Chapter One
Karen Mercer set her suitcase on the ground and shut the hatchback of her brother’s car. “Thanks for the ride, Mike,” she called out. “See you next Sunday!”
As he drove away, she smiled at her best friend, Andi Swann, who was tucking a stray lock of blond hair back into her heart-shaped kapp. “Well, here we are, following our dream of living Amish for a week—not just reading the books but walking the walk and talking the talk!”
“Look at how this place has changed since we went to church camp here,” Andi remarked as they stood at the entry to Promise Lodge. “This must be a new metal entryway sign, because I don’t remember it having sunflowers and wheat sheaves, do you? And this plot to the left was a mowed pasture for horseback riding, and now it’s planted in green beans and tomatoes—”
“Probably to be sold at this produce stand,” Karen said, nodding toward the wooden structure at the roadside. “And look at all the houses! And there’s a tiny home with a dock on the far side of Rainbow Lake. How cool is that?”
“The old timbered lodge and the cabins look just the same as I remember them,” Andi said wistfully. “Except the Amish here have obviously done a lot of painting—and that looks like a new roof. The summers we spent here as campers and counselors were some of the best times of my life.”
“Yeah, they were.” Karen pointed toward a large white barn. “And look at those adorable black and white cows! Everything looks too neat and perfect to be real—”
“But what about us?” Andi interrupted, her smile falling a notch. “Do we look authentic? We’re wearing these calf-length dresses we made and the kapps we ordered from a store in Lancaster County—and we’ve read hundreds of Amish novels—but what if they call us out as fakes? What if they make us confess in front of everybody at church and then—”
“They can’t do that, silly!” Karen reminded her with a chuckle. “We’re just taking a little trip down memory lane while we live the Amish life instead of just reading about it. If we stick to our script and imitate the way these folks do things, we’ll be fine, right?”
Andi sighed as though she wasn’t too sure about that. “But we made our phone reservation request and sent our money as though we were Plain, and the Amish think it’s a sin to lie. Maybe we should’ve—”
“But we didn’t,” Karen pointed out quickly. Her pulse was pounding with anticipation as she picked up the old-fashioned suitcase she’d bought at a thrift store. “If we follow our plans, we won’t have any problems. We’re just a couple of Amish maidels who’ve come to Promise Lodge for a week to check it out because we read about it in the Budget newspaper—which we did. Let’s walk to the lodge before you get cold feet and back out on me.”
Side by side the two of them strolled along the main dirt road, gazing at other changes that had been made since their days as teenaged campers. “It must be quite a draw for these folks to have a Dutch bulk store now—and look at how many cars are in the parking lot there,” Andi remarked.
Karen, however, was inhaling too deeply to reply. “I smell pie!” she whispered giddily. “And look way up on the hill—at that pasture where the sheep are grazing. What a picture that makes!”
Andi nodded, focused on the rustic, timbered lodge building they were approaching. “That porch hasn’t changed a bit,” she murmured. “I still remember the night Denny Willoughby kissed me on that swing.”
“Jah,” Karen said with her best Pennsylvania Dutch accent, “but we can’t be talking about past stuff like that. According to our story, we’ve never been to Promise Lodge, remember? Now get your act together, because once we walk inside we become Annie Stoltzfus and Karen Yoder for the next seven days.”
Andi—now Annie—smoothed the front of her deep green cape dress, nodding nervously as Karen reached for the doorknob. When they stepped into the lobby, they gazed upward with wistful smiles, taking in the grand old space that was two stories high with an elaborate chandelier made of deer antlers. Ahead of them, the double curved staircase took their memories up to the level where they’d bunked so many summers as kids.
But it was the tantalizing aromas of sweet fruit, pastry, and spices that made them close their eyes in anticipation.
“Camp food never smelled this good,” Andi whispered.
Karen giggled. “And you can bet they don’t get their pie fillings from those big gallon cans, either. Shall we let them know we’re here?”
As they passed through the huge dining room at the right, between the long wooden tables Karen remembered very well—because she’d secretly carved her initials on one of them—a wave of nostalgia washed over her. Everything seemed smaller than she remembered, yet it did her soul good to see the way these Amish had saved an abandoned church camp from rotting away and being overgrown by weeds. Voices coming from the kitchen made her pause to draw a fortifying breath.
“Jah, hall-o!” she said as she and Andi peered into the kitchen from the doorway. “It’s Annie Stoltzfus and Karen Yoder, come to claim our rooms for the week.”
Two gray-haired ladies in flowery dresses and white aprons looked up from the pies they were making at the big counter in the center of the kitchen. Recalling that some of the folks living here were Mennonites, Karen gave them a little wave.
