Chapter 39
We rented a room nearby at the Hilton. They only had one room available and we were too tired to hunt for vacancies at other hotels, so we took it.
Manny was banged up and we insisted he take the king bed after a shower, but he refused the mattress, making a spot with blankets on the carpet.
We couldn’t in good conscience sleep on the comfortable bed with our wounded friend on the floor, so we tried to force his hand by joining him on the ground, doing our best with sheets and pillows, an absurd situation, who could be the most obdurate, but he claimed he’d never been happier and soon he was breathing deeply.
Though battered and bruised, something had seemed to loosen in Manny after the fight.
He’d been feeling the dissipation of his youth, angry at the furries and wondering if he was an old man now, wondering if advancing technology made him obsolete, his equilibrium lost in the pregnancy drama, confidence shaken.
But he’d gone toe-to-toe with a professional fighter, a cheater, a younger man with a size advantage, and kicked his ass.
A triumph. The victory put to rest questions Manny had of himself. Order was restored. He remained king.
I woke in the middle of the night to find Ronnie on the mattress by herself, under a blanket and peaceful. She remained a princess.
The next day we motored into Amish Country, by way of Pittsburgh instead of the slog through West Virginia.
The towers and suburbs and signs of modernity gave way to fields and tractors, the cars yielding to horse and buggies.
This late in the year, only cabbage remained to be harvested, rows and rows of leafy greens.
The rest of the fields were being tilled and weeded and fertilized in preparation for winter.
The toil never ended, something Piper and Theo had to learn.
Manny woke from a nap in the backseat long enough to murmur, “Great part of America. I’m glad I don’t live here.”
We turned down the same dirt lane as we had two weeks previous, our tires not a perfect match for the wheel ruts, and we braked at the three farmhouses that shared clotheslines and private gardens and barns and a big chicken run, where Madeleine Cardot liked to scatter bird feed.
More leaves had fallen since we had visited, and the red-headed girl was raking them in the side yard with a rake too long for her.
The young boy, visible out back, paused his work of splitting wood with a maul too heavy for him.
His shirt was off and he wore gloves, and I bet he wasn’t efficient with the maul yet but there was only one way to grow up—do your best until it became easier.
The other girl, so cute it hurt, sat on the steps with Elizabeth Miller, shucking corn.
We spotted Madeleine Cardot in the pasture with dairy cows, herding them toward a barn, presumably to be milked. She meandered among them like a free spirit, smiling to herself and patting their rumps and singing, her long gray hair pulled back in a braid. If she saw our arrival, she gave no sign.
Elizabeth stood from her task and called inside the house for Joseph. She wiped her hands on her apron, and Joseph walked out onto the porch, taking off his reading glasses to see better.
“Mariye,” called Joseph. He shook my hand, which he hadn’t done last time.
He shook it like he handled an ax often.
Elizabeth smiled at us, a step behind her husband.
“Welcome back to our farmstead. Did you come for lunch or for the pleasure of our conversation?” He and Elizabeth laughed like he’d told their favorite joke.
They were considerably more at ease than our last visit.
Apparently, when we caused no harm to Madeleine, their trust in us rose.
“We won’t stay long,” said Ronnie. “We need to tie up a loose end and we’ll be on our way.”
“More business with Madeleine?” asked Joseph.
“More or less. Though we don’t need to speak with her. We’d prefer to discuss it with you.”
“That’d be fine,” said Joseph. “Is trouble brewing?”
I shook my head. “No. The opposite.”
“It’s cold out,” said Elizabeth. “If there’s business to talk, won’t you come indoors?”
We followed them. The girl shucking corn smiled politely and moved her bucket to make room.
Inside, both Ronnie and I gave a little gasp.
It could’ve been a showroom advertising the glories of a simple life, nicer than the exterior of the house.
The simple hardwood floors gleamed. Good rocking chairs waited around a black wood-burning stove.
The windows were adorned with heavy drapes.
