A Promise for Miriam (13 page)

Gabe stood there watching them go, feeling helpless and hopeless. Wanting to believe and afraid to believe.

“It’s going to be all right, Gabe. They’ll bring Grace back to you.” Miriam placed her hand softly on his back. He remembered when he had opened his front door and she had fallen through it.

He remembered the feel of her in his arms.

All he wanted right now was Grace back in his house, but it helped to know that the woman standing beside him also cared about his daughter. She understood what it was to watch Grace struggle each day in her unique way, struggle and overcome. Maybe those daily battles would give her the strength to survive until someone found her.

He stood there longer than he should have, connected to her by their feelings for Grace. The others were helping because it was the right thing to do, but he and Miriam were the two who knew Grace, who understood her even if they had come to different conclusions about what was best for her future.

He thought of apologizing, but he knew that it wasn’t the right time.

So instead he pulled in a deep breath and asked for more
kaffi.

Miriam didn’t think her feelings could become any more jumbled. She was so worried about Grace that one more drop of
kaffi
would send her stomach into somersaults. Every time she looked at Gabe, it was as if she experienced his sorrows with him. Plainly his heart was breaking with each moment that passed. The man had been through so much and now this. Physically he was big and strong, but it was obvious that emotionally he was near a cracking point.

She had heard Aden Schmucker was in town for the weekend, but when he’d appeared in the doorway, her emotions had nearly bubbled over. Her relationship with Aden was complicated, and she’d made no attempt to clarify things. In fact, she’d been ignoring the situation for more than two months, ever since the fall festival.

Ignoring had seemed simplest.

She handed Gabe his
kaffi
and then moved back to the other side of the kitchen to stir up another batch of biscuits.

“It’s a real blessing Aden is here this weekend,” Ida murmured. Her sister-in-law had arrived with Noah, explaining that the children would be fine with her parents. They had built a
grossdawdi
house next to theirs, and Ida’s mother and father often came over to lend a hand with their seven children.

“He’s
gut
with Pepper,” Miriam agreed as she measured the ingredients for the biscuits.

“He seemed happy to see you as well.” Eva Stutzman, Eli’s sister, peered over her glasses as she pulled a pan of bread out of the oven. In her fifties, she was the midwife for their families and often worked in conjunction with the
Englisch
doctors. Miriam never quite understood why Eva hadn’t married. Though she had a pronounced limp, that certainly wouldn’t have stopped her from having a husband and a family.

“
Ya
. I’m sure I saw him smile at you, Miriam. Didn’t you go out with him several times during the fall festival?” Ida and Eva kept their voices low as they moved efficiently about the kitchen.

Miriam didn’t think tonight, while Gabe was worried about whether his daughter was alive or not, was the right time to be talking about her dating prospects—or her lack of them.

She glanced over at him to make her point and then shrugged her shoulders as she finished mixing the biscuits. She was surprised Ida and Eva had thought to bring the ingredients for making biscuits and bread. How had they known that Gabe wouldn’t have all that was needed? Perhaps they had guessed because he was a widower. Or perhaps they’d heard talk?

“Don’t worry about him,” Eva said in a low voice. “I doubt if he’d hear a workhorse clomping through the sitting room. We’re background to his agony, is all. If anything, the normal sounds of women’s work is a balm to his spirit.”

She pulled another fresh loaf of bread out of the oven and placed it on a cooling rack, covered it with a cloth, and put more dough in the pan. When she had it in the oven, she perched back on the chair she’d pulled over from the table and resumed knitting. “So tell us about Aden.”

“There’s nothing much to tell,” Miriam admitted, but she couldn’t stop the heat rising in her cheeks.

Ida smiled at Eva, which only made it worse. Older women. It seemed to Miriam they were always imagining romance where there was none.

“Think I’ll see if Gabe wants any of this bread.” Miriam swept the loaf off the cooling rack onto a plate and then swiped a knife from the counter where Ida had been chopping walnuts to put into a walnut-banana bread batter. She turned and walked toward the table near the window, aware as she did that both women were murmuring in an amused way.

Let them murmur, as long as they kept baking.

When the men arrived back with Grace, everyone would be mighty hungry.

Chapter 16

W
hen Grace woke up, she couldn’t see anything.

At first she thought she couldn’t see across her room, but then she remembered she wasn’t in her room. She couldn’t see the trees she knew were standing tall all around her. She couldn’t even see her fingers when she wiggled them in front of her face.

She slipped her hand into her pocket to check on Stanley. Her body must have been keeping him warm. The little mouse nudged her fingers and then scampered to the other side of her pocket.

Grace buttoned the pocket closed, sat up, and rubbed her eyes.

How long had she been sleeping? And why hadn’t her dad found her yet?

She pulled her wool cap down tighter around her ears, over her prayer
kapp
, and then she tried to crawl out of the shelter on her hands and knees, but all she did was bump into a wall of snow. Falling back onto her bottom, she rubbed the top of her head.

Something was wrong. Why couldn’t she get out the same way she had before?

Her heart started thumping faster, like when she played “statue” with her cousins back home in Indiana. This wasn’t Indiana, though, and she should be able to crawl out from under the trees.

Reaching forward with her hand in the darkness, she tried to push out from under the trees. This time her hand hit the wall of snow.

It was as though she’d been buried alive. How was she able to breathe?

She reached up over her head and felt tree branches. So the trees had protected her?

Maybe she could crawl up and out. Or maybe she should stay put.

Grace sat back down where she thought she’d been sleeping before, and she started to cry.

