The Revealing (6 page)

“That’s a very unchristian attitude,” Mammi Vera said.

Mim shrugged. “Maybe so, but it’s the truth.” She cast a sideways glance in her grandmother’s direction. “They’ve all got bright red hair. The whole lot of them.”

Mammi Vera gasped. “Red hair means one is the devil’s own. You know that, don’t you, Mim?”

“Of course, Mammi Vera,” Mim said, eyes widened in innocence.
I
sincerely doubt it, Mammi Vera,
Mim thought.

It had taken two full days last week for Bethany to clean out the second-floor bedroom at the Sisters’ House. The sisters’ fourteenth cousin twice removed had arrived and settled in, though Bethany had yet to meet him. She brought fresh towels up to the second floor and knocked lightly on the door. “Hello?”

Silence.

The door was locked tight as a drum. She set the towels on a small hallway table and went back downstairs. As she picked up old
Stoney Ridge Times
newspapers from the dining room table, she asked the sisters, “So what is this fourteenth cousin twice removed like?”

Lena sat at the far end of the table, hemming an apron. “Very polite.”

“Terribly polite,” Ella echoed.

Fannie walked into the room with a pitcher of hot tea. “He has a good appetite.”

“Oh, isn’t
that
the truth,” Ada said.

Bethany stacked the newspapers on a chair. It seemed as if paper multiplied in this house. “Isn’t it creepy that he’s been here a few days and I haven’t laid eyes on him?”

“Why, no, it isn’t creepy,” Ada said. “He’s busy.”

“Terribly busy,” Ella echoed.

“Where is he now?”

“He’s off to the Lancaster Historical Society,” Sylvia said, “to do some studying and research on family lineage.”

Ada nodded. “He’s not a bother at all. We hardly see him.”

Fannie’s sharp voice added, “Except for meals.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Sylvia said. “He does love Fannie’s cooking.”

Fannie blushed, pleased to be singled out.

“He gives us the full report of our ancestry during supper,” Lena said.

Fannie grabbed a newspaper from the stack to set under the tea on the dining room table. “Feels a little like having someone read you the book of Chronicles. So and so begat so and so, who begat so and so.”

Ella wandered away to pick up a newspaper, then sat in a chair to read it.

Why, this was how it happened! Little by little, the sisters undid everything Bethany tried to do. And they were oblivious to the undoing.

Lena threaded a needle and knotted the end. “It turns out that we have an ancestor who came over on the
Charming Nancy
.”

Bethany tilted her head. “What’s that?”

“The Amish
Mayflower
,” Lena said. “One of the first ships to bring the Amish over to America. 1738.”

Sipping her tea, Fannie looked up. “1737.”

“That’s right,” Lena said. “He did say that. Well done, Fannie.”

“They came over on the
Charming
Nancy
,” Fannie said. “Enough Amish families to start the first congregation.”

At that point the sisters’ conversation quickly digressed into the unbearable living conditions of the eighteenth century. Bethany thought they should be more concerned they were living in an unbearable condition in the twenty-first century, but nobody in this room seemed the least bit con
cerned. She gave up on the living room with all those sisters planted in there talking about the
Charming Nancy
and set off to another room to work for the afternoon.

The next day, Bethany was back at the Sisters’ House to work and slipped up to the second-floor guest room. She jiggled the door handle. Locked tight. She sighed, exasperated. That fourteenth cousin twice removed was turning into an irritating mystery.

4

N
ormally, Brooke Snyder thrived on self-discipline. On a typical morning, she would be out of bed at six for yoga and meditation. By eight, she would be in her lab coat in the dark basement of the museum, with the only light coming from infrared lamps so nothing would decay the paintings.

Instead, she spent her mornings strolling around an Amish farm.

Brooke Snyder was a professional art restorer, also called a conservator. She worked for a museum in Philadelphia—researching, cleaning, restoring works of priceless art.

She had been very bright at school; she had been good at everything. Her English teacher encouraged her to pursue a college degree in English Literature. Her P.E. teacher said that with her height—by the age of fourteen she was already nearly six feet tall—she could play volleyball or basketball, or both. But when it came to decision time, Brooke went for art.

She had learned to paint by studying the masters and copying their techniques—something that was part of every artist’s training before they refined their own techniques. But Brooke never seemed to get that far. She had such a talent
for reproduction that her art professor recommended her for a freelance job at a local gallery that needed help with a fire-damaged painting. One freelance job led to another, then another. She had a reputation for attention to detail, right down to the artist’s signature. As soon as she graduated, she was offered a job at a museum.

If anyone asked Brooke about her work, she made art restoration sound like fascinating work, but the truth of it was that it was tedious, painstaking work in a windowless basement, where the average age of her boring colleagues was seventy, and the pay was horrible. Horrible! How could a person survive on such a low salary? She certainly couldn’t. How could a young woman ever meet an eligible bachelor? She certainly hadn’t.

And that was how she had been tempted to commit a grave error. She’d found herself facing some rather serious credit card debt and complained about it to a co-worker at the museum. It turned out he knew an art dealer who was looking for an artist to commission a painting. After meeting with the art dealer, she agreed to reproduce a Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot painting for a handsome sum. She would have enough to pay off her credit card debt and some left over to put a down payment on a new car.

