Christmas at Rose Hill Farm (15 page)

With a slight movement of his hands, he steered the horse onto Main Street. As the buggy passed the Sweet Tooth Bakery, Maggie suddenly dove down, headfirst, just in case Dottie Stroot was gazing out the window. Amos laughed out loud at that. “Do you really think she cares, Maggie? She hires and fires girls on a regular basis.”

But Maggie was still smarting from getting fired so unceremoniously and, he had just discovered this morning, the reason she was spending so much time at Windmill Farm was because she hadn't gotten around to telling her father she'd been fired.

“Soon,” she had promised Amos after she finally confessed the truth. “I'll tell my dad about getting fired soon. As soon as he hires a teacher. Then, I'll tell him.”

Amused by Maggie's situation, he realized he hadn't felt that sharp ache about Bess in his heart for at least ten minutes. But after he bought the liniment at the Hay & Grain, he drove the buggy back down Main Street and saw Bess and Lainey and the two little girls head into the fabric store. He inhaled sharply, and Maggie gave his arm a reassuring squeeze, as if sensing how the sight of Bess shook him.

He stopped his buggy next to the fabric store with a sinking heart. He had kept alive a small hope that Bess really was sick—that was why she ran upstairs during the service, that was why she hadn't come to see him. As Bess scooped up the toddler in her arms to cross the street, she didn't seem like someone who'd been recently ailing.

He let out a puff of air. Should he go in and try to talk to her? He had questions to ask her and was getting tired of waiting. But he wasn't good at talking deeply in the best of circumstances, and a fabric store filled with women seemed like the worst of circumstances.

“Give her time,” said Maggie, who could evidently read minds. “She needs to sort a few things out.”

For a moment neither of them moved. He felt rooted by surprise and curiosity about Maggie, as if he were seeing her in a new light.

“Amos, come skating with me at Blue Lake Pond. Just for an hour or so. We don't have to talk about Bess or Billy or the wedding. It would be good for you to take a break from too much serious thinking.” She swept a glance in the direction of the fabric store. “Your troubles will be here when you get back.”

Slowly, he shook his head. “Not today.”

“Tomorrow, then?”

He flexed his gloved hands, picked up the reins, and shook them to get the horse moving again. “Maybe tomorrow.”

Her dark eyes shone with delight. “Excellent. Tomorrow, then.” She hummed all the way home. One thing everyone knew about Maggie Zook: if she wasn't talking, she was humming.

B
illy waited a few days to return to Rose Hill Farm to check on the rosebud. He knew the rose wasn't ready to open yet, and he wanted to speak to a few rosarians to learn more about old German roses. From one elderly man in Pittsburgh, he learned that of the eighteen hundred cultivars bred between the end of the nineteenth century and World War II, many were extinct. The rosarian hoped Billy might have stumbled onto one of those German roses, but Billy was confident the mystery rose dated earlier than the nineteenth century. He didn't tell the rosarian that. Not yet.

Mostly, though, the reason he stayed away from Rose Hill Farm was that he needed some emotional distance from Bess. As hard as he tried, she was rarely absent from his thoughts. He kept envisioning those blue eyes with those long blonde lashes, eyes that were incapable of concealing the truth.

His curiosity about the rosebud finally won out and he was on the bus back to Stoney Ridge. Get in, check on the rose, get out; that was the plan. That girl had better stay away from the greenhouse.

Bess did exactly that when he first arrived, but within the hour, she made an appearance. He was sitting on the wooden
stool, studying the veining in the rose's leaves and comparing them to some information he'd gathered from the database. He finished and sat back to study it, then felt eyes on him. He looked over his shoulder and there she stood, still as a statue by the door, hands clasped behind her back.

His heart did a double take. His spine slowly straightened as he turned to face her.

She remained motionless, hands still clasped behind her. “Am I interrupting you?” she asked meekly. Automatically, without thinking, she reached a hand out to snap off a fading white Popcorn bloom, a miniature rose that had just been developed a few years ago.

Billy studied her awhile, a pencil in one hand and a book in the other. “Yes,” he replied and went back to work, poring over a chart of rose genealogies.

She moved closer to him with careful, measured footsteps until she reached the workbench, where she stood in a pose of penitence. “Billy?” she said very quietly.

“What?”

“Won't you at least talk to me?”

Slowly he raised his eyes to look at her. The Popcorn rose bloom trembled in her hands. Tears shimmered on her lower eyelids.

Of all the things he'd expected, this was the last. Did the woman not know what effect she had upon him? The sight of her made his heart quake and his belly tense. He swallowed twice; the lump of emotion felt like a wad of cotton batting going down.

“I think I figured out why you're so angry with me,” she said softly. “It finally dawned on me what you meant when you said I had done nothing to ruin our friendship. You meant
nothing
, didn't you? You meant that because I didn't say anything—at that moment—I ruined our friendship.”

Billy just looked at her as she spoke, listening less to what she was saying than to how she was saying it.

“Please forgive me.”

