Fearless Hope: A Novel (13 page)

“Then I will take care of it.” The bishop’s jaw was clenched as he strode away.

Hope felt sorry for anyone who was part of a church district not overseen by Bishop Schrock. He was a true shepherd, not only in name, but in his deeds. The Lord had given them a great gift when Bishop Schrock was chosen by lot to become their leader.

•  •  •

Logan was once again struggling to get some pages finished on his latest thriller. It wasn’t great writing, but he was at least able to push the plot along. It was Sunday and there was no place to go and nothing to do. The antiques shop and all the other shops were closed, and so were the restaurants.

There was nothing to do except wrestle with his laptop and get his word count up. Two thousand words was the assignment he had given himself this morning. He’d achieved that, but they were not particularly good words. With the word-count function at the bottom of the screen, he had to fight to keep himself from checking his progress every few sentences.

If he
ever
got this last novel in the series finished, he might never begin another one. The only writing he seemed to enjoy these days was the WWII story he had started at Violet’s, which he pounded out on that antique typewriter, where there was no word count to check, only the satisfaction of completed pages piling up.

Word had gotten out soon after about what he was doing, and other elderly men and women began to come in to see him. They sat at the round claw-foot table, drinking Violet’s tea, and told him their stories. To his knowledge, none of them knew that he was a professional writer, and yet their need to tell their stories was so great, they didn’t seem to care. They simply seemed grateful for a listening ear. They liked having someone pay attention to the fact that their lives had mattered.

“I was a nurse in London.” One precious lady in her late nineties had chatted with him only yesterday about her experience in the war. She’d lain propped upon pillows on her bed at the nursing home, gazing at a picture of her husband that someone had hung for her on the opposite wall. She had been a war bride whom a local soldier had brought back to Holmes
County, and she still had a lovely English accent. “I worked at the hospital during a time when the German bombers were being quite . . . energetic.”

“How did you feel about everything that was going on?” he asked.

“Pardon?” She leaned forward to hear him better.

He repeated his question. “How did you feel about the air raids, the rubble, the danger?”

“How did I
feel
?” She glared at him with faded blue eyes. “There was no time to
feel
, young man! We had too much
work
to do! If we had stopped to
feel
, we would never have won the war!”

His fingers flew, trying to get the strength and dignity of that woman’s conversation down on paper.

As he worked, and his typewriter story grew and deepened, the less interested he became in the novels that had made him famous. Still, he labored on, trying to fulfill his contract. Punching words into his laptop each evening. Following the script. Following the template. His heart just wasn’t in it.

There was no script or template for the WWII story. It was creativity at a level he’d never experienced before. Blending the old with the new. Fictionalizing people’s real-life experiences, but remaining true to the values they had expressed.

What had once represented a sort of playtime and a way to get past his writer’s block was quickly becoming an obsession. The stack of pages accumulated on that old claw-foot table.

The more people he talked to, the more a part of the community he felt he was becoming. The older generation had families who began to recognize him and greet him on the street and in the stores. He wasn’t Nate Scott to them. He was just Logan Parker, a slightly eccentric outsider whom Violet—a woman who had taught English to half the people in the county—had taken under her wing and thought might
have the potential to become a good writer. If he really applied himself.

He was thoroughly enjoying his new life . . . except for the book that was due soon, which he did
not
want to write.

Two thousand words were plenty for one day. Now what could he do? Normally he would have worked around the house, except that Hope had already taken care of everything. All was tidy. All in good repair. Even the mousetraps were set.

The girl seemed happy to have so much as a spoon to wash these days. He would have to work even harder at giving her something to do. It was a strange situation to be in. He had begun to deliberately scatter things around just to give her something to pick up and put away. He didn’t want to lose her, and he was fairly certain she was the kind of person who would not take money without first doing what she considered an honest day’s work.

The rain had finally stopped. He decided to take a long walk. This January had been warmer than normal, and exceptionally rainy.

