The Devoted Read online

  It was a beautiful July day. Life had its twists and turns, but right now, it was smooth sailing. David Stoltzfus had never felt more content, more optimistic about the future. He felt light as air.

  He gave the horse’s reins a shake to back up the buggy, eager to return home.

  Home. What a beautiful word.

  Home to Birdy. His wife.

  His wife. It still amazed him, to wake up each day beside this woman, whom he dearly loved and grew more attached to each day. It was a different kind of love he had for Birdy than for Anna, his first wife and the mother of his children. Different, but in a way, it was more precious. He knew how fleeting life could be, how quickly things could change.

  Yes, David thought, he had much to be thankful for: his calling to be bishop, his health, his friends, his family, and now his wife. Life had certainly thrown him some curves, and doubtless there would be further tests, trials, and tribulations. But just for now, on this beautiful summer day, it was to be enjoyed in all its fullness and with all its wonders.

  He thought back to this morning, to holding his beautiful little newborn grandson in the crook of his arms. The baby was mewling away when Katrina passed the bundle to David and his crying stopped immediately. He opened his dark blue eyes and peered at him, as if he knew he already had a place deep in his heart.

  A grandchild. His second. A boy! His first.

  For a long while, he studied this little baby who stared back at him. He lay still, silent, his fists closed tight, his wispy hair fine as silk. David kissed the baby’s forehead. He was sure no baby on earth held a candle to how beautiful his little grandchildren were at birth, not even his own six children. He watched the baby’s pulsing scalp, counted his tiny toes and fingers. So miniature, so perfect. A miracle.

  Too soon, Thelma Beiler, a beloved elderly woman with whom Katrina and her family lived at Moss Hill, insisted he relinquish the baby and return him to his mother. As he placed the baby in Katrina’s arms, Thelma gently scolded him like a mother hen, practically shooing him out of the house. “You’ve got bishop work to tend to.” And she was right. He had a full schedule and then some ahead of him.

  As David watched Katrina rest the baby against her shoulder, a wellspring of emotion emerged within him, a memory so powerful and vivid that it made his eyes sting and he had to turn away. She reminded him so much of Anna. Maybe that’s why people enthused about becoming grandparents: it brought up so many poignant memories, long buried.

  The horse nodded her big head, making the harness jingle, snapping his attention to the present. A police car, lights flashing, siren screeching, was flying down the road past Moss Hill’s turnoff. How odd. It was rare to see a police car over in this part of Stoney Ridge—it was made up almost entirely of Amish farms. And then his thoughts drifted to Luke Schrock and, perhaps unfairly, he automatically assumed the police visit had something to do with Luke. What might the boy have done now? Luke wasn’t a boy, David thought to himself. Nor was he a man. He was stuck somewhere in between.

  As he flicked the reins, clucking to the horse, Thistle, to turn left from the driveway onto the road, his mind traveled from Luke’s frequent brushes with the law to the farms he passed, all belonging to church members of Stoney Ridge, and settled on the church that bound them together. Two years ago, the little church had weathered a great wound and survived. More than survived. It was thriving. The baptism class this last spring was the largest one in years. No families had moved away for over two years. In fact, the church’s population had increased with new families moving in.

  He stopped the horse for a moment to watch the pumpjacks atop Moss Hill, bobbing their heads up and down as they pulled oil from deep inside the earth. Those oil pumps—they were a blessing to this community. It astonished him, and humbled him too, to think the oil had been there, all this time, waiting to be discovered. More Amish families had leased their land after having it surveyed for oil traps. Those oil leases had given Stoney Ridge a fresh wind. The church was able to pay off substantial bills, to build a reserve for future emergencies, and to offer aid to other churches.

  The role of bishop still felt new and a little uncomfortable to David, as if he were wearing a coat that was much too big for him. The previous bishop, Freeman Glick, a tall and broad man, had a powerful presence. Even his long beard, gray and flourishing, conferred considerable authority.

  David’s beard was the opposite of Freeman’s, short and trimmed, a little like his own presence, which was not at all authoritative. “Truth discovered is better than truth told” was his motto as a bishop, as a father. He believed in letting church members, including his own children, embark on their own journey to faith. The Lord God desired obedience, but only if it came from the heart.

