The Devoted Read online

  The rain was pouring, beating the roof, when Nora Miller arrived around eleven in the morning. Dok hurried out to the waiting room to greet her. Nora set her wet umbrella on the porch and walked into the small waiting room, looking around.

  Nora was as round as she was tall. She was only in her midforties, but her center part was nearly bare from years of twisting her hair into a tight knot behind her head. The hair roots had been destroyed. But the hair that was left mingled gray and brown along the edge of her cap. She was taciturn, soft-spoken, with her hands folded against her apron. “How are things going for you?”

  Dok’s gaze swept the empty waiting room. “Slow.” A long silence followed.

  “I came to discuss Malinda with you.”

  “Make yourself at home,” Dok said. “Take a chair, any chair.” They were all available. “How is your daughter?”

  “She’s fine, just fine. She’s young. The youth recover quickly.” Nora sat down in one of the chairs, crossing her thick ankles out in front of her. “I know that the mistake over my Malinda’s appendix wasn’t yours.”

  Dok sat beside her. “How do you happen to know that?”

  “Because I remember it clearly. You were examining Malinda, and you asked me questions about her. You asked me if she complained very much and I told you no. Never. Then I heard you say to yourself it must be an inflamed appendix. I heard you say it. Then you told the nurse that you wanted Dr. Gingerich to take a look at her, soon, before the appendix burst. He was the one who decided it was nothing more than a tummy ache. Not you.”

  Thank goodness. Someone knew the truth. Dok let out a deep sigh. “Thank you, Nora.”

  “You lost your job over this.”

  What was the point of denying it? “I did.”

  Nora was quiet for a long moment, then she slapped her hands on her sturdy knees. “I’ll spread your name around.”

  “Thank you,” Dok said, and she had that feeling again. The feeling that, against the odds, all this might work out after all. Overhead, the clouds parted, this storm moving on.

  As she watched Nora Miller climb into her buggy and drive off, she sensed she was looking at a woman who knew exactly who she was and what she was meant to be in this world. Dok felt—what was it?—an envy for her.

  It wasn’t unusual for Hank Lapp to drop by with interesting scraps of news or humorous incidents to report. Jesse’s landlady, Fern Lapp, a woman with a knack for taking charge of people’s lives like a house afire, seemed to have a sixth sense for knowing when Hank was heading over to Windmill Farm, and usually had a generous slab of pie or fresh-baked muffins waiting for him.

  But it was a little strange to have him come by every single day that week to update Jesse on new details emerging about the murder at Eagle Hill. Hank had heard the rumors at the Bent N’ Dent, where he spent the abundance of his spare time, which was substantial. “LATEST NEWS,” he told Jesse and the wide-eyed apprentices who were supposed to be polishing spokes on the wheels of Edith Fisher’s buggy.

  “Hank, it’s not necessary to shout,” Jesse said. “We can hear you fine.”

  “So can all the neighbors,” Luke Schrock added. He had shown up out of nowhere.

  Sometimes Jesse’s buggy shop felt like a gathering place for all those with a surfeit of spare time. It was a troubling thought.

  “Sorry,” Hank said, but old habits die hard and his voice started to rise in volume with each new juicy phrase. “The dead man committed a burglary with his friends, got in an argument with them, parted ways, and hid out in Stoney Ridge. He was planning to turn himself in to the police as an informant in exchange for amnesia.”

  “Amnesia?” Jesse said. “I think you mean amnesty.”

  “What’s amnesty?” Leroy Glick asked.

  “Pardon,” Luke said, grinning. “A free pass. My favorite thing.”

  That did not come as a surprise to Jesse. Luke liked to think of himself as a subversive. Casually Amish, he called himself. The phrase would make his father cringe.

  Hank wasn’t finished and didn’t appreciate being interrupted. “NOW HOLD ON! Best part’s still to come. His buddies found out and came back to do him in. Broke into the cottage and killed him. IN COLD BLOOD.”

  “Who’s the source for this information?” Jesse asked.

  “My colleagues at the store.”

  The old codgers, he meant. The retired men who spent winter afternoons in the store, sitting in rocking chairs by the woodstove, and summers out on the picnic benches, playing checkers. “Hank, you know they just make things up.”

