The Search (11 page)

By the time Bess figured out that Mammi’s special hiding place for her money was an empty Folger’s coffee tin—the same place her father kept his money—Billy had the horse harnessed to its traces and was waiting for her. She hurried to join him, delighted at the turn of events that gave her time alone with him. Usually, Mammi was within shouting distance and added her two cents to their conversation. Bess tried to think of something interesting to say, something witty and wise. Just last night, she had been working out a few imaginary conversations with Billy, just in case an opportunity like this—driving together in a buggy—presented itself. But now her mind was empty. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say. They were getting close to the store when she blurted out, “Why Coca-Cola?”

“Kills aphids,” Billy said without even glancing at her. And then he fell silent.

“What do you suppose it’s doing to your belly?” Bess said quietly.

Billy turned to her, a surprised look on his face, before bursting out with a laugh. “Good point.” He flashed a dazzling smile at her. His smile seemed as if he had never smiled for anyone else in the world.

Bess felt pleased. She had made Billy Lapp laugh.

Satisfied that the aphids were done in, Mammi spent the rest of the afternoon on another project. Instead of drying the rose petals from today’s pickings, she said she was using them to make rose water. She filled a pot with clean rose petals. Then she poured boiling water over them and covered the pot with a lid. She turned off the heat and let the petals stand until they cooled.

Before bedtime, Bess helped Mammi strain the petals from the water. They ended up with the most beautifully colored liquid a person would ever see. The liquid would be kept in the cooler and used whenever they would bake something that called for rose water, and Mammi would sell it in small mason jars. “And we’ll charge double at Dottie Stroot’s,” she told Bess.

Some nights, like tonight, it was so hot that Bess couldn’t sleep. She threw off her sheets and went downstairs, finding her way by touch because it was so dark. She opened the back door and stepped into the yard. Boomer followed her out and disappeared into the shadows.

She stood still for a moment. Ohio summers were even hotter, lacking the fresh breeze that seemed to always come through Stoney Ridge. There was just a sliver of a moon and the night was not totally black. She could make out vague shapes: the henhouse, the barn, the greenhouse, the cherry trees.

Blackie slid out of nowhere and wove himself between her legs. Bess picked him up. “You’re getting fat! You must be feasting on barn mice.”

Blackie jumped down and oozed away, insulted.

She looked up at the velvety night sky, filled with star diamonds. It was a peaceful time. She still went back and forth about being there, but tonight she was glad to be here in Stoney Ridge with her grandmother.

She thought of the things she had already learned to do this summer: how to pick roses and get rid of aphids, how to dry rose petals to make tea and jam, how to make rose water. And how to make a fair profit. How to bake a cherry pie. Mammi told her that was just the beginning of things she needed to learn.

How much more learning can I take?
she wondered as she rubbed her head.

Later that week, Mammi made one more valiant effort to steal the sheriff’s car. Bess tried to talk her out of it all the way into Stoney Ridge, but Mammi went right on merrily ahead with her plan.

“But why, Mammi? You’re going to give that sheriff a heart attack! Why would you want to kill the poor man?”

Mammi set her jaw in that stubborn way and wouldn’t answer.

This time, as Bess coaxed the sheriff’s car slowly onto the road, Mammi flipped a switch and the siren went on. In the rearview mirror, Bess saw the sheriff run out of the bank and into the road. She pulled the car over and hung her head. Her grandmother was certifiably crazy and she was the accomplice.

The sheriff opened the passenger door for Mammi and helped her out. “Miz Riehl, you are turning into a one-woman crime wave.”

Mammi’s eyes were circles of astonishment. Stoically, she stiffened her arms and offered her wrists to the sheriff for handcuffing. “Do what you must, Johnny.”

Now a crowd started to gather. The sheriff paled. “Aw, Miz Riehl, don’t make me do this.”

“You are sworn to uphold the law.” Mammi clucked her tongue. “Think of all them voters, watching their tax dollars at work. You can’t be playing favorites.”

“Dadblast it, Miz Riehl! If I didn’t know better, I would say you are trying to get yourself thrown in the clink.” His face was shading purple.

“Nothing of the sort! But I do get one phone call.”

The sheriff narrowed his eyes and thought hard for a moment. “Get in the patrol car, Miz Riehl. You too, missy.” He meant Bess.

Mammi slid into the back of the patrol car and patted on the seat beside her for Bess. Bess wanted to die, right there on the spot. But Mammi looked as content as a cat sitting in cream.

The sheriff drove them to his office and took them inside. He pointed to two chairs by his desk. “Can I get you two anything to drink?”

“Nothing for me,” Mammi said politely, lowering herself into a chair, “but my Bess here would like a soda pop.”

Bess didn’t want a soda pop, the way her stomach was turning itself inside out. The sheriff went to the back of his office and brought back a warm Tab. He eased himself down into his chair and leaned back, lacing his fingers behind his head. “Now, Miz Riehl. Let’s cut the cackle and come straight to the point. Who do you want to call?”

“Oh, I don’t want to call anyone,” Mammi said. She pointed at him. “But you can call someone.”

The sheriff picked up the receiver. “What’s the number?”

Mammi turned to Bess. “What’s the phone number to Jonah’s barn?”

Bess’s jaw dropped open. “Oh no, Mammi, no! You can’t tell Dad about us getting arrested! He’ll be on the next bus to Stoney Ridge!”

Mammi pushed a few loose gray wisps of hair back into her prayer cap. “Do tell.”

