A Secret Identity (19 page)

I thrust my feet in flip-flops and raced into the hallway where Esther stood, robe and nightgown falling to her ankles, hair in a long braid down her back, a flashlight in her hand.

“What happened?” She looked dazed.

I shook my head and tore downstairs after the men without waiting to see if she would follow.

I met up with Jake on the drive. He had a strong electric torch that he was using to check out vehicles and buggies. Hawk came to him and poked at his hand, clearly disturbed.

“It’s okay, Hawk.” Jake ran his hand over the dog’s head several times.

Hawk’s anxiety lessened though it didn’t disappear completely.

I know just how you feel, boy
. I wasn’t exactly frightened with the three men checking things out, but I wasn’t totally at ease either.

“Nothing wrong here,” Jake called loudly enough for his father and Elam to hear over the rustlings of agitated animals in the stalls. I could see flashlight beams dancing around in the barn as John and Elam made certain all was well in there.

“My car’s okay too?” I asked Jake.

“Looks fine to me.”

I walked toward him and kicked something dark and unseen, something that hurt my uncovered toe and clattered as it rolled across the drive. Jake followed the sound with his flashlight.

I picked it up and held it out in my palm. “What in the world?”

He took it. “It’s a piece of metal.”

Jake sent a beam of light back and forth over the drive and the lawn. Another shard of bent metal showed at the edge of Mary’s garden, several feet from where we stood. I crossed the lawn and retrieved it, Hawk coming with me before disappearing into the darkness. I was showing it to Jake when John and Elam came out of the barn.

The two men studied the pieces, one in Jake’s palm, one in mine.

John frowned, uncertain what he was looking at, but Elam and Jake moved at the same time, turning their lights toward the road.

A post stood there with a small distorted piece of metal still attached.

“Someone blew up your mailbox?” I was floored. I’d seen rural mailboxes smashed with baseball bats by kids thinking it was cool to be destructive, but blowing one up?

“A cherry bomb or an M-80,” Jake said in disgust.

“Aren’t those things—cherry bombs and M-80s—illegal?” I asked.

“They are, but you can undoubtedly buy them on the Internet,” Jake said. “You can buy anything on the Internet.”

“You can?” Elam shook his fading flashlight. “Why would people sell something so dangerous?”

“Because other people will buy them,” Jake said.

John sighed. “We can thank
Gott
that it happened in the night when no one was around to get hurt by flying pieces of metal.”

“Not that anyone would do it in the daylight,” Elam said with an astonishing amount of sarcasm.

John nodded. “Doers of evil love darkness rather than light.”

“We should tell the police, Father,” Jake said.

John shook his head. “It is just someone wanting to shake up an Amish man. Like we are so easily scared.” He made a scoffing sound. “We will turn the other cheek. Vengeance is the Lord’s.”

“It’s not for vengeance’s sake.” Jake took the piece of metal from my hand, and we all stared at the two mutilated pieces of steel. “What these troublemakers did is very dangerous. A piece of metal flying fast through the air could hurt someone really bad. It’s like shrapnel flying on a battlefield. Whoever did this may do it again to someone else, maybe another Amish family. The police might patrol more often or take other precautions if they knew about this. Maybe they can even trace where the bombs were bought.”

John stared at the steel shards for a few minutes. He reached out and touched his finger to a lethal-looking point on one piece. “You’re right, Jake. Perhaps it is dangerous not to speak. Tomorrow will you call the police?”

“I will. And I’ll get a new mailbox too before Mom comes home. We probably shouldn’t tell her about this. It would upset her.”

On that we all agreed.

Esther and I brought Mary home from the hospital late Friday morning. I felt so sorry for her because I knew she was in severe pain, her leg in a cast, her cuts barely crusted with scabs. In fact there was a very deep gash on her right hip that they wouldn’t let close up. They kept it open to wash it regularly with an antibiotic drip because of an osteo infection that wouldn’t go away.