  Hank jabbed a finger in the air. “Perfectly plausible sequence of events.”

  “Don’t you think you should wait for the cause of death from the coroner?”

  Hank’s tall forehead crinkled in confusion. “WHERE’S THE FUN IN THAT?”

  “He’s right!” Luke said. “The Inn at Eagle Hill hasn’t seen this kind of excitement since that lady who was afraid of spiders.”

  Jesse remembered hearing about that particular guest. A woman with a serious case of arachnophobia. She was an Irish woman who was unusually skittish, the afraid-of-her-own-shadow type. When she called to make a reservation, she had asked Rose specifically if there were any spiders in the cottage. Any at all. Rose assured her that the cottage was spick-and-span, spider-free, but Luke couldn’t resist the bait. He had placed spiders, easily collected in the barn, in strategic locations all through the cottage—in the refrigerator, in the bathtub, in her bed. Each time this guest found a new one, she shouted hysterically for someone to come kill it.

  In the afternoon, the woman sat on the small cottage porch, reading a book. Luke climbed up on the roof above her and quietly lowered a gigantic fake tarantula, rigged to a fishing pole, to gently land on her shoulder. Ruthie said you could hear that lady’s bloodcurdling scream coming all the way from the Inn at Eagle Hill. She had packed up and left.

  Whenever Jesse thought about the Inn at Eagle Hill, his thoughts rambled over to Mim Schrock. Actually, he thought about Mim Schrock nonstop. His ardor for her, over the last two years, had doubled and quadrupled. And it seemed as if Mim was growing fond of Jesse. Well, fonder. He thought there might be a chance for him, especially when Danny Riehl moved to Prince Edward Island with the start-up of a new Amish community.

  But Jesse wasn’t sure where things stood between Danny and Mim. She wouldn’t say outright that it was over between them. Not over, she told Jesse, but not together. She needed time, she said, to think.

  To Jesse, that indicated she was hoping things would still work out between them, despite the distance. What else could it mean? Mim had gone to visit Danny a few weeks ago, and he envisioned the two of them running along the sandy shoreline of Prince Edward Island, hand in hand, barefoot, laughing. Probably laughing about him, stuck in a buggy shop with her little brother for company.

  Stop it! Jesse told himself. His imagination was his worst enemy.

  Maybe Mim was using the time on Prince Edward Island to decide that she didn’t really like island living, or starting a new settlement, or Danny.

  A window-rattling boom interrupted Jesse’s Mim-musing, and everyone looked at Luke, even the apprentices.

  “It wasn’t me!” he said, hands lifted in the air. “I’ve been here the whole time.”

  The boom came from the house, and Jesse bolted over to it just as Fern opened the kitchen door, waving her apron as smoke billowed out behind her. “Fern! What happened?”

  She seemed annoyed but unalarmed as she continued to wave smoke away with her apron. “That stove. Amos hasn’t cleaned it out in months and the flue clogged up.”

  Hank, Luke, and the two apprentices came up behind Jesse.

  “We’ll take care of it right now,” Jesse said.

  Fern stopped waving long enough to sweep her gaze over the five of them. One of her eyebrows went up—a bad sign. “I don’t need five of you messing up my clean kitchen.” She pointed a long bony finger at Luke and gave him a lo
ok that could cut a steak. “He’ll do. The rest of you—” she eyed each of them except Hank—“have work to do.”

  Talk about the lifting of eyebrows! As Luke Schrock was singled out by Fern, his eyebrows shot up to the top of his forehead. He looked colossally worried.

  How about that? Luke Schrock was afraid of Fern Lapp.

  6

  Luke Schrock was in trouble again.

  Yesterday morning, the town of Stoney Ridge woke to find newly installed stop signs placed at every single intersection, even on sparsely traveled roads. Previously, there had been only two stop signs in town, both along Main Street. Now there were over twenty-five. The morning rush hour traffic, composing largely of milk trucks driven by impatient drivers eager to get to the dairies for the day’s delivery, inched through town.

