Shadows of Lancaster County

by Mindy Starns Clark

  Swallowing hard, I turned my attention to the family, who seemed to be in very good spirits despite the fact they had just come from a wake. They filed into the house, but as they did, I reached out and grabbed Grete by the sleeve of her coat and asked her if we could talk.

  “I should put dinner on,” she said, but I told her Lydia had already made dinner, a nice pot of potato soup that should be ready by now.

  Grete then nodded at Nathaniel, who herded the kids inside and closed the door, leaving us out in the cold, alone. Glancing toward the photographers at the end of the drive, I led her around the corner of the house, behind the enclosed back porch, where we couldn’t be observed quite so easily.

  “What is it, Anna? Is something wrong?”

  She rubbed her hands together and blew on them as I nodded, all of my angst about Haley’s cancer and the genetics file and Reed’s stocks boiling up inside of me. With an anger I didn’t know I possessed, I demanded for Grete to tell me what she was hiding in the floor of the henhouse.

  She took a step back and put a hand to her mouth.

  “How do you know about that?” she whispered, looking back and forth as if to make sure I hadn’t been overheard by anyone else.

  “I saw you, remember? I saw you hide something in the cookie jar yesterday and then take it out in the henhouse today. It didn’t take long to find your secret stash, but unfortunately Caleb showed up before I could look inside. I’m thinking now might be a good time to go take a look together. We can use your flashlight.”

  “Why is this your concern?” she whispered. “What could this possibly have to do with you?”

  “It has everything to do with me. Let’s go.”

  Together, we walked toward the henhouse, me holding firmly to Grete’s elbow, her shining a flashlight on the ground in front of us. When we got there, I held the door as she stepped inside, quickly opened the floor, and pulled out the metal box. The chickens squawked furiously, and soon I could see Nathaniel standing at the back door with a flashlight, pointing our way.

  “It’s okay, it’s just us,” I called to him. “Don’t worry about it.”

  He hesitated and then went back inside, closing the door behind him.

  Grete thrust the box in my hands, put the flashlight on top of it, spun on her heels, and marched away. I stayed where I was, daring to hope that I had my family’s priceless jewels in my possession at last. The best I could figure, Grete must have found them at the old homesite, probably after the house had been moved away—though why she had taken them out of hiding yesterday, I wasn’t quite sure.

  Carefully, I pointed the flashlight at the box and lifted the lid. I had expected to see a velvet case or perhaps a smaller wooden box inside. Instead, I found myself looking down at the square object I had seen Grete with yesterday.

  It wasn’t a jewelry case; it was a camera.

  Underneath the camera were photos, lots of photos, mostly of Tresa and Ezra when they were younger, but also candid shots around the house and the farm, pictures of the entire family. No one ever looked directly at the lens, and Nathaniel, especially, was seen only in profile or from the back. The only shot of his face was of him lying on the couch, sound asleep.

  Confused, I swallowed hard, wondering what I had done.

  Quickly, I stepped into the henhouse and put the box back where it belonged, under the floor. Once it was in hiding, I made my way to the house, shining the flashlight on the ground in front of me as I went. When I got there, I spotted Grete sitting on the steps of the back stoop, clutching at her stomach and crying.

  Mortified, I knelt down in front of her.

  “I am so sorry,” I whispered. “That’s not what I was expecting to find, Grete. You were right. That’s none of my business. Please, please let’s just forget this happened.”

  She looked at me, her eyes red, her nose runny. “You have found my secret sin,” she whispered. “Now everyone will know. I will be disciplined. It will be taken from me.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, wondering how on earth I could make this right.

  “It’s just a camera and some pictures,” I said softly. “I promise I won’t ever tell anyone.”

  “These things, they are not allowed. The Ordnung strictly forbids it.”

  I stood up and turned so that I could sit next to her on the stoop.

  “If they are forbidden, why do you have them?” I asked.

  She dabbed at her eyes with the hem of her sleeve.

  “Because,” she said, sniffling, “about a year after my parents died, I realized that I could not remember my mother’s face. With no photos for reference, her image was lost to me forever. I knew my daed would eventually disappear from my mind as well. Right then, I decided I needed a way to remember, a way to see the faces of my loved ones whether they are here with me or not.”

  Heartbroken for the pain I could hear in her voice, I put an arm around Grete’s shoulders as she explained that yesterday morning she had the camera out because she had been snapping pictures through the window of the kids and Lydia playing in the snow. She said that all of her photos were taken that way, when the subjects had no idea they were being recorded on film. If I hadn’t come down when I did, I would never have known. Again, I apologized for poking my nose in where it didn’t belong, and then as simply as I could I explained what I had thought was in there, a set of priceless ruby-and-diamond jewels that had been handed down through my family but disappeared somewhere along the way.

  “Rubies and diamonds?” she asked, clearly astounded. “In a chicken coop?”

  For some reason, her question struck me as funny. I giggled. That, in turn, made her giggle, despite her tears. Soon, she laughed, then I laughed, and as we fed off of each other, we got to laughing so hard that our sides were hurting. Finally, as we both calmed down and grew quiet, I promised her, yet again, that her secret was safe with me, though I added that she might want to relocate the box to a different hiding spot, because Caleb had seen me fooling with the loose board earlier.