  He felt an unexpected sense of peace and well-being on this beautiful summer morning. A rare day!

  Slapping the reins again to get Thistle trotting, he glanced in his rearview mirror and saw a tiny vehicle gain on him from behind his buggy. The driver extended his arm out the side, waving it like a flag. David slowed the horse to see if there was a problem.

  The arm belonged to Hank Lapp, driving up the road in a bright yellow golf cart. “HELLO THERE, DAVID!” he yelled in his everyday voice as he passed the horse and buggy. “Somethin’s brewing over at the Inn at Eagle Hill. I’m heading there now!”

  Hank drove on past him as if it was the most normal thing in the world for an Old Order Amish man to drive himself around in a golf cart.

  2

  Jesse Stoltzfus heard the harsh shriek of a police siren and pulled himself out from under a buggy to see which direction the sound was coming from. It was a rare occurrence in Stoney Ridge and well worth taking a break from work. He wiped his hands on a greasy rag and stopped short when he saw his two apprentices, Sammy Schrock and Leroy Glick, stroll up the driveway. His black Labrador, C.P., two years old but still a puppy at heart, was already darting across the sheep pasture to greet them.

  Jesse’s spirits instantly dropped to the basement. These two boys worked at the buggy repair shop. Work might not be the right word. Puttered. That’s the word. They puttered around Jesse’s buggy shop.

  Why, he wondered for the umpteenth time, did he ever start taking on apprentices? When the idea was first presented to him, over two years ago, he thought it would be a win-win situation. His buggy repair business needed an extra pair or two of hands and he would like to work fewer hours. Miriam Schrock had asked him to take on her brother Luke, the town’s juvenile delinquent, with the hope that Jesse would be a positive influence on him. A sterling example, were Mim’s exact words. “Everyone knows Luke is a difficult boy,” she said, tears glistening on her sooty eyelashes. How could he say no to Mim, the girl who held his heart in the palm of her hands? He couldn’t.

  But he should have.

  Luke was impossible to manage. Oppositional Defiant Disorder was the diagnosis given to him by the local doctor, Max Finegold, and Luke was delighted. “See?” he said, grinning. “It’s not my fault.”

  To Jesse’s way of thinking, Oppositional Defiant Disorder was an excuse that let Luke persist until he got what he wanted and avoid whatever he didn’t want. Like work.

  There was another apprentice, just as impossible to manage as Luke but for an entirely different reason. Yardstick Yoder had cornered Jesse into the apprenticeship, driving a hard bargain, insisting he wouldn’t agree to be the Bent N’ Dent’s delivery boy unless he also learned buggy repairs. Jesse’s father’s store was trying to expand customer services, and Yardstick was the one to make deliveries, quick and speedy. He was the fastest boy in town. How could Jesse say no to that? He couldn’t.

  But he should have.

  Optimistic to a fault, Jesse started the apprenticeships with high hopes for success: Yardstick Yoder, who had a strong work ethic, would settle into work at the store. Mim Schrock would feel beholden to Jesse for being kind to her difficult brother, Luke, who had no work ethic at all.

  S
adly, Jesse’s high hopes were mistaken.

  Those two boys were oil and vinegar; they couldn’t stand being anywhere near each other—all because of Ruthie, his sister, whom they both had serious crushes on. Jesse spent most of his time keeping them occupied with tasks at opposite ends of the buggy shop just so they wouldn’t irritate each other. Once, they nearly came to blows over something as ridiculous as the tune one of them was whistling.

  And then everything changed.

  His sister Ruthie concluded that Luke was a Person of Interest to her—a POI—and Yardstick was no longer a POI. Stunned by her cold rejection, Yardstick decided that the problem did not lie with him but with Ruthie and, by extension, with the entire Stoltzfus family. He quit the buggy shop, he quit the Bent N’ Dent, and he took a job at the Hay & Grain.

  Not to be outdone, Luke quit too. If the job was beneath someone as low as Yardstick Yoder, he said, it was certainly beneath him.