“And here you are, bright and early,” the taller of the two said as she bustled toward them. “Welcome to Promise Lodge! I’m Beulah Kuhn—”
“And I’m her sister, Ruby, who talked to you on the phone,” the other one said with a nod. “We’re glad you’re here, ladies. As you can see, we’re hip-deep in pie preparation, getting ready for a wedding on Thursday—and our assistant, who just came here to live about a month ago, is Sylvia Keim.”
The woman seated on a high stool at the counter nodded shyly at them. Dressed in black, with eyes that seemed to fill her entire pale face, Sylvia seemed more like a fragile doll than a flesh-and-blood woman.
Karen smiled at her, relieved that Ruby and Beulah were already striding through the dining room. She wasn’t sure how to converse with a woman who resembled an invalid—or perhaps a grieving widow—in her somber black clothing.
“We’ll show you upstairs so you can choose your rooms and freshen up,” Beulah called over her shoulder as she clomped steadily up the stairs in her sturdy shoes.
“You must’ve gotten an early start this morning,” Ruby put in, gesturing for Karen and Annie to precede her. “How far did you have to come? I don’t recall where you live—not a town I’d ever heard of when you told me over the phone.”
Andi’s panicked expression prompted Karen to reply. “Cherrydale is south of here, along the Missouri River. It’s about a three-hour trip, but we didn’t want to miss a minute, so we had our driver come early!”
Luckily, as they reached the second level a few steps behind Beulah, they didn’t have to fabricate any more fibs. It occurred to Karen that maybe Andi was right: maybe they’d made a big mistake by pretending to be Amish for an entire week. But it was too late to back out.
“Ruby and I have apartments in the back corner of the building,” Beulah was saying as she pointed down the open hallway to their left. “Our Sylvia lives right here in front of us, and beside her is Irene Wickey, who’s baking pies in that little white bakery you passed on your way up the private road.” She turned to point across the open hallway. “Our bride-to-be, Marlene Fisher, is in the front corner—at least until she gets hitched on Thursday—so you’ve got your pick of the other unoccupied rooms.”
“If you want rooms next to each other, you might choose the ones directly across from us,” Ruby remarked. “You’ll have a nice view of the front lawn and Mattie Troyer’s garden plots, as well as the Helmuth family’s nursery over by the state highway.”
As Karen nodded, pleasant memories nearly overwhelmed her again. This upper level had a railing all the way around the hallway, like a mezzanine, and she was gazing out over the lofty lobby area . . . where she and Andi had once been known to drop water balloons as other counselors passed beneath them.
“That sounds very gut,” Andi managed, gesturing toward the neighboring rooms that overlooked the front porch. “It’s so nice and homey here.”
Their hostesses nodded pleasantly. “We came to Promise Lodge because it’s one of the few places where unmarried Plain ladies are allowed to run businesses and live without answering to a man in their family,” Ruby remarked.
“We hope you’ll want to join us,” Beulah said with a warm smile. “And now, if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got pies ready to come out of the oven.”
“Come on down to the kitchen whenever you’re ready,” Ruby added as she followed her sister down the stairs. “If you missed out on breakfast, we can scare something up for you. Lunch will be pretty simple today, and we’ll eat around noonish.”
Grasping the handle of her suitcase, Karen nodded at the sisters and started around the square-shaped hallway. Because she recalled how voices carried in the open area above the lobby, she kept quiet until they reached the center front rooms, where the doors stood open. She ducked into the first one, hauling Andi in behind her before quickly shutting the door.
“I thought I was going to say something that would give us away at any second,” Andi whispered. Then she giggled. “But isn’t it fun to be back up here? And look out this window—”
“Where I sneaked out after hours one night to crawl along the porch roof and shimmy down the corner support pillar to meet Ronnie Larson,” Karen recalled with a chuckle.
“And when you slipped, you took half of that big trumpet vine with you,” Andi continued.
“Yeah, and I landed in a big rose bush, too,” Karen said. “By the time the camp manager got done treating my scratches and reading me the riot act, I’d paid for my wicked ways. But here we are, back again. Wow. Just wow.”
“Look at the wonderful quilt on this bed. And the furniture matches, like it was a set from somebody’s house. Much homier than in our camping days.”
“We’ll each have a little bathroom in our room, too. That’s an improvement over sharing one with the other girls in this hall.” Karen felt the tension in her shoulders relaxing as she gazed around the simple yet cozy room. “I’ll go next door and unpack, and then we can gather our thoughts again before we go downstairs. I’m hoping Beulah or Ruby will offer us a piece of that fresh pie!”