A sewing table sat beneath a window, near a hide-away desk cabinet.
A table and set of chairs separated this living area from the kitchen, which had butcher-block counters and a wood-burning oven and shelves with glass jars of preserves and a refrigerator that was likely powered by solar panels.
The decorative pillows and the throw blanket were dark blue, and the door to the basement was painted dark blue, the only color other than brown wood.
Joseph pulled out chairs for us. Without asking, Elizabeth rolled open a bread box and set half a loaf of sourdough onto a cutting board on the table, and fetched a bowl of butter. Joseph collected a clatter of tin mugs and filled them with black coffee and plunked them on the table near the bread.
Like time-traveling backwards, to when people had manners and treated guests as valuable. Before you could book rooms at the Hilton, people relied on the kindness of strangers to survive. I wished I’d brought a notebook to write down observations on how people with common sense lived.
Ronnie buttered a slice of sourdough and took a bite and closed her eyes and groaned.
“Did you eat breakfast?” asked Elizabeth. “I have pork leftovers.”
I waved it off. “This is too much. Thank you.”
“Strawberry jam for the bread?”
“No, please,” said Ronnie. “I’m so happy.”
“Our business will make more sense,” I told Joseph and Elizabeth, as they sat across from us and picked up their own mugs, “if I tell you a story in chronological order. I think I have most parts of it right.”
Joseph raised his mug to us. “That’d be fine.”
“About fifteen years ago, Madeleine Cardot showed up on your porch with her son and daughter. Give or take a couple years. She was on the run from something scary, and they abandoned their train unexpectedly in Amish Country. You’d never met them but, as you told me, your community takes in strays.
Their English was passable but clearly Madeleine, Theo, and Emile were fish out of water.
They came from money and modern conveniences, and the children were relocated here against their will.
Soon Emile was acting out. She ran first, perhaps ten years ago, abandoning her mother.
She was in her early twenties? Later on, Theo left too.
I don’t know what happened to scare Madeleine so badly, but I know it was likely related to France’s version of the mob.
Bad husband, bad business, bad men, all that.
Whatever it was, Madeleine couldn’t leave here—she was too broken. ”
Joseph nodded. “So far, this rings true.”
“Good. Emile found her way to Philadelphia. She made friends with a fitness instructor named Piper, and she married a man named Duane. With Emile’s good looks, it wasn’t hard to land a powerful man.
The kind of man she knew from her previous life, being raised as a teenager in France in the world of crime.
Soon Theo left your home too, and he found Emile in Philadelphia.
He began working for Duane and he married Piper. ”
“We never met Duane,” said Elizabeth, “but we met Piper. Once. Lord willing, I hoped to never again.”
“Emile never visited her mother but Theo did on occasion,” said Joseph. “Although he wasn’t in his right mind, we permitted it. His visits seemed good for Madeleine. It’s been an age since, though.”
“Emile and Duane had a daughter. Her name was Sophia. About the same time that Theo and Piper had a child,” I said.
Elizabeth took Joseph’s hand and squeezed it. “Poor babes.”
“Emile and Duane left baby Sophia in the care of a nanny and flew to Italy,” I continued. “Around seven years ago. They never returned, vanishing without a trace. I was in the area and I know the truth—they died in Naples, the result of their own wickedness.”
Elizabeth’s posture was elite, but she straightened even further. “Emile is dead?”
“Yes. And so is her husband.”
“Well.” Jospeh turned to look out the window, where the three children were trying to eavesdrop on the front porch without being caught. He scratched at his chin-strap beard. “We didn’t know that. But nothing good comes from abandoning your ma.”
“That’s dreadful.” Elizabeth looked down at the table, and she seemed genuinely sad. “We knew all along that her heart was wicked, but, no matter, it’s still dreadful.”
“We’ll leave it up to you whether or not to tell Madeleine,” said Ronnie. “That’s not our decision.”
Jospeh and Elizabeth glanced at each other. “I don’t know either,” he said and Elizabeth shrugged. “No point making a fuss. I’ll talk it over with Mr. Yoder.”