  Personally, Jesse could not imagine what Ruthie saw in either one of them. It wasn’t only that the boys never had much on their minds, but they did not seem to have the proper awe and admiration for the important task of buggy repair work. Not the way they should have.

  Never again, Jesse decided, would he take on apprentices just to make a woman happy. Any woman.

  Alas alack. His resolve was promptly challenged.

  As soon as Birdy, his father’s new wife, learned of the two vacancies, she paid a call to Jesse to ask if he would hire her nephew, Leroy, who sorely needed someone like Jesse in his life.

  And he buckled.

  And then Mim Schrock paid him another call, apologizing for her brother Luke and pleading with him to take on her other brother, Sammy. “Before it’s too late,” she said, batting her eyelashes at him in that way that made his stomach feel like Jell-O. “Before Luke’s influence over him is permanent.”

  Again, Jesse buckled.

  It was another grave mistake in his brief management career.

  Jesse had spent the last couple of years diligently improving the disastrous reputation of the buggy repair shop. He had inherited the business from Hank Lapp, a good-hearted but easily distractable man who was untroubled by matters of timeliness. Most of the Amish of Stoney Ridge, Jesse had learned, had taken their buggy business over to Gap or Leola. When he did a little mental calculation, he realized that Hank had lost himself a substantial revenue stream for no good reason other than laziness. Jesse wanted to convince local residents that they didn’t need to go elsewhere for buggy repairs. He could use the help of good apprentices.

  Unfortunately, he did not have good apprentices. He had less-than-average apprentices. Leroy Glick and Sammy Schrock were obsessed with fast girls, fast horses, and fast cars, and they left grease marks from their dirty hands on the freshly painted, pristine walls of the buggy shop. Even more irritating, he had found greasy fingerprints on the cupboard where he kept his private stash of snacks.

  How often did he need to point out the rags to those boys? Yesterday was an example. “When you finish working on a buggy,” Jesse had told them both, “wash your hands before you touch other things. What’s so hard about that?”

  “Not hard at all,” Sammy said, brushing back his floppy brown hair. “I always wash my hands.”

  Both boys, aged fourteen, looked as though they had barely entered adolescence, other than a whisper of untended fuzz on their upper lips—something they were quite proud of.

  Jesse turned to Leroy, who was enormous, a great pumpkin of a boy, as round as Sammy was thin. “Then is it you? Are you the one who leaves handprints on my cupboard?”

  “Not me,” Leroy said, lifting his hands to reveal greasy palms. He had to talk around a big wad of bubblegum in his mouth. “I wash my hands more often than Sammy. Twice as often. Maybe three times.”

  Jesse decided there might be something essential missing in those boys’ brains. Something significant. An axle, a rod, a wheel. Something like that.

  Today, as the boys sauntered up the driveway, late as usual, they stopped halfway up. Leroy did a little dance step and Sammy tried to copy it. Jesse whistled for C.P., but the dog ignored him, dashed between the apprentices, his whole body wagging with excitement. As far as dogs went, C.P. was not good for much. He wasn’t the brightest, he wasn’t the most obedient, he still chewed up any shoe left unguarded, but Jesse had wanted to believe he was, at least, loyal. Not true. Fickle, fickle dog.

  Just as Jesse was about to shout to the apprentices to hurry up and get to work, another police car sped down the road, siren blaring. The apprentices stopped their dance jig and swiveled around to watch the car race along. Not a minute or two later, the siren stopped.

  Leroy looked at Sammy, eyes wide. “I think it stopped near your house. It’s down by Eagle Hill.”

  “Let’s go!” Sammy said, and the two of them bolted down the driveway, C.P. on their heels.

  Well, Jesse thought, watching them as they veered onto the road, to quote his predecessor Hank Lapp, these buggies aren’t dying. They’ll still be there when you get back.

  He hurried to catch up with the apprentices and his fickle dog to find out what the ruckus was all about.

  Later that day, at home, Ruthie heard a knock on the door and went to answer it. Rose King, the owner of the Inn at Eagle Hill, stood on the porch with a tired look on her lovely face, dark circles below her eyes.

  “Has something happened? Did the coroner finish the autopsy? It was a murder, wasn’t it? Oh my goodness, oh my goodness.” Ruthie’s heart started pounding as she stepped aside to let Rose come in. All day long, she had felt rattled by the morning’s gruesome discovery.

