Shadows of Lancaster County (41 page)

He was being lowered down then, lowered onto what smelled and felt like the soft fabric of auto upholstery. He braced himself for what was apparently going to be a drive, rather than a flight, to meet his Maker. He was confused, because surely the Bible had never said anything about getting to the Promised Land this way!

He braced himself for the journey, but nothing happened. His heavenly transport didn’t move at all. Instead, the angels all seemed to be waiting for something as the sirens grew louder, closer.

He was lifted again, put down on a bed or a pad of some kind. Someone grabbed his wrist and held it. Another slid something hard and plastic around his neck. Yet another poked him with a pin on the back of his hand and then strapped down his arm with the harsh, scritchy sound of Velcro. They all kept trying to talk to him, but he couldn’t understand the words now. They were a jumble in his brain, a wave of discord and confusion to his ears.

Soon a new sound was added to the mix, a rhythmic putter-putter that blew wind in his face and shone a beam down to earth from the sky.

Finally, the true light of heaven had come.

Again, as he felt his body being moved sideways one more time, Bobby opened his good eye.

There he saw the Lydia-angel again, running alongside, still crying. To his right, also running, was an Anna-angel as well—only this version had long blond hair and a face covered in tears.

“It’s okay, Bobby,” the Anna-angel was saying. “You’re gonna be okay.”

He swallowed, an act fraught with pain, and tried once more to speak.

“I knew you would come,” he finally managed to rasp.

Then he closed his eye as the forward movement stopped short and the clang of metal slamming shut against metal assaulted his ears. As he felt his body lifting high and then higher, he thought of that old expression, of shuffling off this mortal coil. Sailing into the sky, he knew this was his time to shuffle. Slowly, Bobby let go.

As he raced toward heaven, he smiled, his body given up to God, his mind sliding into the dark, soft embrace of unconsciousness.

September 6, 1812

Love has won over pride.

Tonight, with the guard’s help, I slipped from the palace and made my way to the home of the Jensens. My dear friend Priscilla did not look well. Her face was pale. Despite the cool night, sweat beaded along her brow.

Samuel provided a stool next to the bed, and that was where I sat as I proposed my plan. If my child is born male and their child is born dead, or sickly and likely to die soon, there would be a secret trade, her child for mine. To all eyes, it would look as if my child had died and their child had lived, nothing more than that.

They could raise my son as their own. I would in no way interfere, but I asked that I be allowed to see him once a year, if only from afar. Upon his eighteenth birthday, the truth would be revealed to him and he would return to the palace and his rightful place on the throne.

That was my plan, but as the Jensens are strongly religious, I expected to have a bit of trouble persuading them. After certain assurances,
however, they acted amenable to the idea and promised to put it to prayer.

There seemed to be two reasons for their acceptance of my proposal:

—
They did not want to face the heartache of losing another child. By raising my son, by nursing him at her breast, by training him in the way he should go, it would be like getting a second chance with their own child.

—
They likened my story to that of Moses, in the Bible. Priscilla said that Moses also had been slated to die because he was born a male. To save his life, his mother told his older sister to put the baby in a reed basket and let the basket float to the Pharoah’s daughter in the river. Priscilla said that when the Pharoah’s daughter saw the babe, she decided to raise him as her own. He grew up to be a great hero for his own people.

This story deeply heartened me. I had heard of Moses, of course, but hadn’t known the details of his life story. With tears in my eyes, I told Priscilla that this was exactly like Moses, except in reverse. This time, the princess was giving the babe to the commoner.

Samuel and Priscilla wanted some time to pray and talk, so we have made a plan for Samuel to bring a basket of schnitz pies to the palace tomorrow, as a gift to me. Samuel knows how to read and write, and at the bottom of the basket will be a letter revealing their decision, along with his plan for how we can pull off the trade.

As I wait for their answer, there is such peace in my heart about it. I know one thing for sure. This was the right decision.

Now I can only hope that my precious Amisch friends think so as well.

Our time at the hospital consisted of sitting, waiting, pacing, and getting periodic updates from the RN about Bobby’s condition. She threw a lot of things at us at first: dehydration, exposure, hypothermia, gangrene, fractures, internal bleeding. As the evening wore on, more and more family members came, mostly from Lydia’s side of the family. Given that Bobby had been airlifted to Philly, I wasn’t sure how all of these Amish people were getting here. Again, they had probably either hired taxis or taken the train.

Eventually, the group grew so large that we were moved to a different waiting room, one big enough to hold the cousins and coworkers and friends and loved ones who continued to make their way to us for hours on end. Though it was good to see how many people really cared about my brother, I kept thinking how tactless some of them were, how much better I liked the Amish way of handling tragedy. They didn’t offer stupid platitudes or empty statements. They didn’t try to put words in God’s mouth nor motivations behind His actions.

