The Search

 
L
ANCASTER
C
OUNTY
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ECRETS 

B
OOK 3

The Search

A Novel

Suzanne Woods Fisher

© 2011 by Suzanne Woods Fisher

Published by Revell

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.revellbooks.com

E-book edition created 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

ISBN 978-1-4412-1420-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Scripture used in this book, whether quoted or paraphrased by the characters, is taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Published in association with Joyce Hart of the Hartline Literary Agency, LLC.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

For Steve,

who has been such a supportive and kind husband

that nobody would believe it if I were

to write him into a book!

Thank you with all of my heart.

1

______

It was a June morning, hazy with summer’s heat, and Billy Lapp was already bone tired. Only one person on earth could wear out an eighteen-year-old farm boy, and Billy happened to be her hired hand. For over two weeks now, Bertha Riehl had met him at the barn door of Rose Hill Farm with a to-do list that seemed to grow longer with each passing hour. Bertha’s granddaughter, Bess, was coming for a summer visit, and Bertha wanted the farm so spic-and-span clean a body could eat off the barn floor. Which, Billy knew, meant he would be the one scrubbing that barn floor until it shone.

He didn’t know why Bertha felt her farm needed sprucing up. So sauwer wie gschleckt.
It was as clean as a whistle.
The vegetable garden ran neat and tidy from the kitchen steps down to the greenhouse, beside the yard where she stretched her clothesline. Why, hardly a rose petal dared to wilt without Bertha flying out to the fields with a pair of pruning shears in her big hands. And besides that, folks visited each other all the time. But then Billy remembered that something was not quite right between Bertha and Jonah, her son, Bess’s father. He had left years before. Billy didn’t know what had caused the rift, but he knew enough not to ask. Bertha could be private like that, keeping her business to herself.

“Could you tell me something about Bess?” Billy had asked Bertha the other day as he helped her turn the mattress in the spare bedroom she was readying for Bess.

Bertha flipped her end of the mattress and let it slip into the wooden bed frame with a soft sough. “Like what?”

“Well, how old is Bess now?” He vaguely remembered a towheaded, skinny wisp of a girl coming in from Ohio a few years back when Samuel, Bertha’s husband, passed.

Bertha raised an eyebrow at him, as if she thought his motives were highly suspect. “Old enough,” she said, lifting her big chin. “But too young for you.”

Billy sputtered. “I wasn’t asking for that. Besides, me and Betsy—” He stopped abruptly. He knew how Bertha Riehl felt about his Betsy Mast, and he didn’t want another lecture about thinking with your head and not your nether regions, a comment at which he took offense. But that was Bertha Riehl for you. She didn’t mince words and she didn’t hold back her opinions. And she had plenty of both.

On this sunny day, Bertha handed him a broom. “When you’re done sweeping out the hay loft, you need to clean out the ashes in the chimbley place.” She bent over to pick up her favorite rooster, a fourteen-year-old leghorn named Otto, who followed her around the farm. Bertha tucked Otto under her arm, football-style, and headed up the hill to the farmhouse. Her left side was flanked by Boomer, a big black dog who had appeared one day and never left.

“You gonna finally cook that ol’ rooster for dinner, Bertha?” Billy said, grinning.

“Been giving it some serious thought,” she called over her shoulder, stroking Otto’s feathers like he was a pampered housecat.

Bertha was always threatening Otto was going to end up as Sunday’s stew, but Billy knew better. Bertha Riehl was all bluff and bluster. Well, mostly bluff and bluster. He couldn’t deny she had a way of intimidating folks that was a wonder to behold. It had happened to Billy only once, when he made the mistake of asking her if she was six feet tall. Bertha planted her fists on her deluxe-sized hips and narrowed her eyes at him. “I am five feet twelve inches.” Then she stared him down until he was sure he had shrunk an inch or two, right in front of her.

From the kitchen door of the sprawling brick-and-frame farmhouse, Bertha turned and hollered at Billy. “Es is noch lang net faercih wann’s yuscht halwe gedus is!”
Half done is far from done!

He dashed into the barn and picked up where he left off, sweeping the concrete floor with a dash and a fury. One thing to be grateful for, he thought as hay and dust flew up around him, the day of Bess’s arrival had finally come.

Jonah Riehl was seeing his daughter, Bess, off at the bus station in Berlin, Ohio. He handed her a ham sandwich for lunch and bus fare for the return ticket home. Bess would be spending the entire summer at his mother’s farm in Stoney Ridge, Pennsylvania. His mother had written recently to say she had suffered through some female surgery and could Bess please come? She was in dire need of someone to help.

Jonah knew it couldn’t be true that his mother needed help. Bertha had lived in Stoney Ridge all of her life and had plenty of sisters, cousins, and neighbors she could count on. Wasn’t that what being Plain was all about?

And yet he couldn’t rest easy telling his mother that Bess wouldn’t come this summer. His mother was getting up there in years, and she was the type who had never been young to begin with. A few years back, Jonah’s father, Samuel, had an accident while cutting timber. A big tree fell into a smaller tree, and the smaller trunk snapped under the weight, striking Samuel with terrific force in the forehead. He died seven days later. After his father’s funeral, Jonah had invited his mother to come live with them in Ohio. She said no, she wanted to stay on the home place. Still, he knew his mother had a difficult time, losing her partner of so many years. Bertha Riehl did like she always did: she dug in her heels and made do with life as it was.

So, in the end, Jonah showed Bess the letter from his mother.

“The whole summer?” Bess shook her head. “I can’t leave you, Dad. You need me around here.”

He couldn’t deny that. It was just the two of them rattling around in the house. He hadn’t wanted to think of summer without his Bess—much less about the fact that she was growing up so quickly. It wouldn’t be long before boys would start buzzing around her. Too soon, she would have a life of her own. It was the natural order of things, he knew, the way things were meant to be, but it still grieved him to think of it. So much so that he had written a letter to his mother to say he couldn’t spare Bess.

That very afternoon, before he had a chance to mail the letter, Bess came home from school and announced a change of heart. She would go to Stoney Ridge, after all. “It’s the right thing to do, and you’re always telling me that we need to do the right thing,” she said with a dramatic flair.

It still puzzled him why she had flip-flopped on the topic.

Now the loudspeaker was announcing the bus’s departure, and Jonah’s eyes got blurry. “Be careful, Bess,” he said, “because—”

“—because you think I’m five, not fifteen.” She smiled at him.

Jonah clamped his mouth shut. Bess teased him that each time he said goodbye to her, even as she left for school each morning, he would add the caution, “Be careful, because . . .”
Because . . . I won’t be there to protect you. Because . . . accidents happen.
He knew that to be true. At any given moment, anything at all could happen. He brushed a few stray hairs from her forehead and gave her shoulders a quick squeeze, his way of saying that he loved her and would miss her.