Huckleberry Hill Read online

  INSIDE LIA’S HEART

  Lia sat facing Moses as the ambulance backed up, found a place to turn around, and headed down the hill. She could tell that Moses fought to keep his eyes open. They must have given him something for the pain that made him drowsy.

  “I like tall girls,” he said, letting his eyes close, as if he were unable to keep them open for one more second.

  He might like tall girls, but he wouldn’t marry one.

  Lia held her breath as a wave of pain washed over her. She loved Moses Zimmerman. She loved his kindness and his cheerful spirit, and yes, even though appearance shouldn’t matter, his handsome face and tall, strong figure. She couldn’t imagine ever wanting anyone but Moses. No one else would measure up—literally.

  It didn’t matter that he didn’t want to marry her or that he favored her sister or even that Lia was too plain to dream of such a match. She loved him. Her heart broke even as she realized how completely it belonged to him . . .

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  Huckleberry Hill

  JENNIFER BECKSTRAND

  ZEBRA BOOKS

  KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  INSIDE LIA’S HEART

  BOOK YOUR PLACE ON OUR WEBSITE AND MAKE THE READING CONNECTION!

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Teaser chapter

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  Anna Helmuth eased herself into the wooden rocker where she once cuddled each of her thirteen babies and took up her needles. “Moses is miserable, absolutely miserable. We must find him a wife.”

  Felty lowered his newspaper just enough to spy his wife over the top of it. “You mean Moses, our grandson? He doesn’t seem miserable to me.”

  “He won’t know how miserable he is until he meets the right girl,” Anna said, peering through her thick, round glasses.

  “Then we must make certain he never meets the right girl. Ignorance is bliss.”

  Anna clicked her knitting needles with blinding speed. “Now, Felty, don’t tease me. Our grandson’s happiness is at stake.”

  “Let the poor boy make his own hay. What young man wants two eighty-year-olds picking his future wife? Besides, I don’t know who is good enough for him. He’s a catch, that one.”

  “He takes after you, Felty, except I think you are the handsomer.”

  Felty lowered his paper to his lap. “Oh, Annie Banannie, I was never that handsome.”

  “Pretty Felty. The handsomest boy in Bonduel. That’s what we girls called you behind your back. I was lucky enough to snag you before Rosie Herschberger did.”

  “Rosie Herschberger can’t hold a candle to your fried chicken. It never would have worked out.”

  Anna smiled but didn’t look up from her knitting. Already March, and Felty didn’t have one new scarf to wear to ward off a change-of-weather cold. Surely any Amish wife worth her salt would knit her husband at least seven spring scarves, one for each day of the week, to last until the weather warmed up. “All I’m saying is, it is about time.”

  “For Rosie to learn to cook?”

  “For Moses to find a wife. And we must help him. The grandparents are always in charge of making the matches.”

  Felty shook his finger. “Annie girl, you are making that up.”

  “Now, Felty. Why else would the good Lord grant us years to sit in our rockers if not to scheme and plan other people’s lives?”

  Trying to fold The Budget neatly on the crease, Felty managed to buckle the thin paper until the fold crumpled in his hands. “We reached this age by keeping our noses out of other people’s business.”

  “Not me. I like to stick my fingers into other people’s pies. It’s my birthright as a woman.”

  “Moses won’t go along easy. That girl broke his heart something terrible yet,” Felty said.

  “Three years ago, and the whole rigmarole turned out to be a blessing. She left the church, and Moses, bless his heart, wouldn’t follow her.”

  Felty gave up on his paper and wadded it in his lap. “Smart one, that boy.”

  “It’s high time for him to get busy.”

  “What makes you think you can help him to a good wife? His mamm has tried to match him up with every girl in Wisconsin plus four or five from Ohio and even one from Canada.”

  “And she has fallen short on her duties. We are Moses’s only hope. Do you remember that family we met in Wautoma when we went for Bishop Glick’s funeral?”

  Felty furrowed his brow. “Bishop Glick passed away?”

  “In October. Don’t you remember?”

  “I remember getting old.”

  “There was a lovely family who took us in overnight.”

  Felty brightened and threw his ball of newspaper into the air, but it got away from him and floated to the floor behind his overstuffed recliner. “The Shetlers. With several grown boys and two girls at the tail end.”

  Anna grinned at her husband. “I knew you would remember.”

  “I still don’t remember about the bishop. But the eldest Shetler daughter was tall and pretty.”

  “Just the thing for our Moses.”

  “A sweet girl. She helped me when I sank into that sofa and couldn’t get out. We took hands, and I got about halfway up before falling back into the cushions. I grunted, she snorted, and we laughed so hard I think I sprouted a hernia.”

  “She baked us goodies for the trip home.”

  “A sweet girl. I remember the pumpkin whoopie pies.” Felty stroked his beard. “You could send Moses to Wautoma to fetch her, but I don’t think he would agree to go without a taste of those whoopie pies first.”

