A Perfect Square

Chapter 21




CALLIE MIGHT HAVE DRIVEN past the Grossdaddi House if she hadn’t received instructions from Margie — single story, farmlike, with a barn, on the southwest edge of town, just past the local medical clinic.

It did not look like the retirement villages in Texas. For one thing, there was the barn, which apparently had animals in it. As Callie pulled her car into the parking lot beside the house, she saw an older gentleman lead a horse out of its stall, tether it to a fence, and begin to brush it.

Interesting.

Secondly, there was a large garden area between the barn and the house. There wasn’t much growing in it now, except for fall flowers, and yet there were still three older women turning over the sod with a hoe and what could have been a nurse sitting next to someone on a bench.

Callie clipped Max’s leash to him, then picked up the box of cookies. Before they started toward the building, she cautioned Max to behave. “Where there’s a barn, there are bound to be barn cats.”

Max looked at her with what she was sure was hope in his eyes. “Your idea of play and their idea of play are different, Maxie. Remember what happened to the last kitten you found? You treed it, and I had to climb up in the branches to free it. I’m not going to let you forget that little incident.”

Callie stopped at the front door, checked to be sure there was no sign prohibiting pets, then walked inside.

Rather than having a reception area with a bell to ring, she stepped into a front hall like you would find in most homes. There was, however, a small old woman in a prayer kapp, sitting in the middle of a bench, knitting.

“Hello,” Callie said. “I was hoping to visit someone I think is living here.”

The woman looked over the top of her half-glasses, but didn’t pause in her knitting. Her hands were moving awfully fast. Callie watched in awe. Max whined lightly as the ball of green yarn took a spin with each flick of her wrists.

“My name is Erin Troyer.” She knitted even as she spoke. “I had a dog once. Most people think Amish don’t have dogs, but that isn’t true. We have them, and we love them, but we treat them like animals rather than children.”

Max lowered himself to the floor, his head now on his front paws.

“I see that one thinks he’s part human.”

“I suppose he does. Max stays with me at the quilt shop. He’s a big help, since I live there alone.”

Erin paused for a fraction of a second to look Callie up and down, then knitted even faster, as if she needed to make up for her lost time. “You must be talking about Daisy’s shop.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’d heard someone took it over. Daisy was as fine an Englisch woman as I ever met. Always real kind and helpful.”

“Thank you.” Callie’s throat tightened at the mention of her aunt. As usual, she found herself wishing she’d known Daisy better. This time though, that feeling was mitigated by a sense of pride. She’d heard similar sentiments so many times since moving to Shipshe from such a variety of people, that now it felt like brushing up against a familiar quilt.

There was a comfort to it.

“I sit here mornings, helping folks who come in. Afternoons, one of the younger gals from the local schools takes over. Now who would you like to visit? I know most of our regulars, and I’ve never seen you before.”

“No, ma’am. I want to see Ira Bontrager. I think he lives here.”

The woman continued knitting, though she slowed gradually until she reached the end of the row she was working on. When she did, she pushed the needles into the ball of yarn and scooted over on the bench. Callie recognized it as an invitation and sat down.

Max settled himself between them on the floor.

“Yes, Ira lives here, has since the sickness worsened. Today he’s having a good day. We’re all a little protective of him though. Do you mind my asking why a young girl from Texas would stop by to see an old Amish man?”

Callie was a bit taken aback that the old lady knew so much about her. Was she a receptionist or a guard? Then Erin looked her full in the face and waited, the folds around her blue eyes wrinkled with age but the gaze not wavering. When she did, Callie realized that this wasn’t a nursing home resident doing a parttime job.

This was one friend looking out for another.

“Ira stopped by my shop the other morning — nearly scared me to death appearing before I’d even had my morning coffee, insisting that I listen to him.”

“That would have been on Tuesday when the nurses discovered he was gone. There was quite a ruckus.”

“Yes. Yes, you’re right.” Callie hesitated, unsure how much to reveal. “He stayed a while, told me a story. I fixed him some tea and called Andrew Gavin to help me find his kin. Andrew found his son.”

“So why are you here today?” Erin’s voice was softening, and Callie knew she was almost in. Of course, she realized she didn’t need Erin’s permission to walk down the hall and find Ira. She could barrel her way past the ninety-pound lady, but something told her it would be a good thing to have Erin on her side.

“Saturday I received a letter from Ira. He asked for my help with something.”

Erin waited, nodded, but didn’t interrupt.

“So Max and I, we thought we would come and visit.”

