Finding Mercy. Karen Harper

had to go up and over a hill to see if he could help. When others came, he’d have to fade away, try to cut through the woods past the pond Eben had showed him on his tour this evening.

      Alex limped up the hill, which seemed endless. A sharp pain stabbed his ankle with each step. What else bad could happen to him? His past in ruins, his life endangered, probably a price on his head. But he couldn’t just leave someone who might be hurt or dead. As much of a jerk as the driver had been to speed on these hills, Alex couldn’t leave someone in need, no matter if his own hide was in danger.

      Running footsteps behind him. What if this was a setup? Someone tried to flush him out with the headlights, tried to hit him, but he’d jumped aside, now they’d make sure…

      He hunkered down just off the road—no ditch this high on the hill—and saw a person running toward him. A woman? Her light-colored apron and the white cap Amish women wore seemed to glow in the dark. His eyes had adjusted after staring into the headlights of that car.

      He stood and limped onto the berm of the road. The woman running toward him stopped. “Andrew? Oh, thank the Lord, you’re all right! I heard that car crash like it hit something.”

      “I sprained my ankle getting out of its way. Can I lean on you? I’m pretty sure the crash was just on the other side of the hill.”

      “Oh, ya, sure. Is it bad? If it hurts too much, I can just go see. That crash was loud. Surely someone else will come. They didn’t hit a buggy, did they—or if you didn’t see it, only heard it…”

      He could tell she was nervous too, and not only because of the wreck. Did she not want him to touch her, put his arm around her shoulders? Ella was pretty, the lavender lady, with the white-blond hair and pale blue eyes. She had a great bod her Amish garments could not quite hide and an almost angelic face, framed by that stiff white cap. Unlike her mother and grandmother, Ella had her feelings written plain on her face, emotions that flitted past and changed. He’d been upset to hear he was being given her bedroom, but Mrs. Lantz had assured him that Ella had already planned to move to the small house on the other side of the garden and her big field.

      “Okay, sure, lean on me,” she told him, stepping closer. Strange that, just as he reached his arm to touch her, the new moon popped over the horizon behind her head. Its sickle shape didn’t give them much light but, in the midst of his fear, it seemed strangely like a celestial smile.

      * * *

      At the bottom of the hill, the side of a small, red sports car was wrapped around a big tree. And the hood of the car was evidently on fire. As they trudged toward it together, their awkward gait—Alex was now half hopping, just putting pressure on his good leg—reminded Ella of a three-legged race.

      When they got there, they both gasped. It looked as if the red car itself bled strings of blood. No—Ella saw it was spools of shiny, red cord that had been thrown out of the car.

      “Stay back,” Alex ordered her, and took his arm from her shoulders. “I’ll see if someone’s still inside.”

      “You can’t—your ankle. I’ll check.”

      “No! If that fire spreads, the gas tank might blow!” he shouted, and made a grab for her. He missed and only snagged his fingers in her prayer kapp, which pulled off and yanked her long, pinned-up braid free. The weight of it slapped between her shoulder blades as she ran. She was pretty sure she heard a couple of curse words from Cousin Andrew.

      He was right about a possible explosion. She smelled gas. She’d have to hurry. Passenger side crunched in. Driver’s door open. No one in the car, maybe got out, but to where? Been thrown out?

      “No one here!” she started to shout back to Andrew, but he’d come up right behind her. He tugged her back so hard by an elbow that she almost flew off her feet. She banged into him. He fell back, but she balanced them before he pulled her away. His face, lit by the fire, looked like a mask of anger. What was this man really like?

      “Get back, I said! You could be killed if that blows!”

      Limping, he managed to drag her across the road and shoved her into the ditch, just as the car went up in flames with a big boom! Clinging together, they huddled in shallow water among grass and weeds. The light and heat slapped them, a hundred times worse than an open oven door or roaring fireplace log. Light all over—no, that was headlights up on the road. Someone was here to help! And here she was in Andrew’s arms, clinging to him.

      Ella clambered up and out of the ditch, dripping wet, her snagged braid spilling her hair loose. Despite the headlights in her eyes, she could see someone was getting out of a van.

      “Ella? Ella, you okay? It’s Ray-Lynn. The sheriff’s on his way. What happened? Whose car?”

      “Don’t know, but he didn’t burn up with it. I went to get him out but he was gone.”

      “We’ve got to find him, like you and Hannah found me, saved me. I— Oh, who’s that?”

      “This is our cousin, Andrew Lantz from Pennsylvania, visiting us for a while. We were— We both heard the crash.”

      Ella could see Andrew was already searching among the charred trees along the road, using a Y-shaped branch he’d found for a crutch. “Here!” he shouted to them. “He’s back here!”

      They ran to him, bent over a prone form. It seemed one unwound spool of the crimson cording pointed right at him. A young, dark-haired man lay sprawled half in the ditch on this side of the road. When Andrew turned him over to see if he was breathing, they saw he looked Asian. Andrew gasped.

      “You know him?” Ray-Lynn asked.

      “No—just surprised. Chinese, I think, and here—in Amish country.”

      They could hear the sheriff’s siren coming closer. Andrew’s head jerked up, turned toward the sound.

      “It’s all right,” Ray-Lynn said. “Just the sheriff. He’ll call the authorities for help, and we can tell them what happened.”

      Ella took off her apron and covered the unmoving man.

      “He’s breathing, has a pulse,” Andrew said as he rose and moved away.

      Ella bent over the injured man while Ray-Lynn walked away to flag down the sheriff. He jumped out of his squad car with a bright flashlight. Ella saw him give Ray-Lynn a quick, one-handed hug and whisper to her, though his words carried on the wind.

      “Don’t you let this flash you back to your own accident. You done good, honey, you and Ella and— Where’d that Amish guy go?”

      Ella looked around as Ray-Lynn filled the sheriff in, and he came over to look at the unconscious victim. Unless Andrew had dived back into the ditch, he was nowhere to be seen, and with that sprained ankle. Then in the scarlet reflection of the sheriff’s pulsating light bar, she saw he was crosscutting the field that led toward the pond and the more distant farm, moving jerkily with that homemade crutch.

      Like a real Amish man, was he just humble, not wanting to take credit for helping to save someone’s life—if the car’s driver lived? Or was it because he had his identity to hide and even the sheriff could not know about his being in that protection program? Or, she thought as the new, local newspaper editor, Lucinda Drayton, pulled up, was Andrew just making sure he wouldn’t be interviewed or photographed?

      Ms. Drayton slammed her car door and ran toward the sheriff shouting, “What happened?” Ella would have to tell Andrew that the new editor was real good about not showing Amish faces. Didn’t he know he’d have to talk to the sheriff later?

      Sheriff Freeman told Ms. Drayton, “Don’t know much yet. That license plate’s almost toast, but I’m gonna call in what I can see of it. We got an injured man on the ground. Squad’s coming.”

      He walked back to his car and bent inside it to get some sort of telephone from the seat. Ray-Lynn knelt by the victim, and Ms. Drayton started photographing the still-smoldering wreck.