She didn’t want to cry, because it made her feel like a baby, but she was really afraid. Maybe more afraid than she’d ever been.
Even more afraid than when
mamm
died
—the thought whispered in her head, a terrible thing she didn’t want to be there.

Once she realized how afraid she was, it was an idea that grew and grew. It was scarier than anything else. Scarier than all the tree limbs around her or the darkness or the cold.

What if her scarf was under the snow? What if her dad didn’t find her? How long could she live in a snow cave?

The tears sliding down her face made her cheeks burn, so she scrubbed them with her hand, the hand without a mitten. She’d been keeping it in her pocket—the pocket Stanley wasn’t in. But rubbing her cheeks made them hurt, and that made her cry harder.

Now she didn’t only feel like a baby, but she was being a baby.

She’d done a lot of stupid things before—drank sour milk once by accident, ate a worm on a dare, and even touched the stove when it was hot and burned her finger.

She knew it was stupid not to talk. She heard kids call her stupid, and mostly she didn’t blame them. It was just that once she stopped, she didn’t know how to start again.

But this? This was beyond stupid.

Why had she gone outside? Why had she taken Stanley out of his box? Why had she managed to get lost in a blizzard?

Her throat was dry and scratchy and she wanted something to drink—anything to drink, but she didn’t want to put any more snow in her mouth. She was crying so hard she could feel Stanley running back and forth in her pocket. Her cheeks stung like the time she had sunburned them, and that didn’t make any sense to her.

She must be going crazy.

Maybe that’s what happened right before you froze to death. First you imagined you were hot, and then you heard voices.

What a horrible way to die, especially if you were only eight. She wished she could write a story about it and warn the other students in her class. She would title it “Freezing: The Worst Way to Go.”

First your cheeks sunburn. Then you hear voices. And last you dream up a dog.

This dog sounded awfully close. Why would she be hearing a dog?

Grace tried to stand up, but she couldn’t do that under the tree limbs. When she did, clumps of wet snow fell down on her. Then she had an idea. Maybe she wasn’t dreaming. Maybe she actually was hearing voices. Scrubbing the tears off her cheeks, she crawled forward until she bumped into the tree trunk.

She couldn’t stand up, but she could reach up and shake the branches. If snow fell down in here, maybe some snow would fall down on the outside too. Maybe someone was on the outside—and maybe they would see the branches moving and the snow falling.

Shaking the branches made her arms ache, and it made the snow fall on to her head and shoulders.

But it didn’t bother her because suddenly she was filled with hope.

She was sure she heard voices now and the sound of a dog. She’d only met one dog since they moved here to Wisconsin. That dog was Miriam’s dog, Pepper, and he liked to find things.

It seemed to take forever, but soon she could hear two people calling her name. They were saying things like, “Don’t worry, Grace,” and “We’re almost through.”

And best of all, she heard one man say, “Praise
Gotte
. What a smart girl to hang her scarf on the limb.”

That made her feel warm all over when the man called her smart. She knew pride was a sin—she’d heard her bishop in Indiana preach on it before. She could pray for forgiveness later. Right now it was good to know she’d done one thing right on this terrible night.

Finally there was a tunnel through the snow, and the first thing she saw was Pepper’s nose poking through.

Someone pulled the dog back and made the hole bigger. Pepper barked once very loudly, and then he did it again. This time when Pepper came through, no one stopped him.

He licked Grace on the face, and Grace threw her arms around him and buried her fingers deep into his silky fur. She’d never felt anything so warm before, anything so happy. She put her cheek against Pepper’s neck, and then she started crying again, but this time it was different. It wasn’t a sad crying.

When they pulled her out from under the trees, no one seemed to mind about the tears. In fact, she noticed that the older man wiped at his eyes, but it could have been because of the wind. No one was angry with her, and no one pulled her away from Pepper.

They bundled her in a warm blanket and offered her something warm to drink. She’d been thirsty for so long. When they handed her the warm Thermos she almost jumped for joy. Then she took a sip. It tasted like the
kaffi
her dad liked. She swallowed it even though she wanted to spit it out. Then she handed the Thermos back.

Turned out she wasn’t as thirsty as she thought.

Chapter 17

E
very time a team of two men trudged back through his mudroom, hope surged through Gabe’s heart, but it only took one look at their expressions to know they had no good news for him. They had found no sign of Grace.

It was as if she had simply vanished.

Bishop Beiler walked in with an
Englischer
, an officer named Jack Tate. In his mid-forties, he seemed efficient enough, though he admitted there wouldn’t be much they could do until morning. He’d had a difficult time making it out with the roads closed, driving his car as far as he could and then finally riding with the bishop in his buggy. He explained to Gabe that it would be impossible to assemble a search crew before sunrise.

He seemed to understand their ways. He didn’t ask for a photograph of Grace, which meant he knew the Amish didn’t take pictures, and he never questioned why Gabe would have allowed Grace to go to the outhouse by herself.

After he’d taken Gabe’s statement, he accepted a Thermos of
kaffi
from Miriam and prepared to go out to cover the last area of acreage Gabe had to assign, accompanied by Simon. Miriam’s brother had been working all night settling horses and caring for the buggies, and he was eager to be actively participating in the search.

“You’ve done everything I would do,” Jack said as he zipped up his coat. “At first light we’ll put a helicopter in the air and more crews on the ground. For now, I might as well be out there with a team. Ready to go, Simon?”

“Sure. Are you positive I don’t need to go back and find that
Englisch
car of yours?”