  Because the town of Stoney Ridge was unincorporated, no one quite knew who had approved the new stop signs or who was to blame. There was no mayor or city government, only the sheriff’s office. So that’s who people complained to. The police officers were as baffled as everyone else.

  Working on a hunch, Matt Lehman came looking for Ruthie’s father. Together, they went to the Inn at Eagle Hill and asked Rose to take a quick look into some of the outbuildings. In the last one Matt peered into, an old shack used for storing hay, he found the crude makings of a sheet metal shop, including pieces of sheet metal, soldering tools, stencils, and paint to replicate red traffic stop signs.

  Back at home, Ruthie overheard her father explain to Birdy what he and Matt had discovered. Apparently, last night Luke and his devoted following of lowlife friends had quietly installed the stop signs throughout the town.

  “Just for kicks,” Luke had said, when Ruthie’s father asked why he did such a thing. Luke seemed untroubled by the fact that he would probably be charged with a misdemeanor.

  “The thing is . . . they were really quite masterful,” Ruthie’s father said. “Luke had replicated those stop signs down to the exact kind of bolt. They were identical to the county signs. It’s too bad he can’t take that brain of his and use it for something productive. He has the ability to aggravate the police department in spectacular ways.”

  Ruthie agreed wholeheartedly. She had tried and tried to convince Luke to take the GED with her, but he scoffed at it. He said he didn’t need a piece of paper to tell him he was a genius. When she pointed out that the GED might be useful in persuading other people—such as a future employer—of his brilliance, Luke said he already had big plans in motion. He was always on the point of doing something, on the point of going somewhere.

  So Ruthie took the test alone one Saturday morning in May, after studying for it in the barn all spring, and the results had arrived in today’s mail. Her hands shook as she opened the envelope and read the scores:

  Science: 610

  Mathematics: 590

  Social studies: 750

  Language arts: written 780

  Language arts: reading 790

  She needed a score of 2,250 to pass. She had a score of 3,520. She added the numbers four different times, just to make sure they were correct.

  She had passed.

  On her first try! She, Ruthie Stoltzfus, had the equivalent of a high school diploma.

  She could do anything now. Anything! Go to college. Find a job. Travel. Anything.

  The world was her oyster.

  Her aunt Dok was the only one with whom she planned to share the news of passing the GED, the only one who would understand how monumental this piece of paper was, the only one who would celebrate its significance with her. Whenever Ruthie was around Dok, she felt this world of otherness open up to her. Other options, other choices, other ways of living.

  So, that afternoon when she stopped by her aunt’s new practice, it came as somewhat of a blow when Dok didn’t automatically congratulate her but instead asked her why she had taken the test. “Did you want to see how smart you are? Because you didn’t need a test to tell you that.”

  “No, not at all. I took it because, well, because I want options.”

  “For what? What is it you want to do with your life?”

  “I want . . . to matter.”

  “That’s a wonderful goal, Ruthie, but how? And why? What’s driving that desire? If you leave home, do you have a plan? Do you have money saved up?”

  This conversation wasn’t going at all the way Ruthie had hoped it would. Her aunt didn’t even crack a smile as she read the scores. Instead, she folded the paper carefully, slipped it into the envelope, and handed it back to Ruthie, who now regretted showing her the results at all. Instead of answering her aunt’s questions, Ruthie flipped them around. “So how did you know what you wanted to do with your life? I’m constantly trying to figure it out.”

  “I’m not sure I had it figured out. Certainly not when I was seventeen.” Dok leaned back against her desk. “At that age, I was chiefly motivated by making my mother mad.” She lifted her eyebrows. “And it worked.”

  Ruthie was stunned. “That’s why you’re a doctor? Just to make Mammi mad?”

  “No, but that was why I went to college. The decision to go to medical school came later, after I realized I couldn’t go back to the life I once had.”

  “Go back?” Ruthie was stunned. “Why in the world would you have wanted to go back?”

  “Because making my mother mad wasn’t a very good reason to leave the Amish. In fact, it was a pretty immature decision.”

  “But . . . you’re a doctor! You’re important.”

