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The next morning found Jemima out in the back yard of her parent’s home, hanging clothes on the clothesline. It was still early; there was mist still hovering in the low folds of the hills, and the air was still pleasantly cool.
Jemima picked up a wet dress and draped it over the clothesline. Breakfast had been subdued and mostly silent. Her parents had said nothing about her embarrassing predicament. She wasn’t sure if Deborah knew what had happened, because she, too, had been silent.
Jemima frowned, wondering why Deborah hadn’t told their parents about seeing her walk off into the bushes with a stranger. But to be honest, she wasn’t really worried about it – just grateful.
She had other and much bigger things to be worried about.
It was only a matter of time now before someone saw the story in the newspaper, and the word got out in the community that Jemima King was a rich millionaire. She wondered if people would think that she was greedy for money and full of hochmut. She wondered what they would make of the fact that she’d talked to an Englisch reporter, and had gone all the way to the city with him, alone.
Or, more specifically – what Mark and Samuel and Joseph would make of it.
She shook her head, and stamped her foot and cried. It was that Englischer reporter – if he hadn’t done what he’d promised not to do, if he hadn’t grabbed her and kissed her again, she would’ve had time to get inside before her father caught them, and at least she could’ve had a few days of privacy before everyone found out. But now, even that was gone.
She grabbed up another dress and slapped it over the line savagely. Brad Williams was a liar. He had done only what he had wanted to do; he had no concern for anyone but himself.
And the thing that upset her most was that she was never going to see him again.
The sudden sound of her father’s voice brought her sharply back to the present. His voice was raised in outrage and – yes – it was unmistakably anger.
It was coming from the front porch.
Jemima dropped a shirt onto the grass and ran around the side of the house. She was just in time to see a white truck scratch off down the road in a cloud of dust. She looked up at her father.
He was watching the truck as it left, and muttering in what her mother sometimes called “Low German.”
When he turned back, and saw her standing there, he put his hands on his hips and regarded her with awful irony.
“So, here you are, hoping to see that hound again? No, my addled daughter, it wasn’t him!” he said tartly. “It was a man from another such Englischer rag, full of questions about things that are none of his business! Now go back to your chores, and pray to God to be healed of silliness in the head!”
He relapsed into ominous muttering, and Jemima turned her eyes to the road. The truck was still visible, a tiny white dot speeding back to the city.
“Oh, Daed,” she objected, but he waved her away, and retired to the house in disgust.
Jemima settled back into her chores, and they had quiet for all the rest of that day. But soon after nightfall, when they were all in bed, there was a loud rapping on the front door.
Jemima got up out of bed and went to the window that faced the front yard. There was a van parked outside and several people climbing out of it. Jemima’s heartbeat quickened. There was a big “Channel 10” logo painted on the side of the van. For an instant she hoped that Brad Williams would be with them – but no, he worked for a newspaper, not a television station.
One of the strangers lit a giant lamp, and the whole front of the house was suddenly flooded with blinding light. Jemima gasped and closed the curtain.
She could hear her father stomping down the stairs, and pulling on his pants as he went. The door creaked open, and Jemima could clearly hear a woman’s voice:
“Hi, I’m Pamela Harrison with Channel 10 News – ah, that’s a news station out of Philadelphia – and I was hoping to ask you a few questions about–”
Her usually-civil father cut her off. “We were all in bed, and we have nothing to say to anyone, about anything. Please go away, and leave us alone.”
He shut the door with a bang.
But, Jemima was quick to note, he did not come back upstairs.
Voices muttered unintelligibly from below; the strangers seemed to be holding a conference of some kind. Then there was the sound of footsteps on the porch steps. She moved gingerly toward the window again, taking care not to show herself in it.
A group of four people were standing on their lawn in front of the van. Their silhouettes were razor-sharp against the huge light. The woman was very smartly dressed in a pantsuit and heels, but the others – photographers, she guessed – were dressed in oversized shirts, baggy pants, and sneakers.
Suddenly, the woman’s voice boomed out over a microphone: “Jemima, we know you live here. We’d like to talk to you. Please call us at Channel 10 News.”
Jemima turned her head. Now she could hear her mother’s bare feet rushing downstairs, and she knew why: it was to keep her father from bursting out the front door.
She could hear her mother’s low, pleading voice downstairs, followed by her father’s – the bass organ sound was very strong now – followed by a soft scuffling sound, and her mother’s voice again, very urgent.
To Jemima’s relief, the painful brightness suddenly died. The intruders packed the lamp up again, and slowly climbed back into the van.
The van’s lights flicked on, and the motor growled, and the van slowly rolled away over the long dirt road.
Jemima slumped against her bedroom wall and closed her eyes. Her heart was pounding with a mixture of fright, and deep embarrassment.
Because every other family in the valley had heard the woman’s giant voice calling for Jemima King to “come out and talk.”
She put her face in her hands and cried. But before long she heard her father’s big feet climb the stairs, and then pause outside her door.
It swung open gently, and his tousled head of red hair appeared in the opening.
“Mima, are you all right?”
“Oh, Daed!” she sobbed.
He held out his arms and she went running into them. She wept on his shoulder as he patted her back with one huge hand.
“There now, Mima, my girl,” he soothed, “there’s no reason to be upset. We all know that Englischers are crazy in the head. They are doing what they do. But soon something new will happen, and they’ll forget all about this, and leave us alone. Eh?”
He looked down at her. “Come now, let me see a smile, my brave girl.”
Mima swallowed, and looked up into his face, and mustered a weak smile. A tender light dawned over his face, and he smoothed her hair back.
“That’s what I like to see. Now go back to bed, and don’t worry. Your father is here, and he won’t let anyone bother you.”
He gave her a quick peck on the cheek, helped her back into bed, and pulled the covers up around her chin.
Then he smiled down at her reassuringly, walked out of the room, and closed the door softly behind him.
But after he was gone, Jemima bit the sheets with her teeth, and squeezed her eyes together, and wept again. Not entirely from fright, as her father had supposed.
Now she was angry, too.
