Summer of Secrets

by Charlotte Hubbard

  Rachel would never understand that. And she would never understand or approve of him snooping around in Morning Star, looking for the sister who so closely resembled her yet was different in some very basic ways.

  What was he doing here, really?

  Walkin’ across the Devil’s backyard, the elders would say.

  Micah strode past some other storefronts, telling himself he needed to find Rebecca—to quiz Tiffany—as much for Rachel’s sake as to satisfy his own ... curiosity. This was the sort of prying their preachers, Tom Hostetler and Gabe Glick, and Bishop Knepp warned them about in Sunday sermons; poking around that would get him in trouble for sure if anyone back home found out about it. But if his investigation would resolve the doubts Rachel had about this whole alarming situation, wasn’t it worth the risk of punishment?

  Playin’ with fire, his thoughts warned as he walked alongside the shiny red car. The top was folded down and the black leather interior gleamed richly in the afternoon sun. The silver emblem on the trunk didn’t resemble any horse he’d ever ridden or worked with: far too fancy and fast for Plain folks. Quickly Micah entered the pool hall, before his nerve left him.

  His eyes took a moment to adjust to the dimness. As he studied the men of various ages leaning intently over the green pool tables, bathed in light from swag lamps advertising liquor, the smoke stung his eyes. In the shadowy corners of the room, other fellows slouched over small tables, glass mugs and cigarettes in their hands. The dank musk of beer made him sneeze loudly—and then he was the one everyone eyed.

  “Hey, farmer boy! You lost or somethin’?”

  “Where’d ya get that fine hat, Mr. Hayseed?”

  “Yeah, I’ve been wantin’ me a sun hat like—”

  Micah gasped, swiping at the air above his head: somebody behind him had poked his straw hat off, and now it dangled on the end of a pool cue, just beyond his reach. The man who tormented him appeared to be around thirty—old enough to have better manners. But then, the grimy bandanna around his long hair, and faded jeans with split-out knees, suggested he didn’t much care how he looked. “Whaddaya think your hat’s worth, blondie?” he jeered.

  “Oh, it’s these suspenders I want!” A fellow behind him grabbed the back crosspiece of his suspenders as though he intended to lift Micah from the floor. “Get the feelin’ your kind don’t belong here?” he asked with a harsh laugh. “Or did ya come in to find out how real men pass a Sunday afternoon?”

  “Came lookin’ for Tiffany!” Micah blurted out. He knew better than to grab for his hat or struggle against his captor, because then they’d only torment him more.

  “Tiff Oliveri? Now what would a rube like you want with a hard-core babe like her?” The guy dangling his hat glanced toward a smoky corner of the room and then smirked at him again. “Like she’d waste her time on such a wuss-boy!”

  A movement at one of the tables caught his eye, and through the haze Micah saw a girl with spiked hair wearing a black T-shirt. She gawked at him before downing the rest of her beer and sticking her cigarette in her mouth. Then she slumped against the wall, choosing to ignore him.

  His heart thudded hard. He’d come this far, after finding her mother’s obituary at the county library. He wouldn’t likely get another chance to speak with Tiffany about her sisters—or anything else. A more aggressive man would have marched between the tables and start a conversation, even though the long-lost Lantz sister appeared peeved that he’d spoken her name. But what would he accomplish by embarrassing her in front of her friends?

  Micah jerked free from the guy who still gripped his suspenders. “If you’ll gimme my hat, I won’t bother ya further. Just wanted to express my sympathy about Tiffany’s mom and answer any questions she might have about her sisters, that’s all.”

  “Looks like you’re runnin’ somewhere between fat chance and no chance, plowboy.” The guy in the bandanna laughed at his own turn of phrase. He dropped the straw hat onto a table, where a couple other guys yanked it from their plate of nachos and tossed it toward the door.

  Micah didn’t have to be told twice. He stepped quickly between the tables, grabbed his hat from the dirty floor, and headed out into the muggy afternoon. With his handkerchief, he wiped the smeared cheese from the woven straw, striding up the road toward the parking lot of the Mennonite church. Why had he believed he’d accomplish anything in a pool hall?

