The Search (10 page)

She stood still for a moment. Ohio summers were even hotter, lacking the fresh breeze that seemed to always come through Stoney Ridge. There was just a sliver of a moon and the night was not totally black. She could make out vague shapes: the henhouse, the barn, the greenhouse, the cherry trees.

Blackie slid out of nowhere and wove himself between her legs. Bess picked him up. “You’re getting fat! You must be feasting on barn mice.”

Blackie jumped down and oozed away, insulted.

She looked up at the velvety night sky, filled with star diamonds. It was a peaceful time. She still went back and forth about being there, but tonight she was glad to be here in Stoney Ridge with her grandmother.

She thought of the things she had already learned to do this summer: how to pick roses and get rid of aphids, how to dry rose petals to make tea and jam, how to make rose water. And how to make a fair profit. How to bake a cherry pie. Mammi told her that was just the beginning of things she needed to learn.

How much more learning can I take?
she wondered as she rubbed her head.

Later that week, Mammi made one more valiant effort to steal the sheriff’s car. Bess tried to talk her out of it all the way into Stoney Ridge, but Mammi went right on merrily ahead with her plan.

“But why, Mammi? You’re going to give that sheriff a heart attack! Why would you want to kill the poor man?”

Mammi set her jaw in that stubborn way and wouldn’t answer.

This time, as Bess coaxed the sheriff’s car slowly onto the road, Mammi flipped a switch and the siren went on. In the rearview mirror, Bess saw the sheriff run out of the bank and into the road. She pulled the car over and hung her head. Her grandmother was certifiably crazy and she was the accomplice.

The sheriff opened the passenger door for Mammi and helped her out. “Miz Riehl, you are turning into a one-woman crime wave.”

Mammi’s eyes were circles of astonishment. Stoically, she stiffened her arms and offered her wrists to the sheriff for handcuffing. “Do what you must, Johnny.”

Now a crowd started to gather. The sheriff paled. “Aw, Miz Riehl, don’t make me do this.”

“You are sworn to uphold the law.” Mammi clucked her tongue. “Think of all them voters, watching their tax dollars at work. You can’t be playing favorites.”

“Dadblast it, Miz Riehl! If I didn’t know better, I would say you are trying to get yourself thrown in the clink.” His face was shading purple.

“Nothing of the sort! But I do get one phone call.”

The sheriff narrowed his eyes and thought hard for a moment. “Get in the patrol car, Miz Riehl. You too, missy.” He meant Bess.

Mammi slid into the back of the patrol car and patted on the seat beside her for Bess. Bess wanted to die, right there on the spot. But Mammi looked as content as a cat sitting in cream.

The sheriff drove them to his office and took them inside. He pointed to two chairs by his desk. “Can I get you two anything to drink?”

“Nothing for me,” Mammi said politely, lowering herself into a chair, “but my Bess here would like a soda pop.”

Bess didn’t want a soda pop, the way her stomach was turning itself inside out. The sheriff went to the back of his office and brought back a warm Tab. He eased himself down into his chair and leaned back, lacing his fingers behind his head. “Now, Miz Riehl. Let’s cut the cackle and come straight to the point. Who do you want to call?”

“Oh, I don’t want to call anyone,” Mammi said. She pointed at him. “But you can call someone.”

The sheriff picked up the receiver. “What’s the number?”

Mammi turned to Bess. “What’s the phone number to Jonah’s barn?”

Bess’s jaw dropped open. “Oh no, Mammi, no! You can’t tell Dad about us getting arrested! He’ll be on the next bus to Stoney Ridge!”

Mammi pushed a few loose gray wisps of hair back into her prayer cap. “Do tell.”

______

As Jonah hung up the phone on the wall of the workshop in his barn, he had to sit down. He couldn’t believe what he had just heard from the sheriff. His mother and his daughter were in jail for stealing a police car. In jail! If he hadn’t recognized the sheriff’s voice, he would have even thought it might be a prank call. Bess had been in Stoney Ridge for only a few weeks. What in blazes had been going on back there?

He had to get there. He had to go, get Bess, and bring her home. As soon as possible. The thought of his precious daughter locked up in a city jail, surrounded by drug addicts and cat burglars and pickpockets and murderers, sickened him. He shuddered. Then he had a comforting thought. No one would bother her as long as his mother was nearby.

He went in search of Mose to tell him that he would be in charge of the furniture business for the next few days.

When Mammi and Bess returned to Rose Hill Farm that afternoon, freed from the sheriff after promising that they would stop taking his car, they found a bucket of water sitting on the porch, two big catfish, mad as hornets, swimming inside. “They are sure ugly fish,” Mammi said, “but they make good eatings.” She picked up the bucket and took it in the house, but turned toward Bess at the door. “My ladies need feeding. And take the big pail for eggs. Lift
every
hen.”

