Between Two Promises (27 page)

He skipped along the scenic pictures, pictures Aiden had taken of people and places for his freelance articles. He paused at the pictures of their cabin the first day they’d moved in. He missed the cabin already. Had Aiden really abandoned it?

There were even more pictures of them from their numerous hikes into Glacier. And the more recent photos of the both of them in the Swan Range. Their cheeks pressed together as they stood on an overlook with the Flathead Valley in the background. Aiden’s shussly snowman he’d been astonished to build out of August snow. The two of them squatting by their tent, Aiden’s arm outstretched as he took the photo, their faces creasing with smiles. Almost the exact way Elisabeth had sketched them. Aiden holding up a fish fry, no larger than an elm leaf, but he had never been prouder of his catch out of Black Lake using their makeshift rods. And Aiden’s eyes. He never tired of looking into those golden eyes.

Clutching the camera, which had captured a large chunk of their lives together, he had an urge to share the photos with someone. He yearned to reveal how much he loved Aiden Cermak.

Next he came to a photo that wiped the grin clear from his face. The spray-painted threat on Aiden’s door of the old bungalow he’d rented when he’d lived in Henry. And the picture of the splatter from the pumpkin someone had smashed against the front of the house. He was surprised Aiden still kept them saved on his camera.

He’d assumed Reverend Yoder had made those threats. Now, after his confrontation with him, he was sure he hadn’t. Maybe some angry local who despised homosexuals had been responsible. Was that what the threats had been about? Had they never had a connection to Kyle’s death?

Hopeless, he replaced Aiden’s camera in the front compartment of his laptop case. He was about to withdraw his hand when something inside caught his attention. An envelope. He pulled it out and turned it over in his hands.

Mark’s letter, inviting them both to the wedding.

Aiden had saved the letter since August and had brought it along with him to Illinois. But what for? Some kind of an affirmation as to why they were there, like a horse hitched to the shaft? Aiden’s head always ruminated with romantic, idealistic notions, Daniel mused, missing him more and more each minute.

He took the letter out of the envelope and, nearly brushing the thin paper against his beard, reread it for the first time since he’d retrieved it from the mailbox at the bottom of the gravel lane back in Montana.

Laying the letter in his lap, he shook his head. Aiden had probably wanted to save the letter for a keepsake. Yet Mark’s letter symbolized the entire demise of their relationship. A letter calling them back to Illinois, to celebrate the union of a man and woman, while his union had fallen in a heap to the ground like a broken bale of hay.

A letter had brought everything about. A harmless letter from one brother to another. A simple invitation to a wedding.

Had Mark sent the invitation knowing he and Aiden had been living together?

He was about to shove it back into the case when a second bi-folded piece of paper, pushed farther toward the bottom, grabbed his eye. Another letter Aiden had saved? Who was this one from? When he unfolded the crisp white note, written on the stationery of the Harvest Sunrise Inn Bed and Breakfast, he nearly fell backward and off the bed. In large block lettering in red ink, it read: I TOLD YOU ONCE, WON’T TELL YOU AGAIN – GET OUT OF TOWN!

Chapter Twenty-Three

I
NCREDULITY
raced along Daniel’s spine and down his arm, shaking the note in his hand like the leaves of a sycamore tree in a furious breeze.

He strived to compose his thoughts so that he might understand. To comprehend the events that had at some point unraveled right under his nose while he’d aimed desperately to spare Aiden from harm.

No wonder Aiden had fled town like a raven frightened from a field. Who could blame him? He had had enough. Of course Aiden wouldn’t have bothered telling Daniel about the note. Daniel had not provided Aiden with a single reason to seek his confidence. He had shown him almost no compassion. Pushing him away their entire stay in Henry. The rancid note had been the last straw.

If only he could hold and comfort Aiden.

Forcing himself to gaze at the note again, he wondered when Aiden had received it, and from whom. Had someone staying at the inn left it for him to find?

Tormented with despair, he finally let the note jitter loose from his broad fingertips. It lay by his boots like a dead bird, struck down in flight. Like his and Aiden’s relationship.

But something about the note ate at him more than its implications.

Looking down, he tilted his head and screwed up his eyes to read the note horizontally from the askew position against his boot. Something about the handwriting. He brought the note closer to his eyes. The lettering was near perfect. Angular block letters, all of them in capitals. Few people he knew wrote like that. Where had he seen handwriting like that before? Someplace recent.

He rustled through Aiden’s laptop case and clasped the digital camera. Skimming the photos again, he came to the frightening message spray painted on Aiden’s door. He compared the photograph with the note. They were written with the identical block lettering, he was certain. Was it possible the same person had wanted to finish what he had started more than a year before?

Dropping the camera onto the bed, he raced downstairs.

Where was it? On the counter. The shoebox with his mother’s labels. He grabbed it up and ran back upstairs.

He compared the handwriting on the shoebox with the note from the inn and the spray painted threat. Identical. At least they appeared to be. If only he had the threatening letter Aiden had received in his mailbox last year to make extra sure.

Prickling fear inched its way through Daniel’s entire body. He stiffened. Collecting his thoughts, he jumped from the bed and realized what he had to do.

“Daniel—” Elisabeth’s voice trailed after Daniel as he sped past her for the front door.