  Rose waved off Ruthie’s anxieties. “Slow down! First, I haven’t heard anything. Matt Lehman told me the coroner’s report will take awhile, apparently because he’s backed up.”

  Thoughts collided in Ruthie’s head. The coroner was backed up? A wave of nausea rolled through her as she visualized stacks and stacks of dead bodies in a cold morgue. She had never been comfortable around dead bodies, despite the fact that she had been to plenty of open-casket viewings and funerals in her seventeen years. No matter how lifelike the undertaker tried to make a corpse, it looked weird and smelled awful.

  Rose sat down at the kitchen table. “There’s a favor I need to ask of you.”

  “Anything. Anything at all.” Ruthie couldn’t do enough favors for Rose. She loved working at the inn. She loved it when new guests arrived. There was always someone new to talk to, something new to learn about.

  “The inn’s next guest has reserved the cottage for a month. I called and told him what happened, about the stranger who died in the cottage last night. I was sure he would cancel. Would you believe he wasn’t bothered in the least? In fact, he’s already on his way. If I turn this guest away, we’ll lose a month’s booking.” She bit her lip. “Ruthie, we need the income. So I wondered, do you think he could stay in Jesse’s old room until the cottage is given the all clear? Matt Lehman said it should only be a few days until the coroner is . . . well, until he gets caught up.”

  Another wave of nausea hit Ruthie at the vision in her mind of dead bodies. “I’ll have to ask Birdy and Dad, but . . . I don’t think they’d object.” A thought occurred to her. “Does he have proper identification?” She wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.

  “His name is Patrick Kelly. He’s from Canada. He already paid me, in full, for the month.”

  “But he’s coming alone? That seems odd when it’s not hunting season.”

  “He’s not interested in hunting. Not for game, anyway. That much I know.” Rose hesitated. “He says he wants to become Amish. That’s why he’s coming to stay for a full month. He wants to immerse himself in the culture. That was the word he used. ‘Immersed.’ Like a teabag in hot water.”

  Ruthie knocked her forehead on the table, once, twice, three times. “Not another,” she groaned. Why did anyone think he could, or should, convert to the Amish? So many people came to t
he Inn at Eagle Hill with the intention of becoming Amish. They poked around the countryside, visited quilt shops, and returned at the end of the day to wax romantic about their longing to simplify life. Ruthie listened to them, answered their silly questions, and masterfully hid a smug smile. She knew how these stories played out.

  Three weeks ago, two sisters had arrived with the same determination as this Patrick Kelly fellow. The sisters peppered Ruthie with questions about her life as if she was an endangered species at the zoo, asked if they could attend a church service. “Why, certainly,” she told them, barely able to swallow a smile. Imagine these two sisters, with highlighted hair and French manicures, sitting on a backless hard bench in a barn filled with horseflies . . . for three-plus hours! But then a heat wave rolled in, spiking the temperature with hair-curling humidity. The cottage had no air conditioning, no ceiling fan . . . and . . . whoosh! The sisters had a change of heart. They opted to leave early and head back to city life. Going Amish had lost its romantic appeal.

  As far as Ruthie was concerned, there was nothing romantic about being Amish. She felt like a bird trapped in a cage, eager to break free and fly away. The only one who could understand how she felt was her father’s sister Ruth, for whom she was named. Her aunt Dok, an emergency room doctor at the local hospital, was everything she wanted to be. Dok led a purposeful, valuable, significant life. A non-Amish life.

  “So . . . ,” Rose said, pulling Ruthie out of her muse of discontent, “will you ask your dad and Birdy? See if they’re comfortable with having a stranger in the house?”

  “I’m sure it’s no problem at all,” Ruthie hastened to say. “You know that Birdy thinks nobody’s a stranger once you know their name.”

  Rose stood. “Tell Birdy that Patrick Kelly sounded . . . nice. Friendly. Not someone I would hesitate to host in my home, if we had the room for him.”

  Unlike the bloody soon-to-be-murdered mobster whom Ruthie had let in. She was sure that’s what Rose was thinking but was too kind to say.