Finding Mercy

by Karen Harper

  “I can’t believe the family wouldn’t contact you if it was something unusual,” Ray-Lynn said. “Maybe they just went to visit his people in Pennsylvania. But there’s something strange about him, right? Like he’s been put here to keep an eye on someone? Keep someone safe?”

  “Now, Ray-Lynn, you gotta trust me on this.”

  “Right, but I thought something was fishy with him when I talked to him at the wedding reception. Jack, the guy just doesn’t sound or seem Amish, and I’ve been up close and personal with enough of them to know. Now, I’m more than happy to help by coming along to the Lantzes’,” she assured him since she could see him grinding his teeth, “but can’t you tell me more? I wish I could be more a part of your work. I mean, here you own half of the restaurant and are in and out all the time, especially since you’ve got Win Hayes to help police this place now—which I’m happy about, and you sure don’t need me for a sounding board, but—”

  “Ray-Lynn,” he cut her off, reaching a hand over the console to gently grasp her wrist, “I need you for lots of things. And when a contact I have asked me if I could check into the fact he hasn’t seen Ella working her lavender or their cousin helping in the fields, I just figured if we went as a couple—no police car, no uniform and you bearing your usual gifts—it wouldn’t alarm the family. Can we please leave it at that?”

  “Just one more thing, then. You aren’t still in league with that former FBI G-man Armstrong, are you? Ella told me at the wedding reception he had scolded and threatened her about getting in his way with Hannah and—”

  “He did? Why in the Sam Hill didn’t you tell me that? He has no right to harass her!”

  “So it is Linc Armstrong who noticed Ella and Andrew might be missing?”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “Jack, I won’t tell anyone else, so don’t get upset. The Lantzes are a lovely family, and Ella’s very capable of taking care of herself, though, compared to Sarah and Hannah—she can be a bit—well, prickly. You know, judgmental, set in her ways. But all right, I’ll just go along, not ask any more questions. Besides,” she added, twisting in her seat belt toward him as he withdrew his hand and turned up the lane to the Lantz farmhouse, “even if we’re on official business, I love being with you in your regular car, with you out of uniform—”

  “I can arrange to get out of uniform for you anytime.”

  “Jack Freeman! I am so not shocked!”

  “And I’m just happy to have my chatty, sassy Southern sweetheart back,” he said as he parked near the barn. She got out quickly and took the angel food cake with fluffy white coconut icing from its carrier on the back floor of the car.

  “Opening your own car doors now?” Jack asked with a grin as his eyes went over her. “Guess that means we’re not dating anymore but ready for the next step—the big time.”

  “I hope you mean more than asking me to help you with future undercover work—and never mind a flirty remark about working with me under the covers.”

  “Yeah, for sure, serious commitments for both of us. Soon,” he vowed as they stood by the car staring at each other.

  “Hello there, Sheriff, Ray-Lynn,” came Eben Lantz’s distant voice. “This is a good surprise. But we got three folks down with the flu, so best you not come in. I pray you not got something bad to tell me.”

  Eben closed the door behind himself and came down the porch steps. Ray-Lynn noticed Mrs. Lantz and her oldest daughter Barbara’s faces at the kitchen window, and they’d passed the two Lantz sons on the road, driving a wagon loaded with spring wheat, so the ones sick must be Ella, the grandmother and their so-called Pennsylvania cousin.

  “There’s your answer to why some are missing,” Ray-Lynn whispered out of the side of her mouth. “But flu this time of year?”

  “Yeah. Strange. Just follow my lead, okay?”

  “Don’t I always?”

  “Heck, no.”

  “Today, just call me deputy in disguise.”

  “Shh!” he muttered as Eben started down the walk toward them with a frown on his face. “The fact that he asked about bad news—I’ll bet they’re not here at all and he’s worried. But for the Amish to lie—I don’t like it. So, we brought you a cake, Eben,” Jack said in a louder voice as he shook hands with the frowning man. “No bad news, though—not on our end of things.”