Reaching out, Erin patted her hand. Though Erin’s hand was mostly bones and blue veins, it was incredibly soft on top of Callie’s, reminding her of the few times she’d held Melinda’s baby.

Those times had scared her senseless, as she had no experience with infants. This was a bit frightening too. She suddenly realized how fragile the person sitting next to her was — the fragileness of the line between life and death.

“As I mentioned, today’s better than most for Ira. He’s in the barn. I’d take you to him, but I’m not supposed to leave my post unless someone else is here. You can’t access the barn or garden areas from the front parking area, since some of our residents tend to wander off. Instead follow this hall until you come to the first left. Then go on down that hall and it will lead you outside to where they’re working.”

“Is it all right if I take Max through the house?”

Erin was already knitting again, but she spared a glance to Max, who cocked his head as if waiting for her permission.

“Smart one, that mutt is. Look at him waiting on my answer.” She leaned forward, put her eyes close to his, and Callie wondered how well she could see, wondered how she was able to knit the yarn at all. “You may go down the hall, but don’t frighten the residents. Go quietly.”

Max stood and shook himself, but he didn’t make a squeak.

“Thank you, Ms. Troyer. Maybe I’ll see you again.”

“That would be gut. Ira doesn’t get many visitors.”

Callie started to leave when she remembered she was still carrying the box of cookies. She took them back and set them on the bench beside Erin Troyer, who made Callie promise she’d thank Margie for the residents. Then Callie made her way to the barn, one suspicion confirmed: Ira didn’t have many visitors, so he must be lonely.

If he was lonely, perhaps he’d made up the story about a lost daughter. There was something in the way Erin had hesitated when Callie had said Ira wanted her help with something — in fact she hadn’t seemed surprised and she hadn’t questioned her about it.

Was that odd?

Or was it the Amish way of staying out of other folk’s business?

Or had Erin heard the same stories?

Before Callie could puzzle it out, she reached the barn. Both doors were open, though the day was cloudy and threatening rain. The man she’d seen brushing the horse still stood outside. Now he was leading the horse slowly around the enclosure.

She walked into the barn, and Max yanked on his leash.

“Heel, Max.”

He stepped back to her side, but with a whine. She saw immediately why — two cats sat at saucers with milk in them. When they saw Max, one hissed, but the other continued lapping at the milk.

“Let him go. Don’t expect he’d catch anything more than a swipe on the end of his nose.”

Callie pivoted around and saw Ira Bontrager standing in the door’s shadow, holding the handles of a wheelbarrow. She had to stifle a giggle, he looked so much like a figure out of a history book. Tall, thin, with his white beard reaching nearly to the waist of his pants and his suspenders pulled up over his dark blue work shirt. Today he also wore a wool stocking cap.

“Hello, Mr. Bontrager. Max and I thought we’d stop by for a visit.”

“You can call me Ira. Visit a man while he’s mucking out a stall, you ought to call him by his first name.”

“Do they make you work for your room around here?” Callie smiled, unsure whether she should offer to shake his hand or give him a hug.

“Nah. They think it’s good therapy, as if I didn’t do enough of this when I had my own farm. Now I get to do it on someone else’s place.” Ira motioned her toward a stall. “Truthfully I don’t mind though. Beats sitting inside where all those women are knitting.”

“We met Erin when we arrived.” Callie and Max followed Ira into the enclosed area. It was small but warmer, with the sun shining through the high windows that ran the length of the barn. The smells were earthy and strong.

“Ya. She’s one of the better ones. Some are real hens.” Ira proceeded to stick a long-handled tool into a pile of wood shavings.

“Is that a pitch fork?”

He shook his head but didn’t bother to look at her. “I thought I read you were from Texas. Don’t you have a lot of horses in Texas?”

“Yes. We do.” Callie moved to the corner of the stall, looped Max’s leash under the corner of an upended wooden crate and sat on the ground beside it. Max stretched the length of his leash, investigating. “Can’t say I’ve been around them much. I lived in the city mostly, since I’ve been grown.”

She looked around the stall and added, “When I was a child, we lived on military bases. They had mounted divisions, cavalry, and I remember watching them practice with the horses. Don’t know that I ever saw anyone clean out a stall.”

“This is an apple picker.” Ira waved it at her with a gleam in his eyes. “And these are wood shavings. Guess you can see it’s not hay. An apple picker works best for separating out the horse’s droppings and removing the soiled shavings.”

He plunged it into the pile of shavings, releasing more of the pungent odor, and shook it a tad so that the clean shavings fell to the stall’s floor. What remained on top he dropped into the wheelbarrow. “Wanna try?”