  And why was Tiffany there? Are those the people she called friends?

  He could certainly never relate any of this to Miriam or the girls: they’d seen and heard enough in their café from that—what was the term?—hard-core babe? While it was true enough that something about Tiffany’s brash attitude attracted him, Micah had no further desire to find out what she was like beneath her dyed hair and that tattoo of a skull on her shoulder. Sometimes the cover did show what the book inside was like.

  “Hey. How’d you know about me? And where to find me?”

  Micah’s breath caught. He stopped next to the red Mustang that had purred up alongside him while he’d been lost in his troubled thoughts. Tiffany sat stiffly behind the wheel. Her eyes were hidden behind large, dark sunglasses, but he felt the gaze she fixed on him. Challenging him. How should he answer, considering the way she’d spurned him just moments ago?

  “Saw ya last week at the café in Willow Ridge. Miriam Lantz and her girls are ... family friends.” Why couldn’t he bring himself to say he intended to marry Rachel? Was it because he couldn’t back up his feelings with words? Or was his curiosity about this defiant, demanding young woman overruling his common sense? She was nothing but trouble, judging from her tattoo and her black attitude, but hadn’t God said His people weren’t to judge each other? Jesus and His Father would do the saving or condemning, and meanwhile humans were created to love and forgive ... unconditionally.

  This has nothin’ to do with the Good Book and you know it! But don’t write her off just yet.

  “So why didn’t you tell Becker where to get off?” she demanded. “Should’ve punched him out for grabbing your ... suspenders, for starters.”

  Micah put on his hat, despite the greasy spots on its rim. He badly wanted to retuck his shirttail, but that seemed inappropriate with Tiffany studying him so intently. “It’s not our way. And what would I have accomplished with violence?” he pointed out. “One punch, and I’d’ve been knocked to the floor, outnumbered about twenty to one. Totally at their mercy. Not my kind of odds, thanks.”

  Tiffany removed her sunglasses to gawk more intently at him. Her shimmering blue eyes looked so much like Rachel’s yet so ... icy hard. “So you are a wuss, like they said?”

  “Is that why you came after me?” Micah crossed his arms, scrutinizing her in return. Why had he even entered into this sparring match? Tiffany’s expression told him all he needed to know: she found him odd and out of place in her world. Somebody to make fun of, now that he was standing close enough that she could see all the reasons not to take him seriously.

  Isn’t that why you came today, without tellin’ anyone? To get a closer look at this girl who appears so alien? An outsider in more ways than one?

  One corner of her mouth lifted. “Get in. Unless that’s not your way, either.”

  His pulse pounded. Tiffany was inviting him for a ride in this car that glowed like hellfire, which would put him at her mercy ... odds he liked better than those he’d had in the pool hall. Yet he hesitated with his hand on the door. The Ordnung expressly forbade riding in cars on Sunday—let alone with a brash Englisher like this one. He’d known that law all his life and had sworn to abide by it when he’d been baptized into the church.

  Micah’s throat went dry. Still those blue eyes taunted him. Tempted him.

  “Suit yourself,” she said with a shrug. “I thought we could compare notes about what my old man told me and what you know about that lady at the café. She was gawking at my clothes, but ya know ... she was wearing all black, too.”

  “Lost her husband—your da
t—a couple years back. She still misses him.” Before she could change her mind and roar off, Micah climbed into the seat beside her. “Are ya sayin’ you don’t remember anythin’ about bein’ washed downriver? Let alone recall your own mother and sisters?”

  “Hey! I was only a little kid!”

  “And I intend to see that ya don’t hurt those folks any more than ya already have,” Micah went on. He turned in the seat to look at her, unflinching. “Our people no doubt appear odd and out of step to ya, but your mamm suffered horrible-much when she lost ya that day—and again when Jesse died and left her and his other two girls to make their way without him. I won’t allow ya to tromp all over their feelin’s, Rebecca.”

  She winced at the name. “When I asked the shrink last week, she said I probably repressed the whole episode. Was too freaking scared to let my mind recall what happened—or remember anything about that day,” she muttered. “Don’t expect me to come crawling back, acting all grateful or apologetic, or—”

  “If ya can’t be grateful for a mother who loves ya, don’t come back at all.”

