The Amish Nanny (49 page)

George dropped us off at the church and we hurried into the office, where Daniel explained our predicament to the secretary. She led us back to the library room we'd seen on our tour and told us to feel free to snoop around.

Once she was gone, Daniel reminded me that he'd spent quite a bit of time in the library last summer, looking through the church registries and other records, and he hadn't seen a carved box or come across a stack of letters. He would have remembered. Which meant Giselle must have hidden the box well. He pulled a step stool over to the shelves at the far end of the room and started looking on the top row.

“Try to think like Giselle,” I said. I looked in all of the cupboards under the windows. They were full of cardboard boxes of manuscripts.

“I went through all of those,” Daniel said, moving the ladder to the next set of bookcases.

“Maybe it's in one of the other rooms,” I said.

Daniel groaned. “It could be anywhere.” There was a gap between the floor and the bottom of the bookcase Daniel was in front of. It was definitely big enough for the box to fit under. I grabbed a ruler from the main desk, went to the first one, and knelt down on the floor, scraping it under the edge. I didn't feel anything and scooted forward a little. When I was almost at the end, I brushed up against something. Getting down on my stomach, I wiggled the ruler further under the shelf, thinking maybe it was a book. It was wedged in pretty tight. I reached in with my hands and felt carvings on each side.

“Ada.” Daniel was looking down at me. “What are you doing?”

“There's a box under here,” I said. “A carved box.”

As he got down on the floor beside me, I inched it back and forth until I pulled it free. The carving on the top was of the bakery in Frutigen with the Alps towering above it. Another of my ancestral homes.

“Open it,” Daniel pleaded.

I lifted the lid. The box was full of letters. Tears stung my eyes.

“I'll skim through it for the agreement.”

It only took him a minute to declare it wasn't there. “But this is still better than nothing,” he added. “The letters might make some references to the agreement or maybe have information about where it was hidden.”

He slipped into a chair with the whole stack and dove right in. I wasn't sure how much time we had, so I excused myself and went down to the office to use the phone.

I called Alice's room and got Will, who said that, between Giselle's cast and Alice's paperwork, they wouldn't be finished for at least an hour or two, maybe more. He asked if we wanted George to come to pick us up, but I said no, that we'd stay here a while longer and then just walk to the hospital.
It wasn't until we hung up that I realized I'd forgotten to tell him about the box.

Back in the library, I found Daniel exactly where I'd left him, at the table, intently poring over the letters.

After I sat down across from him, he said the first letter was dated May 8, 1877, and the return address was
Crossing the Atlantic
. In the first letter Elsbeth wrote about her stepchildren and how at first they were hesitant around their father after having been separated from him for the two years he'd been in prison, but they were warming up to him. There wasn't any adjustment for them toward her being their mother because, as their governess, that was what they had come to think of her as anyway. She wrote that she was looking forward to their new life in Indiana, and she hoped her father would change his mind and soon sell Amielbach and join them in America. She also asked that he please accept the fact that she loved Gerard Gingrich and was married to him and would be for the rest of her life.

“Nothing about the agreement?” I asked.

He shook his head and went on to the next one.

It detailed their arrival in New York City and their journey west. When they arrived in Adams County, Indiana, they were welcomed by the other Swiss Mennonites there who had arrived two decades earlier. The people already had vast farms and were making good livings. An older, wealthy couple took Gerard, Elsbeth, and the children into their home and offered the young family a loan to purchase land. She was optimistic about their future.

By the end of the first year, the family had a farm with a house and a big barn—and another child. Elsbeth wrote that her stepchildren, who were now ten and twelve, were attending school but she was still helping them with their studies as both were very bright and needed to be encouraged to make the most of the gifts God had given them. She wrote that she was doing all she would have been doing as a governess for the family, and much, much more. She was far happier than she could have ever imagined being—except for being so far away from her beloved father and missing the mountains, hills, and valleys of her homeland.

While I found my great-great-grandmother's epistles fascinating, I realized none of them was probably going to have any information about an agreement between Abraham Sommers and Ulrich Kessler.

Daniel zipped through several more, saying every couple of years another baby was born, and it was obvious that Abraham had written in his letters that he was worried about his daughter. Elsbeth assured him her health was fine. The older two children grew up and left home. The younger ones began school. More kept coming. Gerard was a hard worker and was growing wheat and raising dairy cows, and with the help of his sons, he kept acquiring more and more land. None of the sons wanted to return to Switzerland to live with their grandfather as he had requested.

Daniel looked up at me. “She wrote that for all his talk of family being most important, she would think that her father would have come to join them.”

Without waiting for a response from me, his head dropped back down, and then he explained that in 1889 she wrote that she was still waiting for her father to visit, as was the rest of his large, extended family. In 1890 her ninth child was born and she named her Sarah. I was pretty sure that was
Mammi
's mother.

