by Madelyn Alt
I glanced at my watch. Eleven fifteen. Was that too early for lunch? My stomach didn’t think so.
“Can I help you?”
I looked up. The youngest of the three women had noticed me eyeing their sign. Round of cheek and breast and hip, she was the picture of robust good health that hard work and clean living can give you. Perhaps a bit broader than Hollyweird’s skewed definition of perfect female beauty, but I doubted most men would mind. I smiled at her. “I was just trying to decide whether my diet could stand a cup of the noodles. They smell wonderful.”
“Ah. What is a cup of noodles on a day like today?” she asked in a soft voice reminiscent of the wisest oracles of long ago. She lifted the lid on the closest pot and stirred the contents. The languorous movements raised a snake of steam that beckoned as it tantalized. “It is but a few quick steps down the lane to burn it off. A row in the garden to be weeded. A loaf of dough to be kneaded. Not so much.” Her bright gaze glittered as it lifted, and she cocked her head to one side like a bird. “You are a slim girl. Not yet a mother, I do not think. A little meat and egg noodles would do you some good. Put some color in your cheeks and make your skin glow.” She paused and glanced over my shoulder, her eyes twinkling. “Would you not agree, Luc? She could use a little fattening up, ja?”
I turned to find Luc Metzger watching us both from one of the nearby picnic tables. In the sunlight, his hair and chin-only beard glowed like a mixture of burnished gold and copper, and I was struck again by his resemblance to some pre-Raphaelite angel. For a moment his face was without expression as his eyes met mine. Then, as the woman turned away to ask another to reach the stack of cups, his gaze lowered as I watched. Slowly. By the time he had brought his gaze back up to mine, my cheeks were hotter than the noodles in the pot. His ruddy lips quirked up at the corners, as though he was aware of my schoolgirl discomfort and was amused by it.
Holy sheep.
“I take it you found the bread.”
Marcus appeared at my elbow, a large waxed paper sack dangling from his fingers. I nodded toward it. “I take ityou found the cookies.”
“Three dozen of the best damned sugar cookies you could ever hope for.”
“Oh, good,” I said faintly, glancing back to where Luc Metzger had been giving me the eye. But he was gone now, no doubt scared off by Marcus’s sudden appearance. I gave a sigh of relief. Whatever the reason for his little game of cat and mouse, I wanted no part of it. “I was about to yield to the call of the Carbmonster and indulge in a cup of this lady’s chicken and noodles for lunch. Want some?”
“Sure, why not? We can take a cup back for Liss.”
I stepped back to the booth, waiting my turn. It didn’t take long.
The rosy-cheeked Amish woman smiled at me. “You have decided, ja?”
“Ja. I mean, yes,” I said, blushing at my slip. I had a knack for picking up the speaking habits and dialects of others without even trying. Sometimes it made for an uncomfortable moment—after all, you never knew when someone would think you were poking fun at them. “I’ll take three cups of the noodles. With mashed potatoes,” I added as an afterthought. If a girl was going to go all the way, the least she could do was enjoy it.
“Three? Well. You are a girl who makes up her mind.” She laughed as she scooped up three servings of mashed potatoes and ladled the thick noodle, gravy, and chicken concoction over them. “A woman after my own husband’s heart. He is the same way. My Luc. Once he makes a decision, that is the way things are going to be…for better or for worse.”
“Oh,” I said with some surprise as I dug in my purse for my wallet. “So you are Luc Metzger’s wife?”
“Ja.” She smoothed back a lock of shining red hair that had slipped from beneath her white cap as she gazed at my face more closely. “You know him?”
I shook my head. “Only from the auction. I was at the pavilion when they announced that Eli Yoder’s cabinet had been chosen for the top award in the charity auction. He does really nice work, your husband. Have you been together long?”
“We have been married for over nine years now.”
