The Amish Clockmaker

by Mindy Starns Clark

  But instead of a quiet day, the store quickly became swamped. I realized I wouldn’t be able to leave for a long while, not until after the rush was done. All morning long, the bells hanging from the door handle chimed as people flooded in and out—and in again. We were used to being busy, especially in the mornings, but this steady of a stream was unusual for a Friday.

  The urge to move my search forward grew even stronger when I realized that most of the customers weren’t looking for horse feed or new reins. They were looking for gossip.

  I spent some time in the part of the store that was closed, using the tall, empty shelves to sort out stock that had become mixed up in the shuffle of construction day. I couldn’t see the customers from there as I worked, but I could hear them.

  “I’m sorry about your shop,” one man said. “It’s too bad the hotel next door is kicking you off your property and building a second hotel.”

  “Oh, boy,” I heard Amanda reply, forcing her voice to be light and friendly. “Sounds like the rumor mill is working overtime on that one.”

  The next customer asked if we offered guided tours “of the murderer’s house and the farm that had been mysteriously willed to him by his father.” The accent sounded Englisch. When I peeked my head around the corner, I saw a group of young men in jeans and T-shirts standing at the register. I walked over to relieve Amanda from the situation, asking them if they needed help finding anything. They pelted me with questions about Clayton Raber, but when I offered no exciting answers, they left.

  I was about to return to my work area when, yet again, the bells rang. Two Amish men walked through, one younger and one older. I was prepared to tell them we wanted no part of their curiosity or rumors, but I could see by the knowledgeable way they looked around the store that they were here to shop, not gossip. Finally, some actual customers.

  “Excuse me,” the younger man said. “Where is your leather strapping?” He motioned to the older man beside him, explaining that he and his grandfather had a buggy shop down near Strasburg. “We’ve always bought our supplies at Waggoner’s since it’s so close, but now that he’s retiring, he suggested we look here.”

  Deeply pleased at this development, I was about to respond when I heard Amanda gasp. I turned around quickly to see if she was okay, but when I looked at her, she was smiling. She walked past me and up to the two men.

  “What a nice surprise seeing you in here!” she exclaimed. She shook both of their hands warmly, as if they were old friends. Turning to me, she said, “This is my husband, Matthew.” I stepped forward and shook both of their hands. “Matthew, this is Joel and Tyler Miller.”

  The tone of her voice indicated I should know who they were. Miller. I recognized the last name but couldn’t remember why.

  Tyler must have seen the confusion on my face because he paused to explain. “We’re related to the blacksmith Jake Miller. I’m his nephew—though we grew up more like brothers—and this is his father.”

  Miller. Now I remembered. Fumbling over my words, I welcomed them to the store, shook their hands again, and excused myself, retreating to the closed aisle as fast as was polite. I was more familiar with the name “Jake Miller” than I wanted to be. Amanda had courted him. She had been courting him, in fact, at the same time she was falling in love with me.

  Whether these two men knew the whole story or not, I could still feel the heat in my face as I considered what Jake Miller must surely think of me, the “other man” who stole his girlfriend away. Then again, by doing so, I had freed him up to be available for the true love of his life. Obviously, things had worked out well for both of us in the end.

  Working back behind the shelves, I couldn’t really hear Tyler and Amanda’s conversation at the register. But then she brought him to the section of the store with the leather straps, which was right on the other side of the aisle where I stood. Through no fault of my own, I was privy to their entire conversation.

  At first they just talked about the merchandise and the kinds of products the Millers would be buying here from now on. But then their voices grew silent for a moment.

  “How’s Jake?” Amanda asked after the lull.

  “He’s doing well. He and Priscilla just had their first child a few weeks ago, a boy. They named him Daniel, after her late father. Mother and son are healthy.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Amanda said with sincerity.

  “Jake misses his family and friends here, of course, not to mention his mother’s cooking. But otherwise he’s happily married and enjoying Indiana. His blacksmith shop there has grown so much, in fact, that this past spring he hired his first employee, a second blacksmith, to work along with him.”

  Amanda expressed her happiness and asked another question, but I was no longer listening. Relief had washed over me. I’d harbored such guilt about the whole matter, and seeing Joel and Tyler had reawakened that fear. But now that I knew Jake really had ended up with the right woman after all—as had I—I could forgive myself and let it go.

  My mind was pulled from my thoughts when I heard Tyler say my name.

  “Matthew looked sort of… uncomfortable about us being here. It’s not going to be a problem for him, is it? That you used to date Jake?”

  I cringed. Had I really been that obvious?

  I heard her laugh. “No, Tyler. He’s not uncomfortable. He’s preoccupied.” To my relief, she proceeded to inform him of the current situation with the expansion, the tension with Starbrite, and trying to locate Clayton Raber. I’d grown weary of the day’s gossip, but this time around, the explanation was just the thing that was needed to reinforce Amanda’s response.

  Tyler was quiet for a moment once she was done. I could hear him picking up and putting down various leather straps. “You know, maybe Matthew should talk to someone in the police department to find out if they have an address for wherever Clayton moved to after he left here. That’s where I’d start.”

