Upon A Winter's Night Page 17

  Josh came closer and put a foot on the lowest stall rail. “Your father likes to quilt?”

  “The family secret, one of them, I guess. He’s good at it, does beautiful work.”

  “I won’t tell anyone I know—especially him. I’m hoping he will honor me with his friendship and counsel someday. As for your mother, at least I got a loaf of friendship bread from her. It was delicious, though I had the feeling she came over partly to keep an eye on us.”

  They left the barn and went out into the wind again. She didn’t want to worry Josh by repeating what Hank had said about seeing Gid circling her house when he drove by. Gid was probably just being helpful again, making sure none of the shutters were damaged, that everything looked all right outside.

  “Here, let me,” Josh said, and took the key from her trembling, gloved hand to unlock the back door of her house. Inside, he lit both kerosene kitchen lanterns so that warm light bathed the room. They stood awkwardly across the corner of the kitchen table from each other.

  “I’d like to kiss you good-night,” he said, twisting his hat in his hands. “But I don’t know if I’d want to leave then, and I hear Melly and Gaspar calling.” Despite his little joke, he looked painfully serious. “I’d better get going. You sure you’ll be all right? You’ve never been alone here at night, have you?”

  “No, but this is home—for now. I can’t thank you enough for delivering me safe and sound.”

  “With all this media attention about Sandra, it’s best that no one sees my buggy here tonight. I’d better get going,” he said again.

  “I think the media folk have cleared out, though.”

  “I’m praying they won’t be back. And that the blow to Sandra’s head fits the loft ladder rung I cut off for the sheriff.”

  “You did? If it fits, then she hit her head falling, because no one could lift that ladder to hit her. Oh, but—” she felt her stomach go into free fall “—someone could still have pushed her out of the loft.” And, she recalled, Josh’s flashlight had been there, but—

  “Lydia, I swear to you, if someone hit her, it wasn’t me.”

  “As I said, I believe you, or you wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have come to you tonight—kissed you back.”

  They almost swayed together, but he picked up his lantern, went to the door and put his hand to the knob.

  She called after him, “Josh, an Amish man’s word is his bond. You don’t have to swear you’re telling the truth—about Sandra, about me.” About love, she almost added.

  “And a good Amish woman trusts her man. Now lock this door behind me.” He went out and firmly closed the door.

  She locked it and watched through the kitchen window as he drove away into the windy darkness. Suddenly, she realized she was hungry and took cheese and milk from the fridge. Things looked a little rearranged in there since she’d fixed breakfast this morning, but Mamm had probably been making more bread. She must have been distracted, though. She’d put a jar of honey in the fridge where it would crystallize, so Lydia took it out and put it back in its place in the cupboard. Mamm had obviously used a lot of it, and it wasn’t for her bread recipe. The outside of the jar was sticky, so she must have really been in a rush. Things were usually immaculate in Mamm’s kitchen.

  Lydia got some crackers and ate them with cheese washed down by a glass of milk that tasted much colder than usual. The house seemed so chilly and silent—“Silent Night,” but somehow, not “Holy Night.” She hoped both of those were included in the carols Ray-Lynn’s friends would sing at their outdoor manger scene. She liked most of the worldly Christmas carols.

  “It came upon a midnight clear,” she sang, but the house seemed to swallow her words. Besides, singing right now didn’t cheer her up. It was near midnight but cloudy, not clear outside, as if another storm was hovering. The thought of Daad so ill hung heavy on her, especially in the wake of Sandra’s death and Victoria Keller’s. At least Josh’s almost-profession of love, her growing friendship with Ray-Lynn and renewed one with Bess Stark lifted her spirits a bit. But then there was the eternal tension with Mamm...

  She shook her head as if that could clear it. She had to gather a change of clothes for her parents and above all find Daad’s blood pressure medicine. It was in the medicine cabinet, Mamm had said. Taking one of the two kitchen lanterns, she went up the stairs. They creaked, which she hadn’t noticed before. The house was cold to the bone, and it was windy. The gentle hiss of the lantern was drowned by other sounds.