He could have insisted there was nothing to forgive, but they both knew she had hurt him.

For several inescapable seconds, while their hearts thundered, they stared at each other, hurting, fearful. Then she swallowed and dropped her hand. “It didn't take me two minutes after you left to realize you would have told me if Betsy Mast was back in your life. You would never have kept that hidden from me. Not you.” The appeal in her voice was lost on him. He stubbornly continued his work. “Billy?”

But the hurt within him was still too engulfing. So he returned in a cold, bitter voice, “Yeah, well, you were two minutes too late, Bess.” He tossed his pencil down and rose to his feet. “Do you know what it did to me when you looked at me that way, like I was some—some crummy two-timer?'

“Why didn't you tell me about Betsy asking you for money? Why didn't you tell me what your brothers had been up to? If you had, it wouldn't have come as such a shock to me that day. Everything happened so fast—you got a new buggy, your father and brothers arrived at Rose Hill Farm and found the box of collectibles in your buggy, and everyone was upset because one was missing . . . then . . . your brother said you had loaned money to Betsy Mast . . . and rather than explain anything, you just got on your high horse and left. You walked away. From everyone. Including me.”

Abruptly, Billy swung around and confronted her with fists balled and veins standing out sharply on his neck. “I shouldn't have had to tell you I wasn't guilty. You should have known what kind of man I was. But I saw it in your eyes, Bess. I saw that flicker of doubt, so don't deny it.”

“I won't,” she whispered, sounding ashamed. Then, a little
bolder, she said, “But you should consider what it felt like on my end. I didn't have any idea where you had gone. I kept thinking you'd come back, sooner or later, or would try to get in touch with me. Amos and I spent weeks, months, trying to locate you. Right around Christmas, someone told Amos where you were living east of Lancaster. He went to talk to you, to bring you home, but when he returned, he said you just wanted to be left alone. He said that if you wanted to come home, you would, but no one could force you to do something you didn't want to do.”

“That's about right.” Billy swallowed and stared at the glass wall, feeling a clot of emotion fill his throat.

“After that, I realized it was time to abandon hope of seeing you again. There was no mistaking the meaning of your silence.”

“It doesn't matter anymore. It doesn't change anything. It's all ancient history.”

“You don't mean that, Billy.”

“Don't I?” he shot back, telling himself to disregard the tears that made her wide blue eyes shimmer. He stood like a ramrod, too stubborn to take the one step necessary to end this standoff. “I'll leave you to wonder, just like I felt after I left.”

For the moment neither of them moved. He tried to tear his eyes from her, but it didn't quite work. He realized one of them had to be sensible, and was the first to look away.

“Well,” she said in a small, remorseful voice, “I am sorry, Billy.” She took a step closer. “I've wondered about one thing.”

He kept his eyes on the graphs spread out on the workbench.

“What do you think ever happened to the Santa Claus bank? To that collectible?”

Most likely, his brothers sold it and wasted the money on liquor and ladies. Did it even matter anymore? “Like I said, it's ancient history. The only question I want answered is about the identity of this rose. Are you absolutely sure you don't remember
anything about this rose? Anything your grandmother might have said about it?” He studied her face carefully, increasingly convinced by the way she avoided his eyes that there was something she wasn't telling him. He pointed a finger at her. “Bess, I want the truth. I've asked you before and you act slippery. Cagey, just like your grandmother. What do you know about this rose?”

She looked down at her hands, then drew a breath as if to say something more, but didn't.

“Bess. If there's something you know about this rose, you need to tell me.”

“I vaguely remember something about a special old rose, but I can't know for sure if it was
this
rose. Mammi had so many special roses.”

“I heard all that before. Tell me what you do know.”

“It's a long story.”

“I want to hear this.” He patted the wooden stool. “Sit. And talk.”

“It goes back to that autumn after my grandfather passed and I was staying with my grandmother for an extra week to help her adjust. A week turned into a month, and there was still no discussion of me returning to Ohio . . .”

———

Late October 1969
, an overcast, dismal day. Bess and her grandmother were crossing Main Street in downtown Stoney Ridge just as a pickup truck rounded the corner. Mammi jammed her fists on her deluxe-sized hips and planted herself in the middle of the road. The driver had to veer wildly to avoid hitting her and ended up swerving his truck far to the right, then jerking to the left to miss a telephone pole, before he ran his truck off the road and came to a stop.

The driver climbed out of the truck, beside himself in outrage.

You'd never seen a more surprised look on Mammi. “Well,
skin me for a polecat,” she said, thunderstruck. “If it isn't Charlie Oakley.”

He threw his cap on the ground. “Look what you've done now, Bertha Riehl!”

“Me? You're the one who nearly ran over a poor, defenseless little child.” Mammi pulled Bess in front of her to prove the point. “You never did know how to drive a straight line.”