Perhaps that was the reason for her pink cheeks. If his smile had meant what I thought it did, Luc Metzger had a healthy interest in the female form, perfect or not. “Children?”
She nodded, now gazing distractedly over my shoulder. “Two daughters, eight and four, and two sons, six and two.”
Every two years, just like clockwork. “What a blessing. Oh, you know, I’ll also need two loaves of bread—one sourdough, and one cinnamon cranberry—and a dozen oatmeal raisin cookies.”
She gathered the items together for me, but it seemed to me that her peaceful façade of moments ago had fled. I wondered why, but it was not my place to ask.
“Thank you,” I told her, handing her a twenty-dollar bill. “Keep the change.”
She held the money in her hand, staring at it blankly. I was about to walk away when she reached over the counter and stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. Her dark eyes bore into mine, hot and insistent, almost wild. “There’s trouble here ahead for us all. A sickness, settling in. We who see must be very wary and vigilant.”
She released me suddenly, muttering to herself. The other two ladies in the booth, I couldn’t help noticing, had backed away and were now watching her, senses on edge, fear in their eyes.
“Thank you,” I said again, even though I knew she would not hear me.
Odd woman, I thought to myself. Nice, but odd.
I tried to brush off her warning as I rejoined Marcus and handed him his cup of noodles. It didn’t mean anything, no matter that it was an echo of some of the things I had been thinking and feeling for weeks now. Things were better in town. They were. The dark months were gone. The time for concern was long past. There was no reason to fear.
But despite what I was trying to convince myself of, the Metzger woman was just one more notch on Ye Olde Worry Belt.
“You okay?” Marcus asked me as I walked in silence beside him, a frown tightening my brow. “You seem kind of distant.”
“I’m okay. I…Marcus, what has been going on with the N.I.G.H.T.S. lately? What have I been missing?”
He gazed at me, quietly assessing. “Well, now, why the sudden interest?”
I shrugged, blushing. “Well, it’s not like I haven’t been involved. I’ve only missed a few of the meetings.”
“Eight, Sunshine.”
Eight. Had it really been that many? Liss had never said a word, never once questioned me about my absence from the informal get-togethers. What would I have told her, if she had? That I was afraid? So unnerved by my experience on the lake in December that my only way of dealing with it was to withdraw? I had tapped into something that night, something stronger and more powerful than anything in my wildest imaginings. Something…primal.
And the worst thing was, I had not a single clue how I had done it. And that scared me more than anything. I was afraid of myself, and the only way I could think of to deal with it was total and utter avoidance.
To give up the ghost, as it were.
I cleared my throat and shrugged away my feelings of guilt. “Fine. Eight, then.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“I—There’s something wrong, Marcus, and I don’t understand it. I don’t understand any of it, and it scares the crap out of me. I mean, you and Liss and the others, you’ve been a part of this for a while now. You’ve had time to adjust, right? But I…” I took a deep breath as the panicky feeling welled up in my chest. I closed myself down, purposely, to combat it. “I don’t want to talk about it right now. I can’t.”
“Hey, hey.” He stopped me when I would have walked away. “I didn’t mean to make you feel like I was giving you a hard time. If you’re not comfortable, it’s okay to take things slow. Whenever you’re ready, we’ll be there. We’re not going anywhere.”
Because the spooky stuff wasn’t going anywhere. Maybe that was a part of what I was most afraid of. Th
at what we had been experiencing was more than a blip on the radar screen. Maybe, just maybe, it was a bona fide trend.
I thought it, but I didn’t say it. Instead I attempted a smile. “Thanks, Marcus. I appreciate it.”
We started walking again, and he began to fill me in. “We had baseline readings on most of the sites in the area where people have reported strange experiences. That’s nothing you haven’t heard before. But what you may not realize is that all of the places we have investigated have shown marked signs of growing worse. And we’re receiving more reports all the time.”
It was as I had feared. Sensed. “But why?”
“I don’t know.”
“That doesn’t really make me feel better, Marcus.”
