Upon A Winter's Night Read online

  “Will you tell Josh for me that the Community Church would like to rent a manger scene? One camel, one donkey and a couple of sheep for Wednesday, December 12, in the evening, like six to nine? We intend to really kick off the Christmas season for the area.”

  “Sure, I’ll tell him. That early and the middle of the week, it will probably be fine. I’ll bring you a list of the prices next time I see you. Ray-Lynn, danki and thanks, both!”

  As Lydia started to get out of the car, Ray-Lynn grabbed her arm. “If you need to talk to someone who cares, you come see me.”

  “I will,” she promised. As she got out of the van, she glimpsed the pale green plastic sandwich box with the note in it sticking out from under the seat. She hated to give the note up but she was getting much in return. The sheriff, maybe thanks to Ray-Lynn, wasn’t angry with her. He had given her the names of Anna Gingerich, who lived about twenty miles away, and Sarah Miller, who lived up near Cleveland. So there was a place to start, a trail to follow, people to question. Now, if only Sandra Myerson could help her out without trying to get Josh back—because, of course, she must have been in love with him.

  With a wave at Ray-Lynn, Lydia hurried into and through the barn, greeting animals by name, petting her favorites among the donkeys who pushed against their bars to get their ears scratched and a dried apple to eat from the bin. “Melly, Balty, all of you are expected to be on your best behavior today,” she told the six camels as they swung their curved, shaggy necks over the railings to greet her with fluttery, fat-lipped air kisses.

  “Hugs and kissy face!” she told her avid furry listeners. “What do we care about all that in the big, bad world, right?”

  Since she had left the donkeys with only one apple apiece, they brayed in protest, and the sheep murmured their baa-baas.

  Lydia wrote Ray-Lynn’s requests on a piece of paper on Josh’s barn desk—long oak boards on barrels—then turned toward the camels just as the back door opened and Josh stood there. Hatless, his hair blew free in the wind. Vital and strong, with the crisp blue, winter sky behind him highlighting the color of his eyes, he seemed to fill and warm the large door frame.

  “Lydia, glad you’re here. As you may have seen, Sandra’s here from Columbus, wants to stay a day or two—that is, at the Plain and Fancy B and B in town. She’d rather not come out to the animal barn, but can you come in the house? She’s pretty excited to meet you and exchange some genealogical help for info on Amish Christmas, if you’re still willing.”

  Oh, ya, Lydia thought, she was still willing, despite the fact Josh’s face looked much more flushed than the winter wind usually made it.

  * * *

  Up close, Sandra Myerson was very pretty with auburn, arched eyebrows and full lips that smiled easily to display snow-white teeth. Her expressions came quickly and were full of emotion and life. She shook Lydia’s hand, then pressed it between both of hers. Her brown eyes were alert and sharp and warmed when she looked at Josh. Lydia tried not to take that all in and instead managed glances at Josh’s living room.

  She hadn’t been in his house since he’d bought his brothers out. She figured the place must tell a lot about him. A spacious, two-story white farmhouse with high ceilings, it was well-lighted from the tall windows. Maybe a bit sparse on furniture but what he had was well arranged. On the table next to the comfy-looking dark blue sofa was a stack of zoo and animal magazines, and the calendar on the wall had a picture of zebra in the snow for the month of November.

  “Josh had his friend Hank fill me in on the phone about you, Lydia, but I’d love to hear your take on everything,” Sandra said. “I’d be happy to help you try to trace your biological roots and take in trade anything you can tell me about an Amish Christmas here in Eden County. Not that Josh and I didn’t have some go-arounds about that, but women see things a lot differently from men.”

  Sandra gave Josh a playful punch in his midriff, which Lydia figured was a lot more intimate than a punch to his arm. Oh, well. She had to work with and get along with this woman. And if these two still meant something to each other, Lydia had to accept that, at least for now.

  “I don’t even have names to start tracing,” she admitted as Josh sat in his chair and the two women took the sofa, facing each other. “But there has to be a newspaper record of my parents’ deaths, because car-buggy accidents are always written up. I do know the week they died because I was ten days old. It was the second week of February 1992.”