“Umm. Maybe I should watch this time.” At the rate he was moving, Callie figured it would be lunch before he finished with this one stall. She hoped no horse needed back in there soon.

“Guess you received my letter.”

“I did.”

“So you’ll help me?” He didn’t look at her, kept working the apple picker into the wood shavings.

“I won’t lie to you, Ira. Can’t really see what I can do to find a girl that went missing so many years ago — “

“It was 1965. I know it was 1965.” He jabbed the apple picker in more forcefully and lifted it, though his arms were trembling. When he turned to look at her, his gaze never wavered. “Suppose I know how many years ago it was. Might forget where I am sometimes, but I don’t forget the year those funnels from hell came tearing out of the sky, the year my dochder went missing.”

Callie had thought she could come and pay a visit to an old man, maybe brighten his day a little. She thought she might be able to ease his pain a bit. Would dragging his memories back to something that had happened so long ago help? Was there any chance at all that this woman could still be alive?

This was a fool’s errand, and Callie was a sucker to think she might do any good.

“Thirty-nine twisters. That’s what those newspaper men said when it was all over.” His work took on a slow, methodical rhythm as his voice recited the facts. “Across the central plains they came — Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and of course here in Indiana, leaving two hundred and sixty people dead.”

He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, wiped his brow. Callie couldn’t tell if it was from the labor or from the remembering.

“Would you like me to get you a glass of water, Ira?”

He waved the request away, resumed cleaning the stall. “Palm Sunday. Terrible day for such a thing to happen. Day of the Lord’s triumphal entry. Hmph.”

He shook his head, was silent for several minutes. Finally he stopped working and leaned on his apple picker. Max padded over to him and licked his fingers. When he did, Ira reached down and ran his hand gently over the top of the dog’s head. Then he leaned the picker up against the side of the stall and sat down on the crate beside Callie.

“Haven’t spoken of that day all these many years. A thing that terrible. You try to move past it. You tell yourself it’s best forgotten and maybe it was. Maybe it was.”

“How old was your daughter?”

He didn’t answer immediately. When he did, his voice sounded distant and wavered like the trees in the wind.

“She is three, just a wee thing. She is but three years old.” Tears began to travel down the grooves and crannies of his cheeks made by the many years and dozens of wrinkles. “Rainbows. So many rainbows around the lake.”

Callie thought not to ask him. She started, then stopped herself, then started again. The problem was that at some point since entering the stall, she had started believing his story. And if she believed his story, than she had to ask. If she was going to help — and it still seemed a harebrained thing to believe she could — then there were two things she had to ask.

“Why do you think she’s still alive?”

“Never found a body. All the others, eventually a body showed up — under the rubble, or sometimes miles away, but it did appear.

Might be days later, but they found something.” He rubbed at the tears on his face. “Sharon, she kept saying to wait one more day. That maybe Bethany would show up. Maybe she’d wandered off with the wrong family and they’d bring her back. We’d had a late meal at church that day, and there was a lot of confusion.”

He pulled in a deep breath, rubbed Max’s ears when the dog leaned against him. “But days stretched into weeks, and finally I accepted no one was going to be bringing Beth home.”

“And you never had a funeral?”

He shook his head. “Sharon won’t hear of it. She can’t bear to hear Bethany’s name spoken, but she keeps a little box of things for her, just in case. I know it’s not right — that something in my wife was broken by those storms, but I don’t know what to do. So I keep farming best I can. Helps to have my son, Caleb, around the place. Have you met my son, Caleb?”

“Yes. I met him the other day.”

Ira stood, shuffled over to the wheelbarrow and pushed it out of the stall.

Callie gathered Max and his leash and hurried to catch up with Ira.

“But after all these years, what makes you think Bethany’s still alive, and that I can find her? Any number of things could have happened to her since then. Why look for her now after all this time?”

Ira’s constant drift between the past and the present wasn’t lost on Callie. She understood he was struggling with dementia and knew that condition was influencing what he remembered as well as how he perceived things.

When he turned to answer her though, his eyes were as clear and cognizant as Shane’s — though why Callie thought of him at that moment she had no idea.

“Why you?” Ira drew himself up straight. “Because you’re the only one who will listen to an old man’s ramblings. Why now? Because my heart tells me now is the time. Because I have a pain that won’t stop hurting, won’t stop until I see her again.”

As he turned and walked out of the barn, Callie realized whether she wanted to or not, she was about to start searching for one Bethany Bontrager, lost since 1965.