Then his smile faded. Like an echo in his mind, he could hear his father’s voice, riddled with disgust, stamping out his mother’s compliment. “Snotty noses and ear infections. That’s the main job of pediatrics.” If he was really in a snarly mood, he would add, “Women’s work.”
It was ironic that Will’s father didn’t have any daughters. He had often wondered what his father would have been like with a daughter, but then, Will would never have wished such a fate on any girl. It was hard enough being Charles William Stoltzes’ only son.
A tiny slice of movement snagged Will’s attention. Someone was watching him from the kitchen window. Mary Kate. He didn’t doubt for a minute that girl knew everybody’s comings and goings. He could tell her mind spun faster than the arms of the red windmill on a blustery day.
A woman came out on the porch to fill a bird feeder. She was an older woman, in her forties or fifties, as thin as a broom handle. When he saw her face, he could have sworn he was looking at Katharine Hepburn. A handsome woman, unsmiling, yet with unfathomable depths in those steel flint blue eyes—that’s how his mother described Katharine Hepburn’s appearance. His mother was a nut for Katharine Hepburn movies. His father indulged her on her birthday and watched a few movies with her. This woman on the porch could have been Katharine Hepburn’s double. Wouldn’t his mother have enjoyed this coincidence? He would have loved to take a picture of her on his cell phone, but he didn’t dare. He had a hunch the Katharine Hepburn look-alike would have boxed his ears.
Two horses trotted over to the fence and leaned their heads over the railing to pick at the hay. Will split up a flake of hay and tossed it over the fence. A mother and colt walked up to the hay on the ground. The mother horse pushed her head against one of the horses that had beat her to it. The gelding gave up and looked at Will to solve the problem, so he tossed another flake at the gelding. Even in nature, Will thought, mothers protected their young.
A buzzing sound startled him. His cell phone! It seemed so out of place on an Amish farm. He reached for the phone and held it against his ear. “Will Stoltz.”
“You were supposed to call in yesterday.”
Will’s heart plummeted. He gulped back panic. “Mr. Petosky, I thought we had an agreement. We left it that I would call you. You don’t call me.”
“I don’t like having to track you down,” Mr. Petosky said. “That’s not our deal. What’s going on?”
“It’s too soon to tell. Look, I just got here yesterday.”
The voice turned dark. “Please tell me you have some good news for me.”
“Mr. Petosky, I’ve barely unpacked. And the Amish farmer has a long to-do list for me.”
“Hey, all I’m asking for are updates. And as soon as the time is right, you complete your task. It’s as simple as that.”
Simple. Right. That’s why Will’s stomach was rolling like a tiller in the fields.
The voice softened, as if reading Will’s mind. “Remember, Will, this is a win-win. The bird wins and you win.”
“And you win,” Will said. “Don’t forget that, Mr. Petosky.”
A husky laugh filled the air. “Right. A three-way win. Everybody wins.” Mr. Petosky cleared his throat. “Check in tomorrow.”
Will snapped his cell phone off.
Sadie tucked a strand of hair behind an ear, her gaze following the tall cowboy as he strode to the pasture. Earlier today, she hadn’t looked directly into his face, too embarrassed by her mistake of assuming he was a baby thief. Now, though, as Will Stoltz helped her quiet the baby again, she had an opportunity to peruse his features without his knowledge. And she liked what she’d seen. His thick, wavy hair, combed straight back, reminded her of her father’s hair. Where Amos’s was dark brown with streaks of gray, the cowboy’s hair was brown with sun-bleached streaks.
When she came into the kitchen and tucked the sleeping baby into his basket, Fern had just put a casserole into the oven. She asked Sadie to finish cleaning up some pots and pans for her while she went to the basement to get a jar of canned peaches. That’s all they’d been eating lately—peaches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Fern wanted to use them up before the new crop set on the trees.