Charlie Oakley was the bane of Mammi's existence. He seemed like a harmless old man, with bib overalls over a graying T-shirt. But Mammi had warned Bess not to be fooled by Charlie's stature. He called himself a grower and Mammi called him “a fellow who didn't know the difference between thine and mine.” He had a reputation for sneaking into people's yards to dig up valuable perennials from their gardens and selling them to unsuspecting nurseries. He had made a serious mistake when he slipped onto Rose Hill Farm under the dark of night and made off with Mammi's Most Special Rose. Yesterday, she had discovered the disappearance of her rose and it lit a fire under her.

Charlie unlatched the tailgate of his pickup truck and climbed up. He uprighted a few boxes, then finally shook his head, furious with Mammi. “I'm supposed to get these over to a fellow in Lancaster by five p.m. or I don't get paid. I gotta call him.”

Mammi had her nose in the back of the truck. She hitched a leg up on the tailgate of the truck. “Give me a boost, Bess.”

It was slow going. Bess huffed and puffed and pushed until Mammi heaved herself up onto the bed of the truck.

All the while, an agitated Charlie sputtered and complained, pointing a long finger at her. “You stay out of my merchandise, Bertha Riehl.”

For her part, Mammi didn't seem to be paying any attention to Charlie Oakley's travails as she peered into boxes. “You got something to hide?”

Charlie's face grew red. “You just leave my merchandise alone. I've a mind to sue you for jaywalking.”

She reached down and picked up a box thrown on its side, then opened it up to look closely inside. “Now, Charlie, even you wouldn't be mean enough to sue a poor little widder lady.”

Charlie started to sputter again and Mammi told him to simmer down, that she'd find a way to get his truck out of the ditch for him. “Bess, go run to the Sweet Tooth Bakery and ask Dottie Stroot to call Caleb Zook. You remember him—he's the one who buried my Samuel. He won't mind helping and he doesn't live too far. New ministers love jobs like this. Tell him to bring a good horse or two, and rope. Lots of rope. Take this reckless driver down to the bakery with you. He can use the phone there.”

“Reckless? Reckless!” Charlie's jaw started flapping.

“You run along, Bess,” Mammi said, ignoring him. Charlie eased himself off the back of the truck and followed behind Bess.

Dottie Stroot was extremely annoyed that Bess didn't intend to buy anything from the bakery. When she heard Bertha Riehl had sent Bess to make a phone call, the news practically sent her through the roof. “That woman!” She pursed her lips like a dried berry and finally relented after Charlie exclaimed his very livelihood was in jeopardy if he didn't get to Lancaster by five o'clock. Plus he bought a bag of day-old pastries.

By the time Bess and Charlie Oakley returned to the crime scene, Mammi was resting on a sidewalk bench. She supervised from afar as Charlie and Bess set to work to get the boxes turned right side up in the bed of the truck. They were nearly done by the time they heard a familiar clopping of hooves and jangles of harness, and there was Caleb Zook in a wagon behind two enormous horses with hooves the size of dinner plates.

Caleb Zook laughed as Bess studied the horses' big heads. “They're called Percherons. My wife Jorie breeds them. They're stronger than a tow truck.”

Bess and Bertha stood out of the way as Caleb tied ropes to the truck's back bumper and attached the ropes to the horses' harnesses. “Pull,” Caleb called to the horses. Bess was fascinated to see the way their nostrils flared as they strained to pull, pull, pull. Little by little, the truck was pulled out of the ditch.

Satisfied that there wasn't any damage to his truck, Charlie thanked Caleb, scowled at Mammi, and hopped into his truck to speed off to Lancaster.

“Well, Bertha,” Caleb said, “that's that. Do you need a ride home?”

“We'll take you up on that,” Mammi said. “I'm so worn out from helping Charlie Oakley that I want to fold up like an empty feed sack.”

Bess scrambled into the back of the wagon as Caleb heaved and hoisted Mammi into the passenger seat. Slow going for him too, Bess noticed. As he led the horses down Stoney Leaf Drive, he asked Bess how long she planned to stay in Stoney Ridge.

“Just a little longer,” Mammi answered for her.

“Where's Jonah?” Caleb asked.

“He went home after the funeral. Had to work. Plus, too many memories for Jonah in Stoney Ridge. Bess is staying on to help me in my time of sorrow.”

Caleb glanced over at Bertha. Bess wondered if he was thinking the same thing she was: Mammi didn't seem to be a woman who needed much coddling, newly widowed or not.

Later that night, Mammi could hardly get through her chores for her haste. She had two pans in the kitchen sink, one of suds, one to rinse. She washed, Bess dried, and she was hurrying her along.

“Mammi, where are we going?”

“Got an errand. Bundle up. It's a brisk night.”

By then Bess knew she was in for something.

Mammi hurried into the barn and reappeared a moment later,
pulling the reins of Frieda, the buggy horse. In the blink of an eye, she hooked Frieda's traces to the buggy shafts and away they went down Stoney Leaf Drive, heading toward town a few miles away, on a moonless autumn night. When they reached the ditch where the truck had swerved, Mammi pointed with a flashlight to something large under a tree. “There it is.”