  * * *

  After supper that evening, Ella was excited to be driven around Sarasota a bit and thrilled to see the big, high-ceilinged building where Janus and Trixie McCorkle practiced their circus act. Janus unlocked a big building, turned on the overhead lights, then the McCorkles left them to look around while they went to put their costumes on. High up, the huge room was strung with wires and a swing, which Ella soon learned were called tightropes and a trapeze. At least, she thought, a net stretched out below to catch anyone who fell.

  “Even climbing in or out of that high net would take some skill and courage,” she whispered to Grossmamm as the two of them sat in the front row facing a large asphalt floor edged by a raised rim.

  “Ya. I wish the regular circus folk didn’t take all the animals away with them this summer,” the old woman whispered back. “Like to see an elephant up close, ya, I sure would.”

  Andrew was entranced, Ella saw, not by all the circus trappings but by talking to Janus, whom he seemed to like a lot. Now painted and costumed as Corky the Clown, he had appeared before Trixie. Ella was glad to see the odd friendship between the Englischer dressed up like an Amish man and the Englischer dressed up like a clown. Janus had explained his costume was based on some old-time movie policemen called Keystone Kops. Right now, that was probably the only kind of law officer Andrew wanted to trust anyway.

  “I have to laugh just looking at him in that getup,” Andrew said as he came over to sit with them. “I’m tempted to kid him back sometime by getting in that second identical costume that always seems to be hanging on the line.”

  Grossmamm put in, “Too hot and humid to dry things good on the line like at home.”

  Andrew went on, pointing upward, “But he sure knows his stuff about everything here—the rigging, the lighting. If I have to run away again, maybe I’ll go join the Foreman Circus. They’re in Minneapolis right now.”

  “Very funny,” Ella said, hitting his shoulder lightly with her fist. “I can’t see you as a clown.”

  They sat back smiling while Janus—that is, Corky the Clown—beguiled them with antics and explanations: “Okay, I don’t talk in this gig, but without the clowns who play the bad guys I’m chasing, I’ll have to narrate my shtick. Playing robbers, the other clowns steal a big wallet from the ringmaster’s pocket—so big he’d never get it in his pocket in the first place—that’s sleight of hand—and then I chase them around for a while.”

  “So that’s what he was practicing in their backyard,” Andrew said as Janus tore around the ring, bouncing high off several small trampolines, contorting his body into strange poses before bouncing down again. From somewhere strange music blasted over loudspeakers that went along with the pantomime. “Old silent film chase music,” Andrew whispered.

  Janus had to talk really loud to be heard over the music. Ella noted that, as well as being the clown of a thousand tricks, he was also the clown with different voices, some low, some high-pitched. That was really clever too, but he’d said he didn’t talk during this routine.

  Meanwhile, Trixie was climbing a rope ladder up to a small platform where a trapeze was attached. Ella’s gaze bounced back and forth between her and Janus. They were both so wonderful to watch, she so graceful, he so crazy. Too bad the circus never came to the Home Valley. She was sure her people would think it was wonderful.

  “Janus says he’s what is called an Auguste clown,” Andrew told them, though he didn’t take his eyes off the performers either. “They have colorful clothes and makeup. They specialize in a certain kind of lawlessness and disorder—sounds familiar to me.”

  Ella said, “I just can’t
believe that some people have a fear of clowns. What was that he called it?”

  “Coulrophobia,” Andrew said. “I’m waiting for the satire part he promised, instead of his just mocking cops and robbers.”

  To their amazement, Janus—oversize shoes and all—began to climb the same rope ladder Trixie had used. As he started up, he called down to them, “Now the clowns who took the money—oh, by the way, they took it from a prop labeled ‘Big Bank’—gave the money to me and I stuff it in my pockets.”

  “Cops being bribed?” Ella asked, but no one answered her. As Janus climbed, they saw, across his rear end, he had somehow attached a big sign that read FANNIE, then under that, in slightly smaller letters, FANNIE MAE.”

  Andrew said, “That was one of the two government mortgage agencies the feds—the national government—took over when they got in debt, a real mess.”

  With Janus nearly to the platform, Trixie, in a skimpy, red outfit with sparkles all over it, loosed the trapeze from its hook and, hanging on by her hands below it, swung back and forth, pumping her legs to go faster and higher like someone on a swing. Suddenly popping out from beneath her was a bright banner that read YOUR IRA.