Bess always gathered every one she found, but maybe some days she didn’t look as hard as she might. She picked up the pail by the kitchen door and turned to Mammi. “Aren’t you wondering where those fish came from?”

“Billy left ’em,” Mammi said. “He’s done it before.”

Bess took off her big black bonnet and hung it on the porch railing. She walked across the yard to the henhouse, cataloging her woes. Her father, understandably, had been astounded to hear that she was at the police station and said he was on his way to Stoney Ridge. He would probably be here by morning, if not late tonight, to take her home. Just when she was starting to feel encouraged about her developing friendship with Billy Lapp.

On the buggy ride back to Rose Hill Farm, Bess had fought back tears. She asked her grandmother, why didn’t she just say she wanted to send her home? Why go to all that trouble to aggravate the poor sheriff?

Mammi gave her a look of pure astonishment. “I
don’t
want you going home.” She turned her gaze to the back of the horse. “I want my boy to
come
home.”

“But why?”

“It’s high time.” Then her jaw clamped shut in Mammi’s own stubborn way and she didn’t give up another word all the way home.

What troubled Bess the most was that she understood Mammi’s logic. In fact, even more worrisome, she thought it was pretty smart. Her father wouldn’t have come back to Stoney Ridge under any other circumstance than an emergency. And finding out his daughter was thrown in jail for stealing a sheriff’s car would definitely constitute an emergency.

She got a scoop of cracked corn from the feed bin and tossed it around the ground as the chickens tried to peck at her bare toes. Life just wasn’t fair, wasn’t fair at all. Under the late afternoon sky, all life seemed wrung out.

From the kitchen window came the smell of catfish sizzling in the frying pan. Suddenly, Billy came flying out of the barn, pounding for the house, face first, bellowing like a calf, “No! No! Don’t eat it!”

With eyes as big as quarters, Bess watched him jump the steps into the kitchen. She threw the corn on the ground and ran up to the house. Inside, Billy grabbed the frying pan from a startled Mammi and tossed it into the sink. Then he yelped in pain, “Eyeow!” and hopped on one leg. He had burnt his hands from picking up the pan without a rag.

With unusual presence of mind, Bess thrust his hands in the bucket of water the catfish had been in. “
What
is the matter with you?”

He yanked his hands up and she pushed them back in the water. “Those fish. Something’s wrong with them. I shouldn’t have left ’em on the porch, but that black cat of Bess’s was eyeing them in the barn.”

“What makes you think something is wrong with them?” Bess asked. She was putting ice from the icebox into a rag and tying it up to make an ice pack.

“Didn’t you see them?” he asked.

“They were just as ugly as any other catfish,” Mammi offered.

“They didn’t have whiskers,” he said, taking the ice pack that Bess offered to him. He leaned against the counter, holding the ice pack between his hands. “And one was missing its eyes. A few weeks ago Bess noticed that birds weren’t singing at the lake. So I’ve been back a few times. She’s right. There’s no birds up there anymore. And this time, I found these fish up on the shore, practically dead. Something’s wrong with that lake.”

“Blue Lake Pond?” Mammi put a hand against her chest. “That place is teeming with wildlife. My Samuel used to say he only needed to hold out a pail on the shore and fish would jump in.”

“Not anymore,” Billy said mournfully.

“What were you planning to do with the catfish?” Bess asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I hadn’t gotten that far.”

“Something like that happened in Berlin. A company dumped chemicals in a lake. Birds ate the fish and they ended up with strange-looking babies.”

Billy’s dark eyebrows shot up. “Someone is
polluting
the lake.”

“Maybe so,” Bess said. “But you need proof.” She held up some B&W salve to put on his hands.

He held out his palms. “I don’t know what shocks me more.” He looked at Bess as she put a dab of salve on his hands. “Someone ruining my lake—” he gave her a sly grin—“or hearing you speak a full entire paragraph that makes sense.”

Mammi snorted. “Come around here for breakfast sometime. She babbles like a brook. A person can hardly drink a cup of coffee in peace.”

Bess wrapped a rag around Billy’s hand and tied it so tight he yelped like a snake bit him and yanked it away from her.

“So how am I going to get some evidence that someone is polluting my lake?” he asked.

Bess put the salve back in the kitchen drawer. “You have to go out there and look for tracks. Maybe even stay out there awhile and watch, at different times of the day. Even at night.”

“Trapping!” Mammi said happily, clapping her big red hands together. “Haven’t gone trapping in years. Used to be my favorite thing in the world. We’ll go tonight.”

Later that evening, Jonah Riehl was on the bus heading to Pennsylvania. He gave Mose a note to give to Sallie, telling her he had a sudden errand to attend to. He didn’t explain the circumstances. He felt too ashamed of what had happened. He leaned against the window on the bus and tried to sleep, but his thoughts kept him awake. He had been back in Stoney Ridge only once in the last fifteen years—for his father’s funeral—since he left it that year after Rebecca died.

