An Amish Christmas Promise. Jo Brown Ann

children recalled the surname they’d been given at birth. “This is Rose Anne, and that is Kevin.”

      “Kevin? Like Hurricane Kevin?”

      “Appropriate for a five-year-old boy, don’t you think?” She laughed at the surprise on the man’s face. She didn’t want to tell him that, with her emotions so raw, she had two choices: laugh or cry. During the day, she laughed. At night when everyone else was asleep, she gave in to tears at the thought of how the flood had taken her home and livelihood. With her kitchen gone, she could no longer bake pies and cookies for the diner in town as well as a trio of tourist farms not far out of town.

      And laughing kept her from having to respond to the man’s amazement when she said Kevin was five. She’d heard comments about how big he was for his age and how advanced he was. She’d brushed them aside, not wanting to admit the truth. Kevin was almost eighteen months older. She’d changed his age, as well as his sister’s, to make it harder for Leland to locate these two sweet children. Assuming he was looking for them—and she had to—he would search for a nearly seven-year-old boy and a girl who’d had her fifth birthday. As far as the residents of Evergreen Corners knew, Rose Anne was four. More than one person had commented on how early she was losing her teeth, but that was always followed by a comment about how every kid was different.

      “I’m Michael Miller,” the man replied with a wink at Kevin. “They told us to report to a check-in center at the school. Can you point us in the right direction?”

      “I’m heading that way. It’s easier to show you than tell you.” Her voice caught, but she rushed on, “Almost all the familiar landmarks are gone.”

      He nodded, and she saw his sympathy before he picked up the bag he’d dropped when she’d nearly run into him. His large duffel bag was set with others on a narrow patch of grass that had somehow not been washed away.

      “We appreciate that, Mrs.—”

      “Carolyn will do.” She wasn’t going to explain that her neighbors assumed she was a widow. Guilt tore at her each time she thought of the lies she had woven like a cocoon to protect Kevin and Rose Anne. “We’re not big on formality.”

      After he’d introduced her to Benjamin Kuhns and James Streicher, two men who’d traveled with him from an Amish settlement across the New York line, she motioned for the trio to follow her and the kinder.

      Children! She needed to say “children” not kinder.

      She must remember not to use Deitsch. Or act as if she understood it. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed hearing the Amish spoken language until these plain men began using it. But she had to seem as ignorant of it as her neighbors. Revealing she understood the language was one of the clues that, if repeated beyond the village, could draw Leland’s attention to Evergreen Corners.

      Holding Rose Anne’s hand to stop the curious little girl from peering over the broken edge of the road, Carolyn made sure Kevin and the men were following her as she walked along the street toward the single intersection in the village. Nothing appeared as it had a week ago. Wide swaths of ground had been wiped clean by the rushing waters, and teetering buildings looked as if a faint breeze would send them crashing onto the sidewalks.

      Michael moved to walk alongside her and Rose Anne as they passed ruined buildings. She heard Kevin regaling the other two men with tales of trying to recover their ten missing chickens.

      “Do you think they survived?” Michael asked. “The chickens, I mean.”

      “We’ve seen most of them around the village. I opened the fence around the chicken coop before we evacuated.” She pushed from her mind images of the horrifying moments when she and the children had struggled to escape the maddened waters.

      She couldn’t keep them from filling her nightmares, but she didn’t intend to let those memories taint her waking hours. If they did, she might get distracted and fail to discover Leland had found them until it was too late. She couldn’t take the chance he’d abduct Kevin and Rose Anne as he’d tried to before her sister died.

      “And now everything is gone?” Michael asked, drawing her back from the abyss of her fears.

      “Not everything.”

      “What’s left?” he asked.

      “Anything more than twenty-five feet above the brook survived, though several buildings were flooded a couple of feet into the first floor. The school, where we’re headed, is the closest building to the brook that wasn’t damaged at all.”

      He looked along the road running east and west through the village. “You’re talking about more than five hundred feet away from the stream’s banks.”

      “Uh-huh.” She’d started to say ja, but halted herself. “Look at the mountains. They make this valley into a funnel, and the water kept rising and rising. We lost two restaurants and three shops as well as parts of the town hall, the fire station, the library, the elementary school, a building supply store. Also some historic buildings like the old gristmill that used to sit next to the brook. And, of course, a lot of houses, including a couple that had been here from when the town was founded in 1750. Many of the records were saved from the town hall, and, thankfully, the local newspaper had stored its back issues from the nineteenth century in the library, because their building washed away.”

      “What about the library books?” asked Benjamin. “Were the books saved?”

      “A lot of them were lost. The cellar and first floor of the library were flooded, and many of the ones out on loan were washed away.”

      The men exchanged glances, but she looked at Kevin and Rose Anne. She was glad they were talking to each other and paying no attention to the adults’ conversation. Her arms ached as she remembered holding them and trying to comfort them after their escape from the flood. They’d been upset about losing their home, but having the library flooded had distressed them even more. They’d loved going there and borrowing books or listening to one read aloud to them.

      “Though the books have gone swimming,” Rose Anne, ever the diplomat, had said, as tears had welled in her eyes, “Jenna will tell us stories. She’s nice, and she has lots and lots of the goriest stories.”

      Carolyn had translated Rose Anne’s mangling of the language as she did each time Rose Anne came up with a new “version” of a word. She’d guessed the little girl meant glorious rather than goriest, but she hadn’t wanted to take the time to ask. Instead, she’d offered the little girl what solace she could. However, after talking with her good friend Jenna Sommers, the village’s librarian and the foster mother of a six-year-old little girl whom Rose Anne adored, Carolyn knew it would be many months—maybe even a year or two—before the library was operational again. First, people needed homes, and the roads had to be repaired and made safe.

      And the children needed to be kept safe, too. Her sister had won full custody of the two children in the wake of her separation from Leland. He’d fought to keep them. Not because he wanted them. They would have been in the way of his rough life of drinking and drugs. He’d fought because he hadn’t wanted his wife to have a single moment of joy. It hadn’t been enough he’d left Regina with bruises and broken bones each time he bothered to come home. At last, her sister had agreed to let Carolyn help her escape the abuse. Regina had been free of her abusive husband for almost three months before she became ill and died two days later from what the doktors had said was a vicious strain of pneumonia.

      “Wow,” murmured one of the men behind her as they reached the main intersection where a concrete bridge’s pilings were lost in a jungle of debris and branches. “Is there another bridge into town?”

      “Not now. There was a covered bridge.”

      “Was it destroyed?” Michael asked.

      “Half of it was except for a couple of deck boards. The other half’s wobbly. From what I’ve heard, engineers will come next week to see what, if anything, can be salvaged.”