  “Who’s Ira? What’s that mean?” Ella asked, feeling this was all above her—in more ways than one.

  Andrew started to explain but he was laughing too hard, especially when Trixie, still holding her YOUR IRA sign, intentionally let go and took a big dive into the net below, which now had a notice, US GOV’T, which had magically appeared. She bounced wildly up, then down when she hit into the web of ropes.

  Grossmamm, who had been transfixed, cried out, “Should we go see if she’s all right?” But their attention was riveted on Janus, who had grabbed the trapeze as it swung back to him. Now, somehow, from the depths of his costume—or maybe from the platform—he produced a sign that had a tumbled-down wall painted on it. The drawing also had a big + and the word STREET on it.

  Wall Street? Ella thought. What about Wall Street?

  As he swung back and forth, big dollar bills began to drop from his pockets. He too took a dive into the net just as Trixie was holding on to its edge and doing a summersault to get back onto the ground.

  Grossmamm and Ella clapped hard as Janus bounced a couple of times, then walked to the edge of the net, grabbed its edge and flipped over to stand on the ground.

  Ella didn’t get all the satire, but she could ask Andrew later. When she looked his way, tears were in his eyes but he was no longer laughing. His lower lip quivered. Oh, ya, this had gotten to him bad, because he really was crying and over some silly clown act about money and Wall Street.

  * * *

  The night of their visit to the Lantz farmhouse, which had gotten them nothing but the repeated insistence that Ella, Mrs. Lantz’s grandmother and their Pennsylvania visitor, Andrew Lantz, had all caught the flu, Jack took Ray-Lynn into Wooster for dinner at an Italian restaurant called Little Italy. Wine, the works. They had gone in his unmarked car again and, as far as she could tell, he had no cell phone on him at their secluded booth, no pistol in a shoulder holster under his nice navy-blue suit jacket. He was dressed so spiffily, she thought, people would probably think he was a lawyer or a funeral director.

  At that, a little chill shot through her, despite the fact she felt warm from the Montepulciano d’abruzzo and from just being the object of his riveted attention. Here they were on one of their rare real dates, she had him all to herself, he did not seem to be distracted—though he was nervous—and she was starting to get jittery. Maybe she just hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that something was wrong about Eben Lantz’s story.

  Jack clinked his wine goblet to hers, and they lifted them together. “Gotta level with you, Ray-Lynn. I wasn’t sure you—or we—were gonna make it, but I think we have. If you can just put up with how distracted I get sometimes, I—”

  “And you can put up with my Southern flippancy and my Gone with the Wind collections all over the place, then I guess—”

  “Will you just let me talk for a sec, honey? I love you, Ray-Lynn, and I’d like you to be my wife, and I want to give you this.”

  A red rosebud, she thought, as he extended the single flower to her. Now where had he been hiding that? But her hopes fell. With that pretty speech and his shifting around on his side of the booth, you’d think there was a ring in sight and not a red rose, however fresh and beautiful.

  And then she saw it. The tight bud was wearing a diamond ring, which glittered in the candlelight.

  She sucked in a quick breath and reached for the flower to touch the ring, to put it on. You might know she managed to snag a thorn getting it off, scratching herself, but that didn’t matter.

  “Does that mean a yes?” Jack asked.

  “It means everything’s coming up roses for you and for me,” she cried—and, ding-dang, really started to cry as she jumped up and slid into the booth on his side of the table to hug him. Surely nothing in their entire lives could ever go wrong now!

  * * *

  Ella was indeed enchanted, just like Andrew sometimes teasingly called her. Janus and Trixie had brought the three of them to see the Gilded Age mansion of John Ringling, one of the founders of the so-called Greatest Show on Earth circus in Sarasota. She was awestruck at the size and grandeur of the estate.

  “There are other circuses with their home bases around these parts,” Janus told them, as if he were the guide on their tour, “but no one can ever top this man! If he was alive today, no one I’d rather meet!”