As Beulah placed the last of the hot fruit pies on cooling racks, her mind was abuzz with conflicting emotions. She waited until her sister had slid five more pies into the oven, however, before she voiced her concerns.
“Are you gals ticking off the little discrepancies about our guests, the way I am?” she asked quietly. She glanced up the back stairway to be sure their visitors weren’t coming down. “If you ask me, something’s fishy—”
“Oh, those two are so fishy, we could whip up tuna salad to last us for weeks!” Ruby put in with a mirthless laugh.
Sylvia nodded as she carefully cut slits in the top crusts of two more pies. “Every settlement sounds a bit different, far as how they say some of their words,” she said, “but even as far away as I was sitting, I didn’t think they sounded Deutch.”
“Jah, my first clue was while Karen was on the phone a couple weeks ago, and she called herself a may-del instead of a my-del,” Ruby put in. “And she pronounced Annie’s last name, Stoltzfus, ending with fuss instead of foos. Not to mention the zippers I saw in the backs of their dresses as we went upstairs just now.”
“It was their kapps that first struck me,” Beulah said as she rolled out dough for three more pies. “I’m not Amish, but I’ve been under the impression that those heart-shaped, filmy kapps were mostly found in Pennsylvania, and these gals have told us they live in Cherrydale, Missouri.”
“Jah, we wear those heart-shaped kapps out East,” Sylvia put in. She looked up with the hint of a smile lighting her emaciated face. “Nothing like a little mystery to keep us on our toes, eh? That’s what I like about Promise Lodge. You never know what each new day will bring.”
“Jah, well, we’ll keep our eyes and ears open,” Beulah said emphatically. “A fellow who came here under false pretenses last summer could’ve made off with a bundle of our residents’ money if our apartment manager, Gloria, hadn’t gotten snoopy.”
Sylvia’s eyes widened. “What happened? I had no idea people could be so malicious as to pass themselves off as Amish for profit.”
Ruby shook her head as she recalled the details. “He was quite the smooth talker. Said he came here from the Council of Bishops in Lancaster County to inform Bishop Monroe that Promise Lodge had gotten way too progressive. He intended to take over as the bishop here and insisted that a donation to the Council’s fund might make up for our wayward inclinations.”
“Jah, he had folks worried sick because he was saying our married women shouldn’t be running businesses, too,” Beulah recounted. She poured sweet pink rhubarb filling into two empty crusts. “Luckily, Gloria found an English suit and tie hanging in the closet of the room he was staying in at Lester’s place—along with a laptop computer. Turns out he was a fellow who’d gambled away most of the accumulated savings in the Willow Ridge district before running off to leave those folks in the lurch.”
When Sylvia’s jaw dropped, her sunken face reminded Beulah how frail their newest resident was. After coming to live out her final days following a terminal diagnosis involving a brain tumor, Sylvia Keim was emerging from her reclusive shell—and it was Beulah’s intention to make every one of this sweet woman’s remaining days fulfilling and worthwhile.
“It’s a real joy to have you helping us with these wedding pies, Sylvia,” she said, reaching across the counter to pat the little woman’s wrist.
“Jah, just look at how pretty these pies have turned out with your slits that form a heart shape on the top crust,” Ruby chimed in. “Marlene will think it’s mighty special that you’ve contributed your talent to make her wedding day even nicer.”
“And you’ll tell us if we can be doing anything for you, to keep you going, jah?” Beulah asked gently. “And you’ll rest when you need to, I hope?”
When Sylvia slumped on her stool, Beulah could’ve kicked herself for spreading it on so thick—for reminding the pixie-like woman that she was ill, when Sylvia had been so happily engrossed in helping them.
“It’s been nice to have a tall stool, and to have something enjoyable to do,” Sylvia murmured.
“And I’m sorry I brought it up and burst your bubble, dearie,” Beulah said with a sigh.
“You realize, of course, that around here, we all tend to call it the way we see it,” Ruby teased lightly. “You can put us in our places any time, Sylvia. Believe me, I’ve spent my life telling Beulah when she’s being a pain in the patoot—”
“And I’ve considered it my personal mission to inform Ruby that she’s too much talk and not enough action,” Beulah put in with a chuckle. “You’ll notice, after you’ve been here awhile, that the three sisters who bought the Promise Lodge property—Mattie, Christine, and Rosetta—don’t let anybody rain on their parade, either. So we’ll go back to speculating about Karen and Annie—”
“At least until they come downstairs again,” Ruby finished with a chuckle.
