Upon A Winter's Night Read online

  “Hi, Hank. Sandra Myerson here. Message for Josh Yoder. I’ve learned something interesting about Lydia’s mother, but I’ll save it to tell either you or her. I wasn’t going to tell her at first because it’s pretty upsetting. But I’m coming back to show you I can face those camels, cows and whatever else you have stashed in that barn. Maybe you’ll let me have a kitten for old times’ sake, or are they too young to leave their mother? Can’t wait to see them. Josh, don’t be mad at me. Sorry we had that fight. We can make up and be close again, even if we’re apart. See you soon.”

  Josh stood transfixed. Something about Lydia’s mother. Her birth mother, evidently. But he was analyzing what the sheriff would have learned from this message. It was good she’d said she planned to go up in the loft, but bad news that she’d said he was mad at her. And be close again? The only woman he wanted to be close to was the one this scandal might have made him lose forever.

  15

  By midafternoon the day after Sandra’s death, the parking lot and front yard of the Brand Amish furniture store looked as if it was having a yard sale. Reporters’ cars and television trucks sprouting antennae took most of the parking spaces, forcing buggies and customers’ cars onto the snow-covered lawn. Some of their customers milled around outside, looking at the biggest vehicles. Live at Five, Cleveland News, one truck had written large on its side. Another read, Six on Your Side, Columbus.

  Even the brisk, icy wind did not deter them. In came a small group of men and one woman, straight toward Lydia’s reception desk. One, no, two cameras! Naomi was running an errand back in the store, so she couldn’t leave. The phone was ringing again, but Lydia didn’t answer it because callers wanted interviews, not furniture. Without even picking up the receiver this time, she put the caller on hold. Was Josh facing the pestering press, too, or had they all come over here?

  “Mike Jenson, WCOL News, Columbus,” the tallest man said. “You are Lydia Brand? We learned in town this is where you work, that your family owns this store. You are—were—a friend of Sandra Myerson and Josh Yoder? How well did you know the deceased? What’s your relationship to Mr. Yoder?”

  “Yes, I’m Lydia, but I have nothing to say about all that. You should ask the sheriff—”

  “I understand Mr. Yoder and the deceased had a past relationship they had broken off. Then why did she come to the Home Valley?”

  Gid appeared with the megaphone they used to run the summer games for the staff. His voice boomed so loud through it that even Lydia jumped.

  “Please leave the store unless you are shoppers,” he announced. “This is a place of business, and we have just placed a sign on the front door allowing only customers here.”

  A long pole with something on the end of it swung away from Lydia toward Gid. The two men with cameras on their shoulders turned them toward him, too, then at Daad when he appeared, trying to usher people out. Oh, no, they were taking their pictures, capturing their images, as Bishop Esh always called it. “You have stolen me!” he had shouted one time at several people snapping pictures of his face. Sometimes the Englische just didn’t understand that photographs violated God’s law about not making graven images.

  Some of the invading crowd—maybe only about ten people but it seemed a hundred—backed off a bit, but one man yelled at Gid, “You’re interfering with freedom of the press!”

  “The press,” Lydia repeated when Daad hustled her away into his office and closed the door. “Now I know how those people got that name. Press, press, press for information, my relationship to Josh—”

  “I hope your mother never sees a newspaper that talks about that.”

  “—and about how well I knew Sandra, like why she’d come to the Home Valley.”

  “And why did she?” Daad countered, then began a coughing fit. She poured him a glass of water from the pitcher on his desk. He slumped into his rocking chair. He meant why Sandra came back yesterday, not originally, Lydia figured. The aftermath of Sandra’s death made her realize she needed to tell her parents about the search for David and Lena Brand before these meddlers turned it up. But she wanted to have her parents together for that, at home, not in this turmoil.

  Keeping her voice calm, Lydia said, “She has been afraid of most animals for years and wanted to face up to that, get past it, so I guess that’s why she went into the barn alone. I—I think she was also going to take a kitten from the haymow loft for a pet. And she probably wanted to say goodbye to Josh.”