He came in an hour later from a long tromp in the woods, exhilarated from the exercise. Hiking on his own property was much more fun than walking on a treadmill in the gym.

At the door, he stopped to wipe the mud off his feet and then thought better of it. Tracking in dirt might give Hope all of ten minutes of mopping to do tomorrow.

He pulled off his damp sweater. He hadn’t talked to his mother in a couple of weeks because she was involved in a high-profile case that was keeping her and her firm ultrabusy, but she usually gave herself a break on Sundays if at all possible, no matter what else was going on.

He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was eleven o’clock. If she’d gone to St. Patrick’s this morning, she would be back by now and having her second cup of coffee. When he was
younger, she would have spent part of the morning with several Sunday newspapers scattered about, but these days she read her
New York Times
and
Wall Street Journal
online. It should be a good time to call. He went out on the front porch, where the reception on his cell phone was best.

He had continued to come up against things that felt familiar to him, curves in the road where the feeling of having been there before would hit yet again, the inside of the country store in nearby Trail, where he stopped to purchase some of their famous bologna. He had begun to wonder if maybe he
had
been here at one time during his childhood. It was the only thing that made sense. It was normal for a person to have déjà vu from time to time, but not this often or this intensely.

He had even slowly worked his way off his antidepressant medication, wondering if it had been somehow causing this—but the feelings of strange familiarity still did not go away.

The sound of his mother’s smoky drawl made him smile. She had given up cigarettes years ago, but all that smoking had left a permanent roughness to her voice. She tended to speak slowly, and with a certain built-in sarcasm. It worked well in the courtroom, and made her stand out in a city that moved and talked fast. With him, though, there was never any sarcasm. She was all mother, all the time. As he’d grown older, she’d become one of his closest friends.

“Logan. It is
so
good to hear from you.” The instant she realized it was him, a smile wrapped itself around her words.

“Is the case going well?”

“We won!” she crowed.

“Congratulations.” The woman was deadly when it came to protecting her clients.

“So how are you getting along?” He heard her take a sip of coffee.

His mother had a need for coffee that rivaled even his own.
In fact, sometimes he thought it rivaled normal people’s need for oxygen. She said it took the place of cigarettes.

“Getting words down on the page as usual.” It was his stock answer, but evidently she heard something in his voice that made her dig deeper.

“What’s wrong?”

“Can you remember if I was ever in Holmes County as a child?”

There was a long silence on the other end of the phone.

“Mother? Are you still there?”

“I’m still here, darling,” his mother said. “I’m just trying to remember. No, I don’t think so.”

“Did Grandmother ever take me on vacation here by any chance?”

“My mother?” She gave a throaty chuckle. “Hardly. If your grandmother took a vacation, it was always to Europe.”

His grandmother had been a painter, and had spent a great deal of her time in Paris. He, too, could not imagine his grandmother bringing him here.

“Why do you ask?”

“I think I mentioned to you when I told you about buying the house that it felt familiar?”

“You did.”

“It’s still the strangest thing, Mom,” he said. “I feel like I’ve been here before.

“It’s called déjà vu, dear.”

“I know, but this feels . . . different.”

“I’m sorry, but I’ve never been in Ohio in my life,” she said. “As far as your grandmother? I doubt we could have paid her to go there. The Midwest wasn’t exactly her thing.”

“No.” He smiled. “French sunsets were her thing.”

His mother laughed. “I still have several of those paintings of hers in storage if you’d like a few for your house.”

“Several?”

“Um . . . maybe thirty.”

“One thing about Grandmother,” he said. “She was as prolific as she was eccentric. Too bad she wasn’t a particularly good painter.”

“I miss her, terribly.”

“Me, too.”

“You did have a good childhood, didn’t you, Logan?” There was an unfamiliar catch in his mother’s voice. “I mean, you did have a happy life in spite of having two nutty women raising you?”

