Brightest and Best

by Newport, Olivia

  “Your niece and a couple of neighbors. No one saw anything helpful.”

  “What about Ella and Rachel Hilty?”

  “The Amish women?” Fremont used his pen to sign his name on a form.

  “The witnesses,” James said.

  “I beg to differ,” Fremont said. “On the afternoon of the incident, they both confirmed that they did not see the attack as it happened.”

  James set his jaw. “They might have seen something they did not realize was significant.”

  Fremont looked up again. “Shall we make an agreement? You do your job, and I’ll do mine.”

  If James felt even minimal assurance that Deputy Fremont would in fact perform his duties, this conversation would be unnecessary.

  “The matter has nothing to do with you,” Fremont said.

  “Lindy Lehman is a family member.”

  “You’re not her husband or her father,” Fremont said. “Neither are you a witness to the events in question. I’m afraid if you want information, you’ll have to read it in the newspaper like everyone else.”

  Or I can uncover the information myself. Never in his life had he read an English newspaper, nor was he in the habit of gambling his money on long odds.

  James left the sheriff’s office determined not to return but equally determined to discover who would hold a grudge against someone as mild-mannered as Lindy.

  He pulled up to her workshop a few minutes later, prepared to load and deliver items she had ready. Seeing her through the glass of the locked door, he knocked. Lindy hobbled on one crutch to let him in.

  “David made me promise to lock myself in,” Lindy said. “And my neighbor Margaret was on his side. I couldn’t defy them both at one time.”

  “Don’t apologize,” James said. “Under the circumstances, he’s right.”

  “What circumstances?” Lindy said. “We don’t know what happened or why.”

  “Your shop was vandalized twice. You were attacked.”

  “I choose to think it was a vagrant who won’t be back.” Lindy settled herself on a stool and picked up a paintbrush. “Not when he knows somebody other than me might have gotten a look at him.”

  “Just how good a look did you get?” James asked.

  “I didn’t see his face, Onkel James. I told you that already.”

  “But you might have had a sense of how tall he was. Maybe you saw his boots, or noticed a limp.”

  “I wish I could tell you any of that,” Lindy said, dipping her brush in blue paint and touching a birdhouse with the delicate point. “I guess I’d say he was taller than average. But I didn’t notice his hat or his boots or anything else. I’ll take Ella’s word for it that he was wearing a blue shirt.”

  “Think carefully, Lindy,” James said. “Any detail could be important. Maybe he was left-handed. Maybe his knee creaked.”

  Lindy laughed. “You sound like an English police officer—and a better one than Deputy Fremont.”

  Gertie would ask more questions than Deputy Fremont. James kept this thought to himself.

  “Feel free to look around,” Lindy said, “but I just want to get back to normal, and I’m not going to live in fear. That’s not the way of our people, is it?”

  “No, it’s not.” Her use of “our people” softened him.

  “Are you still going to make my deliveries today?”

  “Of course.”

  “I left my list in the kitchen.” Lindy set down her paintbrush and reached for her crutch.

  “I can get it,” James said.

  Lindy shook her head. “I can do it. While I’m gone, you can start with the two quilt racks for the furniture store.”

  James clasped his hands behind his back to squelch the impulse to offer support to Lindy’s elbow—she would only swat him away—but he watched to be sure she safely crossed the patch of grass between the workshop and the house. Then he turned to her workbench before pacing to the wall used to shatter birdhouses ten days ago. James had seen the damage for himself. Now he wished David had not followed instructions to clean up the mess. Almost certainly Deputy Fremont would have overlooked a meaningful remnant, if there was one.

  James carried a quilt rack out to the wagon and secured it. Before returning to the second one, he glanced across the street, unsure which house belonged to Margaret Simpson.

  Ella had not known exhaustion and exhilaration to be twins before, birthed from the same labor.

  At two thirty in the afternoon she stood at the school door saying good-bye to her students, making sure they had collected shawls and lunch buckets and primers. Lizzy corralled her sisters and brother for a long walk home, the Mast boys shot off toward their house, and the Byler children’s mother showed up with a buggy to collect them. Ella admitted relief to herself when she saw Gideon’s buggy clattering down the lane.

  Ella bent over and tied the strings to Gertie’s prayer kapp. It was a preventive action. Gertie had a tendency to run out from under an untied kapp when she was set free outdoors. Savilla chased her sister, and both girls were in their father’s arms a minute later. Gideon looked over their heads, his face a question. Ella watched as he helped his daughters into the buggy and then ambled toward the school. Ella slipped back inside the building.

  “I’m sure you had an extraordinary first day.” Gideon caught her hand and closed the door behind him.

  Ella blew out her breath. “I think it went well, but I’m sure the girls will give you their opinions.”

  Gideon put his hand against her cheek. “You are so brave. I could not admire you more.”

  She breathed in his scent, holding it until her lungs begged for a fresh exchange of air.

  Gideon glanced out the window. Ella followed his gaze. Two faces leaned out of the buggy and fixed on the schoolhouse.

  Gideon laughed. “If we take two steps to the left, we’ll have time for one short kiss before they burst out of the buggy to see what is taking so long.”

