Plain Jayne Read online

  Plain

  Jayne

  HILLARY MANTON LODGE

  HARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS

  EUGENE, OREGON

  The author is represented by MacGregor Literary.

  Cover by Left Coast Design, Portland, Oregon

  Cover photos © Pascal Genest / iStockphoto; AVTG / iStockphoto; Susie Prentice / Shutterstock; Sigrid Olsson / PhotoAlto Agency RF Collections / Getty Images

  Author photo by Danny Lodge

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  PLAIN JAYNE

  Copyright © 2010 by Hillary Manton Lodge

  Published by Harvest House Publishers

  Eugene, Oregon 97402

  www.harvesthousepublishers.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lodge, Hillary Manton.

  Plain Jayne / Hillary Manton Lodge.

  p. cm. — (Plain and simple)

  ISBN 978-0-7369-2698-0 (pbk.)

  1. Women journalists—Fiction. 2. Amish—Oregon—Fiction. 3. Oregon—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3612.O335P53 2010

  813’.6—dc22

  2009018880

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 / RDM-SK / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Epilogue

  Simply Sara Sample Chapter

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Other Harvest House Fiction

  Amishreader.com

  For Danny

  I couldn’t have done it without you.

  While Amish believers do reside in western states such as Washington and Montana, the Amish community in this novel is purely a work of fiction. However, several Mennonite congregations make their home throughout Oregon and the Pacific Northwest.

  Chapter 1

  Sol called me at ten. Wanted to see me in five.

  I couldn’t tell if I was jittery with espresso or excitement.

  “So, Brian.” I propped my chin on the edge of our cubicle wall. “Who do you think he’s gonna send to Miami?”

  Brian sighed and didn’t look up. “I have no idea.”

  “You don’t want that story, do you?”

  “Marisa would change the locks if I left that long.”

  “Are you talking about Cuba?” Laura stopped midstride as she nearly passed us. “Did Sol say anything?”

  I masked a smirk. “I’ll find out in five minutes.”

  Laura tapped her pencil on the ridge of Brian’s cubicle. “Such a great story. Cuba, post-Fidel—”

  “Miami, in April—” Brian drawled.

  There was a moment of silence, out of respect for sunshine. Portland, Oregon, isn’t known for its sunny springs.

  Miami in April, a shot at an above-fold feature…

  I wanted it. I wanted it bad.

  “Have a seat, Tate,” Sol said, stretching out in his chair, his cocoa brown arms tucked behind his head. All he needed was a stogie to top off his newspaper editor image, and a year ago that might have been the case. After twenty-five years of marriage, the missus finally got to him.

  That, and the building’s nonsmoking policy. Instead, Sol’s arms lowered and he reached for his stress ball. A copy of yesterday’s newspaper covered the immediately visible part of his desk. He tossed the ball from one hand to another.

  I sat and crossed my legs.

  “How’s life?” he asked?

  “Um…” Where was this going? “Life is good.”

  “Any major stresses going on?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Huh.” He set aside the stress ball, adjusted his reading glasses, and leaned over his newspaper. “‘Henry Paul Tate of Lincoln City, OR, passed away Monday, March 20, of a heart attack,’” Sol looked up. “I’ll skip a bit. ‘Tate is survived by his wife, Kathy, daughters Beth Thompson, of Neotsu, OR, and Jayne Tate, of Portland, OR, and granddaughter Emilee Thompson, of Neotsu.’” He folded his hands. “I don’t think I need to read the rest. There aren’t any other Jayne Tates in Portland who grew up in Lincoln City, much less with a father named Henry.”

  “Are public records that amusing?”

  “Were you going to tell me your father passed away?”

  “That’s my personal life.” Such as it was. “I didn’t think it mattered here.”

  And I didn’t. Mom held the service on a Saturday, I drove to Lincoln City long enough to hear my uncle’s very long eulogy, sing all three verses of “Blessed Redeemer,” and hand wash the punch bowl set.

  I did my duty. It wasn’t as though I showed up in jeans and a Good Charlotte T-shirt and explained to everyone how my father could suck the joy out of a five-year-old. How he smiled about once a month, and usually to people other than his younger daughter. How my sister Beth married at eighteen to get out of the house, though I explained at the time how leaving for college accomplished the same goal.

  No. I wore a nice black pantsuit with sensible heels, played the good daughter, drove home, and vacuumed my apartment.

  Sol didn’t say anything.

  “Really, we weren’t close.”

  He shrugged. “Whether you were close or not makes no difference to me, but I’ll tell you this—your work is slipping.”

  “I’m your best features reporter!”

  “Lanahan’s my best features reporter. I keep you around for the day he digs too deep and they find him at the bottom of the Columbia River.”