“At least we can try to understand what’s happening. That’s a start.”
But was it enough?
As we reached the pavilion and stopped to search for Liss, we were enveloped by a wave of applause that had the air of completion about it. The auction was just ending.
Liss saw us at the same time that we caught sight of her. We met somewhere in the middle, people milling about all around us. In the pavilion, the armoire and other large items were being manhandled into position on furniture dollies.
“Done already?” I asked Liss, handing her a cup of noodles.
“Mmm. Thanks. They smell lovely.”
“Taste lovely, too. So,” I said, nodding toward the armoire, “how much did it go for?”
“Five thousand, two hundred and seventy-five.”
Marcus broke in with a long, low whistle. “Wow. Kudos to the team of Yoder and Metzger. Maybe I should rethink this foray into the knifemaking business.”
Somehow I couldn’t quite picture Marcus as a sedate and sedentary woodworker. The idea had me smiling. “Stick with the knives and the band,” I recommended. “Much more your style.” To Liss, I asked, “So, should I call my dad and enlist him and his pickup for furniture-moving duty?”
“No need. I didn’t win it.”
“What? Oh. I’m sorry. I know how much you wanted it.”
“C’est la vie, ducks. Someone will love it, and that’s all that’s important. There will be other armoires for me. The woman who won it looked thrilled to have it.”
I cast my eye around. “Who was it? Do we know her?”
“I don’t see her just now. An older woman—not quite my age—who was here with some friends. It was adorable, really—she squealed like a young girl when the auctioneer announced her the winner. Obviously the right woman won.”
I was still stuck on her description of herself. I looked askance, trying to see it. “You’re not old, Liss. You’re as young and hip as any of my friends.”
“Tell that to my knees and back,” she quipped, chucking me affectionately beneath my chin. “They put up quite the fuss every time I try to weed my garden. One of these days they might just win the battle, too. But until then, I quite enjoy thumbing my nose at them, just for the spite of it.”
That’s one of the things I like best about Liss. She’s as much a rebel at heart as I had always longed to be.
“Maybe we could get Eli to build you an armoire to spec,” Marcus suggested. “I’m sure he’d be thrilled.”
“It’s a nice thought, but you heard Eli. His armoires are meant to be plain. What attracted me so much to this one in particular was the carvings.”
“They’re very unusual for a piece of Amish furniture,” I conceded.
“That they are. In fact, I don’t know how closely you looked at them, Marcus, but they appeared almost Celtic in design. Knotted vines, circular patterns, interlacing features, and I even saw crescent moons. Definite symbolism in use there. It might be interesting to talk to this friend of Eli’s.”
Nature symbolism? Well, the Amish are known for their ties to the land, so in a way that made sense. Or perhaps Luc Metzger was a creative personality locked within an austere belief system. Just because a person was born Amish didn’t mean that he could completely go against his inner being.
How well I was beginning to understand that myself.
“I met his wife just a little while ago,” I commented as an aside.
“Oh?” Liss’s whip-sharp gaze turned my way. “And Luc?”
“Mmhmm, I kinda-sorta met him, too.” And I wasn’t about to elaborate on that one. I was still a bit shell-shocked over the unexpected tractor-beam eye lock.
“Well, lead on, dear girl. If I can’t have the armoire, at least I can tell the man how enamored I am of his work.”
“Sure.”
The three of us left the pavilion together, wending our way amicably among the shoppers and festival junkies, the teenagers who were there for the food and the party atmosphere, the retirees who steadfastly avoided them, and strolled back down the walkway toward where the Amish women had set up shop with their baked goods and aromatic egg noodles. High above us the noonday sun shone brilliantly in a sky clear and devoid of the April showers that had been plaguing the area of late, as per the dictates of the season. I lifted my face to the sky, trying to feel the heat of the sun, but there was none to be had. In its stead a chill slithered across my cheek, taunting and cruel. I shivered at the reminder that while spring had arrived, summer was not yet within our grasp.