Ronnie ate more bread.
“The American government still doesn’t know what happened to Duane and Emile.
But baby Sophia needed a caretaker, and so she was handed to Theo and Piper to raise.
The full control of Duane’s estate was granted to them, for the purposes of raising Sophia.
Seven years has to pass before someone can be declared legally dead, and no one challenged them for control. ”
“The poor child,” said Elizabeth. “I can’t reckon which would be worse, having Emile as a mother or Theo as a father.”
“Amen,” said Ronnie, wiping her mouth. She seemed a little embarrassed by devouring the bread and she picked up her mug to sip it like a lady.
“Here’s where the story takes another turn,” I said.
“Piper and Theo are unwise and lazy and didn’t want to raise both children, and they did something criminal—they swapped the identity of their daughter with baby Sophia.
They began calling their own biological daughter Sophia, pretending it was Emile’s child.
That way they could have access to Duane’s fortune and spoil their own daughter, without the hassle of having to raise the actual Sophia. ”
“Great days,” said Joseph. “This generation of children will drown itself. My word.”
“What happened to the real baby Sophia?” asked Elizabeth, though I suspected she already knew.
“Theo and Piper had a problem on their hands. They had too many babies. They didn’t want both.
They wanted the money, not the hassle. So they told their few remaining friends that their own child died, which was a lie.
The child lived. But they gave her away, and kept their own daughter under the false pretense.
There’s no government agency out there checking for things like this.
They swapped identities and faked a death without reporting it and no one knew.
I should’ve put the names together the moment I heard it, but it took me a while. ”
Joseph looked blank.
We heard the children rustling outside, arguing about something as quietly as they could to avoid detection.
“I’ll give you a hint what they did with Emile’s baby, the real baby Sophia,” I said. “In order to successfully swap identities, they renamed baby Sophia, calling her the name they first gave their own biological daughter. And Theo drove her here and left her on your doorstep, seven years ago.”
Quietly, like under her breath, Elizabeth whispered, “Margaret.”
When Ronnie and I first came here two weeks ago, I’d heard Elizabeth call after the children—Daniel, Margaret, Rachel, get back here. Margaret was the girl so pretty it was hard to look at her.
“I assume Margaret, like Madeleine, was taken in as a stray?” I said.
Elizabeth didn’t move.
Joseph nodded.
“She looks like her grandmother,” said Ronnie.
Joseph cleared his throat. “Does she?”
“Lord, yes,” blurted Elizabeth. She used her apron to dab her eyes. “I’ve mentioned that to you before. Half of me assumed that was a coincidence, but half of me wondered… The Yoders brought it up too.” She shot Ronnie a commiserating look. “The men never notice a thing.”
“We’ve been raising Emile’s daughter?” asked Joseph.
“Shhh, keep your voice down, you wool-headed man. We don’t want her finding out like this, do we,” said Elizabeth.
“Does Madeleine know?” he asked.
“Madeleine barely knows her own name,” said Elizabeth. “She pays no attention to the children.”
Joseph finally lowered his voice. “Our Margaret’s real name is Sophia?”
“If you ask me,” I said, “Margaret is Margaret’s real name.
You are her real parents, biological or not.
She’s being raised where she should be. She’s shucking corn and playing baseball with a family that loves her, while Theo and Piper are raising a brat in the suburbs.
Of course you have options, but I wouldn’t change a thing. She’s your daughter.”
“Of course she’s our daughter,” said Elizabeth, crying harder, enough to warrant a hand towel for the tears. “She has been for seven years.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” said Ronnie, who withdrew some papers from her satchel. “Because she’s the true biological heir to Emile and Duane. And that comes with perks.”
“Perks?” asked Joseph. “We don’t need a thing.”
“Maybe not. I think the Miller family has earned a vacation,” said Ronnie, smiling big enough to light the room on fire. “To a lovely little beach house I can’t wait to tell you about.”