  My eyes widened at the thought. It was a good idea, one I would try as soon as things slowed down a bit and I could leave.

  “I found what I needed. Are you ready to check out, Tyler?” asked an older voice. Joel must have joined Amanda and Tyler in the next aisle.

  “Yep, I’m ready. We were just talking. Daadi, have you ever heard of a man named Clayton Raber?”

  “The clockmaker?”

  “Ya. Amanda says he used to live here. This was his clock shop.”

  “Oh.” Joel was quiet for a moment as he seemed to process this.

  “Did you ever meet him?” Tyler asked.

  “No,” Joel replied, and then he cleared his throat. “Gosh. I was just a little thing when he lived around here, maybe four or five at the most when he moved away. Though now that you mention it, I do have a connection with the man. We have a connection with him, actually, in a sense. You know how we give free safety inspections on any buggy, even ones that didn’t come from our shop?”

  “Ya,” Tyler said. “I did one of those yesterday for a guy who was buying a used spring wagon from a friend.”

  “Well, the reason we offer that service is because of something that happened to Clayton when he was a child. His father had bought an old market wagon from a neighbor, and it had a faulty axle—though neither one of them realized it at the time. One day when Clayton and his parents were out, the axle snapped and he was terribly injured. My father didn’t know the family, but when he heard about the poor little Amish boy who had been so hurt and nearly lost a leg, he made a decision. From then on, he would provide free safety inspections on any buggy because he knew accidents like that one could be prevented with just a simple check by a person who knew what he was doing.”

  The volume of their voices lessened as they walked across the shop to the register, though I was glad I’d caught at least part of their conversation. It was nice to hear that at least one good thing had come out of Clayton’s tragic childhood accident, free safety inspections at one of the best buggy shops around.

 
I managed to get out of the store by noon, and after a quick lunch at home, I went to the police department. Two miles up the main road from home, I pulled in to see a long multicolored building painted in strips of blue, orange, and tan with a series of red garage doors. It was oddly colorful for a municipal building, and its cheery exterior gave me hope that it might contain what I needed inside.

  The officer manning the desk asked what he could help me with, so I told him I was looking for information from an old case, one that had happened in the county in the fifties.

  “You’re going to need to fill out an information request form.”

  “I really just want the address of one of the people involved, if that information is even in there.”

  “Like I said, you’ll have to file an official request.”

  “Can you at least tell me if it’s going to be worth the trouble?” I asked. “It’s kind of a long shot that the address would even be on there, isn’t it?”

  “Sorry, but that’s not something I can look up here,” he said, gesturing toward the computer. “Our digital records only go back to the late seventies.”

  “So how do I get that information?” I asked, trying to keep the frustration from my voice.

  He looked at me blankly. “File an information request.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “How long will that take to process?”

  “If it gets cleared, you should have what you need in about five days.”

  Five days? Starbrite could have tracked down Clayton by then. But what else could I do?

  “All right. I assume there’s paperwork I need to fill out?”

  “There is.”

  “May I have it?”

  “We don’t keep that here, sir. You’ll need to go to the clerk of court’s office in Lancaster.”

  I sighed. That would require hiring a car—and missing another day of work at the shop.

  “You might be able to do it on the Internet,” a policewoman offered from a nearby desk.

  Deciding that was my best bet, I thanked them both and left for the nearest library, which was in Leola. Once there, I signed up for a computer, waited my turn, and then filed the request form online. Sure enough, it said I would receive the results in approximately five days. Why had I even bothered?

  Hoping to redeem the trip, I moved on to another task. Still online, I googled “quitclaim deed” and then looked through the list of options until I found what I needed to create such a document for myself, just as the lawyer had suggested. Fortunately, a template was provided, and it wasn’t long before I felt confident in what I was doing. Step by step, I pulled the deed together, filling in every blank except the price, as I knew that depended on Clayton and what we ended up working out once I found him and explained what had happened.

  When I had finished creating the deed, the site instructed me to print it and have it signed in the presence of a notary public. After that, I was to take the notarized deed to the country records office to get it recorded, which would require a filing fee. Then all that would be left was to wait for the original deed to be mailed back to me.

  Satisfied, I printed out the completed page and paid for it at the front desk. Maybe I’m jumping the gun, I thought as I returned to the computer, but I want to be prepared for when I finally track down Clayton.

  I still had time to spare before my hour on the computer was up, so I decided to go into some old newspaper archives and read whatever reports I could find from back in 1955 about the death of Clayton’s wife, his subsequent arrest, and his later release. Unfortunately, that was easier said than done. I knew the Lancaster paper, the Intelligencer Journal, had been around for a long time, so I started there. As it turned out, the paper had actually been in existence since the late 1700s—but their online archives only went as far back as 1989.

