Free Stranger's Gift by Anna Schmidt Page A

there after returning the boat to Margery’s marina. But after examining him for injuries beyond a broken wrist and a variety of abrasions and bruises, the resident told Hester that with the more seriously injured people waiting to be treated—three who had suffered possible heart attacks—it would be hours before they could treat John. The doctor suggested that she would be better off to take him with her back to Pinecraft. The first-aid station there could splint his wrist and tend his other wounds. It did not escape his notice that the doctor spoke to Hester and her father, rather than to him.
    By that point he’d been overcome by a wave of pure exhaustion, feeling every inch the refugee he’d become so that when his rescuers had led him from the ER to Arlen’s car, he had not questioned their destination. He’d heard of Pinecraft, hard not to know something about the Amish/Mennonite haven that attracted tourists in droves in high season. But he had no interest in sightseeing. Instead, he slumped down in the backseat and stared out the window, vaguely aware of palm trees with their crown of fanlike foliage sheared off by the raging winds and water-covered streets through which Arlen navigated his thirty-year-old car. While they were in the emergency room, it had continued to rain, as Arlen had predicted. The usually jammed Highway 41 that cut right through downtown Sarasota was eerily deserted. Only a few cars and the occasional ambulance or patrol vehicle roamed the four-lane road.
    Businesses were boarded up and closed. Parking lots were empty of cars and covered in water. Once they turned onto Bahia Vista, the surroundings changed from commercial to more residential, but the homes and condominium complexes were also shuttered and deserted. It was like driving through an abandoned city littered with huge palm fronds and downed power lines tangled in uprooted trees that had been partially pushed to the side of the road. Bits of broken asphalt tiles from roofs and other debris floated on the water that had overflowed from the clogged drains and gullies so that in places the streets were more like canals than roadways.
    Then almost as soon as they crossed a main thoroughfare and entered the Pinecraft area, it was as if they had left the worst of the storm behind. The east/west street that bisected the community was filled with people and activity, while side streets bustled with bicycle and foot traffic. The scene had all the attributes of a church meeting, but John was well aware that it wasn’t celebration that had brought these people out in force. It was the need to help and to care for others.
    In the faces of those he passed, he saw worry and anxiety and concern for a neighbor who might have suffered. Through the rolled-down windows of Arlen’s car, John heard a man call out to a neighbor inquiring about damage the second man had suffered from the gale force winds. At long tables on the covered walkway of a shopping mall, women in traditional Mennonite garb worked in unison filling heavy cardboard boxes with clothing, canned goods, and bottled water. As soon as a box was filled, a boy would load it onto a three-wheeled bicycle, and when the bike’s rear basket was filled, the youth would pedal away toward another area where a fleet of small trucks and vans waited. At the same time another boy would pedal forward and hop off to help. Their industry was impressive. Their cheerfulness to be doing God’s work and helping others was merely annoying.
    Arlen had pulled his sedan into a parking lot near a building marked P ALM B AY M ENNONITE C HURCH , and Samuel escorted John to the first-aid tent set up by the Red Cross at one end of the lot. There he had turned him over to a jovial young medic who had cracked stupid jokes with a nearby nurse while attending to John’s wrist. They’d given him some pain medication to get him through the next twenty-four hours plus a