  “Thanks.” I was better than Lanahan and we both knew it, but Lanahan had staff seniority I couldn’t accomplish without a fake ID.

  “You’re welcome. But you’re not bad, your sources love you, and you can write your way out of a wet paper bag. That’s why it’s easy to tell when your work is slipping. Your leads are flabby and your descriptions are clichéd.” He picked up a piece of paper and read from it. “‘Rain-soaked highway’?” He snorted in disgust. “Are you kidding me? What, you think you’re writing for your college paper again?”

  “I’ll edit anything. You know that.”

  “But you’ve never had to edit this much. Look. You’ve always been the wonder kid around here, but times haven’t been kind to this business. We’re laying off good reporters left and right and printing more AP celebrity fluff. If Bernstein and Woodward w
ere trying to expose a presidency in this day and age…well, let’s just say they wouldn’t have gotten that far. Papers around the country are cutting their foreign correspondents and satellite offices or, worse, resorting to online editions only. People don’t read newspapers anymore. Can you believe that? I’d be suicidal if my wife didn’t have me doing tai chi. Does wonders for my nerves.” He set his reading glasses on his desk and massaged the bridge of his nose. “Basically, the way things are going, you need to get yourself back together or look for a job elsewhere. Except, there really aren’t jobs elsewhere. When was the last time you took some time off?”

  “Aside from weekends…” Not that I ever really relaxed, per se, even on weekends. Either way, my relaxation techniques or lack thereof weren’t Sol’s business.

  “According to your file, you have a lot of PTO time built up. I think you should use it.”

  Every muscle in my body tightened up. “How long? Is this a forced leave?”

  “It’s you getting a chance to save your job. I’m doing society a favor—you’d make a lousy waitress. You’ve got three weeks saved. Use a week and a half, and I’ll make up the rest.”

  “Sol—”

  “You might think about some tai chi while you’re out.”

  “What about…Miami?”

  Sol sighed. “I’m sending Laura.”

  The words hit like a blow to my stomach. I could barely breathe. “She can’t write a lead.”

  “Right now, neither can you.”

  My trip to Miami. My shot at an above-fold feature, all gone because I’d probably slipped too many passive verbs into first lines of my articles.

  “It’s for the best,” he said. “There will be other big stories, Jayne.”

  I agreed with him out loud, but in my head I was shouting like mad.

  I finished up my last projects and left work early. No sense in sticking around if anything I turned in was going to be thrown right back at me.

  I wrestled into my motorcycle gear and hopped on my bike, thinking I might calm my nerves with a ride.

  I didn’t get past Powell’s Books. I guess that’s the curse of being bookish. I got lost inside every time I visited, but there are worse places to be lost. Each of the rooms is color coded, but I always got the red room and the rose room mixed up. Not that it mattered—I was still surrounded by hundreds of volumes.

  Even as I fingered through shelves of books promising to teach me about fine paper folding, I couldn’t get the scene with Sol out of my mind. Ever since I’d started work at the paper, I’d continued to work at ninety miles an hour. I couldn’t slow down. I didn’t know how to slow down. At this particular moment, I felt as though my insides were tearing me in forty different directions.

  What would I do if I had to take a vacation? I didn’t want to see my family. My sister would show me which wall she had just painted and what item she had ordered from the Pottery Barn catalogue.

  Maybe I’d be okay with that life at some later date, but at twenty-six I wasn’t there yet. I didn’t know how I’d fit a car seat onto my motorcycle.

  Probably couldn’t.

  One magazine cover caught my eye. A long line of laundry fluttered in the breeze, and a little girl in a dark dress was either hanging it up or taking it down. She faced away from the camera.

  I flipped through the pages until I found the article. The journalist—who wasn’t half bad—wrote a portrait of a people apart. They forgave when faced with searing hatred. They often provided for other members of the community. They called themselves Amish after Jacob Amman, a man who set his group of followers into motion before fading into obscurity.

  My mind starting ticking, even as my insides seemed to quiet down. I couldn’t take my eyes off the picture of the girl hanging laundry. What would cause people to live like that, when there are electric dryers with de-wrinkle cycles?

  I bought the magazine and started home.

  A little internet research revealed an Amish community just outside of Albany. Yet more research reminded me of Harrison Ford’s role in Witness, Jodi Picoult’s Plain Truth, and a small army of other books about the Amish. They certainly didn’t lack media representation.

  I wondered how they felt about that representation. Nothing I’d read made this group seem as if they particularly enjoyed the limelight. I wondered how accurate that representation really was. The idea of a utopian society, working off the land and truly caring for each other—frankly, I had a hard time buying into it. Even if it did work, what was their secret?

