Stranger's Gift (6 page)

“You're joking, right?”

“Not so much,” Grady replied. “Look, his aunt doesn't want any publicity about this. She's called in some favors, I take it. Arlen's agreed to go, but he says he'll make the time only if you agree to take the hand-holding part of this.”

Hester saw the situation for what it was. This was exactly what she and her father had been talking about the night before. This was what she had prayed about.

“If the guy's alive but injured,” Grady pressed, “we need to get him out of there, Hester. You're a trained nurse.” He waited a beat. “Please?”

Hester closed her eyes, reminding herself that God had given her the mission to serve Him by helping others. Whether she was leading or following was hardly the issue. And even though this man had defied logic to ride out a hurricane, he was a human being in need. It wasn't the first time she'd heard of such stubbornness. Plus, if she helped Grady with this, then Grady would be free to help those who had played by the rules and still lost everything. “I'll take care of it.” She took the map from him and folded it up. “How's Amy doing?”

Grady grinned. His wife was eight months pregnant with their first child, and he was already a very proud father. “She's ticked off because this hurricane wasn't a male name. She was all set to name the baby after the storm. I do not even begin to understand why we would wish that on a kid.”

“It's a boy, then?”

“Yep. You know what she told me this morning? She said there's still a month before the baby is supposed to come, and even if the little guy is late, hurricane season goes through October.” He shook his head, but his smile told the real story of his abiding love for his wife. Hester couldn't help feeling a twinge of envy. Over the years she'd pretty much given up on the idea that she would ever know the kind of deep commitment and love that bound Grady to Amy. The two had so much in common, and in many ways it was hard to imagine one without the other.

Hester had always thought that she had more in common with males like her brothers and the boys she'd gone to school with than she did with the girls she'd known. Guys all seemed to like her, like having her around. But when it came to one of them considering her as spouse material, things changed—fast. She was thirty-three years old now, well past the age when most women of her faith had settled down to the business of making a home and raising a family. Many people thought she had missed her chance at marital happiness when she had insisted on going to college and getting her nursing degree. Others thought that it was her devotion to caring for her sick mother that had made her miss out on the opportunity to meet a suitable young man.

There had been one young man, a farmer from Indiana she'd met after she'd completed her nurse's training and had returned to Pinecraft. He had even proposed. But just a week before their wedding, he had made it clear that while he had found her unorthodox behavior appealing when they first met, it simply would not do to continue along that path once she became his wife and the mother of his children. Hester had called off the wedding, once again setting tongues to wagging throughout the little community. But shortly after that, her mother's battle with Lou Gehrig's disease had begun its downward spiral, and the tide of sympathy had turned in Hester's favor. Many had seen it as part of God's plan that Hester should be free to care for her beloved mother.

“I'd go myself,” Grady was saying. “But there are still dozens of people unaccounted for, and …”

“It's your job to account for them.”

Grady puffed out his cheeks and then blew out a breath of frustration. “Yeah. I have to admit that at times like these I sometimes question my career choice, but this is the path I chose.”

And I chose my path
, Hester reminded herself sternly.
Just as staying put in a hurricane was the choice of John Steiner. Judge not, Hester Detlef
.

“Okay. Tell Dad I'll meet him at the shop. I need to let Emma know she needs to take full charge of things here for a while.”

“Be careful out there, okay?” Grady said. “The area is still unstable with all those downed trees, and, of course, there's no power or water. Don't go poking around. Just see if you see any sign of Steiner. If you find him, do what you can to get him stabilized, and then call in the evacuation chopper.”

“Unless he's okay,” Hester corrected.

“Either way,” Grady said, “call the chopper and get him to a hospital. I'm not taking any chances.”

“Got it,” she said. “Do you have any further information about him? Anything else that might help in case he's—you know—confused or delirious?”

“Not really. Word has it that his mother—the congresswoman's sister—was some sort of hippie who abandoned the high-society life for a simpler style. She married this Amish farmer and moved out to his place in Indiana.”

“So John Steiner's father is Amish?”

“And so was Steiner until a few years ago. I think he was shunned or whatever they call it when he's gotten himself kicked out of the community.”

“Banned,” Hester corrected quietly. “If he cannot go back, then he has been banned or ex-communicated.”

“Whatever. He left, came here, and bought the old Tucker place.” Grady let out a sigh. Both of them knew that he might very well be the first fatality of the storm. “Do your best, okay. Just be careful. I warn you, Hester, from the air the place looked pretty unstable.”

“We've probably seen worse,” Hester assured him.

But an hour later as she and her father and her father's newly hired cabinetmaker, Samuel Brubaker, beached the sturdy fishing boat they'd borrowed from Margery and worked their way over uprooted trees and dunes of wet sand that had not existed the day before, Hester was not so sure.

“How could anyone survive this?” she murmured. In spite of her annoyance that John Steiner was somehow entitled to special attention, her heart went out to the guy. If he was still alive, he had lost everything.

I
t had taken John most of the morning to claw his way out from under the rubble that had once been his bedroom above the kitchen and the heavy cypress beam that had proved his salvation. Oblivious to the pain that racked his body, he'd just broken through the last barrier into the gray and ominous aftermath of the hurricane when he got his first look at the fury and devastation the storm had wrought. It looked like Hurricane Hester had roared straight through his property on her way to who-knew-where. His once-pristine cluster of faded candy-colored outbuildings that tourists liked to associate with “old” Florida looked more like an oversized game of pick-up sticks.

