that, Jonah thought, as Bertha poured two cups of coffee. But Bess’s appearance had changed. In just a few weeks, she seemed older, more mature. “The sheriff gave me his side of the story. Mind filling me in on yours?”

  Bertha eased into her chair. “I had to do something that would get you back here.”

  “Why didn’t you just ask?”

  “I did,” she said flatly. “Been asking for years.”

  So she had. Jonah leaned back. “What is so all-fired important that you need me to be back in Stoney Ridge? Right now?”

  His mother took her time answering. She sipped her coffee, added sugar and milk, stirred, then sipped it again. “Simon’s dying.”

  Jonah snorted. “Impossible. Dying would take too much work. He’ll outlive us all.”

  “He’s dying all right.”

  “Where is he? The cottage looked empty.”

  “He lost that years ago when the bank took it. It’s been up for sale for a long time. He’s at the Veterans Hospital over in Lebanon.”

  Jonah sighed. “What’s he dying of?”

  “Some kind of cancer. Hopscotch disease.”

  “Hodgkin’s?”

  “That’s what I said.” Bertha stood and went to the window, crossing her arms against her chest. “Them doctors are looking for family members. They want bone marrow for him.” She turned back to Jonah. “They think it might cure him.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re getting tested to give your brother—a man who has done nothing for anybody his whole livelong life—don’t tell me you’re planning to give him your bone marrow?”

  “I tried. I’d give it to him if I could. But I’m not a match.” She sat down in the chair. “But you might be.” She looked into her coffee cup and swirled it around. “And so might our Bess.”

  “Bess?” Jonah looked up in surprise. “She’s a distant relation to him.” He easily dismissed that notion. “What about your sisters? Why don’t they get tested?”

  “Two did. Three refused because he’s still shunned. The two that did—Martha and Annie—they aren’t a
match.” Before Jonah could even ask, she answered. “And their husbands won’t let their children or grandchildren test for it.”

  “Because he’s been shunned.”

  Bertha nodded. “You and Bess . . . you’re his last chance.”

  Jonah exhaled. “What makes you think Simon would accept my bone marrow, even if I were a match? You always said he was as cranky as a handle on a churn.”

  “You leave Simon to me,” she said in a final way.

  On the following Sunday, before church, Jonah was buckling the tracings on the buggy horse. Bess and his mother were upstairs getting ready to leave. His mind was a million miles away from churchgoing. He was thinking about what his mother had told him yesterday, about wanting him to take a blood test to try to cure Simon from his cancer. His mother rarely spoke of her brother—Simon had been excommunicated from the church years ago. He wasn’t included in family gatherings, his name wasn’t spoken, and he was ignored when he was seen, which was often.

  Jonah could never figure out why Simon stayed in Stoney Ridge. He moved there right after he was discharged from the army due to an injury. Simon had been drafted in World War II and served as a conscientious objector, stationed as a maintenance worker in a base camp in Arkansas. He was accidentally shot in the foot. He claimed he was cleaning a gun, but the story was vague and changed each time he told it. Samuel, Jonah’s father, said it probably went more like this: Simon was doing something he shouldn’t have been, like hunting when he was supposed to be on duty, then blamed the Army for the accident. Using his disability pension, Simon bought a run-down home near his sister’s farm and ran it down even further. It was as if he enjoyed being a thorn in everyone’s side. But . . . that would be Simon. His father said Simon was born with a chip on his shoulder.

  Jonah slipped the last buckle together on the bridle and looked up over the horse’s mane to see Lainey O’Toole walking toward him.

  “Bess invited me,” she said, as she took in his confused look. “To church.”