  “Moses will take some buttering up. We must bring his bride to Huckleberry Hill.”

  “Annie, leave the poor boy be. When he’s ready, he’ll find his own wife.”

  Annie rested her knitting needles in her lap. “Now, Felty. We can’t leave something this important to a man. Wha
t man has ever known his own heart?”

  “When I first laid eyes on you, Banannie, I knew I wanted to hold on to you for the rest of my life.”

  “Well, you’re stuck with me.”

  “And you’re stuck with me.”

  “Gute. I’ll write the Shetlers tonight.”

  “And I’ll hitch up the buggy and go warn Moses to beware of old women with knitting needles.”

  “You’ll do no such thing. We will catch him by surprise. When I am determined to do something even the angel Gabriel himself can’t stop me.”

  “Oh, Annie, that I know from years of experience.”

  Chapter Two

  Moses Zimmerman whistled a lively tune as he unhitched his horse from the buggy and led him to the barn. Letting his eyes adjust to the dimness, Moses made a mental note of what needed to be done for Mammi and Dawdi today. Pull bales from the loft, pitch hay, milk the cows. Thin peach trees, chop firewood, haul coal. If he weren’t so busy with his cheese factory, he’d get up here more often. Dawdi had sold his sixty-acre farm to Uncle Tim over a decade ago and moved to Huckleberry Hill where Dawdi tended peach trees and gathered huckleberries and maple sap from the woods. Uncle Titus and three of Moses’s married cousins occasionally helped on Huckleberry Hill when they weren’t busy working their own farms, but in Moses’s mind, it never seemed enough.

  Huckleberry Hill sat west of Bonduel, making it a remote place in a remote Wisconsin settlement. Dawdi had plowed two acres for a garden and some fruit trees, but otherwise the hill grew wild with sugar maples and thick stands of huckleberry bushes. Early spring harvest kept the family busy collecting sap, and in late summer, they gathered baskets full of reddish-purple huckleberries.

  Moses heard Dawdi’s rich bass voice and poked his head out of the open barn door. Dawdi, carrying a bucketlike container, attended to his chores like he always did—singing at the top of his lungs.

  “Life is like a mountain railroad, with an engineer that’s brave, we must make the run successful, from the cradle to the grave.” He stopped singing when he laid eyes on Moses. Smiling in his grandfatherly, protective way, he shook his head. “My boy, there’s trouble brewing.”

  Moses took the container from Dawdi’s hands and gave him a stiff hug. “What kind of trouble?”

  Dawdi pointed in the direction of the house. “Just keep in mind how much your mammi loves you, and there won’t be no ill will.” He smoothed his beard. “In this case, it might turn around all right. She’s a pretty little thing with a heart a gold. I could tell right off.”

  Moses hadn’t a clue what his dawdi was talking about. “Has Mammi been trying out a new recipe?”

  “All’s I’m saying is, don’t lay no blame to my charge. When your mammi gets a notion into her head, she won’t go back.”

  Moses nodded as if he completely understood and decided to change the subject. He lifted the container in his hand. “What kind of bucket is this?”

  Dawdi lit up with enthusiasm. “Ain’t it something? It’s my new chicken feeder. You turn this crank and the feed shoots out here. It spreads the feed without hardly lifting a finger.”

  “Can I carry it to the coop for you?”

  “I’ll take it.” Dawdi winked. “You got bigger fish to fry. Go look in on Mammi.”

  Dawdi disappeared around the barn as Mammi and her curly-haired dog, Sparky, burst out the front door. Sparky sported a green doggie sweater with a black stripe running all the way around Sparky’s midsection. Mammi’s sweater was made from the same yarn as Sparky’s, without the black stripe.

  Mammi’s favorite hobby was knitting. She could knit a pair of mittens for every one of her grandchildren in twenty-four hours flat.

  Mammi threw out her arms, and Moses couldn’t help smiling as she hopped down the steps like a much younger woman. Her hair, the color of billowy clouds on a sunny day, blended in with the white of her kapp. Her blue eyes twinkled persistently, as if every day were Christmas.

  “Moses!” she squealed as she wrapped her arms around his waist. She couldn’t reach her hands high enough to get them around his neck. Moses had not inherited his height from Mammi’s side.

  “My favorite day is when you come to see us,” she said.

  Moses squeezed his mammi tight and planted a kiss on the top of her head. “What do you need done today?”

  “Plenty of time for that. I have two surprises for you.”

  “Two?”

  “I made your favorite cookies, but I had to hide them because Felty won’t stop eating them. I wanted to save some for you.”

  Moses grinned. He had never had the heart to tell Mammi that her ginger snaps could break a tooth if they weren’t soaked in milk first. And “ginger snaps” was an apt name for Mammi’s personal recipe. The heavy ginger made people snap their heads back and look frantically for a drink of water. But it warmed his heart to please Mammi with how much he loved her cooking, so he always gobbled up four or five cookies for her sake.

