Shadows of Lancaster County (40 page)

She looked at me, her eyes red, her nose runny. “You have found my secret sin,” she whispered. “Now everyone will know. I will be disciplined. It will be taken from me.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, wondering how on earth I could make this right.

“It’s just a camera and some pictures,” I said softly. “I promise I won’t ever tell anyone.”

“These things, they are not allowed. The
Ordnung
strictly forbids it.”

I stood up and turned so that I could sit next to her on the stoop.

“If they are forbidden, why do you have them?” I asked.

She dabbed at her eyes with the hem of her sleeve.

“Because,” she said, sniffling, “about a year after my parents died, I realized that I could not remember my mother’s face. With no photos for reference, her image was lost to me forever. I knew my
daed
would eventually disappear from my mind as well. Right then, I decided I needed a way to remember, a way to see the faces of my loved ones whether they are here with me or not.”

Heartbroken for the pain I could hear in her voice, I put an arm around Grete’s shoulders as she explained that yesterday morning she had the camera out because she had been snapping pictures through the window of the kids and Lydia playing in the snow. She said that all of her photos were taken that way, when the subjects had no idea they were being recorded on film. If I hadn’t come down when I did, I would never have known. Again, I apologized for poking my nose in where it didn’t belong, and then as simply as I could I explained what I had thought was in there, a set of priceless ruby-and-diamond jewels that had been handed down through my family but disappeared somewhere along the way.

“Rubies and diamonds?” she asked, clearly astounded. “In a chicken coop?”

For some reason, her question struck me as funny. I giggled. That, in turn, made her giggle, despite her tears. Soon, she laughed, then I laughed, and as we fed off of each other, we got to laughing so hard that our sides were hurting. Finally, as we both calmed down and grew quiet, I promised her, yet again, that her secret was safe with me, though I added that she might want to relocate the box to a different hiding spot, because Caleb had seen me fooling with the loose board earlier.

After that, Grete and I went inside the house, though when she told me to “butz” my “gums,” I couldn’t help but start laughing again. She laughed too as she explained that she’d merely been suggesting that I clean the mud from my shoes.

Upstairs, I hung up my sweater dress and changed into jeans, and then I went back downstairs and joined the family at the dinner table. There, they were just about to have prayer and enjoy Lydia’s soup, homemade biscuits, and a delicious-looking fruit salad.

Over dinner, somehow we began talking about the old days, about how
Grete and Lydia and Bobby and I had been such constant companions whenever we visited our grandparents in Dreiheit as children. Once Caleb was born, the girls usually brought him along as well. I still remembered being astounded by that, by the sight of my peers, mere children themselves, caring for their younger sibling with all the expertise and confidence of young mothers.

Lydia talked about the noisy games of Dutch Blitz we had played on rainy days, and Grete shared with the younger ones about how Lydia and Bobby were the biggest pranksters ever born—and even worse when they were together to egg each other on. I reminisced about the old games of sardines and hide-and-seek, all the hours we had spent playing in our big old family house.

“Remember Bobby’s favorite trick with hide-and-seek?” Lydia asked, eyes twinkling. “You think we would have wised up after a while.”

“That’s right,” I said, grinning as it came back to me, “he would hide near the person who was counting, and then as soon as they were finished and set off to find everybody, he would slip out of his hiding place and go put himself right where the counter had stood when they were counting.”

“
Yah,
I remember that,” Grete added with a laugh. “No one ever thought to look in the place they started from, the place they had already been, because they didn’t think anyone would be there. Bobby was always so smart.”

Lydia moved on to describe some adventure we’d had out in the tree house, but my mind stopped where it was, right at that point in the conversation. There was something about what we’d said, something about Bobby, that suddenly clicked in my brain like the biggest, most powerful light switch in the world.

“Wait!” I said, but because they were laughing and talking they didn’t hear me. “Wait! Guys!” That time I seemed to draw everyone’s attention. Startled, they all turned to look at me. “It’s Bobby. I know where he is.”

I looked at Lydia, the one who had called me with such urgency in her voice four days ago and begged me to help her find him.

“Really,” I said, my heart pounding, my hopes soaring for the first time in days. “I think I know where we can find Bobby.”

I had never driven so fast in my life.

Crammed into my little four-seater rental car was me at the wheel, Nathaniel in the passenger seat, and Caleb, Rebecca, and Lydia squeezed tightly in the back. Grete had wanted to come too, but as there literally hadn’t been room for one more, she offered to stay back with the kids and with the neighbors who had come to stand guard while we were gone. As we flew down the dark and hilly roads with four vehicles of paparazzi in pursuit, I tried to explain my theory, one that Bobby had probably been counting on me to figure out a lot sooner than this. Just as in hide-and-seek, I explained, he had hidden himself right where it began.

I didn’t know if I could find in the dark the gravel road Reed had driven us down, so instead I just headed to the high, sharp curve of the highway. Once there, I pulled over, turned off the car, and we all spilled out, flicking on flashlights as we did. Leading the way, I practically ran down the steep hill, past the sight where the motorcycle had crashed, past the place where spattered blood had been found. At the bottom of the hill, in a full-out run, I headed for the empty farmhouse, the one where Bobby had left some cash and a note saying he had taken the tractor.