Daniel kept translating the letters one by one. He announced when he was on the next to the last one, and translated that Elsbeth referred to Abraham's letter “explaining everything.” This must have been the letter he referred to in his diary when he mentioned his transgression. She said it was upsetting, but of course she and Gerard forgave him. She also said they had a much better life in America and all of their children had opportunities in Indiana they never would have had in the Emmental. It was God's will for them to leave, and it was obvious He used her father's ill motives to help speed His will. She would write to Marie and tell her about the agreement, in case her friend's father had only told his older sons, not his youngest, his only daughter. But she couldn't imagine her friend traveling back to Switzerland now to claim her land.

Then she said she didn't want her children to know what their grandfather had done, so she hid his last letter in the bottom of her carved box.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What was that last bit?”

Daniel looked down at the letter as he said, “She says she doesn't want her kids to know what he's done, so she's hidden his last letter in the bottom of her carved box.”

“Which box would that have been?” I asked. “We have three of them now. The one
Mammi
gave to Lexie, the one
Mammi
kept, and the one Herr Lauten had given Giselle when she first moved here.”

“It seems as though she's talking about the one from your grandmother with the farm scene.”

I started to stand.

“Wait. Let me read the last letter,” he said. “It's not to Abraham. It's from Elsbeth to Caspar Lauten.”

He returned his gaze to the stack of letters and began to translate. “She writes that she is grieved her father didn't receive her last letter before he passed and wasn't assured of her forgiveness.” Daniel continued reading and translating, saying Elsbeth agreed to the arrangement her father made with the Lautens to stay at Amielbach, pay the taxes, and maintain the property. In time, she said she would choose one of her descendants to inherit the property. “She also said she hadn't heard back from Marie, but at least her friend knew about the contract and could choose to do what she wanted.”

Daniel folded the letter. “That's it.”

“Let's go,” I said, jumping to my feet.

We stopped by the office and he spoke with the secretary in Swiss German. She responded, he thanked her, and off we went.

“She said they'll never miss what they didn't know they had,” he explained.

As we hurried along the slushy side of the road on the outskirts of town, I brought up Giselle, asking if he was surprised to find out she was my birth mother.”

He nodded. “It's quite a story you have, Ada.”

Determined that he know everything, I told him about Lexie and how both of us had the same father, an older married man, and how Giselle relinquished us when Lexie was two and I was a newborn.

“But your grandmother is your biological grandmother, right?”

“Yes. Giselle's sister Klara and her husband, Alexander, legally adopted me. They are my parents.”

He sighed in relief. “I was afraid maybe you weren't a blood descendant of Abraham Sommers.”

I wasn't sure why that mattered but didn't take the time to ask, because, speaking of blood, I had something else I needed to tell him.

“There's another thing you should know,” I said. “I have a blood disorder. Hereditary spherocytosis.” If he wanted to get closer to me, he might as well know the biggies to start with.

“Excuse me?” Daniel turned his head toward me, the box clutched tightly to his chest.

“It's abnormally-shaped blood cells. It causes hemolytic anemia.”

“Is it fatal?” His voice was hesitant.

I chuckled. “No. I used to have transfusions, that sort of thing. But I've been much better the last several months.”

“But it's hereditary?”

I nodded.

“So kids are out?”

“Not necessarily.”

“But you wouldn't want to pass it on.” We'd reached the sidewalk, and he was moving more quickly. A woman sweeping her front steps froze as we passed by, her eyes glued to me.

Ignoring her, I struggled to keep up with Daniel's pace. “My life hasn't been so bad…” My voice dropped in volume with each word. I was really thankful I'd been born, regardless of my disorder. That was when it dawned on me. Daniel would be happy not to have children at all.

T
wo hours later we caravanned up to Amielbach in the two cars. Daniel sat in the front of Morgan's car, and I sat in the back with Giselle, whose badly broken ankle was now set in a fresh cast.

She held the box in her hands but gave it back to me when we approached the estate. “Will you come inside while we look for Abraham's last letter?” I asked her.

She said she would as long as she had help up the stairs.

When George arrived with Will, Alice, and Christy, Will assisted Giselle up the steps. In no time she was inside Amielbach, using the crutches from the hospital to make her way down the entryway. I stayed back and walked with Alice, who took it slowly but seemed steady on her feet. Even so I held her good elbow as we walked. The nurses had had her out in the halls the last few days, and she seemed to be regaining her strength.

Morgan had called Oskar to tell him we were all coming, and he'd prepared lunch, a traditional Swiss meal of Raclette cheese with potatoes, pickled onions, and prosciutto. I settled Alice in a chair, while Daniel hurried down the hall to Herr Lauten's office. He appeared a few minutes later with the box from
Mammi
, the one with the farm scene from Indiana, in his hands. Herr Lauten was at his side.

Once they reached us, Daniel turned the box over, searching for a false bottom I presumed. When he found none, he put the box on the table where I was sitting and took out all the letters, handing them to me. Then he picked at the floor of the box.

Morgan pulled a file from her purse and handed it to him. With it he pried up a thin piece of wood. Though the box did, indeed, have a false bottom, I could tell by the way his face fell that the small space inside was empty.