Revealing, The (The Inn at Eagle Hill Book #3): A Novel Read online

  “Oh, my . . .” She rested her arms on the windowsill and took in the red barn, the pastures with horses and sheep milling around. And was that a billy goat? She wanted to see more, and she turned away from the window, then stopped as she saw how the light had changed the character of the room. Now the butter-colored walls were beautiful in their sparseness, and the simple furniture spoke more eloquently of the past than a volume of history books. She moved through each room, opening the curtains. The living room, which she’d barely glanced at the night before, felt cozy and homey.

  The door opened and a woman in her sixties walked in. She had a dumpling figure, doughy cheeks, small dark eyes, salt and pepper hair that was primly twisted into a tight bun and capped with a white covering. Brooke had heard the Amish were known for their friendliness, but this woman didn’t look at all friendly.

  “You must be Rose Schrock,” Brooke said.

  “No.” The woman set a breakfast tray on the kitchen table. “I’m Vera Schrock, Rose’s mother-in-law.”

  “Denki.” Brooke liked to demonstrate her exceptional mastery of the Penn Dutch language. She considered herself a whiz at foreign languages.

  The woman didn’t seem at all impressed. “Leave the tray outside the door when you’re done.”

  “Do you happen to have a newspaper?”

  “No. You’ll have to go into town to get it yourself.”

  Vera opened the door, then stopped and looked back at Brooke. “If you don’t eat everything, don’t throw it out. We don’t waste food around here.”

  Got it. Eating was serious business with these people.

  Brooke looked past Vera at the door and saw a road curled against the hills in a pale, smoky trail. This beautiful place! To think that only yesterday she wasn’t even sure she wanted to be here. The woman’s dark mutter broke the peaceful mood, and she startled, realizing the woman was waiting for her to respond. “I’ll do that. Thank you.”

  Even the dour expression of the woman couldn’t detract from the enchantment of this quiet, peaceful location, and the knots inside Brooke began to loosen.

  Finally, something had happened to ease her discouragement. She started the day with a much lighter heart. She walked to the window to gaze up at the sky. The high, fluffy clouds looked as though they should be printed on blue flannel pajamas.

  It was a beautiful Sunday, and she wouldn’t let even a surly Amish grandmother spoil it for her.

  Mim and her brothers arrived at school just as Danny rang the bell. He had asked her to call him Teacher Danny like the other children, but she refused. Instead, she never addressed him at all. She hurried to put her lunch on the shelf in the back of the schoolroom and slipped into her seat. As she took out her books from her desk, she noticed a buzz of conversation in the classroom. She felt a gentle tap on her shoulder and turned to discover the horrible boy who had tripped her was seated next to her.

  “Remember me, Miss Humility?”

  Mim gave him the stink eye, a look usually reserved for her brothers.

  “You never told me your actual name.”

  She turned forward in her chair, ignoring him.

  “I’m Jesse Stoltzfus,” he whispered loudly. “We moved in across the road from your farm. My father bought the Bent N’ Dent.”

  Something red caught her eye and she realized there were more students in the schoolhouse. All redheads. Carrot tops. All with that same sticky-up hair. Her gaze traveled across the room as horror set in. There were so many Stoltzfus children! Were they all as awful as Jesse? “How many of you are there?”

  “Six. I’m the only manchild. It’s a sore trial.” He motioned toward the teacher’s desk. “She’s the oldest. Katrina. Dad sent her to get us registered for school. She’s seventeen, nearly eighteen. I’m fourteen. Nearly fifteen.”

  Standing next to the teacher’s desk was that girl who had come out of the Bent N’ Dent after Jesse tripped Mim. Danny was listening carefully to the girl, then laughed at something she said.

  Jesse leaned across the aisle. “Boys go crazy over Katrina. They always have.”

  Katrina was beautiful, delicate yet curvy in all the right places. She had perfect teeth, and her neck was long, like a gazelle. She had a face like an angel. Mim, she hated her.

  As soon as school let out that afternoon, Mim hurried home, ran to her room, and locked the door. On the top shelf of her closet, too tall for snoopy Mammi Vera to find, she had hidden a hand mirror that she bought at a yard sale last summer. She took it out and examined her face in the mirror. It was a perfectly reasonable face. Why then was she lacking sparkle, like Katrina had? It wasn’t a lively face. It looked flat somehow.

  She turned to Luke’s big dog, Micky, who was staring at her with a soulful look on his face. “What do you think, Micky?”

  His tail thumped once, then twice. He seemed pleased. He stretched his big creamy limbs in front of her door.

  “Move, Micky. I need to go downstairs.”

  She found her mother in the kitchen and grabbed an apple from a bowl on the table. “Mom, do you know anything about those Stoltzfuses?”

  Her mother stopped chopping vegetables and looked out the window toward the Stoltzfus farm. “I know that their father is a minister, David Stoltzfus, and he comes trailing clouds of respect.”

  “I’ve heard he’s a man to be reckoned with,” Mammi Vera added.

  Mim would not mind having David Stoltzfus for a neighbor. She was less sure about his son, Jesse, who both irritated and intrigued her. “His son Jesse is abominable.”

  “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 i
t.

  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 concerned. 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

  Normally, 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 t
he 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.

  Right then Brooke made up her mind. She wasn’t going to leave this humble Amish inn until she had her new life firmly in its grasp. A simple plan began to take shape in her heart and mind. I won’t leave until I find a fresh wind. A new life direction.

  But . . . what?

  On a sunny afternoon, Galen led Silver Queen into the pasture, the foal following closely at her side. Rose closed the pasture gate behind her and walked up to Silver Queen, who bumped her with her nose. Rose scratched her between the ears as Galen put a nylon cord around the foal’s neck. It was soft for him to wear for a while as he got used to the feel of something on his neck.