  And it seemed so dark up here when one lantern had often lit her way. Shadows loomed from the open, silent mouths of the doors. Even the thought of a bath and her own bed didn’t comfort her.

  She went into her parents’ bedroom and put the lantern down on the cherry dresser so she could see into their drawers. Yes, a change of undergarments for both, easily spotted, and another shirt for Daad. She took the pile of clothing to pack and, carrying the lantern, went into the bathroom to get the medicine.

  She hesitated at the door. The dark green bathroom curtain was pulled shut when Mamm liked it open to air out the tub and the tiles. There were no mirrors to reflect the light like in Englische bathrooms she’d seen, and her own huge shadow seemed to leap at her.

  Though she knew it was a crazy idea, she yanked the curtain open. An empty tub, of course, but water speckled the tiles and—yes, the bottom of the tub. Daad took a shower at night, and she and Mamm had baths then. No one would have used the tub since last night so the water would not have stayed here like this.

  Her pulse started to pound. The house had been closed up. And with the shower curtain closed, the water hadn’t dried up, that’s all. She was letting everything get to her. The medicine—just get Daad’s medicine where Mamm said it would be.

  She opened the pinewood cabinet. As usual, it was immaculate with perfect placements of over-the-counter remedies for headaches, bug bites, bruises and—sleeping pills, no doubt Mamm’s! When had she started taking sleeping pills? But she didn’t find Daad’s prescription bottle. Had she missed his medicine beside his bed? No, if Mamm said it was here, surely it was.

  From the cabinet, Lydia took Daad’s hand razor. No Amish beards were cut or trimmed, but the men shaved above their mouths to keep a mustache at bay. That was a tradition from the terrible days when European soldiers who sported mustaches hunted down the Amish and dragged them off to torture and death. Lydia pictured one dreadful drawing in the Amish book called Martyrs’ Mirror and shuddered again.

  She also gathered their toothbrushes and toothpaste, a brush and comb. She’d already taken some money for Mamm from her top dresser drawer.

  Frustrated, wanting to get to sleep—maybe on the sofa downstairs because she didn’t like the idea of being up here alone tonight—she hurried down to the kitchen.

  No medicine bottle there. Maybe the surgeon would have to phone Daad’s doctor, but what if he had not been taking his pills? Maybe he had lost them or thrown them away. That would need to be reported, too. As stubborn as he was, perhaps he’d brought about his own heart attack. He’d looked especially bad these past few weeks. After those first two medicines gave him bad side effects, what if he’d gone off the latest one on his own?

  Once she’d checked the dining room table and the end table by his favorite chair, Lydia decided to look the only other place she could think of—the side parlor, his quilting room. She’d been in there before but not for several years. She’d had the feeling he would still welcome her there, but he didn’t want Mamm coming in, and he could hardly bar just one of them.

  It was locked, but she knew where he kept the key, under the back foot of the table near the sofa. She put down the pile of clothing and tried the door.

  Feeling like a naughty child about to be caught at something, Lydia unlocked the door, lifted her lantern and went in. Bolts of cloth were neatly stacked on the shelves of walnut cabinets once used for books. Several evidently completed quilts were piled in the rocking chair near the door.<
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  A large frame stretching a nearly completed quilt—a Christmas gift for her or Mamm?—claimed the center of the high-ceilinged room. Two straight-backed chairs faced the quilt as if a specter quilter joined him in his solitary abode. No doubt he just didn’t want to move a chair when he changed positions. An unlit, suspended double lantern hung over the quilt frame, but now her lantern cast the only light. Things seemed to shift in shadows as if an unseen hand were quilting, moving the material.

  She got hold of herself, whispering a little prayer of thanks that Daad would be coming back to finish this beautiful quilt, dominated by Christmas colors, white-and-gold squares on a dark green background. The Amish avoided red, the color of martyrs’ blood.

  The quilt was upside down from her position, but she could see it did have a Christmas theme with an angel in every fourth square. It also featured repeated sheep and donkeys—even camels! Could it be intended as a gift for her? Was he honoring her work with Josh’s animals or was he simply using manger symbols?