  “Goodbye or a new hello? Your mother thinks it wasn’t goodbye. By the way, you realize today is the day she’s decided to bring in the loaves of bread for the entire staff.”

  “Oh, no! She didn’t tell me, and if she gets into that mess outside...”

  “I’d better go wait for her, get her in without being attacked by our visitors.”

  With a huge sigh, even a groan, as if getting to his feet was too much for him, Daad went out again. Lydia thought he looked so bad that maybe she should play the sacrificial lamb and face the media mob herself, hopefully get them to disperse. But if she was answering their questions and Mamm arrived... No, once Mamm saw what was going on here, surely she’d buggy right by.

  Gid knocked, opened the office door, came in and closed it. He leaned against it. “Your mother’s here. Sheriff Freeman is, too, and has made the raving horde get off the property. Now they’re parked up and down the road instead. You’ll be fair game once you’re outside, so you might want to lie down in the back of my buggy and let me cover you up with a lap blanket, take you home a back way. Someone else can bring your buggy around to you later.”

  Lying down, covered up in Gid’s buggy was not something that excited her, but it did seem practical. And he had been kind and controlled lately.

  “I may take you up on that,” she told him. “But they may try to question you, too.”

  He just snorted. “Of course, where it would be idiotic for you to go is to the Yoder barn—ever again. It’s like the biblical handwriting on the wall, Lydia. This is all a warning to you.” He held up his hands as if holding off the protest he knew was coming. “Don’t argue. Let’s go out into the workroom while your mother delivers her gifts. Sol, Susan, you and me. Let’s present a united front in the face of this worldly chaos.”

  She agreed with him again and yet she didn’t like the way he’d put that. It sounded as if they were all co-owners of the store, even family. Gid was slowly but surely trying to corral her, she thought, just the way she herded stray animals in, not with shouts and quick movements but with a steady hand and calm talk.

  Lydia went out with him and headed through the now-quiet showroom toward the large back workshop. She realized that, for once, Gid wasn’t going to wear the plastic oxygen mask he sometimes used in the workroom because he was so sensitive to the smells of shellac and stains. He held the door for her, and she went in to join her parents.

  Unlike Gid, she had always loved the smells of the low-ceilinged, large workroom where Amish craftsmen of different ages sanded, stained, buffed and assembled the furniture, those pieces at least that weren’t finished throughout the valley in what Daad called “the cottage industry part of our shop.” Today the distinctive scent of cinnamon from Mamm’s bread mingled with the smell of sawdust and wood stains. Gid took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, but of course, he wouldn’t want Mamm to know even the smell of her bread could bother him, too.

  The twenty-four men and six sweep-up boys who were being apprenticed had left their tasks and gathered in the middle of the shop. They surely knew what was coming since Mamm was there with her sacks of bread every year. Two weeks’ extra wages in a plain envelope with a thank-you card came later.

  Gid held up his hands for quiet. “It’s not quite Christmas yet, but a good time to kick off the season of giving,” he announced in his strong voice, which did not need a megaphone. “Those of you who are veterans here know that means Susan Brand’s delicious friendship bread. That’s the perfect name for it since
we consider all of you friends as well as fellow workers.”

  Gid was making himself one of the family again, Lydia thought. Daad had always made this speech before, but, with his cold, he’d probably asked Gid to do the talking. She’d just die if Gid, Daad or Mamm actually thought Gid would soon be her betrothed. For sure, she had to tell her parents three things fast, however bad Daad looked, however upset Mamm got. One, she’d stand her ground that she was still not going to get betrothed to Gid. Two, once the reporters left, she was going back to work with Josh and his animals, at least during this busy season of the year. And three, she would have to tell them that Sandra had actually come to the Home Valley the first time because their own daughter had asked for help tracing her birth parents.

  The workers stepped forward in orderly file, each one typically giving way to the others while Mamm, not really smiling but more pleasant looking than Lydia had seen her in a while, handed out the loaves. Gid was the one smiling. And Daad grabbed at his chest, cried out and collapsed onto the concrete floor.

