Still Life in Shadows (30 page)

“Close the door,” Mari said and when he finally, reluctantly did, she said quickly, “We’ve got to find the hotel.” She’d made the reservations, again taking over because he could not make the phone call to book the two rooms. Ever since he’d found the body in the Dumpster, he’d had trouble making decisions. It was as though his brain had turned to sand. Mari was the one who borrowed the GPS from Della so that the trip here could be without error.

With her eyes ahead and obeying the directions of the voice on the GPS, Mari drove. Her jaw was set, and although she didn’t speak, Gideon felt she must be disgusted with his antics.

At last he said, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Being difficult.”

A moment later she said with conviction, “I’m so glad he’s in jail.” He guessed she’d been thinking about Reginald.

Kiki stirred and asked, “Are we there yet?” Her voice was sleepy, but once roused, she looked out the window and cried, “This must be it! This is it! It looks just like the picture.”

“What picture?” asked Gideon.

“The one Moriah showed me. He showed me one like this with pastures and the mountains way in the background.” With her nose against the windowpane, she cried, “Oh, wow! Hey, there’s one of those buggies.”

On a side street stood a black buggy with a gray horse. The horse had one charcoal ear. Gideon thought he knew that horse; it belonged to the Benders. He turned away and placed a hand over his face. He didn’t want to be recognized, not now, not yet. Lowering his hand, he felt silly. The Bender horse with the gray ear had been ten years old back when Gideon was a boy. There was no way that this could be that same horse now, so many years later.

A white sedan pulled beside the buggy and a camera snapped a photo from the opened window.

Tourists,
thought Gideon.
Just like in Twin Branches, always wanting to catch the local scenes and townsfolk for their photo albums.

As the car sped away, a memory of Moriah flashed into his mind. Moriah in the high chair with his fist grasping a piece of apple-buttered toast. And he was laughing because Moriah was a happy toddler. Mother had said, “If only every baby was as sweet as Moriah.” Now her sweet boy was dead.

He steadied himself, closed his eyes and didn’t open them until Mari said, “This is it. The Old Carlisle Country Inn.”

“Do they have a pool?” asked Kiki.

Mari slipped the hearse into a parking space. “It’s much too cold to go swimming.”

“An inside pool,” said Kiki. “Do they have one?” She was looking at Gideon; he guessed she assumed he would know.

Choking back emotion, Gideon said, “No, Kiki. No pool, no room service, none of what you see on TV. This is a quaint inn and it comes with a bed.” He hoped the owners wouldn’t recognize him. When he’d lived in Carlisle, the place had been run by a couple by the name of Guttenberg. From the old country, they spoke English with guttural accents.

“Ah, they had a pool at the hotel where Mari and I stayed in Asheville when we went to see Mama at Christmas. But it was outside. What good did that do? What good was that?”

Mari opened the rear of the hearse and removed all three of their bags. “We aren’t here to swim,” she said to her sister as Kiki exited the hearse. She patted Moriah’s coffin. “We’ll be back soon,” she said, as though talking to a child.

Gideon ambled to her side. For a moment he thought of telling the others to go inside the inn before him. He hadn’t seen Moriah in the coffin, and perhaps he needed to look at him one last time and pay his respects. Isn’t that what people said,
I came to pay my respects.

Seeing his sad expression, Mari tried to console him. “It will be okay.”

Taking the bags from her hands, he nodded. Somehow, some way, he wanted so much to believe her.

T
he inn held three floors, a lobby with a bushy Christmas tree, and one elevator. Kiki made a comment that Christmas had ended over a month ago and wondered why the tree was still up. Mari told her to lower her voice.

The woman at the front desk was short and had graying hair. Gideon waited for her to speak, tugging his John Deere cap over his head, hoping she would not know who he was.

Her accent was not German and, relieved, he relaxed his shoulders. He wouldn’t have to worry about being recognized and having to make small talk.

Mari checked them in as Kiki observed the large Broken Star quilt hanging on the powder-blue wall to the left of the front door. Sure enough, Kiki asked Gideon about the quilt, what it was used for, and why it was on the wall.

Gideon gave a short response. He knew she didn’t care to know all he did about quilts and quilting. Mother and his sister Esther were excellent quilters, so he’d grown up being privy to all the patterns. He’d
even cut a few squares for the Stars Log Cabin design one winter. Helping Esther had been a nice change from his usual task of collecting eggs from their seventeen hens and milking the twenty Jersey cows.

Mari conversed with the woman at the check-in desk. Gideon admired her for making the effort to be chatty and interested in all the woman had to say about the region. When she handed Mari the keys to their two rooms, Mari thanked her and, taking the opportunity, quickly moved away from the desk.

“Hungry?” Mari then asked him as Gideon watched the tree lights twinkling on and off.

He felt he could just stand there all evening, as though he was in some sort of stupor.

When he said nothing, she repeated, “Are you hungry?”

“I am!” Kiki grinned at them. “Where do we eat?”

“Sure,” said Gideon, moving from the tree, trying to move from that gift of the wood Moriah had given him back when the kid had been just four.
What did I do with that block of wood?
He tried to think back to that time, but it was so long ago, back when he himself was just a boy wanting to leave the farm, and yet uncertain how to do it.

“Hey,” Kiki was nudging him, her fingers jabbing at his hands like woodpeckers do to the trunks of pines.

Gideon forced himself back to the present. “We can get something to eat.”

W
hat is it?” Mari asked after they’d taken the elevator up to the second floor, found their adjoining rooms, and Kiki had run about both of them, claiming she loved being in hotels. “I know you’d rather not be here in Carlisle, but Gideon, come on, don’t be so silent.”