  “You mean you weren’t even told your parents’ names?”

  “It was— I just sensed it was difficult to ask. As if I would be disloyal if I did. Actually, I did ask once and Mamm said that she and Daad were my real parents now, so I got that message loud and clear. I didn’t want to upset her more and wanted Daad to know I loved and trusted him—which I do,” she added hastily.

  Sandra raised an eyebrow at Josh. “Well, more of a mystery, then, though I’ve seen other situations where key information had been lost or even lied about. I can check the database archive from the Cleveland Plain Dealer online if it goes back that far, but is there a more local paper?”

  Josh put in, “Homestead has a weekly paper but it’s only about nine years old. We’d need to go into Wooster in the next county to check on articles from the Daily Record.”

  We’d need to go? Lydia thought. Was Josh going to help Sandra? But this was his busiest time for the Christmas animals. Or did he automatically think of himself and Sandra as a team?

  “Is there any way you could go to Wooster with me now?” Sandra asked Lydia. “I saw a mileage sign a ways back that I think said thirtysomething. I can call ahead to check on the paper’s closing time.”

  Lydia’s head was spinning. Go in that little red car right now when her parents would think she was working over here?

  “I came to work with Josh’s animals so—”

  “I can take care of them,” he said. “I know how much this means to you and how much you’ve meant to the animals and me.”

  Lydia’s gaze met and locked with his for a moment, but it seemed a long time. Sandra cleared her throat. “Let’s do it,” Lydia heard herself say. “I can’t thank both of you enough for your help.”

  “Besides, we need to get to know each other better, since we’re going to work together,” Sandra said, bobbing up from the sofa. “Who knows? Maybe their archives are online.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” Josh said.

  She got a flat, little thing out of her purse, flipped it open and started stroking the small screen. “I’ll just check the closing time of the Wooster Daily Record offices or else get their number and call them. And thirty-some miles means you can talk about your genealogy project en route and about an Amish Christmas coming back.”

  “You’ll be surprised how complicated my problem is compared to how simple our Christmas is—both of them,” Lydia told her as she and Josh stood, too. She wished she’d dressed better than her barn clothes but that wouldn’t stop her from going to Wooster. She was too eager to get started on finding out who she really was—and who this Sandra really was, especially what she meant to Josh.

  * * *

  By the time they pulled up in front of the Daily Record newspaper office in Wooster, the county seat for the next county, Lydia had talked a lot but learned a lot. One thing, though she hated to admit it, was that she liked Sandra Myerson. She seemed honest and straightforward, as Josh had said, a go-getter who knew what she wanted from life, and Lydia couldn’t help but admire that. Sadly, the woman did not like animals except cats, but surely there were worse flaws in human beings. At least, Lydia thought, that probably meant Sandra and Josh were not meant for each other, except for the fact Sandra had carried on about what a great, genuine guy he was.

  Dusk was descending as they hurried into the Daily Record office and told the curly haired woman at the reception counter what they hoped to find. She didn’t blink an eye that the two of them looked so different, but Wayne County had plenty of Amish
, too.

  “Okay,” the receptionist said when she’d heard their inquiry, “a double death, car hits buggy. That or a court case means a clip should have been kept, though only events from the last ten years are stored in our computer system. From the time period you want, our clips are not in a database but should be in an envelope filed in the morgue.”

  “The morgue?” Lydia said.

  “Just our slang. We don’t have a librarian anymore, but some of our veteran editors know how to find stuff in the morgue—it’s kind of like a library. Let me see if someone can help you, but several have gone home already.”

  They waited about five minutes until a plump, sixty-something woman named Monica Jordan came out to help them. They wrote out their information for her and sat down to wait again.

  “I’ve done research in the States and Europe,” Sandra told her in a quiet voice. “It’s sometimes just like this—fill out forms and wait, but then—voilà!—some hidden gem falls right in your lap.