  Ella tugged his hand and took two steps.

  CHAPTER 27

  James had not meant to spend so much of the day in Seabury, but Miriam was the last person he wanted to disappoint, so he stood in the line at the mercantile waiting to pay for three spools of black thread. A markdown on canned beans caused an unusual midafternoon glut at the counter.

  Four people ahead of him in line at the counter inched forward. Then three. Then two. Then one. With each ding of the cash register, James slid forward a couple of feet. Then a tall man stepped in from the side, nearly putting his boot down on James’s toe.

  “I ordered those long screws three weeks ago,” the man said to the clerk.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Truesdale,” the clerk said. “They haven’t come yet, but they should be here any day.”

  “I’d better not find out that you didn’t put the order in immediately.”

  “The order went in. It just takes time to get the length you asked for. They probably have to come from Chicago.”

  The man thumped the counter with both palms. “I’d think you would have figured out how to use the telephone by now. You’re not the Amish, after all.”

  Truesdale looked down his long nose at James and brushed past him.

  “I apologize,” the clerk said to James. “That’s Braden. His brother, Gray, is a much more pleasant person.”

  James set the thread on the counter and watched the man exit the store before handing the clerk his coins. By the time James reached the sidewalk a couple of minutes later, he saw no evidence of Braden Truesdale’s presence.

  Across the street, in front of a narrow house painted brown with yellow trim, a sign announced the business within: PERCIVAL T. EGGAR, ESQUIRE, ATTORNEY AT LAW. James worked his lips in and out a few times before tucking the thread under his wagon bench and crossing the street. As far as James knew, no member of the Geauga County Amish had ever engaged the services of an attorney. The Bible clearly said that true believers ought not sue each other in the courts of unbelievers, and ri
ght living kept them on the right side of the law.

  Until now.

  James came into Seabury more than most of the church members. Until a few weeks ago, he never paid much attention to the yellow and brown house. Lately, after two rounds of fines and the audacity to open their own school, James wondered how much trouble the Amish fathers might be in.

  In the front room of the brown house, a young man at a typewriter looked up at James.

  “I’d like to see Mr. Eggar,” James said.

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “No, sir.”

  The secretary raised an eyebrow at the hat still on James’s head and his simple black wool suit coat with no lapels or pockets.

  “I’ll see if he has time to meet you now.” The young man straightened his rimless glasses as he stood.

  James suspected this would be the attorney’s first meeting with an Amish man. If nothing else, curiosity might secure the meeting.

  James watched the gray suit disappear through an inner door, speculating that the attorney’s private office had once been the dining room of the house. Perhaps the upstairs was still in use as a residence. Electric lamps testified that the structure had been modernized. James eyed a chair, unsure whether to take the liberty of sitting down.

  The inner door opened. The young man returned.

  “Mr. Eggar will see you,” he said, gesturing that James should go in. As soon as James crossed the threshold, the secretary quietly closed the door behind him.

  James was relieved to see a man of more maturity rising from a large desk and coming around it to shake his hand. Immediately he liked the friendly light he saw in Mr. Eggar’s eyes and the firmness of his grip as he guided James to a high-backed chair upholstered in reddish-brown leather.

  “Now, this is unusual,” Mr. Eggar said, taking his seat behind his desk. “But if a man like you has need of my services, I give you my word that I will listen carefully.”

  The grace of God appears in needful moments.

  The buses arrived and departed barely half full, making Margaret think that school administrators had underestimated from the start both the number of rural Amish students attending the one-room school in the past and the tenacity of Amish parents to influence the education of their children. The buses still carried students who were not Amish, but it seemed that each week fewer straw hats and prayer kapps dotted the view of children lining up at the buses. Margaret stood on Monday afternoon with other teachers making sure the bus pupils were accounted for before the engines roared. The afternoons were cooler now, and the drivers had lowered canvas siding on the wood frames of their buses to cut the wind.

  “Have you none of them left in your class?” Miss Hunter, the third-grade teacher, said.

  “None of whom?” Margaret said. She refused to cater to the tendency to speak of the Amish students as them.

  Miss Hunter rolled her eyes. “You know what I’m talking about. You still have an Amish boy in your class, don’t you?”

  “Hans,” Margaret said. “He was not in attendance today.” She pictured him in Ella’s classroom and hoped he got to sit next to Gertie.

  The last of the buses pulled away from the school, and the teachers drifted into a huddle where they could brace the afternoon’s brisk breeze together.

  “The school district ought to give them what they want,” Mr. Snyder from the seventh grade said. “Give them their own school. Things could go back to normal around here.”

  Margaret pressed her lips closed. If the other teachers did not yet know that the Amish had built themselves a school, she would not be the one to tell them. She only found out three days ago herself.

  “I had not noticed the Amish children were particular trouble,” Margaret said. Gertie and Hans were quite sweet.

  “That’s because you teach first grade,” Mr. Snyder said. “You don’t have to contend with older students not doing their work, or pupils who are obviously too old for the classes they are in. They’re bored, and it’s not my job to entertain them when they belong in the high school.”

  “Still, they deserve an education,” Margaret said. “We have to admit that some of our students have been distinctly unwelcoming.”

