A Home for Lydia (The Pebble Creek Amish Series) (40 page)

“I don’t know, but we need to go for help, not rush in like three fools.”

“Go for help?” They both turned toward him, but it was Clara who spoke. Lydia reserved her condemnation to a stare and a sad
shake of her head. “How would you even make it to the barn without them seeing you? And by the time you got back, they’d be gone!”

“Clara’s right. This doesn’t sound like you, anyway, Aaron.” Now Lydia put her hands on her hips, and he felt his throat go dry. He did not need a confrontation with her right now.

“You’ve fought awfully hard to bring these cabins back from near ruin.” Lydia ran her fingers over her lips, as if she could bring forth the words that would reveal his secrets. “Now you’re just going to let them get away with this? I don’t think so. Not when we’re finally turning a profit.”

She turned and stepped off the front porch.

Aaron knew in that moment that he had no choice. He had to act.

Lydia thought she was a big girl. He heard the disparaging comments she sometimes made about herself. But he thought she was beautiful and precious, and he knew she weighed hardly more than Clara—maybe just another ten or fifteen pounds.

He reached forward and grabbed her around the waist, picking her up with no problem. With his free hand he opened the door of cabin three. He shoved her inside in one fluid motion and grasped Clara’s hand, Clara who was staring at him as if he’d lost his mind—and maybe he had. He pushed her in as well.

Pulling the door shut, he grabbed the master key out of his pocket and overrode the inside lock.

“Aaron! Aaron, what are you doing?” Lydia’s voice was startled, and he almost smiled. He’d finally done something that surprised her.

“He locked us inside.” Clara rattled the door, her tone clearly insulted.

“Aaron, let us out right now!”

“Keep your voices down. We don’t know if they’re armed.” He rested both hands against the door. They might raise the window and crawl out, but it was a good drop to the ground. They would risk turning an ankle—and they would have to pry off the window
screen first. He didn’t think Lydia would actually damage property in order to escape the cabin. Surely they wouldn’t resort to that. He prayed they wouldn’t.

“I’ll hurry and see if I can catch a glimpse of them and identify who it is. As soon as I do I’ll go after Officer Tate.”

The girls had stopped arguing with him, but someone continued to rattle the doorknob.

“Wait here, please.”

He prayed once more that
Gotte
would keep them safe, and then he turned and crept out into the rain.

Lydia kicked the door, and then she realized mud covered the toes of her shoes. She’d be cleaning that off later—more work! Exactly what she did not need.

“Why would he do that?” Clara smacked the door with her hand. “He’s so rude, so arrogant, and so mean!”

Lydia turned on her sister with a vengeance, yanking her away from the door. “He was trying to protect us!”

Clara pulled back, rubbed at her arms. “What is it with you two? You’re worse than
mamm
and
dat
. It’s not as if I’m a child, and you’re not, either. And it’s not as if
dat
could protect us anyway.”

Maybe it was the rain, her frustration, or being locked in a room with Clara, but for the first time in a long time, Lydia listened past her sister’s words. She listened to the hurt lurking beneath.

“It doesn’t always take strength to protect someone.
Dat
protects us with his prayers and his words. He guides us in many ways, even though he’s physically weak.”

Clara plopped onto the bed, a sigh escaping her lips. “Do you believe that?”

“I do.”

“That sounds like something
mamm
would say.”

“Should I apologize for that?” Lydia sat beside her on the bed.

“I guess not.” Silence enveloped them until Lydia became aware of the sound of rain dripping on the roof of the cabin.

Clara plucked at the quilt top, her voice softening and merging with the sounds of the night. “Everyone thinks I don’t remember
dat
being strong, but I do. Sally Ann, Amanda, and Martha might not remember, but I do. He used to pick me up as though I weighed no more than a loaf of bread.”

Lydia thought of interrupting, but instead she waited as she listened for the bark of a rifle shot or the rumble of an
Englisch
car starting.

What was Aaron doing now? Should they try to escape the cabin and go after him?

“When I see how he’s changed, it makes me sad, Lydia. It breaks my heart.”

“It’s not a sin to feel heartache over what has happened to him.” Lydia reached out in the darkness and covered Clara’s hand with her own.

“But you still believe it’s
Gotte’s wille
?”