Sadie picked up a mitt to put a hot skillet in the sink, then ran some water into it and braced herself. She had always felt frightened by the reaction of a hot skillet to cold water, both the quick angry hiss and the clouds of rising steam. Fern said she had to get over all of these silly fears. Skillets and steam didn’t scare Fern one bit. But then again, nothing scared Fern.
Sadie looked out the window at the cowboy who, she just learned, wasn’t a cowboy at all. He just liked the hat and boots. He was a student at a university in Philadelphia. Taking a semester off to find himself, he had said. Had he been lost? she wanted to ask, but thought twice before saying it aloud.
She saw Will glance up at the farmhouse as he fed hay to the sheep in the pasture. He waved to her and she waved back. He picked up a baby lamb in his arms and pretended it was his dance partner, sweeping it around as if he was waltzing in the pasture. Then he gently set the lamb on the ground, turned to Sadie, and made a grand bow. Alone in the kitchen, Sadie laughed out loud. When Will popped back up, his lips spread into a grin beneath the brim of his felt cowboy hat. For a minute, Sadie caught herself just . . . watching him smile. He had a really nice smile, actually. A little impish. The expression seemed kind of mischievous, as if the two of them shared a private joke and Will was enjoying it.
She would think a fellow like Will Stoltz would have a lot of girls fluttering around him at that fancy college. It wouldn’t be hard to fall for a boy like that. She tilted her head, wondering if she could hear his heart beat if she laid her cheek against his chest. She had such foolish thoughts as these. Sadie Lapp, just where will that line of thinking get you? Into trouble! she upbraided herself. Another part of her brain answered back: What’s so bad about a little bit of trouble?
Such questions seemed to constantly buzz in her head like mosquitoes, but she felt far short of answers.
As Gideon Smucker pulled the buggy up to the barn at Goat Roper Hill, his family farm, his father came out to meet him. Gid leaped from the buggy and walked around to release the horse from its tracings. Wordlessly, his father pulled the buggy and leaned it up against the barn. Gid led the horse into the stall and filled a bucket with fresh water. He tossed a forkful of hay into the horse’s stall. His father followed him in, standing in the center aisle of the barn.
“Something on your mind?” Gid asked. It wasn’t like Ira Smucker to not have his hands busy.
Ira sat down on a hay bale set against a wall, leaning forward, steepling his fingers in front of him.
Gid paused in lifting another pitchfork of hay to look at his father. It was strange. His father couldn’t seem to look Gid in the eye, as if it was taking everything in him to try to act calm.
Finally, Ira spoke. “Being a minister, well, it’s not easy.”
Gid knew that to be true. His father was chosen by lot to be a minister nearly three years ago, just before Gid’s mother had passed. Gid often thought that the timing of becoming a minister had been a gift to his father. His father was a quiet man, well respected by others. He would have become even quieter if it weren’t for the demands of being a minister. And Gid knew that folks counted on Ira’s sound judgment. He didn’t say much, but when he did, folks listened. Gid tossed a forkful of hay over the stall’s door and moved onto the next stall. He faced his father, hooking his elbow on the rounded end of the pitchfork’s handle. “What’s happened?”
Ira cleared his throat. “There’s some talk brewing about . . . about Sadie Lapp.”
He leaned the pitchfork against the wall. “About the baby.” Gid closed his eyes. “I just drove past Windmill Farm and saw her walking that baby. I didn’t talk to her, though. I just couldn’t.”
Ira nodded sympathetically. “I know my own son well enough to realize Sadie hadn’t told you anything about ha
ving a baby.” He sighed. “I remember what it’s like to be a young man. There are certain temptations. Sometimes, a couple in love gets ahead of their wedding day.”
Gid’s eyes popped open. It hadn’t occurred to him that Sadie had been in love with this other fellow. What had gone so wrong? When had she met him? Was she seeing him while she was going out with Gid last December? He counted back the months and slammed his palm against his forehead. Stupid, stupid, stupid! She must have been seeing this other fellow at the same time she was spending time with him! Who could it have been?
