Hide in Plain Sight (14 page)

Andrea walked to the patio wall and surveyed the damage. She might be able to plant flowers, given enough instruction, but this she couldn’t fix. Disappointment filtered through her at Cal’s absence. She’d expected that today, of all times, he’d be here to help.

Well, he had a business to run. Once that would have been a guaranteed excuse, at least from her perspective. She’d changed, if all she could think was that he should be here.

Stepping over the patio wall, she began to gather the stones that were scattered across the grass. Maybe she couldn’t fix the wall, but she could make the area look a little neater.

The stones proved far heavier than she expected. She straightened her back, frowning at one particularly stubborn one.

“Take it easy.” Cal’s voice spun her around. “I’ll do that.” The bag he carried in one arm thudded against the wall.

“I thought you left.” Did she sound accusing?

“I went to get cement mix to repair the wall.” He lifted his eyebrows. “Not very complimentary that you thought I’d desert you this morning.”

She wasn’t sure what to say to that. “Well, you do have a business to take care of.”

“Friends come first,” he said shortly.

Are we friends, Cal? What would he say if she
blurted that out? She wasn’t sure she even wanted to hear the answer.

Movement beyond him on the lane distracted her. “What on earth…?”

Cal turned. “Looks like the Zook family think friends come first, too.”

Her breath caught, and tears welled in her eyes. Three buggies came down the lane, packed with people, and a large farm wagon bore so many flowers that it looked like a float in the homecoming parade.

She could only stand and stare for a moment. And then she bolted toward the house.

“Rachel! Rachel, come here this minute! You’re not going to believe this!”

Andrea sat back on her heels, admiring the snapdragons she’d just succeeded in planting with Nancy’s help.

“Looks good already.” Nancy, Emma’s daughter-in-law, smiled, brushing a strand of dark hair back into the neat coil under her prayer cap. “We brought enough flowers, I think.”

She nodded. They’d certainly brought enough help. Eli and Cal fitted the last stone into place on the wall, while Nancy’s small son stood by holding the bucket with cement. Nancy’s husband and another Amish man, their red shirts a bright contrast to black trousers, used a lawn roller to smooth out the ruts. The grass seemed to spring into place in their wake. And the flowers…

“You must have gotten up at dawn to dig all of these plants to bring. We can’t thank you enough for this.”

“We always get up at dawn,” Nancy said. “This is just being neighborly.”

All along the flower border figures knelt, setting out new plants to replace the ruined ones. Children ran back and forth, fetching and carrying, the girls with bonnet strings streaming, the boys small replicas of the men.

Funny. When she’d spread the Sunshine and Shadows quilt over her bed this morning, she’d felt that they were locked into a dark stripe. Now the sun had come out. She glanced at Cal, who seemed to be keeping himself busy well away from her. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that the dark was interwoven with the bright.

A time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted.

A clatter of spoon against pan sounded. Emma stood in the doorway. Her face was still red and painful-looking, but she’d arrived with the others and marched into the kitchen. “Breakfast when you are finished. The flowers must be in before the sun is high.” She vanished back inside.

The comment seemed to inspire a fresh burst of industry. Nancy handed her another flat of blooms. “Impatiens,” she said. “Along where it’s shady.”

Andrea nodded. The move brought her next to Levi, who was setting out clumps of coralbells. When he saw her, his round blue eyes became even rounder.

“Hi, Levi. Thanks for helping.” In the light of day, her suspicions of him seemed silly. Levi was, as he’d always been, an innocent child at heart.

He ducked his head, coloring a little. “Help is good.” He seemed to struggle with the words, and she realized he’d be far more comfortable with the language of the home. Unfortunately, she’d forgotten whatever German she’d learned as a child.

“Yes. You’re good neighbors.”

He stared at her, and she saw to her horror that his eyes were filling with tears. “Sorry. Sorry.”

He scrambled to his feet, arms flailing awkwardly, and ran toward the barn.

She was still staring after him when Nancy knelt next to her, picking up the trowel he’d dropped and finishing the planting in a few deft movements. “It makes no trouble. Levi will be fine. One of the children will get him when it’s time to eat.”

“I didn’t mean to upset him.”

“He’s been—” she paused, seeming to search for a word “—funny, just lately. He’ll be all right.”