“I believe
Gotte
has a plan for
dat
.” She searched her heart and added, “I don’t understand it, but I trust Him. It’s only hard sometimes to know how we’re supposed to meet the needs of our family…”

Clara turned her hand over underneath Lydia’s and laced their fingers together. “Sometimes I think if I were to marry soon, it would be one less worry.”

Lydia snorted. “Is that why you go to the singings every week?
Dat
would not want you to marry for any reason other than that you had met the person
Gotte
meant for you.”

“How will I know?”

Were they actually having this conversation right now? Lydia’s mind turned to Aaron, who could be confronting the burglars even while she talked to Clara about courting. “You’ll know. If you’re not sure, wait.”

“I’m not
gut
at waiting,” Clara admitted.

“Runs in the family.”

“Seems as though we could be doing something to help Aaron right now.”

“I agree.”

“Are you
in lieb
with him, Lydia?”

“What?” Lydia’s voice jumped a notch, and she released Clara’s hand.

“It’s confusing watching you two. You argue about almost everything, but then you’ll laugh at the same moment. And you often blush when he looks your way. I don’t understand.”

“Let’s focus on tonight’s problem.”

“Maybe we could think of a way out of this cabin if we worked together instead of fighting all the time.”

Lydia didn’t answer.

Had her sister received a bump on the head when Aaron had pushed them inside?

Why had she even agreed to come back and check on him? They should have gone home. They should be making dinner right now. Why was Clara suddenly talking like a reasonable young woman instead of her bratty little sister? Why the change in attitude?

And why was she pulling her off the bed toward the window?

“Aaron told us to stay here,” Lydia reminded her.

“When did you start minding him?”

“He locked the door from the outside.”

“There’s a window.”

“This is cabin three. There’s a slope. The window’s built on the high side, and we would be jumping into the wet grass. If one of us turns an ankle—”

“It’ll be like when we were
kinner
and playing outside.” Clara was already working on the latch. “Find me a flashlight?”

“
Nein
. The burglars might see us.” Lydia realized there was no stopping her sister once an idea took root in her mind, and she was tired of waiting. “You open the right latch. I’ll open the left. They slide left to right to unlock.”

Would she regret agreeing to this?

The summer night air came through the window with a whoosh, and with it the soft rain still falling. “Help me with the screen so it doesn’t fall out into the mud.”

Clara held the tabs at the bottom while Lydia inched the screen up. It raised enough for her to slide her fingers underneath the frame and pull it into the room.

“I’ll go first,” Clara said.

“No, you don’t. I’ll go first, and if it’s dangerous, you’ll stay here. If I whistle, you’ll stay here. Agreed?”

She felt more than saw Clara’s nod.

So she climbed over the sill, careful that her dress didn’t catch on the window casing. She couldn’t tell how much of a drop it would be. She couldn’t see anything as she hung there, her feet dangling in the darkness.

So she closed her eyes, pictured the wall of the cabin on the slope, and let go.

Chapter 34

A
aron had no intentions of confronting the two men rifling through the office cabinets.

As he crouched beneath the windows, peeking inside, he tried to get a better look. All he could make out was their clothing—work boots, leaving muddy tracks all over Lydia’s clean floor, blue jeans, long-sleeved cotton shirts, and baseball caps.

Both men had brown hair that went below the baseball caps and reached to their collars.

Both men had their backs to him as they searched through the desk and the filing cabinet.

They each carried a duffel bag, which they were dumping things into, apparently anything they found to be of value.

If they would just turn around, Aaron might be able to tell if they were Amish or
Englisch
. He might be able to tell if he knew them.

He’d looked for a car or buggy first, but there was nothing in the parking area. They must have left their ride farther down the road. So again—they could be Amish or
Englisch
.

He’d been hunkered in the rain for ten minutes, watching, water from the roof dripping down the neck of his shirt, when he heard a noise behind him.

Turning, at first he saw only darkness, but then he made out the white prayer
kapps
of Lydia and Clara.

He wanted to rant. He wanted to holler at them for not staying put. But he did not want to alert the robbers, so he kept his mouth shut and motioned them beneath the sill of the window.

They crept closer and peered inside.

At the exact moment Lydia and Clara pressed their faces to the glass pane, the taller of the two burglars turned toward them. Young and clean shaven, the man’s face was gaunt, his eyes sunken and bloodshot. Aaron’s first thought was that this was a very ill person, someone who must need the money for medical reasons. But if that were the case, and he were Amish, he’d only need to make his need known. He’d only need to ask.