Ira’s cheeks turned scarlet. “In a . . . situation . . . like this . . . I think it’s best to face things head-on.” His father kept his eyes on a piece of hay that he was twisting in his hands, back and forth, back and forth.
A horse shuffled straw with his hoof in his stall. A starling flew from one side of the barn to the other, disappearing into a nest in the rafters. In the silence that followed, it slowly dawned on Gid what his father was getting after, why he was acting so strangely.
Gid wondered what Sadie had told people. Had she led others to believe that Gid was the father of that baby? He wasn’t! He most definitely wasn’t! Gid bit down on his tongue to hold back words of protest.
If he told the truth, he thought about what that could mean for Sadie. She would be under the bann for six weeks, then confess her wrongdoing before the church. And even though she would be restored in full fellowship, there would always be questions, talk, murmurings. She would be raising this baby alone. The quiet pressure might be so intense that she would want to leave the church. To start fresh somewhere else.
With someone else.
And what would happen to them? There wouldn’t be a “them.”
It would play out the way it had with his second oldest sister, Martha, called Marty. She had met someone while visiting relatives and came home carrying that someone’s child. What made it worse was that someone was a married man. Gid was only thirteen at the time, but he remembered the shame that fell over Goat Roper Hill, as real as a covering of deep snow. Marty sat on the front bench and confessed as their mother sat in the back row and cried. It seemed his mother didn’t stop crying that entire summer. His mother claimed that everywhere she went, she heard a hiss of whispers: “They’re the ones with the adulterous daughter.”
His father said she was imagining things and to stop making Marty feel as if her life was over at nineteen. “It isn’t,” Gid vividly remembered his father telling his mother. “God is in the business of second chances.” But his mother said that while God might give second chances, people weren’t as generous. Then she told him he just didn’t understand the way of the world and she started crying all over again.
Whether the pressure came from outside the home or inside it, Marty had enough. She left home before the baby was even born. She worked as a waitress over in Harrisburg and was living with another someone. Every so often, she called home and asked for money to fend off the bill collectors. Her father would always send a check off to her, no questions asked.
But no requests for her to come home, either.
Gid snatched up the pitchfork and jabbed it into the mound of hay with enough force to bend the tines. If he lied and said he was the father of Sadie’s baby, it would mean that he, too, would be put under the bann for six weeks. He might even lose his teaching job. And then he and Sadie would be expected to marry. Immediately.
In a way, it wouldn’t entirely be a lie. He could, essentially, become the baby’s father. That baby was part of Sadie, and Gid would raise him and love him as his own. He loved Sadie. He didn’t doubt that for a moment. And Gid couldn’t imagine his life without her. He wanted to spend the rest of his days with her, filling a house with children and serving God.
He would do this for her. He loved her that much.
He gave a little jerk, setting his feet in motion. “Dad,” he said, in a voice so steady that it could not be his own. “I want to marry Sadie Lapp. As soon as possible.”
A broad smile lit Ira’s face. He turned to his son and nodded, satisfied, then ambled toward the barn’s wide opening, leaving Gid alone with his thoughts.
5
At first Sadie thought she was woken by the moonlight streaming into her window. Full, orange, the moon seemed to teeter on the windowsill. The light spilled into the bedroom and across the wood floor. Then a broad beam of light swept over her bedroom wall and along the ceiling. She popped up on her elbows. Heart pounding, she climbed out of bed and knelt at the window. At first she could see nothing; then she saw someone below her window. A tall, dark figure silhouetted against the moonlight. He held the flashlight up to his face so she could see him. It was Gideon Smucker, looking up at her, motioning with his free hand for her to come down. She pulled up the window sash.
“Hang on a minute, I’m coming down.” Her heart zinged into her throat, and before she could talk herself out of it, she dressed, slipped downstairs, slid her feet into flip-flops, and went silently through the back door.
He was waiting for her. “You’ve come home,” he said, holding out a hand to her as she approached him.