5

______

As Jonah hung up the phone on the wall of the workshop in his barn, he had to sit down. He couldn’t believe what he had just heard from the sheriff. His mother and his daughter were in jail for stealing a police car. In jail! If he hadn’t recognized the sheriff’s voice, he would have even thought it might be a prank call. Bess had been in Stoney Ridge for only a few weeks. What in blazes had been going on back there?

He had to get there. He had to go, get Bess, and bring her home. As soon as possible. The thought of his precious daughter locked up in a city jail, surrounded by drug addicts and cat burglars and pickpockets and murderers, sickened him. He shuddered. Then he had a comforting thought. No one would bother her as long as his mother was nearby.

He went in search of Mose to tell him that he would be in charge of the furniture business for the next few days.

When Mammi and Bess returned to Rose Hill Farm that afternoon, freed from the sheriff after promising that they would stop taking his car, they found a bucket of water sitting on the porch, two big catfish, mad as hornets, swimming inside. “They are sure ugly fish,” Mammi said, “but they make good eatings.” She picked up the bucket and took it in the house, but turned toward Bess at the door. “My ladies need feeding. And take the big pail for eggs. Lift
every
hen.”

Bess always gathered every one she found, but maybe some days she didn’t look as hard as she might. She picked up the pail by the kitchen door and turned to Mammi. “Aren’t you wondering where those fish came from?”

“Billy left ’em,” Mammi said. “He’s done it before.”

Bess took off her big black bonnet and hung it on the porch railing. She walked across the yard to the henhouse, cataloging her woes. Her father, understandably, had been astounded to hear that she was at the police station and said he was on his way to Stoney Ridge. He would probably be here by morning, if not late tonight, to take her home. Just when she was starting to feel encouraged about her developing friendship with Billy Lapp.

On the buggy ride back to Rose Hill Farm, Bess had fought back tears. She asked her grandmother, why didn’t she just say she wanted to send her home? Why go to all that trouble to aggravate the poor sheriff?

Mammi gave her a look of pure astonishment. “I
don’t
want you going home.” She turned her gaze to the back of the horse. “I want my boy to
come
home.”

“But why?”

“It’s high time.” Then her jaw clamped shut in Mammi’s own stubborn way and she didn’t give up another word all the way home.

What troubled Bess the most was that she understood Mammi’s logic. In fact, even more worrisome, she thought it was pretty smart. Her father wouldn’t have come back to Stoney Ridge under any other circumstance than an emergency. And finding out his daughter was thrown in jail for stealing a sheriff’s car would definitely constitute an emergency.

She got a scoop of cracked corn from the feed bin and tossed it around the ground as the chickens tried to peck at her bare toes. Life just wasn’t fair, wasn’t fair at all. Under the late afternoon sky, all life seemed wrung out.

From the kitchen window came the smell of catfish sizzling in the frying pan. Suddenly, Billy came flying out of the barn, pounding for the house, face first, bellowing like a calf, “No! No! Don’t eat it!”

With eyes as big as quarters, Bess watched him jump the steps into the kitchen. She threw the corn on the ground and ran up to the house. Inside, Billy grabbed the frying pan from a startled Mammi and tossed it into the sink. Then he yelped in pain, “Eyeow!” and hopped on one leg. He had burnt his hands from picking up the pan without a rag.

With unusual presence of mind, Bess thrust his hands in the bucket of water the catfish had been in. “
What
is the matter with you?”

He yanked his hands up and she pushed them back in the water. “Those fish. Something’s wrong with them. I shouldn’t have left ’em on the porch, but that black cat of Bess’s was eyeing them in the barn.”

“What makes you think something is wrong with them?” Bess asked. She was putting ice from the icebox into a rag and tying it up to make an ice pack.

“Didn’t you see them?” he asked.

“They were just as ugly as any other catfish,” Mammi offered.

“They didn’t have whiskers,” he said, taking the ice pack that Bess offered to him. He leaned against the counter, holding the ice pack between his hands. “And one was missing its eyes. A few weeks ago Bess noticed that birds weren’t singing at the lake. So I’ve been back a few times. She’s right. There’s no birds up there anymore. And this time, I found these fish up on the shore, practically dead. Something’s wrong with that lake.”

“Blue Lake Pond?” Mammi put a hand against her chest. “That place is teeming with wildlife. My Samuel used to say he only needed to hold out a pail on the shore and fish would jump in.”

“Not anymore,” Billy said mournfully.

“What were you planning to do with the catfish?” Bess asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I hadn’t gotten that far.”

“Something like that happened in Berlin. A company dumped chemicals in a lake. Birds ate the fish and they ended up with strange-looking babies.”

Billy’s dark eyebrows shot up. “Someone is
polluting
the lake.”

“Maybe so,” Bess said. “But you need proof.” She held up some B&W salve to put on his hands.

He held out his palms. “I don’t know what shocks me more.” He looked at Bess as she put a dab of salve on his hands. “Someone ruining my lake—” he gave her a sly grin—“or hearing you speak a full entire paragraph that makes sense.”

Mammi snorted. “Come around here for breakfast sometime. She babbles like a brook. A person can hardly drink a cup of coffee in peace.”

Bess wrapped a rag around Billy’s hand and tied it so tight he yelped like a snake bit him and yanked it away from her.

“So how am I going to get some evidence that someone is polluting my lake?” he asked.

Bess put the salve back in the kitchen drawer. “You have to go out there and look for tracks. Maybe even stay out there awhile and watch, at different times of the day. Even at night.”