Accidentally Amish (40 page)

“He’s only been home a week.” Ruth’s hands were busy in the sink. “I tried to tell
Mamm
and
Daed
that they should let someone else take their turn to have church. But Rufus is determined to attend the service.”

“Then I guess it’s better it’s here. All he has to do is come downstairs.”

Ruth shook water off her hands and reached for a dish towel. “Thank you for bringing me home again.”

“Your
mamm
seems glad to have your help caring for Rufus.”

“He won’t stay down much longer. He’s threatening to go out to his workshop on Monday. The men who work for him have already been asking.”

Annie carried Rufus’s dishes to the sink and began to wash them. “What about you, Ruth? Are you going to church tomorrow?”

Before Ruth could answer, Eli Beiler entered the kitchen.

“The benches are almost set. Perhaps we could offer the men a cold drink.”

“Of course,
Daed.
” Ruth opened a cupboard and began taking down glasses.

Annie helped Ruth fill them with cold water and put them on the tray to carry into the wide rooms cleared of the family’s furniture and filled with wooden benches. In her very
English
jeans and T-shirt, Annie stayed in the kitchen and let Ruth serve the men. But the door was open, and with fingers playing with the gold chain at her neck, she watched the way several men gathered to speak in hushed tones. The words that wafted toward her were Pennsylvania Dutch. As Ruth approached them, they straightened up and put on smiles. Even in another language, Annie recognized someone changing the subject of conversation.

“What were they talking about?” she wanted to know as soon as Ruth returned to the kitchen.

Ruth set down the empty tray. “I didn’t hear everything, but I think it’s about Rufus’s medical expenses. Mrs. Troyer is having cancer treatments, so the fund is stretched.”

“What does that mean?”

Ruth lifted one shoulder and let it drop. “They may ask families to contribute more.”

“I hope everything works out.” Annie tossed a dish towel on the counter. “I’d better go. I have an errand to run, and there’s a lot to do at my house.”

“Are you coming in the morning?” Ruth asked. “Please?”

“I’ll be here.”

Annie picked up her denim bag and went out the back door. She strode around the house to her car. With a little luck, she could get to the hospital before it closed. And with a little more luck, the business office would be open on Saturday.

Ruth sat in the back with Annie on Sunday morning. Both wore solid-colored, long skirts and high-necked blouses with no buttons, but still they stood out among the river of blues and purples and blacks. Ruth glanced at Annie to make sure she had remembered to tuck her chain under her blouse.

Worshipers stared not only at Annie, the visitor. Ruth felt the stares of families she had not seen in eighteen months, the last time she gathered with them for worship. For the most part, she avoided their eyes. This was not the time to explain to anyone why she left.

When the opening hymn began, Ruth’s throat thickened too much to sing. How long it had been since she heard the timbre of unaccompanied voices slowly pondering the beauty of the High German words of worship.
Kommt her zu mir, spricht Gottes Sohn.
“Come to me,” says God’s Son, “all you who are burdened.” Ruth let the hymn flow richly around her, adding her voice when she could gather enough air to sing a few words. The first stanza faded, and the second began. Ruth closed her eyes, wanting to believe the words that rose from the rows of benches. “I will help each person to carry what is difficult; with my health and strength He will win the kingdom of heaven.”

Ruth held the hymnal open for Annie, who did her best to keep up with the German words printed in elaborate script without knowing the tune. Most hymns had ten stanzas or more. Hymn followed hymn for an hour’s time. In between, the men whispered, “You sing,” as they encouraged each other to begin a new song. In the custom that swarmed Ruth with familiarity, men humbly deferred to each other until someone at last intoned a long note. Ruth knew most of the hymns by heart, and as she sang them, she tried to forget she had been gone these long months.

But she had been gone. And she would be gone again. Ahead of her, sitting with the unmarried men and next to Rufus, Ruth saw Elijah Capp. He had to know she was here. How long would he wait before he approached her about the night that changed their lives? For the moment, Ruth wanted only to lose herself in the music and its assurances of God’s help and presence.

The sermons followed. Ruth’s body still remembered how to sit perfectly still for hours on the wooden bench. Next to her, Annie crossed and uncrossed her legs. Even Jacob, sitting a few rows ahead with their mother, was keeping still with more success than Annie.

Following worship, the men turned the benches into tables with practiced ease, and the women soon had the food laid out. The men of the church migrated to Rufus so that he could hardly get a bite in before receiving the well wishes of a representative of every family present.

Among the women, Annie seemed to mix in surprisingly well, a welcome visitor. She seemed more at home than Ruth felt. Even the minister and his wife called Annie away from the group for a private word on the porch, and Annie went without hesitation—even with a smile.

The smile faded, and Ruth saw Annie wander away from the gathering. Ruth followed her off the porch and across the yard toward the barn. Though Annie quickened her steps, Ruth caught up with her.

“What’s wrong?” Ruth grabbed Annie’s wrist to slow her pace.

Annie shook her head. Ruth could see the water in her eyes.

“Tell me,” Ruth urged.

“The minister spoke to me—the one who gave the second sermon. I thought perhaps he wanted to welcome me. But what he was really doing was scolding me.”

“For what? We’ve always welcomed visitors.”

Annie sagged against the side of the barn. “I’m not just a visitor. I’m the
English
woman who paid Rufus’s hospital bill yesterday.”

