A Rose Revealed (2 page)

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 was, 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.”

“Right.” He pointed to the balloon chair I’d just vacated. I sat down again gratefully.

“You, sir,” he said to Peter, “can wait in the living room.”

Peter hesitated. “But my mother and my brother.”

The policeman just looked at him.

“The people in the car,” I said to the officer. “Sophie and Ammon Hostetter.”

The cop looked at Peter. “And you are?”

“Peter Hostetter.”

“Well, Mr. Hostetter, if you’d wait in the living room for the detective, I’d appreciate it. And if there is any news from outside, I’ll see that you get it. And I’m sorry for your loss.”

Peter blinked. “Thank you.” He turned and walked to the living room.

It was almost two hours before the police were finished with me. The detective on the case turned out to be a guy named Lem Huber. I had gone to school with his younger brother Al at Pequea High School. I knew Lem as the football star who was three years older than Al and me, then as the college man who showed up at Al’s high school games to cheer for him. Most recently I had run into him at the hospital a couple of times when my ambulance runs and his investigations overlapped.

“Well, well, Rose Martin,” he said when he came in to the Hostetters’.

I felt my tension level diminish dramatically when I saw him.

“So tell me everything you know,” he said as he sat in the companion balloon chair. “Nice and slow and nice and detailed.”

He let me talk without interruption. Then he questioned me politely about what I had said, asking the same questions from several different angles. I answered as thoroughly as I could, but it all came down to one thing as far as I was concerned: through some terrible accident Sophie and Ammon Hostetter had died.

When Lem finally told me I could leave, I sighed with relief. I grabbed my medical equipment, my purse, and keys and rushed out the front door. Fire equipment and emergency vehicles still filled the drive and lawn, many with lights revolving, all with static pouring from their radios. The fire was long extinguished, but all the attendant chaos of a crisis was present, including men and women in a variety of uniforms talking and laughing, now that the immediate need was met. Police officials were examining what was left of the Town Car under high-voltage lights. Yellow crime-scene tape was draped all over the lawn.

I was so consumed with relief that I could finally leave that I was unprepared for what I saw. Memories long buried leaped at me, overwhelming me, choking me, a kaleidoscope of emotions tearing reason and control from me. My stomach heaved and I grabbed one of the porch pillars to keep from falling.

“Rose?” Lem Huber spoke behind me, and his hand came out to help support me.

I swallowed once, twice, and tried to contain the incipient panic welling inside, the great beast who waited in the shadows to devour me whenever my guard was down.

I pushed myself away from the pillar. “I’ll be all right,” I said with what I hoped sounded like assurance. I suspected I was so white he wouldn’t believe anything I said even if my voice had been steady, which regrettably it wasn’t. “Too many memories.”

Lem nodded as he continued to hold my elbow. “This was pretty bad,” he agreed.

I made a little noise he took for assent, and I allowed him to think that it was the horror of today’s events that had overcome me. It was safer that way.

Lem raised an arm and waved, and next thing I knew, one of the EMTs was holding up two fingers and asking, “How many?”

“I am not concussed,” I said.

“Now how would you know?” he asked with a smile.

“I’m a nurse.” I held out my bag.

“Ah,” he said, unimpressed, as he studied the knot on my forehead in the porch light.

“And an EMT.”

“Good for you, sweetheart.” He poked around the injury. “Then you know this needs to be cleaned out and disinfected.”

“Ouch.” I flinched as he got too enthusiastic. “So clean it.”

“Inside,” he ordered. This time I sat in the kitchen and squirmed as he painted my forehead orange with mercurochrome.

“Hey,” I groused. “Couldn’t you have used something a bit less obvious?”

“They don’t give me Bactine.” He stepped back and studied his handiwork. I didn’t like his smug grin.

I took my orange forehead and my sagging energy level and went outside again. But this time I was prepared. I had my thoughts firmly in neutral as I walked across the yard and out to my car. I drove into Lancaster and to the Home Health Group office, my mind a careful blank. I pulled into the parking area behind the office and parked the car, concentrating on nothing. I unlocked the back office door and put all my supplies away, signing the supply sheets and requisition orders, thinking only of pleasing Madylyn. I got into my blue Civic and started for home.

I hadn’t gone very far when my mind, never very quiet at the best of times, exploded. Images flashed with the relentless pulse of the light strip on a police cruiser. Fire, crushed impatiens, sirens, static, yellow police tape. Surviving brothers with sunglasses. EMTs with mercurochrome. Polite detectives with fine brown hair that floated every time they turned their heads.

And rushing white water, swollen and angry, creaming over rocks.

And the inevitable, “Rose, what have you done!”

It didn’t take much intelligence to realize just how close to the edge I was.

I’m fine. Really. I’m fine
. I repeated it to myself like a litany. Maybe if I said it often enough, it would become true.

But coming out of the house and seeing those lights and hearing that static had brought such a rush of agony that I was unlikely to feel fine for quite some time. I hadn’t had this strong a flashback in years.

You’re being stupid
, I told myself.
You’re a nurse and an EMT. You deal with emergencies much too frequently to be spooked like this
.

But that’s when I’m the healer, the helper. I fix the problems. I don’t cause them.

But you didn’t cause the problem today
.

No, I didn’t, but I didn’t prevent it either.

Like you could have. What are you, prescient?

I shrugged away that bit of logic and went back to the real crux of my distress.

Because I was the cause then.

Suddenly I knew I wasn’t going to make it home. I felt the bile rise in my throat and swallowed desperately. I felt the tears begin, blurring my vision until I could barely see the road. I felt the shaking start deep in my stomach, and I knew it would radiate outward until my whole body shook.

Oh, God!

I blinked madly, desperately.

Oh, God! I have to get off the road before I fail again, before I’m the cause again
.

And I saw the answer to my prayer loom out of the darkness, a white farm house with green trim, clean and orderly and known. I pulled into the Zooks’ drive, shoved the car in park, and fell to pieces.

Chapter 2

I
don’t know how long I sat in the Zooks’ drive. My normal thought processes and emotional responses were very much on the fritz. It was one of those terrifying times when thinking is too horrendous, and your mind copes by going blank. I sat gripping the wheel, unable to do anything but sob for a long time. At least it felt like a long time. In reality it may have been only a few minutes.

Then I tossed my glasses on the passenger seat because they suddenly felt too tight for my swollen, overheated face. I hugged myself as I shivered and cried and generally made a fool of myself, though I suppose since no one saw me but me, I didn’t, strictly speaking, play the fool. But I felt the pain. Oh, how I felt the pain.