A Rose Revealed (The Amish Farm Trilogy 3)

  A Rose

  Revealed

  GAYLE ROPER

  HARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS

  EUGENE, OREGON

  Scripture verses are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, IL 60189 USA. All rights reserved.

  Cover by Dugan Design Group, Bloomington, Minnesota

  Cover photos © iStockphoto / Lingbeek, Willard; Frank Krahmer / Photographer’s Choice / Getty Images

  Backcover author photo by Ken Rada Photography

  Gayle Roper: Published in association with the Books & Such Literary Agency, 52 Mission Circle, Suite 122, PMB 170, Santa Rosa, CA 95409-5370, www.booksandsuch.biz.

  Previously published as The Decision.

  A ROSE REVEALED

  Copyright © 1999 by Gayle Roper

  Published by Harvest House Publishers

  Eugene, Oregon 97402

  www.harvesthousepublishers.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Roper, Gayle G.

  A rose revealed / Gayle Roper.

  p. cm.—(The Amish farm trilogy; bk. 3)

  ISBN 978-0-7369-2588-4 (pbk.)

  1. Nurses—Pennsylvania—Lancaster County—Fiction. 2. Lancaster County (Pa.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.068R67 2011

  813’.54—dc22

  2010025113

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Printed in the United States of America

  11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 /DP-NI/ 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  A Note to Readers

  About Gayle Roper…

  Discussion Questions

  Be sure and read the other two Gayle Roper books in the Amish Farm Trilogy.…

  More fine Amish fiction from Harvest House Publishers…

  AmishReader.com

  Chapter 1

  The force of the blast knocked me to the ground.

  I fell into Sophie Hostetter’s beautiful red impatiens lining the front walk, breaking off the brittle stems with my legs, torso, even my head. It no longer mattered whether or not the predicted frost struck tonight. The plants were decimated, a fact I grasped much more readily and with more distress than the event that had tossed me willy-nilly into them and had ground expensive licorice bark mulch into my palms and forehead.

  Being thrown to the ground by forces too strong to counter was beyond my experience. When the displaced air pushed ahead by the expanding gases of the explosion hit me in the back and sent me sprawling, when the heat of the resulting fire scorched me through my sweater and turtleneck, I couldn’t comprehend it.

  Impatiens I knew; impatiens I could understand.

  Exploding cars and searing heat were beyond my ken.

  Instinctively I raised my hands over my head and pulled my knees to my chest, belatedly protecting myself. I tried to think, to break through the gray fog of shock. After all, I was a nurse and an EMT. I was used to catastrophe. But I usually dealt with the aftermath of other people’s pain, not participated in it. I was the one who bound up the wounded, not the one who lay flattened, deafened, and blank-minded.

  I stared at the shattered impatiens and reached out tentatively as if I thought I could repair them. A bruised and bereft crimson flower sat softly on the back of my right hand. I studied it with the intensity of a philosopher seeking the secrets of the universe in the fragile red petal. Unfortunately, even if I’d discovered some deep truth, I was too fuzzy to comprehend it. My head ached from its encounter with terra firma, and my ears rang from the concussive roar that had filled the air. Even my vision was fuzzy, but I instinctively knew that was because my glasses had fallen off.

  Somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind, the part that always responds to personal trauma with denial and trivia, I was thankful that I was wearing my uniform as a home health nurse, navy slacks and cardigan. They wouldn’t show the dirt. Then I realized I was lying with my blue and white turtleneck nearly buried in soil, mulch, and bleeding flowers.

  Rose Martin, BSN, EMT, grubby mess.

  I sighed and tried to remember if I had any clean uniforms left. If I didn’t, did I have any bleach alternative detergent? Or had I used it all up last week? I fretted over the issue like it really mattered and berated myself when I couldn’t recall.

  I sighed again, and slowly my mind began to function rationally. The laundry receded, the least of my problems, and reality hit with the impact of the explosion itself.

  I uncurled and pushed myself to my knees. I retrieved my glasses from the mulch and blew them clear. The great roaring continued to fill the air as I forced myself to look at the fire, not a cozy, inviting fire like in a living room hearth, but a conflagration, a pulsing sea of flames, writhing, consuming what had been Ammon Hostetter’s car.

  And Ammon Hostetter, nice guy and ineffectual CEO of his family’s highly successful toy business.

  And Sophie Hostetter, his mother and my patient. Sweet Sophie who had suffered so long and so devastatingly. Who had been going on her first outing after several debilitating weeks of chemotherapy. Who had been so excited to finally breathe outside air and watch the bittersweet bloom in the hedgerows and corn stalks get collected for silage by silent, industrious Amishmen pulling John Deere harvesters behind their horses.

  Sophie, who had struggled so to live.

  Oh God, I prayed in horror and distress. Oh God! My mind could form no other words. My eyes shut to block out the devastation of the fire. The Town Car was totally engulfed.