  Ca’ d’Zan, or House of John, built in 1924, was the most magnificent building Ella had ever seen. Every inch of imported European furniture, even in the big bathrooms, was ornately carved or gilded. Its high ceilings were painted with patterns or scenes, and its black-and-white marble-tiled floors reflected their images as they followed their guide around. Such a huge place, fifty-six rooms! How could just two people have a home like this, for only John and his wife, Mabel, had lived here where they had copied or purchased furnishings and decor from many castles and palaces they’d seen abroad. So much money spent, Ella thought, and all for prideful show—for pretty, as her people would say.

  As they traipsed along with others on the tour, she listened intently to the narrative about John Ringling’s life. The fact he came from a large German family—she could relate to that. But when the tour ended and the five of them sat together in the beautiful gardens in the shade of a tree, and Andrew turned to her and asked, “So what do you think?” she could not help but tell the truth.

  “I think it’s an amazing place, and I thank you, Janus and Trixie, for bringing us to see it. But I can’t help but pity the man.”

  “Pity John Ringling?” Janus asked with a gasp. Even when he wasn’t in clown face, he had a habit of extreme expressions and wide eyes. “But he had it all!”

  “He had no children to carry on his dynasty,” Ella said, ticking things off on her fingers. “He lost four of his brothers when they were fairly young. His dear helpmeet Mabel died and, when he wed again, it ended in domestic violence and lawsuits. We Amish just don’t like or trust lawyers. He broke off with his only sister, Ida, and her son, who could have been an heir and solace to him in his old age. And he died with only about three hundred dollars in the bank. I can’t help but think he sometimes thought he’d give up all this and his Greatest Show on Earth for a nice little house, his dear Mabel at his side and a big family of his own.”

  Everyone just stared at her, though Grossmamm solemnly nodded her approval. Trixie looked surprised, like such a crazy thought had never entered her head. Janus seemed thoughtful, though he was frowning. But what touched her was that Andrew took her hand and said, “I completely agree. People matter, not things, and your—our people—have that figured out just right.”

  Our people, Ella thought. He’d quickly corrected himself on that near slip. But he’d been through his own kind of hell already, cut off from his people, friends and home, just as the circus magnat
e must have been when he’d faced death. And, through it all, blessedly, Andrew who was once Alex was starting to sound just a bit Amish.

  “Well, let’s get back and get some homemade lemonade,” Janus said. “It’s hot out here. This time of year it’s best to do things at night, but I wanted you to see this in case you have to leave—head back.”

  Ella saw Andrew’s head snap around at that. They had not said anything to him about having to leave. Even with his friend Janus, was Andrew thinking he had to be more careful, less trusting? No, she thought, for sure these kind people were ones to be trusted. So what that the McCorkles had moved in just a day or so before they arrived here and, from the first, had kept a good eye on their Ohio neighbors? Both Janus and Trixie had mentioned they wished they had money to start their own clown and trapeze artist school they could retire to someday, but where would they ever get a windfall for that? So what if Ella was pretty sure that both McCorkles had a suspicion that Andrew wasn’t exactly Amish? And did they believe the two of them were really married, especially when Trixie had asked to use their bathroom when they were visiting and probably noted that Andrew did not keep one thing in the bathroom, even though all three of them shared it?

  But no, Ella scolded herself, she was being too nervous again, too afraid. Things had been going great here in this ghost town of Pinecraft. And with Andrew near, she was savoring each moment, more than she’d ever treasure a gilded palace.

  17

  THAT EVENING, GROSSMAN insisted on taking Ella and him back to Yoder’s Restaurant. Alex didn’t argue, because he was low on cash and that was going to be a problem if he didn’t contact his lawyers or Gerald Branin soon to have some money sent. But that was a big risk. Some insider must have been bought off or threatened to give up his location in the Home Valley. Would they eventually trace him here too?

  He still wasn’t sure who had found his location, evidently twice, and sent a hired gun, as they used to say in the old Westerns. He wished he could ask Janus if he could work for him for cash around the Foreman Circus practice grounds, but that might tip Janus off to things he shouldn’t know. Again, he felt he was a failure at acting Amish: Ray-Lynn had guessed; Janus seemed a bit suspicious; and had Connie Lee known?