“They say I probably got the infection from something on the cellar steps,” Mary said. “But I keep a clean house!”

She was clearly offended at the suggestion of dirt in her home—more upset about the perceived lapse in her housekeeping skills than about the wound itself. I thought of the manure that came into the house as a natural part of living on a farm. It was impossible to keep all traces of it out. Maybe that had been the source of the infection. Who knew? A visiting nurse would come daily to oversee the antibiotic drip as well as dress the cuts, and Mary was to be confined to bed for some time.

Elam and John had come in from the field and were waiting for us when we arrived. They carried Mary inside and up to the bedroom she and John shared. She was barely settled when the home-nurse showed up.

“Rose!” I said in surprise as I let in the woman EMT, now dressed in the blue uniform of the Lancaster Home Health Group. “Do you moonlight as an emergency tech or as a visiting nurse?”

She smiled. “You remembered me.”

“That’s because I already knew who you were. Or guessed it anyway. You are Rose Martin, right? The woman from Jake’s accident?”

She nodded. “Just don’t let Jake know, okay? He doesn’t want to meet me for some reason, so let’s not tell him who I am. I’m just Rose, his mother’s nurse.”

I liked her with her curly brown hair and those sparkling hazel eyes beaming through her glasses.

“He’s still at school right now,” I said.

“School?”

“Millersville University. I’m not certain when he finishes classes today, but I’m sure he’ll try to get home as soon as possible. Like the rest of the family, he’s concerned about Mary.”

“It was wonderful to finally see him the other night,” Rose said, eyes dancing. “Did you know that for some time I thought he had died in the accident? I even put up a little white cross at the scene as a memorial. I felt so badly that I, a nurse, hadn’t been able to save him. I think that’s why I became an emergency tech. I wanted to be sure that it would never happen again. Then I found out he was alive after all. Taking down that little cross was one of the happiest things I’ve ever done.”

“And now he won’t meet you.”

She shrugged. “It’s a pride thing, I think. But I tell you, it’s made me intensely curious about him. That’s why I asked for this case. I knew from the ambulance run that she would need home care, so I spoke to my supervisor. To my surprise she said okay.”

“What are you doing working all the way up here if you live way down there?”

“I don’t live at home anymore,” Rose said. “When I got my job with the Lancaster Home Health Group, I moved to Bird-in-Hand. I’ve been here about six months now. I joined the emergency squad as a way to meet people.”

“Is it working?” I was fascinated. I’d never thought of such a means to making friends.

“Oh, yes,” she said, laughing. “I’ve met some very interesting people.”

I led Rose upstairs and introduced her to Mary, John, Esther, and Elam, not mentioning that she was the Rose from Jake’s accident. After speaking briefly to everyone, Rose firmly sent all of us but John from the room.

“I need to run the drip over the wound,” she explained. “Mary doesn’t need an audience.”

As we left, I looked over my shoulder at Mary, so frail in the great bed. John sat beside her on the edge of the bed, his large, calloused hand holding her smaller, work-reddened one. He reached out and pushed her long, unbound hair back from her face in a loving gesture that he would never normally let another person see. It was a sign of his concern for his wife that he didn’t realize he still had an audience.

Jake arrived home while Elam, Esther, and I were at the table eating the ham loaf and whipped potatoes Esther had prepared for the noon meal.

“Is she okay?” he asked immediately. “Was the trip home hard on her?”

“She’s fine,” said a voice behind him, and we all turned to find Rose at the foot of the stairs. “Esther? John asked that you bring some broth up to Mary and sit with her until she falls asleep. If you ask me, the trick will be to get some of the broth in her before she falls asleep. He’ll come down as soon as you go up.”

Esther jumped to do as she was asked, and I turned to Jake.

“Jake, this is Rose, your mother’s visiting nurse.”

Jake stuck out a hand, and I watched as his fist swallowed Rose’s small hand. I wondered how she felt actually touching the hand of a man she thought for some time was dead.

