Promised to Another (11 page)

Jah, he was a huge sinner. “Angelic” didn’t describe him even remotely. And it seemed that someone in this family knew it, for he heard a snort and turned to the left to discern the source. It had to have come from Aaron or Cathy, both of whom were seated to his left. Aaron looked rather preoccupied, and not at all focused on the Scripture reading. It must have been Cathy.

Maybe she, too, was of the opinion that he was a player. “It’s what everybody thinks,” Annie had said. Shame gnawed at him. He’d had good intentions, but they hadn’t been clear. Another verse came to mind, this one from Proverbs: “
There are many devices in a man’s heart; nevertheless the counsel of the Lord, that shall stand.
” He desperately needed to seek the Lord’s counsel.

Seeing the family bow their heads for the silent prayer, Joshua followed suit.
Lord, please be with me here
, he prayed.
Help me to know if this girl—this place—is part of Your will.
He shouldn’t have taken matters into his own hands as he had. He wasn’t ready to confess before man yet. But God knew, so he would repent to Him, for now.
Forgive me for my dishonesty. Help me to follow Your plans instead of charging ahead on my own paths.

After devotions, Joshua went upstairs to his room. He wanted to shower, but he didn’t want to disturb his new host family. However, he knew he would sleep much better having washed away all of the filth and grime of the day’s work. Decision made, he grabbed a towel and headed to the bathroom, but the door was shut, and he could hear water running. Apparently, someone else was of the same mind-set. How big was their hot water tank?

He returned to the bedroom and folded back the covers on the bed. The sight of an ugly black spider—the biggest he’d ever seen—made him jump, and it took all of his effort to contain the shout that wanted to erupt from his lungs. If there was one creature on God’s great earth that he couldn’t abide, it was spiders. He wasn’t an arachnophobe, exactly, but probably borderline.

He narrowed his eyes and stepped a bit closer, studying the creature. It wasn’t moving. It was…dead? It must have been planted there, for no spider could have maneuvered on its own beneath that heavy quilt.

He opened a window, then grabbed a sock from the top dresser drawer and used it to pick up the creature by one lifeless leg and fling it outside, sock and all. “Ugh,” he said, shuddering. Why on earth had Annie put a disgusting, dead spider in his bed? Was that her idea of a clever prank?

Or maybe she simply hadn’t noticed the spider while she was making up the bed. But that was unlikely.

He shut the window firmly and closed his eyes. He wanted to march down the hall and give her a piece of his mind. If she thought she’d devised a humorous way to welcome him, she was wrong. He wasn’t sure he could sleep on those sheets, knowing a creepy spider had touched them.

A door opened down the hall, and then another one shut. Joshua peeked out of his room. The bathroom was free. After coming into such close contact with a spider, he needed a shower now more than ever.

Tomorrow would be another day. And, hopefully, it wouldn’t bring any more unpleasant surprises.

On his way to the bathroom, he glared at Annie’s closed door. She was the last person he would have expected to pull such a prank. He shuddered again. At least he’d seen the spider before he’d gotten in bed with it.

***

Annie hurried through her morning chores in the barn but never saw Joshua, though she looked for him. When she returned to the haus, she helped Mamm and Cathy prepare a breakfast of fried potatoes, omelets, and crisp bacon, along with a stack of buttered toast. Then, she hurriedly set the table, finishing just as Daed, Aaron, and Joshua came inside to eat. Annie glanced up shyly. “Gut morgen, Joshua.”

He took off his hat, hung it on a wall hook, and finally looked at her. The fury in his eyes almost made her reel back. “Annie. Nice of you to go to so much trouble to make me feel welkum.”

She blinked. What had she done to anger him? In her mind, she reviewed the events of the previous night, then shrugged. She couldn’t think of anything. Unless he’d somehow found out about her quilt and was upset about that. Her stomach roiled.

“So kind of you to consider that I might be lonely in that room all by myself,” he added with an edge to his voice.

Daed turned sharply and stared at Annie, and Mamm’s steps faltered, even though she held on to her walker.

Annie blinked back her tears and regarded Joshua just below his eyes, avoiding their icy anger, forgetting her family’s shocked expressions. “Excuse me?”

“I found a grotesque arachnid in my bed, albeit a deceased one. It couldn’t have gotten there without your help.”

“A
what
?” She was just as surprised to hear him use such a scientific word for “spider.” Her mouth dropped open, and she stared at him.

He shook his head and turned away. “Ach, don’t think you can fool me. You know all about it.”

Aaron chortled. “I doubt that. Annie wouldn’t dream of touching a spider, alive or dead. Whenever she finds one, she screams, and then she yells for a ‘dragon slayer,’ all the while keeping an eye on it, so it doesn’t escape.”

Annie nodded her head vigorously.

Joshua turned back, his gaze softening. “Then, my mistake. I’m sorry I accused you. I just couldn’t think how a dead spider would find its way into a freshly made bed, as tightly as you’d made it, without being planted there.”

Annie shook her head again. “It wasn’t there when I made the bed. I would have seen it. And—”

“She would have screamed,” Aaron finished for her. “Jah, we all would have known it. In fact, based on past episodes, we would have heard her from the barn.”

Annie’s face heated. “Ach, nein need to tell him that.”

Aaron laughed. “It’s something he should know.” He gave Joshua a light punch in the arm. “When you hear a bloodcurdling scream coming from the haus, rest assured, it’s just Annie, face-to-face with a spider.”

Annie huffed and looked around, trying to remember what she’d been doing before all of this unsettling talk about nasty creatures had begun. They’d been getting ready to eat breakfast. She plopped down in her wooden chair, so hard that it creaked, and bowed her head, hoping the rest of them would soon join her.