It was the trial that made him decide to leave Stoney Ridge for good.

The truck driver who crashed into the buggy, killing Rebecca, had been driving under the influence of alcohol that night. Jonah had to testify against him. It tore Jonah up—he was grieving so deeply for his Rebecca, yet he couldn’t ignore the anguish in the truck driver’s eyes. He saw the driver’s wife at the trial every single day, looking as if she was barely holding herself together in one piece. Who was he to ever judge another man? If he couldn’t forgive that man for what he had done, how could he ever expect God to forgive him? In a letter presented by Jonah’s bishop, he had asked the judge for mercy. “He has suffered, and suffered heavily. It was a tragedy, not a crime. Sending the defendant to prison would serve no good purpose, and I plead leniency for him.”

The state was less generous. The truck driver was sentenced to six years in prison for reckless driving and involuntary manslaughter.

Jonah also asked the judge to dismiss a petition for a wrongful death settlement because he was receiving all the financial help he needed from the church. The judge looked at him as if he thought Jonah might have endured more than broken bones in the accident—maybe he had been brain damaged.

The insurance company representing the truck that had struck their buggy and killed Rebecca had offered Jonah a settlement of $150,000. Jonah returned the check to the insurance company with a statement: “I’m not seeking revenge. Our Bible says revenge is not for us.”

Someone in the insurance company, astounded by Jonah’s letter and returned check, leaked it to the press. Newspaper writers and photographers swarmed to Rose Hill Farm like bees to a flower. Jonah couldn’t even go out of his house without someone trying to take his picture and ask for comments. He thought it would blow over, but the story was picked up and reported across the nation. He received hundreds of letters expressing sympathy. And then ordinary folks started arriving at Rose Hill Farm, knocking on their door and wanting to see Bess. That was when he couldn’t take it any longer. Every day brought reminders of what he had lost. It was just too painful to stay in Stoney Ridge. Even more so because he knew better. His people were known for yielding and accepting God’s will. Yet, deep inside, he was angry with God for what had happened. It made it worse still for him to be among his people and feel like an outsider.

His father understood why he had to move, but his mother didn’t. She felt that family belonged together, through thick or thin. Maybe that was why he agreed to let Bess go this summer. It was time to smooth things out with his mother.

His eyes jerked open. How could he possibly smooth things out when his mother got his daughter tossed into jail?

When a round and creamy moon rose above the barn later that evening, Billy came back to Rose Hill Farm to pick up Mammi and Bess in his open courting buggy. It was so small that it tilted to one side when Mammi climbed up on it. Bess was squished between Mammi and Billy and tried not to notice how good Billy smelled—like pine soap. He led the horse up to the turnoff to the lake and drove the buggy to the edge of the trees. Then he hopped out. “I thought we would walk the perimeter and see if we find anything out of the ordinary.”

Bess climbed out behind him.

“I’d better stay alert for us all and keep a lookout on things at this end of the lake,” Mammi said, stretching out in the buggy seat. She yawned. “I’ve got eyes like an eagle and ears like an Indian scout.” She dropped right off.

Billy and Bess had hardly gone a few hundred yards when they heard the rhythm of Mammi’s snores echoing off the still lake water.

“She’s as loud as an air compressor,” Billy said.

“This is just the prelude snore,” Bess said. “Wait till you hear what it sounds like when she’s sleeping deep. She rattles the windows. And if you think that’s loud, you should stand clear of her sneezes. If I sneezed like Mammi did, I would fly apart.”

A laugh burst out of Billy and he stopped to turn around and look at Bess, amazed. “It’s nice to hear you finally talking, Bess. Kinda made me nervous at first when I thought we were going to be stuck picking rose petals together all summer.”

Bess’s knees suddenly felt as quivery as Mammi’s green Jell-O salad. Her heart was pounding so loudly she was sure it drowned out her grandmother’s snores. She hurried to keep up with Billy’s long strides. There weren’t many perfect moments in life, she thought happily, but this was surely one of them. Here she was with Billy Lapp, on a moonlit summer night, at a beautiful lake.

“Whatever happened with that lake in Berlin?” Billy said, turning his head slightly to call back to her.

Oh.
Apparently she wasn’t exactly on the top of his mind like he was on hers. “Well, someone found out it was the chemical company that was dumping their waste in the lake. So then the state of Ohio got involved and the chemical company was fined a bunch of money and had to clean up the lake. Took a few years to come back, but now it’s just like it was before.”

“How did the state of Ohio get involved?” Billy asked.

“I guess someone notified the police.”

Billy stopped abruptly. “Oh,” he said flatly. He looked crestfallen.

“What’s the matter?”

“Even if we found something tonight, I’m not sure what I would do with the information. You know I can’t go running to the police.”