Bookends Page 14

  Sliding his vehicle to a dramatic stop, the bearded young man scrambled out of the front seat, then unlocked the trunk and pulled out a hefty power unit and a contraption that resembled a huge set of pliers. “Jaws of Life, coming through!” he bellowed, carting fifty pounds of equipment in each hand across the treacherous ice. Cheers broke out as the team hustled to get the device ready to go, their movements a blur of speed and precision.

  Jonas held his breath as the hydraulics kicked in and the metal door on the driver’s side began giving way with a piercing shriek. Two inches. Four. “How much space do we need to get her out?” Jonas hollered above the deafening noise of the engine.

  “The most it’ll give us is twenty-seven inches,” Ted shouted back. “I can’t tell by looking. How big a woman is she?”

  “Not very.” Jonas slowly shook his head, his gaze glued to the action mere feet away. “Tall, but kinda skinny. Should be enough room.” Gotta be enough, Lord. Gotta be.

  He’d never felt so powerless. Standing there, unable to help, unable to reach past the jagged wreckage and pull her clear, waiting instead for an experienced crew to do the one thing he couldn’t do: save Emilie Getz.

  “Emilie! Emilie, do you hear me? We’re going to lift you out of the car now. The paramedics are here and your vitals are good, so just relax and let us do the work, okay? That’s it. That’s the way.”

  Two firm hands grasped her shoulders while another pair carefully snapped a thick white cuff around her neck. “Ohhh.” The moan took an enormous amount of energy. The pain claimed whatever was left. She couldn’t focus her eyes, couldn’t feel her extremities. Her mouth was dry as parchment, her lips cracked, and the dense, metallic taste in her mouth begged for something wet and cold to rinse it away.

  “Water,” she croaked, not sure if she spoke the word or only thought it. She tried again. “Water.”

  A plastic bottle appeared near her lips and she drank greedily. The effort nearly consumed her. “Thank you …”

  “That’s why we’re here, Emilie.” A young woman’s voice. Soothing, comforting. “Rod is going to maneuver your legs through this opening, while Skip supports your shoulders through the other window. We have a gurney waiting, so don’t worry, we gotcha. Okay? Ready, Emilie?”

  “Ready.”

  Voices around her counted to three, then all at once she was moving, being turned and steered like a vehicle careening out of control. “Help,” she whimpered, confused. She was sliding. Sliding! Backwards. Sideways. Stop! Stop the car. “Stop. Stop,” she moaned.

  Finally she did stop, landing flat on her back—a cold white sky above, a cold white sheet below. The voices had faces—faces that smiled down at her, red-cheeked and grinning. “What a trouper you are!” the man they called Rod said, the one who’d guided her legs through the narrow opening.

  “Right.” Her smile was faint but genuine.

  The young woman with the calm voice pushed aside a torn coat sleeve to slip a blood pressure cuff around Emilie’s arm. “Good thing you wore so many clothes, ma’am. All that padding probably saved your life.”

  “Good thing,” she agreed, her eyes drifting shut from utter exhaustion. Why did she have so many layers on? Was she cold? Was she sick? No. She was avoiding … avoiding some …

  “Somebody’s pretty anxious to see you, Emilie.”

  A shadow fell across her, blocking the pale wintry sun. She moistened her lips and tried to speak. “Who …?”

  “It’s me, Emilie.”

  The voice was low, rough, masculine. Halting, as if caught on a branch. She could feel the warmth of his breath hovering over her. Her eyes opened slowly, weighted down with invisible bricks. “Ohh. Jonas.” She closed them again, but not before noticing the tears welling up in his enormous brown eyes as he knelt by her side. “Good,” she said, feeling some need to ease his obvious discomfort.

  “It is good, Emilie. It’s …” His voice broke. “Good to have you out of that car and … alive.” One lone drop escaped, landing on her chin. Huge, warm, wet. “Sorry.” She felt him brush it gently away with one gloved thumb. “How ’bout I follow the ambulance to the hospital? Mind if I do that, Emilie?”

  “Do,” she murmured, feeling her world starting to spin again. “Please … please … do.”

  Ten

  Anything you lose automatically doubles in value.

  MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN

  “I dunno what happened, Beth. I just lost it.”

  “Lost what?” Beth’s dark blue eyes twinkled.

  “My mind, of course.” Jonas exhaled and threw his hands in the air. “My sense of reason. Something.”

  “Start at the beginning. Tell me how it all took place.”

  Jonas stared out at the rain pounding on the church parking lot, the last of the snow and ice giving way to swollen gutters and overflowing rainspouts.

  Whatever had possessed him to share this with Beth Landis was any fool’s guess. He’d vowed afterward he wouldn’t tell a living soul. All the way home from the hospital Friday evening, all weekend long, he’d kept his inexcusable behavior to himself. Until this morning when his chest threatened to implode if he didn’t get it off there and let somebody else work him over, give him what-for, make him suffer.

  Beth and Emilie were friends. That made Beth the most likely candidate for letting him have it with both barrels. Not that she was the shooting type. Sitting there behind her desk at church, hands busy stuffing envelopes, Beth resembled anything but a shotgun-totin’ mama.

  “Sit down, Jonas. You’re making me nervous, pacing like that. I’m fully prepared to hear every sordid detail.” She grinned. “Not that I expect there to be any.”

  “It’s like this.” He dropped in her visitor’s chair with a determined thwump. “I kissed her.”

  “Kissed who?”

  “Don’t be cute, Beth.” Which was ridiculous. The woman was the definition of cute. “Emilie. I kissed … Emilie.”

  Beth glanced up from her envelopes and tried to look disinterested. “Oh. On Friday?”

  “No, on the mouth!” He groaned and rolled his eyes. “Yeah, on Friday. At the hospital. That’s what makes it so awful, Beth. She was … uh … unconscious.”

  Beth gasped. “She was out cold? You kissed her without her—?”

  “Yes. Disgusting, isn’t it?” He stood again, circling the small office. “What kind of man would lean over an injured woman on a gurney and … and take advantage of her like that?”

  Beth tossed her work aside and leaned back in her chair, a wide grin inching across her freckled face. “What a minute. Who says you took advantage of her? Maybe she liked it. Maybe she welcomed it. In fact …” She sprang to her feet, cornering him between her bookcase and the office coat-rack. “I’ll bet she asked you to kiss her.”

  The hairs on the back of his neck rose to attention. “W-what did you say?”

  Beth folded her arms. “I said Emilie probably asked you to kiss her.”

  He gulped. “W-where did you get such a crazy idea?”

  “Am I right or am I wrong?”

  “You’re … right.” She was right! He blew out a sigh of relief. “That’s exactly how it happened. I leaned over to say I’d stick around until the doc came back and she said … uh …”

  “Kiss me?”

  He narrowed his gaze. “Did she already talk to you about this?”

  “Nope. The point is, she knew it was you. Knew what she was doing. So … what’s the problem?”

  Was the woman dense? “The problem, Beth, is that she didn’t know what she was saying. Emilie was … delirious.”

  She laughed. “Before or after the kiss?”

  “That’s it. I’m outta here.” He grabbed his coat, sorry he’d ever trusted Beth with such sensitive information. Poking his arms in the sleeves with minimal success, he grunted, “I suppose you’ll tell her everything we talked about here.”

  “Relax, Jonas. You and I are friends, too, remember?” Beth edged toward th
e doorway, effectively blocking his exit. “Look. The only real question here is, did she kiss you back?”

  Oh, yeah. He could still feel Emilie’s buttery lips molding themselves to his, her soft nose squashing beneath his own, her porcelain skin rubbing his rough beard, her soft sigh against his mouth when he finally pulled away …

  “You’re smiling, Jonas, but you’re not telling me what I need to know. Did Emilie kiss you back?”

  He wiped the grin off his face and shrugged. “Yeah, I’d say she kissed me back. But remember, it was her idea to begin with. I was just … handy.”

  “Right.” Beth stepped to the side, giving him a clear shot at the hallway. “My guess is, now you’re wondering if she remembers this torrid kiss.”

  “It wasn’t torrid. It was … sweet.” That’s what she’d said. “So sweet.” He caught himself before he grinned again. “And that’s precisely what concerns me—does she even remember it? I don’t wanna have to bring up the subject myself.”