Ruth’s eyes widened. “The whole bill?”

Annie nodded. “Apparently it was a bad idea.”

“The Amish care for each other,” Ruth said softly. “When someone has large medical bills, the community takes care of them. Granted, it may be difficult because we don’t have as many families as districts in Pennsylvania or Ohio, but we still are responsible.”

“‘We’?” Annie asked. “You still see yourself as one of them. And I keep blundering on the outside. Why do the Amish say no to so many things?”

“Our life is not so much about saying no, but about saying yes and meaning it.”

“But I have money. Plenty of it. Why shouldn’t I use it to help?”

“Perhaps
because
it costs you so little,” Ruth said gently. “Money does not answer every question.”

Annie exhaled and looked at Ruth. “You understand the secret unwritten code better than I do, but you don’t fit here any more than I do.”

Ruth sucked in her lips before speaking. “No, probably not. But they are my family. My people. I have to figure it out.”

“Well, so do I,” Annie said, “just for different reasons.”

Ruth nodded, not speaking.

“I think I’ll go to my house.” Annie dug the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. “I’m worn out from trying to be somebody I’m apparently not.”

“Only you know.” Ruth floundered for words of comfort.

“I’ll pick you up in the morning to go back to town.”

“I’ll be ready.”

Annie stood at the corner of the barn and looked back at the families eating lunch, still separated by gender. She watched Rufus. He sat up straight as he spoke and laughed with the other men, eating heartily among friends. This was his world.

Now he lifted his eyes to her across the yard. The quizzical look on his face sharply tempted her to go speak to him, but of course he was eating with the men. She would just make things worse by approaching him. She offered a weak wave and walked around the back of the barn to find her car.

She slowly maneuvered around the line of buggies with their black boxlike bodies. The horses were all in the pasture, Dolly’s territory. She pulled out onto the highway feeling like a city girl through and through. Why had she ever thought she was meant to buy a house in Westcliffe?

Annie had managed to have some basic furniture delivered to the new house. She had a sofa to sit on in the living room with an ottoman to prop her feet on while she worked on her laptop. Mrs. Weichert’s antiques store yielded a brushed brass floor lamp and a small oval oak dining table with four mismatched chairs. Both front and back doors had new locks. She let herself in the back door, dumped her bag on the table, and slouched into the couch with her laptop. On autopilot, Annie checked her e-mail, scanned through Facebook posts, rolled through Twitter, and clicked through a few blogs.

Nothing interested her. Her brain absorbed few of the words that reeled past her eyes. She opened up iTunes and played several favorite selections while she flipped through three of the unread magazines she had brought from her condo. Nothing made the jiggling in her knees stop.

Only one thing would help.

Annie went upstairs to the bedroom, where she still slept on an inflatable mattress while she shopped for a bed to suit the room, and pulled a pair of tennis shoes out of a box. She changed quickly into shorts with a sweatshirt and the shoes. The cul-de-sac was only a mile and a half away. An easy run. She hooked her house keys to her waistband and slipped one other item into a back pocket.

She was there in under twenty minutes. The crime scene tape was long gone from the house where Rufus had been attacked, a fact that infuriated Annie. She paused to stretch and catch her breath in front of the house, glancing around while she did so. On a Sunday afternoon, no crews were at work. Fairly sure she was unseen, Annie circled around to the back, seeking an unobtrusive way in.

The credit card in her back pocket came out and quickly earned its annual fee by slipping the back lock open. She was in the kitchen then walked through the hall to the stairs. The floor was tiled with large brown ceramic squares, and the stairs newly carpeted in a muddy beige. By the smell of it—she sneezed twice—Annie speculated that it had been installed only two days ago. There was no telling how many signs of Karl Kramer’s presence the construction crew had covered. She opened a couple of closets and wished she had thought to bring a flashlight. Slowly Annie walked up the stairs, picking at the edges of the carpet. They were firmly tacked in place. Upstairs she easily found the master bedroom, where the attack happened. Her heart thudded in her chest when she saw that the padding was down, but the carpet was still in a roll at one end of the long room. She knelt and fished along the seams of the padding, determined to find something in the afternoon light. Inch by inch, she moved down the seams and along the edges of the room looking for loose spots.

On the third wall she found it. Something. A triangle of paper, barely an inch wide, was trapped between the wall and the carpet pad. With a gentle touch, Annie scraped one finger down the wall to get a grip on the paper and dislodge it. She groaned when she felt the edge rip away from a larger paper that was probably nailed down. But she had something. Holding it in her hand, she leaned back on her haunches. Handwritten letters—
ner
.

Or maybe half of an
m—mer.

Written in black ink on a line. A signature.

Annie sensed a shadow cross hers. She jumped to her feet and moved toward the hall. “Who’s there?”

She saw no one but in the stillness heard shifting weight, the creak of a step on subfloor in an uncarpeted room.

A
nnie clenched the scrap of paper and stepped cautiously into the upstairs hall. Hardly breathing herself, she heard panting to her right. She stepped to the left and found the top of the stairs.

“What are you doing here?” a man’s voice said.

Annie tapped down three steps rapidly then couldn’t resist the urge to turn and look. The man she saw was dark, with black hair that needed cutting and a ragged mustache. He was older than the man her mother had spotted at the motel. Annie had always imagined Karl Kramer would look more businesslike.