  She stopped short of expressing her opinion about the general insufficiency of Mr. Tarkington’s response to pupils who taunted the Amish children. He hauled offenders to his office, but Margaret suspected nothing of consequence transpired once they got there. She’d seen the smirks on the faces of students as they emerged from the principal’s office.

  “It’s all an unnecessary distraction,” Mr. Snyder said.

  “The teachers in the one-room schools had no trouble accommodating a variety of students.” Margaret thought of Nora Coates.

  “That’s hardly the same as teaching in a town school,” Miss Hunter said.

  Margaret’s spine straightened, but she pushed down the retort forming on her tongue. “It’s getting chilly out here,” she said, turning toward the building.

  Mr. Snyder might well be right that the Amish students would be better off in their own school. On that conclusion he would find common ground with Amish parents regardless of the position the superintendent and principals took. It was Mr. Snyder’s reasons that were convoluted. Margaret could find no agreement there. Viewing the Amish students as an inconvenience to established comfort infuriated Margaret.

  Margaret’s offer to help Ella Hilty was sincere. For the sake of the children, she had to figure out how to carry out her word.

  Gray grinned at Margaret across the bench of his truck three days later.

  “At this time of year,” he said, “you never know how many pretty days we’ll have left.”

  “Thank you for inviting me for a drive.” Margaret dipped her head in a manner she hoped was coy, though she wasn’t sure. “The fall colors are spectacular.”

  “We could drive all the way to Cleveland if you like.” Gray’s eyebrows raised in question.

  Of all his endearing expressions, Margaret liked this one best. “What would we do in Cleveland?”

  “Have supper,” he said. “Then we’ll see.”

  It was tempting. Ride all the way to Cleveland with the smell of him swirling into her every breath. Walk down the street holding hands. Stare into his brown eyes over the flame of a candle and not care who might think she was behaving in an unseemly manner. Feed him pie off the end of her own fork.

  But the papers were full of news of influenza. They might not even find a restaurant open to serve them.

  “It’ll be dark soon,” Margaret said. “Maybe we could just find a spot with a nice view and watch the sun go down.”

  He stopped at a corner and looked to the west. “I know a spot, if you don’t mind driving past the Amish farms.”

  Her stomach soured. “Why would I mind? It’s beautiful countryside.”

  “I would think you’d get enough of them at work.”

  “Get enough of them?”

  Gray accelerated the truck into motion again. “Don’t get testy. I was only thinking of you.”

  “I’m sorry if I sounded testy.” Margaret stared straight ahead.

  “I understand if it’s a sensitive subject for you.”

  His tone was tender. She wanted to believe him.

  “The sooner Brownley and Fremont knock some sense into them,” Gray said, “the sooner things will be easier for you.”

  “Things are not difficult for me. Every school year has its challenges, but I’m grateful for any experience that makes me a better teacher.”

  “Did you know they built their own school?”

  Against her will, Margaret’s gaze snapped in Gray’s direction. He met her eyes for a moment before turning back to the road.

  “You did know, didn’t you?” he said.

  She wouldn’t straight-out lie to him. “Yes, I did. I didn’t realize it was common knowledge yet.”

  “I don’t know that it is,” Gray said, “but it will be soon enough. Fr
emont got wind of it today. He went livid as an angry bee.”

  Margaret stifled a groan.

  “They’re causing a lot of trouble, Margaret. A lot of people are spending time and attention they ought to be using on other things.”

  She said nothing. She could see Gideon Wittmer’s farm in the distance.

  “They have to consolidate,” Gray said. “It’s the only way to let everyone move on. It will be better for everybody.”

  “The Amish don’t seem to think so.”

  “They’ll be made to see.”

  Gray Truesdale was a gorgeous man in any woman’s eyes. Margaret was sure of that. That he would court her all these weeks was a phenomenon beyond her ability to explain. When his eyes latched onto hers, a loveliness surged through her that she had not known was within her. If they could just ride out this storm, perhaps the stone forming in her gut at this moment could soften again.

  Or perhaps that was something she told herself when she ached for one more delicious moment, one more tantalizing kiss, before hope turned to vapor.

  “Would it distress you if I changed my mind about taking a drive?” she said. “I think perhaps I should spend the evening in after all.”

  “I’ve upset you,” he said, contrite.

  “I wouldn’t be very good company tonight,” she said. “As you can imagine, I have a lot on my mind.”

  Gray pulled to the side of the road and turned the truck around. They rode in silence back toward town, but when he reached across the bench for Margaret’s hand, she gave it to him.

  In front of her house, he parked and walked around the truck to help her out.

  “I’d like to escort you to church on Sunday,” he said, “and then we can have dinner with my brother. It would please me if the two of you met.”

  Margaret hesitated.

  “We can set all this aside for a day, can’t we?” Gray said, putting a finger to her chin to turn her face up. “A Sabbath?”

  Margaret swallowed hard. “I would be delighted to meet your brother.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Margaret disliked the stares. This was not the first time she had arrived at church with Gray. Two hundred people turned up at this church every Sunday morning. Why should it raise eyebrows when two of them chose to sit together?