“You don’t know what’s causing it?”

Nancy shrugged. “He doesn’t talk so much. Sooner or later he will tell his mother, and she will make it right. Some simple thing, most likely.”

Nancy was probably right. She certainly knew Levi better than Andrea did.

Still, she couldn’t help but wonder. Why had Levi begun to cry at the sight of her? And why had he said he was sorry?

C
al pulled into the driveway and stopped close to the back garden. He’d seen Rachel mourning over the pieces of the birdbath earlier. The one he’d found at the garden store out toward Lancaster should be a decent replacement.

He got the wheelbarrow from the utility shed in the garage, struggling to manage it. Even with his wrist taped, using that hand was awkward. Lucky it wasn’t the right, or he’d be out of work until it healed.

Andrea emerged onto the patio, carrying a watering can. She checked at the sight of him, then waved and began sprinkling the potted plants along the edge of the patio.

Maybe Andrea hadn’t quite figured out what had changed between them last night, either. He hefted the birdbath onto the wheelbarrow with one hand. They were both trying to look busy, which probably meant they were both confused.

During those moments when they’d fought for their lives, there hadn’t been time to think, only to act and feel. Trouble was, he felt too much.

Lord, does it make any sense at all for me to fall for someone like Andrea? If You’ve taught me anything in the past year, isn’t it that this is the life that’s right for me? Andrea could never be content with that. She’s itching to race back to the city the minute she’s free.

If he told her what he felt—but that could only lead to pain and awkwardness between them.

He was maneuvering the birdbath into place when Andrea caught the opposite side and helped him.

“This is lovely. Where did you find it?”

“Little place over toward Lancaster.” If he looked at her, he might weaken, so it was better to concentrate on getting the birdbath into exactly the right spot. “I thought it would please Rachel.”

“She’ll be delighted.” Her tone had cooled in response to his.

He hated that. But wasn’t it better for both of them in the long run? Why start something that could only end badly?

Andrea touched a scalloped edge. “About last night…”

He tensed, but before she could say anything else, a buggy came down the drive, the horse driven at a fast trot. “It’s Eli.” He went to meet the buggy, aware of Andrea hurrying beside him.

Eli pulled up. “Have you seen our Levi since this morning?”

“No, not since we were working on the lawn.” He glanced at Andrea, and she shook her head. “Is something wrong?”

“No one has seen him all day.” The lines of his face
deepened. “That’s not like him. He never goes far, and he always tells his mother. We are starting a search.”

Cal glanced at his watch. Nearly five. Levi had been missing for something like seven hours.

“What can we do to help?” Andrea said.

“Search all your buildings. And pray.”

“We’ll do both,” he said quickly. “If we spot him, we’ll ring the bell.” He nodded toward the old-fashioned dinner bell that hung next to the kitchen door.

“I must tell the other neighbors.” Eli was already turning the buggy, and he rolled off without another word. The Amish habit of leaving off the niceties of conversation could seem abrupt, but it was certainly understandable now.

Andrea glanced toward the house. “Grams and Rachel are resting, and they wouldn’t be much help in any event.”

He headed for the garage. “They don’t need to know yet. We can start at this end and work our way out toward the barn.”

While he checked the cars and the garage loft, Andrea opened the door to the attached utility shed.

By the time he came back down, she was dusting her hands off. “Nothing in there but a lot of spiderwebs.” She hesitated a moment, as if something was on her mind. “You know, Levi was a little odd this morning.”

“Odd in what way?” He headed for the old brooder coop, which stood next in the line of outbuildings.

“He was upset when he realized I was working next to him.” She seemed to be choosing her words carefully. “I tried to talk to him, but all he’d say was that he was sorry. Then he ran off, almost in tears.”

“You didn’t get a sense of what it was all about?”

She shook her head. “When I mentioned it to Nancy, she said he’d been withdrawn lately, but she didn’t take it seriously.”

“What could he have been sorry for? For what happened last night?”

“I don’t know.” She brushed her hair free of the collar of her shirt with an irritated movement. “Does that seem very likely? He doesn’t know how to drive, does he?”

He flung open the door of the brooder coop. It was packed solidly with furniture. “A mouse couldn’t hide in here.” He closed the door again. “I wouldn’t think Levi could drive, but a surprising number of Amish people can. Learn when they are teens, most of them. What direction did Levi head when he ran off?”

