A Home for Lydia (The Pebble Creek Amish Series) (42 page)

A
aron didn’t wait.

As soon as Mattie closed her hand around the knife, he let go of Clara and launched himself at Jerry.

He wasn’t sure what he expected. Maybe some part of his mind thought the guy was desperate enough to put up a fight. The man had certainly been acting erratically.

When he hit Jerry with the full force of his body, knocking him to the floor, he caved like a dry, dusty skeleton.

Aaron actually thought he heard all the air go out of him in a whoosh.

Jerry lay perfectly still.

For one moment, it occurred to Aaron that he might have killed him. The man had looked as if he were standing on death’s door. What if he had pushed him through it?

The terrible hacking sound resumed, and everyone began talking at once.

“Get off him. Can’t you see he’s hurting?” Mattie sounded desperate.

“Hurting?” Clara’s voice was shaking with anger and indignation. “He’s
hurting
? He had a knife and was going to use it on us!”

“No. He wouldn’t have. Please, help him up.”

“Mattie, step back,” Lydia said, suddenly taking charge. “Give Aaron room. He won’t hurt him. I promise. Clara, go and fetch a glass of water for Jerry.”

“Fetch him a glass of water? He was robbing us—”

“Please.”

Aaron pulled himself up off the floor, dragging Jerry with him. The man was all bones. He jerked when Aaron touched him, but he didn’t offer any resistance. The jerking seemed involuntary—almost like the child with Tourette’s syndrome Aaron had gone to school with back in Indiana. Jerry’s facial muscles twitched, his eye twitched, and he repetitively touched the same spot on the side of his face, his chin, and finally his chest.

The pattern never varied.

Jerry refused to look him in the eye as Aaron pushed him into a chair. Now that the immediate danger was over, Aaron was noticing other things he hadn’t seen from across the room. The odor from the guy was sour and overwhelming. Also, he had burns on the inside of his palms. Some had scabbed over but others were raw and red. Though he was almost six feet tall, he couldn’t have weighed one hundred and sixty pounds.

Clara returned with the glass of water.

Aaron handed it to Jerry, but he shook his head, waving it away after making eye contact only briefly. He continued to glance toward the open door, the window, Mattie, and back to Aaron. He didn’t seem able to focus on any one thing for more than a few seconds. Mattie was crying now, sobbing really. Aaron heard Lydia trying to comfort her.

Clara remained between Jerry and the door, as if he might make a run for it.

“Do you have any other weapons?”

The tics and three touches. “No. Why would I have a weapon?”

“You had the knife.”

Jerry shrugged.

Without turning away from him, Aaron asked Mattie, “Does he
have any other weapons, anything he could harm himself or someone else with?”

“No. He doesn’t. I promise he doesn’t. Please, just let us go. Let us leave.”

“Where would you go, Mattie? You need to stay here and let us help you.” Lydia’s voice was soft but firm.

“You can’t help us. That’s why we have to go. We have a plan. We’re leaving Pebble Creek. We’ll never come here again. I promise you that.”

Aaron pulled out another chair, turned it around, and straddled it. “Everyone sit down. No one’s leaving until I understand what’s going on here. If I’m going to let you rob me not once but twice and not call the bishop or the police, I have to know what has happened, and I have to be sure no one is in danger.”

“And why would you do that? Why would you let us walk away?” Jerry’s smile followed the grimace, the touch to his face, chin, and chest, but the smile was more of a sneer, and he’d begun scratching again.

“Call it grace. You remember grace, right, Jerry?”

Clara pulled out a chair on the side of the table near the windows and flopped into it. Mattie and Lydia sat down across from her. Mattie was still crying, but she seemed calmer at the thought there might be a way out for them.

Aaron turned back to the man sitting in front of him. The man who looked as if he couldn’t walk to the end of the parking lot, yet he’d managed to break into their office two times. Had they broken into other places? Had they robbed the list of businesses and churches Rae had shown him?

Jerry continued to jerk, and Aaron’s mind went back to Andy, the boy who had transferred into his school in fifth grade. His condition had been full blown by the time he’d moved to Indiana. His parents had explained to the church that they had moved to give their son a new start, and also because the grandparents in their old town had trouble accepting the boy with his Tourette’s. They
thought Andy could control the tics and the words he would throw out when he found himself in a tense situation.

Aaron soon learned just how smart Andy was. He’d even cheated off a paper of his once—something he’d done a month of extra chores for when he’d been caught. Andy had shown up to help, even though it wasn’t his fault.

Jerry reminded him of Andy in several ways, but not in every way. There were several things that were off, like the smell and the sores. Those things reminded Aaron of other men he’d seen in Fort Wayne, when he was older. Men he’d walked on the other side of the street to avoid.

“What are you using, Jerry?”

Jerry didn’t even look up. “What difference does it make?”

“Maybe it doesn’t. But you’re not leaving until you answer my questions. Or Clara can take the buggy to go fetch Officer Tate.”