  As she started to walk around the quilt to see it right side up, she caught sight of a pill bottle on a lower shelf, nearly hidden by scissors and spools of thread. That had to be the blood pressure medicine. It better be because her heart was pounding so hard she probably needed it herself.

  She picked up the bottle and turned the label close to the lantern. Ya! His Hytrin medicine. Mamm just hadn’t known he’d moved it here. And beside it, or rather behind it, another bottle of pills. She squinted in the dim light to read Paxil, whatever that was. Oh, around the back of the label it read, “for depression.”

  Daad was taking medication for depression? Sure, her people used modern medicines and saw worldly doctors when they needed to. The bishops had permitted that for years. But Mamm couldn’t know this, could she? Besides, it seemed to Lydia that Mamm was the one depressed, not Daad. He’d only seemed tired to Lydia. Of course, she’d have to tell the surgeon this. Was Daad unhappy with his life? With his tense marriage? Could he have been upset that she didn’t like Gid, who could run the store for him someday?

  Holding both medicine bottles in her left hand, Lydia lifted the lantern higher to examine the quilt from the bottom up. How lovely the angels were. They looked just like the one in the precious snow globe she had broken and must get fixed. On the main border of the quilt draped over the frame, the star of Bethlehem was sewn around the edges in a repeating pattern, and, just above that, an inner border was stitched with the scripted German words Vergeben Sie Vater—Father Forgive, the Lord’s words from the cross.

  Or, since those two words were duplicated over and over with no punctuation between them, did it say, “Forgive Father”? No, it must be the Bible quote, but it puzzled her. That was an Easter, not a Christmas quote. Another mystery like Victoria Keller’s half-written note to the girl Brand baby. And if this quilt was meant as a Christmas gift for Lydia, what was the message? At least, if it was to be hers, she could ask Daad when and if he gave it to her. It wouldn’t be a strange message as if from the grave, as Victoria’s had been.

  With a final glance at the quilt she knew she must keep a secret, unless Daad figured out where she found his meds, she tiptoed out, relocked the door and replaced the key. Though she didn’t usually think this way, she wished she could phone Josh just to hear his voice. Or Ray-Lynn. Sometimes she wished her people had phones that were in the house, not way down a dark, cold road in a common booth. Even another voice from a radio or TV would help right now. Not that she was disloyal to her people or usually felt that way. But tonight, at this moment, she felt so alone.

  She decided she would sleep downstairs but she’d need to wash up and get her nightgown and a fresh dress for tomorrow from her bedroom. The dress she had on looked as if she’d slept in it, and she longed to take her hair down and brush it.

  First, she went into the pantry to get two of Mamm’s bread sacks to put her parents’ clothing in. She noted that several were pulled off the shelf and lay on the floor. Any sort of disorder was unlike her overly tidy mother, but then she’d probably been in a rush to get all that bread ready to take to the furniture store staff today. Or the sacks had slid out, and she hadn’t seen them. Lydia put the bags back in place, then labeled the two she needed Daad and Mamm and slid their personal items inside. Taking her lantern again, she hurried upstairs. As tense and nervous as she’d been today, exhaustion was starting to take a toll on her.

  She stripped off her clothes in the bathroom and washed quickly with soap and warm water. Trembling from the cold, with a towel wrapped around her nakedness and the lantern in her hand, she tiptoed—now, why tiptoe?—to her bedroom and went directly to her closet. Putting the lantern on her tall dresser, she slipped on a warm flannel nightgown and robe and jammed her feet in her woolen slippers.

  She should take her clothes for tomorrow downstairs, too— No, she’d come up tomorrow to wash up better. She’d just take her pillow and a blanket. She could use one of Daad’s quilts from the living room, too, and pretend she was wrapped in the Christmas quilt.

  But as she turned to her bed, she gasped. She’d made it this morning, all smooth and straight, but now the sheets were yanked awry, pillow punched and indented. She moved a step closer. It looked as if someone had slept in it, twisting and turning, writhing! And strings of sticky honey were dribbled on the pillow, all around!