“Toward the barn—yours, not the old one. But wouldn’t you have seen him if he were there?”

“I haven’t been in all day. Too much else to do. Maybe we’d better check there next.”

She nodded, trotting beside him as he quickened his pace. It wasn’t the first time Levi had wandered off, but he didn’t generally go farther than the Unger place. Levi could have decided to take refuge in the barn, he supposed, hiding from some imagined misdeed.

They hurried up the earthen ramp, and he pulled the door open.

“Levi! Levi, are you in here?” The words echoed in the barn’s lofty spaces.

Andrea grabbed his arm. “The trapdoor to the lower level. It’s open.”

He swung around, following the direction of her pointing finger. The hatch, used long ago to throw hay down to the stalls in the lower level, was always kept closed and bolted. Now it yawned open.

He was there in an instant, bending to peer down into the shadowy depths. His heart jolted into overtime.

Levi lay on the floor below, arms outstretched, blood darkening the straw beneath his head. His hands were open, palm up, and next to his right hand, glinting in the shaft of sunlight that pierced the dimness, lay a ring of car keys.

Andrea sat on the plastic chair in the hospital waiting room. She glanced at her watch. How much longer? Surely the doctors knew something by now. At least they’d been given this secluded room in which to wait, rather than sitting out in the open where others could stare at the quaintly dressed Amish.

Grams sat bolt upright on her chair, as if to show any sign of weakness would be a betrayal. She had her arm around Emma, who wept softly into a handkerchief. Nancy sat on Emma’s other side, having left the children with Rachel, who’d been quick to say she’d be more trouble than she was worth at the hospital.

Men clustered in a group in the far corner, drinking coffee and talking in low voices. Every now and then the door opened and more Amish appeared, quickly segregating themselves by sexes. A carryover from their separation in church or simply a male desire to be as far away as possible from female tears.

The men’s black jackets, the women’s black bonnets
seemed almost a sign of mourning. She shook off that thought. Levi would be all right. He’d been breathing on his own when they brought him in. That was a good sign, wasn’t it?

Each time the door opened, all eyes went to it. Each time, Emma sobbed a bit more.

“I don’t understand.” Emma’s wail was loud enough to startle even the men. “Why did Levi go to the barn? How did he fall?”

Grams took the twisting hands in hers. “We’ll know when he’s well enough to tell you,” she said firmly.

Eli came to his wife and patted her awkwardly on the shoulder. “We must accept,” he said. “It is God’s will.”

Was it? The questions that had hovered at the back of Andrea’s mind since she and Cal found Levi forced their way to the front. Her eyes sought out Cal. He was filling his foam cup at the coffee urn, but, as if he felt her gaze on him, he looked up and brought the cup to her.

“Have some. I know it’s awful, but at least it’s hot.”

She took the cup, rising and moving toward the window, where they had the illusion of privacy. “Do you really believe Levi could have driven that truck?” She kept her voice low.

He glanced toward the group around Eli before answering. “It’s starting to look that way. Samuel admits that Levi was fascinated by cars. He thinks some of the local teenagers might have thought it was funny to show him.” He shook his head. “I just can’t figure out how he’d get away from home last night. Emma has been keeping pretty close tabs on him.”

“She has, but she was probably exhausted. I don’t see how he’d have gotten the keys if he didn’t do it. Unless the driver dropped them someplace and he picked them up. And assuming they’re the keys to the truck.”

“Maybe we’re going to find out.”

The door had swung open again. This time it was Chief Burkhalter. He glanced around the room, seeming surprised to find it so crowded.

“Any word yet on the boy’s condition?” He directed the question to Eli.

Eli shook his head. His normally ruddy face was gray with pain. “The doctor will come when they’ve finished, he said.”

“In that case…” His gaze singled out the two of them. “Maybe you’d step outside so we can have a word, since you found him.”

She was grateful for Cal’s hand on her back as they followed Burkhalter out into the hallway, knowing everyone watched them go. In the corridor, he gestured them into a room a few doors away.

It was a replica of the other waiting room with its pale green walls and generic landscapes. The chairs looked just as uncomfortable. Burkhalter jerked three of them into a circle. At his commanding look, they sat.