Within moments, she heard the scrapes of chair legs against the floor, followed by complete silence as everyone bowed in silent prayer. For a moment, Annie considered sneaking out while everyone’s eyes were closed and minds were occupied.

But she needed breakfast before tackling another long day at school, and she’d need a lunch, too. Like it or not, she was stuck.

How could Joshua accuse her of such a thing? Her eyes popped open, and she glanced beside her at Cathy, who’d remained curiously silent throughout the entire exchange. She had her head bowed in prayer, but a smirk played at the corner of her mouth.

Cathy, who wasn’t afraid of anything, especially spiders.

Cathy, who’d vowed to get rid of Joshua.

Annie clenched her folded hands together so tightly that her fingernails dug into her skin. She wouldn’t go blaming Cathy out loud, for all to hear. But, somehow, she had to talk to her, try to get her to stop.

Before she did something even worse. More insidious. Possibly dangerous.

On Wednesday morning, Isaac came inside carrying Joshua’s sock—the one he’d used to fling the spider outside. It was soaking wet and muddy from the rain. “You must have dropped this when you came in last nacht.” He set it on the counter and turned to face him again. “There is another thing, though. I found your shoes and socks in the middle of the living room this morgen. We have to be careful not to leave things lying around, since my frau uses a walker or her wheelchair. So, when you take off your socks, please leave them in your room. I’m sure Annie left you a laundry basket to use as a hamper.”

She had. And Joshua had thought he’d dropped his dirty socks in there, with the exception of the one he’d flung out the window. He wasn’t completely sure. Tilting his head, he thought for a moment, and then he remembered: he’d worn his socks upstairs last night. He recalled sitting on the bed to take them off, all the while thinking about how glad he was not to have to share a room with Luke. He knew he’d tossed them into the laundry basket. And he knew his shoes hadn’t been left in the middle of the floor. He’d left them by the door, neatly lined up with everyone else’s footwear.

But he didn’t dare contradict his new host. It would be childish to blame somebody else for messing with his belongings. So, he simply nodded and promised it wouldn’t happen again. Meanwhile, he wondered how he would keep that promise, especially if someone else was responsible, as he suspected. Whoever had it in for him certainly seemed fearless, given his or her bravery with spiders and smelly footwear. Joshua shook his head. He still couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea of someone ostensibly as kind as Annie doing things like this. But it had to be Annie.

Yet her entire family had teased her about her fear of spiders, and she was always busy, whether teaching school, grading papers, or doing household chores.

Joshua shook his head in confusion. Okay, maybe it wasn’t Annie. But Aaron was so preoccupied with his bride-to-be, he probably wouldn’t think of pulling pranks, and Cathy seemed innocent, except for her snort during the prayer last night. As far as he could tell, she was usually busy working, inside or outside the home, and spending time with the bu she was seeing.

He was pretty sure that bu was David Lapp, another man who’d come from Pennsylvania in the swap—and he hadn’t been Joshua’s friend. In fact, he and Joshua had seemed set against each other from the first day of school. Joshua couldn’t remember all of the details, exactly, just that David had run out of the building in tears, climbed a tree in the school yard, and refused to come down until his older brother had shown up. David had blamed Joshua—for what, he couldn’t recall. For taking David’s pet bullfrog, maybe? Jah, that was it. And David had hated him ever since. Well, maybe “hated” was a little strong. But they certainly hadn’t been friends.

An idea dawned in his head. If Cathy had been spending a lot of time with David, it was likely that he’d been filling her head with stories. Maybe he’d recruited her to target Joshua and help make his life miserable.

With another apology to Isaac about the socks, Joshua took all three of them upstairs. When he entered his bedroom, he stopped short. The double wedding ring quilt had disappeared from his bed. In its place was a nine-patch. It was a pretty pattern, too, but he was curious. Who would have switched his quilt after just one night? And why? It wasn’t as if it needed to be laundered already.

When he returned to the kitchen, Isaac was gone, so Joshua headed for the barn. Sure enough, he found him there, setting up some sort of contraption.

“This is an extractor,” Isaac said without looking up. “In a moment, I’ll show you how to extract the honey from the frames.”

Joshua remembered helping Isaac carry the frames from the hives into the honey room, which they kept tightly shut, so that the bees wouldn’t rob the honey.
After we’ve robbed them of it
, Joshua thought with a smile.

When it was time to extract the honey, Cathy joined them in the honey room. She kept a fire going, and a pot of water boiling over it. Isaac explained that this was to keep the uncapping knife hot, which made it easier to remove the ends of the honeycomb.

Cathy wiped the steaming knife with a towel, then deftly removed the wax, setting it aside for later candle-making.

“Watch carefully,” Isaac told him. “See how she moves gently from side to side, like slicing bread? Start a quarter of the way from the bottom of the comb, slicing upward, and then complete it with a downward thrust of the knife, to uncap the cells on the lower part of the frame.”

After the frame had been uncapped, Joshua lowered it vertically into the extractor with the others. Then, Isaac closed the lid and began cranking. “You start spinning slowly at first. Build the speed as you progress. Don’t ever spin the frames at the maximum speed, because it might damage the delicate wax comb.” After he’d spun the extractor for five or six minutes, he had Joshua turn all of the frames to expose the other sides to the outer wall of the extractor. Then, he let Joshua do the spinning.

“As the extractor fills with honey, it becomes difficult to turn the crank, so then we need to drain off some of the harvest.” He opened a valve at the bottom of the extractor and let it filter through a honey strainer into the bottling bucket.