  She gasped, and the walls seemed to echo the sound. The house creaked as if its very bones were breaking. She recalled that little fairy tale she’d read from the library bookmobile years ago, before Mamm found out and took it away from her as being “worldly nonsense.”

  “Who has been sleeping in my bed?” said Mama Bear, Daddy Bear and Baby Bear.

  Lydia staggered back against the wall, barely breathing, trying to sift out sounds. No footsteps, no one else in the room, but some evil presence had been here and still lurked. Had Daad given Gid a key? He’d been walking around the house. No, he wanted to gain favor with the Brands. He’d never do something like this—sacks on the floor, water in the tub, honey in the refrigerator and in her bed, and who knows what else she’d missed?

  Reminding herself to breathe, she approached her bed and ripped the upper covers back, terrified she’d see something dreadful there, a threatening note at least. Nothing, but the sheets were damp as if the invader had taken a shower, then come straight here to roll in the honey, punch her pillow and violate her bed.

  18

  Crying and shaking so hard her lantern quivered, Lydia searched room after room in the house. All she wanted to do was run outside, but she was afraid to go in the barn alone or race through the woodlot to Josh. Besides, perhaps the person who had done this wanted her to be outside alone, like that night Leo Lowe accosted her. If she could only hitch Flower to her buggy or run to Josh, spend the night there—but what if this was a setup to force her to do that, catch them together late at night?

  Because she couldn’t bear to search the attic or basement, she locked both doors and wedged ladder-back chair under their knobs. Yet surely no one was hiding upstairs or down there. She would hear them, sense them, wouldn’t she? At least Ray-Lynn would be here early tomorrow. Emotionally and physically exhausted, Lydia decided she’d get dressed again and sit on the sofa downstairs, keep the curtains closed and lots of lanterns lit. And with Mamm’s heaviest wooden rolling pin in her hands.

  But sometime in the night, amid the shrieks of wind and creaking house, she dreamed her own voice was shrieking. She was gripping a rung of a ladder or the smooth wooden limb of a tall tree, climbing amid thick leaves and straw, searching for Sandra. Was she still in the loft? Sandra had to tell her what upsetting thing she had found out about her mother—and which mother? But as she climbed the tree, people snatched at her skirts, Leo Lowe, Gid, even Connor, who was trying to spray the tree. Mamm! Mamm was below, too, scolding her to come down. Where was Josh? She needed Josh!

  Lydia woke to the sound of someone cutting the tree down with a hatchet, rap, rap, r
ap—and then realized someone was knocking on the back door. She forced her eyes open and jerked awake.

  * * *

  “Connor,” Ray-Lynn called as she got out of her car in the Brands’ driveway, “what are you doing here so early? I thought Jack told you Sol Brand had a heart attack and is in the hospital in Wooster.”

  As she had driven down the lane, she’d watched Connor walk from the line of spruce trees that edged his property, across the driveway and up to the back porch, where he had knocked on the door. He looked startled to see her. “Oh, yeah, he did. My mother went back to Columbus overnight. I called her to tell her, and she said to check on Lydia.”

  “So you know her mother’s staying in Wooster, too? I’m here to drive Lydia to the hospital, then back,” she said as she walked up to join him on the small back porch. Like a young kid caught doing something wrong, he jammed his hands in his jeans pockets.

  “Oh, so she’ll be here tonight, too? I’ll tell Mother.”

  He seemed frazzled, as if he’d been up all night just as Jack had. Surely, the duties of mayor weren’t weighing Connor down, but maybe selling Christmas trees was demanding, even though he had a large staff.

  Still looking nervous, he started down the steps. “Mother told me to see if Lydia needed any help, and she’d be back tonight—my mother, from Columbus, where she had some business.”

  “Got it. Lydia may be sleeping in. It’s been quite a time for her. I’ll give her your message.”

  The back door opened, and Lydia stood there. Dark half-moons shadowed the underside of her eyes, and her clothes were mussed. Her hair looked as if she’d combed it with her fingers beneath her lopsided prayer kapp.

  “Oh, Ray-Lynn,” Lydia said. Then she added, “Connor! Is everything all right?”