“What about the bishop?” Clara asked.

“Bishop Atlee will insist we call the authorities. Drug use is not something he will tolerate in the district.” Aaron was playing a hunch that Jerry would not want to deal with Tate. “Atlee is a
gut
man, but his hands will be tied. I think you both know that.”

Jerry began scratching again. “I need to go, man. You don’t understand.”

“Explain it to me.”

The laugh was more of a bark, and it brought on a fit of coughing.

“My guess is crack. Is that what it is? Is that why you’re stealing?”

“I’m stealing because I lost my job. Me and Mattie. We’re leaving.” The coughing grew worse, and Jerry doubled over in the chair.

Aaron scooted back. He didn’t trust him. The guy looked frail and thin, but drugs could do strange things to people. And someone who was strung out? Desperate for their next high? There was no telling what Jerry was capable of doing if he thought he had a chance of getting away with it.

“Mattie, is that true? You’re both leaving?”

“
Ya
.
Ya
, it is. We’re going to the city next week. Jerry has some
freinden
there. We can stay with them until we’re married.”

Silence filled the room, and Aaron was once again aware of the rain outside, falling softly. Finally, he pulled in a deep breath. “Is that what you told her, Jerry? You need the money to go to where…La Crosse? Or were you headed all the way to Green Bay or Madison?”

When Jerry didn’t answer, he pushed further. “Or maybe you were going to keep the money and score a few more highs.”

Jerry still didn’t speak, but he kept glancing toward the door.

“Who are you purchasing from, Jerry?”

“Different people. Why? Are you interested?”

“Amish or
Englisch
?” Aaron waited, but Jerry didn’t answer. “I’m guessing you owe them. I’m guessing you need to leave town for several reasons. It’s not hard to score a little, but when your habit owns you, things become complicated. Is that it, Jerry? Maybe you were planning to leave, but you weren’t going to take Mattie with you?”

“You can shut your mouth.” Jerry had tensed and was clutching the arms of the chair. Waiting in the room and unable to move around with them all watching him was beginning to take its toll.

“I’m guessing you told her that so she’d help. You probably don’t even care about her—”

Maybe Aaron’s words pushed him over the edge. Maybe it was Mattie’s crying.

Aaron recognized too late that his hunch was correct—the man had more muscle left in him than you would think looking at his emaciated form. And his need for the drugs had the ability to push him beyond what he should have been able to do.

He rocketed out of the chair.

Instead of heading toward Aaron, he shot past Clara.

Aaron jumped up.

He darted to the right, but his path was blocked by the back of Mattie’s chair and Lydia, who had risen to comfort the girl.

He moved back around to the left past Clara, who had her hand over her mouth and still managed to let out an ear-piercing scream.

Jerry darted through the open door.

Aaron ran after him, down the wet steps, and slipped in the
rain-soaked grass. He caught himself, regained his balance, turned the corner, and tore out after Jerry.

The fool would get himself killed if he actually made it to the car he had hidden. His mind seemed to be operating in starts and stops, worse than an old
Englisch
tractor.

They had both made it across the parking area and to the street, which was pitch dark. Aaron stopped and listened for the sound of Jerry’s footsteps. He had gone to the left. He was sure of that. But had he kept to the road or gone off into the brush?

Suddenly a car accelerated around the curve, and Aaron could clearly see Jerry’s image in the middle of the road, silhouetted in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.

Jerry froze.

The car continued approaching.

Three hundred feet.

Two hundred feet.

A hundred feet.

Jerry shielded his eyes, covered his entire face with his arms, but still he didn’t step out of the path of the car, which had rolled to a stop only fifty feet from where he stood on the center stripe.

The red and blue lights began to pulse, and an officer stepped out.

Aaron couldn’t see him in the backdrop of the lights, but he immediately recognized Officer Tate’s voice.

“Son, I want you to put your hands up and turn around for me.”

Chapter 36

L
ydia stared at the female police officer.

The woman had just asked her something, probably had repeated the question twice, but Lydia had no idea what it was.

“Look, Miss Fisher. I understand it’s been a long night for you, but we’re almost done here.”

The Hispanic officer was unlike any woman Lydia could remember meeting before. She wasn’t ultrathin like most
Englisch
girls Lydia knew. If anything, she tended toward being on the heavy side, but it seemed to be a muscular weight. She didn’t look like someone most criminals would mess with. She was all business, from the way she planted her feet to the uniform she wore—complete with a belt like Officer Tate’s, which had all manner of items clipped to it: radio, handcuffs, gun…

Lydia did not question that Officer Mendoza had been well trained to use every item hanging from her belt. The scowl on her face conveyed that she wouldn’t hesitate to do what needed to be done to maintain order in her jurisdiction.

There were no doubts in Lydia’s mind. This policewoman was as different from her as the crane which visited the river behind them was from the fish that darted in and out of the rocks. They had nothing in common.