  “What is your other surprise?”

  Mammi sprouted a twitchy grin and clapped her hands in delight. “I have found just the girl for you.”

  Moses became a wrinkly, deflated balloon. He resisted the urge to slump his shoulders. Dawdi had warned him.

  There’s trouble brewing.

  Since Moses’s nineteenth birthday seven years ago, a host of well-meaning relatives and friends had done their best to marry him off. Up until now, Dawdi and Mammi’s house had always been a safe haven. His grandparents were his only blood relatives who had never admonished him about finding a wife.

  It seemed that their patience had finally worn thin.

  Moses had tap-danced around so many requests that he didn’t even have to think about his response. He managed a weak smile, which considering his sudden change of mood was quite admirable. “If you like her, Mammi, I’m sure she’s a peach. But I don’t think I’ll get the chance to meet her. Things at the cheese factory are mighty busy.”

  Being conveniently busy proved a wonderful-gute way to avoid desperate girls and their equally eager mothers.

  “Not to worry. I knew I’d have to bring her to you.”

  “I’m too busy to have visitors at the factory.”

  Mammi smiled smugly as if she had bested him in a game of cards. “No, my dear boy. She’s here. In the house. She’s from Wautoma settlement and will be staying with us all summer. You’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other.”

  Moses wanted to throw his hands in the air and run screaming down the hill. Instead, he fell silent as his mind raced. Mammi had done her own dance around his bucket of excuses.

  What now?

  No escape. He’d have to buck up, meet this girl, and get it over with, although he dreaded the introduction almost as much as he dreaded that root canal last year. He pictured the kind of girl Mammi would choose for him. Probably some woman fifteen years older than he with sunken cheeks and a glassy stare from working at her knitting too long. Or perhaps she was one of those empty-headed schoolgirls who couldn’t put two sentences together without giggling. Old ladies like Mammi thought youth was the only thing a female needed to make her attractive.

  His own mother said Moses was too picky, but not even Mamm seemed to understand that Moses didn’t want to find another girl. Barbara would be back, and he intended to wait for her. When he told people this, they thought he was deerich, foolish, holding out for a girl who’d left three years ago.

  He wanted astonishing, and he’d only found astonishing once. He would wait for Barbara.

  Mammi wrapped her arthritic fingers around his wrist. “Cum reu, come in.”

  Moses had no choice but to follow. Shuffling his feet, he tromped up the porch steps and into the house.

  Mammi handed him three rock-hard cookies in a napkin. “I just know our plan is going to work out wonderful gute. I just know it.”

  Our plan?

  Moses refused to claim any credit for such a plan.

  She looked
up at him expectantly. “You’ll find her in the cellar.”

  Determined to be grumpy about it, Moses sighed inwardly, surrendered to the inevitable, and opened the cellar door. At six feet five inches tall, he had to stoop all the way down the stairs to avoid scraping his head on the ceiling. He heard a crash and set foot on the bottom step in time to see a girl kneeling on the floor, carefully gathering shards of a broken canning jar.

  She turned her face to him, and he almost fell over. He had expected a girl and he had expected Amish, but he hadn’t expected beautiful.

  Chapter Three

  Blast!

  Lia sank to the floor and surveyed the pieces of what used to be a bottle. Her first day at Helmuths’ and she had already burned the pancakes, snagged a hole in her stockings, and broken an innocent canning jar that had probably never done harm to anyone in its entire life.

  As she reached out to retrieve the biggest piece, her hand grazed a shard protruding from the broken base of the jar. She gasped in pain and watched as droplets of blood appeared in a nice straight line across her palm.

  Blast!

  One more mishap like this and she wouldn’t blame the Helmuths if they sent her packing. But, oh, how she wanted things to work out here on Huckleberry Hill! This was the first time in her life she’d left home. It was bound to be an exciting adventure, even though her sister, Rachel, kept reminding her that she was only going to tiny Bonduel from just-as-tiny Wautoma to work for “two boring old people.”

  Still, Lia had been almost giddy with excitement. Back home she had so many people depending on her for their happiness. Some days the weight of her responsibility felt like it would suffocate her right quick. Huckleberry Hill seemed like a place where she could take a deep breath.

  She heard footsteps on the stair and quickly brushed her bleeding hand across her apron. Not even enough blood to worry about, and she didn’t want Anna to fuss about it.

  Lia looked up, expecting to see Anna, who could take a set of stairs like a twenty-year-old. Instead she saw an exceptionally tall young man. She estimated he stood taller than she by a good five inches—didn’t see that every day. But his height wasn’t what made her look twice. His lips curled into a half smile, revealing a charming dimple on his left cheek. His eyes, so intensely blue they almost glowed in the dim light of the cellar, studied her face with a mixture of surprise and annoyance. Annoyed or not, he looked unnervingly handsome.