  I read a little more and learned that the Amish were similar to the Mennonites in their pursuit of a simpler lifestyle. Both were pacifists and against infant baptism, but the Mennonites connected to city electricity and drove cars. The Amish who left the community often became Mennonite.

  My mind started whirring again. A column the paper occasionally picked up was written by a Mennonite woman—could she have connections to the Amish? Probably. I chewed my lip as I considered the possibilities.

  A story was in here, and I had three weeks all to myself.

  Shane frowned at me. “You’re going to do what?”

  I suddenly regretted my need to share the plan with my boyfriend. “I’ve got it all worked out,” I said, a little defensive. “I’m off work for three weeks. There’s an Amish community outside Albany. I’ll stay in Albany for the first week or so. I’m hoping I can board at one of the farms after that.”

  Shane leveled his serious brown eyes on me. “You’re going to knock on doors and ask if anyone has room in the hayloft?”

  I straightened my shoulders. “We occasionally print the column of a Mennonite woman—”

  “What?”

  “Don’t interrupt. Ethel Beiler’s the name of the columnist. I already talked to her. She knows a couple families in that area, and she’s going to talk to them about me staying with them.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “That’s journalism.”

  “Jayne.” Shane released a frustrated breath. “Your dad just died.”

  “We weren’t close. I told you that.”

  “But he was your dad. It doesn’t matter if you were close or not.”

  We weren’t getting anywhere. “Do you have anything interesting in your fridge? And when I say interesting, I don’t mean, ‘it’s changed color since last month.’”

  “There’s some Mongolian chicken. Tell me again how long you’re planning on being gone.”

  “About three weeks.”

  “Are you…” he hesitated. “Are you still serious about us?”

  My eyes widened. “Of course I am! Are you?”

  “We’ve been together six months. You’ve met my parents, my brothers, everybody.”

  I sat down beside him. “And I think they’re great, really.”

  “But you don’t want me to meet your family.”

  “You don’t want to.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “No, really, you don’t. I’m trying to save you the mind games, the guilt trips—you don’t need that. We don’t need that.”

  “Your sister? Your sister’s like that?”

  “My sister is brainwashed, and anything we say gets parroted back to the parents.”

  “Parent. Your dad’s dead.”

  I cupped his face with my hands and planted a kiss on his unresponsive lips. “Trust me? Please?”

  He sighed. “Three weeks?”

  “Three tiny, little baby weeks. I’ll be back before you know it. I do have a favor to ask…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Pick up my mail?”

  “For you? Anything. Just make sure you come back.”

  I knew I couldn’t head out of town without clearing it with Joely, Kim, and Gemma, so I called them all and set up lunch for the following day.

  Joely Davis, Kim Keiser, and Gemma DiGrassi were, for all intents and purposes, my best friends in the world. Kim and Gemma I knew through the paper. Kim was on city beat—and the onl
y writer I knew who can make a highway construction piece read like an acetic social commentary.

  Gemma worked in food, which meant she ate at fabulous restaurants and criticized the staff. Despite her job, she was one of the sweetest people I knew. And she made amazing pots de crème.

  Joely and I met when I was on the crime beat—she was usually the only cop on scene with a sense of humor. I introduced her to Kim and Gemma, and we’ve all lived in each other’s pockets ever since.

  Joely shook her head as I approached the table. “Such a sweet bike. It’s a Triumph, right?”

  “We saw you through the window,” Kim added. “Sit. Order. I’m hungry.”

  I glanced over the menu and picked everything I might not be able to eat while I was gone.

  Kim lifted an eyebrow after the waitress left. “Giving up food for Lent and eating while you can?”

  I shook my head. “I’m headed to Amish country for a couple weeks.”

  “As punishment for what?” Joely asked.

  Gemma swatted her arm. “Shut up. You’ll have fun, Jayne. My aunt did that—went on a buggy ride and everything.”

  “Where did your aunt go?”

  “Ohio.”

  “I’m actually heading to a community near Albany.”

  “What about the Miami story?” Kim asked, swishing the ice around in her water glass.

  “Laura got it. I’m actually on leave for a bit.”

  Gemma nodded. “Because of your dad? That’s probably a good idea.”

  “Laura can’t write a lead to save her life,” Kim said. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m using the time to get a story on my own.”

  I received three blank looks.

  “Freelance,” I clarified.

  “Let me get this straight.” Kim leaned forward. “You’re taking leave to get this story? Did Sol not want it?”

  “Sol doesn’t know anything about it. The break was his idea.”

  “He wants you to take time off, and you’re using it to get a story in Amish country?”

  “Yes.” I looked down and unrolled my napkin, setting my utensils aside and placing the napkin in my lap.