  “So what’s this about two Amish Christmases?” she asked. “Josh only told me about one, December 25, a family day, keep-it-simple, sometimes homemade gifts, a traditional meal. It sounds like the rest of us except for the lack of razzle-dazzle and ooh-la-la, no over-the-top decorations and Santa stuff we moderns enjoy.”

  “For sure no Santa stuff.”

  “But how about decorated trees? I passed a Christmas tree farm near Josh’s.”

  “That’s the Stark tree farm on the outskirts of Homestead, but the Amish don’t buy those. The moderns do, though, and the farm ships truckloads of trees to local cities to be sold on rented lots. That’s Ohio Senator Bess Stark’s family business, though she’s almost never here, and her son oversees it.”

  “Boy, that’s a good one. Snarky Stark’s family sells Christmas trees.”

  Lydia didn’t know what snarky meant but she didn’t want to ask. Sandra used all kinds of strange words like voilà.

  “So, go on about Christmas,” Sandra prompted.

  “The truth is that many Amish want to ignore the December 25 celebration, since the world has commercialized it so much. We struggle to ignore outside temptation and keep the day focused on our faith. But as for the second so-called Amish Christmas, we just call it Old Christmas because it went with the historical religious calendar from centuries ago. We close our stores on that day, too. It’s January 6, called Epiphany, the traditional day of the arrival of the wise men from the East—probably the first non-Jews to see the baby Jesus, and that shows anyone can approach Him.”

  “So you celebrate January 6, too, while the rest of America does not? I don’t think that’s very well-known. Great, I can use that in my dissertation on immigrant holidays. The modern-day Amish are against commercialized Christmas, so they cling to another day when the wise men brought their gifts to the manger.”

  “But it’s a simple day, too, sometimes spent with extended family. You know, that’s one of the things I might have missed, being adopted. I have a few cousins on my father’s side, but they don’t live within buggy distance, so I see them mostly at weddings and funerals. Mother’s family is from Pennsylvania, so the same there. But maybe if I learn who my biological parents were, there will be new cousins, even some in buggy range.”

  Sandra leaned closer and put her hand on Lydia’s arm. “Don’t dream too big. They might not even find the old article of the accident. Then, if you still don’t want to involve your adoptive parents, we’d have to start asking around on the sly.”

  But her voice trailed off as Monica Jordan came back out to the front desk with a manila folder in her hand. “Ladies,” she said, “I think I’ve found what you’re looking for.”

  They rose. Lydia’s heartbeat kicked up. They approached the counter where Ms. Jordan spread open the folder, filled with old newspaper articles that looked more black-and-yellow than black-and-white. And on top lay one with a photo of a crumpled buggy in a ditch and a dead horse.

  Lydia sucked in a sob. Any hurt or killed animal got to her, even when the local men went hunting. But this—her parents’ death scene...

  “Could we look at this over there?” Sandra asked the woman. “We’ll be very careful with it.”

  Evidently noting Lydia’s distress, Monica said, “It’s almost closing time, but I can photocopy it for you.”

  Lydia carried the warm copy of the article outside into the thickening dark. She cradled it to her cape; it seemed to burn her hand. When they got back in Sandra’s car, the overhead light popped on. Lydia was suddenly afraid to look at the picture again, though it didn’t show dead bodies. Sandra turned on the ignition and the heater, but it blew out cold air at first.

  “Can you read it out loud or should I?” Sandra asked.

  “I can. I want to—have wanted to for a long time,” Lydia whispered. Then, despite feeling chilled from within, she read aloud, “‘Young Amish Couple Die in Buggy Accident. Driver Cited.’”

  Lydia frowned. “Driver cited?” she muttered as Sandra leaned closer to look at the photo. The article was trembling in Lydia’s hand.

  “That means the driver of the car. Go on, and I’ll make notes,” she said, fumbling in her big purse for a pad and pen.

  Her voice shaking, Lydia went on.