  * * *

  Josh had wiped off the large wooden assembly pieces that made up one of the two construct-on-site mangers he rented out, when he heard a car pull around in front and kill the engine. To his surprise, the front barn door opened. Someone was ignoring the police tape, and he’d have to warn them off. But Sheriff Freeman himself came in, looking as if he was in a hurry.

  “I see the media mavens have decamped to the Brand furniture store,” he said. He closed the barn door behind him.

  “I was hoping they wouldn’t go over there,” Josh said, wiping his hands on the rag. “Is everyone there all right?”

  “Yeah, far as I know. Heard tell they hid Lydia and shooed everyone out, but I didn’t go in, just cleared the media off their property. Her mother drove in with loaves of bread for the staff. Listen, Josh, I’ve got some bad news for you, which I haven’t told anyone in the community yet. The autopsy on Sandra—”

  “I didn’t know they’d have to do that!”

  “Calm down. Standard procedure with something like this. It indicated that a cylindrical object struck the back of her head. With the fall, that probably killed her, but more tests are to come.”

  “The blow to her head could be from when she fell and hit a rung of the ladder.”

  “Maybe. I’m gonna have you saw off a rung and take it with me. That flashlight of yours—it wasn’t on the floor or in the haymow loft where she could have hit her head on it?”

  Josh’s eyes widened. The sheriff must suspect he’d hit her with the flashlight and shoved her out of the loft. He realized he was hesitating too long, but that was his biggest fear, that all this would somehow point to him. And hadn’t Victoria Keller possibly died of a blow to the head, whether it was from her swinging the gate closed...or something else?

  “No, I had the flashlight out in the woodlot—turned off—while I waited to see if that intruder materialized again.”

  “I talked to Amos Baughman about his ride-the-donkey fiasco. The kid wouldn’t make up an intruder just to get you from blaming him, would he?”

  Josh could read between the lines here. Cleverly, carefully, the sheriff was questioning him again, implying that if Amos had concocted an excuse for why he was thrown from the donkey, Josh could have concocted that same intruder to get off being accused of much worse. His stomach clenched. He tried to keep a tight rein on his temper to avoid shouting at the sheriff that he understood how he was tightening the screws. If the Amish trusted worldly lawyers, which they did not, he would have retained one quick.

  “I don’t think he made up the intruder any more than Lydia made up Leo Lowe accosting her,” Josh said as slowly and as calmly as he could manage since his heart was pounding hard enough to shake the rafter beams.

  “As a matter of fact, a visit to Mr. Lowe is on my docket today.”

  “Here, Sheriff, let me saw off a ladder rung for you, or as many as you’d like,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind if I bring down the mother cat and her kittens first, at least until I get another ladder. I’ve been feeding her.”

  “She climb that ladder—the mother cat, I mean?” the sheriff asked as he followed Josh across the barn. The animals were keeping quiet, Josh noticed, almost as if they knew something was wrong or could go very wrong.

  “Ya, far as I know. I didn’t ask the Beiler boys who work here if they gave mama cat a boost up there in the first place.”

  “I’ll have to interview them, too, case they saw anything strange. Too bad your animals can’t talk. Isn’t there some Christmas story where the animals in the manger talk?”

  “Ya, an old European legend, I think. Sandra mentioned it a couple of years ago when she started writing about immigrant practices at Christmas. The legend says the animals speak only on Christmas Eve, and people should not eavesdrop, or they’ll hear that the beasts don’t think much of their human masters—something like that. Another superstition she mentioned was that oxen will kneel each Christmas Eve in their stables in honor of the Christ child, too. I’ve got to admit I’ve seen them kneel, but not just at Christmas.”

  Josh realized he’d been yammering too much about Sandra’s work and to the wrong person. Unbidden tears filled his eyes as he recalled all the talks he and Sandra had enjoyed when they were seeing each other. But had he really ever known her?

  “I ought to get a copy of Sandra’s work and let Ray-Lynn read it,” the sheriff said, leaning closer as if to study each pore on Josh’s face. “You think there’s anything there that would help me know Sandra better, maybe info about someone she interviewed I don’t know—someone she angered?”