  I steeled myself and staggered to my feet. I moved toward the fire even as I pulled my cell phone from my waist clip, but the intensity of the flames made a close approach impossible.

  I circled the car at an awkward run, hand held before my face to protect my eyes from the staggering heat. I hit 911.

  “Help! Fire! Explosion!”

  I tried to find someplace the fire wasn’t totally overwhelming, someplace I could get near the vehicle, some way I could offer help.

  Smoke ascended, twisting and wrapping in on itself like some mythical monster. The flames undulated, arms raised skyward, awful in their red, orange, and white-hot glory. The air was acrid with burning, not the warm, autumnal scent of blazing leaves but the raw odor of hot metal and burning tires.

  My heart fought the realization that there was no life-saving care I could give here. Finally, sobbing, I stumbled toward the house.

  I’d almost reached the front door of the Hostetters’ great home on the golf course when a second explosion rocked the early November afternoon and knocked me down again. This time it wasn’t brittle impatiens that took the brunt of my fall but my forehead as I struck it against the first riser of the shallow cement front steps.

  Pain lanced across my skull and along my neck and flashed down my spine. Groaning, I rolled on my side and reached up a shaking hand. I found broken skin and blood. A
swelling had already developed, but I felt no pain. Shock, I diagnosed.

  I turned back to the blaze, pulsing with renewed life, and saw with horror that pools of fiery gasoline were spreading from beneath the car, rivers of flame racing across the drive.

  “My car!” I ran raggedly to the white sedan with Lancaster Home Health Group stenciled on the side along with the agency logo of a blue cross within the outline of a house. I threw the door open, wrenched the keys from my slacks pocket, quickly started the car, and hit the gas. I drove out onto Route 23 and parked the car as close to the property’s privacy hedge as I could. I didn’t think the fire would get this far.

  I rested my aching head on the steering wheel for a minute to ward off vertigo. My eyes were watering from the smoke and my ears still rang. Even here on the far side of the hedge the air reeked with the odor of burning gasoline and crackled with the sound of the fire.

  I grabbed my phone from the passenger seat where I’d tossed it and called my office to tell them I wouldn’t be able to make my last two calls. Madylyn, our whiney office manager, was not pleased.

  “Deal with it, Madylyn,” I snapped, and then slammed the phone shut. I wasn’t up to cajoling or peacemaking right now.

  I slid from the car and crept back around the hedge to see whether the fire was still raging wildly. It was. I looked with a strong sense of unreality at the scene and beyond to the house.

  And I froze at what I saw through the pulsing waves of heat and smoke.

  Standing at the front door of the mansion, mouth agape, shock in his eyes, was Peter Hostetter watching the conflagration.

  “Oh, no! Oh, God!” I prayed, unable to voice my thoughts. Tears of sympathy wet my face and a vise gripped my stomach, tightening, tightening until I felt I might implode from the pressure. His mother and his older brother!

  I skirted the site of the accident and raced up the front steps even as a police car pulled into the drive, only to back out again when the officer saw the spreading gasoline-fueled flames.

  “Peter!” I laid a hand gently on his arm as I shouted to be heard above the roar of the fire. “Let’s wait inside. Help’s on the way.”

  He didn’t hear me. He didn’t even see me.

  I grabbed him and shook. “Peter!”

  He looked at me without recognition, confusion struggling with the vagueness in his eyes.

  “Peter! It’s me, Rose! Come inside while we wait for help!” Not that help would be able to do anything.

  His eyes slid from me to the car.

  “Ammon.” His voice was barely audible through the ringing in my head. “Mother.”

  I swallowed against my tears. “I know.” I leaned against him, trying to move him into the house, away from the terrible inferno. He held his place against me for a short minute, and then sagged suddenly against the jamb. When I felt his body give, I pushed as hard as I could. We went flying into the vast entry hall, knocking against the pair of antique balloon-back chairs Sophie had found just before her devastating bout with cancer.

  We struggled to stay upright, grabbing the curved backs of the chairs for stability.

  “Sit here,” I ordered when my head stopped spinning. I pressed down on his shoulders, and he folded, collapsing on a petit point seat, disoriented and sweaty, gray. His breathing was shallow and his pupils were great black circles as he stared out the open front door. I rushed to close it, blocking his view.

  In the distance we could hear sirens, not surprising since the fire company was right down the street.

  I sank into the twin of the chair Peter sat in and swallowed against tears.

  Peter looked at me and shuddered. “I was almost in that car,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “I was going with them on the ride.”

  I nodded.

  “I just came in for some sunglasses.” He clutched them in his right hand. He looked at me wildly. “That could be me out there!” His voice climbed the scale with every word, his emotional chaos obvious.

  “But it isn’t.” I reached to pat his hand again. “You’re fine.”

  “Right,” he said, jerking away from my touch. “I’m fine.”

  When he pulled back, his elbow cracked against the chair back, and the pain made him flinch. He swung around to see what he’d bumped, swearing as he rubbed at the ache.