There probably hadn’t even been a tractor.

In fact, he likely hadn’t ever left.

Knowing my brother as I did, if he had been extremely injured in that crash but still coherent, he would have dragged himself here, bandaged himself up, done something to make it look as if he had left, and then simply found a safe hiding place to lie in wait until the threat was gone or until I found him, whichever came first.

Given that he hadn’t yet resurfaced, I had to conclude that either he knew he was still in danger from a killer who hadn’t yet been caught, or he was so hurt that once he got into his hiding place he couldn’t get back out.

I had explained all of this to the family in the car on the way over, and now with shouts of Bobby’s name, we fanned out, each of us looking for where he could have hidden himself. The press was going nuts, trying to decide which person to follow, shouting questions about what we were
doing and why. Finally, I stopped and turned around, facing the whole lot of them.

“My brother is here somewhere,” I said with certainty. “He’s here and he’s hurt and he needs us to find him. You guys can either jump in and help or get out of the way.”

“Hey, I’m just a stringer,” one reporter said. “Whatever you’ve got going on, my job is to write about it.”

“You want something to write about?” I demanded, advancing toward him, my hands clenched into fists at my sides. “Write about how a herd of bloodsucking, tabloid-writing leeches did something decent for a change and helped us find an innocent and injured man.” By then, there were at least ten people in my audience, each of them staring at me as if I had gone nuts. I took a deep breath and told myself to calm down. “Let’s try it this way. The sooner you guys pitch in, the sooner we can find him, and the more likely you are to get an exclusive before even more reporters and photographers show up here.”

That seemed to work. Suddenly, they all sprang into action, going where I dictated, doing what I said to do. I pointed out the gravel road behind us and sent three of them back up to their cars, telling them to go the long way around and see if they could drive up in here on the gravel road, so that we could use their headlights to see better.

Even with everyone searching, we still couldn’t find him. We broke into the house and checked the attic, the basement, and every nook and cranny of every room and cabinet and closet. We scoured the barn and the silo and the washhouse and the other structures that dotted the land, even the older structures that were no longer in use. Finally, when some were giving up hope, I said that if I knew Bobby, he would have put himself someplace smart, someplace underground, maybe, where the temperature wouldn’t get down to freezing.

“A good root cellar would do it,” Nathaniel told me. “The temperature is more or less constant year round.”

“
Yah,
” Rebecca added, “if the cabbages do not freeze all winter, then Bobby could have survived for a few days.”

“But we already checked the basement and the springhouse,” Lydia cried, her voice thick with despair.

“The barn!” one of the photographers said suddenly.

“
Yah,
the barn,” Nathaniel nodded. “Sometimes there is a second root cellar in the barn!”

En masse, we ran into the big red barn with its graceful, curved roof. Nathaniel led the way, scanning the dark, cavernous room with his flashlight. Finally, he paused, training the vivid beam upon a large rectangle of wood flooring over in the corner. On one end of the long, door-sized board were hinges; on the other was what looked like a handle—a blessed, beautiful, black, wrought iron handle.

Holding my breath, I half clung to Lydia, half held her up as we watched Caleb grab that handle and lift open the door.

The angels were calling his name.

He could hear them, their voices urgent, crying “Bobby! Bobby!”

He wanted to respond, wanted to tell them not to carry him away to heaven just yet. He still had others to save here on earth first.

Surely, they would understand. Surely, God would give him a little more time to get to his wife, his son, his unborn child. Bobby opened his mouth to cry out in return, to explain, but no sound came.

The water was all gone, had been gone since morning. His throat felt like sandpaper against raw, bleeding tissue.

He was cold, the shivers wracking his frame like seizures.

He was dying, he knew that, but he fought it. He wasn’t
ready
to die.

Lydia. He still had to get to Lydia.

Funny how one of the angels sounded just like her. Was that God’s idea of a joke—or was it meant to be a comfort? As the bright light came—and he had known it would, eventually—he didn’t even have the strength to shield his eyes. He simply opened the one good eye and looked up to see the heavenly beings that had finally arrived to carry him off before his time.

He had always thought that the light at death would be a single, divine
illumination. This wasn’t like that at all. This light came from many different sources, beams and flashes and every one of them causing him immense, wincing pain.

Wasn’t there supposed to be no pain in heaven?

Funny, but one of the angels even looked like Lydia, smelled like Lydia.

Wept like Lydia.

He blinked, wanting to understand why this moment was nothing like what he had expected of death. It was far more painful, far more real, far more desperate.

Angels looking like men came down and surrounded him and scooped him up, their faces those of his loved ones, their arms strong and sure. As he braced himself for their flight to heaven, instead he felt himself being carried sideways, toward more lights, another softer pair of hands supporting the back of his head. The lights they were approaching looked like the twin headlights of a car.

Were there cars in heaven? Were there sirens? Because he could hear sirens in the distance, no doubt.