“Mom,” he said, sincerely, “I had a great childhood. You were always so good to me. Grandmother, too. I never lacked for anything.”

He could hear his mother sigh with relief and he wondered if age was finally catching up with her. It was rare for her to need reassurance.

“Is there something wrong, Mom?”

“No, dear. I just miss you, that’s all, but I’m glad you’re enjoying your new home.”

“It’s beautiful here. I’d love for you to come for a visit.”

“You know what? I might just do that pretty soon. I’ve got a few more cases to get off my desk first.” Her voice grew stronger. “Now, you get back to your writing! I need another Nate Scott novel to read.”

“I
s Nate Scott your favorite author?” Hope asked.

He was deep into a book he’d purchased about WWII artillery. “Why do you ask?”

“You have an awful lot of his books lying around. I read a few pages.”

“What did you think?” He waited, curious about her answer.

“I did not like it much.”

He winced. Now even his housekeeper was giving him bad reviews. He might as well tell her the truth.

“I’m Nate Scott.”

“You have a fake name?”

“A pseudonym. A lot of authors do that.”

“You wrote all those books?” She digested this. “Why?”

“Because that’s what I do. That’s how I make my living. That’s who I am.”

“Oh.” She thought it over. “Is that the reason for the crazy room?”

“The crazy room?”

“The one with all the colored note cards taped to the wall with strange things written on them?”

“That’s the method I use to structure a book.”

“Oh.” She looked confused.

“I tape the plot to the wall where I can look at it and think about it and change it.”

“Oh.” She thought this over, too. “That is your job? Making things up?”

It was obvious that she did not think much of his method, his books, or the profession he’d chosen.

“That’s how I make my living. I knew from the time I was a child that I wanted to be a writer. It’s worked out well for me.”

“That’s nice.”

He had been around her long enough to know that when she used the word
nice
she was just being polite. To her, being a writer was probably synonymous with being lazy.

“Isn’t there anything you ever wanted to do since you were a child, Hope? I mean, something in addition to being a wife and mother?”

“
Ja
.” She seemed uncomfortable with the question.

“What was it?”

“You will laugh at me.”

“I would never laugh at you.”

“I always wished I had a farm to run.” Her voice was shy. “A place where I could be in charge. I always thought I would make a very good farmer, but my father told me it was not an appropriate thing for a girl to do. I think he was probably right.”

“I don’t think that’s true anymore.”

“It is. Women grow vegetable gardens and mow yards, but I’ve never known an Amish woman farmer unless she was helping her husband.” She seemed to lose interest, or perhaps she was embarrassed for having voiced her dream. “You must tell Violet who and what you are.”

“I will. Soon. It’s just that she assumed . . . and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and then one thing led to another.”

“One thing always leads to another. That is why we are taught by our preachers not to let Satan get a toehold.”

“You’re right. I’ll tell her tomorrow.”

Hope nodded approval. “Good.”

•  •  •

Violet was not nearly as surprised as he expected her to be, and much more excited than he’d ever dreamed.

“I knew you had talent!” she crowed. “Just wait until I tell my friends!”

“What are you going to tell them?” He felt a little nervous about her enthusiasm.

“Why, I’ll tell them that all these stories you’ve been collecting from us are going to get published!” Her forehead creased in thought. “You should probably hurry, though. Frank’s heart has been acting up.”

He had expected her to be upset, or mildly disappointed in him. It had not occurred to him that she would assume this would mean automatic publication. All he’d been doing was using these stories and that old typewriter to overcome his writer’s block and get to know the community. Now she was expecting immediate publication? This might have been a mistake.

“When will our book be finished?” she asked eagerly.

“Soon.” He felt sick at heart. This work he’d been doing here was not serious writing. He was writing a WWII love story, for pity’s sake. No one wanted to read a love story by Nate Scott. The fans would be so disappointed. “Maybe in a month or two.”