  Beth checked her watch. “Tell you what. I’m here for another hour, then I’ll swing by Emilie’s place on the way home and see if she makes a confession of her own.”

  Jonas buttoned his coat, feeling immensely better. “And you’ll let me know?”

  “If she brings it up, I’ll listen. That’s as much as I can promise you.” Shivering as the blustery winds outside rattled the old windows, Beth reached behind the desk and bumped the thermostat up to seventy. “The last thing I want is to get between you two.”

  Jonas paused in the doorway, confused. “Why is that?”

  She groaned. “Because you’re both stubborn, hardheaded, and strong willed, for starters.”

  “Both of us?” His fist hit the doorjamb. “You gotta be kidding! Emilie Getz and I have absolutely nothing in common. She may be stubborn, but no way do I fit that description. Absolutely not. Hardheaded? Not this guy. Not in a million years …”

  The woman was pushing him out the door. A twenty-something pipsqueak and she was shoving him out into the hall. In all his years of dealing with women, he couldn’t remember such a thing happening.

  “Who told you I was strong willed? Huh? Who said that?” The louder Beth laughed, the more he bellowed. “C’mon, you know it’s not true. I am not stubborn. Am not!”

  The door closed behind him with a firm bang.

  Emilie couldn’t remember a more miserable Monday morning.

  Her BMW was scrap metal.

  Her right collarbone was equally shattered and bruised while every muscle ached from the tension that’d seized her body on her endless, downhill slide to disaster.

  Worst of all, the insurance agent perched on her living room sofa was scratching down numbers and shaking his head.

  “The Blue Book value doesn’t look good, Miss Getz.”

  She rubbed her temple, willing away the headache that had lodged itself there since Friday. “The what book?”

  “Blue Book. It tells us what your seventeen-year-old car is worth. Naturally, we can only pay you the salvage value. As a courtesy.”

  “And that amount is …?”

  “Pitiful.” He told her the figure in dollars and cents.

  “Oh, great.” Emilie groaned, slumping further down in the overstuffed chair that served as her makeshift hospital bed. “Almost enough for a bicycle.”

  “A used one, maybe.” His chuckle was meant to amuse, but instead grated on the one nerve she had left. “Because you dropped your collision insurance six years ago we don’t cover damage to your car. Just the things you hit. Like stone fences.”

  “I see.” So much for frugality.

  “Look for your check in a couple of days. Anything else I can do for you?”

  “No, you’ve done enough, thank you.” She slid Hamilton’s three-pound History of the Moravian Church onto her lap, wincing at the stab of pain that shot across her right shoulder. “I’m woefully behind in my research, so if you don’t mind seeing yourself out …”

  “No problem. He stood and quickly pulled on his coat, heading toward the front door. “Sorry about the bad news, Miss Getz. That’s how it goes when things get old and lose their value.”

  Did he mean her or the BMW?

  “Appreciate you stopping by.” She lifted a hand as he disappeared from sight, then dropped it on her open book, exhausted from the effort.

  How in the world was she going to manage? A broken right collarbone made writing impossible and turned typing into a tedious, hunt-and-peck proposition. Without a car, she couldn’t get around to do on-site research, or grocery shopping, or go bookstore browsing in Lancaster.

  Or sledding with Jonas. Not that she planned to slide downhill in a moving vehicle ever again.

  Her head fell back on the upholstered fabric as vague memories from Friday washed over her. Being pulled out of the wreckage. Seeing Jonas. Watching Beth and Sara smile and cry at the same time. Riding in the ambulance to Lancaster General.

  Jonas, looking concerned, asking questions of anyone in scrubs who stood still long enough for him to snag their sleeve.

  Jonas, holding her hand, making her laugh in spite of her pain.

  Jonas, begging her forgiveness so many times it was ridiculous.

  He’d driven her home Saturday morning with Trix in the backseat keeping watch over four bags of groceries for her and a thermos of hot, perfectly sweetened Earl Grey waiting up front in the passenger seat. Sunday he’d stopped by after the early service with a church bulletin, get-well greetings from the staff, and two cheese Danish—which he ended up eating.

  Now it was Monday, a workday for both of them. No telling when—or if—she’d see him again.