I helped Esther prepare a tray for Mary, putting a dishcloth under the soup bowl to make the tray surface slip-proof. I added a glass of ginger ale and some saltines while Esther ladled the warm broth.

“Here, I’ll carry that.” Elam took the tray from Esther as she walked toward the steps.

Esther beamed, but I thought he offered more because he wanted to check again that his mother was all right.

I turned from watching Elam and Esther go up the stairs to watching Jake and Rose talk by the front door.

“I’ll be here about the same time every day,” I heard her say.

He mumbled something in response that I couldn’t make out, and then he reached out and pushed open the screen door for her. He rolled onto the front porch after her and watched as she climbed into her car with its Lancaster Home Health Group logo of a blue cross inside the black outline of a house.

Feeling a little unnecessary at the present moment, I went up to my rooms and began working on the series proposal my agent wanted from me. I always enjoyed working up the bare bones of a plot and establishing the characters that lived within it. I worked happily for what seemed only a few minutes when I happened to look at my watch and saw it was 5:30 already.

I flew around, getting ready for Ward and Marnie’s visit. I was pulling my hair back into a wide gold barrette when my cell phone rang.

“Cara, it’s Marnie. We’re behind schedule, but we’re coming! The babysitter was late. I’m going to blame it on her rather than my husband. We’re on Route 100, not too far from Exton. We’ll pick up Route 30 from there. We took the Commadore Barry Bridge over the river. What do you think? An hour from here?”

“Give or take a few minutes. Why don’t you meet us at the restaurant instead of coming to the farm first? I’ll call and change the time of the reservation. We can come back here after dinner.”

“Sounds good,” she said. “But tell me. What’s this
us
we’ll be meeting? Is he really coming with you?”

“Who?” I asked innocently. I could hear Ward in the background yelling, “What? The lawyer’s actually coming? Cara’s got a real date?”

“Don’t give me that ‘who’ stuff. You know who I mean,” Marnie said.

“Oh, you mean my lawyer,” I said, trying to sound offhand about the whole matter. “A real date?”

“Ignore your brother. He means well even when he talks too much. So we’re going to meet him?” Her voice was eager.

I watched a gray car turn into the drive. “He’s pulling up out front as we speak.”

“I can’t wait,” she said. “I told Ward the guy would come. In fact, we had a bet, and I just won.”

“You bet about me and Todd?”

“About whether you’d actually have the courage to invite him.”

“Ah, I’d forgotten,” I said. “Ward thinks I don’t have any guts.”

“Poor mistaken baby,” Marnie said affectionately. She was probably looking at him as she spoke.

“Poor mistaken idiot, you mean,” I said with a smile. “I love it when I prove him wrong.”

“I know I should say something about you two being too old for sibling rivalry, but I love it when you get him too.”

“Marnie!” Ward said in the background. It was interesting how my brother couldn’t resist taking part in any phone conversation he was around, whether he was an intended participant or not. “What about your wifely duty to be true to me?”

“My dearest heart,” Marnie said to Ward, her voice so clear that I knew the comment was for me too. I could almost hear her eyelashes fluttering as she spoke. “Never for one moment doubt my resolve to always fulfill my wifely duties. You are the king of my heart. But sometimes,” and her voice lost all its honey in favor of vinegar, “it does the king good to get his ego knocked by one of those he perceives as his ladies in waiting!”

I laughed at my sister-in-law and thought again how much I loved her. “We girls must stick together,” I agreed.

I gave her directions to the restaurant. “See you soon.” And I hung up.

I went down to meet Todd, glad for time alone with him. Tonight he was wearing an olive green sport shirt and olive green slacks two shades deeper. Mr. Monochromatic. I, for my part, was wearing a soft yellow dress that I had gotten the day I met Alma and had bought my lovely coral gown. I hoped he would notice.

“Hello,” Todd said when I opened the door to him. “Will you tell Cara I’m here?”