Marcus noticed, and threw his arm around my shoulders, then slung his arm around Felicity’s waist for good measure. “Can’t let my two best girls get cold, now, can I?”
I felt more than a little bit guilty at the flush of warmth that radiated from that simple touch. Marcus was one of those guys who can throw any woman for a loop, and I was definitely not immune. I was human, and he was a charmer, through and through. It was his nature. But it was all innocent fun. Marcus was taken, and so was I, for all intents and purposes, and to dwell on the sensations would be wrong. So I did what any self-respecting good girl would do: I pushed them from my thoughts and tried to focus on the quilt-covered table just ahead. F-O-C-U-S.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Metzger wasn’t behind the table anymore. I stepped up to it, waiting for one of the other bonneted ladies to attend to me. The first to finish with her customer was the little dark-haired one with the pale, drawn face. She looked at me and gave a little smile that did nothing to warm the wariness reflected in her features. “Can I help you?”
I cleared my throat. “Hi, there. I was here a little while ago and was helped by a Mrs. Metzger. Luc Metzger’s wife. I was wondering if you knew where they’ve gone. My friend here”—I indicated Liss behind me—“wanted to meet them.”
The dark little Amish woman leaned to one side to catch a glimpse of Liss, then exchanged a private glance with the rawboned matron who was working the table with her. Before I could wonder what the glance meant, she began straightening and restacking the loaves of bread on the table. “She went off looking for her man. There.” With nothing more than a flick of her gaze, she indicated the path the Metzger woman had taken.
The three of us headed in that direction, not certain of where we were going, but Heritage Park wasn’t overly large or grand, and I felt sure we could spot her eventually.
As it turned out, we hit pay dirt. We found them both.
The beautiful Amishman was just where I might have expected him to be—standing in the door of one of the big barns, beside an open buggy. His wife stood facing him, her hand on the horse’s neck. It was an iconic scene that might have appeared in any number of romantic advertisements for Amish Country, USA…except they were embroiled in conversation, and from the tension that wavered like a heat mirage in the air around them, it was not pretty.
All three of us seemed to notice at the same time, and we hesitated as one as words floated back to us, audible even through the festival babble.
“You promised me, Luc. No more. Are you forgetting why we came here? Why you went to work at the factory?”
“Are you saying we do not need the money, Hester? That our children do not need new shoes? That we do not have repairs to
make to the farm?”
“Are you saying that money is the most important thing?” she countered, her chin quivering but set in determination.
“Of course not. But I will not stand by while they want, either.”
“We are fine. We do what we can do. No one can do more. Youare working, Luc. You are supporting our family. The children need a father more than they need material things.” She paused a moment, then said, her voice vibrating with emotion, “I need their father, too.”
His jaw tightened. “Hest—” A warning, no comfort to be found.
Watching, listening, was perhaps wrong, but the three of us were held fast in the grip of the couple’s private torment, unable to turn away. Tears sprang to my eyes as I felt the depths of the young woman’s need, a need that went unmet. Didn’t he know what she was feeling? Couldn’t he understand? I bit my lip as raw emotion coiled into a knot just below my ribs.
“Luc, please. Please.”
Suddenly his demeanor changed. Anger melted away from his features, replaced by a softer, chiding tenderness. “Hest, it is a simple job, just for the afternoon. Do you think I will fly away from you so quickly?” Abandoning the customary public reserve our Amish are known for, he reached out for a moment and stroked his thumb along the creamy line of her jaw before withdrawing to a more respectable distance. “I will be home by supper, and next weekend we can buy some of the things we have been needing. We’ll make a day of it. Lunch by the lake in the park. Won’t that be fine?”
She didn’t want to say yes. She didn’t want to give in. And yet, watching her, I was just as certain that she could not help herself. “All right. Just this one last time, Luc?”