  With the horrid weather, he wouldn’t be likely to come knocking on her door today. After the morning’s dense fog lifted, heavy rain clouds settled over Lancaster County, resulting in the worst flooding in five years.

  At least that’s how the noon news anchor described conditions. Emilie stayed high and dry, cocooned inside her little borrowed home with a tuna salad sandwich and a few green grapes for lunch.

  Not that the house itself wasn’t grand company. She loved the old hallway clock built inside the wall such that it opened on both sides, put there by Clarence the clockmaker from across the street, who owed the family some money generations ago.

  Then there was the bank vault encased in the dining room wall, and the natural wainscoting from the 1840s, and the charming plate rail that circled the cozy kitchen with its scant seven-foot ceiling and eight tiny windows over the sink.

  Emilie would happily call it home for a lifetime.

  Instead, she’d be Salem-bound come June.

  A sharp knock at the back door snapped her out of her reverie. Beth Landis—at least, it looked like Beth, bundled up in a hooded red parka—peered in, motioning frantically. Emilie jumped to her feet, then regretted it when her head started pounding and the room tilted sideways. “Hang on,” she mumbled, making her way toward the door.

  Beth blew in on a stiff, soaking gust of wind. “Whew! Thanks. It’s wicked out there.” She unzipped her parka and dried her dripping hair with a nearby dishtowel, eyeing Emilie with an affectionate appraisal. “So. How are you feeling today? You look worn out.”

  “Some encourager you are.” Emilie shuffled over to the table, doing her best to remain perpendicular. “Have a seat and I’ll make some tea.”

  “Forget that, Doc. You sit and I’ll make the tea.” Beth gently pushed her into a kitchen chair, then busied herself with the necessary ingredients, pulling a generous rectangle of Moravian sugar cake out of her zippered pocket to add to their plates. “Helen sent me home with a whole panful yesterday.” Beth grinned as she peeled back the plastic wrap and sliced the cake in two. “I knew you’d want some.”

  It was lovely to have company—not just company, a friend—bustling about her kitchen. Emilie observed Beth’s cheerfully efficient manner and imagined little Sara sitting just so, legs dangling high above the floor, watching her mother make
lunch.

  She didn’t mean to say it; it simply came out. “Sara is lucky to have you for a mother.”

  “Think so?” Beth joined her at the table, her task complete, her eyebrows furrowed. “I dunno. I’m never sure if I’m doing any of it right.”

  Emilie poked at one corner of her sugar cake, not really hungry, wanting to be polite. “I can’t imagine having a child under my roof for twenty-four hours, let alone twenty-four years.”

  Beth nodded, popping a forkful in her mouth. “Pretty scary stuff. No way to prepare yourself, either. When it comes to motherhood, you just dive in. And pray. Speaking of which, okay if we bless this?” She lowered her fork and reached for Emilie’s hand. “Would you do the honors?”

  “Would I what?” Emilie’s hand suddenly felt like ice in Beth’s warm grasp.

  “Pray. You know, bless our food and our fellowship.” Beth dipped her chin and closed her eyes in anticipation.

  Pray? Emilie gulped, then closed her own eyes. Now what? Should she say the blessing from the Daily Texts? Is that what Beth wanted? The words came slowly, mined from childhood memories long forgotten, spoken with the sober formality of her German ancestors: “Come, Lord Jesus, our guest to be, and bless these gifts bestowed by thee. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Beth echoed, then squeezed her hand tighter, adding, “And Lord, while you’re here with us, touch Emilie’s shoulder. Mend her broken bones and tender bruises. Comfort her with your assurance that all things work together for your good, Lord. Reveal yourself to her as husband and provider and lover of her soul.”

  “Lover?” Good heavens!

  But Beth wasn’t done yet.

  “Be with Drew as he travels to Atlanta on business in this awful weather. Keep him safe, Lord. I love him so much.” Beth’s voice wavered, but only for a moment. “Help me be a good mother to Sara. Our daughter is a precious gift. A miracle.” She swallowed hard again. “Bless this dessert now, Lord, and our time together. Thank you for my friend, Emilie, and for loving us so completely through your Son, our savior, Jesus. Amen.”