  Dok tilted her head. “Ruthie . . . work is important. But it isn’t work that makes a person important. That’s something that has to be settled between you and God.” She reached out and put a hand on Ruthie’s shoulder. “Maybe it’s just too soon for you to try to figure things out. Maybe that’s why you feel uncertain of what to do. Just remember that God has a plan for your future. Wait, Ruthie. Watch and wait for God’s timing. You’ll know it when it comes. I wish I’d realized that truth when I was young, like you. I’d have been far more careful about the choices along the way, instead of those that seemed important or self-satisfying at the time. Decisions you make now can be very . . . far-reaching. Good ones and bad ones.”

  Ruthie sensed her aunt wanted to say even more but was holding herself in check, and frankly, she didn’t want to hear any more. She felt deflated. She glanced around her aunt’s office—it was a disaster. Boxes waiting to be emptied, desk piled with books and papers and file folders. “Looks like you’re pretty busy.”

  Her aunt’s gaze drifted around the room. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

  Ruthie walked to the doorjamb, then spun around with an idea. “I could help. Just get things put away. I’ve got some time today.” Until the Inn at Eagle Hill was given the all clear to reopen, she wasn’t needed there, and the last thing she wanted to do was to work at the Bent N’ Dent. If her dad knew she had free time, he would expect her behind the cash register.

  That offer brought the first bright, honest-to-goodness smile on her aunt’s face, the one Ruthie had expected to see when she showed her the GED scores. “Yes! Yes, yes, yes. I would love the help.”

  Ruthie got right to work, cheered up. For the moment.

  Ruthie set up a rigorous daily schedule of tutoring Patrick Kelly in Penn Dutch. Partly, she believed this was the best way to learn a language. Partly, she wanted the money. She might not have a plan figured out yet for her future, but she knew a fat savings account would be essential to success.

  She gave Patrick fifty vocabulary words to memorize each day, quizzed him, and corrected his pronunciation with impatient annoyance. He had studied German in high school so there was a foundation to work from, but as a dialect, Penn Dutch sounded different, vowels in particular. “Patrick, listen carefully. You keep making the u sound as an uh sound. It needs to be u like ewe. You need to listen and practice.”

  “Immersion.”

  “What?”

  “That’s how to learn a
foreign language. Total immersion. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

  “Well, then. Immerse yourself. Stop talking in English.”

  A look of panic hit him. “I . . . can’t. I would hardly speak. I can barely understand Penn Dutch.”

  “You have to try.”

  “But I am trying!”

  “Not hard enough. Try harder. Like now.” She opened a children’s book. “Repeat after me: Eise verharde nemmt viel Hitz.” Much heat is required to harden iron.

  “Eise verharde nemmt viel Hitz.”

  “Da elephant is gros un groh. Eah’s oarich shtaut un sadda shloh.” The elephant is huge and gray. He’s very strong and sort of slow.

  Patrick repeated what she had said, then his face crinkled up in confusion.

  “Da monkey find sich so di haym mitt en banana draus in di baym.” The monkey feels at home with a banana out in the trees.

  He stared at her intently, and she could see he was thinking very hard about what she said.

  “Oh boy. Ruthie, the thing is, I’m not sure these particular phrases would be ones I would need to use very often.”

  “Stop talking in English!”

  At just that moment, David walked into the kitchen. “Ruthie, hab Geduld!” Have patience. “You sound a little tough on your student.”

  Ruthie looked up in utter surprise. “Patrick wants me to be tough. He told me he plans to be fluent by the end of the month.”

  Patrick nodded. “She’s right. I want her to be tough on me. Full immersion.”

  She threw her hands up in the air. “Kannschtt du Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch schwetze?” Can you speak in Pennsylvania Dutch?

  Patrick’s eyebrows lifted in panic. “Unwohl.” Not well.

  “Nau is awwer ball Zeit!” Now is the time!

  Patrick paled.

  “Ruthie, I don’t think yelling at him is going to help him.” David took a green apple from the bowl on the kitchen counter and sliced it into slivers, then sprinkled the slices with ground cinnamon. He put the apple slices in two bowls, one for himself and one for Ruthie and Patrick. “Immersion. In a way, it’s like learning to listen to God, isn’t it? Immersing yourself in prayer. Developing an ear. Daily practice. Practicing daily.”