  “Your mother loved these chairs.” I trailed my fingers over the curving arch of cherry that formed the back of my seat.

  And she had. In a house filled with valuable antiques and reproductions, Sophie had prized these chairs with their mauve needlepoint seats worked with delicate bouquets of cream, pink, crimson, and green.

  “It’s the petit point that makes the chairs valuable, so I don’t let anyone sit in them,” she’d told me once. “They date to the nineteenth century.” She grinned. “That’s why I keep them in the hall. Everyone gets to see and admire them, but no one uses them because no one sits in the hall.”

  “Mother loved beautiful things,” Peter whispered as he stared at the wedge of seat visible between his legs. He continued to rub his elbow absently.

  “She loved you,” I whispered back, but if he heard me, he gave no sign.

  Rarely had I spoken truer words. Sophie had loved both her boys with a fierceness born of the unexpected blessing of late-in-life babies. Though these babies were both men now, towering over their mother with strong, hard bodies and equally strong, willful spirits, Sophie’s dedication and intense affection had never waned. If anything, it had increased in the three years since their father’s death.

  “I’m probably the only person who loves them for themselves,” Sophie had told me one day as we sat waiting for the bag of chemicals to drain into her wasted body. “They are such wealthy young men that people want to get close to them for all the wrong reasons.”

  “Don’t they say it’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one?” I asked with a smile.

  Sophie laughed. “So they say. But I want the girls Ammon and Peter finally choose to love them like I loved Tom. All the money makes it hard to discern true feelings. I mean, my boys are wealthy enough that they’ll be hard pressed to spend it all, even if that’s all they did for the rest of their lives. And it had better not be! Or their wives either!”

  I laughed at her outrage at the thought of her sons and their nonexistent wives becoming lazy spendthrifts.

  She looked at me speculatively. “You aren’t looking for a nice, rich husband, are you?”

  As I sat beside Sophie the day she offered me either of her sons, I contemplated Ammon and Peter. Certainly they were nice enough to look at, could be exceedingly charming if they felt like it, and had that assurance that comes from being raised with money. But for some reason they never spoke to my heart.

  “You want to know if I’m interested in either of your sons?” I was genuinely touched that she thought someone like me might make a good mate for these men. “I can’t think of a nicer thing you could say to me.”

  She looked at me, uncomfortably perceptive as always, at least about everything but her sons. “Thanks but no thanks?”

  I smiled as gently as I could and nodded.

  She sighed. “So I’ll keep praying. There’s got to be a pair of nice girls out there somewhere who will like them instead of their money.”

  “Maybe they’ll find someone like you,” I said. “You liked Tom for himself, not his money.

  “That I did,” she agreed. “But then he didn’t have money when I married him. The wealth came as a great surprise to me.”

  “To Tom too?”

  “He always said not. He always said he was going to become filthy rich, and he did.” She smiled. “He always told me he achieved in spite of my lack of faith. I always told him that he achieved because of my lack of faith. He just had to prove me wrong.”

  She smiled tremulously and stared at her hands. A great diamond glittered on her left ring finger. I couldn’t imagine how many carats it wa
s, but I was surprised that a frail little woman like her had enough strength to hold it up.

  “I miss him so,” she whispered. “You can’t imagine how I miss him! There’s nothing quite as empty as a double bed with one person in it.”

  I reached out and grasped her hand, and she held on for dear life. The pain of widowhood had not dissipated in three years’ time, and I knew from my mother that it didn’t in fifteen years’ time either.

  The sirens outside stopped, and I was back in the present. The muffled sounds of car doors slamming and people shouting filtered in to where Peter and I sat. It wasn’t long until the front doorbell rang.

  A uniformed cop entered the front hall and stood with his arms away from his body in that policeman stance accommodating all the gear hanging from his belt.

  “Are you two all right?” he asked.

  Peter and I nodded.

  “What happened?”

  “The car exploded,” Peter said. “And I was almost in it!”

  The cop looked at Peter’s neatly pressed chinos and oxford shirt under a navy cable sweater. “You were near the car when it blew?”

  “No. I was in the house getting my sunglasses, but I was supposed to be in it.” He patted his chest pocket where the glasses bulged slightly under his sweater. “I just ran back for them. The glare, you know. I was supposed to be in the car!”

  The uniform nodded and looked at me. I could see him assessing my grubby clothes and abraded forehead.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  I nodded. I glanced down at myself. “I had just tucked a lap robe around Mrs. Hostetter and was walking back to the house when the first explosion came. It knocked me into the flowerbed. The second one knocked me into the front steps.” I indicated my forehead.

  The cop nodded. “I want the two of you to talk to the detective assigned to the case. Why don’t you wait here, Ms.—” He waited for my name.

  “Rose Martin. I’m Mrs. Hostetter’s home health nurse.”

  He nodded. “That your car outside the hedge?”

  I nodded. “I was afraid it might catch fire too.”