  Where was this stern, Old Testament side of him coming from? Micah settled into the low-slung seat, reminding himself that this hard-core babe might just order him out and never speak to him again ... which wouldn’t accomplish a thing, would it? Micah glanced at her delicate hand as she shifted into DRIVE again. Except for the black fingernails and the chains running between the metal ring on her finger and the leather band around her wrist, it could be Rachel’s hand. Could he convince this black sheep of the Lantz family to open her heart to the mother who’d missed her for so many years? Could she at least come to see Rachel and Rhoda as young women who were like her in so many ways?

  “Answer me this, then, Micah: When I went to the library to check out the newspapers from back then, there were no accounts of a little girl getting washed downstream.” Tiffany focused on the road then, as though she could turn her attention on and off with a switch.

  Micah suspected that beneath her big, dark sunglasses some tears were gathering. And why wouldn’t she cry? It had to be frustrating, figuring out whom to believe when she’d learned the Oliveris weren’t her natural parents—and this after the woman she’d called her mother had passed on. “I don’t have an answer for that,” he replied beneath the rush of the wind. “My family moved to Willow Ridge from Lancaster County a couple years after the flood. My mamm is Miriam’s best friend, and she was completely ferhoodled when you showed up last week. Had no idea the Lantz girls had been born as triplets.”

  “And you don’t find that hard to believe?” Tiffany shot back. “Why is it, when I ask these questions or go looking for evidence, it’s like my ride down the river never happened? Like I—I never existed, until I got rescued by Bob Oliveri? Or so he says!”

  Micah resisted the urge to hold the hand that rested on the shift lever between them. Her voice had risen into a register that threatened to crack, and he couldn’t imagine what she must be feeling. “Maybe you need to ask him more about—”

  “How can I trust what he tells me? These are the people who faked my identity—called me the same name as a little girl they’d lost, and used the same birth certificate, even! What’s wrong with this picture?”

  He let out the breath he’d been holding. As she got more upset, Tiffany’s ringed fingers gripped the wheel tighter and they flew down the road even faster. What had he done, putting himself in her hands? Was he risking his reputation—his standing in Willow Ridge as Rachel’s beau—by allowing himself this secret taste of forbidden fruit? Was he risking his life, riding with Tiffany? He saw now why Amish men believed it was a bad idea to allow a woman to take the lead, or in this case, take the wheel.

  Yet she was asking important questions. He prayed things wouldn’t go terribly wrong while Tiffany was this upset. He said nothing more, so as not to distract her.

  “Okay, something else I don’t get.” She said above the rush of the wind. Tiffany obviously loved the open road: after a few moments of calming silence as she sped down the highway, she lifted her face to the sun with a mystifying smile. “How come your women wear such dull dresses, all made in the same dumpy style? And what’s with those little hats with the dangly strings?” she demanded. “You can’t tell me Amish guys wear suspenders and straw hats as a religious ritual! I mean, really! Do you believe you’ll go to hell if you wear plaid pants—or go to a barber for a real haircut? Or that your women will be condemned if they sewed a dress from a neon leopard-skin print?”

  Micah’s breath left him. While she sounded genuinely curious, she could obviously fillet him with her sharp tongue even faster than Rachel did when she got upset. When a gust of wind popped his hat from his head, he grabbed it and held it on his lap ... not proper behavior, especially in the presence of an Englishwoman, but what else was he to do? “When we are baptized into the church—as adults, so we choose to live the Old Ways—we agree to follow the Ordnung our congregation has agreed upon.”

  “Ordnung ? You mean like rules and regs?”

  “Jah. And it reminds us to not be distracted or misled by worldly things like electrical appliances and—”

  “That is so freaking weird.” From behind her sunglasses, Tiffany stared at him as though he had two heads. “So then, how do they cook at the café? And how on earth do those women conduct business without a phone?”

  “Bishop Knepp allowed Miriam to partner with Mennonites—her husband’s cousins—who wired the buildin’ for electricity after she had it built. So she can run the Sweet Seasons with a kitchen that’s up to code,” he added in a voice that sounded none too confident. “The two shops share a phone in a little booth out back—”

  “You let one guy decide who gets electricity? That’s nuts!”