  After that, Grete and I went inside the house, though when she told me to “butz” my “gums,” I couldn’t help but start laughing again. She laughed too as she explained that she’d merely been suggesting that I clean the mud from my shoes.

  Upstairs, I hung up my sweater dress and changed into jeans, and then I went back downstairs and joined the family at the dinner table. There, they were just about to have prayer and enjoy Lydia’s soup, homemade biscuits, and a delicious-looking fruit salad.

  Over dinner, somehow we began talking about the old days, about how Grete and Lydia and Bobby and I had been such constant companions whenever we visited our grandparents in Dreiheit as children. Once Caleb was born, the girls usually brought him along as well. I still remembered being astounded by that, by the sight of my peers, mere children themselves, caring for their younger sibling with all the expertise and confidence of young mothers.

  Lydia talked about the noisy games of Dutch Blitz we had played on rainy days, and Grete shared with the younger ones about how Lydia and Bobby were the biggest pranksters ever born—and even worse when they were together to egg each other on. I reminisced about the old games of sardines and hide-and-seek, all the hours we had spent playing in our big old family house.

  “Remember Bobby’s favorite trick with hide-and-seek?” Lydia asked, eyes twinkling. “You think we would have wised up after a while.”

  “That’s right,” I said, grinning as it came back to me, “he would hide near the person who was counting, and then as soon as they were finished and set off to find everybody, he would slip out of his hiding place and go put himself right where the counter had stood when they were counting.”

  “Yah, I remember that,” Grete added with a laugh. “No one ever thought to look in the place they started from, the place they had already been, because they didn’t think anyone would be there. Bobby was always so smart.”

  Lydia moved on to describe some adventure
we’d had out in the tree house, but my mind stopped where it was, right at that point in the conversation. There was something about what we’d said, something about Bobby, that suddenly clicked in my brain like the biggest, most powerful light switch in the world.

  “Wait!” I said, but because they were laughing and talking they didn’t hear me. “Wait! Guys!” That time I seemed to draw everyone’s attention. Startled, they all turned to look at me. “It’s Bobby. I know where he is.”

  I looked at Lydia, the one who had called me with such urgency in her voice four days ago and begged me to help her find him.

  “Really,” I said, my heart pounding, my hopes soaring for the first time in days. “I think I know where we can find Bobby.”

  I had never driven so fast in my life.

  Crammed into my little four-seater rental car was me at the wheel, Nathaniel in the passenger seat, and Caleb, Rebecca, and Lydia squeezed tightly in the back. Grete had wanted to come too, but as there literally hadn’t been room for one more, she offered to stay back with the kids and with the neighbors who had come to stand guard while we were gone. As we flew down the dark and hilly roads with four vehicles of paparazzi in pursuit, I tried to explain my theory, one that Bobby had probably been counting on me to figure out a lot sooner than this. Just as in hide-and-seek, I explained, he had hidden himself right where it began.

  I didn’t know if I could find in the dark the gravel road Reed had driven us down, so instead I just headed to the high, sharp curve of the highway. Once there, I pulled over, turned off the car, and we all spilled out, flicking on flashlights as we did. Leading the way, I practically ran down the steep hill, past the sight where the motorcycle had crashed, past the place where spattered blood had been found. At the bottom of the hill, in a full-out run, I headed for the empty farmhouse, the one where Bobby had left some cash and a note saying he had taken the tractor.

  There probably hadn’t even been a tractor.

  In fact, he likely hadn’t ever left.

  Knowing my brother as I did, if he had been extremely injured in that crash but still coherent, he would have dragged himself here, bandaged himself up, done something to make it look as if he had left, and then simply found a safe hiding place to lie in wait until the threat was gone or until I found him, whichever came first.

  Given that he hadn’t yet resurfaced, I had to conclude that either he knew he was still in danger from a killer who hadn’t yet been caught, or he was so hurt that once he got into his hiding place he couldn’t get back out.

  I had explained all of this to the family in the car on the way over, and now with shouts of Bobby’s name, we fanned out, each of us looking for where he could have hidden himself. The press was going nuts, trying to decide which person to follow, shouting questions about what we were doing and why. Finally, I stopped and turned around, facing the whole lot of them.

  “My brother is here somewhere,” I said with certainty. “He’s here and he’s hurt and he needs us to find him. You guys can either jump in and help or get out of the way.”

  “Hey, I’m just a stringer,” one reporter said. “Whatever you’ve got going on, my job is to write about it.”

  “You want something to write about?” I demanded, advancing toward him, my hands clenched into fists at my sides. “Write about how a herd of bloodsucking, tabloid-writing leeches did something decent for a change and helped us find an innocent and injured man.” By then, there were at least ten people in my audience, each of them staring at me as if I had gone nuts. I took a deep breath and told myself to calm down. “Let’s try it this way. The sooner you guys pitch in, the sooner we can find him, and the more likely you are to get an exclusive before even more reporters and photographers show up here.”