The chicken coop was flattened. He hated to think of what he might find beneath the rubble. The cage he'd left behind when the roof blew off the coop was now embedded in the trunk of a palm tree like a spike. The concrete walls of his toolshed had collapsed in on each other, and the corrugated metal roof was missing. He turned toward the old packinghouse and saw that one section of its tin roof now balanced precariously in the branches of the large banyan tree that dominated the yard; one half of that tree was leaning against the house. The second floor of the main house was gone with the exception of the door frame that once had led to his bedroom. On the first floor all of the doors and windows were missing, and one of the four walls had fallen as well. The only recognizable furnishings were the kitchen table, mired in at least a foot of sludge, the stove, and half of the fireplace chimney. He was able to identify his kitchen cabinets and countertops only by the splintered pieces of wood that littered the landscape.

His life had been spared when he was able to crawl onto a fallen ceiling beam and cling to it until the storm finally abated sometime just before dawn. The angle of the beam had protected him as the second floor of the house collapsed and had kept him from drowning in the waters that filled the first floor as he lapsed in and out of consciousness. He tightened his grip on the Bible he'd managed to rescue from the rubble and thanked God for saving his life. He turned to the old citrus groves and to where he had planted his kitchen garden and additional fruit trees.

Muck and sand covered the entire property where just the morning before he had walked through the rows of evenly spaced trees. Over there was where he'd planned to add green beans, and over there, pea pods. This larger bed was to house large heads of cabbage and lettuce in alternate rows alongside tomato plants. But now what little he could see of the remains of the carefully plotted garden was buried under several inches of muck and water. He set his Bible on a window ledge, and then walked farther into the orchard, where he bent to scoop wet silt and sand from the ground. He could find nothing that was salvageable of the work he had poured his heart and soul into for the last two years. Here and there the recycled cypress boards he had used to build the planters stuck up from the sand like grave markers. The branches on the fruit trees that had managed to survive the storm's rage were gray with sea salt. Other trees had been snapped off at the base.

Slowly he took stock of his losses, trying without success to comprehend the fury of a storm that had robbed him of everything he'd worked so hard to build. When he'd settled on the Tucker property in spite of the naysayers who had thought him mad, he had seen not an abandoned homestead and business but a place where at last he could pursue his Walden experiment unencumbered by the disapproval of others. Here he could prove to those who had banned him that he was a man of faith and tradition—perhaps far more so than the neighbors he'd left behind had been. Here he could honor the memory of his mother and the way that she had encouraged him even with her dying breath.

Still stunned by the extent of the storm's damage, he finally registered the steady throttle of a fishing boat puttering close to what had once been his pier. It was now no more than a twisted aluminum sculpture sticking up from the muddy water. “What now?” John muttered as he watched a trio of Mennonites—conservative judging by their dress—beach the boat on a nearby sandbar and wade through the uncommonly high waters of the bay to shore. John bit his lip hard and silently prayed for strength and patience. Like he didn't have enough to deal with.

“Plain people” as the various sects of Anabaptists were often called. Amish, Mennonite, Hutterites—all linked under the yoke of plain dress and a simple separatist lifestyle despite their differences. In particular, the Mennonites seemed to have this thing about needing to help people—whether anyone asked for their help or not.

So here they came—two men and that woman—the one who'd demanded he leave the night before. The men could have been father and son. The elder sported a full white beard, while the younger was clean-shaven, indicating that he was single. Both wore the somber uniform of their faith. Dark loose trousers with suspenders, solid blue cotton shirts with no collar, and the telltale stiff-brimmed straw hat. John had abandoned the dress code when he came to Florida because he believed it would be easier to maintain his anonymity if he did not call attention to himself.

He turned his attention to the woman. She was wearing sneakers that were stained with the brown muck of the creek. Her dress was a pale blue floral print covered with a black apron. She carried a cloth satchel. Her skirt was wet and muddy for a good foot above her ankle where she'd waded in to shore. Her hair was parted in the middle, then pinned up and back and crowned by the traditional starched white mesh prayer kapp. And while the men were both fair, the woman was not. Her hair was as black as the night that had engulfed his property just before the storm struck.

In no mood for company and especially not for the woman's right to gloat, John glanced around, seeking escape. But other than the boat they'd arrived in, he had no other options. Where once there had been a winding lane out to the main road in the days when Tucker had owned the property, there was now a jungle of downed palm trees and uprooted shrubs to add to the maze that had been the overgrown path he'd so carefully avoided clearing. On top of that he sported a long bloody gash on one arm along with a variety of throbbing bruises and possibly a broken wrist given the pulsating pain he was feeling there. His shorts and shirt were both ripped, and his signature planter's straw hat was probably halfway to New York by now—along with most of his other possessions that had not been nailed down against winds that must have topped well over a hundred miles an hour. Three uprooted Norfolk pines that the nursery owner had advised him not to plant now formed a kind of bizarre natural obstacle course for the trio of do-gooders to navigate.

Seeing that there was no way to avoid them, he waited with arms folded across his chest and his feet planted firmly in the soft sandy soil. “Can I help you?” he called out when they were less than ten feet away. Where had they come from? It was as if the storm had dropped them off on its way inland.

“Ah,
mein bruder
, it is we who should be asking that of you,” the older man replied with a sympathetic nod toward the chaos that lay all around John. He pulled a brochure from the pocket of his trousers and tapped it lightly against his thigh as he made the introductions. “I am Arlen Detlef. This is my friend Samuel Brubaker and my daughter, Hester.”

“Hester.” John was unaware he had spoken aloud until he saw the widening of her eyes at the sound of her name. “Like the storm,” he added. He had failed to fully appreciate the significance of the connection the night before, but now it made sense, for certainly she had roared in and out like the hurricane itself.

The older man chuckled. “In many ways, yes, my friend.”

“Dad,” the woman said. Her tone held the rebuke that her smile disarmed. John studied that smile, but she had offered it to only her father—not to him. She had barely glanced at him. The woman clearly did not like him. So much for Christian charity.