  The bishop had insisted they use pneumatic tools and a generator in their carpentry shop, rather than more convenient electrical power, but he and his brothers hadn’t protested or challenged Hiram’s judgment. “He was chosen by God to lead our district—”

  “So you’re saying God lets you Amish have phones, but only outside? Get real!”

  “Only because the café brings in tourists that supplement all our incomes. We don’t have telephones in our homes because—”

  “This is unbelievable! Freaking uncivilized!” Tiffany looked at the road again and then swerved to get back into the proper lane. They were going way too fast, yet she seemed able to control the car ... as though she enjoyed driving with the wind whipping her short, spiky hair.

  And he enjoyed watching her.

  Micah shifted. Recalling this same rush of excitement when he’d ridden hell-bent down the highway with his English and Mennonite friends a few years ago. The wind was blowing his chin-length hair into a tangle, but he didn’t care: it was enough to feel these moments of glorious speed with no one from Willow Ridge to witness how he’d spent his afternoon. He’d pray about it tonight. Talk to God about staying on the straight and narrow way he’d sworn to uphold, because Rachel deserved a man who kept his word—to her and to God.

  As Tiffany slowed to make a U-turn in the middle of the road, he tried desperately to speak of his faith, of the strong family ties fostered by Old Order ways ... family ties and a birthright she could reclaim, if she chose to. But he was bungling it badly when she took a tiny phone from a holster on her belt and began talking into it, oblivious to his presence for several moments. How could she negotiate this turn with one hand, and talk at the same time?

  Tiffany made a face at the cell phone before she slipped it back into its holster. Then she focused on him instead of watching the road. “So where’s your car?” she demanded.

  “Don’t have one.”

  “You what?” She jammed her foot on the brake, to stare at him as the Mustang idled right in the middle of the county highway. “So you don’t even know how to drive? And you’re how old?”

  As Micah watched the incredulous emotions play across her face, he felt like a little s
choolkid. Tiffany’s sudden mood switches intimidated him—and they might not be too safe at the speeds she’d been traveling, either. But, of course, if safety was a concern, what was he doing here with this English-raised daredevil? “Jah, I drive,” he insisted, “but without a license, I’m limited to farm machinery and horse-drawn carriages.”

  “Let me guess: your bishop decided that, too.”

  Micah cleared his throat, grateful that she was driving again rather than sitting in the middle of the curving road. “Ownership of cars fosters envy and competition. Takes us too far from home—”

  “So how’d you get to the pool hall? Didn’t see a horse outside—not that there was a hitching post, either!” An unladylike snort escaped her, and once again Tiffany became his interrogator, his challenger.

  “I parked amongst the rigs at the Mennonite church.”

  “And why weren’t you at church today?” she shot back.

  “It’s not a preachin’ Sunday, so—”

  “Look, forget it.” Tiffany turned left so suddenly the tires squealed on the hot pavement as she headed back toward town. Micah grabbed the door handle and the console to keep from being knocked around. His arm brushed against hers, and he was suddenly too aware of her—and also aware that her laughter was at his expense. The car shot across the other lane of traffic and into the church parking lot, where she gleefully stomped the brake to skid to a halt.

  The ruckus made Rosie, his mare, dance nervously and toss her head. All the other carriages had gone home, so it was very obvious the new courting buggy was his—not that Tiffany would be impressed.

  Micah’s heart felt heavy in his chest. At least folks weren’t coming out of church to witness the end of this fruitless little adventure where the joke had been on him: he knew some of the young Mennonite men who attended service here, and they’d never let him live it down that a girl like Tiffany had spurned him. Through her dark glasses she was gawking at him as though his next move should be obvious, so he stepped out to the pavement. As he closed the shiny red car door, he resigned himself to reality. “Look, I’m sorry we couldn’t reach any solutions, but I hope ya realize Mr. Oliveri—your dat—wasn’t makin’ up that story about the flood and findin’ ya in the river. And I wasn’t lyin’ about how your mother wants to—”