Return to Harmony
Return
to
Harmony
Return to Harmony
Copyright © 1996
Janette Oke and Davis Bunn
Cover design by Jennifer Parker
Cover photography by Buck Holzemer, Minneapolis
Scripture quotations identified KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, MN 55438
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Oke, Janette, 1935–
Return to Harmony / Janette Oke [and] Davis Bunn.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-55661-878-9 (pbk.)
1. Friendship—Fiction. 2. North Carolina—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Bunn, T. Davis, 1952– . II. Title.
PR9199.3.O38R45 2010
813'. 54—dc22
2010016354
F
OR
J
EAN
With thankfulness to God
for the many shared dreams
laughter, tears, and treasures.
All that a sister was meant to be—
mentor, supporter, encourager,
and special friend.
JANETTE OKE has more than thirty million copies of her books in print. She has also won both the Gold Medallion Award and the Christy Award for fiction. Janette and her husband, Edward, live in Alberta, Canada.
DAVIS BUNN, the author of twenty bestsellers, has received numerous accolades, including three Christy Awards. He and his wife, Isabella, make their home near Oxford, England. Davis serves as Writer In Residence at Regent’s Park College, Oxford University.
Contents
Books by Janette Oke and Davis Bunn
JODIE RACED DOWN
the dusty street, her calico skirt gathered in one hand, the other trailing a piece of colored bunting. The broad ribbon streaming out behind her was a remnant of the parade marking President Woodrow Wilson’s reelection campaign. Her leather lace-up shoes still felt clumsy and awkward after almost a month of discomfort. She had received them for her thirteenth birthday, and it was a present which still rankled. Her mother had declared it was time for a proper young lady to have proper shoes, to quit all this running around barefoot, that she had given in to Jodie’s pleadings quite long enough. Good anklehigh lace-ups tied nice and firm were the answer, and it had not mattered how much Jodie complained. And she had complained quite a bit.
Jodie slowed her skipping at the sight of a vaguely familiar form. The smaller girl crouched on the bottom step of a porch, head bowed down on her knees, her shoulders bent and shaking.
The streamer settled unheeded into the dust of the sidewalk as Jodie approached the small figure. “What’s the matter?”
The young girl was sobbing so hard it took her a few minutes to get the words out. “I… found me a… a puppy,” she finally managed between hiccoughs.
Jodie hesitated a moment. Bethan Keane was as much a stranger as anyone near her own age could be in the town of Harmony. She was a quiet, shy little thing with a riot of copper curls around a small, pale face. She scarcely had the nerve to say she was there when the teacher called out her name. She was an easy target for teasing from the other kids, because she was so small and so quiet, and because of her eye. Bethan had a lazy eye, was what Jodie’s father had explained. Her father, who ran the town apothecary, knew all about things like that. How could an eye be lazy? Jodie wanted to know. But her father did not answer. He seldom had time for most of Jodie’s questions. Jodie had heard him tell a customer that if he answered even half of Jodie’s questions he would not have time for anything else. Now, as Jodie stood and looked down at Bethan’s sniffling little form, she saw how the left eye swam out to one side, just as though it really was lazy.
Jodie squatted down on the stoop beside Bethan. “Why does finding a puppy make you cry? Most kids would be—” she searched for the appropriate word, groping for one she had just heard her mother use, “eg-static.”
That opened the faucets up wide. “My momma won’t let me keep it. Not even for one night.”
So it was settled indeed, then. Bethan’s momma, Moira Keane, was known as a woman of her word. Jodie’s mother said that Moira’s severe exterior hid a heart of solid gold. Maybe so, her father had replied, but that exterior was about as yielding as the pit of a Georgia peach.
Jodie inspected the puppy, reaching out to touch the sides that shivered with excitement, or nervousness, and declared, “Sure is a scrawny little runt.”
“He’s hungry. I fed him some milk and meat scraps and a piece of bread, and he’s still hungry.”
One small hand stroked the puppy’s back. The bones of its spine jutted up through the soft fur, and every rib was clearly visible. “I think maybe he was ’bandoned.”