She had nothing to feel guilty about, did she? So why did she feel as if she wanted to look anywhere except into Burkhalter’s face?

“Tell me about finding him.”

Cal nodded. “Eli came over to tell us he was missing and asked us to search the property. Ms. Hampton and
I happened to be out in the garden at the time. We started searching the outbuildings.”

“It didn’t occur to you to look in the inn first?”

Andrea blinked. “I suppose I knew it was unlikely Levi would go inside. He’s—well, skittish around strangers.” She thought of the rabbits that looked askance when she came out onto the lawn and hopped quickly away.

“So you started searching. What took you to the barn?”

“I remembered that he had gone that way when he left the group that was repairing the damage from last night.” She closed her mouth, reluctant to say anything that might contribute to his suspicion.

“Did you talk to him at all this morning?” The man seemed to have radar for evasions.

“Yes, a little. He seemed upset.” She darted a glance toward Cal, but he couldn’t help her. “He said he was sorry.”

“Sorry about what?” Burkhalter’s response was like the crack of a whip.

“He didn’t say. He ran off.” She shook her head to forestall any questions. “There’s no point in asking me anything else. That’s all I know. I remembered he went toward the barn, so we went there. We saw the trapdoor open.” Her voice shook a little, and Cal’s hand closed hard over hers. “We found him.”

Burkhalter transferred his gaze to Cal. “That trapdoor. You always leave it open?”

“No. I always keep it closed and bolted.”

“What did you do after you spotted him?”

“Called paramedics. Went down to see if we could
help him.” Cal had apparently decided he could be as laconic as Burkhalter.

“I ran back to the house to ring the dinner bell,” she said. “We’d agreed that’s what we’d do if we found him.”

Burkhalter nodded, his gaze fixed on her face. “You know, Ms. Hampton, whenever the police get called in, people get choosy about what they say. Mostly it’s innocent enough, but they don’t want to say more than they have to. Wouldn’t you agree, Counselor?”

If Cal was surprised that the chief knew about his past, he didn’t betray it. “Maybe so, if they think it’s unimportant.”

“Cops get so they have a sense when someone’s hiding something.” He turned on Andrea. “How about it, Ms. Hampton? What aren’t you telling me?”

She blinked. He really did have radar. “It’s nothing.”

“Tell me anyway, and let me decide if it’s nothing.”

She brushed the hair back from her face. She had no choice, and surely nothing she said could make matters any worse now.

“There was another incident, after the prowler call. I was locked in the downstairs pantry. I thought it was an accident—maybe I bumped the door myself.”

“And what else?”

“One night when it was storming, I went to close the windows. I saw someone standing out on the lawn, watching the house.” She hesitated. “It appeared to be a man in Amish clothing. I couldn’t identify him any further.”

“She called me,” Cal said. “I came over—didn’t catch him, but I found the place where he’d been
standing. Judging by the way the grass was trampled, he’d been there for quite a while.”

Burkhalter made a show of consulting a small notebook. “I understand your housekeeper had an accident with the stove.”

“Yes.” Levi wouldn’t do anything to hurt his own mother. Surely Burkhalter could see that. “The repairman couldn’t say whether someone had tampered with it or not. It could have been an accident.”

“Quite a string of bad luck you folks have been having,” he observed.

She waited for him to probe more deeply, but to her surprise, he rose.

“You can join the others, if you like.”

“Chief.” Cal’s voice stopped him at the doorway. “Those keys—were they the keys to the stolen truck?”

He didn’t move for a moment. Would he answer?

“Yes,” he said. “They were.”

The stack of green ledgers in the middle of the library desk gave Andrea pause. Rachel, searching in the lower kitchen cabinets for a bundt cake pan, had unearthed yet another batch of Grandfather’s records that she’d put away in an unlikely place. Andrea had delivered a lecture on organization, but doubted whether it would do any good.

Andrea pushed the ledgers to one side and switched on the computer, feeling too tired to deal with much of anything this morning. The doctors had come out at last and announced that Levi had a severe concussion and several broken ribs, but would mend. Emma’s tears had
turned to rejoicing, and the bishop, a local farmer named Christian Lapp, led a lengthy prayer of thanksgiving.