They simply prayed in silence, sat in quiet companionship, comforted with hugs and pats and gentle, soothing sounds.

Lydia seemed oblivious to almost everything that happened outside of those much-anticipated medical updates from the charge nurse. Never
making much noise or fuss, every so often Lydia would simply start crying again, and once in a while those tears turned to sobs.

At one point I felt a familiar hand on my shoulder, and I looked up to see that Haley was there. Of all the non-Amish people in the room, she turned out to be the best at simply knowing what I needed. Surely, that kind, instinctive competence had risen up out of her own battle with cancer; she didn’t give me any empty platitudes because she knew from her own experience that they were meaningless and sometimes even hurtful. Instead, she made sure Lydia and I always had a water or coffee or tea at hand, that we ate an occasional piece of fruit or cracker, that we had both a Bible and a blanket nearby. When the nurses pulled Lydia and me aside to give us updates, Haley came with us and made sure we understood exactly what they were saying.

Most amazing of all, as far as I could tell, Haley didn’t sneak a drink the entire time. She slipped away for a smoke now and then, but she always came back ready to do whatever needed doing next—even if that was just to sit in the seat beside mine and let me rest my head on her shoulder.

Despite the large number of people who waited there with us, there was one glaring absence in the room: Reed Thornton. I took that as a very bad sign. Reed had a close working relationship with the police on this investigation, so there was no way he couldn’t have known by now that Bobby had been found. In my opinion, Reed’s not showing up here at the hospital spoke volumes about what was really going on. I didn’t know why, but he had to have been the one who murdered Doug and tried to murder Bobby. He wasn’t here now because he was already on the run, afraid that Bobby had been coherent enough to provide the name of his attacker before losing consciousness.

I had said as much to the cluster of law enforcement officials who seemed to be keeping an eye on the situation. They wrote down the information I gave them about my suspicion of Reed’s conflict of interest with the stocks, and though they thanked me for the input, they didn’t exactly keep me informed of what they did with that knowledge or how their own investigation was progressing.

Sadly, Bobby had been so out of his head when we found him that
he had only managed to mutter one intelligible sentence the entire time. Tears filled my eyes now as I remembered it, that moment when they were loading him onto the helicopter and he opened one eye and saw me.
I knew you would come,
he had whispered, and all I could think of now was that his faith in me had been utterly misguided. I hadn’t done a very good job of finding him at all—especially considering the fact that his life still hung in the balance. He had already gone into cardiac arrest once, on the helicopter, though they had been able to jolt him back to life with the onboard defibrillator. We could only pray that he would make it through the night, because according to the nurse, that would go a long way in helping to get him from critical to stable.

As the hour grew later, the crowd began to dwindle until it was down to a handful. Worried about her health, I finally insisted that Haley go home. She agreed but promised to return the next day once she was finished with Doug’s private funeral. Nathaniel was offered a ride back to Dreiheit with a cousin, and we urged him to take it, to go to his family and his farm. Caleb had stayed here as protection for Lydia, and Rebecca remained simply for support.

Somehow, the four of us—Caleb, Lydia, Rebecca, and I—managed to make it through the night, stretching out on the chairs in the quiet waiting room and sleeping fitfully between updates. Just after dawn, the nurse came and told us that for the first time since he arrived last night, Bobby’s vital signs were looking good. The doctors still weren’t sure if they would be able to save his leg, but at least it looked as if they had managed to save his life.

Breathing a deep sigh of relief, the four of us simply fell together into a big group hug. Blinking away the tears, I didn’t know what I would have done if Bobby hadn’t made it.

We still wouldn’t be allowed to see him for at least another hour, so I suggested that we go down to the cafeteria and get some breakfast. Lydia insisted she wasn’t hungry, so Caleb said he would stay there with her if we would bring him back something. After freshening up in the restroom, Rebecca and I walked together through the maze of hallways until we found the half-empty cafeteria. Grabbing trays, we went down the line
and served ourselves and then chose a table by the window. As I sat there sipping coffee and watching the sun rise above the horizon, I felt much better.

Bobby was alive.

Soon, all of our questions would be answered.

As we made our way back to the waiting room, Rebecca carrying the box that held Caleb’s breakfast, our small talk turned to quilts. I asked Rebecca if she did much quilting, and if she enjoyed it.

“
Yah,
I like it, but more for the company than anything else,” she replied. “It is hard to make myself sit down and do it all alone.”