“Abandoned,” Jodie corrected, and examined the puppy with the experienced eye of a country girl with the added benefit of a father knowledgeable about medicine. The trembling little beast was a mongrel, probably part hound and certainly the runt of the litter. But the eyes were clear, and the dog looked intelligent and eager despite being so weak from hunger. “Can’t be more than a few months old,” she observed.
Bethan nodded and sniffed and wiped her eyes. Jodie noted that a pink ribbon from one of the girl’s braids was tied around the puppy’s neck. Every once in a while the puppy would sit down and work at it with one paw, but then would lose interest and return to staring at Bethan with adoring eyes. “Momma says I’ve got to let it go. But if I do, who will feed it?” she mourned.
Jodie gazed at Bethan, whose hand kept brushing at the puppy with such love and whose chin still trembled with her sorrow. Jodie felt herself touched in a way she couldn’t explain at the girl’s reluctance to put the small pup back out on his own with no one to tend to his needs—abandoned once more.
A shadow fell over them. “Hey, what’cha got?” Jodie looked up to find Kirsten Sloane staring at the puppy. Kirsten’s father ran the local butcher’s shop, and her mother was the sternest teacher in their school. She was the tallest girl in the class, bigger even than many of the boys, and somewhat of a snob and a tyrant. She took one look that swept in Jodie, Bethan, and the small puppy all in a glance, sneered at them, then turned to call back down the street, “Come look! The runt’s found herself a runt!”
Bethan’s chin quivered, but she kept her voice steady as she said, “Leave my puppy alone.”
Kirsten seemed to enjoy tormenting those smaller and weaker, and Bethan was often her favorite victim. Her eyes glinted as she reached for the little dog. “I can touch him if I want.”
Without thinking, Jodie coiled herself up and sprang at Kirsten. The larger girl was caught completely off guard and went sprawling in the dust. For one moment Jodie felt triumph, then surprise. She had not expected her effort to bring such immediate results. But the satisfaction soon turned to concern when she glimpsed an adult shape coming their way. She put on a contrite expression and reached down to Kirsten. “I’m sorry. Here—let me help you. I… I stumbled.”
Kirsten slapped the hand away and scrambled to her feet, fists clenched at her sides. “You did it on purpose! I’m gonna—”
“Here, here, what’s this?” Miss Charles, the new teacher at their school, was upon them in an instant. “Now just a minute, Kirsten.
Didn’t you hear Jodie tell you it was an accident?”
Jodie stepped back and breathed a sigh of relief. For reasons she could not quite understand, Miss Charles had taken an instant liking to her. The knowledge made her feel safe enough to say, in a slightly smug tone, “I don’t know what happened—I must have slipped.”
“Did not,” Kirsten hissed between her teeth. The look she turned on Jodie said clearly that she knew what had happened and was in no mind to let it pass without retribution, even though she felt unable to do anything about it at the moment.
“If I catch the slightest wind of anything more between you two,” the teacher said, reading the situation correctly, “I will take it up personally with your mothers. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”
Kirsten subsided to an angry scowl and Jodie lowered her eyes in submission and nodded slowly.
“I asked you a question,” Miss Charles said, turning to Kirsten and using her warning voice.
Kirsten gave a single nod, then turned and fled, shouting over her shoulder as she ran, “All right for
you
, Jodie Harland!”
Jodie turned back to Miss Charles and gave her a proper curtsey, something she ordinarily would have done only after pleadings from her mother. Or maybe a nickel from her dad. “Thank you, Miss Charles. I’m sorry to have disturbed your day.”
“Not at all, Jodie. I do hope this is the end of it.” She smiled at them both, turned her gaze on the swiftly vanishing Kirsten, then back to the two before her. “You girls have a nice afternoon, now.”
When the teacher had strolled on, Bethan turned to Jodie with eyes wide in surprise. “You did that for me?”
Jodie was a little surprised herself. “I couldn’t let Kirsten pick on you like that.”
“Thank you,” Bethan said, her voice little more than a whisper. Before Jodie could respond, she turned solemn and said, “But you fibbed to the teacher.”