  The Philadelphia papers weren’t much better, the oldest archives dating from 1978. Frustrated, I tried casting the nets a little wider, searching papers in New York City and Washington, DC. I didn’t know if the story had been big enough to merit coverage outside the Lancaster/Philly area, but given the unusual Amish element, I knew there was a chance. And though I was able to find some archives that went back that far, none of them included anything about it.

  After a good fifteen minutes of poking around, I’d come up with only one thing, a single, brief mention in a now-defunct newspaper out of Baltimore I’d never heard of. It wasn’t even an article about the incident, just a photograph and a snarky caption. The picture, taken from behind, showed a man in Amish clothing being led toward a police car by two uniformed officers. The wording underneath said simply: So much for nonviolence: Lancaster County Amish man taken into custody, charged with killing his wife.

  There were no other details, no other related articles before or after, no mention whatsoever of the Amish man’s name. I couldn’t even know for sure that it was Clayton, though I didn’t doubt it. The date fit, not to mention such an occurrence was incredibly rare—especially back in the fifties, when there were only about ten Old Order Amish communities in all of Pennsylvania.

  Otherwise, my newspaper search was a wash—at least for today. If necessary, I knew I could go into Lancaster to the main library, where they probably had all the old newspapers on microfilm, but looking through that would take a lot of time and trouble, so I decided to hold off for now.

  Before giving up the computer, I still had one last avenue to try, an idea Amanda had suggested last night: the membership rosters of the various clockmaker associations around the country. I thought such a search might be difficult, but it ended up being the easiest task I’d tackled all day. A few simple Google searches gave me access to a number of clockmaking groups, which I found encouraging. Unfortunately, they didn’t pan out. Though I eagerly scanned every roster I could find, I saw neither a “Clayton” nor a “Raber” among them. By the time I was finished, my eyes were tired and my heart was heavy.

  Once I left the library, I headed back to the Helmuth homestead. I’d made up my mind to try to speak with Joan again, to insist they help me out and give me some answers. But when the first of their pastures came into view, I pulled over, out of sight of the house. I studied the farm from where I sat. Long shadows of the animals played against the ground in the last rays of the day’s light. Lamplight flickered in the kitchen window. The family might be sitting together, reading from the Bible, enjoying a piece of pie or strawberries-and-cream for dessert. Something told me not to go back there yet, that I needed something else—something new—that would get me through the door. Something that would persuade Becky to let me see her mother and then convince Joan to trust me enough to share any information she might have on the whereabouts of her brother that could aid in my search.

  Dejected, I looked out across the rolling farmland one last time and then started up again. As I made my way home, I wondered if this was a hopeless cause. I wished again that my grossdaadi were around to advise me. I thought about my prayer that God would close any doors He didn’t want me to go through. Maybe this really was one of those closed doors, and I should accept it as a sign to give up entirely. At this point, I just didn’t know any more. All I knew for sure was that I was angry, hungry, exhausted, and hopeless.

  Too bad our construction was on hold, I thought, because in that moment I would have loved nothing more than to take all of my frustrations out on the walls of the old clock-shop-turned-tack-store, busting them down with a vengeance.

  NINE

  I made it back in time to help Amanda close up the shop. As we worked, I spoke little, my mind preoccupied with the disappointing day. She must have noticed my silence, because as soon as she flipped the sign on the door, she came over to where I stood and placed her hand on my shoulder.

  “Want to talk about it?”

  The sweetness of her voice and sincere care in it drew me out of my thoughts. “I’m just frustrated.” I rubbed my temples with my fingers. “It’ll be okay.”

  �
�Well, this isn’t going to make you feel any better,” she replied, and then she reached under the counter and pulled out the spiral notebook in which we logged the store’s phone messages. As she began relaying the returned phone calls that had come in for me today, I found myself growing so agitated that I picked up the broom and began sweeping the floor. From what I could tell, every single person on my list of out-of-town Raber relatives that I’d left a message for had called me back, but not a one had any answers to offer.

  “At least that rules out the farther-away people,” she said, trying to lift my spirits.

  I swept the debris from the floor into a dustpan and bent over to pick it up, my stomach churning. With those people scratched off my list, there was no one else to approach, no more tactics left to try.

  If only I could get in to see Joan Raber Glick. I just knew with her being Clayton’s only surviving sibling that she had to have some kind of information that could point me in the right direction.

  “Since when do Amish refuse to help other Amish?” I asked as I banged the dust from the pan into the trash bin. “We are always there for one another.”

  Amanda let me rant, perhaps sensing I needed to get the frustration and worry out of my system. When I was finished, she didn’t even try to say anything to cheer me up, for which I was grateful. She must have caught on to how dire our situation was growing and knew that mere words would not encourage me now.

  After she finished closing out the register, we carried the money to the back room to put it in the safe.

  “What’s that?” she asked, looking toward the area that had been partially dismantled when we’d broken down the old bathroom on Wednesday. Glancing over, I realized she was talking about an ancient coal hamper that our work had uncovered. Unused for I didn’t know how many decades, it had been built into the far wall of the original structure and later covered over with plaster.

  “Do you know?” she prodded, stepping toward it to get a closer look.