He stopped right before stepping outside, his jacket clenched in hand. Their eyes locked onto each other.

“Where are you going in such a hurry?” she asked him.

He could no longer lie to her. He wanted suddenly to tell her everything, to declare his love for Aiden. Shout loudly enough that the neighbors—even the ministers—would hear. Time for the falsehoods to stop.

Elisabeth continued to look at him, her eyes wide, almost frightened looking, yet the softness of her mouth encouraged him on.

“I’m going to find Aiden Cermak,” he said, unblinking.

“Then go,” Elisabeth said after a pause. “Go find him.”

He waited, wanting to say more. Needing to say more. To clarify any confusion or ambiguity about what he had meant. “We… we’re more than friends.” He looked at her straightly. “We… we been living together in Montana. I… I can’t live without him. He’s my world now. He’s everything to me. Everything I got.”

Elisabeth’s blue eyes gaped so wide he feared he might fall into them. For a moment, Daniel believed he and Aiden had misjudged her—like they had Reverend Yoder—that she had been ignorant about the depth of their relationship. She had drawn their portrait as one would any two friends. Nothing more. She was shaken and disgusted to hear such a confession from her brother. Then he saw her gaze fall over his right shoulder. He spun to look. Standing under the doorframe, his hat trembling in his hands, was his father.

D
ANIEL
turned back to face Elisabeth. The alarm in her eyes verified what he’d suspected. Their father had overheard everything.

Staring back at his father, knowing he had walked in on him in the same way Reverend Yoder had when he and Kyle had been kissing in the barn all those years ago, he shook in his boots. The return of the same nightmare.

Yet the terrible memory dashed through his mind like a magpie whooshing over the snow-blanketed farmland. The horror failed to well up inside him the way he had expected.

Alarm at seeing his father softened.

A buoyant gladness found its way inside his chest and tightened his throat as the sensation worked its way to his head, filling him with a breath of delight he hadn’t experienced since running across Aiden in Glacier National Park so unexpectedly back in June.

What struck him was the relief that massaged him—and how little his father’s dismayed expression bothered him.

With everything out in the open, he no longer agonized over the family discovering his secret. Indecisions evaporated out of the door and into the snowy sky.

Uncertainties and fears disappeared.

He wanted to be with Aiden Cermak, and no one could stop him. Not the ministers, not his father. Not his own reservations.

Wordless, he raced past Samuel, nearly pushing him into the doorframe, leaving behind the trademark wide-brimmed hat on the wall peg. Snow had begun to fall, and the tickling flakes on his nose annoyed him. He was about to rush into the barn for Gertrude when he discovered her already hitched to a buggy in the driveway. David was in the process of undoing her trace. Daniel stopped him. David backed away, bewilderment etched on his face. Daniel rebuckled the trace in a fury. In his peripheral gaze, Elisabeth stepped onto the porch, wearing what looked like a subtle grin. Samuel wobbled behind her, raking fingers down his scraggly, gray beard.

David strolled closer to him. “Daniel….”

Impatient, Daniel barked, “What?”

He stared at Daniel a moment, his mouth opened slightly, as if his words fought to part with his lips. “Are you… are you going to find Aiden?”

Daniel inhaled. Had young David pieced together everything? Or perhaps he had overheard too. Yanking firmly on Gertrude’s trace, Daniel looked long at David. Despite everything, he grinned.

“Go on,” he said, placing a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Go on and help Elisabeth and Dad with the afternoon chores.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

H
E
HAD
Gertrude at galloping speed, leaving the lane behind him in a plume of snow. Once on Henry’s main street, he slowed her to a reasonable pace. Observant of the English traffic laws, he impatiently waited for each blaring red light to change to green before continuing.

A few blocks from
The Henry Blade
, he parked Gertrude along the street, as close to the snow berm as possible. The village administrators frowned upon buggies parked along the street. They preferred the Amish to park their buggies in the slender side lots, out of the way of traffic, to prevent the horses from getting spooked. But Daniel paid no mind to that village ordinance.

He hitched Gertrude to a parking meter and hurried down the sidewalk, empty of pedestrians. Tormenting fears wrestled with him. He remembered that dream he’d had, the one in which the ferocious grizzly bear abducted Aiden. Was he jumping to conclusions? But the raking instincts scratched and scraped until the bloody images filled his head, and he was powerless to shake them loose.

The race down the sidewalk was like an endless trudge through a narrow tunnel. He saw little, heard little, perceived little of the snow and slush under his boots. Only his apprehensions, churning like the belt on a threshing machine, propelled him.

Relief stole his breath when he saw the bright fluorescent lights fill the window of the newspaper office. The hardworking newspaperman would be at work. He went to open the door, but to his surprise, it was locked. The cardboard Santa hanging from it seemed to mock him.

He peered inside the window, craning his neck to see through the frosty glare. No one was visible. Someone must be inside, due to the icy buildup. Human breath had iced over the cold windowpane. He pulled on the door lever some more. It would not give.

Breathless with determination, he banged on the door with his bare hands, leaving large-sized prints on the glass from the heat of his tight fists.

“Kevin Hassler, Kevin Hassler, you in there?” He pounded harder, craning his neck to get a better look inside. His heavy rapping dislodged the Santa from its adhesive, and it fell to the floor, sliding under a chair.