She worked extremely hard on that Corot plein air reproduction. She not only duplicated Corot’s unique style, but she replicated his painting from every angle: back, front, and sides. She mounted and framed it in an identical way. She even copied the supplier tags. She did a stellar job.

So stellar that the art dealer passed it off as an original and sold it. The art dealer, who was now under investigation for selling several fakes to unsuspecting collectors, had gone
missing. The museum curator was furious with her, though she claimed she knew nothing about the art dealer’s unscrupulous actions. “Corot, of all artists!” the curator said. “One of the most faked artists of all time.”

She knew that. A recent
Time
magazine article said that Corot painted eight hundred paintings in his lifetime, four thousand of which were in the United States.

“But it wasn’t an
intentional
fake,” she assured him. “My mistake was imitating the original too closely.” It pleased her that she had fooled a collector—though, wisely, she kept that thought to herself.

“And adding the artist’s signature instead of your own,” the curator pointed out. “Intended or not, it is what it is. You created a forgery. A copy.” He looked at her with disdain and told her she was fortunate to not be under investigation by the FBI—only because he had vouched for her innocence. And then he fired her.

Copied. There was
nothing
worse in the art world than that word. And yet . . . that’s all she really had become, even her aunt Lois—Brooke’s most favorite person in the world—had said so. She was a copier.

Brooke thought it might be wise to let things settle down and think out a new path for her future, which, according to the curator, apparently wasn’t going to be in the art world. He told her she had committed a cardinal sin, crossed an unforgivable line, which she thought was a little extreme. However, getting out of town for a breather sounded like a good idea, so that’s what she did. When her aunt Lois recommended a quiet little inn in Amish country as a place to recalibrate her life, she wiped away her tears, grabbed the idea, and ran with it.

And now Brooke was far, far removed from the art world. She watched the hens in the chicken yard, mesmerized, amused. When had she last stood still and just noticed something as silly and mundane as chickens? She wandered into the large vegetable garden, mostly dormant at this time of year, though she saw the tips of asparagus peeking through straw beds in tidy rows.

In her mind, she re-dressed it into a portrait of summer’s full bloom: Glossy basil plants, snowy white impatiens, tomato vines, clay pots overflowing with red geraniums. Bright orange nasturtiums with the delicate blue flowers of a rosemary shrub, silvery sage leaves as a cool backdrop to a cluster of red pepper plants.

She smiled to herself. Maybe she should consider painting garden scenes. Claude Monet? No . . . too obvious. Philippe Fernandez? No . . . too odd. Perhaps Zaira Dzhaubaeva. Yes, she would be the one to study.

There I go again!
Copying.
She hung her head. She couldn’t help it. Copying was what she knew to do. Aunt Lois had urged her to drop the copies, skip the restorations, and become an original at something of her own. Anything, she emphasized, choose anything! Become the real thing.

How insulting! Brooke
was
the real thing. She was gifted at what she did—everyone said so. If she studied others long enough, she could fix her mind to think like they thought, act like they would act, speak like they spoke, paint like they painted. Even write like they wrote. Why, she could do anything. “Except be an original!” she could just hear Aunt Lois say.

Two cats came up to Brooke and curled around her legs. She wasn’t a cat person, so she untangled her legs and followed
a path that led up a hill. Halfway up the hill, she stopped to absorb the view of the farmhouse from the back. The clapboard white of the house glowed in the sharp morning light. Ivy vines clung to the mortar of the brick chimney, climbing up a drain spout and curling near the green shutters at the windows. The main part of the structure was built in a simple, unadorned rectangle, the typical style of the Amish farmhouse that she’d read about in the tour books. A one-story room bumped haphazardly off the end, probably a later addition. The grandparents’ quarters, perhaps?

Down below, she noticed a pretty young woman hanging brightly colored laundry on a clothesline. “Amish dryers” the tourist book had called those clotheslines. Brooke watched the Amish woman move efficiently down the line, with motions as graceful as a ballerina. She was petite, and her clear pale skin made an unusual contrast with her dark hair. She must be Rose Schrock, Brooke realized, the innkeeper. Or maybe she was Bethany, the older sister to Mim? Brooke might have all the women mixed up. Maybe everyone in Stoney Ridge looked the same.

If the woman was Rose the innkeeper, Brooke should head down and introduce herself. One thing she’d already noticed about these Amish—they were always moving on to the next thing. If she didn’t catch Rose Schrock now, she’d miss her chance.

One of the cats had followed Brooke up the hill and rubbed against her legs. She scooped down to pick it up, trying not to think of the fleas it might carry, the ticks, the disease. She was doing her best to be fully present and enjoy this farm experience without overanalyzing everything. The sky felt bigger at Eagle Hill. It curved from one horizon line to the
other. The fields that had been gray in the early morning had turned to a soft shade of amber brown in the midmorning sun. So beautiful.

It was perfect. Absolutely perfect. Aunt Lois was right. There could be no better place for what she needed right now: a reinvention of herself.

Brooke needed to be here. Every instinct told her this was the place she had to stay, the only place where she could find both the solitude and the inspiration to figure out how to resurrect her career. Her stubborn streak set in.