She smiled at him. His eyes were beautiful—a deep, clear blue, as blue as a robin’s eggs, with impossibly thick lashes fanning outward. Looking into his eyes ignited something in her and she never quite knew how to describe it. Unsettled was the closest feeling she could claim. He was so sure about her, so certain that she was meant for him. It made her nervous, but pleased too. More pleased than nervous. “No one knew, not even Dad. I wanted to surprise everybody.”
“You did just that. You certainly did.”
They headed toward the maple tree in the side yard—on the opposite side of the house from M.K.’s bedroom. Sadie plunked down on the swing that hung from the tree’s large branch. Gid leaned his back against the tree trunk and stared at the clouds rushing through the night sky. Gid wasn’t much of a talker, but those eyes of his—they told her everything he felt. Tonight, there was something in his reserved expression that spilled out sorrow. Something was wrong.
Gid’s gaze shifted to a spray of lightning bugs dancing past them. “I remember coming here once and watching M.K. chase lightning bugs.”
He stopped and swallowed, then looked up into the trees. It hit her then that he was just as nervous as Sadie was.
“Gid, you might have heard things,” Sadie whispered.
He kept his gaze angled toward the night sky. “It’s okay, Sadie. I want to make this better for you.”
She caught his sleeve and gave it a tug, forcing him to look at her. “Make what better?”
He looked at her for a long moment, dropped his head, then squeezed her hand that was still on his arm. “Your . . . circumstances.”
She was confused. “I don’t know what you mean. What needs to be made better?”
“You know. The baby.”
She blew air out of her cheeks. “M.K. told me that you were told.”
His head snapped up. “I didn’t know it was a secret.”
“It’s not. Not exactly.” She watched the moon pass behind a cloud. “I mean . . . I would have preferred the news to not have gotten out like it did. So that I could figure out what I needed to do without everybody’s opinion.”
Gid didn’t say anything for a long time. “Folks are quite surprised at this . . . situation.”
Okay. Now she was mad. This wasn’t a situation! This was an orphaned baby. “Why is it anybody’s business?”
Gid looked flustered.
“I’m sorry if I sound testy,” she said, still sounding testy, “but I have a hard time understanding people who talk about you behind your back.”
“It’s just natural, I suppose. I remember a lot of talk when the same thing happened to Marty—”
“Marty? Marty!” She flinched, as if suffering a physical blow, and yanked her hand out of his. “But it’s not the same thing. Not the same thing at all!” She searched his eyes. “You believe that, don’t
you, Gid?”
There was a beat of silence. “I want to,” he said quietly. Gid scuffed the dirt with the toe of his boot, eyes down.
“How many others are thinking what you’re thinking?”
He rubbed his neck. “Quite a few. Most.”
A chill swept through her soul. How far was this rumor traveling? She envisioned the faces of her neighbors—Sol and Mattie to the east, her Zook relatives at Beacon Hollow to the south, Jonah and Lainey of Rose Hill Farm to the north, Carrie and Abel to the west. She couldn’t imagine any of them believing such a lie. She lifted her chin. “So our friends and neighbors would just prefer to believe the worst about me.”
“You have to admit, it doesn’t look good.” Gid ducked his head, bright color staining his cheeks. The singing wind shifted the clouds again, flickering shadows and light over Sadie’s face. He took a deep breath. “Love covers all wrongs. I forgive you.”
Such beautiful words, and yet, from somewhere deep inside, Sadie felt a well rising, filled with fury. She was livid. “If you’re going to pull one verse out of the Bible and toss it at me like a preacher”—she stood and faced him—“then how about this one: ‘Love believes all things, hopes all things.’”
His eyes sent her a silent plea. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to do, Sadie.”
“Then why don’t you ask me for the truth?”
Gid tipped his forehead against Sadie’s. “I’m sorry,” he murmured.
She leaned against him, breathing in his familiar scent: sandalwood. She could feel his breath, his words, falling onto her.
“All right then, Sadie. I’ll ask you for the truth. Who is the baby’s father?”
The Haven Page 5
