Free The Road Home by Patrick E. Craig Page B

deep and dark, almost black.
    Maybe that wasn’t my mother. My eyes are violet, not dark .
    As Jenny tried to recall everything she could about the woman, the words kept coming back to her. “Jenny, come find me. I’m lost, so lost,” she whispered to herself.
    Jenny wondered what that meant. Why was she lost? Where was she lost from? Then Jenny remembered something Papa said about the car where Mama found her. The car was from New York, and the police found a man in the pond with the sunken car. She thoughtabout the man and wondered if he was her real father. Jenny didn’t like the thought. The man had tried to hurt her. She decided to look through the old newspaper files at the library for stories that could tell her more about the dead man.
    Jenny put her unfinished project back in the file folder and then carried it with her up to the front desk. Mrs. Blake was checking in returned books. She was an older lady with white hair and pointy Harlequin glasses that hung on a chain around her neck when she wasn’t putting them on her nose to peer at the paperwork in front of her. Jenny waited while Mrs. Blake finished checking in a copy of Swiss Family Robinson . Mrs. Blake looked up from her work and noticed Jenny standing there.
    â€œHi, sweetie. Do you need something?”
    â€œMrs. Blake, is anyone using the microfiche this morning? I need to do some research on my project, and I have to check the old newspaper and magazine files.”
    Jenny felt a small check in her heart. Great—now she was lying to her friend. Maybe Papa was right. Maybe the whole pursuit of her past would only bring heartache. She felt a surge of guilt about lying to her papa and to Mrs. Blake, and she wondered where else her newly acquired sin would take her.
    The librarian smiled and said, “No one’s using it right now, honey. You can have it until someone comes in and asks for it.”
    Jenny’s need to know about the dead man in the car that night overpowered the quiet voice in her spirit, and she took the key to the microfiche room from Mrs. Blake’s hand and headed down the hall. In the room she placed her folder by the reader and then went over to the wall of filing cabinets where the film was kept.
    Now how did that all go? The big storm was in the fall of 1950. The police located the car in the pond the next spring, and while they were removing it, they found the man’s body .
    She decided to look through the files for articles from early 1951 in the Daily Record , Wooster’s local paper. She pulled all the film for the months she wanted and then sat down at the reader and began to work. It took her about an hour, but at last she found an article in the April 4 edition of the paper.
    Local Police Locate Dead Body in Jepson’s Pond
    BY B OB S CHUMANN
    The Wayne County Sheriff’s Department discovered a dead man in Jepson’s Pond near Dalton. The body was in a severe state of decomposition. Police were unable to take any fingerprints, and no means of identification was found, so the identity of the man remains a mystery.
    The body was located while officers were removing a sunken car from the pond. According to sources in the department, the car had been in the pond since the Thanksgiving Day storm. Local resident and war hero, Bobby Halverson, reported the sunken car in November, but authorities had to wait until the ice melted this month before they could send divers to investigate. While searching the pond for the car, the divers came upon the remains of the dead man.
    Halverson told this reporter that he and Reuben Springer, a member of the Apple Creek Amish community, found the car on the ice while searching for Springer’s wife, Jerusha, who was lost in the storm, but that they did not know about the man in the pond.
    The car slid into the pond when the ice broke as the two men were retrieving a battery from the vehicle during their successful rescue of Mrs.