  That seemed to work. Suddenly, they all sprang into action, going where I dictated, doing what I said to do. I pointed out the gravel road behind us and sent three of them back up to their cars, telling them to go the long way around and see if they could drive up in here on the gravel road, so that we could use their headlights to see better.

  Even with everyone searching, we still couldn’t find him. We broke into the house and checked the attic, the basement, and every nook and cranny of every room and cabinet and closet. We scoured the barn and the silo and the washhouse and the other structures that dotted the land, even the older structures that were no longer in use. Finally, when some were giving up hope, I said that if I knew Bobby, he would have put himself someplace smart, someplace underground, maybe, where the temperature wouldn’t get down to freezing.

  “A good root cellar would do it,” Nathaniel told me. “The temperature is more or less constant year round.”

  “Yah,” Rebecca added, “if the cabbages do not freeze all winter, then Bobby could have survived for a few days.”

  “But we already checked the basement and the springhouse,” Lydia cried, her voice thick with despair.

  “The barn!” one of the photographers said suddenly.

  “Yah, the barn,” Nathaniel nodded. “Sometimes there is a second root cellar in the barn!”

  En masse, we ran into the big red barn with its graceful, curved roof. Nathaniel led the way, scanning the dark, cavernous room with his flashlight. Finally, he paused, training the vivid beam upon a large rectangle of wood flooring over in the corner. On one end of the long, door-sized board were hinges; on the other was what looked like a handle—a blessed, beautiful, black, wrought iron handle.

  Holding my breath, I half clung to Lydia, half held her up as we watched Caleb grab that handle and lift open the door.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  BOBBY

  The angels were calling his name.

  He could hear them, their voices urgent, crying “Bobby! Bobby!”

  He wanted to respond, wanted to tell them not to carry him away to heaven just yet. He still had others to save here on earth first.

  Surely, they would understand. Surely, God would give him a little more time to get to his wife, his son, his unborn child. Bobby opened his mouth to cry out in return, to explain, but no sound came.

  The water was all gone, had been gone since morning. His throat felt like sandpaper against raw, bleeding tissue.

  He was cold, the shivers wracking his frame like seizures.

  He was dying, he knew that, but he fought it. He wasn’t ready to die.

  Lydia. He still had to get to Lydia.

  Funny how one of the angels sounded just like her. Was that God’s idea of a joke—or was it meant to be a comfort? As the bright light came—and he had known it would, eventually—he didn’t even have the strength to shield his eyes. He simply opened the one good eye and looked up to see the heavenly beings that had finally arrived to carry him off before his time.

  He had always thought that the light at death would be a single, divine illumination. This wasn’t like that at all. This light came from many different sources, beams and flashes and every one of them causing him immense, wincing pain.

  Wasn’t there supposed to be no pain in heaven?

  Funny, but one of the angels even looked like Lydia, smelled like Lydia.

  Wept like Lydia.

  He blinked, wanting to understand why this moment was nothing like what he had expected of death. It was far more painful, far more real, far more desperate.

  Angels looking like men came down and surrounded him and scooped him up, their faces those of his loved ones, their arms strong and sure. As he braced himself for their flight to heaven, instead he felt himself being carried sideways, toward more lights, another softer pair of hands supporting the back of his head. The lights they were approaching looked like the twin headlights of a car.

  Were there cars in heaven? Were there sirens? Because he could hear sirens in the distance, no doubt.

  He was being lowered down then, lowered onto what smelled and felt like the soft fabric of auto upholstery. He braced himself for what was apparently going to be a drive, rather than a flight, to meet his M
aker. He was confused, because surely the Bible had never said anything about getting to the Promised Land this way!

  He braced himself for the journey, but nothing happened. His heavenly transport didn’t move at all. Instead, the angels all seemed to be waiting for something as the sirens grew louder, closer.

  He was lifted again, put down on a bed or a pad of some kind. Someone grabbed his wrist and held it. Another slid something hard and plastic around his neck. Yet another poked him with a pin on the back of his hand and then strapped down his arm with the harsh, scritchy sound of Velcro. They all kept trying to talk to him, but he couldn’t understand the words now. They were a jumble in his brain, a wave of discord and confusion to his ears.

  Soon a new sound was added to the mix, a rhythmic putter-putter that blew wind in his face and shone a beam down to earth from the sky.

  Finally, the true light of heaven had come.

  Again, as he felt his body being moved sideways one more time, Bobby opened his good eye.

  There he saw the Lydia-angel again, running alongside, still crying. To his right, also running, was an Anna-angel as well—only this version had long blond hair and a face covered in tears.

  “It’s okay, Bobby,” the Anna-angel was saying. “You’re gonna be okay.”

  He swallowed, an act fraught with pain, and tried once more to speak.

  “I knew you would come,” he finally managed to rasp.

  Then he closed his eye as the forward movement stopped short and the clang of metal slamming shut against metal assaulted his ears. As he felt his body lifting high and then higher, he thought of that old expression, of shuffling off this mortal coil. Sailing into the sky, he knew this was his time to shuffle. Slowly, Bobby let go.

  As he raced toward heaven, he smiled, his body given up to God, his mind sliding into the dark, soft embrace of unconsciousness.