  “A young Amish couple from the Charm, Ohio area, David Brand, age 24, and Lena Hostetler Brand, age 23...”

  Her voice caught. David and Lena, David and Lena... Their names were David and Lena... And her mother’s people were Hostetlers. She knew of some in this area, though not in the Homestead Amish church.

  She cleared her throat, blinked back tears and continued.

  “...were pronounced dead at the scene after a vehicle carrying four tourists from Parma, Ohio, struck their buggy at approximately 9:00 p.m. on Wednesday.

  Clinton MacKenney, the Holmes County sheriff at the scene, theorized that skid marks indicate the vehicle, a station wagon, careened over the hill behind the buggy at a speed of at least fifty miles per hour, could not stop in time and hit the buggy from the rear. Marvin Lowe, 65, was cited for driving over the speed limit with reckless abandon. Further charges of double manslaughter may be forthcoming.

  Lowe made no statement but said he will soon have a lawyer. His vehicle sustained minor damage...

  “Minor damage,” Lydia whispered, blinking back tears. “It isn’t fair. So perhaps there was a trial.”

  “But this gives us all we need to know to start searching.”

  “And there’s no way my mother could still be alive,” Lydia admitted with a sigh. She’d told Sandra about the note. “Talk about getting my hopes up...”

  Sandra shook her head. “So sad. A tragedy that could have been avoided. Do you want me to read the rest of it?”

  “Okay but I’m fine. Well, not really, but I want to find out no matter what.”

  Sandra took up where she’d left off.

  “Since it was nearly four hours after dark, the Brand buggy had two lanterns on the back, both surprisingly found still lighted in the ditch when medics and the sheriff arrived. The horse was also killed. The couple had wed barely a year ago and leave one infant daughter who is staying with relatives. David Brand was a tree cutter with a company in Amity.”

  “A tree cutter,” Lydia repeated. “I wish it said if they left behind other family—siblings, cousins.”

  “I can search for their obits later, and those might tell.”

  “Maybe. The Amish come from far and wide for funerals. More likely their obituaries appeared in The Budget, the national Amish newspaper. But I’m sure no one keeps clippings from that in folders or databases.”

  “I forget I’m dealing with an enclave culture here.”

  Another word Lydia didn’t know but she got the idea.

  “I just wonder,” Sandra said as she turned off the light on the car’s ceiling and backed out, “if the relatives you were staying with the night of the accident or thereafter are your adoptive parents or if there were others who took
care of you at first. What’s the relationship between your adoptive father and your biological father?”

  “I’m not sure. A cousin, not first cousin. Ach, our people value family, even extended family, and many know their roots way back to the few Amish families who migrated from Europe to escape persecution there. And here, I know next to nothing,” she added, blinking back tears again.

  “But you know a lot more than a few minutes ago, and it gives me information to start digging. It’s obvious your real mother died in this accident,” she said, “but Victoria’s note gives us such an interesting twist we might still want to check it out.”

  “Yes, I still do,” Lydia told her, stroking the old photo of the scene of the double murder—that’s what it was, murder! Nothing to do about that this late, of course, except try to forgive. But unlike what her daad and mamm wanted, after today, she could never forget. Like she’d heard Josh say once when he was talking about his time in the world, A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

  7

  “Lydia, it’s so raw outside, and I’m afraid I’m getting a cold,” Mamm told her late Tuesday afternoon, the day after Lydia and Sandra had been to Wooster. She did, Lydia thought, sound nasal and had been blowing her nose, though sometimes she thought Mamm had private crying bouts and sounded like that, anyway.

  “I know you’re heading for the animal barn,” Mamm said, “but could you take these four loaves of bread outside to Mattie Esh for the Stark funeral?”

  Although Lydia had overheard that some local Amish women referred to her mother as “Sad Susan,” Mamm was also known in the community for her generous gifts of what most outsiders called Amish friendship bread. She gave loaves of it away for Christmas gifts and anytime the church had a special event. Even the local Englische knew to look for it in her plain brown wrappers at Amish benefits and yard sales.