Staring out the window into a dark night, he let the numbness of the past week take over. He hadn’t been aware that he’d been silent, as she put it. The noise in his head was so loud, he couldn’t believe she couldn’t hear it. He wished for silence.

Mari observed the view from the window as the streetlamps glowed
against the buildings. “This is a cute town. How far is your house from here?”

“Seven miles east,” he said. “Once you get out of the city limits, you’ll see farmland.” He could curl up and sleep, as Kiki had. Perhaps he shouldn’t bother with dinner.

But Kiki was at his jacket sleeve, tugging on it like a small child. “Come on, Gideon, let’s go get some grub.”

He did have the wherewithal to guide them to a small restaurant on the edge of town, hopeful that it would be fairly vacant and void of anyone he might know. The place was the Daily Bread Diner, and although he’d never eaten at it, he’d passed it when riding in a buggy on the way to the Yoder farm to deliver cartons of eggs. The diner’s sign was painted to look like a pinwheel, with narrow strips of light blue, metallic green, and sunflower yellow painted from the center. In the middle of the narrow strips was an orange dot and the words on it were “Best chicken and biscuits in the whole world.”

Inside the dimly lit restaurant, a waitress showed them to a booth. Kiki said she wanted macaroni until she saw that the menu didn’t have it listed. Mari said she should try the chicken and biscuits and she agreed she would. Gideon ordered toast with apple butter. He was glad that no one commented on his small selection.

Mari tried to make conversation, and he was appreciative of her attempts. She noted the décor on the wall, two identical photos of a lopsided black buggy and one of a loaf of bread in a wicker basket. On the bread photo was the caption, “Give us our daily bread.”

Kiki yawned and said that once she finished eating, she wanted to go to bed. “Which bed do you want?” she asked her sister. “The one by the door or the window?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Great! I want the one by the window. I want to see the sun come up over the mountains.” Slurping her Coke, her mood changed to pensive. “When do we bury Moriah? Do we really have to stand outside? It’s cold here. It’s like, going to snow.”

Gideon thought of the phone call he’d received nights ago regarding the burial. “A friend from here called me,” he said. “Jeremiah heard about Moriah and called the auto shop. I wasn’t there, so Ormond took a message.”

From the looks on both Mari’s and Kiki’s faces, Gideon could tell that he had yet to tell them about this incident. These days he had a hard time being aware of what he said and what he thought he’d said.

“How’d he get the number?” asked Kiki.

“Oh, you know, it’s painted on every fencepost.”

“I know why! You’re famous. You help people when they want to try another kind of life.”

“What did Jeremiah say?” Mari asked, after telling Kiki she needed to sit up and stop slurping.

“He said he and some others would be by to dig the grave. He said not to worry about that.” Sheepishly, Gideon said, “I hadn’t been worried. I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

Their orders arrived shortly after that, the waitress carefully placing their meals in front of each of them.

The apple butter was tasty. Gideon dipped his finger in the little dish that came with his plate of toast and was pleased. Then he spread it lavishly onto the three pieces of toast and took a bite.

Kiki dug into her chicken, using both a knife and fork. “Watch me eat with my best manners,” she said.

Mari simply sipped from her water glass.

“You must be exhausted,” he said, realizing that she had driven most of the way.

“A little. What time do we need to be up tomorrow?”

Gideon hoped tomorrow never came. He knew he needed to call the pastor of Covenant Church in Harrisburg just to make sure he was still able to come to Carlisle to perform the funeral. And if he’d forgotten? What would it matter?

“I want to buy some flowers,” said Mari after taking a bite of food and chewing it. “Who sells them around here?”

Gideon realized he’d never purchased flowers here. Growing up, Mother had a small garden where she grew daisies in the spring, roses in the summer, and chrysanthemums in the early autumn. Whenever his family wanted flowers, they just picked out of the garden. “I think there’s a florist a few miles from here.”

Kiki wanted to order dessert, saying the apple pie looked good, but Mari told her that they needed to get back to the hotel.

Gideon shot Mari a grateful smile, and with that, she asked the waitress for the check.

Gideon took bills from his wallet and laid them on the table. Mari folded them and handed them back. He protested, but she said, “My treat tonight.” He read her eyes, certain they spoke the words:
Let me help you because I want to do all I can under these circumstances.

Gideon wanted to say that she already had helped immensely, that her presence during the trip up here was more than he could ask for, more than he deserved. But his mouth felt rubbery and so instead, he just said, “I appreciate it.”

A
t the inn, Kiki and Mari headed toward the elevator. Gideon said he’d sit on the sofa in the lobby for a minute and make a phone call. But once they’d left, he couldn’t recall the pastor’s name. He searched his cell phone for recently made calls. Finding a Pennsylvania area code in front of a set of numbers, he decided that one must be it and hit dial.

He had just disconnected when Mari pulled up a chair beside him. He smiled wearily at her. “Hey.”

“How are you?” she asked.

He rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay, I guess. Is Kiki tucked in?”

“Already asleep. And you? Aren’t you going to your room?” Her voice was laced with concern and for that, he was grateful. He wanted to thank her for all she’d done, but he felt so unworthy at the moment. Difficult. He knew he was not the easiest person to deal with even during normal circumstances. Moriah had told him more than once to chill
and not be so worried about cleaning and working so hard all the time.

Gideon put his phone into his shirt pocket. “Soon. I just can’t seem to turn off my mind.”

“It seems surreal.”

“It does.”

“I’ve wanted to come to Amish country, but not like this.” He was aware of her hand reaching over to rest on his.

“I never wanted to return,” he confessed.