  “I couldn’t say,” Josh said, turning away. “You mind if I go up first to bring the cats down? I won’t touch anything else up there.”

  “Sure. Fine. Everything up there’s being tested for evidence by the BCI techs in their lab, or will be soon, so your leaving DNA now won’t change a thing about what they find.”

  Again, Josh’s insides twisted. How had all this happened? He blamed himself, but no way should he blurt that out.

  Since the sheriff only wanted one rung, he changed his mind about going up. He went over by his office to get a saw when he heard the sheriff’s phone beep. He spoke hurriedly to someone, nodding, frowning. More trouble with the media? Josh wondered.

  “Saw me a rung off quick,” the sheriff ordered. “That lower one. Sol Brand collapsed over at the furniture store, and they used the business phone to call for help. Probable heart attack. I’m going to lead the EMR to Wooster Community Hospital. His wife and Lydia are with him.”

  Though his hands were shaking, Josh cut off the lowest ladder rung as fast as he could and handed it to the sheriff as if he were brandishing a club. “Tell Lydia I’m very sorry, and I’ll be praying,” Josh said as they both sprinted toward the front door.

  “Will do.” Sheriff Freeman ducked under the tape outside and tore toward his cruiser.

  It was only then that Josh realized that “tell Lydia I’m sorry, and I’ll be praying,” could have sounded like a confession of sorts, about Sandra’s loss and not the rush to save Lydia’s father.

  * * *

  “I’ll take care of things here,” Gid told them as Lydia wedged in next to Mamm on a hard bench along the side of the big, square, red EMR vehicle parked behind the furniture store. The driver slammed the door shut on the concerned faces of Gid and several staff, then got in the cab. They pulled quickly away. Lydia knew both local volunteer medics, one driving, one tending the IV drips in her father’s arms. Daad looked absolutely gray-skinned around the edge of the oxygen mask. In truth, he looked dead, but the heart monitor said he was still alive.

  Mamm gripped her hands, her own hands, rather than reaching for Lydia’s. “Too much strain,” Mamm whispered. “All this you got yourself into...”

  In other words, Lydia thought as she tried to steady herself and fight breaking down, Mamm believed this was her fault. Suddenly, telling either of her ad
optive parents that she was searching for her birth parents seemed the height of stupidity and impossibility.

  As they started out through town and sped past their house, the sheriff’s car appeared from somewhere ahead of them, lights flashing, siren wailing to lead the way. She glimpsed Josh standing outside his barn. As they rushed past it looked as if the bright yellow police tape strung there had caught him in some strange spider’s web.

  Just like when Lydia was in Sandra’s little red sports car, the houses and fields blurred by. Daad had to live. He just had to! Why hadn’t they insisted he rest more, lie down, leave more store business to Gid at this busy time?

  But that thought terrified her, too: What if Daad didn’t make it? She would have to work more closely with Gid. The pressure from Mamm and the expectation from others would be overwhelming for her and Gid to become partners in more ways than one.

  Suddenly, she recalled a saying—a superstition, her mother had called it. Years ago Connor had told Lydia that deaths came in threes and, back then in the community, they had. Now Victoria Keller was dead, Sandra was number two, but Daad—that was different, wasn’t it?

  When they turned onto Route 30 East toward Wooster, the same way she and Sandra had driven there, the EMR turned on its siren, too. Though somewhat muted by the vehicle’s interior, the siren’s sharp shrieks and Mamm’s awful sobbing stabbed deep inside Lydia. She reached out to Daad’s booted, bouncing foot and held on tight. If she lost him, she would be so alone, even in her own home.

  16

  That evening, Lydia and Mamm sat slumped in the surgery waiting room at the hospital. Their shoulders touched—at least something did. Mamm either kept her eyes closed or stared off into space. She had not drunk the tea Lydia had brought her from the cafeteria. How Lydia wished Mamm would say something, but, on the other hand, it might be more accusations.

  Lydia guessed it was pretty much after hours for scheduled surgeries, because they were alone, like two strangers who hardly spoke.